Twitter

1. Find seven things worth retweeting in your general feed and share.
2. Reply to at least five things with full responses (not just “thanks”).
3. Point out a few people that you admire. It shows your mindset, too.
4. Follow back at least 10 folks. (I use an automated tool, but this is a personal preference. If you want such, I use SocialToo.)
5. 10 minutes of just polite two-way chit chat goes far.

Facebook

6. Check in on birthdays on the home page. (Want a secret? Send the birthday wish via Twitter or email. Feels even more deliberate.)
7. Respond to any comments on your wall.
8. Post a status message daily, something engaging or interesting.
9. Comment on at least seven people’s status messages or updates.
10. Share at least 3 interesting updates that you find.
11. If you belong to groups or fan pages, leave a new comment or two.

LinkedIn

11. Accept any invitations that make sense for you to accept.
12. Enter any recent business cards to invite them to LinkedIn (if you’re growing your network).
13. Drop into Q&A and see if you can volunteer 2-3 answers.
14. Provide 1 recommendation every few days for people you can honestly and fully recommend.
15. Add any relevant slide decks to the Slideshare app there, or books to the Amazon bookshelf.

Blogs

16. Visit your blog’s comments section and comment back on at least 5 replies.
17. If you have a few extra minutes, click through to the blogs of the commenters, and read a post or two and comment back.
18. While on those sites, use a tool like StumbleUpon and promote their good work.
19. Write the occasional post promoting the good work of a blog in your community.

It’s Not Easy

Maintaining your online presence takes time. If you look at all I’ve listed above, that’s easily more than an hour of work. But it depends what the value of that presence is to you, if you’re doing this as an individual, or to your organization, if you’re doing this on behalf of a brand or product.

We’ve traded dollars for time, in lots of these equations, as we see the return on our advertising spend diminish. It’s your choice whether you want to maintain an active online presence, or if you want to get away with a bit less.

What do you think?

It’s interesting what you chose. I don’t agree with some of them, but when I read the titles, I know what was going on at the time, and I can see how things went the way they did. By the way, what’s your favorite post to link? Turns out, mostly numbered list posts. Like this one.

So here they are, My 50 Most Linked To Posts:

1. When Google Owns You
2. 50 Ideas on Using Twitter for Business
3. 20 Free eBooks About Social Media
4. 50 Ways to Take Your Blog to the Next Level
5. Free eBook on Personal Branding
6. 50 Ways Marketers Can use Social Media to Improve Their Marketing
7. 100 Personal Branding Tactics Using Social Media
8. 50 Steps to Establishing a Consistent Social Media Practice
9. 50 Online Applications and Sites to Consider
10. Twelve Ways to Sell Social Media to Your Boss
11. A Sample Blogging Workflow
12. Etiquette in the Age of Social Media
13. Best Social Media Advice From This Site
14. 50 Blog Topics Marketers Could Write For Their Companies
15. My Best Advice About Blogging
16. Nine Ways to Promote Your Blog Posts
17. How to Do More With Less Time
18. On Managing A Community
19. Write Your LinkedIn Profile for Your Future
20. Is Your Community For Sale?
21. Five Tools I Use for Listening
22. Ten Secrets to Better Blogging
23. Essential Skills of a Community Manager
24. What Social Media Does Best
25. My Best Advice About Social Media
26. My Best Advice About Personal Branding
27. How to Use Friendfeed as a Collaborative Business Tool
28. Starting a Social Media Strategy
29. What are Some Social Media Marketing Best Practices
30. Develop a Strong Personal Brand Online Part 1
31. How to Create Business From a Blog
32. Cuil Misses Me
33. Social Media Starter Moves for Freelancers
34. Thinking About Trust Agents
35. How I Tamed My Inbox
36. You Can Do Your Job Without Twitter
37. Make Your Blog Design Work For You
38. How Content Marketing Will Shake the Tree
39. Advertising and Trust
40. What I Want a Social Media Expert to Know
41. Workflow- Social Media for Marketers
42. How to Listen for Opportunities on Twitter
43. Thinking About the Negatives
44. Threading Some Trends Together
45. Google Gets Back to Nick (related to this).

46. Social Media Does Not Replace Marketing Strategy
47. Cherp is a Twitter-Flavored Agency (why?)
48. Share Share Share Share Share
49. The Vital Importance of Your Network
50. Is Your Blog For Rent?

I’m not sure I agree that these are my best, but they’re what people linked to for whatever reason. Maybe this is useful to folks who are new to the blog? Let me know.

And thanks for your attention.

Photo credit David

It’s important to think about where you want information to live, and how you want it to impact the world. For everything you toss into a stream rolls past, and if I’m not at the stream when you throw your leaf onto the waters, I’ll miss the leaf entirely, or perhaps catch only the ripples.

