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Why I Follow… Gary Vaynerchuk

August 2, 2011 By Sam Beamond 1 Comment

I was introduced to Gary Vaynerchuck by a work colleague over a year ago and was instantly drawn in by his passion for social media and marketing online. Soon after I read his book “Crush it” in a few hours (and i’m not usually a book reader). As an online guy myself, I certainly had a “head start” on building my online brand. Gary’s enthusiasm easily rubs off on you and helps you get into gear and to establish yourself in your field.

Gary’s focus is wine, being founder of Wine Library TV and the Daily Grape, much of his efforts are focused on that. Gary doesn’t fail to keep up with the times though and report to his audience through video at garyvaynerchuck.com, which is where I find it interesting to learn his take on new technologies and platforms as they become available and progress online.

Much of what I have learned in social media and online brand building has stemmed from my initial following of Gary’s brands.

If you haven’t heard of Gary or looked more about what/who he is, I suggest checking him out today.

Following on Twitter @garyvee

Or his blog at garyvaynerchuck.com

Follow these links if you’re interested in reading “Crush It!“, or his latest book the “The Thank You Economy.

Thanks Gary!

What have you learned from Gary Vaynerchuck?

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What Can You Learn About Blogging From Mashable?

July 26, 2011 By Sam Beamond 2 Comments

I’ve been reading mashable.com for about 18 months now. In that time the blog has continually made minor updates and tweaks to improve performance, reader engagement and help SEO. Since Mashable is such a huge blog and has a large following, what better site to attempt to emulate in its build and functionality? Obviously this internet marketing blog is a much smaller scale, but there have been improvements made to Mashable that can be implemented on a much smaller scale. Below are a four features of Mashable, that I have incorporated into internetmarketingsource.net.

1. Article Linking

You’ll probably notice as you ready through posts on Mashable that the content links to other posts or categories with specific keywords. This is good practice for a few reasons, a. It helps readers navigate your site and learn about more topics relevant to the article they are reading, b. this in turn is good for SEO because it helps search engines find all pages on the site, and c. if these links are set as anchor links with relevant text used as the hyperlink, it further strengthens the SEO for the site since relative words are the actual link and terms like “click here” are not hyperlinked (which tells search engines nothing about the content that is linked to).

2. Share Button Usage

One piece I notice about Mashable is that they are constantly tweaking their share button organization and arrangement. They add the latest buttons that become available such and most recently, Google Plus. This provides readers with ample options for sharing content and thus encourages shares, regardless of which share platform the reader is familiar with.

3. Minimize Outbound Links

I’ve noticed that Mashable keeps outbound links to a minimum. Oftentimes, the site reviews an online service or website that requires linking to. They will usually only provide one link to this source within their content. This helps retain visitors on their actual site. With Mashable providing a lot of content and resources within its own platform, it is easy for them to link to their own content instead. It is important however, to make sure that you link up relative offsite resources too, you’ll be doing those external sites a favor and build rapport with these sites as well as your own readers. Sometimes I find that Mashable does not externally link enough. I have found it difficult to find the link to the new website or online product before.

4. Disqus Commenting

When I first installed my WordPress blog, I utilized the commenting system built in with the platform. While this works reasonably well, I found that it was susceptible to spam, which grew and grew and grew. I did install the captcha plugin, but that too began to be abused. In the past I had been reluctant to install something requiring registration to comment, through fear of losing engagement, but now the spam had made this a necessity. Mashable uses the Disqus platform and so do many other sites in my field. That said, I chose to use the same figuring that many of my audience will already have a Disqus account and would minimize the loss of engagement. Disqus also appeared to be a clean and robust platform. I was happy to find that by migrating to the Disqus commenting system, the plugin allowed for the transfer of all previous comments and reactions over to the new system #awesome.

There are many elements to a website these days, we’ve come along way from animated gifts and static html. I think we can all learn something from the successful websites out there, like mashable.com.

Which blogs or websites have you learned something from?

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Online Marketing Summit – Minneapolis Roundup

June 10, 2011 By Sam Beamond 1 Comment

It was great to have the opportunity to attend Online Marketing Summit earlier this week for Day 2 and the Social Media Workshop on Day 3. It was unfortunate that the workshop was reduced to half day, but that’s ok. Generally speaking, the event appealed to me with its serving up a variety of topics and discussions that i could identify well with having had my hand many different online channels for several years. From social media, to paid search to email marketing, OMS had something for everyone.

On top of the insightful sessions, I had an awesome time connecting and reconnecting with fellow industry peers from the area.

Aaron Kahlow did a great job putting the event together and engaging us all.

I’ll attempt here to give a quick overview of the days I attended.

Day 2 – June 7, 2011

The day began with Gina Debogovich, Senior Community Manager of Best Buy, giving us a run down of how Best Buy have been successful in the social media campaigns. I believe, their success has not only been because of their involvement, but is largely driven by their willingness to participate across the board. Essentially, everyone engaged in social media is a marketer to some degree as they are publicly representing the brand online.

The next session I chose to attend was led by Lee Odden, I hadn’t heard him speak before, but had heard a lot about him. Now I know why. He really knows his stuff when it comes to SEO and Social Media and really spoke to my interests giving me an insight into areas I can develop. His presentation style certainly helped keep attendees engaged.

