Advertising is expensive and it does a poor job of helping you develop a relationship with your market. If you advertise on Treehugger.com, even if you get a client or two, their primary relationship and bandwidth of loyalty still remains with Treehugger.com

Much like restaurant owners buying the land their eatery is sitting on, you’ll greatly reduce you advertising spending and greatly increase the rapport you have with your market base if you simply own the blog that you advertise on.

So, now that you’ve decided to reroute your ad dollars into creating your own blog, which is best?

Well, there are several strong viral blog networks to consider:

1. Blogger

2. WordPress

3. Tumblr

4. Posterous

5. More…

But let’s address these in a the next blog post. There’s a bigger picture to address first. Do you even want to pay bloggers or spend your own time generating blog post content to fill your blog? If no, you have a choice. All of the above requires that you pay writers or you have to write articles for yourself. Your alternative is to host a site where your users can submit their own mini posts.

Only a few organizations have chosen to adopt the User-Generated-Content model. But some of those who have are wildly successful. Take a look at multimillion dollar site http://digg.com and http://foodspotting.com/

The extra bonuses of hosting a user-generated-content site is that you are not responsible for any of the copyright infringement issues. Youtube just won that battle against Viacomm. Now the Digital Millennium Copyright Act says that your users cannot get you into a lawsuit. But the best part is, they do all the hard work of creating content. So to start your viral marketing campaign, start within a base of preexisting networks then start your own. What you need is a sovereign island and an embassy on the mainland.

Here’s a feature by feature comparison of CMS software for your island:

CMS/Features	PLIGG (Digg Style CMS)	WordPress
WYSIWYG Editor	No	Yes
Requirement for Design Modification	HTML; PHP	HTML; PHP
Legal Copyright Liability	No	Yes
Admin Level Simple Widget Modification	Yes	Yes
Allows User Generated Content	Yes	No
Allows Users Moderator Privileges	Yes	Yes
Allows Public Voting Up Popular Topics	Yes	No
Allows Public to Choose Home Page Featured Posts	Yes	No
Allows Multi Paragraph Long Form Blog Posting	No	Yes
Guests to Post Automatically	Yes	No
Allows Other Guests to Flag and Hide Other Guest Posts	Yes	No
Allows Public Comments	Yes	Yes
Google Friendly	Yes	Depends of Theme Used

So that was the good news. The bad news still applies for both. Even if you build it, they will not come. It’s much easier to build readership traffic by assuming all the blogging production and copyright liability than by asking people to submit their stories to a site that has no traffic.

But there are ways to grow both — rapidly. Contact me for help building your web branding and capturing your target market online. Say hello at 310 598 1606 and http://twitter.com/journik – Bob Wan Qi Kim

Posted via email from Social Media Marketing Strategies for the Closet Revolutionary

This took a bit of time to figure out. Once you know how, it’s super easy. Since all the pages in ELGG / PLIGG or any CMS are dynamically generated in PHP, all you have to do is add php code that triggers the physical url into the facebook pluggin. So instead of entering http://DisastEarth.com in the URL field at http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like … you’d enter {$story_url}

BUT DON’T.

Although PLIGG uses {$story_url} to reference urls, ELGG, and other CMSs may not. So… to find out what php code your CMS like WordPress or Drupal uses, just open up one of your site template pages and look for <a href=”THISisTHEphpCODEyouNEED”

You’re not done yet.

Do NOT put the THISisTHEphpCODEyouNEED or {$story_url} in the facebook plugins builder wizard. It’ll render these characters, “{$}” into their HTML code. You need these characters as-is – NOT converted to html code. So, just go into your html text editor and add {$story_url} or THISisTHEphpCODEyouNEED instead of the static url:

So, like.php?href=http%253A%252F%252Fdisastearth.com%252F

becomes like.php?href={$story_url} or like.php?href={THISisTHEphpCODEyouNEED

Here’s the last step. If your facebook like button still doesn’t work, the reason is simple. THISisTHEphpCODEyouNEED may just generate a partial url like http://story.php?title=a-bp-gulf-oil-spill-photo-i-will-never-forget-tedchris … it’s missing the domain name. So.. just add: http://disastearth.com/ right in front of THISisTHEphpCODEyouNEED. If you do it right, in PLIGG, it looks like this:

like.php?href=http%253A%252F%252Fdisastearth.com{$story_url}

Posted via web from I’m just amazed.

This one will be quick.

Nobody wants to talk to someone they don’t know. They’d be at a total disadvantage not knowing you or what you’d say in response. So the biggest bloggers and celebs never reply to strangers. Afterall, their rent is on the line.

So if you want bigshots like @garyvee @rrw @benparr @jason and @om to reply to you over Twitter – and maybe even give a valuable commercial shout out about your brand, get known.

1. Add value. Comment in THEIR blogs.

2. Get them to feel comfortable with you.

3. Take a leadership role and start a forum or ning about the celebrity and their sayings. Believe me. If you started a Deepak Chopra blog or forum, he will hear you.

