How to get the new Facebook Timeline profile today

Wow there were certainly a lot of exciting announcements at the F8 conference this week and Facebook’s Timeline Profile was just one of them. After having had a chance to test it out for the last 48hours, I absolutely love it! From a marketers perspective it’s a dream in terms of the amount of new real estate we now have access too. Your new about me page is literally a fully blown webpage which I’m sure will prompt a lot of people (like me) to do a mini Spring clean. And with the new open graph app platform opening up to developers, we are going to see some seriously exciting new widgets available in the coming months. Personally I’m really keen to see the impact the ability to search news inside Facebook is going to have on SEO.

Facebook’s new Timeline cover photo adds a new dimension for marketers

The facebook Timeline cover photo is literally like a magazine cover where you can advertise anything you want in large, widescreen format. I’m sure it wasn’t Facebook’s intention to create advertising space but it has lots of creative potential for marketers, including a great place to feature our blogs : -)

What I also loved about this, is if you click and choose one of your existing photos, it seems to magically resize it to the correct format without any distortion.

Now lets get your new Facebook Timeline enabled

Find out how many of your Facebook friends can see your new Timeline

Once you’ve hit the get it now button on your profile, head over to the Introducing Timeline page and you will be able to see how many of your existing friends magically became overnight Facebook developers! Just scroll right to the bottom of the page. Mine seem to be multiplying by the hour which just shows how excited everyone must be to check out the shiny new features.

Thanks to both Mashable and Techcrunch for the early instructions!

If you have your new profile enabled, I’d love you hear your thoughts in the comments below. And if you think your friends would benefit from getting the Facebook Timeline early, make sure you click one of the share or recommend buttons on this page.

Michaelé

The easy way to create a Google+ invite for your friends

If you’re an online marketer, no doubt you’ve heard that Google+ finally opened it’s doors to it’s testing phase in the last few days. And given it launched via ‘invite only’, the question on most people’s lips seems to be how the heck do I get in there! So far it seems that many of the tech industry were amongst the chosen few, along with randomly selected google accounts. And once you were on the inside, you could easily invite others until google decided that due to ‘insane demand’ they had to shut the process down! While some are already accusing the company of hype, I’d say the fact that just one of their Google+ Youtube videos has almost 2 million views in less than a week is a good indication that the demand is real.

How do I get a Google+ invite?

Ok first up you need to know someone who already has an account :-) Then just get them to follow the steps below or send them the link to this post.

STEP 1.  Click on what’s known as the circles tab up the top of the page.

STEP 2.  Once on the circles page you’ll see that as well as some predefined Google+ circles, you have the option of creating your own. Click to create a new circle.

STEP 3.  Give your circle a name and then click on ‘Add a new person’. Enter the email addresses of the people you want to invite into Google+. You’ll also want to add one of your own email adresses to this circle and I’ll get to why in a minute. Note:When I was testing this, any email address that was linked to my  google profile didn’t work. So make sure you use an email addy that isn’t associated with your google accounts.

STEP 4.  Now it’s time to share with your circle. What happens here is once you share an update with your circle, anyone who doesn’t have a Google+account will be notified via email. It’s in that email that they’ll receive a link to get in!

Another way to get a direct invite link to share with friends who aren’t on Google+

In step 3 I mentioned to make sure you include one of your own email addresses in your circle and here’s why… Once the email arrives notifying you of your own update, the link down the bottom that says Learn more about Google+is a link you can share with anyone. How cool is that! I just tested this with a friend today whose email address wasn’t included in my test circle and the link in my own email worked to get him in.

Be patient with the process as I initially thought my 3 tests had failed. I didn’t receive the email above until nearly 13 hours later! And then another email that I included in the test arrived another 2 hours after that. Google’s servers are apparently overloaded which might explain the delay. But for now, not only will this give you a way in, you’ll now have a direct link to share with friends. I’d be careful about over sharing the direct link as who knows what Google might do if 100 people suddenly join through the one link.

UPDATE: I just tested this again and it looks like the link you receive by adding your own email address to your circle will only work with one person. So if you want to invite 5 people, you’ll need 5 different email addresses to use.

I hope you enjoy Google + and if you have any questions or comments, just leave them below and I’ll be sure to answer them. Oh and although it seems hilarous to say this, don’t forget to share this post with your freinds on Facebook :)

Michaelé

Setting your team up with a blogging success plan

In part 1 of this series, we looked at why setting your team up with a blog might be counterproductive if you want fast duplication. In part 2 we covered 7 strategies for getting your team started on Facebook and in part 3 we covered the secret to Facebook’s News Feed optimization. So now that we have your team online without the overwhelm of starting a blog right of the bat, it’s time move to the next level. This post is not meant to be a tutorial for setting up and installing your blog, but rather an overall game plan for launching and beyond.

