Posted on 22 December 2010 by Marketing Spot
Locking down the social network jungle can be hard.
Here is 6 tips to staying on track:
Posted on 15 December 2010 by Marketing Spot
Social News is a great way to promote your site. If you have the time create a account on each of these sites and submit your story to it. It’s guaranteed link and in some cases you can create buzz. If you prefer head over to Freelancer.com and post a job for about $50 to have someone do it for you.
General Social News Websites
1. Reddit: Popular social news website with a large user base. Covers a wide range of news. Includes several topical sections called subreddits, which focus on specific topics like programming, science, politics and business.
2. Digg: The largest and most popular social news website on the internet. Covers all topics including politics, entertainment, technology and general news. Includes a separate video and image section.
3. Propeller: A social news site that covers all topics from technology to politics and entertainment. Operates in a similar fashion to Digg.
4. Fark: A community news site which allows users to comment on news articles. User submitted links will be posted on the main page once they are approved by the administrators.
5. Slashdot: Primarily a tech news site, Slashdot also covers topics like books, games, politics and entertainment. Users can submit stories and they may be published after editors approve it. A popular site that can send a large amount of traffic.
6. Metafilter: A community weblog which allows users to share links and discuss interesting websites/topics. Moderation is done through editors as well as peer pressure in order to prevent gaming.
7. I am bored: Covers general topics with a strong focus on weird and offbeat news. You can submit a link which may be posted after the editors approve it.
8. Mixx: A general social news sites which has a category for all types of news. Topics covered include business, entertainment, sports, health and tech. Includes the ability to create groups to share news with other users.
9. Removed
10. Newsvine: A website consisting of community-driven news stories and opinions. Users have their own blogs and can write articles, save links to external content and vote/comment on other user stories.
11. PageRanked: A general social news site that with a large website owner userbase. Topics covered include entertainment, sports, politics and internet news.
12. Linkfilter: Covers all sorts of news. All links are posted and moderated by users. Links can be ranked on several levels: clicks, votes, age, or a combination of all three called points.
13. NewsCloud: A general social site with a focus on news in all topics. Similar to Newsvine, each user has their own blogs and can publish content to be voted up by other users.
14. Hugg: Hugg is a social news site with a strong focus on environmental issues. Also includes other categories like politics, science, fashion and technology.
15. Plime: A general news site which features a wide variety of topics ranging from religion and sports to technology or business. Odd news performs best in this community.
16. C2NN: An active social news site with a variety of topics including environment issues, business, politics, animals and offbeat. Similar to Hugg in focus but much more populated and active.
17. Kirsty: A general news site with a focus on fashion, entertainment and design on top of other topics like technology and food. Has a strong female user base.
18. Nowpublic: A participatory news network which focuses on citizen journalism. Each user has their own individual profile blog/page and can upload videos, images and news stories.
19. Stirrdup: General social news site with four broad categories: politics, technology, news and entertainment.
20. Searchles: A hybrid social news sites which covers all topics. Includes a video section and offers personalized filtering features and the option of joining groups made up of other users with similar interests.
21. Linkinn: A social news site that specializes in pictures and video. Covers a broad range of topics, particular offbeat and weird content.
22. Earthfrisk: Covers topics like humor, politics, entertainment and business. Combines a social network and group features with digg-style news voting.
23. Truemors: A social rumor news site which focuses on the publication of “true rumors that are relevant, informative, and interesting.” Users can post links anonymously via text, voicemail, web or email. Editors moderate content.
24. StumbleUpon: A social network and browser toolbar which allows users to channel surf the internet. Technically not 100% a social news site, although users can submit webpages to be rated by other users.
25. Linkswarm: Covers a wide range of topics from celebrity gossip to funny media, science and politics. Focuses on pop culture and bizarre news as well.
Here are social websites which focus on a specific niche. For best results, only submit to them when your site falls within the same niche or covers the same topics. Or else you’re likely to be marked as spam.
