It does not matter what you call them: vodcasts, vidcasts, videocasting, or video podcasting... there are a few behind-the-scenes actions you can take to help attract more attention to your video productions. Just like websites, it does not matter how amazing the content is if interested people are unable to find it. Use the following suggestions to help increase the exposure your videos receive... Tips to Optimize Video Podcasts. - 6 weeks ago

Sound effects are often used to compliment and enhance artistic presentations, whether they be podcasts, videos, or other audio/visual productions. Royalty-free sound effects are typically non-exclusive and can be used by anyone who purchases them. Professional sound effects can give a podcast or production a more professional sound. However, many new producers may not realize that sound effects have copyrights, and in many cases it is illegal to use a sound effect that you happen to find on the web without properly licensing it. Most podcasters and producers do not have the time or equipment to go out and record all the sound effects they may want to incorporate into their production. Podcasters are better off using royalty-free sound effects. Royalty-free sound effects are purchased, and there is no recurring fee for the use of the effect. The purchaser may use the sound effect(s) as often as required within the license terms and conditions, without paying for the use of the sound effect each time the effect is used. Sound Effects: The Power of Audio - 3 months ago

Growing subscribers of your RSS feed will expand your reach. Put the appropriate effort into marketing your RSS feed, so you can increase adoption and spread the message contained in the RSS feed. Increase RSS Subscribers - 4 months ago

Learn the ins and outs of using a sound effect to polish your presentation or podcast. What Is A Sound Effect? A sound effect is a ready-made sound for podcasters or producers. Typically, podcasters need to only incorporate the sound into their production for instant success. This can be done with various editors running in a very short amount of time. Sound Effects make the creation of a podcast easier and professional. Sound effects are usually easy to edit and customize using any sound editor, occasionally more sophisticated sound require precise tuning. What Are Sound Effects? - 5 months ago

Repurposing content is not a terribly new concept. Webmasters that picked up on the trend have benefited from traffic surges for a while now. Repurposing content is all about presenting the same content in a variety of different ways, or using different mediums to present the same content. Webmasters can manipulate content in order to provide the same content in any number of different formats. Re-Using Content - 5 months ago

Learn the ABCs of RSS Feeds - 6 months ago

There are a wide variety of things you can do in regard to blog promotion. Here are just a few... Promote Your Blog - 7 months ago

RSS is a standard for syndicating content on the Internet. RSS feeds are used in a variety of ways to distribute all types of content via the Internet. The benefits for individuals subscribing to RSS feeds have resulted in a rapid growth and adoption rate. Software and tools have made RSS feed creation and management easy, even for non-technical individuals, which has also fueled the growth of RSS feeds. Create RSS | Make RSS Feeds - 7 months ago

This article tells you about the most common of the costly link building mistakes many web masters make. Links from irrelevant sites and/or irrelevant anchor text, and links with the “nofollow” attribute are some of the mist common mistakes but they are not the only ones. Linking to sites with poor reputation, linking to good sites gone bad, image links (with or without ALT text) are also some common link building mistakes you should avoid.

Top 10 Ways to Get Traffic for Free

Facebook is the coolest social network and it can help you promote your business and get lots of traffic to your site. There are many ways in which you can harness the power of Facebook and some of them are the topic of this article.

Twitter can drive you lots of traffic if you know how to use it to your advantage. This article will teach you what to do and what not to do, if you want Twitter to work for you.

Impact of HTML5 on SEO

Explains what you can expect from your SEO Career during a recession

This article deals with the differences in the algorithms used by Bing and Google.

List of the 10 most common SEO Mistakes

Owning as much real estate in the SERPs as possible for mentions of a brand is a basic, fundamental element of controlling the public perception. ... - 22 hours ago

Visitors are only as valuable as the Web site that converts them. If the Web site doesn't convert, the visitors are worthless. ... - 22 hours ago

To bridge the gap between setting the right SEM promise and delivering the expected Web site experience, we need to better understand users needs and desires and incorporate them into our Web design processes. ... - 2 days ago

It's more important than ever for small businesses to become active in social media communities in some aspect. ... - 2 days ago

With a decrease in overall advertising, Google looks to help offset some lost ad revenue by increasing the amount they get from existing advertisers. ... - 5 days ago

