Is LinkedIn the Career or Business Tool You’ve Been Searching For?

LinkedIn started out as a website with a focus on professional networking and has remained true to its essence despite the rising popularity of social media websites like Facebook and Twitter.

Used properly it can be a very good tool to manage your career effectively. You can use it to recruit people, to look for a job or to just build a solid professional network with people you have worked with in the past or people whom you might like to work with in the future.

How to Use LinkedIn

However even the best tools are only as effective as you make them out to be. If you know how to use them properly and well you can work wonders with them–if you don’t, they are absolutely worthless.

Simply creating a LinkedIn profile will not propel your career or small business. In order to let LinkedIn do the job it was designed to, here’s what you need to do.

1. Create a detailed, interesting profile that has all your details on it. Make use of the right keywords to let recruiters find you easily.
2. Make sure most of your profile is public. This way, even people who are not on LinkedIn will be able to find you while searching for people with your skill set and experience.
3. Next-its time to make connections. Look for people you have done a significant amount of work with and connect with them. This doesn’t have to be paid work: remember anything that you might have done on a voluntary basis here–it counts!
4. You could also send contact requests to people whose profiles interest you or appear to be valuable to some new business strategy of yours.
5. You can also take a shot at answering questions by simply clicking on the answers tab. This would help establish you as someone who contributes to help others out.
6. Posting some of your own questions to get help from the countless professionals on LinkedIn is another good idea, that will help you network and will create some buzz.
7. LinkedIn provides some great links back to your websites, which is important from an SEO perspective. You can even just use that linking power for other social media accounts–but don’t forget to use it.

Make the Best of This Tool!

With new features being added to LinkedIn you can now get a bunch of things done besides sending messages and asking/answering questions on your network. You can post images, send blog posts and excerpts from articles etc.
LinkedIn is certainly not a complete career manager, but combined with other things you’re doing, it can turn out to be an excellent base for enhancing your career, and could just tip the scales in your favor if your prospective employer is looking for someone who really knows their way around the social media circuit.

Whatever the purpose of your website, one of the most important things you need to do is monitor your traffic (assuming that you want traffic–if not that’s another thing):

You need to know:

• Where it comes from (organic, PPC, referring websites, affiliates)
• How much of it there is
• Are people finding what they’re looking for (indicated by bounce rate–or where they go when they land)
• And whether those visits produce the desired result for you and your potential customers. If your traffic isn’t improving your bottom line then there’s something wrong.

I asked two of my fellow marketers who consistently get it right how they monitor their stats and here’s what I got:

Google Analytics is my favorite stats program because I know it well and it is far more powerful than other, expensive solutions. I once worked with a company that charged $5,000 per month for their Analytics program and it was quite possibly the worst thing I’ve ever worked with.

The only drawback to Google Analytics is that it isn’t real-time, so I also use BLVDStatus (Premium) and let Clicky (Free version) for sites where I need to know what is going on at certain times of the day.

Glen from Viperchill.com

There are two basic ways to use analytics.  You can systematically monitor a variety of elements of your web pages,  making analytics part of your daily routine.  Or you can use analytics as a detective does, looking for clues.

I play detective.  Every now and then I snoop around.  Anything that is not as I would expect it to be is most likely either a warning or an opportunity.

For instance, let’s suppose my client’s website ranks at #2 for Keyword1 and at #7 for Keyword2, and both are expected to have the same traffic potential.  If I see that, despite a much lower ranking, Keyword2 is delivering more traffic, that makes me wonder what would happen if we focused more and ranking for Keyword2 – perhaps it has more traffic potential than we had assumed.  Or if Keyword2 has a lower bounce rate or keeps people longer on the site.  These are signs that we might want to change our focus.

In one case, I was noticing a lot of traffic from a country that had no interest in the site, so I was able to use a geographic filter to reduce spam by over 50%.  This was not the result of systematic application of analytics; this was nose-in-the-dirt detective work (the way I like it).

David Leonhardt of The Happy Guy Marketing

Personally, I am not so keen on Google for the simple reason that I’m wary of sharing all my entrepreneurial data with a search engine that aspires to complete superiority on the Web. OK I know they all do, but Google is closest to reaching that goal and for this reason I believe they’re dangerous: absolute power corrupts.

Here are a few stats monitoring services that are worth a second look:

Mint.com Mint helps you identify where the most interest is being generated and over what!

Webtrends.com Helps you target more effectively.

Awstats.com Although it’s free, Awstats gives you all the metrics you need to work out what you’re doing right, and what you’re doing wrong.

