January 16, 2013

Add blogging to your to-do list this year

Photo courtesy of ~C4Chaos (Creative Commons)

Blog to differentiate yourself beyond your credentials & experience

Edelman recruited me because I blogged about Wal-Mart. Rosetta Stone invited me to blog for them because I blogged about learning German. AdAge invited me to write for their DigtialNext and Global News blogs. Blogging about social media marketing resulted in being invited by Socialmedia.biz and Biznology to blog for them. In the fervor of the presidential elections, I pursued column inches in The Huffington Post. In large part, I can thank blogging for most of my professional success. There is no more efficient way of expressing passion, what you know, and how you think than writing it out. A blog is the perfect platform.

In many ways, blogging made me. My degree is in English and Creative Writing and not in communications, public relations, public affairs, history, politics, languages, or computer science. However, I am a curious man at heart and am fascinated by the world we live in.

Continue reading →

October 31, 2012

How to use content communities to expand your brand’s reach

Use targeted content to take your business to the next level

This is the first of a two-part series. Coming next:
• Build links to your site with video content

Guest post by Julianne Staino
Distilled

“Content is king!” Ah, the wonderfully overused statement that makes me want to throw my monitor at the wall and then hang my head in shame because it’s actually true. I feel like I can safely assume that we can all agree on the increasing importance of awesome content. Recently, it seems like everyone is championing for companies to evolve the way in which they approach creating content. (e.g. Coca-Cola’s 2020 content strategy. If you haven’t watched these videos, I’d highly recommend investing 20 minutes in order to see how big brands are changing the way they think about a cohesive marketing strategy.)

Besides the obvious SEO benefits to having original content, engaging material also helps your customers remember your brand. So having things people find interesting on your site makes it more likely for them to come back. Continue reading →

June 1, 2011

Google wants me to put Google +1 buttons on my blogs

I just popped into AdSense, as I do as obsessively as anyone online, and something new popped up:

Recommendations
Add the +1 button to your pages
Adding the +1 button to your pages allows users to recommend your content to friends and contacts on Google search. As a result, you could get more and better qualified traffic.

How exciting! It has all begun today! I clicked on “Get the code snippet” and here’s what I saw:

I am probably going to wait the week or so until someone releases an easy-to-use and easy-to-implement plugin for my WordPress and Drupal installs so that I don’t have to hack the template.

Any recommendations for Drupal, WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, and WordPress.com solutions for those of us who want to add Google +1 ASAP to all of our fun sites and blogs?