26. Sphinn: Sphinn is a social site for search and interactive marketers. It’s designed to allow you to share and discover news stories, read and take part in discussions, discover events of interest and network with others.
27. Dzone: DZone is a free link-sharing community for developers. Other topics commonly featured include web design and programming.
28. Tweako: A user-powered site and social network with a focus on guides and tutorials in all categories like computing, technology, and the Internet.
29. Autospies: A social site that focuses on automotive news, car reviews, auto show photos and videos.
30. Design Float: A social news site for design-related content. Topics covered include business, freelancing, advertising, digital art and branding.
31. Ball Hype: A site that aggregates content from thousands of sports blogs. Users can submit stories and votes will determine if they make it to home page.
32. YCombinator Hacker News: A news site that focuses on technology, startups, business and entrepreneurship.
33. SWiK: A community driven resource for people who use open source software.
34. Buzzflash: A user driven progressive political news website that allows you to submit political stories.
35. DNHour: DNHour.com is a user-powered news portal built specially for the domain name industry. Most members are generally from the domain name industry, which includes domain name owners, companies or professionals.
36. PlugIM: PlugIM is a user driven internet marketing community. Topics covered include search engine optimization, products, business and marketing.
37.Showhype: Operates in a similar way to Ballhype. Stories come from two sources — users and aggregated content. Users can also submit a link to a story that they’ve found or write their own article on ShowHype.
38. Small Business Brief: A niche social site which focuses on small business news. Topics covered include marketing and sales, website development, management and entrepreneurship.
39. Hypediss: Social news site with a focus on design, fashion, urban culture and art.
40. Chictini: Product-oriented social site which a focus on new trends and styles. It’s possible to submit news stories although most of the submissions feature products from online retailers.
41. DotNetKicks: DotNetKicks.com is a community based news site that focuses on topics like NET development techniques, technologies and tools including ASP.NET, C#, VB.NET, C++ and Visual Studio.
42. Lipstick: Reddit-style social news site for celebrity gossip.
43. Hubspot: Social news site for marketers, entrepreneurs and business professionals.
44. Winelifetoday: A niche social site for wine lovers. Topics covered included news and opinion articles to do with wine.
45. iliketotallyloveit.com: Allows users to publish and share products with the broader public which they find cool, innovative, exceptionally beautiful, or just weird. Included with every item is a link to an online shop where it can be purchased.
46. Wordsy: A niche social news site for people who love reading and books. Topics covered include small presses, fiction writing, authors, book awards and poetry. (Note: Wordsy has suspended its site since Dec 2008)
47. Value Investing News: A niche social news site that covers stocks and investment news. A small but active community.
48. Teenwag: Focus on celebrity gossip. A hybrid social network with digg-style voting. Users can submit links to be voted up by other users.
49. Muti: Muti is a social bookmarking site inspired by reddit and Digg but dedicated to content of interest to Africans or those interested in Africa.
50. Tip’d: A social media site for finance, investing, and business topics. Tip’d users vote on stories they like by clicking the ‘Tip it’ button that appears next to each story, and then can comment by pressing the ‘Discuss’ link below the story.
Posted on 10 December 2010 by Marketing Spot
Blogs are making more money now then ever. Here are the current stats on who is blogging and how they are making money from it.
Posted on 06 November 2010 by Marketing Spot
The starting point in a strong internet marketing campaign is to get your website linked to from common and popular places on the internet. These Directories, Bookmarking, Business Review, Article Submission, and Pinging sites are essential for a well executed free internet marketing campaign.