BONUS: DO NOT DO THIS: http://twitter.com/HEY_TonyROBBINS/statuses/11277869709

If you want me to reply to you, do the same. Comment, let your personality warm on the big bloggers with big followings out there. I do. See? http://disqus.com/journik/

Posted via web from journik’s posterous – a grade A shouldery. (social media marketing wise)

No, I’m not saying “ME” as in, “I’m the savior.” I’m putting the word, “me” in the title because self centered people will google, “how to get bloggers in MY industry to blog about ME.”And they will find me (this particular “me” refers to this blog post). Then, once they read the above sentence accusing them of being self-centered, they will read no further; making this entire paragraph an exercise in futilidad (which is why I don’t care how “futility” is spelled – at all).

BUT, incase I’m wrong…

I don’t know about you, but I loved it when Oprah joined Twitter. All manner of 30-40 something moms jumped onboard and ReTweeted then Blogged just about everything that came their way. They blogged about strollers they had never heard of, baby food that could as well have had lead in it, even child rearing psychology that came from a bald dude with kids in juvie. It was either because they really liked the messages or because they couldn’t come up with anything at the moment and couldn’t stand the negative space.

In either case, as of today, several months later, all the moms have gone home. Actually, I guess nothing has changed since they were at home to begin with.

It’s extremely difficult to get RT’d nowadays.

But, if you DO get an RT leading to a blog post about you now, it’s like platinum. Think about it. Back when everyone was indescriminately RTing everybody else, an RT didn’t mean much. Now, if you get an RT, people actually pay attention. I’d go so far as to say that people read RTs more than direct follow tweets. And it’s that RT that increases your chances of being blogged about and all of said blog followers to be exposed to you.

It’s like your willingness to investigate further if some dude said, “Hi. I’m really good in bed,” vs. if his last girlfriend said, “Wow, I hate him but he’s really good in bed.”

So if a single RT is worth that much more, how much more must a dozen or two dozen be worth? Without boring you with math, suffice it to say that dozens of RTs are worth thousands of page views.

So here’s the Kama Sutra of building multiple Twitter RT partners that lead to idea starved writers who will blog you up:

1. Take the lead in RTing and blogging about the people who have big blogs.
This step is crucial and pivotal. Whether you have a lot of followers or 130, if you show goodwill, people feel compelled to return the favor – even if they have millions of followers. Back when I only had 1,000 followers, some guy with over 1 MILLION RT’d me because I made the first gesture of goodwill.

2. Remember who you RT and blog about.
Seriously, this is business. This is not some sort of universal karmic thing where you kiss Amy and Susan kisses you (years later of course. Otherwise it wouldn’t be a karma coming back around kinna thing. It would be a totally different kinna thing). IMPORTANT: It generally takes about 3 RTs and subsequent blog posts before someone feels like they are truly ingratiated and will RT you.

3. Get more than 1,000 Twitter followers and 10,000 blog subscribers.
If you only have a dozen followers who never use Twitter anyways, even if you kiss butt and massage feet, you’ve got no clout. How did I get my 12,000 followers? ASK ME @journik

And before you do shout out about their blogs and work, make sure that each blogger you want to cover your work actually monitors their traffic. Otherwise, if they don’t see a major spike in their readership, if they have no way of ascertaining a spike in popularity, they will not be excited about talking you up.

4. KEY: Refer back to #2 and DM your industry’s bloggers asking them to do a story about you.
Oddly, inspiteofthefactthat we all get tons of DM spam, it’s actually more effective to ask someone from #2 to RT a specific tweet via DM than an @message. My theory is that it is refreshing to actually get a real DM. And also because if you @zenmommy @riasharon @kevinpmiller @globalpatriot @others all in the same tweet it kinna lets the recipients off the hook. =)

5. Remember who RT’d YOU.
This is the easy part. There’s a trick to it.

In one of my first sales training seminars, we were all asked, “If you are going to sell Bibles, who would you sell it to?”

The responses were varied. Some said, “rich people.”

Others said, “People who don’t have one.”

The instructor said, “Nope. People who don’t have Bibles are called atheists or Buddhists. They don’t buy Bibles. The people who will buy your Bible, counterintuitively, are the people who already have ten Bibles. People who have twenty Bibles are even more likely to buy your crappy translation.”

Remember who RT’d YOU because the people who do are more likely to actually respond when you do #4.

#6 BONUS: How to do #5…
I have a trick to this. Whenever I ask for an RT, I ask that the same bit.ly url be RT’d and the same url always goes to the MAIN url of my blog – never a sub url. The reason for that becomes obvious when you see what I see: Journik’s Twitter Traffic Statistics and ReTweeters.

If you want to partner with me in multiplying each other’s marketing power or want my help in building buzz around you, contact me. I run a small but ingenius los angeles and nyc based web marketing firm.

Posted via web from journik’s posterous – a grade A shouldery. (social media marketing wise)