This is a guest post by David Murton, a professional writer and webmaster.

Image by: Lee

The long awaited week has finally arrived! *Drum roll* Let’s meet our honorable guest of the month – Chris Garrett! Chris had influenced me a lot about the importance of authority blogging. I’m proud to have him here for the first time and talk about how to become a social networking magnet. The stage is yours, Chris!

When I coach my consulting clients the conversation always comes around to networking. I would say having a strong network is vital to any business that wants to succeed online, and is certainly a vital asset for getting ahead in your career today.

We have all these tools, but still people struggle to make good connections.

People say to me “Chris, how do I reach influential people?” or “Chris, how can I get better opportunities to come my way?”, and most popular, “Why is my network not growing?”.

There is a simple answer to ALL of these challenges.

Want to know what it is?

The Simple Networking Secret

People have networking, and especially social networking, backwards!

Somehow people have gotten the idea that we should seek the benefits before putting in any value of our own. That we can take, take, take before we give.

Think of the most selfish, self-centred and greedy person you know. Do YOU find that attractive? Would you want to recommend them to others?

No?

Rather than think what your network can do for you, why should THEY have you in THEIR network?

How do you look from THEIR perspective?

See how simple it becomes when you turn the equation around? OK, so what you need to do become simplified, it doesn’t necessarily become easy.

Add Value Without Taking

When you start networking with a ‘take’ mindset you turn people off.

Instead you should be building up your value to them.

Ask how you can help. Share what you know. Introduce people without asking for anything in return.

Get known as useful and generous.

What happens is more people want to get to know you, people feel like someone they can introduce to others, and most of all you build a positive reputation.

Summary

Instead of seeking out people who can help you right now, or trying to get on the radar of influential people, work on being the most useful, approachable and well-connected person in your niche. Become known for making great contributions and introductions. Over time your reputation will spread and networking will be a matter of responding to invitations rather than hunting down prized contacts!

Chris Garrett is a blogging and internet marketing consultant. He is co-author of the famous book ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income and the founder of Authority Blogger course. Learn more about Chris Garrett and his blog here. Don’t forget to follow him on Twitter @chrisgarrett and facebook too!

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This is a guest post by Srinivas Rao, the editor in Chief of Flightser. He writes about personal development at The Skool of Life and is the host of BlogcastFM, a podcast to help you take your blog to the next level.

Two months ago the CEO of our company asked me to take the lead on launching and growing a brand new travel blog. Flightster, is currently functioning only as a blog and will eventually become a fully functional flight booking engine within the next several months. Starting solely as a blog has shown us the tremendous power that a blog can have in building brand awareness.

Objectives:

• Build Brand awareness
• Leverage social media to Connect with the Online Travel Community

Building the Blog

#1  Budget

One of the biggest mistakes I’ve seen companies make is to assume that the social media is “free.” Social media should be treated just as other marketing channels are. It should have a budget allocated for it. Our industry is heavily driven by extremely high PPC costs that can get up to 6 figures a month. My boss allocated $2500 a month for me to run the Flighster blog, which is an extremely small percentage of the overall marketing budget. However, $2500.00 is a substantial budget to run a blog if you know how to stretch it.

#2  Writers

Putting together a team of writers was my first order of business once I was put in charge of starting the blog. Initially, I reached out to writers from other well established travel blogs in the hopes of getting them to write for Flightster. I got no responses except one letting me know that the writer had been locked into an exclusive with another popular travel blog. After that I decided to tap into my personal network. This is where the power of having my own blog became very apparent. If the person in charge of your corporate blog has his or her own blog and it has a following, put that person in charge of your company blog. The greatest asset that person brings to the table is a network of contacts with an established online presence.

My boss gave me the go ahead to allocate $75-100 per post for contributions, so I reached out to the best writers I could find in my network. I looked at people who I had interviewed for my podcast and those whose blogs I read on a daily basis. Below are the main criteria I looked for in a team of writers:

• Good writers with established audiences who loved them
• Blogs with Roughly 1000 Subscribers
• Bloggers who were very active on Twitter

I reached out to a popular location independent blogger as my first step and I recruited the remaining writers based on his referrals, with only one exception who I hand picked after reading his blog. One simple way to look at this was “If I wouldn’t subscribe to their blog myself, then I wouldn’t hire them as a writer.”

