If you have an internet business, or some form of online home business which doesn’t currently support a blog then you are losing a lot of ground to your competitors and quietly signing the death warrant of your online money making ventures.
Blogging Is The Future Of Online Activity
Actually to be honest blogging isn’t the future of online activity Blogging Is The Now of Online Activity and has been for some time. Everything and everybody is leaning towards web 2.0 based sites such as blogs and when I mean everyone and everybody I’m talking about the people who count and search engines. That’s right search engines…remember those pesky not-so-trivial online dictators that we just can’t seem to do without but fervently wish we could?
SURE…a lot of savvy internet marketers are harping on how the golden era of the search engine has been one-upped by social media sites and is for all intent and purposes over; truth be told that’s a pile of steaming hogwash. Why? Well let’s look at some figures…you can’t go wrong with figures and stats; just as long as they are right I guess:
Search Stats End of 2007
* Google: 63.98% (The bigboy has muscled up)
* Yahoo: 22.87% (Retained the same balanced diet)
* MSN: 7.98% (Looks like Microsoft’s search is on a slimfast diet)
* Ask.com: 3.49% (The toddler of the pack…must be doing good because it won a PC World Nomination for 25 Most Innovative Products of The Year)
Fine And Dandy But What Has Mainstream Search Got To Do With Web 2.0?
Hmmm,wasn’t the whole point of social media websites and the explosion of new refined niche-category search engines supposed to circumvent bigboy online mainstream search? After all Google is no longer the darling of the people it once was and doesn’t seem to abide by its “Do No Evil” motto anymore. Be that as it may Google ain’t going anywhere anytime soon no matter how loud disillusioned acolytes may chant. Google is making sure of that by strengthening its grip on search and its influence in the social media theater…that’s why it bought Youtube for $1.65 billion dollars despite having its own Google Video platform which however, in comparison, performed dismally.
What was the real driving force behind the Google buy up of Youtube? How about the fact that Youtube has over 100 million videos viewed a day and well over 72 million unique visitors each and every month!
But this is happenstance digression, time to get back to the point!
Mainstream Search Engine Web Traffic vs. Social Media Traffic
If you think of mainstream search as enormous relatively unrefined web traffic and that of social media websites as more niche-oriented or refined web traffic you wouldn’t be far wrong. But that is not the complete story because conversely search-engine based web traffic is more valuable to you as an internet marketer or if you have an online home business. Catch is, it ain’t easy to get to the top of the search engines where it really matters! Luckily this is where social media sites and web 2.0 truly shine.
It is a lot easier to get a good flow of web traffic from web 2.0 and social media sites than it is from the search engines, most especially if your website/blog is spankin’ brand new! However getting internet traffic from social media sites also requires a level of input from you (Yup! What one-time big-hair advocate and internationally recognized hairstylist Vidal Sassoon quipped stands ever strong today as the day he uttered it: “The Only Place Where Success Comes Before Work Is In The Dictionary”).
Social Media And Web 2.0 Is All About Community
Much as we like to think of ourselves as unique creatures and largely independent-minded the truth is we humans are little more than herd animals. We tend to appreciate and hangout with like-minded individuals, people who mirror our thoughts and ideas. In other words people gravitate towards people who share the same interests. True there is some time-whipped saying which states that opposites attract but that’s best left to the field of love not the frenzied amphitheater of social media.
Social Medialites are all about the community and friends!
If you wish to capitalize and make any headway using social media sites you need to become part of the community; a task that involves active participation and not merely flagrant self-promotion! Blatant self-promotion without community service is the quickest and most assured way to get banned from a social media site (oh did I mention that most social media sites loathe internet marketers with a venom that Cleopatra’s Asp would’ve envied, though there are a few good ones solely devoted to internet marketing and online business).
Participation in this context means:
* voting for posts
* reading posts (and not just wanton voting)
* making comments
* joining and inviting friends to lists
* writing your own posts
If you’re new to this whole social media thing a good point to begin is read the TOS (Terms Of Service and conduct of behavior) then start making friends by voting for articles or posts you actually like (leaving a comment tends to warm even the coldest of hearts…assuming the comment is positive; social media afficionados tend to favor positive affirmation, much like what goes on in the real world) which will in turn make it easier to get votes for your own posts. The whole point of votes is that that the more of them you have the greater the exposure of your post which translates into more web traffic.
Mainstream Search And Social Media Sites Feed Off One Another
Undoubtedly building up a quantifiable list of friends and fellow voters can take time but when all is said and done that time spent on amassing friends is time well spent indeed! A well-written, intriguing, controversy-juiced post (otherwise commonly known as a linkbait piece) could send anywhere from 1000s to 100,000s of visitors to your site in next to no time.
Web traffic to your blog or website translates into greater love from the search engines which means better positioning in the SERPs (search engine index pages). The bottom line is your social media and web 2.0 efforts will draw web traffic far quicker to your fledgling website than the bigboy search engines, plus that web traffic will push your website further up the search engines.
A good linkbait post helps your seo efforts not only through the links garnered from your amazing penmanship (post) but also for the fact that the search engines these days ascribe greater rank and influence to such links that are heavily and often trafficked! Many heavy-weight links of yesterday that largely exist today as shadowy relics of their former selves (one-time high PR links that now boast little to no movement across their borders) are being consistently and all too frequently downgraded with each passing Google update.
If Content Is Still King; Fresh Content Is His Queen
No denying it, original content is still, as ever, the engine that powers the internet as well as being the enviable darlingest of darlings of the search engines. And you don’t have to be a genius here to figure out that in this respect static sites just cannot compete with mobile platforms such as blogs. King Content’s queen (HRH Fresh Content) is the driving force behind your site being crawled by the search engine bots on a regular basis. With a blog any new content automatically gets inserted on the homepage and pings (notifies) the search engines almost instantaneously. This means even a short post is going to bring the search engines sniffing to your site within hours (sometimes minutes) like a panting beast hot with lust. Just try and get that response with a static website even with a totally original, lengthy article in play!
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Ba Kiwanuka is the webmaster of http://www.internetbusinessmart.com
One Comment
Great article, could not agree more!