You don't have paid search goals and organic search goals; you have search goals. There are opportunities for synergies and savings once you understand how the two can work together. ... - 5 days ago

Push the conversion rates of your promotions into the stratosphere using these tips. ... - 6 days ago

Every language is different and presents its own challenges. You must be linguistically thorough with your keywords to be successful. ... - 7 days ago

Search engine industry gurus Danny Sullivan and Chris Sherman of Search Engine Land are to host yet another conference in the SMX Search Engine Marketing Expo Series. - 8 hours ago

At this point in time there are several great browsers to choose from. At one time it seemed Internet Explorer was set to rule alone. Firefox changed that. And Now Chrome is gaining popularity. And there are others, most notably Safari and Opera. So how do you choose the browser that is right for you? - 5 days ago

Part two of a series of 3 articles on how to succeed as an e-book writer. This article describes how to pick a format and write an outline. It also suggests formulas to help you create content that will keep the attention of your reader and assure the success of your e-book. - 8 days ago

Why Rupert Murdoch gets it wrong and other search engine news. - 9 days ago

Pandia guest writer John Alexander looks at how to write a successful e-book. Note that e-books can also be a useful ingredient of an efficient search engine marketing campaign, as they can lead to a lot of useful quotes, reviews and inbound links. - 2 weeks ago

Zakta is a search engine which is human powered and social. This means that you can find information that has been checked for quality by real people. You can also personalize, share and discover information you find when you search the web with Zakta. Sundar Kadayam, Founder and CEO of Zakta, explains that he created Zakta to help solve the problem with deeper searches for information from the Web. What problem would that be? Most search engines are good at finding facts, but once you search for more general information, you run into problems. To remedy this, Zakta allows users to edit and improve search results. - 2 weeks ago

Here are some of this week's headlines from the search engine scene. We also presents several videos on the new Google Chrome operating system. - 2 weeks ago

The search engine innovation frenzy goes on, as both Google, Bing and Yahoo! refine their search toolboxes. - 2 weeks ago

by Manoj Jasra 2 years ago I wrote a post titled: "Yahoo, Where is the Love?" which questioned whether or not Yahoo had issues with ranking Blogspot blogs strongly in its index. In 2007 we noticed that for the majority of our top ranking keywords in Google were well outside of the top 30 in Yahoo. Some of the key differences which exist now on our blog versus 2 years go is the addition of 40,000+ backlinks, 1000+ pages indexed and a custom domain rather than a Blogspot domain - you'd think this would help. We could also potentially conclude that readers consuming Internet Marketing / Analytics content simply don't use Yahoo. As you can see a large percentage of our traffic comes from Search Engines:       Drilling deeper reveals that our Yahoo referrals are drastically lower than both Google and Bing, furthermore Yahoo referrals are lower than both Feedburner and Twitter.     Check out our small business news site. - 21 hours ago