#3  Editorial Policy

Prior to the launch of Flighster, I spent several months looking at many corporate blogs. When I compared them to the individual blogs I read on almost a daily basis, I noticed a major difference. Individual blogs had an interesting voice and sounded human. They were filled with comments and they kept readers coming back for more. Most company blogs sounded like a marketing brochure and they were incredibly boring. My solution was simple, a very loose editorial policy. If what made my writers popular on their own blogs was their writing, then I saw no reason to place many restrictions on them. I knew this would allow them to write the most interesting content possible.

#4  Timeless Content

I was given only one restriction from our CEO and that was to produce content that was timeless. You’ve heard this phrase “content is king” over and over again. By producing content that is “timeless” we could significantly increase the amount of time people spent on the site looking at our content. Timeless content is what gets shared over and over again. For many bloggers it’s not uncommon to have something popular they wrote over a year ago shared on twitter or Facebook, so I recommend companies take this same approach to content.

Marketing the Blog

After assembling the writing team, I started to think about the most efficient ways to market a blog. Growing my personal blog had taken over a year before it was really on anybody’s radar. With Flightster, I was determined to do this much faster so I decided to narrow my efforts down to 3 channels.

Channel 1 : The Audiences of the Writers

When I started the blog, I assumed that the audience that the writers brought with them would my greatest source of traffic. Part of my thought process in hiring them was that the marketing was already built into the content since I assumed their audience would follow them. As a result, we decided to sponsor the Way Below Status Quo Tour, a road trip across America where 3 bloggers were going to meet all of their readers in person. In exchange for the sponsorship, we asked for 3 posts a week on the Flightster Blog about the various destinations they were visiting. The cost was $100 per post. Given that their readers that they were meeting were also bloggers and people with an active online presence it provided yet another way for our message to spread. While it did give us a, nice initial kickstart, I knew that it was going to take a bit more to make the blog grow.

Channel 2: Facebook

With a budget of $2500 a month, the cost of a Facebook ad would go up very quickly and I wasn’t convinced that it would provide the most effective ROI. But I knew that a Facebook fan page would be essential at some point. So, I set up the fan page and allowed it to grow somewhat organically. The Facebook page is still a bit of a work in progress.

Channel 3: Twitter/My Personal Network

Given the budget I would require to get the most out of Facebook I decided to focus my efforts on Twitter. As a blogger, I noticed something about the audiences of Twitter and Facebook. They didn’t seem to have much overlap when it came to the everyday internet user. However, anybody who was a blogger seemed to be extremely active on Twitter. This was the group of people who could make a message spread. Additionally, I had my personal network of bloggers on Twitter who I have interacted with almost daily over the past several months.

A Campaign to Hire a New Writer

After staffing the blog with 4 writers, I decided to hire another writer. Rather than ask for writing samples and picking the one I liked best, I wanted to use the hiring process as a viral marketing tool. I asked the potential writers to do the following:

• Write a Blog Post About Anything Travel Related on their own blog: I asked them to write on their own blogs because I knew it was something they would already be doing at least a few times a week. The thought process was to make it as as easy as possible for people to participate.
• Link to Flighster in the Post: The goal behind this was simply to generate relevant inbound links from other travel blogs. My SEO knowledge is pretty limited to what I’ve read on various blogs, but I felt that this would also help get the word out about Fligtster among other travel bloggers.
• Tweet the blog Post with the hashtag #FLIGHTSTER and follow us on Twitter: This allowed me to not only build a following amongst travel bloggers, but also stay engaged with all the participants throughout the course of the competition. Additionally, it proved to be a great tool for building awareness of the Flightster brand.
• Get our Attention: In an effort to keep the engagement level with participants up, I gave them freedom to get our attention in any way they felt they could. The result was video submissions and a consistent sharing of their own content with the hashtag #Flightster.
• Voting for the Next Fligthster: After allowing the contest to run for two weeks, we narrowed it down to 10 finalists. We then setup a poll enabling the readers to vote on their favorite writer, and encouraged the contest participants to promote their participation in the contest in order to get as many votes as possible. The result was a signficant jump in traffic.