Many current bloggers (myself included) will tell you that after fumbling through the frustrating learning curve of setting a blog up, they suddenly realized they didn’t have a plan. They don’t have a clear idea on exactly why they’re blogging, other than it seemed like something they should be doing. Ahh the beauty of hindsight! If I only knew back then…. well you know the rest of the saying.

So the first step, is getting clear on why you’re blogging and what it’s main purpose will be

• Generating leads for your primary opportunity?
• Raising your credibility through personal branding?
• Build a relationship with your niche?
• Creating an extra stream of income through affiliate products?
• Or all of the above?

Once you’re clear on why, the next step is how. You need to choose a theme that will serve the strategies above. Now I know this is a getting started post but it’s worthwhile thinking about search engine optimization and squeeze pages etc even if you don’t quite understand what they are right now. If one of your aims is to generate leads for your primary opportunity, you might want to consider a theme that already has squeeze pages built in. One of the newest and most stylish looking themes on the market that has this option is Optimizepress. If you’re on a budget, you can still use a great free theme and buy a squeeze page plugin down the track. One of the best free themes I’ve seen is the current WordPress default theme, twenty ten.

Now it’s time to cover your branding

If one of your aims is to raise your credibilty through personal branding, you absolutely must have your photo in your banner. In the online social marketing age, people are looking to connect with real humans more than ever before. A block of colour and a slab of text just doesn’t cut the mustard anymore and the competition for attention is fierce. If you’re just starting out and on a budget, you can get a personalized banner done over at Logonerds.com for $27.

Next is your tagline

As internet connections increase, attention spans decrease. You have a couple of seconds to make a good first impression or it’s sayonara baby! Your tagline needs to be one or two catchy sentances that let your visitors know how your topic will serve them. The process of crafting a tagline will also help with defining the main theme or your blog.

What topics will I specialize in and who to I want to attract

A lot of people get really stuck when it comes to deciding what to specialize in because they think they don’t have any value to share. This is so far from the truth it’s not funny. Each and every one of us has had totally unique experiences in life that have formed who we are today. Not another person on the planet can explain the pearls of wisdom you’ve gained from a book or course in the same way that you can! Just as my unique blogging experience has allowed me to write this post. You don’t need to know everything about your topic right now, you just need to choose something you’re passionate enough to keep learning about. Once you have this in place, decide who you want to attract and what problems your blog can solve for them.

While having your own blog is great for increasing your online visibility, it doesn’t become a marketing strategy until you have a way of capturing leads

So the next step is to create an offer for your opt in box. Ultimately the end goal is to create your own product or tutorial, but since this series is about coming online without the overwhelm, lets start with a solution you can have up and running overnight! If you haven’t heard of PLR products before, they are basically content packages that you are given the right to put your own name on for a fee. If you google PLR products you’ll find lots of different sites but make sure their quality is exceptional before you make a purchase. You also want to email them first to find out what the cap is on how many copies they sell. Decent sites won’t sell more than about 100- 200 hundred. It’s worth paying the extra for sites that have a cap so that you don’t end up with a product 5000 others are using as their opt in. The best way to use a PLR product is to treat the content as a template and change it around enough so that it’s unique to your personality.

Now that we have our opt in offer, it’s important to have a content strategy before you start posting

This is probably the most important step that I missed when I was starting out.

• Based on the marketing strategies you are already using, how much time can you dedicate to blogging?
• Once you’ve worked out the time you’ll commit, how many times a month will you post?
• Which day of the week will you set time aside to reply to your commenters, and leave comments on other blogs?

If you can write out a clear content plan before you start, it will save you a lot of headaches down the track.

Blogging will be a complete waste of time if you don’t have enough traffic to generate leads and build community

The two best sources of traffic are social buzz and organic search engine traffic. In part 2 of this series we talked about hooking up with an online tribe to create buzz on your Facebook profile. If your Facebook tribe are already bloggers, then you will already have an awesome strategy for creating social buzz. If not, you can read this post on creating your own tribe or check out some of the places I hang out to create awesome blogging alliances.

• Empowered Tribe
• ThatMLMBeat
• WordPress World

I’ve found that almost 50% of my traffic comes from social buzz. That said, we don’t want to leave out the other 50% that are coming from the search engines. Over time, you’ll find visitors naturally coming in from the search engines but you’ll have far higher traffic numbers if you create posts that get their attention. The easiest way to do this is to decide on a keyword you’d like your content to be found for and then optimize your post. If you have no idea what search engine optimization or optimizing posts means don’t worry, I’ll let you in on my secret weapon. It’s a paid plugin called SEOPressor. This little gem will literally hold you by the hand and tell you what you need to do every time you post which will make a huge difference to your organic traffic.

