Honest Marketing Secrets

Photo by jaqian

You know how you read a great blog post and get to the bottom of it and someone’s made a truly stellar comment? You know how you think to yourself, “holy mackerel, that was a good comment, who the heck is this person?” (Don’t tell me you don’t say holy mackerel! ok, ok, you probably say “shazam!” or “zoinks!”, but you get my point, ya?)

Anyway, let’s say you then attempt to click on the person’s name in the comments and check out their site. And it doesn’t work. The commenter mistyped the URL. Horrors! You’re sad. You can’t find out who this amazing person is. You’ll never know what else they might have to say. And the name they typed in was something like “Dan”. Argh, how will I ever search for that?

BUT you’re not half as upset as the person who mistyped their URL in the comments box would be if only they knew.

The commenter has completely lost the greater opportunity to join the conversation web-wide; they’re only conversing on that little blog post floating in the info-ether with no link back to their site. Such a great comment and they get no search engine, or pagerank credit whatsoever for having made the effort. And all because of a little typo. Now that hurts.

Here’s how I avoid this problem altogether: Read the rest of this entry »

I am officially overwhelmed. But that’s nothing new. In fact, I’m sure you’re pretty blasé about being overwhelmed now too. Everyone’s been overwhelmed for the last few years and it’s only getting worse by the second as a new cornucopia of interesting and not-so-interesting blogs hits the net daily. But what to do about it. I need to keep track of everything happening in my area as best I can and I’ve been searching for a good way to do that for a while now. I found a few very cool answers.

Track Your Posts, Track Your Blogs
Need to track your own blog and other blogs you read every day? Wish you could track more easily? Want to find out how well a specific post is doing compared to your other posts? Want to quickly find the best posts ever made to your blog, or to any or all of your favorite blogs? Definitely grab an account over at aiderss.com. I just stumbled across these guys a few days ago and I’m thrilled with it so far. You can track trends, see the historical performance of your blog, or any blog you’re interested in. I could go on . . . but the best way to see why I’m so pleased with it is to just check it out. (You can also do RSS mash-ups here too.)
Check out AideRSS

Follow the Conversation
I mentioned before that marketing and blogging are all about conversations. Now I’ve found a great tool that helps you track blog conversations and will really surprise you with the alternate view it provides. It puts even older stuff you might have seen before into a different context that might trigger new ideas, or interpretations. Never mind the fact that you can watch what people are talking about in an up-to-the-minute sort of way about whatever key phrase is burning a hole in your brainpan today. This tool may be my tool-of-the-month, if I had such a thing.
Check out TalkDigger

Mash Things Up a Bit More: 2 Great Video Tutorials on Using RSS Feeds
If you were to take all the information you’re interested in and mash it up together and then sort it so the most important and relevant stuff popped to the top, wouldn’t that save you a ton of time? Wouldn’t that be cool? That’s what a feed mash-up can do for you and all you need is a good feed masher. There are a number of feed mashers out there, but I recently ran across an RSS tutorial over at John Jantsch’s blog that covers the how, but also suggests a site I hadn’t seen called mySyndicaat. I’m still having a go at mashing my favorite feeds and comparing all these tools, but so far mySyndicaat definitely seems worth checking out.

Alternatively, Jack Humphrey posted a great tutorial on another great feed manager called BlogRovr which you may find very useful. So far, this one is duking it out with AideRSS above for my favorite, but they do slightly different things and I can see using both of them.

Check out the tutorial at John Jantsch’s blog.
Check out the tutorial at Jack’s Friday Traffic Report
Check out mySyndicaat
Check out BlogRovr

Have fun finding yourself and others and have a great weekend! (Holy mackerel, I used an exclamation mark. What on earth was I thinking? . . . was that wise? Hmmm, we shall see.) [dang, WordPress won't accept my interrobang . . . argh.]

-Zack