Viral Internet Links

To know what is being said about your brand everyday in the social sphere, marketers are harnessing the power of social listening to identify newer business opportunities. If you do social listening, you can tell your brand’s story effectively on various social media platforms and see it expanding. The social media metrics help you:

1. Determine whether or not your brand is heard successfully across multiple platforms
2. Get acquainted with your customers and ensure customer satisfaction
3. Evaluate your marketing efforts and their performance/non-performance
4. Schematize better activities in social sphere to enhance your brand’s presence
5. Lend an ear to what you should know about social listening and how it can be made profitable for your brand.



Social listening helps to know how users perceive your brand and also if they are avoiding it.

Social listening is one of the few effective techniques to get insights into your brand’s presence in the market. There are many repeated conversations on social networks that can be significant to evaluate a brand’s performance/non-performance/under-performance in social sphere. Customers share their understanding of brand(s), reveal about their buying experience and the utility of the products/services with other online users.

It’s here where the brands and marketers can derive maximum value from their existing or future customers’ two-way conversations. Brands can understand what is being said in their absence and devise new product or marketing strategies/policies to deliver a better experience for their customers.


1. Get real time insights into customers’ opinions.
2. Measure brand sentiments.
3. Get early opinions on changing customer trends.
4. Get product insights and integrate them with sales strategy.
5. Reach out proactively to customers and address their issues.
6. Join real time conversations and expand your reach.
7. Make social engagement strong and efficient.
8. Keep tabs on the competition.
9. Re-formulate your efforts to improve.
10. Why Social Listening is Important

It may perhaps sound comic, but isn’t really. Dissatisfied customers are coming to social media to voice their views and annoyance on a product/service. It can be damaging for a brand to ignore it. What can be done for this? Probably, “pay attention to what is all being said on social networks,” recommends Brad Shimmin, principal analyst at Current Analysis Inc.

Social listening integrates both social media monitoring and unified communications. Social media monitoring means keeping tabs on market insights, tracking customer conversations, their feedback and criticism. According to Shimmin, “Social listening is important for understanding deeper customer insights, and is considered helpful for effective engagement with them.”


Customers have a voice on social networks. You should be listening to them, without fail.

Brands should pay heed to their customers’ voices and be able to mediate and take suitable measures. Twitter and Facebook offer several options to measure customer feedback in real time. You can monitor customer support forums and analyze conversations about your brand, as well as of your competitors. The new insights can be helpful to improve your business and deliver good customer services.


Don’t miss out on this! Listen to all conversations. Gaze carefully at what your customers are saying on major social networks and use them for your brand and product development. For example, give information to your customers when they are seeking to know more about a product.


Join up online conversations and connect with your customers. Share your thoughts to establish faith between your brand and customers.


You should be able to respond to diverse customer reactions. Transform their experiences into reality by addressing their concerns. If possible, set up a social customer service program.


Use right content to raise sales prospects. Assess the impact of your campaigns by knowing the audience response. You should understand customers’ buying indications and reach out to them.


Consider preparing helpful content for your audience. This should aim at helping them at various stages of buying, such as general instructions, guidance, product launch, repeat purchase, special offers, advocacy, testimonials, etc.


You know how important social listening is to run two-way conversations to promote online presence of your brand. Consider the following ways to make social listening a better technique to capture mentions of your brand.

Identify Online Communities: It is not easy to monitor your accounts on different social channels and keep a track of all conversations. Therefore, locate communities — such as your competitors, industry, etc. — where people are talking about similar products and services. You should join them and interact with them by talking about their product needs.

Identify Online Volunteers: You can identify your online brand admirers who can help in your endeavor. They can share your brand information in the online communities on Twitter, Facebook, blogs, etc.

Make Improvements: It is important that you not just do social listening, but also improve strategies for your product development. Your customers can say a lot of not-so-nice things about your brand. You got to listen up and make necessary changes. This helps to improve brand loyalty and boost ROI.


Google Alerts: It is the most inexpensive social listening tool to get real time insights into web, news, etc., based on your queries. It notifies you each time your brand name gets a mention.

HootSuite: More than a social relationship platform, HootSuite is a popular user-friendly social media listening tool, where you can monitor and measure multiple social media accounts to get real time analytics. It informs you about someone even mentioning your brand.

Salesforce: Earlier known as Radian6, Salesforce is a useful tool for marketing professionals in getting real time charts and helpful data to drive business results.

Social Mention: This is a fast real-time social media search and analysis tool to monitor latest online comments, blogs, videos, and other updates about your brand.


