Now, this is a huge day and exciting news! Search & Social (the company I work) has merged with 10e20 and Brent Csutoras, Inc. to form one AMAZING all encompassing online marketing agency, BlueGlass Interactive, Inc.

I know I am biased but I am sure this merger is going to bring together the web most powerful marketers and form the Internet largest marketing agency.

I am happy to be part of something that huge and I hope we are going to face many exciting changes.

P.S. [offtopic] If you’ve been trying to contact me lately and never heard back, I have some personal issues now and will be back soon!

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The following is the the first post in the series of guest blogging success stories. The series is dedicated to my new venture My Blog Guest, the community of guest bloggers. I am building the site where you can build links and your brand completely for free and by providing real quality, so go ahead: join, participate and help me build it!

The guest post was provided by Glen Allsopp, a talented writer and a well-known blogger who has been building his name by guest blogging.

When I go at new things, I go at them full-force. Naturally, I only take on projects that I’m very passionate about, so the ones I do take on get my absolute attention. When I started a brand new blog mid-way through 2008, things were no different.

The blog I was starting would probably be best defined as a member of the ‘personal development’ niche. A site that helps people with life struggles, productivity, motivation and things like time-management. Something that I was very interested in at the time.

Although I classed myself as a very good internet marketer, I was a total nobody in the personal development niche. I had a new blog and no audience. I decided that instead of going down the usual methods of blog promotion I would try a new strategy to get myself more readers: write blog posts for other sites.

Guest Posts

Guest posts make total sense and provide a winning situation for multiple parties. First of all, the blogger who is accepting a guest post on their site gets free, quality content for their audience. The audience of that blog gets great content to read. The writer of the article gets a link from the post and potentially new subscribers on their site.

As long as the post is of a high quality, everybody wins.

People have been advocating the benefits of guest posting for years, and it’s nothing new. But these people usually recommend it on a small scale. I had the idea of guest posting thanks to Leo Babauta from Zen Habits who claimed that it helped him grow his site so quickly. (I think it was the 50+ digg homepages, but I gave him the benefit of the doubt).

I started writing. And I wrote some more. I took a break. And then continued to write. Instead of writing a post a month or even a post a week, I wrote 2-3 every single week. I wrote more guest posts than anyone else I had ever seen writing them, and things were going well.

Subscribers were up massively, traffic was up, and the links back to the website were now in the thousands. Guest blogging was really taking off for me. In the space of a few months I had written nearly 40 individual guest posts for other websites and was now enjoying a feed count of over 4,000 subscribers.

A Five-Figure Income

I don’t like to reveal exactly how much money I make, but through blogging alone in 2009 I made well over $50,000. This is completely through blog that was built from scratch; not any of the other sites I run. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that if I had not written one guest post in the last 12 months, that figure would be more like $10,000-$20,000.

You see, I think there really is no effective way to market a blog these days. I mean, you can spend hours interacting on forums or blog comments and hoping to get a few clicks. Or, you can spend an hour writing a quality article that shows a brand new audience what you’re about a get both links and traffic to your site.

To me it was a no-brainer, so I kept the strategy going.

In fact, this worked so well that guest posts on some sites would send me over 400 subscribers. That’s right, one article could really increase my feed count so much. Do this on the scale I was doing things, and you start to see how I became successful.

Now that you’ve seen the power of guest posting, let me share some final tips.

Tips from My Experience

Based on everything I have learned over the past year, I just have three main points to make:

• Vary Your Posting: Some people just focus on the biggest sites and that’s it. Instead, I wrote for the ’small fish’ and the ‘big guys’. Both improve the number of backlinks to your site and you never know when a small fish could become a great contact or even a big fish.
• Send it and See: Most people think it’s not only polite but also ‘right’ to ask a blog author if they like a blog post idea first before sending it. I definitely think it is more polite, but I wouldn’t say it’s the best thing to do. Instead, in my experience, I have simply wrote articles I think other bloggers would like and I send it to them. Then they can clearly say yes or no with the content in front of them.
• Accept Rejection: If someone doesn’t want you to write on their site or they don’t like the content you’ve wrote, just accept it. There have been plenty of sites who didn’t think my work was good enough for them, yet Technorati Top 100 blogs that loved my writing. Rejection doesn’t mean anything about you specifically as a person, so just accept it with grace and move on.

