If you are trying to learn how to get traffic to your blog, then you will benefit from the tips in this series, which are designed to show you the necessary steps for how to get traffic to your blog. When you have the right tips, tricks and resources in your arsenal, then that is when you can truly be successful in gaining traffic to your blog. There are twenty tips in all that you need to keep in mind when it comes to learning how to increase blog traffic. In the first post of this series we touched on the first seven, followed by an additional six in the next post, and here are the final seven tips.

1 – Create a blog roll on the side bar or at the bottom of your blog site so that you can publicize links for your favorite blog sites online. Let the bloggers know you put them in your blog roll and you may just get a little bit of reciprocation in return.

2 – Post links to relevant blogs and blog posts in your posts when you are creating blog content. Creating links and references to other blog entries and blog websites will actually increase traffic to your blog just as well as to the blogs you’re linking. This is especially useful when track backs are used because it lets the blog owner and their readers know that you mentioned them.

3 – Learn how to write blog entries that are short without compromising value and that are interesting, even in a small space. This will allow you to improve your ability to blog more frequently for an increase in blog traffic. Don’t be afraid to continue offering comprehensive studies and lists as well, occasionally.

4 – Put effort into the promotion of your most popular blog postings when you are blogging. Write a post that details your top 10 or 10 most popular blogs of the best. Refer to your best blogs in newer entries when the subjects are relevant, or reference old posts while updating the information they contained.

5 – Create a newsletter that operates separately from your blog, and invite your blog readers to become subscribers. Now you have a new way of advertising your blog, as you can link back to your blog in every newsletter that you send.

6 – Utilize offline methods for promoting your blog just as often as online methods. Make sure that your auto signature, your business card and any other marketing or print materials that you have are adorned with your blog address so that people can find you online more easily.

7 – Pay close attention to your blogging traffic reports. Learn from the statistics that you receive and use that information to update the keywords that you use accordingly. The more that you are able to fine tune your writing to your blog traffic reports, the better the results will be.

Social media being used for educational purposes. It’s not a new concept, but it is continuously being used for new applications. among the most recent is the use of social media for educating consumers about money management. it’s not just individual financial planners that have turned to social media for this reason, but the companies themselves. Amidst legal issues and user privacy concern lies a hope that the financial industry as a whole can regain the trust of the American consumer base, turning to social media for marketing and brand-building goals.

Doing so could be a tight-rope walk, but TIAA-CREF and Putnam Investments are among those financial industries that are targeting their core demographics through the use of social media, according to this report. Aggregating educational content and tools, extending online classes and games and socially-driven challenges, these institutions are hoping that the combination of useful content within a virtual environment can help them to gain long-lasting relationships with customers.

Content is the key to this particular method of acquiring and retaining customers, as many corporations have learned that building a Fan Page on Facebook isn’t enough. The juxtaposition of content and presence is a rather lofty goal that many brands have been trying to archive for the past year or so. Improved options for integrated social network and mobile apps have made it easier for third parties to offer a higher level of convenience to their customers, with the growing adoption of this applied technology increasing the trust factor around such marketing and brand-building campaigns.

This trust factor is very important when it comes to the use of social media by financial institutions. The legalities of having an interactive web presence as a financial institution or a financial adviser are very specific in what type of information can be shared online. For the most part, those partaking in social media towards the education of new and existing customers are sticking to the educational realm, providing information that does not cross over into the advice arena.

Utilizing games and challenges that encourage a user to enlist the participation of their friends is another tactic that these financial institutions are using, which can actually increase engagement and produce longer site visits. That’s all well and fine for the companies providing the games and challenges, but I’m rather curious to learn of the success rates of such attempts at luring in customers.

Making education fun and social is something I think could be useful in several areas, far beyond the financial realm. The ability to passively consume content at your own pace, combined with the options to learn in an enlivened environment, could really pay off for certain establishments. Some banks have been trying different variations of this for a few years now, with some even creating virtual environments within the likes of Second Life in order to create a space for teens and adults to learn their lessons is a safer manner.

Providing the information many consumers are already looking for is another good move on the part of TIAA-CREF and Putnam, with Putnam being particularly aggressive in this regard. The benefit for the consumer is the option to access information they would have likely stumbled across had they been online researching for themselves anyway. The danger, of course, is that a company such as Putnam could be rather biased in its curated offerings to customers and new clients.

