{EAV_BLOG_VER:b6db7cc144b9f324}

The worn out and trite epitome of simple marketing suggests that “People buy from People”, although a quick google for this phrase suggests it may not have a single author to its credit.

Rarely has anyone ever said to me “Google tells me this is an excellent product”, instead recommendations come in the form of ‘I’s and ‘they’s  and often the qualification of a single show or celebrity to add to its endorsement.

So it came to pass that search engine marketing , a now bloated and waddling exercise in flagulation by phrases, has peaked and the overflow of eager and frankly ill informed <QUOTE>consultants</QUOTE> seek a new revenue stream and opportuntiy.

Enter the Social Media Guru, the Social Media Manager and the Social Media Expert. Consultants and salespersons whose core skill sets is to hear the jingle jangle of the bandwagon passing and leap unabashed onto the jockey box to proclaim their skills and expertise in guidance and direction.

They have a distinctive characteristic and it is one you would do well to look closely for lest P.T.Barnum be proved right yet again. The characteristics to be wary of are often at an inverse to your expectations; Lets look at a few classic examples.

Twitterers

On Twitter they appear with profiles exclaiming ‘Social Media Expert or Guru’ and when you look closely you see that despite Twitter's lifespan they have only been using Twitter for the last few months. Quite possibly they have a large amount of people they follow and few following back. Although their conversations tend to be self promotional they find a network of similar thinking “professionals” with whom they self promote and congratulate. Often they link to their own blogs ( see bloggers ) where they repeat many trite and obvious idioms all the while encouraging you to call their number and get their advice.

Facebook

Indeed as with twitter so with they have just arrived ( how long has Facebook been going ? ) and they have friends ( who suspiciously also attended the same ‘how to be a social media schill’ course ) who also post and ‘like’ and share the same articles and tripe that they keep churning in the hope they gain credibility.

Bloggers

Similar to their twitter histories these experts have blogs which go back only months. quite possibly with incomplete "about me" pages or just as possibly with incomplete blogs created as tacked on afterthoughts to their own website, which no doubt has a 20 second Flash Splash page intro, possibly with kittens. Rarely do you see any examples of ‘media’ usage beyond the desire to overpopulate their sidebars with plugin after plugin after plugin.

And thats about it.

You are unlikely to see these ‘Social Media’ experts with posterous accounts running alongside their projects or flickr and instagram accounts highlighting conferences, tweetups and events they have experienced. You wont see them curating and collating content in Youtube or Vimeo and as for podcasts or Audioboos? Suffice to say you might start seeing them from today since they have seen this post but until then it simply has not occured to them to use and promote these tools for themselves or their clients.

Put simply these "bandwagon jumpers"  these gurus, experts and ‘professionals’ are not going to help your business or your projects. They do not know how to take risks. They do not know how to go out and explore the internet and live on the frontiers of change and live as the outriders of  opportunity. They are sharks and buzzards feeding only where the shoals and masses congregate and picking at the flesh of business the chunks they can get away with.

Do not rely on them to take you places where your customers maybe or for them to climb the mountains of competition to view ahead into new pastures for your business.

For more on the humanity of good social media take a listen to the first half of 'Social Media White Noise' Episode #62 Cloud Trouble where Nik Butler rants about the tendency of these experts to use tools over experience to appear professional.

About the author

Nik Butler (@Loudmouthman) was on twitter in 2006 and has been blogging since 2004. He makes no claims to being an expert, guru or professional but likes to be known as 'A Digital Roadie'. He has tremendous expertise in getting things done and has the client testimonial page to prove it.

Related blog posts

• Social media science will kill our creativity
• Social media suicide - @LStacey is dead, long live @LStacey
• A Twitter follower is for life, not just for Christmas
• Twitblock - winning the battle against spam on Twitter
• Actually you're probably all wrong
• How to get retweeted

I'm sure I'm right in thinking that most bloggers want more people reading and sharing content from their blogs. With that in mind, I've put together a simple list of 5 things you can do quite easily to increase the number of visitors coming to your blog via search engines. Chances are that you're probably doing most of it right already but I just feel it's good to be mindful of these things if you want to get better results.