When it comes down to it, the most important thing is that you’re monitoring. There are dozens of good web traffic monitoring programs out there. Choose one and use it remorselessly!

OK don’t answer that. I want you to think about it. What made me want to ask such a question? The following headline.

Edelman survey: Trust in all media plunges!

You can read more here.

Quite simply it makes me so sad: sick to my stomach in fact.The results of this survey indicate that the vast majority of people operating online have encountered liars. Damned liars in fact.

Why can’t more of us be truthful? Why don’t we care about our own personal reputation and that of our clients? When working online (or anywhere else for that matter) the most important thing to me is that I am dealing with others honestly, and that they do the same in return.

Is this what it’s come down to?

The following findings (along with a lot more) are sad testimonials to the number of people who look upon their friends and associates as just someone else to make a quick buck off.

- Trust in information from friends and peers, “people like me,” dropped by 20 points, from 47 to 27 percent.

- Trust in information from digital media–blogs, social networks, and free content sources like Wikipedia or Google news, remains low: only between 11 percent and 22 percent of respondents express trust in information about companies from these sources.

Are you just another person who’s building a brand on a lie? It can’t last and it won’t. We should all do our bit right now to stop the lies. Stop misleading people and learn to think long and hard before we print anything online. Our livelihoods may depend on it.

You can fool some of the people all the time and all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all the people all of the time. My apologies to Abraham Lincoln but that’s almost a universal formula.

Building Your Brand in an Environment of Trust

Building trust is (or should be) a very serious business. Here are a few rules to make sure your trust-meter remains intact:

• Never lie or misrepresent yourself or a product or service.
• Never back up someone you know is lying, either in words or by endorsing them via social media.
• Don’t be afraid to call someone out if you know for sure they’re lying.

If you don’t do it, perhaps no one will. And it’s an interesting thing that if you show some courage and stand up to someone who’s doing something you disagree with, very often others will support you: they agree with you but they don’t have the personal courage to do what you’ve just done! You don’t need to do it publicly either. You’ve still done the job if you contact someone privately if you know that they’re contributing to the growing environment of mutual mistrust because they’re not operating ethically in whatever way.

Consider also that creating a fake Twitter account to air your views might just be another part of our problem. Too many people are hiding behind fake social media personas where they feel it’s OK to do and say things that they’d probably never consider doing in real life. But then again, maybe they would if they knew no one would find them out and that’s the root of the problem we have here.

It’s a well known cliche that in war truth is always the first casualty. Let’s work to make sure that in years to come our grandchildren don’t say ‘when the Internet was born truth laid down and died.’

That was my periodic Rant. Consider it over.

Wow! Why is it that all the disasters seem to happen in January, or right at the end of December so that all of January overshadowed by them?

Using Our Skills to Help…

The SEO community, along with all the other communities on Twitter, Facebook and other social media channels, quickly started using whatever skills they possess to get the word out and help with what’s going on in Haiti right now. The poorest country in the Western hemisphere was struck by a powerful  7.0 earthquake on January 12 with a devastating result that is still only just emerging.

Last year it was the attacks on Gaza. which began on December 27 2008 and dampened our spirits throughout the month of January, also triggering a massive social media response. Before that, on December 26, 2004, the entire world was shocked at the worst Tsunami in history which caused an earth-shattering level of death and destruction in the countries bordering the Indian Ocean. Indonesia bore the brunt, and over a quarter of a million people lost their lives, although some estimates put the number much higher.

Step Back and Take a Deep Breath

It’s sometimes hard to focus on the good that is all around us at times like these. But I have personally been moved to tears by some of the truly great selfless acts I have witnessed over the past few days.

That’s why I especially appreciate efforts on the part of my Twitter friends to raise awareness and funds to help the people of Haiti. They are unstinting and as of January 16, social media efforts together had raised an amazing US8 million for Haiti relief.

A Wall Street Journal article pinpointed the many ways in which Twitter has been particularly useful to worldwide efforts to help the people of Haiti. Twitter and Facebook have been used for locating lost relatives, raising awareness on the magnitude of this disaster, and even coordinating relief efforts.

Here are some of the millions of Tweets that are focusing on Hait right now:

Elsewhere on the Web…

Google Crisis Response page

Hatian-Americans turn to Facebook in search for loved ones.

& Midnight Moguls is Born

I am particularly excited, and honored, to be part of a wonderful movement just being started up by Scott ‘Social Media’ Allen @ScottAllanto help those who are out of work due to the sagging economy right now.

He set up Midnight Moguls as a hub where in return for an offer of help for those affected by the present economic crisis you get a little promotion by Midnight Mogul members. Please support us and spread the word to people you know, especially on Twitter.

