Guest what? I was just on your blog reading your latest article. I enjoyed it and decided to share it with all my twitter friends. To my surprise your twitter code has no handle included. What? No twitter handle?

This means I closed the pop up and didn’t share your article!

I will not share an article on twitter unless your twitter button has your twitter handle in it. So when I’m on your blog and I click the tweet button it better include your name. (My Example) @bbrian017 (more…)

Many of you might remember a month or so back I deleted some accounts from the Blog Engage community. They made a fuss like big immature bloggers do but what’s really sad is how they moved to the Blokube community and have clearly started the same manipulating behavior.

Now first let me explain, Dev and I are great friends. We have worked together for over 6 months in a business partnership and have mutual respect for one another. When Dev needs help I provide assistance and when I need help he’s always there for me. We have a great online blogging relationship.

The sad part is Dev’s community is not strong enough to take the heat easily like Blog Engage did with these amateur bloggers. If he was to delete these accounts there’s a good chance because of his smaller following it would devastate the Blokube community. (more…)

I want to talk to you about ways to successfully promote your business using social networking tools. There are so many tools available for you to take advantage of. Along with these tools, you have to provide your share of the contribution. One of these contributions is being business-savvy.

Doesn’t it drive you mad when, whenever you log onto Facebook or Twitter, there can never seem to be any common ground? On your Twitter account, there may be people following you, who contributes to your interests, goals and inspirations, then there are people who don’t.

They are not even in the same playing field. Now, your interests, inspirations and goals in life and your career may be entrepreneurship. You may be an inspiring entrepreneur. So, given your interests and goals in life, wouldn’t you want to only add the people who can contribute to that in your circle, whether it be on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, or any other website or blog? I would. (more…)

They are explosive, spreading fast and disruptive. Google +1, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or any social media site as they are known have created a new world of opportunities where anything is possible. For example Facebook has more than 700 million users worldwide bigger than more countries in the world, although slightly less than the population of India.

(more…)

Many business owners understand that they should be “on” social media sites like Facebook, but that is where their acumen ends.  Many small businesses just create their page as a shell and then sit back and welcome what little traffic they may get naturally. 

These companies have completely passive Facebook pages, assuming that the small amount of traffic and ”likes” they naturally accumulate will all count as “profit.”  But an ill-tended Facebook page will actually reflect badly on the company that created it, causing the company’s brand value to go down in the long run.

Facebook won’t work for you unless you work for it.  Only active, intelligent users will be able to leverage Facebook as a tool for improving their business.

I work for a Dentist’s office in a small town in Indiana, and we thought we were doing well to have 30-something fans until we started talking to some people with more Facebook proficiency.  When we started our Facebook-rejuvenating project we realized how severely we were underestimating our page’s potential.

After checking out this guide, we got motivated to give one person the task of updating our page three times a week.  Whenever something eventful was happening around our office or someone found a particularly cool picture or video, we posted it on our page.  At first this didn’t buy us much, as the 30-something fans that we had were not even particularly engaged with our page.  But as we improved our content and sent more of our clients to our Facebook page, our “likes” began steadily increasing and engagement soon followed.  Around that time we also increased our visibility by mailing out postcards.

We took this small spark and tried to kindle it into a flame.  Facebook provides a number of different metrics, called Facebook Insights.  We checked out this guide to insights, and began monitoring our traffic.

The Facebook Insights dashboard shows a lot of different metrics you can look at, like the total number of daily active users, the demographics of your fans, the people that refer to you externally, and the daily page activity of your fans that mentions you.  In particular we paid attention to the likes/comments for all of our content and our monthly fan growth.  By watching how our content was received, we were able to tailor our content to what our fans wanted to see.  Our fans didn’t seem to respond much to our discussion prompts (probably, admittedly, due to the quality of the prompts themselves), but did tend to chime in on any cute dental health infographics we found. 

Sure, some users were following us somewhat ironically, “trolling” us, but their comments were good-natured enough, and overall engagement continued to increase.  We watched our monthly fan growth ratchet up, and our total number of fans grew slowly past 100 and then bloomed from there to the ~400 we have now.  Now that we have a decent following, we also started to see some people unsubscribe.  Our attrition rate so far seems very slow and steady, with no real pattern for why people are leaving.  But I imagine that if our popularity continues to increase, we will have to become more sensitive to our attrition rate.