by Ross Dunn Over the past 12 years consulting on web marketing  I have answered countless questions but one question I receive often stands out from all; how to remove a Google penalty. The following is an example of a question I received in the past from a person named Patrick: PLEASE HELP! For the last 8 years we were #1 for a ton of search terms but then my site got penalized by Google because we had overused some keywords. We fixed the issue months ago but my top rankings are all still over the place. Sometimes we get back into the top 10 and we all breathe a sigh of relief, then just a few hours later we are on page 5. What is going on and how can I correct this? We are beyond frustrated! First, Some Research In order to answer Patrick's question I needed to find out a couple of things about his website to make my answer more accurate: His site has excellent content right now and when I looked at past versions of the site I see the content was still great but definitely had keyword stuffing problems. Key finding: his site is really well done so I can see why it had top rankings before. I took a look at competitors found in the top 10 under several keyword searches that were obviously main targets for his website. After reviewing the backlinks for each competitor's sites I could see they were all very well entrenched but their content was not up to par with Patrick's site. I reviewed Patrick's backlinks and was surprised to find that he had very few.  Key finding: his competitors have a lot of backlinks than Patrick's site does. An SEO Tool Note: I use Yahoo Site Explorer for cursory examination of backlinks for my clients and their competitors. For more in-depth research I use OptiLink by Winrose Software which provides excellent statistics that are very useful for analyzing the quality of backlinks among other things. Here are more recommended web marketing tools. I checked the server headers for their home page and other key pages to make sure nothing was outwardly wrong with their server configuration; everything was fine. I took some time to surf through Patrick's website and discovered that not all of the keyword stuffing had been removed. Key Finding: Google may still feel his site deserves a penalty because it is not 100% clean. My Answer to Patrick First I will layout why it seems your site did so well to begin with. Your website has very few backlinks in comparison to your competitors who have significantly more. So, as near as I can tell your top rankings were so high because you had built an awesome reputation with Google by providing unparalleled content; I can't find a single competitor that can match the quality of your content. For a long time you managed to stay at the top of your marketplace by continuing to provide great content. Unfortunately, you were over-optimizing the content by adding too many incidences of the same keywords (keyword stuffing) and Google took a disliking to it. So why is it so hard to regain your ranking stability? Your site lost the glue that kept it competitive when Google penalized it. The glue, in this case, was your site's reputation that was created based on your content which lost its stickiness due to Google's penalty for the keyword stuffing. Without your content advantage your competitors have leaped ahead of you because they have far more links than you have and no ranking penalties (that we know of). Without links and with the Google penalty applied to your site your content hasn't the power it had before so your rankings will fluctuate for an indeterminate amount of time; there is no sure time limit on a Google penalty. My Recommendation for Removing the Google Penalty Remove all of the keyword stuffing on your website. I know it is a large site and this is no small feat but it needs to be done. With your site cleaned and nothing remaining but quality content there will at least be an end in sight to the Google penalty and your site will also benefit from being more readable and usable to a visitor. Begin an ongoing link building campaign now - there is no time to delay. Links are another path to building credibility for your website which it sorely needs right now. There is also a good chance that high quality incoming links will act as additional entry points to your website for Google to index your newly revised site and reconsider the penalty. Review Google Webmaster Tools and attend to any errors/alerts/warnings that Google has provided. Also make sure to submit a fresh sitemap once the site is cleaned so that Google takes notice of any content that may have gone unnoticed and/or new content. Freshen content on key parts of your website with rewrites or additional articles. This will provide positive activity that Google will not deny adds value to its index. Bolster your Pay Per Click campaigns so they can bear some of the burden during this dry spell of low organic rankings. Be patient. If you do everything I have noted above you are in a great position to succeed and your site will be stronger than ever before.By applying these recommendations you will very likely discover that the Google Penalty was more a blessing than a curse because your site will come out stronger than ever before. Check out our small business news site. - 4 days ago

by Jeff Howard Google is paving the way for small business owners to take a proactive approach toward online marketing. For lots of folks seeking better local exposure claiming their business at the Google Local Business Center is their first step into the realm of search marketing. But, it's not always smooth sailing. The maps system has bugs, limitations, and can sometimes misrepresent a business causing a steady decline in leads. Here are 6 common mishaps straight from the Goolge Maps help forum. Problem: Unable to Verify By Phone Answer: For security reasons some listings need to be verified by post card, it's probably best to verify your listing first by mail if you have time. For those hard pressed for time if the phone number area code is in the same area as the business, phone verification should go smoothly. Forum Thread Problem: Listing Flagged Answer: This can happen if guidelines are not followed correctly, and from reading the forums it will sometimes happens even if you're following the guidelines. To remedy, post something to the LBC Maps forum and make sure it includes the word "Flagged." Generally a Google employee will look at this and get back to you. Here are two examples of that happening. Forum Thread, Forum Thread Problem: Listing Not Showing Up Answer: Once a listing is claimed you will be able to view it via a link inside the Local Business Center. It's a common complaint across the forums that listings do not show up for specific keyword searches. For example, someone claims a listing, populates info and then is upset they are unable to find it for a related keyword search. This doesn't mean that your listing is inactive. It only means it is not being shown for that particular search term. The best remedy is to make sure that your business is listed under the correct category. If not Google will refer you to this page for tips on map optimization Forum Thread Problem: Multiple Listings or Duplicate Listings Answer: Claim both of the listings, then make sure each are absolutely identical. That includes address, categories, titles, descriptions, everything. Google should then catch this and update it. Sometimes it can happen quickly, other times not so much. If nothing changes in two weeks notify Google via their forum and it is likely they will resolve the issue. Forum Thread Problem: Removing A Negative Review Answer: A negative review can certainly be detrimental. But, Google isn't going to remove that review just upon your request. It is Google's incentive to provide searches with the most information possible about your business. The best defense against negative reviews is to encourage your customers to leave positive reviews. Like they say, the best defense is a good offense. Forum Thread, Forum Thread Problem: Your Company Shares an Office Building & The Address Is Used By Another Company Answer: You're screwed, no kidding. Forum Thread Conclusion: During the time I spent cruising the forums I found a lot of unanswered questions, but having said that, many of the unanswered questions are from folks that aren't taking the time to read the guidelines and support material provided by Google. Google provides this here , they also have a handy video about claiming your business . A final recommendation would be to use the website www.getlisted.org which is a basic tool for checking the status of your map listing. Check out our small business news site. - 5 days ago