The thought process behind the campaign had a few components. First I wanted to kill as many birds with one stone as possible. That is why I made connecting with us in all of our channels a component of the contest. Another thing that we wanted to do was to give the participants a sense of control over their participation in the contest. Many of the various contests have winners that are chose at random, thus reducing the incentive for people to participate. The result of this kind of contest is a “what are my chances” mind set. By allowing people to gather votes to become our next writer, we put them in control. Another interesting byproduct of the contest was that we facilitated an ongoing conversation between participants. Contestants commented on each other’s blogs and followed each other on twitter. We served as a connector.

The Results:

Bloggers Who Participated: 24

Finalists in the Contest: 8

Traffic During the Contest

Traffic During the First 2 Months of Flightster

As you’ll see above, the results were decent for a brand new blog that nobody had heard of prior to its launch in early July. Without a doubt the campaign to hire a writer was the most effective tool we had in our arsenal which is what caused the biggest spike in traffic. The cost of running this campaign: ZERO DOLLARS.

Lessons Learned:

Engagement vs. Numbers:

One of the things that might surprise some people is that this was all done with roughly 300 followers on twitter and only 130 Facebook fans. If you have thousands of followers who don’t interact with your brand, then you are really missing the point of being on Twitter. Out of the 300 followers, our engagement was focused primarily on the participants in our contest. You need followers who are actually engaged and interacting with your brand. Otherwise it’s like standing on top of a table in a crowded restaurant, wearing a ridiculous outfit and hoping people will want to talk to you. This might seem the like the slower way to grow on twitter, but it’s just slower when you start out. In the long run this approach will make you grow much, much faster. Just ask Scott Stratten, a guy who nobody knew last year and is now this years keynote speaker for Blogworld.

The Power is in a Network:

I can’t underscore how much my personal network played a role in this. Given that I have my own blog and a personal network, getting the word out about this contest was simply a matter of emailing all the bloggers who I had relationships with and asking them to share our post about our contest with their followers. Given that the post was about getting paid to write for a blog, it made complete sense for them to share it with their networks and I got no resistance at all. So, my advice is find out who in your company already has a network in place.

The Tipping Point and The Rule of 150:

A few weeks back I was listening to Malcom Gladwell’s book, the Tipping point for the second time and I came across a concept known as “The Rule of 150.” The basic idea behind this rule is simple. The highest number of social relationships we can effectively manage is 150 and it takes roughly 150 people to make an idea spread. This was the driver behind how I decided to approach building the Flightster following on Twitter and in my own personal brand. With my personal brand I have seen a significant jump in traffic and subscribers to my blog. What this all comes down to is one simple fact: Social media is building a “social” relationship with your brand.

Now Is Your Turn…

How do you build your blog from scratch? Does Social Media plays a big role in your blog-building plan? Share with us your story or if you have anything to ask Srinivas, do so in the comments below.

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This is a guest post by David Smith, a conversion rate optimization consultant working for ConversionRate.net.

Every day, a growing number of companies are jumping on the social media bandwagon. They’re blogging, Tweeting, Facebooking, YouTubeing, and creating custom social media campaigns so they can connect with customers and “join the conversation”—whatever that means. In fact, this year alone, companies will spend about $900 million on social media marketing. By 2014, social media spending is estimated to eclipse $3 billion a year. It’s one of the fastest growing channels of marketing.


But what exactly are companies getting out of their social media marketing efforts? From what I’ve seen, not much. Most companies are blindly navigating their way through the new social media landscape one meaningless Tweet at a time. In short, they’re going nowhere fast, and they’re wasting a lot of time, money, and resources doing it. That’s because too many companies dive into social media marketing without a plan. And like the old saying goes, “He who fails to plan, plans to fail.”


The first step to creating a plan for your social media campaign is to set realistic goals. What do you want to achieve through social media marketing? Here are 5 realistic goals you can strive for.