It really didn’t take as much effort or know-how as you might think to transform our pathetic Facebook page into a good tool for connecting with our clients.  Insights make it fairly easy and straightforward to see what is going on with your page’s traffic, and from there it’s a simple matter of finding out what kind of content people want and trying to deliver it to them a few times a week.

Official June 2011 Monthly Guest Blogging Contest Post #13
Contest Article

We have a lot of social networks such as Facebook, Friendster, myspace, Twitter, and many more that we have heard about and we can connect with old friends as well as find new friends. But what about the social network for bloggers? Here are a few that I know of: Blog Engage, Technorati, Bloggers.com, Bloggeries.com, etc. What do these websites do? For all you bloggers, you probably already know that these websites is where you can submit your blog and post your blog articles, have them voted for and so on depending on what features the website have. Besides that, by joining these websites, I can say that it is one of the easiest ways to promote your blog to increase traffic and also to build your social network with other bloggers, be it successful bloggers or those bloggers who are new to the blogging world.

Yes, I do believe that bloggers (especially new bloggers like myself) can learn a lot from older successful bloggers. But I seem to have one problem about joining the social networks for bloggers. You see, I have joined a couple of websites such as Blog Engage, Technorati and Bloggers.com and maybe a few more awhile ago. The problem is, I can’t seem to keep up with all of them. Currently, I find myself attached to Blog Engage (may be because it seems so addictive to me). I ‘visit’ Technorati and the other websites once in awhile.

As for me, I get ‘engaged’ in Blog Engage and read articles, vote, etc and that is how I spend my time on the internet other than updating my own blog, Facebooking, checking my mail and just browsing through the net. By the time I need to go offline, I realize that I did not check on other social networks for bloggers. And if I think that I’ll check them out the next day, here’s what I’ll do: The next day, I’ll go to the websites which I went the previous day and check for updates. Along the way, if I find links that interests me, I’ll view the link, get carried away and at the end of the day, the same thing happens as I realize that I haven’t visited the sites which I was supposed to for the day.

So people, my question is, especially for those of you who have been blogging for quite awhile now, I would just like to know how it is for you keeping up and updating yourself with the few bloggers’ social network which you have joined? I do believe that active bloggers join more than one social network. I find it quite difficult for me as each and every website on the internet, be it a social network for bloggers or not, have their own specialty and for some websites you have many links to explore!

So, I’ll leave the topic there for now. Now, it is your turn. What do you have to say about this?



Official June 2011 Monthly Guest Blogging Contest Post #5
Contest Article

Free Software Foundation (FSF) is an organization that campaigns for the freedom of usage of softwares. They support things like open source and programs under the GNU General Public License where users have the right to use the programs free from any limitations mostly found on proprietary softwares.

When we think of proprietary softwares, or softwares under some license that holds and limits the users of the program to the terms suggested by the company or the creators, what product would immediately register on our minds? Of course, the oh-so-famous Microsoft products.

When Windows 7 became live on 2009, FSF immediately created a campaign “Windows 7 Sins” stating the things that Microsoft yet again brought to existence – the monopoly role of the said product on our regular computing lives, the terms to carry on our shoulders, the limitations included that prevents the users from expanding their knowledge and the right to know about everything they need to know about the product they are using, and so on, and so forth.

But recently, a post against the usage of the social networking site Facebook caught my interest.

What’s with Facebook that made them against it?

We all know that we are free to use Facebook as we are not paying anything to use it. Nonetheless, what ‘free’ on the Free Software Foundation means is the freedom to use, not ‘free’ as in free beer – the analogy they always use to define the word free. But we are free to use Facebook, right? Or are we not?

FSF is claiming that by using Facebook, we are not communicating with other people directly; that we are communicating with Mr. Zuckerberg first before the person we are interacting with. Sounds legit? Yes, I can tell. Some posts, especially on your Status, will first be checked by the system before you send it. If it contains some malicious and distasteful content, it will not be posted. That’s the same as links, if you post links (e.g., links under famous URL shorteners like bit.ly), you need to enter the words to a CAPTCHA test first before it is posted.