by Sage Lewis So I've been playing around with Google Wave. I'm not sure about the whole hoopla. Here's my take. Check out our small business news site. - 5 days ago

by Stoney deGeyter I don't consider myself a real blogger. To me, real bloggers don't have jobs, they just get paid for writing about their opinions. Kinda like journalists. I'm just a small business owner that happens to blog on a few times a week. But since my source of income is my business blogging takes a back seat to business needs. Most small businesses can't afford to hire a full-time blogger or ghost writer so they have to work blogging into their many business-owner duties. And because those duties are so heavy on the business owner, blogging generally falls by the wayside as more pressing matters are attended to. Many small business owners are out there thinking "Blogging? That's just one more thing to add to my already over-booked work schedule. No thanks." I feel you. There is no doubt that sitting down to write a good blog post takes time. Add in artificial deadlines and blog posting schedules, that's why most small businesses simply don't do it. But blogging is an important aspect of growing your business. The key to good blogging is understanding how to work it in, prioritize it properly, and not to feel obligated to anybody but your family and customers. Establish your blogging priority Many small business that blog find themselves torn between business obligations and feeling like blogging is one of the most important things we can do to grow their business. It is important but it needs to be prioritized properly. Looking at the big picture, blogging isn't just about communicating with our audience. Blogging, when done effectively, helps us improve our reputation, build a brand, get customers, increase search engine rankings and, ultimately, grow the business. Yet, missing a day of blogging here or week there certainly isn't going to cause your business to fail or turn your customers against you. As with everything else, you have to keep your blogging time in perspective and prioritize it properly. You don't have to blog every day. You can set time aside on a weekend, or on your typically slow days and write several posts at once and publish them later. If your designated "blogging time" gets interrupted by more important issues, take care of what's important. It's not the end of the world if you don't get your post(s) completed on schedule. Know when to stop writing All of our time is limited so when writing a blog post sometimes we find it taking a lot more of our time than we anticipated. And BLAST!!! you still have two more posts to write today! Ok, stop for a second. Think about this. Can your really long blog post be broken down into several short posts? Snip here, cut there and you just met your blog quota for the week! You can also break your blog writing time into several shorter periods. Write one post a week, spending 15-20 minutes a day until it's done. Change your blogging patterns It is often not so much a matter of how much you blog but a matter of the content you provide. Not every blog posts has to be 1200 words. Some can be a few hundred, so long as the information you provide is valuable. If you didn't get time to sit down and write your typical blog posts, just think of something that you can share in a couple of quick paragraphs. Write it, post it, move on. You can always go back later and revisit on and expand the topic it later. Short posts can often be just as good, if not better than, long posts. Quick bits of information can be fantastic to readers who don't always have time to invest in reading long pieces. Create a blogging schedule How and when you blog is up to you, but I recommend that you work blogging into your schedule. Have certain times of the day or days of the week or month that is designated as blogging time. It's also a good idea to stay a few weeks ahead of yourself. I like to keep 4-6 weeks worth of blogs posts ready to go. This gives me a chance to 1) write a post and go back to it later for proofing, and 2) have blog posts ready to go should something interfere with my normal blogging schedule. Then you never have to worry about not having a blog post ready. Blogging can be very important to the success of your business. There is a lot of value and potential growth you can get from it, you just need to make sure you set time aside to make it happen. Check out our small business news site. - 6 days ago

