You may have heard about the Social Media Release and are wondering whether you should be using that instead of a traditional press release?

No, you shouldn’t replace your press release with a Social Media Release; you should be doing BOTH!

First, some background on what a Social Media Release is.

It takes the essence of an old-fashioned press release (providing and distributing information about your company to garner publicity) and reorganizes it in a way that makes it compatible with Social Media.

Essentially, it takes a plain-text press release and turns it into a blog post, with all of the capabilities that a bog has, including the ability to comment, and aggregate inbound links.

The Social Media Release (or SMR) was developed by Todd Defren at Shift Commuications in 2006. A template of the SMR can be found at http://www.pr-squared.com/.  Todd gives lots of great tips on how to use it and lets you use it free of cost.

More advice that he give is to not use the SMR when you submit the release to the news wire services.  Instead, put together a traditional press release and add a link to the corresponding SMR in it.  This way, you get all the benefits of the SMR without having to pay the fees to the wire services for using one while still getting all the benefits of their wide distribution.

So what can the SMR do that a traditional press release can’t?

Well, when posted to a social media newsroom (check out Todd’s link above for more information about that) a SMR can allow you to use all sorts of multimedia options, like video, audio, and graphics.

So why should you bother to do both?

Well, we all know that press releases are great for improving SEO and your Google ranking (beyond the obvious benefit of getting your message out there, of course); a SMR is like a press release on crack.

With a traditional press release, you are submitting to the news wire services in the format that they are used to, and not paying any hefty fees, but with a SMR, you have interactive capabilities up the wazoo that will drive the SEO benefits through the roof.

Now, in order to maximize the SEO benefit that you get, you need to make sure that you’re writing with your site’s SEO considerations and keywords in mind.  But make sure that you’re not trying to stuff in keywords that aren’t organic to the release – it will sound fake and undermine the publicity efforts of the release.  You can also include rich media content (like images or videos or podcasts) that will raise the pick up for Google Images and Google video; again, just make sure everything is tagged with the right keywords.

Here are a couple great additional resources for learning more about Social Media Releases…

• http://blog.pitchengine.com/
• http://www.socialmediarelease.org/

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As we hope we have been able to get across, one of the greatest things about using different “Web 2.0″ sites is the ability to own more then one result in the top 10 of Google with your content.

The problem is with Google’s “duplicate content filters” and if you are using only one variation of the content that you submit to the different sites you are pretty limited on how effective you can be. Of course you are already aware of this but it is just so much damn work… you create a great piece of content and then having to rewrite it over and over again… it is sooooo painful.

Here are two very simple “FREE” tricks that may.. and we stress “may” help you rewrite your content in a fraction of the time. These do not work in all situations and are not good for everyone but some of you will love them. With both of these methods, sometimes the resulting content can be very confusing and is almost easier just to rewrite the content from scratch but do test these out for yourself and see what you think.

Tip #1 Auto Summarize

With some of the sites you submit to you do not have to add the entire article, you can instead submit a 200 word summary of the content. We use this on sites like clipmarks.com and tumblr.com

To create a summary, simply use the Microsoft Word “Auto Summarize” feature. To use this feature click on the “Tools” menu inside MS Word and then click “AutoSummarize. . .”, then select the “Create a new document and put it there” and select 50% in the drop down menu (or less if you want).

Here is a helpful link to info about how to find and use it within MS Word. . .

http://www.microsoft.com/education/autosummarize.mspx

IMPORTANT –> Make sure to copy, paste and save the final document into a NotePad document (.txt) with the reason for this being MS Word will add extra hidden formatting characters that get copied into your posts and become formatting nightmares. By saving the document as a notepad .txt you remove all those extra characters. We wish MS Word would come out with the ability to copy clean text with no formatting… but no such luck yet.

If you do not own MS Word then there are some online tools for this and one of them is located at. . .

http://www.pertinence.net/ps/main.jsp?ui.lang=en

Tip #2 Google Translate

Step 1: Go to http://translate.google.com/ and enter your original content in the text box.