In addition to helping out over at the Midnight Moguls website, I am offering resume-editing for anyone looking for a job right now. You can Tweet me @ISpeakSEOif you want more info.

What can you give back to the community?

Brand-Building & Reputation Management

If reputation management is a headache you’re already encountered, or if you’re one of the many businesses where your reputation could be attacked through no fault of your own, then you should prepare yourself to get busy on social media. The many social media channels are a proactive reputation management gift to anyone who would like to fend off a possible reputation attack, or fix a disaster that’s already happened.

Social media is the cost-conscious way of tweaking your brand in any direction you like: compare a cost of zero with the hefty price tag that comes with traditional media. And if you’re the type who doesn’t like to try anything until the big boys have tried it first, bear in mind that brand-giant Pepsi has decided to forgo its traditional superbowl ads on TV in favor of social network promotion online. The saving? Word is they’ve put aside $20 million to use as prizes for social media campaign, which involves competitions. Could that have been their previous budget for the superbowl ads?

Of course you can launch a paid social media campaign, which can set you back up to $10,000.00 per tweet. But I wouldn’t recommend it. This is missing the whole point of social media in my opinion, and if you do it right you could get exactly the same result without the disapproving looks (yes this kind of advertising can actually get you unfollowed on Twitter) or the hefty price tag.

Let’s have a brief look at how you might create a social media campaign

Facebook

All social media campaigns begin with opening an account and following best practices to make sure you don’t alienate your new network.I haven’t found a better or more comprehensive guide to using Facebook than Mashable’s. Highly recommended whether you’re new to Facebook or a seasoned user.

Create a Facebook Group and Fan Page for your product or service. Don’t beat people over the head about it, but share useful content and build friendly networks and your reputation will take care of itself. If you do a good enough job of this you could even find that a few of your friends are prepared to put themselves on the line to defend your reputation.

Twitter

Personally I consider Twitter the best reputation management tool of all. You can monitor what people are saying about you through the many Twitter search tools and address the comment if they’re bad. You can build fantastic friend networks, and like Facebook, if you’re a good Twitter friend, your contacts will likely do a great job of defending your honor online. Twitter conversations are often indexed, so can be searched through the engines, and not just through 3rd party Twitter tools.

Digg

If you can come up with a story or event that is so newsworthy that it hits the first page of Digg, you’re basically made. Online this is like making the front page of the NYTimes. Digg is not as much fun as it used to be though, and getting a story to hit the front page can be stressful. Personally I prefer to use Facebook and Twitter for fun and effectiveness.

What Else

There are many other social media channels that you might like to explore. Used together they can help you build a truly amazing social media campaign for brand building or reputation management.

SEO: If you do nothing else, build links!

It’s more-or-less official: link-building is quite possibly the most important part your SEO campaign if you’re at all serious about breaking into the ranks of page-1 Google results.

But the more we hear people talking about building links, the more mysterious the whole subject becomes: surely there’s a lot the average person can’t know about it?

Actually, it’s not that mysterious. Here’s a breakdown of what you need to get right to create a world-class piece of linkbait that will garner valuable links as well as get people talking about you and your blog or website!

1. First, be very clear about what linkbait–or link bait–really is: it’s plain, old fashioned quality content. Even super-quality content, no matter what it actually is. It can be an article, a blog post, a photo, a cartoon, a video or an audio post. If it’s good, people willl link to it and it will be linkbait.
2. Decide if Linkbait is what you need or if you should be buying plain old links. Here’s a discussion debating paid links v linkbait.
3. Read up about specific definitions of different types of linkbait is so you can do a better job. Here’s Matt Cutt’s post on the subject, and here’s celebrity blogger DoshDosh’s take on list building, which is a very successful form of linkbait creation.
4. Choose a subject for your linkbait that is 100 percent relevant to your site, and that will have benefits for readers. Making linkbait useful is critical to its success.
5. Be sure that the linkbait you choose isn’t going to compromise your brand in any way (hence the caption above).
6. Create a title for your Linkbait that will compel the reader to continue. Copyblogger’s post on creating magnetic headlines will help you get started on creating your own masterpieces.
7. While press releases are not strictly speaking Linkbait, I’m including them on this list because they can get you a lot of incoming links and can enhance your brand image when done properly. Chris Crum over at WebPro News gives us a lot of information about press releases.
8. To be sure there are examples of linkbait that are scaremongering, lies, disinformation or all of these and more, but in my experience if linkbait is to have long-term value it’s better to stick to the truth and keep within the guidelines of ethics.Providing your linkbait is not unethical, you should be OK with Smashing Magazine’s Golden Rules of Linkbaiting.
9. Some ideas to get you started: you could write an expose of something you think is wrong, a review of a product you like, create a controversial opinion piece that you know some people will hate (no such thing as bad publicity), create a list of tools or services that will be useful to your audience, come up with some breaking news that no one else has yet and make sure people know you had it first, conduct a poll or a survey,  come up with a video that is highly popular (this is a good one–get it right and you’ve got it made!), create a top 10, top 20 , or top anything list (go as high as you like).
10. Assess the level of emotion your article is going to trigger. If it doesn’t elicit emotion you are dead in the water, as Search Engine Journal’s Dave Snyder explains.
11. If your linkbait is the written kind, don’t forget to link out to anyone who provided information or inspiration–they’ll probably link back to you so your piece will have a built-in linking mechanism.
12. When you’re done, promote, promote, promote. Some sites that you may find useful for buzzing up your linkbait are Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed, Plurk, Posterous, Digg, Mixx, Delicious, and Tip’d if your piece has anything to do with the world of finance. OK I know there are scores more, but this should be enough to seriously get anyone started promoting their pieces.
13. Notice I didn’t talk about paid links: if you buy (or sell) links, and Google catches up with you, you’re sunk!

