How important is the online presence today? How many of us (in the entire world) spend our day-to-day time: online?
According to a Harris Interactive poll (December, 2009)the weekly internet usage in the US is now a whopping 13 hours, as twice as many when compared to 2005. Also:
* over 60 billion emails are sent daily around the world (ICT data);
* 77% of executive recruiters use search engines to research applicants (CareerBuilder)
* there're over 300 million Facebook users worldwide and over 50 million LinkedIn users, etc.
Today websites become virtual business cards for both corporate and personal branding. The truth is we all have an online reputation, whether we realize it or not.
The question is: do we choose to build it for us or let the search engines pick up the answers - randomly? The second choice won't do us any good, for sure.
Below are listed helpful tools for managing your online presence: be that your website or your blog:
1. Subscribe to Google Analytics - a comprehensive analysis over your website statistics, helping you to track the number of unique visitors, most popular articles, refering sources and many more..check it out for yourselves.
2. Join Technorati - the leading blog search engine indexing millions of blog posts in real time. It also tracks the authority, influence and popularity of blogs. Alternatively, start using Twittorati - to search and monitor the data on both blogosphere and Twittesphere.
3. Become a Guest Blogger/Expert Writer - Offer a blog posting for free to someone in your interest group and expose your relevant content to an entirely new audience!
4. Make your Subscription Options Obvious - via RSS fields and email newsletters. Alternatively, post sharing options/bookmarkings and help your readers share your content among their audience - an obvious Word-of-Mouth tool, don't you agree?
5. Post a freebie - free report, an eBook, a PowerPoint presentation using such tools as SlideShare. Make the files easy to access, posting them in PDF, for example.
6. Leave comments on other blogs (related to your own business area) - mentioning something relevant about your own blog and post a link. You'd be surprised to find out how effective these referrals may be to your blog/website traffic and authority!
7. Become an active presence in Social Media World - Take time to answer LinkedIn
discussions and questions. Submit blog posts to Digg,LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, SumbleUpon, Reddit, etc. Taking part in these activities will establish connections and build your reputation. Don't forget - Online Conversations build Online Relationships!
8. Join Virtual Groups like Yahoo!Groups or Google Groups connecting to people who share similar interests you do and may also be potential audience for your site.
9. Monitor Your Links to determine your most effective referral websites, using tools like WhoLinkstoMe and BackTweets.
10. Last but not least: Inform your Audience - post relevant and newsworthy content. Remeber, your readers might be influencers who can spot advertising and product placement and will not hesitate spread the word. Choose a positive outlook for your online presence be it a corporate or a personal perspective.
What other useful tools would you share?
Good Luck!
This issue Menu prepared by : Digital Lunch Team
Print this post
7 comments:
Good blog, good advice, well done
Nice Post
Thank you for your support.
Digital Lunch Team
Nice Information and i supposed to be in future online presence will become our necessity.Either we are doing business through online or making our career. Nowadays social media playing vital roll such as Facebook, Linkedin, or making blogs, doing online marketing that means everything which is related to our works.
And this blog providing very informative knowledge.
thank you
Thank you for your insight and support. Much appreciated.
Digital Lunch Team
I think it is important to decide what are the most important areas of your online presence and focus on improving those. For example I put a lot of effort into social networking, and let my website be slightly understandard - why? Because the important work I do is through the individual personal connections that I make with people. I make friends with people, and whether they like my website or not they still remain my friends, so the website is not so important.
For someone else it might be one of the other things that are most central - one can focus on blogs, another on great website design and content etc.
You don't need to do all of it at once - start at the most important bit and work from there.
That's an interesting point, I suppose it all depends on what's the purpose of your Online Branding. This may determine how much effort one should put in buiding online relationships and image.
Thank you for your view.
Digital Lunch Admin
Post a Comment