How to launch your blog with maximum impact

I remember chatting to someone one day to see how their blog was going after their launch, only to find out they had already quit. When I asked why, they replied “I don’t think Google even knows I exist.” So I zipped over to do a site search on Google and sure enough, they hadn’t even been indexed! Don’t let this happen to you! One of the easiest ways to get indexed is to submit your first post to Digg. And if you head over to fiverr.com Sir Fred (as he likes to called) will submit your post and get you 25 Diggs for 5 bucks. Another one of my secret weapons! To check if you’ve been indexed, head over to the google search bar and type in “site:http://www.yourblogname.com” without any spaces.

Once you’re indexed, make sure you have all the right social buzz and community widgets installed. Once you’re all set, send a shout out to your tribe to come and join/like them to create social proof before you officially launch. When the grand day arrives, it’s time to transform your Facebook profile, into one very cool advertisement for your new blog. To do this we are going to convert your 5 thumbnail pics at the top of your profile page into your blog banner so that it looks similar to this:

And guess what, you don’t need to know how to do this as I’m going to let you in on another one of my secret resources. If you send a file of your blog banner to my friend Jon at Facebook Custom Pictures, he’ll do it for you. But wait for the best part……it’s only 5 bucks! I don’t know about you but these 5 buck services are really growing on me :) The only thing left to do now, is to let your tribe know you’re blog is ready for lift off. Now you can sit back and relax as you watch the power of social buzz unfolding. Just one of the many rewards of starting your online presence on Facebook and launching a blog after you’ve built those connections.

If you think the post or any of the posts in this series can help your team, there’s a Facebook share button below :) And as always if you have any questions or want to share some of your own strategies, your comments are always welcome.

Michaele

The secret to Facebook’s News Feed Optimization

In part 2 of this series, we looked at simple strategies to get your team started on Facebook. Now that we have the basics down-pat, it’s time to take your team to the next level and give them and edge over everyone else!
Going forward into 2011, understanding how the News Feed works is absolutely critical for success on Facebook.   Let me explain…

Have you ever wondered why some people post updates that attract a tonne of activity, while others post and you can almost hear the tumbleweeds? Like it or not, it’s because Facebook has an algorithm that decides whether or not your updates are important enough to show in the News Feed. And since Facebook displays the Top News section of the News Feed by default, this is how most people catch up on all of their friends activity. So if you aren’t showing up there, you’re basically invisible! A lot of people seem to be confused as to why their friends or fans haven’t seen their latest updates. It’s not because they’re not interested in you, it’s because Facebook’s algorithm determines what it thinks you’ll find interesting! Given that many people have hundreds, if not thousands of friends, it makes sense that your unique News Feed displays content that’s deemed to be the most relevant to you.

The bad news is that new people who don’t have an online support Tribe will have a hard time gaining exposure initially. Here’s why:

• Their interaction history is almost non existent, so the ‘affinity’ value of anything they post is going to be pretty low.

• Since a new person has very few friends, its hard to build up your initial affinity. And since people with more friends who have been around longer will have a higher affinity score than you, the chances of showing in the News Feed of someone popular is extremely unlikely.

As a marketer on Facebook, understanding how to get into the Top News Feed could be the single most important strategy you learn

The good news is, that understanding News Feed Optimization (NFO) is pretty simple.   The secret is to take a close look at their algorithm, otherwise known as EdgeRank.

Believe it or not, that less than edgy picture of EdgeRank holds the key to successful visibility on Facebook! EdgeRank is simply an algorithm, just as Google’s PageRank is and it will rank what it deems to be important.   Before we break it down, there’s a bit of Facebook jargon to understand:

• Object ~ This simply means content e.g.   a status update, a photo, a link or a video.

• Edge ~ This is basically any interaction that occurs with the object e.g. Likes, comments, tagging or sharing.

Now lets have a look at EdgeRank

• The affinity score between the viewing user and the edge/content creator. If you regularly interact and engage with another person’s objects, your affinity score with that person will rise. What this means is that their objects will be more likely to show up in your News Feed. Unfortunately constantly engaging with that person doesn’t mean that your objects will necessarily show in their news feed. There are some strategies you can implement here though which I’ll get into in a minute.

• The weight for this type of edge. Now this is the part of the algorithm that Facebook doesn’t completely reveal. From the research I’ve done it appears comments carry more weight than likes.   All in all though, it’s the combination of all interactions that contribute to the weight.