by Robert Clough A company has created an ad that they are running through Google's AdSense on our site that, in my opinion, makes it look too much like the services are offered by us.  We have nothing to do with the company. I've blocked them in our AdSense account, but according to Google, it could be a few hours before the ad stops running. In case you don't know, Google runs a service called AdSense that allows publishers to generate ad revenue from Google's AdWords advertisers. AdSense/AdWords are fantastic services but as you can see, you need to keep an eye out for problems.  This is no fault of Google's, just comes with the territory of using automated systems. Here is what the ad looks like... click to see an enlarged view: (You'll have to forgive the terrible graphic, my PhotoShop skills are aweful. :) Check out our small business news site. - 6 days ago

by Jennifer Laycock Back in part two of this series, I took a look at some of the most popular native Facebook Page applications and gave you step by step instructions on how to set them up. Today in part three, we're going to continue diving into the native Facebook Page applications so you can make sure you're taking full advantage of your Facebook presence. Today we're going to take a look at how to make use of the Photos and Video applications. These are your chances to really add some content to your Facebook Page. Sure, you can (and probably should) have this content set up on other areas of the web designed for it (Photos could be shared over at Flickr and videos find homes on sites like YouTube), but there is an advantage in housing this content on Facebook. This fall, Mashable reported that users were now spending more time per month on Facebook than any other site on the Internet. In fact, Facebook users spend an average of 5 hours and 46 minutes per month on the social community, making it many people's "home base" for the web. (For perspective, that's three times as long as they spend on Google.) This is something that can't be overlooked. Social media is all about meeting people where they are and giving them access to your information in the ways that make it easiest for them. Why make them follow you around to YouTube, Flickr, your blog and so on, if you can easily deliver all of that same content right to their doorstep on Facebook? So all that said, let's get back into the thick of things. Getting Into the Admin Panel The first thing you'll need to do in order to work with applications is to get back into the admin panel for your Facebook Page. To do this, you'll need to log in to Facebook and go to the Facebook Page you want to edit. Once you're there, look underneath the large avatar on the left and find the link that reads "Edit Page." Clicking on this link will take you back into the Facebook Page admin panel. Once there, you'll want to scroll down to the section that says "Applications." Once you're there, you'll need to scroll toward the bottom to find the box labeled "video." Using the Facebook Video Application If you're an online marketer, you've heard of YouTube. You've heard about the amazing time on site stats (still more than 30 minutes per visit the last I checked) and you know how well consumers engage via video content. Video gives people a quick and easy way to digest information, get entertained, or become motivated. YouTube has also always held value because of how easy it is to share videos with friends. Thankfully, these same values apply to video on Facebook. In fact, some might say video on Facebook holds even more value due to the naturally viral nature of the site. More on this after we talk about how to actually get your video on Facebook. Since I started writing this series, Facebook has thankfully made a few steps toward improving usability. You no longer have to move your mouse over to the far right of the box to click on the blue mystery pen icon if you want to edit things. Now there are clearly labeled "Edit," "Application Settings" and "Remove Application." Click on the "edit" link to get started. If you've never used the video app before, you're going to see a fairly blank screen that looks like this: Don't worry, you'll have content in there soon enough. Just click on either the big text link dead center that reads "Add Videos" or go find the grey box in the upper right corner that says "+upload video." Click either of these buttons and you will be taken to a page that will let you either upload an existing file or record a new video. If you're uploading an existing video, click the browse button and navigate through your files to find the one you wish to upload. While your video is uploading, Facebook will ask you to prepare a title and a description for the video. When that's done, go ahead and click the blue "Save Info" button. Doing so will take you to the default viewing screen for the video within your Facebook page. Publishing the video will also make it appear on the wall of your Facebook Page, like this: ...and in the Pages stream of your fan's Facebook pages, like this: Once someone watches the video, they've got several options. They can tag the video if they spot anyone they know. They can embed the video on any page on the web by cutting and pasting a snippet of code (like you do with YouTube). They can also share the video...and that's really where the power of uploading videos to Facebook lies. When one of your fans sees your video and decides to share it, they have the option of adding their own message and then sending the video out to their stream of friends. Once they share it, it will go out on their stream the same way any other update would. That means the video you uploaded for your own group can quickly be shared with dozens, hundreds or even thousands of other Facebook members who don't follow you, because they'll see it in your fan's stream when they choose to share it. It's one of those great viral benefits that is native to the Facebook community. For those of you already using YouTube there are also quite a few YouTube related apps worth looking into. We'll explore some of them in a later post in this series. For now, let's move on to