Paid Directories:
Free Directories:
Submit your blog:
Ping Sites (some sites may require you to register first):
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://bblog.com/ping.php
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://bitacoras.net/ping
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
http://blogbot.dk/io/xml-rpc.php
http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc
http://blogmatcher.com/u.php
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://coreblog.org/ping
http://ping.bitacoras.com
http://ping.blo.gs
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc
http://ping.blogmura.jp/rpc
http://ping.myblog.jp
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.weblogs.se
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://trackback.bakeinu.jp/bakeping.php
http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b
http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi
http://www.lasermemory.com/lsrpc
http://www.mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatter/ping.php
http://www.mod-pubsub.org/knapps/blogchatter/ping.php
http://www.snipsnap.org/RPC2
http://www.weblogues.com/RPC
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping
Article Submission:
Bookmark submission:
Submitting to business review sites:
Posted on 02 November 2010 by Marketing Spot
In the last few days alone, two top-level executives at the world’s largest online search company, Google, announced they would be stepping down from their posts due to personal reasons.
Chad Hurley, now 33 years old, was the first executive to announce he would step down from his position as the chief executive officer at YouTube, the same company he founded which was later acquired by the search giant for $1.65-billion in an all cash deal.
Mr. Hurley founded YouTube along with co-founders Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, who also had positions at Google but later left the company.
Mr. Hurley earned $345-million alone as a result of the Google acquisition, which included terms that he would continue working at the company as CEO.
Although Google consolidates revenue from its properties into a single account, executives previously said they expected YouTube to begin turning a profit in the short-run, confirming the almost six-year-old site is still not profitable.
Extensive operating costs and marginal advertising revenue in the economic downturn have made it a challenge for YouTube to turn a profit.
In the latest earnings conference discussion, Google said YouTube is now serving more than 2-billion videos every week.
Google faced litigation challenges over copyright infringement allegations made by publishers, but those lawsuits were dismissed as the company was found to have taken reasonable care to mitigate any losses by promptly removing indicated videos from YouTube.
In a clear attempt by Google to finally turn a profit for YouTube, the company has appointed Salar Kamangar to succeed Mr. Hurley as the new chief executive of YouTube effective now.
Mr. Kamangar will be responsible for growing YouTube by generating more revenue through content partnerships and by managing primary revenue streams like advertising, which generate less than 10-percent of total advertising revenue for Google annually.
In an attempt to generate more revenue, the company has experimented with new forms of advertising to increase click-through rates, such as by placing advertisements directly into videos, something users find very intrusive.
The Internet landscape has effectively changed as tech-savvy Internet users now click less on advertisements, and the value of ads has also decreased over the last few years as new advertising networks have emerged and as companies spend less due to increasing economic volatility.
Mr. Kamangar faces a challenging job ahead of him at netting the first profit for the company.
He needs to ensure the user experience at YouTube does not diminish in a frugal attempt to marginally increase click-rates from more intrusive ads.
Mr. Kamangar already works at Google as the vice president of Google Web Applications.
The company has not said if Mr. Kamangar would be the permanent new CEO at YouTube.
The second top executive at Google to be stepping down in the coming weeks is Omar Hamoui, who co-founded the mobile advertising network AdMob in 2006, the same company Google scooped up for $750-million last May.
Posted on 20 October 2010 by Marketing Spot
The new-this-year-yet-somehow-already-ubiquitous Facebook Like button has been around just long enough to generate some interesting numbers relating to Facebook users and web traffic.
The button, which launched in April at f8, Facebook’s developer conference, is now present on roughly 2 million sites around the web, from sports sites to news organizations and many other kinds of publishers.
A media analytics lead on Facebook’s Developer Network Insights team crunched some numbers and found that Facebook Likes not only generate interesting data about the “likers” (a.k.a. Facebook users who are also active on your website) themselves; this data also speaks volumes about clickthrough rates, time on-site and other engagement metrics.
Stats about people
On average, a Facebook user who “likes” your content has more than double the number of friends than does a typical Facebook user. This could mean the user is more “social” or more influential; on the other hand, it could mean the user is an attention-seeking narcissist.
While it’s fatuous to read too much into that statistic, the number does show that the average “liker” is more active from a social-web standpoint.