Still need help?

Alan Bleiweiss over at Search Marketing Wisdom gives some great suggestions for building links (not linkbait–just straightforward valuable links).

SEOBook can always be relied upon to give accurate,  reliable information and their post on linkbuilding is no exception.

And if all this information doesn’t inspire you to create the best piece of linkbait ever, you need help! Some of the best linkbait creators of all time are:

Me (of course )

Eric Ward

Lyndon Antcliff (perhaps the King of controversial Linkbait)

Michael Gray (Graywolf)

NOTE: A small bribe will secure your listing here! (Just kidding). There are hundreds of excellent linkbait experts–can’t practically list them all here.

Let’s Follow the Yellow Brick Road, SEOs

A while back I read an interesting comment over at SEOmoz after watching Rand Fishkin’s Whiteboard Friday: it roughly, and rightly, stated that SEOs are tired of following Google’s latest algo change.

In his video, Rand asserts that all we’ll need to worry about in the future are the facts that backlinks will always count as votes of confidence and good content will always provide a satisfactory user experience. All true.

But what about the role of social media in the future of SEO?

Rand says that he doesn’t think that social is going to be as big as some are saying it will. I disagree. To justify his position he mentions that Twitter and FaceBook are easy systems to game. That’s true at the moment. But people are also learning that marketing through these social media without gaming them can actually be more successful than the unethical approach.

The face of search is changing and we detected a radical shift at least a year ago.

There’s even a new search engine called Leapfish that includes results on social media sites as well as traditional search engine results.

Interestingly a couple of years back when I asked Rand if he thought that Google included data on site traffic in the ranking algo, he said that he didn’t think so. That’s changed and now he says that Google will increasingly incorporate usage metrics to gauge the value of websites, to the extent that good traffic could even make up for not-so-good backlinks.

Rand also speculates that verticals will replace Google for some categories of search, such as Craigslist for apartments search, Kayak for travel search etc (those are his examples).

I would also venture that the comments over at Ad Age regarding Google’s treatment of SEOs and marketing people in general have served to create a general malaise over Google too. In plain language we’re all sick of Google moving the goal posts, insulting us, and outright calling us criminals when all we’re doing is providing a much-needed online service.

Is Google biting the hand that feeds it?

To read between the lines of Google algo changes and updates, you might be forgiven for thinking that today’s online marketers (including SEOs of course) are just mutations of yesterdays spammers and porno-peddlers. Naturally we’re all rankling at that–who wouldn’t. So in effect, Google sees itself as big enough and mighty enough to alienate a huge sector of the online community with impunity–and no compunction whatever.

So aside from the fact that most of us see Google’s monopoly as a huge danger, particularly with the development of ‘the cloud,’ (How the cloud can be a danger to us is a subject I’ll be covering in a post shortly), we will also be anxious to adopt the first real alternative to the Google empire simply because of the bad feeling that Google itself has created.

I started writing this post several months back. Since then many online marketers of all stripes have  joined the growing crowd who see Twitter as playing an increasingly important role in online search and more. Already, as I predicted in a guest post over at Search Engine People back in March, users are looking to Twitter for instant gratification. Just a few minutes ago, I found myself searching Twitter for Google Wave invites (Ironic I know). You can see the result when I searched Google here. While this is the result I got for a Twitter Search for Google Wave invites.