So, you still don’t think guest blogging is ineffective, do you?

This article was written by Glen Allsopp who blogs about Viral Marketing. As you can see, he is a big advocate of guest posting.

Got a guest blogging success story? Send it to me and I’ll spread the word! seosmarty@gmail.com

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One of those tactics that keep working for me is creating viral pieces (like long lists full of cool images) that attracts thousands of visitors and dozens of links. People seem to never grow tired of “20+ Weird Something” (I myself am guilty of regularly sharing these types of content with friends via IM and social media). So why not try them if they work and entertain people (looks like a win-win to me)?

As I’ve been playing with them for a while, I decided to go ahead and share my sources of link bait inspiration (in a hope you’ll share yours in return).

1. Google Search

Good old Google search is quite understandably my first source of inspiration. Here’s one trick I’d like to share that always works: Google wildcard search. Just insert * anywhere in-between your topical search phrase and you’ll get plenty of suggested term variations right within SERPs:

• [amazing * swimming pools] for more ideas on swimming pool designs;
• ["what kind * are you"] for more viral quiz ideas;
• [weird *] just for something bizarre.

Quick tips:

• Use usual “viral list” cliches to get more ideas (amazing * word, awesome * word, weird * word, bizarre * word, etc). Note: in case Google decides to drop the word as being “descriptive and unimportant” be sure to place plus sign (+) before it to force Google to include it;
• StumbleUpon addon installed with search integration activated helps much to quickly make judgments as to how popular each article might be (see the stars indicator in the screenshot above)

2. Google Images

I use Google images more and more lately. Most importantly, it allows great visualization: you almost always can predict which type of content each listing represents: an ecommerce shop, “viral” blog post or any other. Thus, you only click through if it looks like something worth attention (=saves time a lot) Look:

Besides, Google images search seems much more straightforward than general search: those images that are linked to, contain search terms in alt text and file path are usually ranked higher. So first pages will contain plenty of images from viral pieces like you do (other types of content seldom put so much emphasis on images).

3. Digg Search

I hadn’t used it before it was improved so it is hard to tell how much better it became but now I just love it! Here’s a quick guide:

1. Go to Digg;
2. Provide your base search term and include +p to make it show only those stories that hit the front page.

That’s usually enough to get an idea of what type of topics end up going popular on Digg.

Here are a few more useful Digg search filters:

• Narrow search by media (stories / videos / images): search sidebar option;
• See only popular stories on your topic coming from one particular site (site:domain.com);
• Add +b to see buried stories (another very essential option for your topic analysis).

4. Flickr Groups

Flickr is an awesome source of inspiration. Last year I did a detailed post on Flickr search tools that make searching it much easier. Another useful tip that always turn effective for me is browsing through Flickr groups that unite photos on one particular topic.

While I didn’t have much luck finding really cool Flickr groups through its built-in Groups search option, I came up with an alternative way:

1. Search all images using your base term (and probably using one of the tools mentioned above);
2. Look which “pools” most popular / commented / favorited images belong to. Chances are, you will find many quality relevant Flickr groups this way:

5. Inspiration “Lucky” Buttons

Oftentimes. you just don’t even know the base words: you just need something awesome to write about. Or you’re just stuck and need something completely new and fresh. Or you have much free time (which is unlikely, I know).

In all those situations, just clicking through random links and scanning everything that comes up is the best thing you can do. Here are a few tools that will help:

StumbleUpon ToolBar “Stumble!” Button

• Just click it and you will be shown most popular stories that are likely to appeal to you (based on your preferences and SU browsing and thumbing history).
• You can also customize it to show (a) pages from one of the channels, (b) pages thumbed by your friends, (c) pages related to the term you specify:

FriendBar “Lucky” Button

FriendBar is a FireFox addon that aggregates your Facebook and Twitter accounts allowing you to track updates in both social media networks. One of its features is a “Lucky button” that shows you a random story currently popular on Twitter.

Yoono “Surprise” Button

Yoono is another FireFox addon that creates a handy “social” sidebar in your browser aggregating your Twitter, Facebook, Piczo, Flickr and Friendfeed accounts. By clicking a “Surprise” button at the bottom of the widget you will be taken to a random page.