The social networks are becoming a hub of customers’ continuous communication. Customers share their online viewpoints via comments, likes, reviews, blogs, videos, pictures, etc., and rate brands and their products. Listen to real-time customer conversations on social networks for business promotion and hone-in on sales opps.


Source: Alan Smith @SpinxWebDesign and Clickfire

John Tanyishin is the developer of Work From Home Using Your Computer, providing you with work from home opportunities. He lives in Singapore and currently still a student but is looking actively for passive income. You can grab free ebooks here and receive tips as well and visit Go Articles




So What Exactly Is Link Building

To put it simply, link building is the process of getting links from other websites pointing to your website. The more back links your site has, the higher the link popularity.

When done effectively, it creates higher traffic to your website, increases page rank and allows you to rank higher in search engines.

However, link popularity alone doesn't guarantee that you will achieve high rankings in search engines but it is still a critical tactic to get your site indexed and get organic traffic.

There are different types of links that will require different methods of getting them.

Inbound links. These are the links that are appearing on other websites pointing to your site. They are also known as one-way, non-reciprocal links. Some of the common ways of getting them will be through directories submission, blogs, articles submission and press releases. Having high quality inbound links from relevant websites will give your website higher page rank.

Reciprocal links. This means having your website linking to others and the other websites will link to yours in return. They are also known as two-way links. There are many effective websites which provide services to help exchange links with others. Sometimes, they are in a form of automated service where you pay monthly or one-time fee and they help you do the dirty job. Another form will be providing you a community or platform where you trade links with other webmasters. Some experts have commented that this form of linking is of lesser value because major search engines have given lesser credit to it. The experts believe only to exchange links with relevant websites which have high page rank and avoid websites that have adult or illegal content.

Three-way links. This is a method which described in its simplest form will be having website A links to B, B links to C and C links to A. However, this type of linking is usually achieving by done through a third party which requires a fee. By getting your website handled by a reputable service, your website will be well taken care of. Sometimes, this process is automated and requires little effort. Your website will link to others but rest assured that these websites will not be linking back, if not it will be two-way linking. In this way, you are creating another form of one-way links but through a third party.



There are many other link building services available for you to explore but do take note that not all of them provides effective results and some of them may even cause you to be blacklisted by the search engines. Do find out more about them before engaging to their services.

Getting link building services can help you save effort, time and money, when used well it can help you achieve higher results with search engines. Some of the recommended services will be 3waylinks, linkvana and link machine.

The quality of links is important as well, having BBC or MSN pointing to your website carries more weight than links pointing from personal blogs. One way to determine whether the page carries enough weight will be from its page rank. Having a website of page rank 4 linking to your website compared to a website of page rank 1 means creating four times value to your site. So keep focusing on getting links from high page ranked websites.

Link building is a long term strategy to have your website rank higher on search engines. There is a program that you will love to use to see your link popularity, called link popularity check. Try searching for it. You will need to have constant increasing links pointing to your website.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR: A freelance writer who meticulously structured and maintained blogs just for you:A LIFE SO FAR AWAYand my other blog:OFW: THIS IS MY LIFE AND STORY Thank you for your valuable time. Follow my business & writings and you'll find what life's meant to be.

Photo Source: LinkedIn Booth by Dynamic Network Services, on Flickr

LinkedIn – Get Linked in With the Right People

Linkedin is a great network for professionals but do you know how to build your brand and get new leads for your websites? Check out these 5 tips.

With millions of professionals from 130 different industries, Linkedin represents a potential gold mine for high end leads for your websites. Many members are looking for new job opportunities but this network’s real value to you is the incredible knowledge base and new business opportunities that can strengthen your personal brand and increase your websites’ potential.

Here is a list of five simple steps to get the most out of your Linked in account.

Don’t gloss over your profile

A basic first step is establishing your profile and you should take the time to make this look like an executive bio and not just a resume. Insure that you have included all of your educational credentials and memberships to professional organizations (particularly if you held a leadership position) as well as relevant job titles.

Don’t waste copy on your ego. Give specific examples of what you have contributed to former employers and what you have done to grow your own business. Cite a case study if appropriate.

The objective here is to make you as attractive as possible to potential new business opportunities including those who may want to do a joint venture with you.

Link up your profile

Linkedin gives you three opportunities to link out to your websites. In the profile page click on edit and then click on “more” and this will allow you to edit the default settings for My Website and My Blog.

Change these titles to keywords that are relevant for both. For example if you have an accounting business you may change My Website to accounting service or tax accounting. The same goes for your blog. Use these opportunities to build backlinks to your websites.

