Spent 5 minutes on Sphinn lately?

It’s amazing what you can find, new authors you’ll discover, and marketing or traffic generation techniques you’ll learn.

It’s a great place to spend your morning coffee break to see what the rest of the internet marketing community is buzzing about.

My personal tip to save time on Sphinn (or risk clicking and reading and commenting all day) is to choose one topic in the green navigation bar – Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Search Marketing, Social Media, Online Marketing, Searching, Other – and browse the headlines. You can find me skimming through the Social Media tab from 9:30-10:15 am EST, Monday to Thursday.

Some of the faces you’ll find there are well known in the industry. Others you’ll be thrilled to discover.

Social Marketing on Sphinn

Today I landed on a Courtney Tuttle post and found it informative enough to share here. These are the basics of social marketing – build for your market, strategize your efforts, promote others.

Five Reasons I Used to Suck at Social Media (November 7) – “In the last few months, I’ve gone from getting almost no social traffic to regularly having 3,000+ visitor spikes.”

Good read. Especially helpful if you have been hearing all the hype about Web 2.0 traffic, have tried to generate your own Web 2.0 traffic stream, and aren’t seeing the results everyone else is. Courtney also comes clean about the huge waste of effort most internet marketers expend on getting to the top of Digg. Be sure, as well, to skim the comments left on the post.

I’d suggest subscribing to Courtney’s site as well – the traffic to that blog alone has steadily risen since April 2007 (launch) and is now in the top 25,000 visited sites online (according to Alexa).

A Bit on Sphinn’s Backend

Last year I told you about a Web 2.0, Open Source software, called Pligg. It was great then and it’s still great today. Not that open source programs don’t come with their own set of problems, but the programmers and volunteers behind Pligg are dedicated and hard-working.

Sphinn.com is powered by Pligg (as are a number of very busy and profitable Web 2.0 sites). Launched just 4 months ago, Sphinn’s current Alexa places it in the top 25,000 most visited websites.

If you’ve considered jumping on the bandwagon and having your own Web 2.0 site there’s no time like the present and there’s no better free program and support than Pligg offers (in my opinion anyway).

I have Pligg running on a niche site that I started last year – but did not launch – and loved playing around with it. Pligg has been updated since and is now easier and has more features. (see: Web 2.0 OpenSource).

Step aside from all the hype, excitement and disruption of Google’s OpenSocial project and what you’ll see is a time saving opportunity in the not too distant future.

At a gathering last night I became ‘as excited as Scoble*‘ trying to explain what OpenSocial meant to the online landscape. And yes, my personal show was complete with arms flapping, heightened voice tone, and even forgetting where I was in the point I was trying to get across.

My friends and associates (who are not geeks and many don’t even own a website) listened and watched for 5 minutes as though I had 5 heads.

Sigh.

Thankfully two entrepreneurs in the room ‘got it’ and wanted to talk more about it – making me feel not quite so ‘fringe’ and nerdy.

So let’s talk about what OpenSocial and those Scoble videos mean to you — the online entrepreneur with a well defined target market — and let’s do it in a less sensationalist manner than I displayed last night. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ll write more about these videos tomorrow, but right now I don’t want you to miss it. Primarily because if you aren’t excited about social marketing yet, this Scoblizer vid will change your mind when numbers and concepts start flying.

Secondly because I expect a lightbulb or two to go off mid-video regarding how the social sites are inter-linked and connected and why (and how) you need to capitalize on that to ensure your marketing message is heard, is cohesive, is effective…

This is not ‘their’ starfish! This is ‘your’ starfish. (Click play, watch to the end and see what I mean.)

To save you hunting to find video 2, here it is… Read the rest of this entry »

More Visibility, a two time INC. 500 Company (and the only firm in their industry to have received such an honor), often releases free reports and whitepapers to their targeted audience and subscribers (distributed through various channels).

The one I was reading today was a little remedial, but a good primer for new website owners or netpreneurs who haven’t yet considered that there is more to the traffic equation than buying links from other websites.

“Marketing Strategies Beyond Traditional Search” is a tidy 13 page PDF file that discusses contextual advertising, local search, vertical search, affiliate marketing, display advertising, broadband advertising, rich media, and more. If you’ve been marketing online for any amount of time you will not learn anything new from this report, but it might be worth your while to read some of their other free white papers.

The kicker is in the conclusion of “…Beyond Traditional Search,” copied partially below. Remember this is a search engine optimization company (companies whose income depended solely on their ability to achieve top search engine positions for their clients) writing this. Read the rest of this entry »

Looking for a way to use Web 2.0 (either social networking or social bookmarking) online in languages other than English?

Connecting socially, a lot like Facebook

skyrock.com (also available in Spanish and Dutch)
Home Page: 6
Alexa Traffic Rank 10/07: 26

xiaonei.com (Chinese)
Home Page: 5
Alexa Traffic Rank 10/07: 362

Read the rest of this entry »

One of the latest comScore reports on social networking and e-commerce has just been released. You can read some of the findings, free, in the press release.

The reseach supports a similar study completed last year about this time. Last year’s study marked the beginning of my own journey into discovering where all the traffic had gone from my retail and affiliate based sites. (In fact, that statement alone reminds me to share the Boomerang Effect with you. It is the how/why data on consumer trends shopping direct from manufacturer. Perhaps tomorrow.)

Back to the comScore research. Here are a few snippets from the press release.

“…which showed that heavy U.S. visitors to social networking sites are significantly more likely than average to visit leisure-oriented retail site categories, such as music, jewelry/luxury goods/accessories, consumer electronics and apparel.”

“…exhibited a particularly high tendency to visit the more leisure-oriented retail categories…” Read the rest of this entry »

I must admit I haven’t talked much about Facebook publicly (only in my email newsletters). And until earlier this month I also haven’t done much with my Facebook account…

Since the start of the year I have been focusing on Web 2.0 properties that (a) have a finely focused niche audience, (b) provide some sort of search engine juice as a result of my efforts, and (c) allow me to partially automate the content creation aspect.

Caring Less and Less About Search Engine Love…(b)

These days I’ve been caring less about the extra search engine ‘points’ by having off-site content. (If you don’t know why I’m caring less, check yesterday’s post.) As a result of reader comments and a few discussions in Facebook I woke up and realized that other marketers, entrepreneurs and website owners are seeing the same anomolies about site traffic as I am.

For example, Allan Cockerill (one of my Facebook friends and fellow bloggers – www.AllanCockerill.com among others) openly shared through a discussion that began: “Will Social Media Become More Important Than SEO…?”

Allan shared: “…1600+ visitors to my blog during September, using nothing but Facebook, Stumbleupon, Twitter and Digg…has me pondering the future.”

Laura said: “…the wake up call came when I noticed clickthroughs from Google down – even though I held #1 spots and even though the # of searches per month, per keyword, was constant…”

Read the rest of this entry »

There’s a huge rush on – from marketers around the globe – to market their products and services (or increase their search engine position) by posting content and creating profiles on multiple Web 2.0 properties.

This is one way a very smart internet marketing trainer is teaching others to domninate the search engine listings for their select keywords.

It’s a great idea, but is it a viable long-term solution to increasing brand awareness and building business value? Or is it a short term solution to (hopefully) some fast cash?

Surfers Spending More Hours on Web 2.0 – Less on Search

Before you run off creating multiple accounts on multiple Web 2.0 properties and posting your proprietary content there in an attempt to dominate the top 10 results in google, consider Read the rest of this entry »