1. Get some focus

What one subject do you write about the most? What is your blog best known for? Those are two questions you should ask yourself before you do anything else. Even if you don't have the best analytics in the world (do you have any at all?) you should know which posts are most successful with regards to what's being read and shared. Those are the things you should be concentrating on. Simply put: Do more of that and less of the other. If you enjoy writing about the other stuff too, consider starting another separate blog for it.

2. Look after your blogroll

Most blogging platforms have the facility to have a blogroll, that's basically a list of links to other blogs. As with the rest of your content, you should also have focus in mind here too. Link to blogs that are similar to yours with regards to the content they are posting. That's not all you should do, if you want to really improve your ranking, get those blogs to link back to you too. If you've followed step one above and your content is good (which I'm sure it is) they would be silly not to link back to you!

3. Think keywords

Keywords are important and if your blog has focus, should be almost organic. Know what keywords people are using to find you already (Google Webmaster Tools are good for this) and think about the keywords you want people to find you by. Once you've got your keywords down, prioritise them. Your main site keywords should, if possible feature in the page title on your homepage and in as many pieces of content as possible. If you can squeeze them into post titles too, you're doing well but don't put them anywhere that they aren't relevant. That's a big no no!

There will also be keywords that are particularly relevant to whatever piece of content you're writing too. Getting those into your post titles and at the very least into the first paragraph of your post are absolutely essential. Again, keep it relevant and keep it readable. Stuff too many keywords in there and no human being or search engine is going to want to come near you!

4. Links are good

When you're writing a post, there are probably going to be plenty of opportunities to link to other relevant pieces of content out there on the web and also on your own site. Both will increase your site's overall authority and page rank. Always remember to use good descriptive anchor text for your links and always be descriptive in your  "title" attribute too. If you can get your keywords in there whilst keeping it relevant and humanly readable too, you're doing it right.

5. A picture speaks a thousand words

Pictures are good. Not only do they grab people's attention and hold them on a page a little longer but search engines like them too. Search engines and people alike will like them even more if they have good relevant "alt" and "title" attributes and the image filename and content are relevant to the text that is around them. As with links, if you can get your keywords in there too you're definitely winning.

SEO related posts on leestacey.com:

• SEO is dead
• Link building, blogrolls and all that jazz
• 3 steps to generate traffic to your blog by doing very little

N.B. You won't get any prizes for pointing out how bad I am at practicing what I preach.

If you would like a chance to be involved in something cool or know any other bloggers that like a fun, techy challenge, throw some blog links my way and you might find something cool happens.

For those whose links I don't use in the project, I will try to give you a bit of exposure in some other way.

It's mysterious.

It's fun.

It's guaranteed to be geeky.

Are you in or are you in?

Just fill in as many or as few details as you're comfortable with on this form:

https://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=dFZtbmg0Vmd3b25RaFZyTkU2SXVxSnc6MQ

Thanks in advance!

For whatever reason, I was completely unable to sleep last night so I thought rather than waste time I'd get on with something useful and fix the mess that was my blog.  Along with fixing the theming (how the website looks), I also added a couple of bits; accessible from the nav on the right.

New bits

• Music - I thought it was about time I gave my music a bit more exposure.  You can download my album and a few other tunes I've written from this page.
• Pics - Nothing special, just a slideshow from my Flickr stream.  It'll do for now, until I get my photo blog properly integrated.
• Location - Where I am, where I've been and where I might be going... Actually, not the last bit.  In fact, as I write this, the rather snazzy plugin I've used here isn't actually working.  Epic fail.
• About me - Just a short blurb about my humble self.