As you can see, if you’re looking for a Google Wave invite, Twitter is the place to go! Those results just prove what I’ve been saying for months. Twitter poses a serious threat to Google as The New Search Venue. In fact, if I were a Google exec, I’d be much more worried about Twitter than Bing or any  possible search engine combination.

For many of you this will be revisiting the basics. We could all do with a little refresher course on what’s important in SEO now and then.

It’s common for SEO clients to pick and choose what they want included in their SEO campaign. Many SEO consultants will, often against their better judgment, agree to a scaled-down campaign that suits the client (or rather the client’s budget). If you’re thinking of saving money on SEO, you should be aware that if you leave out certain elements you may not be negating the entire campaign, but you will certainly be limiting your scope for success.

Here’s a list of what absolutely cannot be left out of your SEO campaign:

1. Check domain integrity and canonicalization issues to ensure that, basically, there is only one version of your home page.
2. Elimination of any inadvertent Black Hat elements such as invisible text, cloaking, or keyword stuffing, or any links that could be construed as paid links in any way by Google.
3. Thorough keyword research to ensure that you are optimizing for the phrases that exactly match what your customers will be searching for, and nothing else.
4. Website audit along with competitive analysis to ensure that you are in a position to compete with websites presently at the top of a search for your chosen keywords.
5. Page title tags. These have to be perfect for each page because they are critical to your Google success.
6. SEO content creation. The goal is to fill your pages with content that will impress Google and entice your customers.
7. Link building. Without sufficient quality, incoming links you cannot compete. Be careful of purchasing links because Google has ways of sniffing them out and will penalize you decisively.
8. Monitor results of your SEO campaign for all you’re worth. This is key to future SEO work. If you dispense with this step you might as well give up and settle for failure.

Indicating that great things are expected for Arabian startup Arab Crunch, Ex-Vice President of Yahoo, Basil Ojjeh has invested an undisclosed sum, expected to launch Arab Crunch to assured stardom on the Internet.

Arab Crunch owner and CEO, Gaith Saqer  is about to hit paydirt. The fact that an ex-Yahoo exec is willing to play the role of angel investor to Arab Crunch is an indication of the expectations for the Middle East’s answer to TechCrunch.

An Arab Crunch blogpost described the purpose of …

“ArabCrunch.NET will facilitate knowledge transfer and enable veterans from Silicon Valley to work with and mentor young talent from the MENA region,” said Bassel Yassine Ojjeh, a former Senior Vice President of Yahoo!, Inc. USA, a serial entrepreneur and Board Member of ArabCrunch Group, who led the round of funding.”

Join the Free Copywriting Bonanza!

Are you absolutely sure you want a free copywriter with all that it entails?

To start there’s the karma.

Realize, that you may find yourself being asked to work for free too. What? You wouldn’t dream of it? That’s odd, considering you are expecting a copywriter to work for free!

Remember too, that you get what you pay for. Even a good copywriter is not going to give you his best if he’s not getting paid. That’s just plain human nature.

What Free Copywriting Will Do for You!

And if you’re a copywriter about to give away your work for free, remember that you’re setting a precedent. You could be making sure that you never get paid again. After all, if you did it for free once, a potential client has every right to expect you to do that again. And here’s the thing: you’re not only devaluing yourself, you’re devaluing the entire writing industry. So don’t be surprised when other writers avoid you and even distance themselves from you.

As Harlan quite rightly says in his video: would you expect to drive into a gas station and get free gas? Would you go shopping and expect to walk out without paying for the goods (yes, try that by all means: it’ll end well for you!). What is it about writing that makes people think it’s not valuable?

As a matter of fact, writing is the one, single factor that can make a serious difference to your bottom line. A good writer can increase your perceived value. Great writing can set the stage for a relationship of trust between you and your potential customers. Heck, it can even persuade people to buy. Glenn Murray of Divine Write just posted an article on the same subject, as it happens, and he has a lot more to say about the value a good writer can bring to your project. Be sure to click through to the examples of ‘cheap’ writers’ work he refers to: it’s worth a good laugh if nothing else.

Even if you pay out a modest couple of grand for a writing project, you can reasonably expect to see an increase in sales. Most of the time your investment pays off within weeks, if not days. The better the writer, the more likely it is that you’ll see a real return on your investment.

So I’m not kidding when I tell you that hiring a cheap or free writer can actually hurt your bottom line. Think about that for a moment. Deciding to invest in a good writer will change the way you feel about your business, and that will be communicated to your potential clients. A well-paid writer will give you his very best copy, every time. He will put his soul into that work and it will make all the difference, I promise you!