Step 2: Select to translate from “English” to “Spanish” and then click “Translate”

Step 3: On the right hand side of the screen, highlight and copy the spanish version and now paste it back into the text box.

Step 4: Select to translate from “Spanish” to “English” and click translate and voila you have a rewritten article. You will of course need to edit it so it reads well

If you need more then one variation, repeat this with the different languages.

Just a couple little tips on a summer weekend that we hope you find useful. If you have any tips you want to add, leave a comment below and I will add them to this post with a link to your site.

Click Here Now to Download “How to Build a Business Not Just a Blog” for FREE and Learn the Right Way to Make Money Online! – Copyright JohnCow.com – All Rights Reserved

A couple days ago we talked about how to structure your content for different web 2.0 sites and today we are going to talk a little about optimizing the content for better results.

Our number one rule for content is always to put the human reader first. Content that is first created for pleasing the search engines is content that is not focused on providing value and is usually very shallow and short lived.

Once you have finished created your content for the reader it is easy to go back in and optimize it for the search engines (to help boost its rankings) and it is very easy to do.

Here are the basics that we try to cover within our content before we submit to sites squidoo, gather, hubpages and ezinearticles.

1. Always have the keyword in the title and if possible make sure it is in the first half of the title.

2. Do not have a keyword density of more then 6% max. That means that in a 500 word article, if your keyword phrase is made of three words (Product Name Review), then you would not repeat it more then 10 times within the article. This however is the absolute max and is usually too many times in our opinion. We recommend that you focus on making sure the content reads well above everything else and then if possible try to mention the keyword…

• Once in the opening sentence of the opening paragraph
• Once in the last sentence of the opening paragraph
• Once or twice in the middle paragraphs
• Once in the last paragraph

Whenever we have the keyword more then that, we will use an alternative phrase in place of it. So for example if the keyword we are using is “Johncow eBook Review”, if we mentioned this phrase more then the above listed amount of times we would use a variation such as “Opinion of the eBook by Johncow”.

3. What about adding bold <b> and italicized <i> to the content? The issue is this is not content on your blog, this is for content on web 2.0 sites that can get a little picky about content that looks like it is overoptimized and spammy. This is just our personal opinion but content that we have submitted that we over optimized seems to get flagged and / or voted down, way more then content that we just do a little optimization with. If you use the bold or italicized, make sure that you do it in a way that is logical to the reader and highlights a point that you are trying to stress… do NOT just bold and highlight the keyword.

4. One last thing, always try to make sure no paragraph is more then 3 sentences in length. This is a psychological thing with readers and smaller paragraphs have proven to work better at keeping the reader interested in your content then long paragraphs.

Update–> this was mentioned in the comment below from and was a good point that we wanted to add for this, so thanks Steve (CraftsBlog.co.uk) for mentioning it…

“Also from a structural point of view if you move on to a new point always start a new paragraph. This allows the jist of the article to be understood by skim readers who just look at the start of each paragraph.”

That’s it… there is really nothing more then that

Hope at least one of you got something form this… if so let us know

Click Here Now to Download “How to Build a Business Not Just a Blog” for FREE and Learn the Right Way to Make Money Online! – Copyright JohnCow.com – All Rights Reserved

We firmly believe that the absolute most important part of using social media (Web 2) sites is the content you submit. Without good content you will not get your articles ranking in the search engines and even if you do get the rankings you will not get any conversions.

There are different types of online social marketing sites available to use. There are some that allow you to bookmark, some leave little comments or posts and others that allow you to create your own little page such as Squidoo.com, Hubpages.com, Ning.com, Google Notebook & Ezinearticles.com. It is these sites that the content we talk about in this post is focused on being used on.

The majority of people out there trying to earn money with these types of sites are often too focused on quantity rather then quality. They will outsource the content or spin it without taking the time to ensure it reads well and is informative. Your first priority needs to be focusing on the human visitor. You can then go back and tweak the content slightly to better optimize it for the search engines, which we will
explain more about later on.