Is filtering depriving users their freedom to post whatever they want? As we all know, filtering is for security purposes, to prevent abuse from users. But is preventing abuse a deprivation of freedom?

“The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good,
in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs,
or impede their efforts to obtain it.”
- John Stuart Mill

Well, a system could not possibly detect the main purpose of a user when submitting a post. Unlike humans, it cannot instantly tell that a certain post is made for malicious purposes or not. It could detect only a little. So is the system’s inability to fully detect the purpose of the user a flaw to the whole system? I don’t think so. It’s like cursing a dog for not being able to purr.

Another thing is the tracking system used by Facebook to detect Likes and Recommendations on a page that contains it – that even non-Facebook users’s information will be logged and that these information could be used to invade the users’ privacy. One almost high type of a speculation (but is not impossible), is that it could be used by the government on surveillance purposes.

And so they are suggesting that we use the alternatives which passed their requirements of a free software (again, free as in freedom not free beer.) The alternatives mentioned are GNU Social, Status.net, Crabgrass, Appleseed, and Diaspora.

What makes it sound absurd?

Of all the alternatives mentioned, I’ve only heard of Diaspora. What makes Facebook effective as a social networking site is that you could really network with people you want to interact to. The problem with FSF’s alternatives is – it’s like suggesting us to connect with ghosts. We all know that not all Facebook users are geeks, and you just can’t tell them to leave Facebook and create an account on Crabgrass or GNU Social. The tech geeks you could convince; but social networking isn’t about all people with same interests together, else just create a forum site or something similar to deviantArt.

Facebook has contributed a great role to drive traffic to our before-unknown spaces on the web. Could social media enthusiasts live without Facebook for the sake of this campaign? What left me thinking is – is there any similarity between Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerburg that made them trigger the “dislike” button for both?

How about you?

Do you use Facebook? Do you regularly use it? Are you willing to give up using Facebook and migrate to the said alternatives? If yes, will you (or could you) convince your friends to migrate, too? Feel free to share your thoughts and suggestions.

Are you looking at building quality backlinks to your blog? Are you looking at increasing your blog traffic? If your a business or personal blogger please continue reading.

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Content Syndication

With our service we will automatically syndicate your blogging content to the Blog Engage community. Your content will also be syndicated into our portfolio of social media websites such as Blog Serp, Top Blogged, RSS Leak, Blogger Ink, Tag Serp and Blogger Tag.

Contest Sponsorship

All Business, Platinum and Gold Membership Customers are included as a “Contest Sponsor” in all our Guest Blogging Contests. Our contestants are given bonus points for writing individualized sponsor reviews, these would be reviews of your blog and or service. As our contests grow so do the contestants entering and participating. This year in 2011 we will be giving away a total of 3000 USD.

Business customers (19.99 per month) receive top sponsorship placement in our guest blogging contests. In addition our contestants are given 150 points for each individual review they do of your blogs and or services. This points are used towards gaining the lead in our guest blogging contests.

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1. The content about our sponsors must be unique
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SEO and Backlinks

When you market using the Blog Engage RSS Service your blog will start generating backlinks to all individual articles. Our portfolio of social media websites are all do follow and help you build up your page rankings. When our blogging contestants write reviews you will also be rewarded with dedicated backlinks that will help you stand out against the competition for targeted keywords.

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The Blog Engage RSS Service also automatically tweets your published articles to all of @bbrian017′s 2500 followers. Your Published content will also be shared with our facebook fan group Blog Engage with over 530 friends.

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With the Blog Engage RSS Membership you get the opportunity to earn with all your blog article submissions to Blog Engage as we are a Google Adsense Revenue Sharing Community. On all your syndicated story pages at Blog Engage your Google Ads will be displayed when visited from any Blog Engage member or search engine traffic.

So what are you waiting for? For as low as 19.99/month your business can start growing online with our community and real members! Engage your business with Blog Engage RSS Service

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Be sure to add me as a friend, bbrian017

Twitter, bbrian017

Thanks,

Brian