• Time decay factor. Unlike Google’s PageRank where authority accumulates over time, an objects authority in the News Feed gathers dust after about 48 hours.

FB also states that they factor in the of the type of object you created. Given that links videos etc create engagement, they seem to be favored over status updates with plain text. Watch this space though as I’ve noticed a trend towards favoring their newest products e.g. check in’s through places.

So how do you use this knowledge to your advantage?

If it isn’t obvious yet, making it into the Top News Feed should be an important part of your overall strategy on Facebook.

In part 2 of this series we covered strategically connecting with thought leaders and people of influence in your niche. The question is, how do you get into their News Feed?

Unfortunately all the commenting and likes that you do on their profile, won’t have you showing up in their News Feed. When you engage with their objects, this builds your affinity towards them. Put simply, this will result in them showing up in your News Feed but not the other way around. So whats the answer?

1. Create interesting and engaging objects that make the Top News Feed in their own right due to the amount of edge they receive.
2. Leave valuable and interesting feedback on their objects so that they become curious enough to visit your profile directly. Once you have them interacting with your content, their affinity score towards you will increase and so will your chances of showing in their News Feed.

On a final note, you want to start testing the different days and times that engagement is at it’s highest. Social Media Management company Vitrue, who analyzed Facebook Fan Page data from 2007 – 2010, came up with some interesting findings in their white paper ‘The Anatomy of a Facebook post which you can download here. Mashable did a great story on this 2 months ago highlighting the busiest time for conversations is 3pm US EST. Keep in mind that this was a study of Fan Pages. If you look a little closer, you’ll find that this includes brands that promote coupons at the time of day that people are hungry etc. It’s only through testing and tweaking your own posts, that you’ll be able to discover when your audience are most likely to give your object an edge!

If you’ve found this helpful and you think News Feed Optimization is something your friends would find valuable, make sure you share this on Facebook. I would love to hear your thoughts and comments below on how understanding EdgeRank has helped your visibility.

Michael

7 Strategies for getting your team started on Facebook

Get people excited by demonstrating how powerful the platform is

A lot of people still have the same resistance to Facebook as they do to Twitter. They’ve heard it’s a social site where people do meaningless mundane updates on what they ate for lunch. The fastest way to change their perception is by showing them your own account. Since most people are visual, the best way to do this is by doing a Skype screenshare. Give them a quick tour of your wall and the walls of other successful marketers so that they can see the powerful interactions going on and the relationships being formed. Let them watch over your shoulder as you go in and post updates and engage with people. Demonstrate the strategy behind tagging people using the @ symbol.

Walk them through their profile set up

It might sound like a no brainer, but not a day goes by where I don’t see someone on the Social Networks without their profile and bio set up. Even worse, a photo that’s not their own! Do not let anyone in your team become a ‘Fakebooker’! Talk to them about what they want to be known for in their industry and develop a branding strategy around that.

If they are employed full time, it’s critical that you walk them through the basics of the privacy settings so that their marketing posts don’t end up on google for their employer to see.

Brainstorm their niche

Find out the persons likes and interests are so you can help devise a friend adding strategy relative to their niche. E.g if one of the benefits of the product they promote is enhanced athletic perfomance , it sounds logical to go out and friend other athletes. But this is only true if they have a passion for the topic itself outside of any marketing. Help them find a match between their target market and what they’re naturally passionate about talking about. While having 1000 friends might sound powerful, it’s meaningless to have 1000 friends who have no interest in what you like to talk about.

Targeted friend adding and building relationships with influencers

This strategy has two components:

• A general but targeted friend adding strategy
• A more focused strategy based on connecting with people of influence and potential JV partners

The first step is to use the import your email list and skype contacts feature.  This is the fastest way for a new person to go from no friends to some friends almost immediately.
The next step is to start making connections with like minded people through groups and pages. As an entrepreneur, some of the best places to start with are the ones created around well known authors on the topic of their niche. For example, if you do a search on Facebook for Robert Kiyosaki, you’ll find close to 200,00 people have liked this page. Are you kidding me! Over 200,000 budding or established entrepreneurs to connect with! Are you loving how powerful this is yet?

As Facebook doesn’t publish the daily limit on friend requests, play safe and stay with around 30 a day

In order to create a super responsive and engaging friends list, I would suggest only actively seeking out and sending friend requests until you have your first 100- 200. The purpose behind this strategy is that once you are actively engaging with your initial community, friend requests from their friends will start naturally flowing in on a daily basis. When people request to be your friend because they liked the valuable comment you left on one of their friends pages, the connection is immediately more powerful. Growing an ‘organic’ following on Facebook is key if you want powerful connections, rather than numbers.