Company Page

Here’s an opportunity to look like an industry leader. Include your logo and sell the benefits of your operation. Make sure you include your websites as well. If you have employees, make sure they link to this page.
Create a group…join a group

Linked in groups are where the action is at and you’ll want to participate in them for two reasons. The first is to develop potential leads by creating or joining a group that would be of interest to you market.

This is a social network so get social. Respond to articles, answer questions and put yourself in a position to be viewed as an expert in the field or at least as a reliable source of information. If you start your own group you obviously have considerably more control over what direction interactions are going to take.
Don’t look just for end users
If your websites all promote consumer goods you probably won’t find end users in Linkedin. What you will find are distributors and manufacturers’ representatives and these can be great resources for distribution and new sales opportunities.

Keep that target audience in mind when you create articles or respond to questions and comments. Developing relationships with this group can give your websites the extra marketing boost that turns them into home-runs.

If your business is B2B you’ll find a gold mine of potential distributors as well as end users it’s simply a matter of being active and getting recognized.
Use the Q&A

The Open Q&A is a great place to participate in and draw attention that can lead to connects. Focus on participating in this at least two or three times a week and you will go a long ways in developing a reputation as a valued source.

You can also use this forum as a market research tool and evaluate what your target audience is interested in or wants answers to. His can obviously help you develop hot, relevant content for your e-commerce website.

Online business networking really is no different than offline events. The obvious advantages include access to a far larger network than you could possibly create offline and far better tools to get your brand out to the world. But remember it is networking which means this is not a fire and forget strategy but one you have to work on consistently if you want your websites to benefit.



ABOUT THE AUTHOR: A freelance writer who meticulously structured and maintained blogs just for you:A LIFE SO FAR AWAYand my other blog:OFW: THIS IS MY LIFE AND STORY Thank you for your valuable time. Follow my business & writings and you'll find what life's meant to be.

"Top 20 wordpress plugins that you don’t miss by honeytech, on Flickr">
Source: Petrona Alexon. To learn important hints about Blog Writing and even on Website Design, see this website and Published-Articles.com




WordPress has become the most popular platform for blogging and website creation and is used by millions to create and launch their sites. One of the many benefits of using WordPress is the huge assortment of plugins available to be installed, so many that, at times, it is impossible to know which plugins to use on your site.

Properly created WordPress plugins will provide a vital function for your site while running in the background and not using too much disk space and memory. Almost all of the top plugins run automatically, meaning you set them and leave them alone, although some of the plugins that post content or fix errors need attention. We are going to look at some of the better free plugins that should be a part of each WordPress site that you create.

1) Akismet. This free plugin is usually installed automatically when you install WP, but if not, be sure to add it to your site. Akismet will provide a valuable spam filter for your site, blocking the attempts by spammers to post worthless comments or reviews in an attempt to piggyback your site for back links. Make sure you have an Akismet API and install this on every site you own.

2) Google XML Sitemap. This handy plugin will notify the major search engines of new postings on your site and help get your site indexed and ranked. Simple to install and requires no maintainance.

3) W3 Total Cache. Recommended by most hosting services, this caching program will dramatically speed up the loading of you site when visited by a viewer. Google has said that it is factoring loading speed into its rankings, so make sure you install this plugin and use it properly.

4) SEO Friendly Images. Adding pictures to your posts and pages is important both visually and for ranking, and this plugin helps to make your images SEO and WordPress friendly. A great set-it-and-leave-it-alone add-on.

5) SEO Smart Links. While there is a premium (paid) version of this plugin, the free version works fine for almost every site. You put in a few keywords and website links (yours or others) and this program will automatically post the links in your articles or pages.

6) CBNET Ping Optimizer. Did you know that WordPress pings key RSS sites every time anything changes on your site? This can be good and bad. If you make a lot of changes on your site, creating a lot of pings, you may get tagged as a spammer. This plugin allows you to put a limit on how many pings per day can be made.

7) Cystats. Okay, this doesn't speed up your site or perform any repairs, but it does give you great information regarding who visits your site, where they came from and how many robot spiders have visited your site. This is a wonderful tool to have to find out how well your SEO efforts are doing to drive traffic to your site.

Are there more good free plugins? You bet, around 999,999 but we don't have the time or desire to review all of them. These six are a good starting point for building a WordPress site, are easy to install and use and, best of all, are free. Check them out, read more about them and decide if you should be using them on your website.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: A freelance writer who meticulously structured and maintained blogs just for you:A LIFE SO FAR AWAYand my other blog:OFW: THIS IS MY LIFE AND STORY Thank you for your valuable time. Follow my business & writings and you'll find what life's meant to be.