another visual area of Facebook. Using the Facebook Photo Application Photo sharing is one of the older forms of social media on the web. Sites like Flickr, Photobucket and Zooomr have been bringing communities together around a shared love of photography since long before Facebook became popular. While there's still a lot of value to investing in those communities, many companies are choosing to use Facebook as their centralized content hub in the social media world and are taking advantage of Facebooks native photo application. To get started, you'll need to once again return to your Facebook Page and look for the "edit page" link under your avatar. From there, scroll down to the "Photo" box and click on the "Applications Setting" link. The first option to pop up lets you decide if you want your photos to show in a tab or in boxes. (If you've forgotten, tabs are the navigation options that run along the top of your Facebook Page and boxes are the literal boxes of content that appears down the left hand side of your Facebook page.) Pick whichever ones you want, I've set mine to display via both tabs and boxes. Next you'll need to click over to the "Additional Permissions" tab so you can make sure your photos will publish to your stream. Once you've made sure your settings are right, you're ready to start adding photos. From the edit application page, you can click "edit" in the Photos box: You can also get to where you add photos by clicking on the "Photos" tab on your Facebook Page. No matter which route you take, you'll end up on the page showing any existing photo albums as well as a grey button that reads "+Create a Photo Album." Clicking that button will take you to a page featuring three form fields allowing you to name the album, specify the location where the photos were taken and describe the contents of the album. Fill in all the fields and click the blue "Create Album" button. This will take you to an upload page allowing you to browse your hard drive to find the photos you want to upload. Once you've located them, make sure the photos you wish to upload have check marks next to them and click the grey "Upload" button at the top right corner of the browsing box. Once your photos have uploaded, Facebook will take you to a page giving you the option to add a caption to each picture. You can also decide which photo you'd like to act as the album cover by clicking that option underneath the picture. If you decide you don't want to upload a certain photo after all, just click the "Delete this photo" option and continue working your way down the list. While you're captioning your photos, don't forget to tag any individuals that might be in them. This works especially well for event related photos being posted to an events page. To tag someone, simply click on them in the picture. A window will pop up allowing you to type the name of the individual into a form. If they are one of your existing friends or contacts on Facebook, the picture will send out a notification to both the person and their network that they have been tagged in one of your images. When you're finished, click the blue "Save Changes" button at the bottom of the page. This will update all the caption, delete any photos you've marked for deletion and tag any photos you've added people to. A window will pop up asking if you'd like to publish the photos to your news feed. Click "Publish." Once you've uploaded your pictures, you'll be taken to the album view. If you look at the very top of the album, you'll see options to edit, organize or add more photos to this album. The Edit button will return you to the page you were just on for writing captions, tagging people or deleting pictures. The add more photos option is fairly self-explanatory. The organize option is handy if your photos need to be sequential. Clicking it allows you to drag and drop the photos into the specific order you want them to show. For instance, my photo of dicing the apples should have come AFTER the photo of pouring water into the pot. Using the organize feature, I can simply drag and drop them into the right positions. Once you're satisfied, click the blue "Save Changes" button at the bottom of the page. The Alternative Way of Doing Things Of course one thing I've learned about Facebook is they like to offer a million different routes to get to the same exactly place. That's part of what makes writing a comprehensive how-to guide so difficult. With that in mind, here's a quick bit of insight into the "other" way of posting photos. Head to your Facebook Page and locate the photo icon just below the form box on your Wall. You're faced with a couple different ways of doing things if you go this way. The first is to upload a single picture to your account. To do this, click on "Upload a photo from your drive." This will pop up a window asking you to browse your hard drive for the specific image. Once Facebook knows where the picture is, just click "share." If you have a webcam and select the webcam option, it will walk you through taking a photo with the webcam and uploading it to your account. If you choose the "Create an Album" option, you'll be asked to type in a name and description for your album before proceeding into the exact same steps I outlined above. No matter which route you take to upload your photos, you'll want to click back to your main Facebook Page to see how they show up on your wall when it's done. It will also broadcast to the any of your fans on their "Pages" status updates list. Of course if you tagged any individuals in your photos, the specific photo you tagged will broadcast out to their wall and have the chance to be viewed by all of their friends as well. Coming Up in Part Four In the next article in the series, we'll take a look at both the Notes application and one of the best third party applications for integrating your blog posts into the mix on your Facebook Page. More Articles In This Series: Part 1 - Setting Up Your First Company Facebook Page Part 2 - Setting Up Your First Company Facebook Page Part 3 - Setting Up Your First Company Facebook Page Check out our small business news site. - 7 days ago