The second strategy is more targeted and focused. This is about concentrating on specific relationships with people of influence or thought leaders in your niche. So as well as the general friend adding strategy, you want to be actively friending and directly connecting with 3-5 people a week that have influence in your industry. The bulk of your time should be spent building solid relationships with these people.

Always include a personal note letting the person know why you would like to connect. If you can include something you both have in common before you send the request, you are planting the seed for a powerful future relationship.

What to post in Facebook status updates

For someone brand new, this is actually quite a daunting question.

• How personal should I be?
• What do I post about?
• Do I let everyone know about my business opportunity?

Ok so lets address the first one. If you are on Facebook as a marketer, you need a balanced approach to how personal you should be. It’s a social site so by all means be social and be yourself. Afterall, it’s the human side that makes this platform so powerful! Having said that, you will eventually have an audience of thousands of people potentially viewing your status updates. Is it going to benefit your brand if you post every detail of your pending relationship break up? This is not about being false, it’s also about respecting others. People don’t log into Facebook to be burdened by problems they might already be facing in their own lives. Sure if you’re having a bad day, post it but add some sort of engaging or light hearted twist to it. Just be mindful of posting negative personal updates that draw people into any drama.

So what do we say in our status updates? A good question here would be, what do you like to see in other peoples status updates? I’m guessing this would be anything that is entertaining, educational, enlightening or engaging. There are no rules here and don’t forget people love controversy!

From what we know about Facebooks News Feed algorithm (more details in the next post), links and videos are favored over status updates. Some of the best places to find interesting posts to link to are:

• Digg
• Better Networker
• Simple Truths
• PopURL’s
• Youtube
• Your favorite blogs

Don’t get too hung up on what to post, after all it’s you people are connecting with.

If you are posting about your opportunity, remember the 90/10 rule of value vs marketing.  Provide value and people will become naturally curious if you keep your opportunity posts less blatant.  E.g. “Wow check this out www.myopportunity.com” vs “Totally excited about some of the new marketing strategies my team are testing out.” It also goes without saying that you shouldn’t be falsely friending people with the intention of spamming people with private ‘my opportunity’ messages.

Set up a Facebook support tribe

While engaging on Facebook might seem like second nature to some of us, it can still be daunting for a new person. Imagine being brand new for a minute and every time you do a status update, not a single person replies or engages with you…

The fastest way to get a new person into the groove and generating buzz quickly is to set them up with their own mini tribe

Get them connected with a small inner circle of others who agree to comment on each others updates. This is also critical if you want to be showing up in your friends newsfeed. One of the reasons people post updates that have zero likes or comments is because the update hasn’t appeared in your friends News Feed. As Facebook doesn’t favor new people, it’s very easy to become completely invisible in the news feed until your affinity score increases. Although Facebook doesn’t reveal the exact details on how the score is calculated, inbound activity plays a huge part. Just as Facebooks NewsFeed algorithim favors links and videos over text updates, comments are also favored over ‘likes’.

The art of engaging on Facebook

This topic is so important it literally deserves a separate post as even fortune 500 companies are still struggling with getting this right. What a lot of people, and companies view as engagement is a form of shout marketing. In the case of a company this would be constant updates that aren’t that dissimilar to an ad. Online entrepreneurs also fall into this trap by constantly posting updates that don’t invite people into the conversation. Facebook is a Social Media platform, not a Me Me Media platform!

The simplest way to get people engaged is by asking questions. Not only do people love to answer questions, but by inviting people into a topic you give them the chance to shine in front of your audience. And people love to hang out where they can look good! Once you do have an engageing update happening, it’s important to make the contributors feel valued and acknowledge. If you like some of the replies, take a nano second to click the like button. Acknowledge as many of the commenters as possible with an @theirname reply and if it makes sense, draw them back in with another question. People are missing out on a huge amount of rapport building because they sit back and ignore an update once it takes on some life.

The same goes for joining conversations on other peoples updates.  If you are late to the party, take the time to read through some of the other comments before you join in. If you like what someone else has written, start your reply with a response to @friend1 before you offer your own comment. I continually receive friend requests (often within minutes) of using this strategy.

None of this means anything if you are not taking these friendships and relationships and building them offline

While public interactions on Facebook are incredibly powerful for rapport building and positioning, behind the scenes is where business really happens. As soon as you click with someone, send them a message asking to connect on Skype or the phone. The great thing about connections that start on Facebook, is by the time you do speak to someone offline, they already know, like and trust you. Now thats a powerful basis to start any potential business relationship from!

In the next post I’ll be going into the in’s and out’s of Facebooks NewsFeed optimisation, and why it’s important to understand how it works.

If you enjoyed this post or have some tips to share that I’ve missed, please leave me a comment below. If you think this information might help others to get started, don’t forget to share it on Facebook.