1. Improve Search Engine Rankings

Social media marketing can be a powerful tool for increasing your organic search engine rankings. Social media sites like Digg, ReddIt, StumbleUpon, YouTube, and Twitter can do wonders for boosting your search engine visibility as Google weighs links from social media sites and even ranks those social media mentions to help you take up more space in the SERPS.

Additionally, whenever you promote your content through social media, you can earn more links as more people will begin to link to your content on their blogs and websites, creating a viral effect. Of course, the more natural back links you have, the better your search engine rankings will be.

To maximize the SEO benefits of social media, you need to create relevant content on hot topics that your audience cares about. Having strong, linkbait-style headlines can also go a long way to driving more traffic and earning more back links.

2. Increase Brand Awareness

One of the great things about social media marketing is that it levels the playing field by giving small businesses a voice. Small businesses that blog and interact with their target audience on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media sites can raise awareness for their company, letting customers know who they are and what they do.

A word of advice: Don’t treat social media like a typical advertising medium. Rather than shouting your offers to your Twitter followers, focus more on being personable and building relationships and trust with your audience.

3. Increase Positive Brand Mentions Online

Social media has given consumers a voice. Now, customers share their experiences with companies—good and bad—on Twitter, Facebook, review websites, forums, and more. There’s a good chance that your company has been mentioned already.

By creating a strong social media presence, being aware of what’s being said about your company, and reaching out to your customers, you can work to minimize negative brand mentions and earn more positive mentions. Reach out to those who say negative things about your company to see if there’s anything you can do to rectify the situation. And also, encourage your satisfied customers to review you online.

4. Improve Overall Customer Service & Satisfaction Ratings

It’s interesting to see how social media has turned into a customer care medium for many companies. For example, AT&T recently decided to start using social media to reach out to customers who are having problems with their service.

This is a great way to connect with customers and solve their problems quickly. However, if you plan on using social media as a customer service tool, make sure you train employees on how to do so properly. Also, don’t get rid of your other customer service mediums as not everyone wants to talk to you online.

5. Earn More Sales

One of the biggest criticisms of social media is that it’s not a viable tool for driving sales and improving the bottom line. I disagree. Sony recently said they made an extra $1 million in sales thanks to Twitter, and Dell said their Twitter presence earned them $3 million more in sales. Some companies are even combining social media with other forms of marketing like direct mail to help spread the word about their offers and earn more sales.

You can also take advantage of the new group buying concept found on websites like Groupon and BuyWithMe. These websites allow you to create special offers that customers share via social media, earning you more sales and increased brand awareness.

Do you have any set goals for your social media campaign?

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This week we have another honorable guest on board – my good friend, Rajeev Edmonds who will share with you an useful Facebook tip today about how to create a private discussion board. Take it away, Rajeev!

Whether you’re an individual, a non-profit organization or a business entity, Facebook is one of the most important social media channels to connect with more people. It’s an excellent medium to let other people know what you’re up to. However, there are circumstances when you selectively want to club a group of people on facebook and want to keep the ongoing activities of this group completely private. It can be a family group, a social media group, a company’s elite members group or just a gang of friends. Whatever is the case, facebook let’s you achieve this very easily via Private Groups, that inherently supports private discussion boards.

Facebook provides an option to create private ‘family groups’. Though the name suggests it can only be used for binding family members, you can use it to include anyone who is on facebook. These groups are like normal facebooks groups with the exception of being completely invisible to non-members. So let’s get started and see how to create our very own private discussion board.

How To Create A Private Discussion Board On Facebook

Step 1: Head on to ‘create private group‘ registration page and fill in your group name. Make sure you add yourself as a member.

The registration page gives you an option to add more members either by their name or through e-mail addresses. If your potential group members are not on facebook, enter their e-mail addresses separated by commas. I’ll strongly suggest you to avoid writing names in the first step. Later on, you can add members via friends list to make sure you make no mistake and inclusion is fast and easy.

Step 2: Update group picture and basic information. This includes assigning a relevant category and providing helpful description for the group.

You can update this basic information via ‘Info’ tab. Along with basic information, you can also update the contact information which includes, website link, address, city and zip code.

Note: Updating contact information is optional.