• The button sows the most relevant page based on the content in your bookmark folder.
• You can also ask for a “surprise” based on one of your bookmark folders.
• You can check an option to have a surprise each time you launch your browser.

Digg Random Story

Digg FireFox Extension (among other cool features) shows “Random” Digg story to diversify your browsing experience. This way it give some SU feel to Digg which can also turn useful at times.

Any inspiration tips to share? Share them in the comments!

Post image by naama

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I love original and unique ideas that promote themselves. Creating content that spreads is art and you are unable to generate dozens of unique and catchy ideas weekly: sometimes a person creates something truly unique once in a lifetime.

Still, there are some tactics behind crafting something that becomes viral. One such tactic is making fake mini websites that feature some sensation or weird concepts.

Those websites create their own imaginary world around them (for example, describe the life in a non-existent country) or share some spoofed scientific research or experiments or claim to describe an event that never happened, etc.

The best thing about those sites is that they don’t require much time or effort and are eagerly shared. Very often all you need is to contact a power blogger or even a journalist and share your hoax and it will work like a charm.

Let’s have a look at just a few examples to get an idea and inspiration:

Brand it:

Notice how the Onion, the weekly “satirical” stream of fake news, brand their video category: the logo, video watermarks, and the overall design are CNN-styled. This trick already makes their stream viral:

Make it easy to believe:

Male Pregnancy, the official site dedicated to the first male pregnancy, is a great example of how to design a hoax site. Everything here testifies for the reliability of this “scientific experiment”: video documentary, online EKG, magazine cover, etc.

Brainstorm a sticky concept

Some ideas don’t even require any design work or time to develop. Look at Internet First Page and Internet Last Page for example: all they needed was an idea and the domain name for that, and here we go a nice naturally-linked page to transfer link juice wherever you need:

Another cool example: turnofftheinternet.com

Grab a sensational domain

Sometimes a domain is what makes a website spread. A great example of that is PetsORFood.com for the site that claims to deliver exotic animals (like baby seals) meat to American dinner tables. The domain speaks for itself and provokes emotions by combining two “uncombineable” concepts that do not fit together: pets who we love dearly and food which we eat:

Post image by Capture Queen ™

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Let’s face it, we do flatter daily in real life either sincerely or on purpose. There is no secret that flattering is also a widely used social media marketing tool. With it you can get more social friends, their support and help, and establish yourself as a social network power user.

Didn’t you once [or twice or multiple times] make a “great-post” comment? Didn’t you once approach a power niche marketer with “I-enjoyed-your-article” message? Didn’t you once cite an expert and link back to him? Isn’t that flattering? Let’s call a spade a spade: don’t be a goody – accept it, you do flatter now and then no matter for what reasons. [Ok, to please die-hard skeptics out there I can call that 'praising' or 'complimenting']. Anyway no matter how you prefer to call it, the main thing is to do it right. There are five principles [let's say 5 social media unwritten rules] that can ensure a positive feedback from the person you are [cough] complimenting: (1) Do it timely; (2) Do it sincerely; (3) Do it expertly; (4) Do it moderately; (5) Do it creatively.

1. Why time is important? If you are too new to the community, your flattering is too evident. Yes, the right to flatter should also be earned [like anything else btw]. If you are an established user, praising is no more viewed as flattering – it is now a positive evaluation. So don’t hurry to send “you-are-so-great” message once you join a social media network. First get noticed with your hard work and value you add to the community.
   
2. Flatter sincerely – yes, this is evident. Say something only if you feel you should. Being unnatural is always evident no matter how hard you try to hide it.
3. Expert evaluation wins respect. Don’t say you like someone’s work – add why you like it and what you like most. Be specific, if you are well acquainted with the person’s work [and this is a must], that will be no problem.
4. Again, no hurry! Plenty of flattering a day or per post seems unnatural. That’s what I call “brown nosing” [well, there is a more precise word for that but I am a too well-mannered girl to use it];
5. Being creative is important in everything. There are plenty of ways to show your respect and praise: private message via your common SM, a well-reasoned comment at the person’s blog, email, link to his post, etc. Linking is one of the best choices. Your friends are clever people, they are most likely to try to promote a post linking to them. Promoting your promoters is a well-known and most effective [for both sides] technique.