Michaele

If you want fast duplication in your business, setting your team up with a blog might be counterproductive

With web publishing tools becoming easier to use by the minute, more and more marketers are being lured into the powerful world of blogging. The concept of setting up a brand around “You Inc” and owning your own piece of real estate on the internet sounds exciting. And if learning the technical know how seems like to much to get your head around, there are fantastic blog design services out there that will do it for you. Given the massive exposure a blog can bring compared to traditional offline marketing, it makes sense to want to bring your team on board.

If you’re in a business that requires duplication for success however, you might want to rethink the blogging strategy for newbies. After watching closely for some time now, I’ve noticed some revealing trends…

• The high drop out rate of new marketers who came online to build their businesses because they were led to believe it would be easier.
• The drop off rate due to the shear overwhelm of discovering the other strategies they need to learn in order to drive traffic to their blog.

While all this is going on in the background, valuable time that could have been spent building powerful business relationships is being lost.  Even worse, momentum either doesn’t kick in or becomes suffocated in the process. Now don’t get me wrong, in this day and age I think it’s more important than ever to have a central hub to build your brand from and a blog is the perfect platform for this. For brand new people coming online however, I’ve discovered you need both a short and  long term, beginners and intermediate strategy.

Blogging is a powerful intermediate strategy for your team but Facebook can bring fast short term rewards

Setting up a blog is not a strategy in itself. As well as the continual never ending technical learning curve, there’s content to be produced, opt in offers to be created, auto responders to be set up, search engine optimisation to be learnt, videos to be made, traffic to be driven, community to be built and the list goes on and on. For most people, it takes many months before they start seeing results.

When people first come online, they bring with them the same skill sets they had offline. If they lack good communication skills or the ability to lead and influence, this will only be amplified online.  If you’re in any sort of relationship marketing business (and thats most of us), learning the art of building rapport quickly is paramount. And the most powerful online medium we have to shorten that learning curve is Facebook. Teaching your team how to engage, build rapport and create potential business contacts through Facebook can start producing results almost immediately.

Facebook is predicted to hit one billion users by 2012

If a brand new person has ever had an opportunity to connect with their target market en mass without the need for elaborate technical skills, it’s now.  2011 is just around the corner and your target market are on Facebook.  In the months it might take for a new person to start producing results from their blogging efforts, they can be building an online presence and connecting with prospects within weeks.  For a new person coming online, the faster you can empower them and build confidence in their ability to generate results, the more likely they are to get excited about the next step. So if someone is brand new, set them up on Facebook as a beginners step and integrate blogging as part of an overall intermediate strategy.

While this post goes against the grain of what a lot of online marketing courses are teaching as a first step, I hope it’s enabled you to rethink whether it’s really been the right path for your team.

In the next post I will be sharing strategies for getting your new team members set up and tapping into the power of Facebook in no time.

Whether you agree or disagree with this concept I would love to hear from you in the comments below. And if you found it valuable, don’t forget to share this post on Twitter and Facebook!

Michaelé

Have you noticed lately that the cool Twitter tools that enabled you to automatically unfollow people have all but gone?

With one click of a button we could target followers in our niche and in the next click, automatically erase those that didn’t match certain criteria we set. If you’ve been wondering why so many of these tools don’t allow you to do this anymore, that’s because it’s against Twitters Terms of Service. And in recent months Twitter has been systematically either closing these tools down or requesting they become compliant. I don’t know about you but the thought of cleaning out 1000 inactive followers click by click doesn’t sound like good time leverage to me! There is still a super efficient (almost automated) solution though.

Manage Flitter will clean up your Twitter followers in a matter of seconds.

Despite a run in with Twitter earlier this year, Manage Flitter remains one of the few surviving tools that allow you to clean up your account with a few clicks. I created a quick video demo below to show you how easy it is.

To think we almost lost this super efficient tool a few months ago when the developers received the following email from Twitter:

“We’re writing to let you know that your application, ManageTwitter, breaks our Automation Rules and Best Practices (http://help.twitter.com/entries/76915). Specifically, it facilitates bulk automated user unfollowing, which is not allowed. It’s best for both our
users and your users if your application follows the rules, so please make the necessary changes, such as removing the “Select All” option (and requiring users to decide on each user individually) to bring your application into compliance. “

After nearly 2000 people tweeted their support for the “Save Manage Flitter” campaign, they managed to come to an agreement with Twitter by removing a simple select all button. Given my own account showed over 1700 people that were either inactive or not likely to contribute any value, I couldn’t imagine deciding on each user individually as Twitter states above. We use Twitter to build solid relationships and have fun, so we need tools that efficiently manage who we hang out with.

