President Obama in Office

President Obama used social media to raise money and awareness during his campaign towards the presidency. It should then be no surprise that he has continued his social media outreach with a white house blog and weekly video blog. 

On his blog, which isn’t really written by him, you’ll find updates of what he is doing and copies of remarks given at various events, press briefings and meetings. It should be an interesting chronicle of his daily activities. You can even subscribe to his rss feed. 

A few bloggers might disagree with my analysis of this blog,  but I think this is a start in the right direction for a more transparent presidency. The move is actually one of many that shows Obama wants to reach out to new audiences. His first sit down television interview was the Al-Arabiya, which sub sequentially opened up many more opinions about his actions. 

What do you think about the president’s latest attempts to “join the conversation?” Do you think the nation will listen?

Obama's Blackberry, Photo courtesy of Jae C. Hong.

The following are a few stories from my feed readers that I am following or found interesting over the last couple of days.

Google Disputes Harvard Fellow’s Pollution Estimate – CIO
Interesting new study released by a Harvard physicist that says Google is responsible for high levels of pollution. Of course when you boil it down, the study includes emissions from personal computers used during search, which in that case it wouldn’t matter who is the search provider. Google maintains they are the greenest major search engine.

Useful Tech at CES ‘09 – MSN
CES stands for consumer electronics show. Check out some of the hottest gadgets in this issue.

Web Making You Sick? Help for ‘Cyberchondriacs’ – MSN
One in four people use the Internet to look up health information. This article reviews the strikingly high number of people that actually misdiagnose themselves.

Obama’s big idea: Digital health records – CNN
EMR, short for Electronic Medical Records is part of Barack Obama’s plan to improve healthcare and decrease costs. Healthcare Administrators worry about the ability to find qualified staff to implement universal EMR systems.

Tax Cuts for Teachers – New York Times
Thomas Friedman offers a spectacular idea for boosting the economy, finding better teachers and investing in our future. He suggests eliminating federal taxes for teachers as a means of attracting new talent. He also suggests double the salary of highly qualified math and science teachers, as well as offering green cards to exchange students with whom we help subsidize their education.

I hoped you like these, if you have any feeds worth checking out, please let me know.

Your website should be considered the most important piece of your online marketing puzzle, but if it is the puzzle, you might be in trouble.

While your messages may be strong; Are they strong enough to rank highly in Google, as well as help bring you closer to making a deal?

Balancing building your pages for search engine rankings, as well as closing a deal is a tough. That is why it is important to expand your marketing efforts beyond your website. Consider the following tools for pushing your key messages online.

Google Adwords: There’s no easier way to attract visitors, then to pay for them. With Google Adwords, you create a simple text ad that shows up when people search on Google use one of your keywords during a search. You’re basically advertising to an audience that’s already interested in you. In addition, ads can be placed regionally. Businesses in competitive spaces like laptops and watches, should be aware that ad placement is done through a bidding process and can get relatively expensive.

Blog: A blog is a critical piece of the online marketing puzzle. Not only do they attract visitors through search engines better than a static web pages, but they also bring a real voice to a company. A blog is a great area to make announcements. In the online world, a blog posting can have easily as much impact as a traditional press release.

YouTube Video Channel: YouTube channels have the potential to reach millions. A recent article on TechCrunch [http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/11/07/the-internet-as-a-force-in-politics-obama-would-not-have-won-without-the-internet/] reported that Barack Obama received 14.5 million hours in free exposure during the last election.

If you are having doubts, YouTube videos channels can be customized to reflect your brand. And in terms of quality, you don’t have to worry about creating HD quality video, since the web is not set up to display that.

Twitter: Twitter is a free microblogging service, which asks people to report on what they are doing. The service is unique in that users can microblog by texting from their cell phones. The craze hasn’t entirely taken off, but once you try it, you’ll probably get hooked.

Facebook/MySpace: Social networking, blah, blah, blah. I’ll save this explanation for later, but if you haven’t explored the possibilities, social networks like Facebook and MySpace are great places for spreading your key messages.

New tools for pushing your key messages come out everyday. If you think I missed one, please share by leaving a comment.

Finding time to blog, while I am working and trying to enjoy summer and golfing is tough. Finding time to Twitter on the other hand; It takes about two minutes to write something funny.

If you haven’t tried Twitter, you might want to try. Just set up an account and when you feel like writing something, just text a message to 40404. It’s that simple.

Feel free to follow us on Twitter, as well.

Allan: www.twitter.com/allanwoodstrom

Josh: www.twitter.com/jneiman

Google Trends is a simple tool. It tells you the highest search engine keywords and shows the stories related to them.

A couple days ago, I did a test. On another blog, I wrote about a topic with a keyword that ranked high on Google Trends.

As it turned out, the results were nothing spectacular. They also weren’t bad, but it’s clear to see, if you want to get good results it is much better to anticipate than to react.

How to Anticipate Google Trends:

1. Blog about upcoming events. Immediately following a big event or big show, people go looking for information based on conversations had at the water cooler.
2. A slight extension of the last point, but weighing in on a reality television show is a sure fire way to attract an audience.
3. Don’t shy away from people who are controversial. People and celebrities who are train wrecks (Amy Winehouse, Britney Spears) will continue to hit the news, although following A-listers is extremely competitive and not recommended. Surprisingly politicians are an easy target because of their loyal following both for and against. Just be careful you say though.

Search engine optimization firms and freelance professionals are usually hired with the expectation that they can wave a magic wand and build website traffic fast. And while many of us have proven methods to help increase traffic as fast as possible, unfortunately it is not quite that easy. Listening to Joseph Jaffe speak earlier this year, his advice was to be in it for the long haul, but let’s face it, that answer doesn’t always fly with clients who like to see numbers.

Based on my own experience, I couldn’t agree more Jaffe. With each month of blogging, a quality blogger can expect to gain a quality link here and there and after a while it seems as though each post attracts just a little more traffic than the last.

Not to skirt around the subject, but if you need to build website traffic fast – Start a blog. And with that I have put together a few tips that should be able to build traffic fast.

1. Choose a quality blog host. I recommend using blogger or wordpress. It is amazing how many links you’ll recieve internally from blogger or wordpress. In addition, each of these hosts will submit your sitemap for free.
2. Pick a topic or series of topics and keep it at least semi-focused on your core subject area. This is especially true, if you are hosting a company blog. It will be easier to attract new links if you are offering up bits of information that is new and timely.
3. Customize your look & feel. This will help your credibility with other bloggers and help you attract links.
4. Keep at it. If at first you don’t succeed in building your blog traffic, keep at it. It is unlikely that other bloggers will link to your blog, if it is brand new because of the high likelihood that your blog could be abandoned.
5. Mention your blog in as many other social networks that you are a part of. Some good ones to participate in are Facebook, MySpace, mybloglog.com, blogcatalog.com and Technorati.
6. Submit your content to social bookmarking sites like Digg.
7. Within those social networks, interact with other bloggers by leaving comments and adding to their discussion. This will help them find your blog and build your credibility.\
8. Make it easy to subscribe to your blog feed. This will help build repeat readers.
9. Write quality content. Quality is a key for gaining traffic and aquiring new links.
10. Around big events throw some content up covering it and to your suprise, I think you’ll get some new visitors.

Good luck building website traffic fast. I hope that these ten tips can help you out. If you any additional tips for building traffic fast, please leave a comment.