Well, if you follow the rules, you are most likely to succeed. Remember a good flattery is always good. Few people can resist it. A well-done flattery adds value; it’s never irritating or annoying. Instead that’s a good way to grab attention and build friendship. So good luck to you, if you do it right, you have nothing to be ashamed of.

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Following new fashion trends and getting into the Christmas spirit, I decided to elf myself. No, that’s not about getting extra Google traffic nor am I trying to become a part of the highly successful viral campaign [well, I have been planning to "elf myself" for a couple of days and I did at last when 5 of my friends sent me their elves - so, yes, that should be considered as viral campaign success]. It’s just Christmas coming and I have that spirit you know… It took some effort and patience as the website connection was down several times but I did manage to make two elves of myself: sad elf and smiling elf.

P.S. Merry Christmas to every dear reader of my young SEO blog! Thank you so much for your support and help [yes, it was hard, but so exciting to start blogging]!

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Time to move from theory to practice now. StumbleUpon reviewed throughout this post was taken as an example. The approaches listed below can be applied to any similar social network, I believe.

Facts we all know about StumbleUpon:

- It can send an impressive number of visitors to your page;
- People coming from refer.php page are as a rule just random surfers (they won’t stay for a long time or ever come back unless you do not offer digg-front-page content type).

Benefits you can still gain using StumbleUpon:

- build relationships within your niche;
- develop your brand;
- get targeted visitors.

After some time of playing around and trying different methods, I compiled the list of approaches which worked great for me:

1) Get-noticed approach = grab attention of at least one niche power stumbler and others will come. StumbleUpon [as well as many other social media sites' out there] strong point is that each niche influencer has many “fans” (i.e. “followers”) who also have fans of their own; so if you appeal to one, you will soon [if you do your homework well] connect to others at an exponential rate.

How do I do that?

>>> Be an early bird: be the first to stumble interesting posts by your favorite bloggers. They will appreciate your efforts;
>>> Add bloggers you daily read to your friends and follow them. By reviewing their stumbles you will get their attention.

2) Brand-your-image approach. The power of imaginary should not be neglected. Photos catch an eye and stick in the memory. Having seen your image several times on the web, people will start recognizing you.

>>> Make sure to add one and the same photo to your StumbleUpon profile, to your blog home page and everywhere else where you actively participate.

3) Brand-your-name approach = if your name pops up here and there regularly, it will soon be recognized.

>>> “Interweave” networks you actively participate in. For example, stumble an article where you posted a comment. Thus a person will first see your comment and then see your StumbleUpon review = that’s it, he knows you already. This is the secret of “being everywhere” illusion.

4) Build-a-fan-club approach. Bear in mind that each time you stumble an article, your fans may read it – don’t waste your friends’ time.

>>> Stumble only truly valuable posts. This will encourage people to follow your stumbles and add you to friends.

5) Build-social-friendship approach. Treat your fans with attention; don’t focus solely on niche influencers – every contact is precious.

>>> Thank your stumblers (those who stumbled or reviewed your post) – drop them a message, stumble their articles (if they are worth it), review their profiles, comment on their blogs, etc

6) Friends-to-partners approach [using a new SEO 2.0 jargon]: if you managed to grab a niche mentor’s attention, don’t stop at this point – move forward.

>>> Subscribe to his blog and post comments regularly, do a research and find if you participate in more common social networks and add him/her to friends.

7) Do-your-homework approach. Note that there is a person behind a stumbler. And your task is to get to know this person: his website(s), his interests, social networks he participates, etc.

>>> When you already feel at home in the community and have many devoted friends, connect to them closer: reply to each message and comment thoughtfully, mention their posts or personal details they made public earlier (e.g. comment on their photos you saw on Flickr or Facebook).

Do-not-get-obsessed approach. Each approach listed above should not be overused.

>>> Don’t send messages to your friends daily saying how great their stumbles are or how interesting their new post is. Move forward moderately. The best thing is to be sincere. If you really liked the post – say it. Don’t try to be “excessively good” to everyone – this can be irritating. Stick to your own opinion. This is the art of being polite but still independent.

9) Tweak-your-own-system approach. What I have understood from my own experience – no method is perfect for everyone.