Nevertheless, it’s smart for a brand to position itself smartly within social media, giving consumers a mini place of research refuge (even if its slanted). The use of social media in this way will help to drive the web in a more semantic direction, hopefully offering a way for search engines to give users answers to their questions instead of just links to third party web sites.

This article credited by EverythingPR

The lesson here is that before deciding if social media is going to work for you, and telling any company that you are working with that you want your site/blog/whatever tied into it, do some research. Here are a few things to do first:

• Define your customer – industry, age, geographic area, etc.
• Find out where your customers “live.” Are they online? Do they go to tradeshows or read magazines? Do they subscribe to eNewsletters? Do they use Twitter?
• Look at the demographics of the potential social networks you might get involved in. At a minimum, look at Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Do those demographics meet those of your potential clients?
• Find out if there are niche social networks that your clients frequent, including Google and Yahoo groups.

Once you know if you should even get into social media, and which sites to spend time on, it’s strategy time.

Time vs. Money

Running a small business means that I have to be careful how to spend my money. That means if I can do something that takes time rather than money I’ll do it. And that’s why I love social media. Who needs sleep? Not me. I have a coffee IV running 24×7. But seriously, if you don’t have the time or inclination to find out the above list of items before creating a social media strategy, which I would offer should be part of every business strategy, then be prepared to pay for it. The choice is yours: spend time or spend money.

Source via The Non Marketer

Continue this blog post from last time we talk about new features added in Mulaboration, we are introducing the Search & Follow Up for Twitter in Network Leads.

 Let's start with Search & Follow Up first, as we mentioned about Mulaboration, it is a collaboration tool for enterprise with social media integration. We are mostly focusing on HOW enterprise like you guys to communicate with colleagues and business partners in a secure social style platform, and HOW your company could have a better tool to start marketing over the popular social media web sites.  By having a system for your company communicates with customers, we understand corporate do need a RIGHT people to do so.  You cannot assign a Sales Manager to work on engineering task, or an engineer work on Sales and Marketing role. So here the Search & Follow Up function created in Mulaboration for company to assign the RIGHT people to answer the RIGHT questions/ feedback from the consumers on Twitter.

 When your colleagues or you do search something Twitter status that is relative to your company, you can assign the suitable Workgroup to follow-up the selected Twitter user.
In Muecs for example, when someone on Twitter are talk about “collaboration tool” or “social media” as keywords that we searched.  Our colleagues will see the message and send the status message to a specify Workgroup to follow-up.  If the message talk about “looking for collaboration too for my company”, then this Twitter status will send to our sales department Workgroup to follow-up.  If there is talking about “How can my company network upgrade to Enterprise Plan in Mulaboration?”our technical support Workgroup will follow-up and reply to the user.

This post is credited by Social Media Examiner

I’m guessing many of you are still sitting on the fence when it comes to putting your business on Facebook.

“Let me get this straight,” you may say. “You want me to use Facebook to market my business? Are you crazy?”

Not if you provide products or services to postmenopausal women. Women over the age of 55 make up the fastest-growing Facebook segment, according to Paul Dunay and Richard Krueger, authors of Facebook Marketing for Dummies.

 Would your product or service appeal to anyone over 35? “The fastest-growing demographic is the 35- to 54-year-olds… the next fastest-growing demographic is the over-55 crowd.”

According to the authors, Facebook has over 200 million active users, and a quarter of a million people register every day. About 3.5 million people become a fan of a Facebook Page every day.

Yes, you read that right. A fan of a Page. You don’t have to be a rock star to have fans on Facebook!

All you have to do is:

1. Buy Facebook Marketing for Dummies by Paul Dunay and Richard Krueger.
2. Register with Facebook.
3. Create a Page for your business. A Page is the business equivalent of an individual Facebook Profile.
4. Finish reading the book.
5. Start spreading the news.