by Stoney deGeyter Whenever a new medium emerges and becomes the "it" thing. Everyone flocks to it until the next shiny thing comes around and then that becomes the new "it." Inevitably, those on the cutting edge of "it" always decry the downfall of the previous "it" which then becomes "that". "That" is obsolete. "That" doesn't have long-term value. You need to give "that" up and put your money in "it." But "that" doesn't always go away no matter how much "it" gains in popularity. Remember radio? Of course you do. We still listen to radio. Sometimes even listen to it on old fashioned radio tuners instead of over the internet or via satellite. But didn't you hear? Radio is dead. Radio "died" with the invention of the TV. Ah, the memories of old fashioned TV. Television died when the Internet came along allowing us to download programs on demand. But the television is still there, piping in hours of entertainment into our homes every night. And then there was SEO. That died around 1992. Google killed it remember? Or was it social media that killed SEO? Oh heck, I keep forgetting because, well, SEO dies every year with some new proclamation of the new "it". But then here we are, still helping people make their sites better so they deserve top placement in the search engine rankings. Luckily the prophets of doom have been wrong more than they've been right. Heck, they are already onto their next death: the death of blogging. According to Wired Magazine, Twitter, Flickr and Facebook are the new "it" and blogging is on it's way out. We'll file that right next to the death of SEO! There is no doubt that Social media and micro-blogging platforms have diminished the need certain types of blogs and blogging. We no longer have to write long-involved posts about what we did last weekend, we can just twitter it as its happening. Pretty cool. But twitter and Facebook is hit and miss. If your followers are not there reading your updates when it happens, then as far as they are concerned, it didn't, unless they go out of their way to read your specific history. Think of twitter as live TV and blogs as your DVR. If you miss the live broadcast on twitter you're SOL. But hey, if they blog about it, you can go back and get all the pertinent details on your own time. Twitter, Facebook and even flickr updates only give you a small part of the story at any one time. It's like trying to watch an entire movie in 3 minute chunks. Sure, it can be done, but it'll take a long time and you lose a lot in the process. I'm not against Twitter, Facebook or Flickr. I love them all. Each has their purpose and their place and they can certainly make it so you don't have to blog as much as you used to, which can be a good thing for everybody. The power of the blog But blogging isn't dead, nor do we want it to be. Especially for the small business. Blogs hold tremendous power that every small business needs to utilize. Blogs bring traffic Yes, people still read blogs. You're reading one right now, so there is no reason to think someone won't want read yours. It's just a matter of having something valuable to say. There are two primary ways people will come to read your blog. The first is via search engines. If you're writing about your business's topic, you need to be sure you're doing keyword research. Find out what people are searching for that's related to your industry. Then use those keywords in your blog posts. The more you write using keyword phrases the more opportunity you'll have to bring in targeted traffic to your blog via search engines. The second way people read your blog is through RSS readers. These are people who already found your blog, like your content and want to make sure they don't miss a thing. Each blog post is imported into their feed reader which shows them all the new posts from your blog as well as other blogs they are subscribed to. From the RSS feed you can drive these readers into your site, whether it be your blog or your main business content areas. Blogs promote your knowledge Blog posts are a great way to share your knowledge. In any industry those that are viewed as the most knowledgeable tend to be the most trusted. Whether you are in a competitive field or a shallow one, you can make yourself--and your business--stand out by promoting your in depth knowledge of your topic. Sharing little known tips, tricks, strategies, helpful tidbits, detailed instructions and tutorials all lend to your own credibility. Put enough of those together and you have your own e-book, or a library of e-books. Blogs help people Not an egomaniac? Fine, don't think about blogging as a way to promote yourself or your knowledge. Just think of it as a way to help people. Because while you're promoting your knowledge you're also giving people valuable information that helps them in life, business or whatever. Your tips and tutorials are providing valuable information to people who otherwise may not have known. You are making people's lives better by giving them an education. Blogs build links The more helpful your blog posts are the more likely they'll be passed on or linked to. Twitter is great for passing around URLs. One good blog post can get a lot of distance through the social media platforms. As your resources get noticed you'll start to build links. People will link to you in their blogs or websites or pass your information on via Facebook or twitter to other who may link to it. You'll find your posts accessible from industry related websites and sometimes even direct competitors. People love sharing information and on the web, information is shared with links. Blogs create customer and brand loyalty The more you blog, and the more helpful your blog is, the more customer and brand loyalty you'll be creating. Not every blog post is designed to get customers, nor should it be. But the more people who come to read your valuable information, the more likely they'll be to become your customers when they need what you have. But until your readers become your customers, you're building up your brand. Brand recognition is extremely important as it plays toward perceptions... which are also passed along. Brand loyalty builds word of mouth, which in turn, builds more customers Blogs increase sales Building customers means one thing... you are increasing sales. Yes, your blog will have a lower conversion rate than your main areas of the site, but again, it's primary function isn't to directly build sales. But in the long run, that's exactly what will happen. The more links you get, and the more your blog posts are passed around and/or read, the larger your reach becomes. As your reach grows, your sales grow. There is no doubt that blogs are a lot of work. It takes time to decide what to write and then put your information together in a compelling way. In my next post I'll discuss ways that the small business can manage it's blogging schedule in order to maintain a healthy blog while not ignoring their business. If you haven't started blogging for your business you need to start. If fact, if you're not blogging or twittering I'd say start twittering and work your way to blogging. If you are blogging, start twittering and promote your blog! But you need to get to blogging. A blog can be set up in a matter of hours and ready for your first blog post. Start building your audience today. Check out our small business news site. - 8 days ago

