Weekly Marketing Skinny – February 16, 2013

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marketing skinny february 16 I am really liking this new “Marketing Skinny” series on Saturdays.

It’s my positive constraint to keep in touch of what’s going on in the world of marketing, as well as pass that information in a concise bite-sized easy-to-digest form to you.

Positive what?

When you use positive constraint, you put yourself into a circumstance where you have no choice but to get something done.

For instance, now that I’ve published these skinny reports for three weeks in a row, my readers are starting to look forward to reading them on Saturdays as they sip their morning coffee and try to decide whether they should get out of their pajamas at all this weekend.

Other examples of positive constraints:

You have an idea for a product, but struggle with finding time to actually do it. Schedule a webinar for your readers where you walk them through your ideas. That way, you’ll have no choice but to get it done, plus you can turn the webinar into a product of its own.

You want to guest post, but procrastination is your middle name. Come up with a great title for your future guest post and email the pitch to the blogger you want to write for; ask them if they’d like to see the draft for the post. If they say yes, you have no choice but to write it.

Clever, huh?

You can learn more about positive constraints from this podcast by Pete Williams.

The idea of using a positive constraint to finally make yourself write those guest posts you should’ve written a long time ago came to me as I was studying the art of guest blogging from Danny Iny’s Write Like Freddy course.

If you want to learn how to write amazing 1,200 – 1,400 word guest posts in under two hours, then I definitely recommend you learn how to Write Like Freddy.

So here’s the scoop on what went down in the past week.

Social Media

Twitter shut down my brand new account after 53 minutes, 16 tweets, and following 10 people.

Moral of the story:

Get the people you connect with back to your blog as soon as possible!

That’s the only way you can protect your “assets” (i.e. potential readers/customers) from the likes of Twitter.

Facebook is now going to let you pay to promote your friends’ posts. Not pages though.

January 24: Twitter acquired and launched Vine: a mobile service that lets you capture and share short looping videos.

Videos play in a loop, and are limited to six seconds — yes, six seconds.

Your reaction to that is probably the same as when you heard that tweets were limited to 140 characters.

Clearly, Twitter and Vine are expecting users to not only adjust, but to also learn to love short videos.

What can you say in six seconds of video?

Something like this:

Stop motion vine vine.co/v/b5H0FPvUvHu

— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) January 24, 2013

Women Trump Men Across All Social Platforms Except Twitter (source).

So if you are targeting certain age/gender audience, it might be time to adjust your marketing strategy.

SEO

I haven’t been writing much about getting traffic from the search engines lately.

Much of it was because of so much uncertainty Google had created with all the changes/updates it launched in the past year.

Only now, after testing a few things, reading a lot, and watching other people fail and/or succeed on their quest for better rankings, I feel much more equipped writing about it.

You’ll see more SEO posts coming from me in the future, but for now, I think you definitely need to check out this post at QuickSprout:

How To Perform A SEO Audit - quicksprout.com

This exceptional post will start you on the right foot with Google.

Make Money

This is not for the faint of heart, work, or budget.

It’s different. It’s mind-blowing. It’s profitable.

Will you take advantage of it?

How To Get Traffic To Your Website Without SEO - affhelper.com

I don’t personally use AdSense, but know many of you do and would love to learn how to leverage it better.

Sunil is just the guy to help.

He just published his Notes from My Google Adsense In Your City Visit and My 1 on 1 Meeting With Google, which I am sure you’ll get a lot of value out of.

This and That

If you are into growing, expanding your online marketing knowledge, and networking with other cool people, I strongly suggest you check out

The Great Online Marketing Scavenger Hunt - firepolemarketing.com

What it is:

“This will be a five week event with over 100 challenges to complete for points, skills and glory. We’ll be taking you through the paces of networking and guest posting, mastering the social web, multi-media, writing, researching and maybe even stepping away from the computer and into the real world once in a while.

If you start and stick it through, by the end of the hunt – even if you don’t win a prize – you will have expanded your reach online, made new connections, deepened existing relationships learned new skills and generally levelled up your business. This, I promise you.”

Head over to FirepoleMarketing.com to sign up for the fun and games.

Thank You

I am vain.

I love seeing my name mentioned around the web.

Plus, it’s good for SEO and traffic.

So to all of you who decided to get on my good side by mentioning TGC in the past week – THANK YOU.

The Perfect Blogging Output Level - Problogger.net

My new best friend Greg Narayan of DearBlogger mentioned TGC in his guest post on Problogger.net.

Once I was blinded by the sight of my name in the post, it was hard to see what else it was about…

After a few blinks, I realized it was really a great post by a great blogger, whose writing style I am starting to fall in love with.

5 Great Bloggers who gave me the Inspiration to start my own Blog - stream-seo.com

Making it to the top (and only) 5 on anyone’s list is quite an honor.

In this post, I learned that:

I have a unique voice;

I have a multiple personality disorder

“Sometimes it seems like she’s so happy to post things that her inner voice comes out to speak. But there are times when she’s also mad and cold about the things she’s analyzing, and that’s something most people don’t have. Most people can’t be rude, unique and happy at the same time.”

I’ve got guts to publish my income reports even though my income is less than stellar.

By the way, you’ll find out why I stopped publishing my income reports in one of my posts next week.

My blog design isn’t that stellar either.

But wait, here’s my favorite part:

“I’ve tried many of the tips from TGC and the important thing is that I can spend 5-10 minutes doing what Ana says and have a real impact on my traffic/engagement/whatever.”

That reminded me why I started blogging to begin with and absolutely made my day.

Thank you, Servando!