Today we announced some new features updated in Mulaboration, our product for enterprise as a collaboration tool with social media features. If you have followed our company press release before, I believe you will know about Mulaboration. So in this blog post, I will skip this introduction part and talk more about our latest update. The big update we have in this time is the Network Leads. We have continuing to build a strong solution for enterprise using Twitter. There’s three updates for Network Leads Twitter clients in this release, the first we have add related search terms when you are using Twitter search through it. Secondly, we added a feature called Twitter Scheduled for you to create specific tasks that your Twitter accounts will do automatically in the time you set. Last, this feature is more relatively suitable for management collaborate, we called it Search & Follow Up. Basically, anyone in your company network who responsible for monitoring the Twitter status feeds or saved search, they can assign to specific internal Workgroup to follow up the Twitter message that they selected. Other than Twitter information analysis and communication on potential consumers, now we are integrated Youtube as a media broadcasting tool able for your company to deliver your messages on the Internet cloud.

Let’s start on Network Leads Twitter clients

Related Search Terms
the related search terms are very useful and good way to explore more information within the search keywords that you define.  We understand that some search engines on the market now come with this in the search result. This allows you to retrieve more relative information around your search.  Base on your search keywords, related search terms will available and appear under the search box if there’s any.

Twitter Scheduled

Basically, you can create any tasks to interact with users in Twitter frequently. We do understand as a business owner or management, you would not have all day long try to keep track in social media of the what people are talk about your company or things you do. 

In this features we offered 4 types of schedule conditions:
1. Schedule Tweet
Simply input the message and specify a time of publish, Mulaboration will help you publish your message in Twitter.

2. Search & Reply
You can define a search term and deliver reply message less than 130 characters in this condition. Mulaboration will base on the set of date time you define, and search for people who are talking about the thing you want to search. After retrieve a set of search result. To prevent of abuse your account in reply others like a “spammer”, Mulaboration comes with intelligence determination to see if the users are relative to your search keywords or not. If yes, it will help you to reply the Twitter status immediately.

3. Search & Assign & Follow Up
It similar to Search & Reply. But this condition are not deliver reply message to Twitter users.  Instead, you can assign for specific internal Workgroup to follow up the Twitter status message.  When your colleagues from the Workgroup saw the incoming message, they act as representative to start conversation with the users. All the Twitter message in the Follow Up Case are recorded, so your colleagues could know what have been mention in the conversation.

4. RSS Feed Tweet
Import you company blog RSS to Twitter, your followers are easier to track your latest news.

We will continue Mulaboration Update Part 2 on this Firday.

Social Media Time Management

Social Media Time Management

View more documents from Amber Naslund.

1) Manage Disruptions

The key to managing disruptions is to have daily priorities. Sounds simple, but isn’t. Pick three things that you have to get done today, and focus relentlessly on those. (Hint: they should always be tied into your bigger picture goals, or you’re wasting time). If that means you have to say “I’m blogging for an hour”, do that, and let nothing but emergencies stand in your way.

Realistically, unexpected stuff pops up. Document it, find a home for it so you can address it later, and give yourself permission to forget it until the time comes where it makes the priority list. If you have to address it now, take note of what you’re working on and come straight back to it when you’re done.

2) Control Information Overload

Stop trying to be everywhere. Just stop. In social media, information overload is yours to own and manage. Pick your two or three social sites and, unless your JOB is to spot the next big things, stick with them. Adopt new tools or strategies only when there is a compelling business reason to do so.

Subscribe only to the blogs you read, and unsub from the ones you don’t, without apology. Delete email you aren’t going to respond to (be honest), and never use your inbox as a to-do list (see #6). Turn your IM off when you’re trying to work. Lots of ideas getting in the way of execution? Create a parking lot for them so you can capture them and get them out of your mind. Visit this once a week, and see if any ideas on the paper warrant a move to reality.

3) Leverage Tools

Use a desktop tool like TweetDeck, Seesmic Desktop, CoTweet or HootSuite to streamline your Twitter use. Blog using a fluid tool like WordPress that has a suite of plugins to make your life easier, and use the scheduling function to write posts in advance. Make folders in Google Reader so you can prioritize your blog reviewing depending on how much time you have available.

However, resist the urge to automate your interactions. Automate and consolidate everything you can up to that point, but the engagement on social sites needs to be you, not a robot. THIS is where you need to spend the time.

4) Annotate and Share

If you don’t have one already, get a Delicious.com account and use it for your bookmarks. I say bookmark freely, even if you never get back to reading it. If you want to find something, it’s easier to go back to it. If you don’t, your links can be a valuable resource of information to others (and you can send them to your specific tags if you get repeated requests for the same information).