I love the picture in this post by Guy Kawasaki. If I share it with Twitter, you might see it. If I blog it, you can come back to it. If I tweet a link to my blog post, I’ve just introduced a stopping point to my stream.

Now, Shift the Analogy

What if your blog itself is comprised of streams and stopping points? Are you introducing data into your stream (the posts) that needs to actually reside at a stopping point (the pages)? Have you made it easy for your blog to help you do business?

To Do Next

Design the flow of information in all of the systems you use. Think about temporary and permanent connections. Think about loosely-joined groups, and about how information spreads.

The stream is a great place to refresh, to see life, and to feel vibrant energy flow past. It is a powerful giver of life. But remember: life often happens out of view of the stream.

Thoughts?

Photo credit tanakwho

Nine Ways to Promote Your Blog Posts

1. Bookmark your best posts on Delicious. Once it’s in there, there’s a chance someone might happen upon it.
2. Stumble your best posts on StumbleUpon. Some folks disagree with stumbling your own work. The way I feel okay with it is that I stumble approximately 9 other people’s great blog posts to every one of my own.
3. Post an intriguing title and link to the post in LinkedIn’s status message.
4. If your post is about a specific industry or relates to other great blogs, find a recent blog post that has related information. (Now, this is different than what you MIGHT normally do, so pay attention). In the URL part of the sign-up form, put the link to your post, not your blog in general. In the comment body, don’t talk about your amazing post. Just offer genuine commentary on the post you read, and share your thoughts and ideas. Repeat: don’t mention the post. (If your comment is great and worthy, people will click through and check it out.)
5. Share your post on Facebook. I really like BlogCast, which used to be FlogBlog. It’s got a nice interface.
6. Share your post in FriendFeed automatically, and let the amazing community there decide if it’s interesting.
7. Try Zemanta. Zemanta is a blogging tool that either adds on to your browser (Firefox only, I think), or comes now as a WordPress plugin. It allows you to find related stories and post them at the bottom of a post. When you’re part of the Zemanta community, I believe your stories also go into their list of potentially related stories. I’ve seen traffic coming in from Zemanta-recommended links.
8. Don’t forget Twitter. I find lots of my traffic comes from Twitter, especially because I don’t ever just post a link. I ask questions, inspire comments, etc.
9. Write blog posts that others will find useful. I know it’s not a technology answer, but it’s the truth. If your posts aren’t that useful to other people, they won’t be popular. People won’t care. If you’re re-blogging news that several other larger sites have covered, who cares? If you’re telling us about your day at college, who cares (unless you’re a great writer)? Make it really good, useful stuff, and we’ll come along for the ride.

**Update: Here’s what people on Twitter said you should do:

Perhaps you have some other ways to promote? Do you have any recommendations? Do you have disagreement with the ways I shared above? Let’s talk about it.

Photo credit, KungPaoCajun

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How to Create Business from a Blog

First, let’s agree that there are many ways to create business from a blog. I’ll cover a handful to start. You’re very welcome to share more advice and ideas in the comments section.

Straightforward Sales

Blogs are a wonderful piece of software to use as a home base for several kinds of website projects. For example, I believe Chris Pearson used a Wordpress blog to build his DIYThemes.com site. There, he’s selling a beautiful theme called Thesis for $87. That’s one way to create business from a blog: a simple sales platform.

Affiliate Marketing

Another way is through Affiliate Marketing. For example, go back and hover your mouse over the URL for the two links to Chris’s latest project. You should see this: http://diythemes.com?a_aid=t4ag3 . That part after the ? is an affiliate code. Some sites don’t really divulge that they’re doing affiliate marketing. Others make disclosure very vital. Now that you know to look for it, you might look at other blogs you read and see when they’re slipping you an affiliate tag here and there.

Want to learn more about Affiliate Marketing? I’ve been reading Revenews, and I also plan to attend (and speak at) the upcoming Affiliate Summit event in Boston in August 2008. One reason why I plan to attend is to understand this space more, because I’m still not 100% sure how I feel about the variations on the theme. Affiliate marketing is a multi-billion dollar industry, so there’s something there to consider.

Lead Generation

Blogs are a great way to establish thought leadership, and further, to encourage lead generation. For instance, a lot of what I do by writing this blog is share with the world at large what I know about social media and how it might apply to your business. My primary goal is to give you as much information as I can possibly share, so that you can likely run off and solve most things on your own.

My secondary goal is to encourage you to contact me, should you have business needs. I work with CrossTech Partners to help me fulfill larger projects (such as building Market Relationship Management platforms and the like). This blog often starts conversations with people who need next-step help. And that’s great. It’s another value, and another way to create business from a blog.