If you’ve noticed any of your favourite Twitter tools have changed lately, I’d love to hear about it. Especially if you’ve found a replacement. And of course if you think this tool will benefit your Twitter followers, hit the Retweet button above and let them know!

Michaelé

It’s no secret that online video is one of the most powerful marketing mediums on the planet.

Creating your first however, can be a huge challenge.  After all, there’s shyness to overcome,   technical knowledge to learn and a reasonable amount of time commitment to make them look professional.   If you fall into that category,  all of your excuses are about to be swept from under your feet!   I’m about to show you a video branding tool that is super fast and easy to use, that will skyrocket your credibility.   It’s called Google Search Stories Video Creator and you’ll find it on YouTube.

In under 5 minutes this powerful little gem will allow you to create a video from Google’s search results all about you.   You can choose results from blogs, images, news and general search.   Choose your music, add a title and with the click of one button, your masterpiece is uploaded directly to YouTube! Imagine the boost to your credibility having a video that shows all of the Google search results on your brand.   But the power doesn’t end there…

Google Search Stories Video Creator is also a powerful way of telling a story.

As well as the obvious plus for your personal branding, you can also create stories around your affiliate products, your Network Marketing opportunity and just about anything else you can think of.   Rather than show you an example of a personal video, I decided to have some fun and create a video about the founders of my Tribe Community.

If you don’t want your Search Story to look like everyone elses, here’s how to stand out from the crowd and take your video to the next level.

Check out the updated video below compared to the first video and I think you’ll agree, the extra 8 seconds in length, makes a difference. Oh and just a tiny thing I forgot to mention…. By the time I woke up the next day, this video was ranked number 4 for the search term ‘Social Media Tribes’.   How cool is that for SEO 101!

Ok so lets dig in to how to create one your own branded video!

This is getting slightly more technical but I promise it’s still easy, and will take you an extra 15 minutes.   You do want to stand out don’t you ;-)

• Take your newly created masterpiece and download it from YouTube to your computer.
• While logged into your YouTube account, click on my videos and find the Search Stories Video you just created.
• Now you should see Edit, Insight and a downward pointing drop down arrow.
• Click on this and select Download MP4

Now your masterpiece in the making is on your computer!

Next head over to OneTrueMedia and create a Premium account ($3.99 a month).

• Login and click on create.
• Go to add images and video clips and  click upload photos and video.
• The next screen will say select files so  choose the name of the file you just downloaded from Youtube.
• Repeat this step and upload a powerful graphic or logo that has to do with your message.
• Next ignore all the options to add music text etc and go straight to Edit & Sequence.   Now you will see your uploaded files.
• Make sure your graphic is before the video file and click directly on it.
• Leave all the properties as they are and click on effects.
• Choose an effect from the dropdown menu, save it and you’re almost done!

Final tip:  Download the video directly to your computer before uploading to Youtube as it removes the OneTrueMedia branding.

Now the reason we want to leave all the properties as they are and just choose and apply an effect, is to save time. This is one of those cool services that have a million and one options but we don’t want to be there fluffing around all day!   If you like the effect I chose, it’s called Metropolis.

If you’ve made your own Search Story, make sure you come back and post your link in the comments, I’d love to see it.  Did you think the extra time spent over at One True Media was worth the effort?   Post a comment below and let me know your thoughts on this incredibly simple, yet powerful tool.

Michaelé

How to beat google through an online Tribe Syndication community!

The latest update to Googles indexing alogorithim, otherwise known as the ‘Caffeine Update’ has now made ‘activity’ more important than ever before.

Here is a snippet from Google ‘s official announcement: “Caffeine provides 50 percent fresher results for web searches than our last index, and it’s the largest collection of web content we’ve offered. Whether it’s a news story, a blog or a forum post, you can now find links to relevant content much sooner after it is published than was possible ever before”.

So essentially, including ‘fresher results’ now means that Google is indexing social activity such as Twitter, Facebook, comments etc at lightening speed.

Over the last few months I’ve watched top affiliate marketers make it to the first page of Google (and even hit # 1) for their keyword in under a week. Guess what their secret has been? An intricate combination of activity!

Here are a few of their secrets to getting first page Google rankings…

Generating link activity to their site by commenting on other high PR sites, waiting for the comment to be approved and then ‘pinging’ the search engines to let them know there’s been ‘activity’ on the site through services such as http://pingoat.net .

Writing 10 ‘keyword’ specific articles and submitting them to a powerful combination of social networking sites, article sites and social bookmarking sites. Followed by pinging the newly created URL’s and then creating rss feeds. Submitting the feeds to the top feed aggregators. (This was all done in a specific, well planned order).

