If you’re not familiar, LinkedIn is like Facebook for professionals. You display your professional experience, connect with current and past coworkers, and even meet new connections. It’s a great online networking opportunity. If you’re a professional blogger and want to boost your credibility as an expert in your field, you should consider putting your blog on your LinkedIn profile.

In the spirit of research, I put U Stand Out on my Wordpress page, which you can see on my LinkedIn profile page. Here’s how to do it: Read the rest of this entry

This article was originally written as a guest post on The Internet Marketing Blog for Today. Thanks to the blog owner Erwin Tan for hosting!

Starting a niche blog is both exciting and overwhelming. Once you post a few articles, that “if you build it, they will come” mentality sets in, and you start checking your stats every 5 minutes. And then you realize that maybe “if you build it AND promote it, they will come.” So you spend hours submitting your articles to social media sites like StumbleUpon, Digg, Delicious, Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, BlogCatalog, commenting on blogs, replying in forums, and so on. Now you’re checking your stats every 30 seconds.

There are some bloggers out there screaming, “This is how I did it! Just follow these steps, and you’ll get a thousand visitors a day!” But for most bloggers, this is not how it works. It takes dedication, passion, and time. But most of all, it takes content that’s going to get people’s attention enough for them to stick around, bookmark it, and tell a few people about it. Here are some tips to creating quality content worthy of social media marketing. Read the rest of this entry

Why is it so important to encourage commenting? This problogger article discussed a study revealing that 90% of people online are lurkers (read or observe content without contributing), 9% of people contributing a “little,” and only 1% of people actively participate online. This is referred to as the 1% rule, and it’s your job to figure out how to break that rule on your blog.

There are so many Wordpress plugins for comments, and sifting through them to find the best ones can be overwhelming. So here are four simple Wordpress plugins I recommend to encourage readers to comment on your blog.

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Bloggers often think that posting daily is the key to getting regular traffic. They scramble to fill their blog with content every day, even multiple times a day. If you’re a full-time blogger or have a ton of free time on your hands, you might be able to post quality content every day and be successful.

But if your time is limited, posting just to fill the space isn’t as effective as posting high quality content every few days. So if you have a full-time job or other obligations that keep you from being a full-time blogger, here are some reasons why it might not be best to publish every day:

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Snip URL is an online tool you can use to make those ridiculously long URLs shorter. So instead of a long URL, intimidating URL, you get this:

http://snipurl.com/beedlebard

Cool, right? I used Tiny URL for a couple of years, especially when sending emails. And if you’re on Twitter, you probably know that Twitter automatically makes your long URLs short using Tiny URL. But Snip URL offers some awesome features that leaves Tiny URL in the dust:

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If you’re planning to use LinkedIn to find job opportunities, optimizing your profile will help you stand out. But did you know that you can also use LinkedIn to improve the SEO of your website or blog?

Here’s how it works: if high ranking websites link to your website, it will improve your website’s page rank, so you’ll appear higher in organic Google searches. LinkedIn profiles have a fairly high Google Page Rank, so if have good profile SEO and link your website to it, your website’s SEO will also improve. I’m not claiming that your page rank will shoot through the roof (you need many, many backlinks for that to happen), but it will help a bit, and if more people click on your LinkedIn profile, they may also click on your website. Read the rest of this entry

Since Web 2.0 exploded, I’ve noticed that there aren’t many websites you can’t sign into anymore. Want to review that hotel you stayed in? Sign in! Want to rate the digital camera you bought? Sign in! Want to discuss Obama’s experience (or lack thereof)? Sign in! It’s the age of the digitally social, and we’re all invited to sign in.

Frankly, it gets confusing. You forget if you’ve already signed up at a site you last visited a year ago. Your passwords become muddled in a memory of account numbers, pins, and everything else in your hectic life. And when you finally do sign in, you’re encouraged to find your friends, even though you’re already friends with your friends on ten other sites. And sometimes it’s so frustrating that you just give up. That’s where Facebook Connect comes in. Read the rest of this entry

Since starting this blog, I’ve joined several social networking sites. Some for bloggers, some for bookmarking, and some for “twittering.” Most of these sites allow you to upload an avatar, usually a 90×90 image you can use to represent yourself.

I used to be really paranoid about putting my picture anywhere online, except for Facebook where I have complete control over privacy settings. I always used a little blonde Simpsons-style avatar. But now I’m attaching my real name to my blog, and I want to establish my web presence across all the different social media sites. So I uploaded a real picture of me taken last week to all the different sites. It also appears on U Stand Out whenever I make a comment. Read the rest of this entry