What I've fixed

• Blogroll - The blogroll is back!  Giving props to my favourite blogs.  They are there because I like and reccommend them.  Check them out.
• Profile pic - It disappeared when I broke the site.  Now it is back and looking awesome, if I may say so myself.
• Links - Links to some of my other properties and profiles on the web.  I'm fully stalkable!
• Colours - Everything went orange and brown for a bit... That was nasty!
• Disclaimer - My blog, my thoughts, my opinions, nobody elses.  Got it?

That's about it.  If you think it sucks, please let me know so that I can do absolutely nothing about it.  :D

Anyone can write a blog these days.  It's easy.  There are so many different blogging platforms available and the good news is that a lot of them are free.

Find your topic

Before you even think about how or where you're going to blog, it's helpful to know what you're going to blog about.  Will it be a purely personal blog about your day to day thoughts and musings or will it be related to a specific topic?  Will it be a mixture of both?  Will it have multiple topics?  It really doesn't matter which road you go down but it will make life a lot easier if you stick to that path so thinking ahead is fairly important.  If you start a blog about programming computers and you write a post about your love life, chances are that you're going to lose readers whereas a personal blog that features occasional posts about programming is probably OK.

The big difference there is that topical blogs are mostly followed and read by people interested in the topic and personal blogs are read by those interested in the person.  Yes there are exceptions but successful examples are rare.

Set your goals

Even with a personal blog it's good to have goals.  What do you want to get out of your blog?  Are you trying to improve your writing skills?  Maybe you are blogging for a cause or an organisation and want to increase awareness.  Maybe you're looking for feedback on something you are doing.  Setting goals will kelp you keep your blog on track.

Writing for your readers

A lot of blogging "how to" guides tell you to write for your readers.  In some cases this is important.  A professional blogger for instance will probably need to keep the numbers up and growing but that's not actually the case for most.  For personal blogs the numbers don't really matter.  This of course depends on your goals.  For personal blogs it's almost certainly best to write your way and gain readers that like your way of doing it.

Find your platform

This is quite daunting for most people that have never blogged before.  There are almost too many choices but in my opinion you can't go too far wrong with a personal blog by using something simple like Posterous or Wordpress.  I use Posterous for almost everything I post online these days because it's just so easy.  Wordpress is a little more powerful out of the box but can be a little confusing for someone with no previous blogging experience.

Get blogging

Hopefully you've now got a better idea of how to get started.  There's no definitive right or wrong way to go about it, just do what suits you best.  That's all I do and it seems to work for me!

Make your own @ http://www.wordle.net/

So you've got a business, you're on Twitter and you're auto adding people based on keyword searches in the hope that they will follow back.  Some do, some don't.  When they follow back you hit their DM inbox with a link to your product/service and you can tweet all day about your awesome things, right into their stream.  Perfect, right?

I decided it was time to stop using Twitpic and start using Posterous for my iPhone snap shots.  Emailing photos is something the iPhone does very well and receiving emailed photos is something that Posterous does well so it's a match made in heaven.

Thanks to Christian Payne (@Documentally) I have been introduced to some newness that I thought I might share with you.  This particular nugget of newness is a very simple audio blogging platform for the iPhone that could well become audio's answer to YouTube.

Where Audioboo beats most other audio blogging and/or podcasting technologies to date is the simplicity factor.  All you do is set up an account, download the iPhone app from the App Store and GO GO GO!  You can link it with your Twitter and Facebook accounts too, should you feel so inclined.  You don't have to set up an account to use it if you don't want to.  Any Boos recorded without an account will be uploaded anonymously.

Once uploaded your Boo can then be individually linked or embedded such is the way of Web 2.0 applications.  If you set up an account all of your Boos will be listed there also.

If that's not enough, you can also subscribe to a user's boos in iTunes!

For more info on Audioboo you can visit their site:

http://audioboo.fm

There is a handy little video tutorial available here:

You'll find my Audioboo account here and Documentally's account here.