If all this pinging and submitting sounds confusing, don’t worry it was for me too! The above strategy seemed quite complex at first until finally the penny dropped. It all boiled down to ‘activity’! Of course these guys were expert affiliate marketers and so they had their sites correctly optimized for their keywords but… A significant part of their first page results came from a calculated amount of pinging, comments etc that all led to letting Google know their site was alive and kicking!

Whilst relevant quality backlinks still remain an important factor, ‘freshness’ of content has never been more important. And guess what counts as fresh content on your blog… If you guessed comments, you’re correct.

If you don’t have a high traffic site that ‘organically’ creates lots of activity, RSS subscribers, pings etc, the way to get the big Google bot’s attention is to join an online tribe community that creates the activity for you. Imagine how much more powerful the above strategies could have been for these guys if they had a tribe submitting their content to 43 social bookmarking sites using powerful tools like Onlywire.

So how can a tribe leverage from Google’s Caffeine Update?

If you’re a part of an online tribe community, no doubt you’ve already witnessed some pretty amazing results for your personal blog. Now imagine taking these results and catapulting your marketing efforts into the stratosphere, by creating a specialized ‘content pinging’ tribe within your community. So instead of just concentrating on your blog, they use Onlywire to ping your Ezine articles, your hubs, your lenses, your opportunity reviews etc etc. Now thats what I call powerful! In fact in the age of Google ‘caffeine’, you’d be crazy not to brainstorm ideas on forming more advanced marketing tribes within your community. I know I will be after this post :)

If you have any thoughts to add on the recent changes to Google’s indexing algorithm, I’d love to hear from you in the comments section below. I’d also love to hear what kind of advanced strategies you’re using within your tribe.

Michaelé

Have you noticed there’s a ‘tribal’ buzz happening out there on the Social Networking sites lately?

If you haven’t, I’m going to sum up the benefits in one short sentence…

Put simply, having your own Social Media Tribe = A massive amount of free traffic and eyeballs on your content.

Unless you’ve been online for a while or are an SEO expert, you would have noticed it’s not easy to get your content out there. You know the feeling… You’ve created your masterpiece, installed the latest cool Social Media blog plugins to make it easy for people to syndicate and a week later your little tweetmeme button painfully sits at the grand total of 1. Thanks Mum! Your blog is like ghost town and the few visitors you’re getting are probably being scared away by the lack of ‘social proof’.

Last year after dedicating every spare moment into squeezing in just about every course I could on Social Media Marketing, there was still something critical missing…. If you listened really closely, you could just about hear the tumbleweeds rolling down my blog. Not good!

ENTER: Social Media Tribes & Blogging Alliance To The Rescue!

Ok so at the end of last year, I hooked up with 5 Ghost Busters (aka Social Media leaders), who banished those tumbleweeds, scared off the ghosts and replaced them with a raving bunch of cheerleaders.

Having your own Social Media Tribe is like a mini mastermind group of like minded people who all syndicate each others content. So instead of promoting your own stuff (which you want to keep to a minimum anyway), your Tribe does all the syndicating!

Here is how it works…

First you want to find 4 or 5 other people who are at a similar stage to you in implementing Social Media.

You then set up a ‘Tribe Power Hour’ on skype once a week.

From there, you go through all of each others social networking profiles and start a frenzy of activity. You add comments to their latest blog posts, share them on Facebook, Retweet them, rate videos on Youtube and tag each other having loads of fun. I can tell you from experience that when a bunch of people are out there stirring up fun, people come from everywhere wanting to join in :)

So once you’ve teamed up with a mini mastermind group who each have a few thousand followers on Twitter and a few hundred friends/fans on Facebook, your content is suddenly being sent out to tens of thousands of people. Did I mention this is all in the space of an hour? Now that’s leverage! Guess what happens after this? EVERYTHING suddenly comes alive and your traffic goes through the roof! It’s like the Law of Reciprocity on steroids!

Of course you still need to be producing content and actively engaging in conversation but no matter what industry you’re in, this is a hugely powerful strategy.

I only learned about the concept 8 weeks ago when I partnered up with 5 guys who had created (in my mind) the ‘perfect’ Social Media Tribe. Why perfect? Because each one of them had a specialized area of knowledge on different aspects of the Social Networking sites. There were some cutting edge strategies and funky plugins that I never even knew existed that really took things to the next level.

More about some of these ‘stand out from the crowd’ strategies in my next post.

How about you, do you have a Tribe of cheerleaders on the Social sites yet? Have you thought about using a content syndication ‘power hour’ for maximum leverage?

If you have any questions or stories to share, I’d love to hear from you.

Michaelé