Step 3: Now comes the real part of configuring a private discussion board for group members. That’s pretty easy and requires a few clicks. Go to ‘Edit Group Settings‘ link and uncheck all the options except ‘Enable Discussion Board‘. Save your settings and you’re done.

After applying these settings, group members will be able to access discussion board and all other parts will be read-only for them i.e, they won’t be able to write on wall, they won’t be able to post videos, photos and links. Now, I don’t think you’ll ever want to exercise such strict policy for private group members. The above settings are only for demonstration purpose to show the possibility of creating a private discussion board on facebook.

CAUTION: Be careful while using ‘Events‘ in your private group. Events are either visible to your friends network or to the entire facebook community.

Rajeev is a pro blogger who shares his expertise in blogging & social media tips. He is the founder of mintblogger.com and you can find loads of insightful articles regarding the mentioned topics at his blog. Don’t forget to follow him on @mintblogger!

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I’m delighted to present you an honorable guest here today – Hesham, the founder of Famous Blogger & MMOSocialNetwork to share some advises on managing busy social networking life. Without further ado, let’s roll out the red carpet:

First of all I would like to thank Ching Ya for inviting me to post on her blog today, it’s a great opportunity for me. I have titled this post close to the question she was asking and wondering about how I/we can manage our busy Social Networking life and still handling multiple projects/sites “wonderfully”!

OK, it’s a sunny day, so let me go to my backyard next to the swimming pool to get some inspiration while writing

Ok, that’s MUCH better!

How I Manage My Busy Social Networking Life

I really have lots of accounts on several social networks, I even run my own social bookmarks site at the same time, and also working on developing a new site called DesignGizer. Hopefully it will be ready by the end of the month, and in all cases I am trying to keep up with all my accounts and projects all together in one place, but this is not possible as each of my projects has a different type of back-end report system that I have to monitor separately, and at the same time each of these projects has it’s own accounts on social media sites, for example I have to create a Twitter account for each project, a Facebook Fan Page for each project, and so on.

So, talking about how I manage those several social networking accounts and projects and still can manage my person and offline life as well, I must say that there is no big secret or any hidden tools from any kind, until now I didn’t fall in love with a management tool better than HootSuite , Google Reader and my simple normal email account which keeping me updated with almost everything I want to know about!

Of course I had to used a powerful machine (laptop) to get all these working smoothly without problem and all at the same time.

My Laptop as a Tool

Maybe you know that before I became a bloggers I was working on the web-design field, and this is why I am used to powerful laptops, with big wide screens, I cannot survive with a 14” laptop anymore, so my Toshiba Qosmio laptop. I am using right now is a a very powerful one, it’s really helping me to do my work in a very easy and effective way, and also to keep up with all my social networks accounts as the big wide screen allows me to set more tabs on HootSuite to display them all together at the same time, which it’s impossible to be done with a small monitor laptop.

I remember you have commented on that post on My Life Thinking blog, that was so nice of you! I cannot deny that I was going for a Mac, but at the last moment I changed my mind because the Qosmio has 4 processors which is not available on Mac laptops yet, and to understand what I exactly do I have to mention that I never shutdown my laptop!

Actually, I am used to work on several projects at the same time since the beginning of my career, and what I mean by working on several projects at the same time is the ability to set priorities of tasks while you are opening each of your projects, so my powerful laptop allows me to open all applications I use at the same time without crashing, so let me tell you exactly what applications are running now on my laptop:

• Firefox browser with 2 open windows and 66 open tabs
• Google Chrome browser with 2 windows and 27 open tabs
• Internet Explorer browser with 5 tabs
• Notepad with 7 windows
• Open Office with 11 window
• Photoshop with 8 working projects
• Dreamweaver with 11 working pages
• Core FTP application

and some other applications that I use or I forgot to close them!

So, do you think I still need any other applications to give me extra information? I don’t know but I just have the feeling that everything is under my hands and control all the time while I am on my laptop, I can monitor all my social network pages, blogs, blog dashboards, and all other pages just by one click to the refresh all tabs button of a browser, and maybe now you got the idea and have a full picture of how I can do it without needing any extra applications, I even keep some blogs open on my browsers for days until I read interesting post before I close it, and the really beauty here is I save all my accounts passwords to the browser, and make use of the “Restore previous tabs” feature in case I have to restart my laptop for any reason.