Use sites like Slideshare.net to share your presentations, and get ideas or frameworks for ones of your own. Try Flickr Creative Commons for sourcing images and sharing your own. Get to know and love the collaborative power of Google Docs or Zoho, so you don’t have to send stuff around in emails. Leverage your intranet or project tools like Basecamp to share information. The less time you spend looking for stuff, the more time you have to DO stuff.

5) Sometimes Templates are Okay

If you’re asked the same question several times a day in an email, write up a little framework of a response that you can personalize for each recipient, but that contains the bulk of the information you need to share. Same with Twitter. No, this doesn’t mean an autobot, this means having a set of standard links on hand or responses to common questions that you can respond to as needed without having to recreate it every time.

Build an FAQ page on your site to point people do. Create sharable documents that contain frequently requested information and have them on ready five in a folder for easy access. Build your tags in Delicious so that you can send people there for broad categories of related information, like statistics or case studies.

6) Wrangle Task Management

When you’re processing email or items in social media, every time a task pops up, you need a place to put it. I use Things for Mac, but there are lots of programs that will work, even the (gasp) task list in Outlook.

When you’re overwhelmed by what you’re supposed to do (say, the notes from a seminar you just attended or the volume of stuff in your inbox), process one thing at a time and ask yourself “What do I need to do with this as a next step?”. Whatever that task is, create an item for it on your task list and archive the rest of the information for later reference. Bonus step? Tag the items on your list that are doable in less than five minutes so you can take time each day (say, 35 to 45 minutes) to plow through a handful of those.

7) Communicate Expectations

Sometimes, you don’t have the answer. Sometimes, you don’t have the time to get to something right now, but you will at some point. Honesty and humility go a long way to helping manage expectations for responsiveness online. Try these:

• “I’d love to get that information to you, but I need 48 hours. Will that be okay, or do you need it sooner?”
• “I don’t have the answer to that, but I’d like to send your request to someone who does and have them respond. Is that okay?”
• “Hey there, I got your note but need a little time to respond. I’ll be back to you within the day.”
• To your boss, perhaps: “I’d like to complete this project, but here’s the information/resources I’m missing to get it done…”

This is another reason why it’s crucial to infuse some humanity into your conversations online, so folks know that you’re just a person over there, not a superhero or a robot. You need time to spend with your kid, feed the dog, spend with your spouse, read a book. Yes, you should still do those things. Being sure that folks know you’re responsive in a reasonable fashion but not going to be able to handle things ’round the clock is super important.

8 ) Establish Routines

If you have regular tasks and tactics to focus on, you’ll want to try and carve out time for them. Some examples:

• Blogging
• Reviewing and responding to email
• Listening and Monitoring (unless you have a dedicated staff person for this)
• Reporting and Analysis
• Checking in on social networks – Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Forums, Community sites

If you set aside specific hours in your day, turn off other distractions. (Yes, it’s okay to close your email program). Put your phone on Do Not Disturb or let it go to voicemail. Even 30 minutes of focused time on a single task, on a regular basis can ramp up your productivity. It is NOT “inauthentic” to set times to interact on your chosen social networks. It’s all a matter of balancing priorities.

9) Unplug.

Please. Get offline. Go outside. Take a bath. Play with your kid. Go to the movies. Or go to an in-person event or Tweetup. There is nothing that will derail your social media efforts more than never walking away from them.

You need perspective from an unplugged view so you priorities stay in focus. You need time to scribble your goals on paper, or just think. Productivity isn’t always about how many balls you’re juggling. Sometimes, it’s about very careful editing of how you do – or don’t – spend your time.

Every year one of the big exhibitions in IT industry, CES have started this week. As I saw the keynotes sessions, there are few common facts that all these companies are trying to foucsing on.  I think these is the technologies trends of 2010.

Here are some articles about news and trend of 2010 technologies from CES :

CES 2010 Preview: What's Hot at This Year's Show

CES 2010 preview
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/ces/6874694/CES-2010-preview.html

Microsoft CES 2010 Highlights
http://www.crispygamer.com/news/index.php/2010-01-07/microsoft-ces-2010-highlights/

Highlights So Far - Techcrunch
http://www.techcrunch.com/2010/01/08/ces-highlights-so-far/

Transparent Display This is the most WOW product inspire me.

Discovery, ESPN to Push 3-D Content to Sony

Que Touchcreen E-Reader Packs in the Features