I’m not going to do a full live-blog, because it’s going to be well-covered by: - Danny Sullivan - Jason Kinkaid - Kara Swisher among others. You can also register and watch the event as a webcast. Search by Voice Marissa Mayer did a brief intro, then brought up Vic Gundotra. Vic is going to show a series of mobile demos [...] - 32 hours ago

It’s that time again! Tomorrow afternoon I’ll record some new videos. I created a Google Moderator page where you can post questions or suggestions and vote topics up and down. I won’t be able to answer every single question, but I’ll tackle several popular questions plus a few interesting questions. Please ask questions that lots [...] - 6 days ago

I’m sitting in a room at Google waiting to hear more about Google Chrome OS. You can watch the webcast along with me if you like. For starters, here’s what Google announced about Chrome OS back in July. At that time, Google called out “speed, simplicity and security” as the key ideas behind Chrome OS. Google [...] - 3 weeks ago

Last week I was in Las Vegas for PubCon, a conference for publishers, and I wanted to share the slides from my main presentation: When I get a chance, I’ll also re-create the talk on video and share the video with you, but in the mean time Lisa Barone did a nice live write-up and coverage [...] - 3 weeks ago

Back in August we mentioned a developer preview of Caffeine, which is new technology that improves our indexing infrastructure. The feedback on Caffeine has been very positive, so we’re ready to move from the developer preview to the next stage of the roll out: going live with Caffeine at one data center. This means that [...] - 4 weeks ago

This year for Halloween I tried to do a see-through hole in your body costume: It worked okay, but not great. The biggest problem was that I didn’t have a gadget lying around the house that could output live composite video. Both my normal video camera and my digital camera had exhausted batteries that wouldn’t recharge, [...] - 5 weeks ago

One of my favorite personal blog posts is about not trapping users’ data. In late 2006, Eric Schmidt declared “We would never trap user data.” Many of the major Google properties (search, Gmail, Calendar) make it trivial to export or download your data. In the past, Google Docs would let you export a single doc at [...] - 6 weeks ago

This year we’ve been making and posting videos on an official webmaster video channel, and earlier today we hit our one millionth video view. Making these little movies has been a ton of fun and we’ve covered dozens of topics for site owners. We decided to celebrate in a couple ways. First, we added captions to [...] - 2 months ago