An even more interesting stat about the likers is that they click on five times more links to external sites than the typical Facebook user. If clickthroughs are what you’re looking for from your social media strategy, this is good news.
Here’s a stat just for news sites: The average Facebook user who “likes” content on a news website is 34 — that’s about 2 decades younger than the average newspaper subscriber.
We’ve known for some time that the future of journalism and social media are, at this point, inextricably linked; this stat provides a little hard evidence for that conclusion.
Stats about traffic
Most website owners are aware that Twitter refers a ton of traffic. It’s meant to be a content-referral network, so link-sharing and clickthroughs are a given in many cases.
The Facebook “Like” button, however, might be bringing Facebook closer to competing with Twitter in the area of referral traffic, though.
Since the button launched and was integrated on millions of sites, many publishers are reporting large increases in traffic specifically due to this kind of social plugin. ABC News reported a 190 percent increase; Gawker’s traffic shot up by 200 percent; Sporting News said their site traffic was up by a shocking 500 percent; and NBA.com said that Facebook had become their second-largest referral source.
Facebook relays messages from publishers saying that these users “are more engaged and stay longer when their real identity and real friends are driving the experience through social plugins.”
As an example, NHL.com reported that pages per user was up by 92 percent, time on-site was up by 85 percent, video-viewing increased by 86 percent more videos and overall visits went up by 36 percent.
Clearly, Facebook is only part of social media referral traffic, but it’s becoming a larger part as the network grows and users become accustomed to interacting with third-party and external content from within the comfort of their social graph.
Posted on 20 September 2010 by Marketing Spot
The world discovered a little bit more about this mysterious “Google Me” project this week, when Googlers, including CEO Eric Schmidt opened up (just a little bit) at the company’s Zeitgeist event.
The main thing that has been revealed is that Google Me will not be a new social network from Google to try and compete with Facebook, but rather a “social layer” added to existing Google products. If you think about it, this strategy makes more sense, as Google already has many of the features of a great social network in its various properties. As I’ve said over and over again, integration among these is the key, and “Google Me” just might turn out to be that integration that connects Google’s offerings, effectively making Google itself the social network.
Michael Arrington at TechCrunch was able to pick up one specific detail from unnamed “sources who’ve worked with Google on the product”. They say that Google Me will produce an activity stream generated by all Google products, and that Google Buzz has been rewritten to be the host of it all.
I’m guessing the existing Google Profiles, which already host the Google Buzz content will be central.
Nick O’Neill at AllFacebook thinks photos and videos are going to be key elements in the competition between Google and Facebook. He writes, “Between tagging and the feed exposure, photos account for the largest percentage of Facebook users’ time on site. While video is also increasing, photos were responsible for most of Facebook’s initial growth. In fact Facebook Photos now has more market share than all the competitors combined (including Google-owned Picasa). Google also clearly has another massive weapon in their arsenal: YouTube. The video site is by far the most popular of all video sites in the world.”
“YouTube is so popular that it ranks just behind Facebook in Alexa’s ranking of the most popular online sites,” he adds. “YouTube is also a relatively social experience to begin with, however there is most definitely plenty of room to grow.”
YouTube is easily the greatest asset Google has in terms of social media. You may recall that YouTube began requiring all users to have a Google account. That’s no coincidence, I’m sure.
So let’s compare Google (as one big social network) to Facebook, feature by feature.
Facebook has the news feed. Google is reportedly working on the activity stream. Facebook has chat. Google does too (text, voice, and video). Facebook has photos. Google does too, with Picasa Web Albums and various other complementary photo-related offerings. Facebook has videos. Google has YouTube (and Google Video). Facebook has notes. Google has Blogger. Facebook has Pages. Google has Profiles. Google has email. Facebook may at some point (MySpace just added it last year). Facebook has games. Google is working on getting more. Facebook has news publications setting up Pages. Google has Google News. Facebook has the Open Graph. Google has search (all kinds of search…and maps).
