Google is still the best website as a traffic sender. But the new social media websites are gaining ground and more people are owning accounts. Chris Brogan talks about the “people referred web” and the power that social networks have to deliver traffic. I think that besides Google you should also try to dominate YouTube, Twitter, FaceBook and LinkedIn. Each website has its own rules for ranking but all four can help your business a lot by increasing awareness and trust. And most important by creating a human face attached to a business.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this one. Leave a comment or send me an e-mail.

Business relations are based on trust – especially on the Internet. There are many ways to build trust on the web and one of those things is to give away free knowledge. As many as you can and as valuable as you can. Now, I’m sure many will ask: if I give it all for free why should a person still hire me?

And I would answer with another question: if you know how to make bread, why do you still buy it. Or if you know how do they make computers why don’t you make one for yourself? Because you lack either technology, or advanced knowledge, or why spend time on it when you can buy it.

This is the answer to your question. People want to see that you are up to the challenge. That is why every article you publish should prove that you can handle any situation. You have to position yourself as a person that knows his market and that provides answers.

If you will give away knowledge for free, in time it will happen one of these two things:

1.    You’ll get more potential clients
2.    You’ll build trust and when you’ll want to sell a product or recommend one people will believe you

This is my take on free knowledge. What do you think it may bring you? Let’s talk in comments bellow.

Definition: a broadcaster on Twitter is a person that is not interested in engaging with others or build relations or communicate

The odd thing is that many times the tweets contain useful tips and suggestions or useful links. So, why this can be a problem? Because it lacks interaction. You see, there are many broadcasters on Twitter. That is why you see every day hundreds of tweets about the same article, in the same form: title of article plus a link to it. There is no value on that.

We never do this in real life. We never recommend a book or a movie like that. We always express an opinion. And this is what I think is missing from Twitter right now. Look at Chris Brogan. Every tweet he puts on is an invitation to engagement and communication. We should learn from that.

I think that this is the real meaning of the phrase: “add value to your network”. When we talk about Twitter that phrase can easily say: express a quality opinion on an article – don’t just tweet it. What does this mean? If you express an opinion it means you care about your friends and you have the ability to make your own judgement. Many people are afraid to say that they don’t like an article. Many people tweet links to articles that I bet they didn’t even read.

Let me know what you think about all this. I think we can improve Twitter by what I said above.

1. Listen. Always pay attention to what people are talking about your niche market. You can set up alerts for that.
2. Interact. You are on social networks to build trust around you. So, after you listen to people’s problems interact with them and try to offer them a solution
3. Listen some more. See if your actions were successful.
4. Provide quality. Be a constant provider of quality information: either we are talking about content or suggestions (tips, advices)
5. Be ready to manage a crisis. You have to expect that not everyone would like you. So, if someone talks bad things about you, it would be a good thing to have an already thought plan on how to react.
6. Be the starter. Sometimes you should be the one that starts a conversation.
7. Don’t talk bad things about someone: eventually it will turn against you
8. Be sincere. This is valid on all social networks. If you are planning to post direct sales make it clear in your profile. Otherwise people will start to ignore you.
9. Never spam.
10. If you are entering a conversation don’t do it just like that: add something to it.

The idea for this article came to me when I launched my new blog. I thought that if I would ask some of my friends from Twitter to tweet something about my blog I would get some really good traffic. I don’t have to say it, because you probably guess: nothing extraordinary happen. Why?

I think that a series of events offered me the chance to understand that the social world of the Internet is no different than the real one. I realize that there are different ways to leverage yourself but in the end it’s all about influence. In that moment I realized that it doesn’t matter how many followers you have on Twitter.

Many users think of the number of followers as some sort of currency: the more you have the more power you have. Well, I think it’s true – in some aspects. What they don’t realize is that many of them are not holding the right currency. Just like in real life there is the mighty dollar and the euro or the English pound and then there are many others with less influence.
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The success of any website depends on how well you plan things before the website becomes online. In this article I’ll present some of the SEO basics of how to plan a blog in order to have a good start. There are several things that you’ll have to consider and each element has to be taken very seriously.

Here is the short list of basic SEO things to do (that I’ll explain it in more detail further down):

1. Identify what you want to write about on your blog
2. Create a list of relevant keywords to target
3. Plan the structure of your articles
4. Think about the list of categories for the blog
5. Think about the list of tags for your blog
6. Analyze the competition
7. Plan how you’re going to use the keywords on your blog

I’ll try now to go further into detail with the above list but I’ll also try not to create a too big article. So, if you feel you need some more info on some of these points feel free to send me a message or write me a comment. I will also put for download an Excel 2007 document to help you plan and sort your keywords.
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