Social Media

Though I’ve written about working as the social media manager for brands like Nissan, Land Rover and Hewlett Packard, I’ve never talked about many of my achievements in this space. For example, you might not know that I helped one newspaper go from a limited social media presence to helping them hit the Digg homepage over 40 times.

Or, how when I worked with Bacardi we drove so much traffic to their site that we took down their servers. Twice. I have plans to cover these stories in more detail in the next few months, but to start the coverage of Social Media here at ViperChill I wanted to bring in 9 other experts in the field to share their thoughts on leveraging social media as a whole.

I’m deviating from the typical type of post here at ViperChill today as I have something pretty awesome to announce: My first plugin, Reputation Management for WordPress, is now available for download. And it’s free. I’ve been using this plugin personally for months and decided that other people would really benefit from it, so now I’m releasing it here.

Reputation management (or monitoring, in this case) is about tracking your brand online. Just imagine if you could easily see when people are talking about your blog, your name, your products or anything else you want to track – all via your WordPress Dashboard. It’s always good to see who is singing your praises and it’s important to know who is criticising you or your brand so you can respond where necessary. Now you can see all that, quickly and easily.

This blog post is quite long so you probably shouldn’t read it. To the 50% of visitors who are still with me, I’ll say now that less than 1% of you will get to the end so you may as well leave now. The value here is in reading the whole post; not in skimming. Now that we’re left with just a few people, let me say first say “Hey” and secondly say “This blog post will go against 99% of the things you’ve ever read about blogging.”

I’m going to be controversial and I might even upset a few people. I’m not being controversial for the sake of controversy and I’ve been told I’m actually quite a nice guy. I’m simply telling the truth, and giving you the real state of the blogosphere for no other reason than it’s about time something like this was said.

I’m a huge fan of personal development. For the last 19 months I blogged about very little else and like to think I made a mark on the industry – despite my age and “total nobody” status. I don’t really write about self improvement anymore but I still actively work on improving different aspects of my life.

Without books like The Power of Now, Psycho Cybernetics, and Tribes, I really don’t think I would be where I am today. In fact, I think that the majority of my success online is thanks to the life lessons I’ve pushed myself to learn and the knowledge I’ve picked up over the last few years.

I ran a poll in the sidebar here for a few days asking people what their main goals were for 2010 in terms of internet marketing. The two clear favourites were: “Quitting your job to make a living online” and “Increase website traffic”. The latter, of course, is people looking for more eyeballs on their content. And, although it may not be obvious, so is the first.

You can make a beautiful, well-structured site that contains excellent content, but it isn’t going to make any money unless it starts getting visitors. No matter what webmasters like to say is ‘king’ online these days, everything we do is for traffic. It’s what matters on the web.

I try not to sound too egotistical when I say this, but over the past 12 months I have certainly been one of the ‘faces of guest posting,’ simply because I have had a lot of public success with the tactic. I’ve been interviewed about marketing using guest posts over 10 times, I’m mentioned on the homepage of a guest posting community and I’ve written far more of them than I care to remember.

Because of this, I feel I’m probably one of the best people to cover this subject with a long in-depth article. If you’re wondering what guest posting is or why you should even care about it then you’ve been missing out. You’ve seriously been unaware about one of the best marketing tactics available today. Thankfully, if you’re reading this article then you may have time to utilise this strategy before it is too late.

I recently stopped working on a number of large projects because I was not totally passionate about them. I’ve always lived my life around what interests me the most, but I’ve always still worked on things I don’t care about that much. That all changes now as I have sold a number of affiliate websites that make me money, but I don’t care about anymore.

This has given me not only a nice lump-sum of cash, but also a lot of spare time. I have decided that instead of starting multiple sites in fairly uncompetitive niches, I’m going to go for a ‘biggie’. I’m going to go for a niche that is highly profitable, but also ultra competitive.

Around two years ago I took some time out to analyse the top 50 Stumbleupon users. At the time, StumbleUpon was just starting to get noticed by internet marketers and as the service had the ability to send a lot of traffic to websites, people wanted to know more.

These days, Stumbleupon is about 8 million users bigger than the last time I did this and while it still has the ability to send thousands of visitors to a website, it seems to get talked about less and less. Now, some people will argue that there is no benefit to being a top user of the service while others claim that you should strive to be one if you want traffic from the site.