>>> You should always track your own progress and edit your initial plan. Put a tick each time when you see some result from your social media promotion; note that the fact that you discovered your individual approach is a great result in itself which is worth time and effort.

Can you share your individual approach to StumbleUpon niche marketing right now?

[time for self promotion: you are welcome to add me to friends if you are using StumbleUpon ]

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Web marketers who view social media as a promotional tool can be roughly divided into three categories:

1) Those who blatantly spam (in a hope to get quick traffic). They usually have no valuable content to offer the community and their main goal is to get people click on an ad.
2) Those who link bait (hoping that their article will generate some links from other bloggers). These webmasters usually focus on a catchy scandalous headlines with no truly valuable post following it;
3) Those who strive to become a part of the community and establish business or friendly connections with niche webmasters.

The third approach takes much time and effort and therefore people tend to choose either of the first two. However what seems to be easier has little [or no] effect.

By doing social bookmarking for traffic or spamming friends with “visit-my-site” private messages webmasters usually see low conversions as people participating in social media are “experienced surfers” – they don’t click on ads. So in this perspective, this traffic is worthless (sorry, Tad) these are only “casual visitors”. What is more, this method can hurt a brand, if a well known expert resorts to spamming.

Edgy headlines with no worth-to-pay-attention-to post below will generate minor or no inlinks as webmasters link to quality and useful resources. Besides even if your article is a state of art it is most likely to be buried without niche experts’ support.

This brings us to the third category of “socializers” who prove to be most successful in achieving all the above aims plus in building reputation, trust and brand awareness. The main rule here is when you start your social media campaign (I mean both social bookmarking and social networks, and even blog commenting), don’t expect fast results. Don’t measure the success of your social activity by mere numbers (traffic, feed subscribers or inbound links). Try to think in a different way. Each time when you want to measure your success, ask yourself the following questions:

- Which new marketing strategies did I learn from my social media activity?
- How do my social media friends evaluate my blogging activity?
- Did I manage to get noticed by a niche influencer(s)?

If you remain active and persistent, you will soon have more questions to answer and more pleasant for an eye statistics to look into. Being backed by niche experts and friends is the huge treasure which will help you throughout the time. Thanks to them you will soon see:

- People searching Google for your name;
- Your brand name being recognized;
- Niche influencers linking to your website and citing your posts;
- Friends asking you for a favor and helping you in return;
- Active social media participants helping you to promote your articles;
- Plenty of other direct and indirect benefits of your social media activity.

Update: please sphinn the post (kindly submitted by Tad)

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To Sphinn or not to sphinn… That is the question. Bookmarking one’s own articles can be frowned upon being compared with mere spamming. And here is my sincere confession: I DO bookmark posts authored by me as social bookmarking is the best way to get to know your audience, to evaluate your own content and to experiment.

Evaluation method	Result	What does it mean?
Compare traffic and feed subscriptions (e.g. Google analytics and Feedburner stats).	Your website experienced the huge traffic boost but there were no feed subscriptions.	1. The traffic was untargeted (refer to the bounce rate and page views stats of the analytics);2. Your content does not provide any new/ exciting/ useful information. 3. You do not provide any clear way to subscribe to your feed.
Compare the actual SB traffic and response rate.	You expected your post to generate a much better response (e.g. in the form of comments).	1. The visitors from SB are not interested in your niche (Google analytics will help to identify this);2. Your website is not optimized for that (it requires registration, asks for additional details, etc); 3. Your post content is not optimized to generate comments (e.g. you do not encourage people to comment)
Evaluate the social response.	Your post was not bookmarked in any other social bookmarking network.	Your post headline is not optimized for SB.
Compare the response from a general social bookmarking community and from a niche one.	Your post is much better responded in a general/ niche directory.	Your writing (style) is universal / very niche specific (nothing bad in either of these, unless your aims are inverse).
Compare the expected reaction and the actual readers’ reaction.	You expected your post to do much better in SB.	Well, that’s a great opportunity to assess your own content and writing skills.

So the most essential stats to look into are:

1. Traffic numbers (Google analytics):

2. Bounce rate (Google analytics);
3. Page views per source (Google analytics);
4. Feed subscription stats (Feedburner.com):

5. Commenting rate;
6. Blog and social bookmarking response rate (Technorati reactions).

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