The simplest and most effective method that we use for creating good “human focused” content is to follow the simple formula A.I.D.A. which stands for…

A – Attention: Get the persons attention right away. This is where your title (headline) comes into play. You will want to right away grab the attention of the reader and for an example, say we were promoting a page on our site that was a weight loss pre sales affiliate page for “Supplement X” and our keyword was “supplement x reviews”; our headline (content title) might be…

“Most Supplement X Reviews Are Full Of Crap, I Stopped Using It and I Will Tell You Why!”

Now, this might seem aggressive to some, but if you were looking for a supplement x review, would this not get your attention?

I – Interest: Now that you got their attention it is time to get their interest in what you are talking about. Following the above example, if our main purpose is to promote this product, this is where we have to pull the reader in and get them interested in learning more.

We have taken the stance that we will be slamming the product but in reality we will not be, the title was just to get their attention. You may want to start by explaining why other reviews are so fake and how it is so hard to know what is real out there. Peak their interest in what you have to say so they keep reading. It is very important that you relate to them right away as well. Remember, this is just an example of a strategy to try… you can write this however you want.

D – Desire: You got their attention, peaked their interest in learning more and so now it is time to spark a desire. In this example we would now need to make sure to come clean and explain what was meant about quitting supplement x. Maybe take the stance that we quit early on because of forgetting to take the supplement and then a month later started up again and we soon realized that quitting was the worse mistake we made because the product worked.

Make sure to explain the benefits of the product and how it will help. Do not just say something like “lose weight” instead you will want to highlight exactly what the benefits of this feature is. So you might say something like…

“Helped me to fit into my size 32 pants from a size 38 in only 30 days”

A – Action: This is now were you tell them how they can quench that desire. This is also where many people fail because they make a weak call to action and just leave the reader hanging. It is so important that you tell the reader exactly what to do. Do not just put something like a keyword linked to your page or use “Click Here” because this does not tell the reader why they need to take that action. Instead tell them why to “Click Here”.

A couple examples may be…

“Click Here Now to Learn How Easy it is to Get Started”

“Get complete access to this incredible system by Clicking Here Now”

You will want to reemphasize the benefits and encourage the reader that this is one of the smartest things they will ever do.

IMPORTANT: You will want to ensure you have linked to your page with the keyword but we also recommend you use a call to action word such as “Click Here”, these get much better clickthroughs then just the keyword. You can add a nofollow to the click here link if you like

It is also important to understand that this type of content is not for every social site, these are meant more for the sites that allow you to create a page that you own. Some sites however frown upon this type of content and do not like call to actions in the content and get up tight if there are more then 2 links in the content. Do not be discouraged if your content gets taken down from some sites, learn and tweak and try again. Remember though, the whole purpose is to get the reader to take an action and visit your blog.. so use the content to convince them that they need to do that.

TIPS: Grab a notepad and a pencil and rough out the outline of the content. It is easier to start it out this way then on a computer. Also, create your headline first and then the article… this helps guide you as to what to write about.

Once you have your content ready, you are going to want to optimize the content (we will talk about this tomorrow) and we will also show you how to make a few variations of one article for a few different sites

So, did you get anything worthwhile from this post?

Click Here Now to Download “How to Build a Business Not Just a Blog” for FREE and Learn the Right Way to Make Money Online! – Copyright JohnCow.com – All Rights Reserved

Yesterday we posted about content with purpose and it brought up a question about “Duplicate Content” and we figured that we better address this before we get into talking about actually posting content on different social media sites. A word of warning however, the following is 100% our opinion only and is based on what we have seen from our result.

1. Duplicate Content is More then Just the Body of the Content

Duplicate content is not just focused on the content body itself but it can be due to other page factors such as the page title and meta description. Basically Google has a goal and that is to offer the best search results they possible can and to achieve that they want to ensure that the results are not simply multiple copies of the same content. This is especially important for on your own blog when you have two articles that are on the same topic but are completely different.

If you put the same title and or description on both pages there is a huge chance that Google will actually consider one a duplication of the other. They figure that if the two pages are talking about the same thing then why should they display both pages.

So the first thing is always ensure your blog has a unique title and description for every page.

2. Do Not Post Content on Another Site and Then Link to the Same Content on Your Site

This may sound obvious but we see it often and what happens is people will create an article, then submit it to an article directory or even another blog and then link to the exact same article on their own blog.