I’ve recently began experimenting with QR Codes both in print ads as well as signage. It was good to learn more about them in Angie Schotmuller’s session. I appreciate your time Angie after, talking over my specific ideas!

In the afternoon I attended the Social Video Marketing, Social Email Marketing sessions, along with Integrated Marketing Success with Adam Proehl. Adam shared some great tools for analytics and testing, and although they are probably beyond what I have the capacity for right now, they are certainly intriguing and warrant a closer look. A few he shared were:

usertesting.com

feedbackarmy.com

fivesecondtest.com

theclicktest.com

The last couple of sessions that I attended were SEO Best Practices with Chris Aburime, who offered some great advice on using title tags on sites with hundreds of thousands of pages. While the closing panel discussion warranted some interesting takes from various angles, that included, Kim Albee, Marie Lettman and Julie Heltunen. My main take away from this discussion was how to segment your social media (personal) from social media (business). The simple approach of using Twitter and LinkedIn for business and saving FaceBook for personal seemed to make a lot of sense.

While I attended these sessions in person, it was fun to “virtually” attend the other sessions by following other attendees on Twitter and monitoring their Tweets. This was an unplanned bonus, that i’ll use again no doubt!

Social Media Workshop

June 8, the last (half) day of Online Marketing Summit, was a lot different to previous event days. The attendance was much smaller and split into two workshops to choose from. I chose “Managing your brand within Social Media Outlets” with Julie Heltunen and Amy Kilgour. The setup made for great discussion surrounding social media outlets, included, FaceBook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Hootsuite and blogs. Various levels of social media experience in the room. Julie and Amy did a great job of keeping the discussion alive and providing something for all levels. I will certainly be maintaining a connection with them.

While writing this it occurred to me that there will likely be several “round up” type posts across the web from the summit, it would be great to aggregate them here, to learn what others got out of the event.

I’ll begin with a post from SpyderTrap here.

Know of any others? Post them in the comments below, thanks!

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Learnings From My 1st Tweet Chat

June 7, 2011 By Sam Beamond 2 Comments

Last Sunday night I stumbled across #blogchat. Being fully aware of what a Tweet Chat was, I haven’t ever participated in one. This time was different, since I had a bit of time and the topic was of particular interest to me, I also thought it was a good opportunity to discover what participating might do for me, as well as contribute to others.

What is a Tweet Chat?

For those not familiar with the term Tweet Chat, its a way of chatting with a large audience on Twitter. The conversation is very public and warrants a large engagement for people who all want to learn and offer advice around a topic. The chat is followed with the #tag. After each contribution via the regular chat Twitter interface, your comment is closed with the hash tag that has been predefined for the discussion. That way, by clicking the hash tag, you can see the whole Tweet Chat discussion. The chat I followed and participated in was #blogchat. #blogchat lasted for about one hour and discussions surrounding blogging ensued.

What Did I Learn from #blogchat?

I must be honest, I came across the chat half way through and I only participated for around 30 minutes, but even in that time I learned a lot about the concept as well as blogging.

One thing to note is that I was surprised to see some of my connections participating also, I’m not sure how large the #blogchat Tweet Chat is as a whole, but there were certainly several recognizable connections on board. This told me me that I have been missing out on some great discussions in my space.

Secondly, I discovered several new professionals in my industry that warranted a connection. I also acquired a few new followers.

As a rough estimate, I’d say that I probably contributed about 50% of my involvement and “listened/learned” for the other 50%. It was comforting to know that I had several people agree with some of my suggestions and, others questioned them, allowing me to communicate my expertise.

All in all, the Tweet Chat experience was beneficial and has opened my eyes to another opportunity for using Twitter in business. What have you got out of a Tweet Chat? Which should my be next Tweet Chat to participate in?

If you are not already following me on Twitter, hit the button top of the right column or click here for internet marketing tips and advice, thanks!

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Why I Follow… Margie Clayman

May 31, 2011 By Sam Beamond 2 Comments

If you’ve used Twitter for a short amount of time and are in the social media space, you most likely will have heard of Margie Clayman.

Margie is an avid Tweeter, which is where I first came across her (thanks to @sandyhubbard). Since then, I have migrated over to her blog where she also blogs a lot, mostly about social media. In fact, her blog is titled “Social Media, Marketing & Musings”. This pretty much sums up what Margie is all about.

Margie’s writing style, is what keeps me on her tail. Quite often she ties in celebrities, movies, shows and the like with her blog posts, which makes for an interesting read. The post “Are You Ready to be Spiderman” comes to mind, with the accompanying graphic burned into my brain.

One area of Margie’s online social activities that i’m yet to dip my toes into (planning to soon Margie, honest), is her #tweetdiner. This is a Twitter-based discussion on social media. All are welcome, it happens every Saturday at around 8pm CST (Margie, correct me in the comments if i’m wrong on that). If you miss the chat she posts transcripts on her associated FaceBook page.

So if you’re looking for my #FF on a Tuesday, connect with Margie Clayman at one of these places:

Twitter

LinkedIn

Social Media Blog

Anything to add about Margie? Enter your thoughts in the comments below.

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