Props Blog dot Com

Knowing where to start with SEO, social media, and online marketing can be confusing and frustrating.  Even if you know your way around, there’s always more to the ever changing puzzle than it seems.

The Online Marketing Blog, TopRankBlog.com, is one of the best places to go to learn about all forms of online marketing ranging from search and SEO to social media.… Click to continue...

For the last couple of months I have been doing liquor tastings and demos at stores all over the DFW metroplex.  I’ve also done promotions for some other companies like I.O. Metro handing out flyers and waving people in and even for Frito Lays handing out Sunchips. (yummy!)

This got me thinking about what really works for marketing both online and offline.

From what I have seen, interaction has a much greater impact on people than putting a sign in front of someone.  Much like those 125×125 ads most of us have on our blogs, the majority of people never even notice a sign for flyer (or notice it, but don’t respond).

Teaching… Click to continue...

Many of us have an academic background where you can never write too much.  If it’s not 5 paragraphs with an intro, three supporting argument paragraphs, and a conclusion, then it’s formatted wrong (this of course is the minimum. More fluff/garage is required the higher the class).

Blogging is different.  Most of us don’t have time to read 3-5 pages of essay when there are 25 other blogs begging to be read, so why do we bother writing that much?  At first, a post might not seem like enough, but trust me, it is.

Brevity is what Chris Brogan preaches with conviction.  Seth

The two biggest ways to get new traffic to your site are SEO and word of mouth (social media).  Which traffic is better is debatable.  I’ve read many sources that say search engine traffic converts better because the visitor was already searching for something specific whereas social media is usually not as targeted.

Regardless, search engines will likely send you the most long term traffic and definitely the most passive traffic of any source.  I had to take a 6 week break from blogging, but I still continued to receive search engine traffic.

We’ve all read the standard SEO tips before.  Get backlinks, using h(x) tags, keyword density without overstuffing… Click to continue...

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you probably already know that social media has exploded over the last couple of years.  The rate of growth seems exponential, and the user demographics for social media has expanded from internet geeks and bored students to just about every type of user you can think of.

In fact, my mother-in-law is so hooked on Facebook that if she doesn’t get her daily dose of it, she starts having major withdrawal symptoms including (but not limited to): moodiness, shaking, tremors, nausea, cold sweet, seizures, bleeding from the eyes, ears, and nose, and occasional death.

For a blogger, social… Click to continue...

Branding is one of the most important aspects of creating a successful product.  Brand identity often revolves around simple visual cues.  There are several types of visual cues that can be used for branding.

One simple way to brand is color.  When you UPS did a major campaign a while back “what can brown do for you?”

Another is style.  Site Sketch 101 might be about how to blog, but it is the hand sketched style and appearance that give it such a distinct branded look.  Nick is an awesome example of how to brand.… Click to continue...

Today is my first day ranked as an Alexa top 100,000 site.  When I started blogging, I didn’t really know much about what all the rankings meant, but I knew that I wanted to get my Alexa Rank in the top 100,000 because that was their cutoff for caring about your site.

I have read several articles about how Alexa ranking was useless, but never took it to heart.  While I don’t hold Alexa in the same high esteem as I did when I first started, I still believe Alexa ranking provides great information about the type of traffic you have… Click to continue...

Over the last couple of months, Twitter has been taking major steps to become more user friendly.  The first major step was adding Twitter Lists.  They are an extremely helpful way to organize people you want to follow.  This is especially useful if you’re following thousands of people.

Twitter is now doing Beta testing for the built in ReTweet button.  Even though I use Hoot Suite (which has a build in ReTweet function) for 90% of my Tweeting needs, occasionally, I do some tweeting from Twitter as well.

The Retweet button appears right next to the reply button on the bottom right of each tweet.  When You click it, a message asks if you want… Click to continue...

Links have always been one of the most critical aspects of the internet.  Being able to link multiple related pages together provides a tremendous value to readers.

Back in the pre-Web 2.0 days, a lot of links were written with “click here” as the anchor text (and a lot of people still link like this).  While that makes writing the link easy for the author, it is boring and not descriptive.  Furthermore, search engines use the text the link is anchored to in order to determine what value the link has.  I’m shocked at the number of people I see not using optimized anchored links.  Appropriately anchored text is an awesome SEO tool.
Use Anchored Links To Improve Your… Click to continue...

Tweeter has been the center of a ton of attention the last year.  It’s explosive growth and strength as a real time organic search engine, instant breaking news resource, and marketing tool provide people using it an amazing advantage over those who don’t.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about 5 Twitter Newbie Mistakes To Avoid which was a great hit and some basic information about Twitter Lists.  The success of those articles has made me do a lot of thinking about how to get the most out of Twitter.
Five Reasons To Use Twitter
If you’re like me, you use Twitter for 5 reasons: To find… Click to continue...