This is pretty much a waste of time since Google is going to only use one version of the content. Instead make sure to always modify your content as much as possible before you link it back to the original content. Remember, you want to own multiple spots in the top 10 for your keyword and by modifying the content you can do that.

3. Using a Snippet of the Content and Linking to the Source Content?

In yesterday’s post i mentioned having content with purpose and part of that was to…

• Give part of the answer but leave them wanting more
• Give them the exact steps to get the rest of the story

What we meant by this was not just giving them part of the article (such as the first paragraph) and then telling them to read the rest of the article by clicking here. Yes you can use this strategy but what we actually mean by this is that you give them some of the answers to their problem but do not give them everything.

You want them to feel like they got value and learned something but if you tell them everything then they have no need to visit your site. On the other hand if you only give them a tiny little taste (like the first paragraph) then you more then likely have not been able to tell them enough to get them interested.

Give them enough to show you know what you are talking about, that you can relate to their situation and that you can help them with their problem… then give them a link to follow.

OK, we know this is not exactly a duplicate content issue but we felt it was something to address none the less

4. Duplicate Content will NOT banish your site:

We blame Internet marketers for this rumor and the reason is they are putting the fear of God into people about duplicate content in order to sell what ever it is they have.

Duplicate content is not a great thing but it is not the evil enemy of Google either. You kind of got to use a little common sense here (yes we know it is not so common).

Think about news sites and popular blogs… they post other peoples content all the time and the reason is the content is worth while and something worth sharing. The issue is when 100% of your content is duplicate content and you are offering nothing new to your readers, then it can cause issues.

If you do post other peoples content on your blog then we recommend you make sure you have one unique post for every duplicate post. It is also wise to make sure your page title and description are different then what others have published.

Also, if you submit an article with an article distribution service, you are NOT in danger of punishing your site. What these services do is blast the same article out to 1000′s of article directories and the idea is to get loads of back links. The issue is this content is all duplicate content and Google pretty much has lost all respect for article directory links from 95% of the directories. Now that does not mean the links are worthless… but they just are not all that fantastic. Also since the content is duplicate, they will only show one or maybe two at the most of your articles in their results… which means very limited traffic.

What will not happen is Google will NOT punish your site or blog for this. If this was the case then all you would have to do is submit the same article to loads of sites and link to your competitors and you could eliminate them all.

5. How Unique Does the Content Need to Be?

This question always seems to come up and the simple answer is as much as possible. The bare minimum however, in our opinion, is to ensure that the title and description are 100% unique and then make sure the body of the content is at least 30% unique.

We have done tests and have seen that making the title and description unique has made the biggest impact. So if your really lazy then at least make your titles and descriptions unique.

Summary:

It basically comes down to the question of are you focused on just getting back links or are you focused on getting traffic!

When you are using article directories or social media sites like Squidoo and Hubpages, you want to ensure that all your submitted content ranks well in the search engines. By putting the same content on all the sites, sure you get back links but only one of the sites will appear in the rankings for that focused term. If you make sure there is unique content on each of those sites then you can potentially rank in the top 10 with each one!

So which one would you rather have… one search result and multiple back links or multiple search results and multiple rankings?

Any comments or questions?

Click Here Now to Download “How to Build a Business Not Just a Blog” for FREE and Learn the Right Way to Make Money Online! – Copyright JohnCow.com – All Rights Reserved

OK so we all know that Web 2.0 sites (online social networks) are a huge buzz worthy thing. Heck we even hear people talking Web 3.0 which personally we find a little premature and think it is people jumping on the “oh lets coin a new phrase” band wagon.

Anyhooo… yes the power of online social networks is HUGE but if you look around at how they are being used, it is pretty safe to say that 90% really have no clue what they are doing. We are not talking about people not knowing how to use the social networks from a technical standpoint (heck we still dont know how to use most of them, but the ones we do know, we use very well). What we are referring to is people not having a clue from a strategic standpoint.

What is YOUR Strategic Purpose for Using Online Social Networks?