A great person who gives in abundance with her blog is Liz Strauss. She derives some amount of leads from her thoughtful and meaningful efforts, too.

Content Marketing

He could tell you this every day, but Brian Clark has been praising the value of content marketing since 2006. This is basically how the Financial Aid Podcast brought millions in revenue to Christopher S. Penn’s Student Loan Network. There’s nothing shady about it. Chris creates great podcasts and blog posts and uses the trust earned through information sharing and helping others as one way to drive sales of his primary product: student loans. He’s the only student loan guy I know who gets profiled by BusinessWeek, The Wall Street Journal, and all kinds of other press.

See also Gary Vaynerchuk, the only wine seller I know who has a Hollywood agent. He’s that cool.

Content marketing is essentially doing great things with content but with a goal that this work leads back to a sale on top of being useful and interesting. To me, this is where it’s at right now. If I were looking to build even more business, and I might just do so, I’d blend content marketing with a mix of my own products, and perhaps some well-chosen affiliate opportunities, and start from there.

By the way, content marketing has the added benefit of helping you with organic search engine optimization, meaning it helps people searching for things find it easier.

Other Opportunities

There are lots of other ways to make money from a blog. I’m definitely not qualified to talk about search marketing, for instance, but this article by Paul J. Bruemmer looks like a useful starting point. There are also projects like Ted Murphy’s Izea, which covers pay-per-post and Social Spark. I’m not versed enough to talk about any of these, but maybe Ted will stop by and talk about his, or you can swing by the IZEA blog.

The web is an interesting place to make money these days, and there are many ways to take a swing at it. Be open about what you’re doing. Be helpful. Offer value. And maybe something will come of it for you.

**Update: I’m not sure how I forgot Darren’s and Chris’s book – ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income . (And yes, that’s an affiliate link). ;)

Your Ideas

If you have some other great ideas for creating business from a blog, let’s talk about them in the comments. Some will be promoted to the main post via updates, so please fill out your URL when you comment, so I can give you credit if I use it in the post.

What do you think?

The Social Media 100 is a project by Chris Brogan dedicated to writing 100 useful blog posts in a row about the tools, techniques, and strategies behind using social media for your business, your organization, or your own personal interests. Swing by [chrisbrogan.com] for more posts in the series, and if you have topic ideas, feel free to share them, as this is a group project, and your opinion matters.

Get the entire series by subscribing to this blog, and subscribe to my free newsletter here.
Photo credit, Rochelle, et al

Twingly could be considered a remix of Technorati, back to what Technorati did well years ago. They have some neat features, like this widget that shows the recent blogs linking to your post. (And for the record, I like Twingly and what they’ve done.)

Further, they are building a search-meets-reputation kind of data set, very similar to what is in place at Technorati.

So, it works, is a refresh, but harkens back to what Technorati has done a different way.

I say, buy it, absorb it, sort things out, and then build us even more tools we can use. What’s necessary? Personal reputation data, attention data, affinity metadata (if you like this site, you’ll love that site), and more.

Could Technorati do that without buying Twingly? Sure. I think they could. But wouldn’t the infusion of fresh blood make for a potential better swing at the prize?

What do you think on this one?

I use Skitch to do screenshots. It’s cool.

Put your search box WAY up high on your page, above the fold, if at all possible. It matters.

Some of you might be practicing this stuff already, but maybe there are one or two tips that will be useful.

I wrote this up originally for my new friend, Nina Simonds from Spices of Life, a video show my friend, Steve Garfield helps produce. We were talking about ways to further develop community and build audience.

What else? How are you building community around YOUR blog?

But what’s missing are filters. Twitter has no filtering mechanism, nor even a “bubble up the good stuff” mechanism. Google Reader lets friends share what they think are good blog posts, but obviously this works out that what YOU think is a good post and what I think is a good post might not always match up. There needs to be another layer of filtering such that I can choose to read your promoted posts, but I should then get the opportunity to bubble my best (and by “best,” I mean most closely informationally aligned) sharing sources to the top of the heap.

It’s all still too linear. Too boolean.

Who’s making the right kinds of filters to promote the best stuff? Who’s helping us suppress the drivel?

How would YOU like to see filters work?

Our “out with the old, in with the new” spirit motivated a decision to fold the home page Recent Site Activity module (formerly located in the right-hand column) into the brand-new What’s New site area. While the What’s New dashboard provides approximately 1,726 times the awesome, many among the Wetpaint faithful liked the “at a glance” nature of the Recent Site Activity module.

What did they do about it? They responded, of course, and gave their customers what they wanted. So, in their blog, they performed both a customer service act (responding to their user base) and product development (adjusting feature sets to match user expectations). Pretty slick, eh?

Full story is here.

And I bet YOU have examples of this all over the place, don’t you? Feel free to share.