Facebook has Facebook Ads. Google has AdWords, AdSense, and Doubleclick. Facebook has applications. Google has Google Apps, the Apps Marketplace, Android, the Android Marketplace, Chrome, Chrome OS, the Chrome Web Store, Google TV which will support Android apps and web apps. Google is also trying to get a music service off the ground. And let’s not forget Google Calendar and Google Reader – two very user-personalized products.
Posted on 16 September 2010 by Marketing Spot
Google said Friday that Internet marketers shouldn’t change their SEO strategies to account for partially-typed keywords using Google’s new Google Instant feature.
Google Instant returns search entries for each and every letter typed, so that “f” produces a page of links beginning with “Facebook,” while “fl” leads off the page with “Flickr”. Some had begun speculating that SEO marketers would need to concentrate on partially-typed keywords, betting that users typing in “res” would be searching for “restaurant” rather than “resume” or “Restoration Hardware”.
But Alden DeSoto, a member of the Google Analytics team, said that SEO marketers shouldn’t change their strategies, at least where that particular facet of Instant was concerned.
“Should I change my search advertising strategy to serve ads on to partial keywords (e.g. if I sell flowers, should I advertise on “flow”)?” DeSoto wrote. “This is not a productive strategy. Please note that ads are triggered based on the ‘predicted query’ and not the stem that the users types in. So, in this example, the partial query ‘flow’ triggers results for the predicted query of ‘flowers’. The only way someone can see your ad for ‘flow’ is if they specifically searched for that word and hit enter or clicked search. And since you sell flowers, it’s not likely that your ad for flowers will be served alongside such a generic and irrelevant word.”
DeSoto also said that the new Google Instant wouldn’t change search rankings, and that search queries using Instant would be tracked as they have always been.
In part, that’s because queries are measured using the predicted query (“resume”) versus the actual query (“re”), DeSoto added. “If a user was typing “web metrics” but got the search result she wanted at “web met” with the predicted term being “web metrics”, then you will see “web metrics” in your Google Analytics reports.
AdWords impressions are also counted in the same manner, with an impression generated by clicking on an ad or link on the page, or hitting “enter” after a query. The only change is that an impression will also be generated after a user pauses for three seconds after a keystroke is entered, as Google executives said at the launch.
Posted on 01 September 2010 by Marketing Spot
As you may or may not of known. Digg the popular social news site has sold out to corporations. And now have little influence of what’s on the site. Since the change about one week ago, I have checked the front page everyday and sure enough all the submissions are by corporate sponsors. As the only popular alternative to Digg called Reddit, which has it’s own problems like being known as one of the ugliest sites on the web (which is ironic for a website that you have to read closely) and that it is designed for children and in many ways ran like children.
So does this mean social news is now dead with no alternative? Of course not.
Since the decline of Digg there has been several little wannabees popping up. None have really taken off, but with the fast downward spiral Digg has sent itself into and the dislikes of Reddit from day one. I think it’s only a matter of time before one of these lucky spawns take off.
We have joined them with our social news site PageRanked.com unfortunately have no time to market right now and timing is crucial for the next social news service to come up. If you have time and a desire to compete, we have some tips below of how to start for free.
How to make a social news site for free.
If you want to jump on the bandwagon then best way is with pligg.com , it’s free and works great. Granted the support is terrible and they really don’t care as a company. but free is free, and you can always get your own tech guy to help out when needed.
Once you set up pligg on your new site, you can simple start adding content and start marketing.
It’s toss up who will win, but i can safely say the lost members of Digg are more then enough to keep any site going strong. Just check there website and you will see account closed over and over.
Posted on 29 October 2009 by Marketing Spot
To be honest I thought the IPhone would of passed the Blackberry by now.
I think next the droid with Verizon will be on the list raising on the IPhone.
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