We are sure there are most likely dozens of ideas that could be listed for “purposes” for using social sites but we are willing to bet that the purpose the majority of people focus on, even though they might say it is something else, is restricted to mainly link building, which is a good one but not the best one.

What we mean by that is if all you are focusing on is using these site to get a link back to your site then you are missing about 90% of the power that these social networks offer.

For us there are essentailly four component we look at and try to keep front and center in our minds when using online social networks. These four components are:

1. Multiple Search Engine Listings: The majority of these sites offer publicly accessible pages that you can optimize for and the search engines love them. By doing this correct, you can not only dominate one top spot for a keyword in Google but you (and we do this often) can own the majority (if not all) of the top 10 spots for that one term. Of course you repeat this over and over to own multiple terms.

2. Repeat Traffic: We all know that RSS Subscribers and Mailing Lists are good for being able to stay in touch with your audience which allows you to also market to them. Social Network sites are built with this very thing in mind, well maybe not always the selling part. These sites allow you to get subscribers, followers, fans, communities and more, which means more repeat traffic from people who know you and are interested in what you have to say.

3. Viral Traffic: Have you ever browsed around profiles of people you follow within differnt online social networks? Chances are you have and you have probably requested friends or followed people you found while doing that. This is an extremely powerful part of using these sites and happens more often then people realize.

4. Worthwhile Backlinks: Getting links from popular sites is good but it is also important to get links from different IPs and these social networks are both respected by Google but also provide variety into your backlinks which help boast your sites rankings in the search engines

Together these 4 components focus in on the “purpose” of increasing traffic to our site. By breaking it down we are able to focus on taking advantage of all the features and benefits these sites offer and do not pigeon hole ourselves into just one, such as linkbuilding.

Tomorrow we are going to talk about the “Social Network Mini Net”, which uses these 4 compenents and allows us to dominate the search engines

Questions:

• Do you use online social networks?
• If not, why not?
• What has been your main purpose in using them?
• What are your favorites to use?

Click Here Now to Download “How to Build a Business Not Just a Blog” for FREE and Learn the Right Way to Make Money Online! – Copyright JohnCow.com – All Rights Reserved

This really does amaze us and we hear so many people say how Twitter is the stupidest thing they ever have heard of… yet we keep hearing so many cool stories about it. You may remember a post we did about James Karl Buck who was arrested in Egypt and used his Twitter account to help get him out, but is still in the process of trying to locate his translator to help get him out of prison?

That was an amazing story.

There was also a man named Ryan Kuder who was going to be fired from Yahoo. What he did the day he went in and knew he was being fired was he used his twitter page to keep all of his faithful readers up to date with EVERYTHING that he was doing. He posted a lot of different things during his last time in the office and it appeared to work out well for him.

We don’t think people truly understand the huge impact that Twitter has, or social media in general. Just because something might seem stupid at first, do not discount it… look, test and try.

The latest story that caught our eye is The Obama/Clinton race and how Twitter may have played a part Obama’s victory over Clinton. There’s a website out there called www.twitterholic.com and what this website does is it tracks Twitter useage. As of June 17^th 2008, Obama had 39,000 followers and Clinton’s campaign had only 4,100 followers.

Here’s some more for ya… Want to know how many Oboma was following? Over 41,000.. and the number for Clinton? a BIG FAT 0.

Now we do not know the whole story behind this but from looking at it there appears to be a solid relationship between Oboma becoming a follower to those following him and this appeared to have paid dividends for results. Clinton on the other hand had 0… i guess they did not think there was anyone out their worthwhile to follow.

Makes us wonder how much of a direct correlation of these two things there was?

If this interests you then you will want to read more about this at…

http://crm2.typepad.com/brents_blog/2008/06/the-revolution.html

As we said a couple days ago… TEST!

We are going to try it out… so if you are not following us, do it now and we will follow back

http://www.twitter.com/johncow

So what is your opinion on this.. do you think the two things are related (following your followers on Twitter)?

Click Here Now to Download “How to Build a Business Not Just a Blog” for FREE and Learn the Right Way to Make Money Online! – Copyright JohnCow.com – All Rights Reserved