In addition to what I mentioned above, I use some services like SocialOomph. Keeps me informed with who is retweeting me just in case if I missed something, and Tweepi is what I use to manage my Twitter accounts, and also a few Firefox add-ons like Google Wave Add-on to keep me informed with new waves I am part of. And of course I don’t want to forget that subscribing by emails to blogs RSS feeds and news letters is a very important thing because it’s easy way to get news early and ideas for my new blog posts.

My Nokia 5800 Cell Phone

By the way I am using the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic phone, it’s has kind of limited available applications compared to the iPhone, but like any other touch screen cellphones it’s a lot of fun to deal with, but not good as the iPhone of course but it does the work, I am using some nice applications on it like:

• Tweets60 to check my Tweets on the go
• Gmail application from Google
• Fring for Skype calls

Social Media Key of Success

The real key to success on Social Media in my opinion is to organize your networks accounts, email accounts and web-browser in folders, so there is a folder for everything and anything you can imagine on my email accounts and on the top of my FireFox browser toolbar, and it’s very important to check your emails regularly, and never leave some emails without a reply since you have opened it and read it, and what I mean by that is to check your emails more than once a day, and if you are on the road or a way from your laptop, simply connect via your cell internet service and check emails/reply to them if there is a need, and if it need some work to be done on your laptop then do it when you arrive to your small home office immediately, it’s not good to do the work “latter”, chances will not wait for latter.

Tools I Use to Manage My Projects

Talking about dealing with several projects, some of them are running, some other are under development, so it’s a little bit hard to keep myself motivated and concentrating on all projects if I am not using the old fashion way, I have tried every other possible way as a technology fan, but believe it or not, a simple paper or notebook and a pen is all what I really need!

I am sorry to disappoint you if you was waiting for me to list a great or a fancy tools and applications I am using, but I discovered that all these mind mapping software and other cellphone applications that reminds you on time that you need to do something important you set before is not working for me, I just find my self neglecting notifications all the time like if they don’t exists!

And this remind me with my manager at a company I worked for a few years back, he taught me this once, and told how to use a very simple technique to keep up with his daily/weekly tasks, and told me that he cannot work without his little piece of paper and whatever pen. I use the paper to write down main title of my projects, and I list all possible daily/weekly tasks under each title, when I finish a task I just mark it as done and forget about it, and so one, at least it’s the only way for me to see all of my projects going in one place, which is the paper!

One very important benefit of “pen and paper” way is it helps a lot on writing down ideas for new blog posts as well, or draw some charts, and basic layout of a design for example, I believe you know that Ching Ya because you are a designer, so probably you cannot live without a pen and a paper like me.

Hesham is a good friend, a hardworking blogger and designer that I’m sure you’re all familiar with his omnipresence in the blogosphere. He’s always commenting, supporting & setting up projects – I’m amazed with his ability to cope with so many things in one time! So I ‘drag’ him here to share his secrets of success regardless how busy he is. Thank you my friend! Don’t forget to follow him @famousbloggers.

Traffic is life and blood of Internet. It is the driving force of any successful online business. There are dozens of channels through which traffic may arrive on your web site or blog. Some of these are conventional channels and some are unconventional and relatively new which were non-existent a decade back. Here are some popular traffic sources that contribute in building traffic on your blog.

Organic Traffic

Social Media

Feed Aggregators (Email + RSS)

Guest Blogging

Discussion Forums

Article Marketing

Comments

Blogrolls

Advertising

Other Traffic Sources

Please Retweet if You Find This Post Useful,thanks!

Merry Christmas

The King is born
A star so bright
Praise him on and on
Day and night

All the girls and boys
So precious and sweet
Santa, reindeers and toys
No wonder they sleep

Christmas is here
Be forever jolly
With Jesus so near
It must be holly

This the reason for living
Our Heavenly Father
It’s the season for giving
Seek no farther

Mae owns Inspirational Words Of Life. She is a data analyst. She gives great honor to the Lord, our God. She loves everyone and everything, and she tries to live her life in a positive way, keeping inspirational words in her mind and heart at all times.