The Maine SEO Blog

This morning I attended my second Social Media Breakfast Maine (#SMBME), and this time I was lucky enough to be invited as a presenter. Today’s event was split into two sections:

• What is SEO and Real Time Search? (by the brilliant Kasi Gajtkowski)
• How to Use SEO to Optimize Your Blog and Social Media Updates (by moi)

As far as my portion of the presentation, you can view the full slideshow below, but here are some of the biggest things to take away:

• SEO Goals
  • Short-term:
    • Rank better
    • Drive traffic
  • Long-term
    • Sell more products/services
    • Have more email signups
    • Make more conversions
• There should be a balance between please the search engines (SEO) and pleasing your audience (personability).

For tips on how to optimize your blog/social profiles, you’ll just have to view the slideshow

Who doesn’t want more hours in the day? We all do.

Unfortunately, I don’t have the secret that will add minutes to your day; but I do have some that will help you use your time more wisely.

Blogging

1. Have go-to blogpost ideas ready for a rainy day. Try some of these easy tips to get started.
2. Repurpose your content by guest blogging or article marketing. Take an existing blogpost you already have and put a different spin on it, or elaborate on a certain point.

Social Media

1. Use services to send out mass status messages to all of your social media profiles. My favorite is ping.fm.
2. Spend your time where your audience is at. If they’re on Twitter, be on Twitter. If they’re on LinkedIn, make sure you’re answering questions on LinkedIn. If your audience isn’t in a particular social space – and you’re pressed for time – I would argue it’s not worth being there.
3. Use Networked Blogs for Facebook, and skip having to worry about posting every blogpost to your fan page. Use a service like Twitterfeed to have blogposts auto-tweeted.

What about you? What are your tips for saving time blogging/social media success?

Nicki Hicks
Let’s work smarter, not harder

Photo credit: tonivc

Today marks two years that I’ve been at flyte. Two years…really? It goes by fast. I just wanted to say a few things about what I’ve learned in the past two years. And it’s a lot, so I’ll try to be brief.

Your style will come with time. I just read my very first blogpost and…yikes! Content’s not terrible, but I just don’t write like that anymore – I hope. Hopefully, my writing’s a little sharper these days. Then again, I could be dead wrong.

Be who you are. As with so many things in life, being yourself undoubtedly proves to be the icing on the cake. Sometimes you might be snarky, other times argumentative. It doesn’t really matter…as long as that’s who you (or at least part of you) are.

Writing for the web is different than other types of writing. You may very well be a very gifted author, poet, or journalist…but there is something very unique about the Interwebs.

Calls-to-action, bulleting, bolding, and linking, oh my! It’s not necessarily the most natural way to write, but it is the most intuitive online and it’s what web users are used to; and it just takes a little getting used to (see Point #1).

So, thanks. Thanks for stopping by. Thanks for reading. Thanks for commenting. Thanks for coming back. I truly appreciate it.

Nicki Hicks
I’m all choked up

Twitter gives you 140 characters to say something. 140. [To give you an idea of how short that is, I'm at 143 as of the end of this paragraph.]

With a blog or your website, you have space. Space to write however much you want. But Twitter forces us into a rectangular box of limited characters. Adding another person’s handle? Go ahead. Including a link? Have at it. But it’ll cost you a few characters.

The good news?

With so few characters, you’re bound to tighten up your writing. Can you really include all of those “…”s? Should you drop the “LOL” on the end of your tweet? Maybe it’s time to learn what “FWIW”, “NSFW”, and “FTW” really mean so that you can stop wasting precious characters spelling them out.

I joke, but Twitter will help you write sharper, clearer, and more concisely. Tweeting will help you think more about what you’re writing and cut out all of the fluff that doesn’t matter.

The better news?

People will actually take the few seconds to read what you’ve written. With a website or blog,  you’ve got skimmers. But on Twitter, people know that reading your tweet won’t take a whole 5 minutes of their precious time. It’ll take 5 seconds.

The catch: make sure you tweet things worth reading so you don’t get tuned out…or worse, unfollowed.

Nicki Hicks
Follow me to see if I can keep it short and sweet

In Facebook, the line blurs between fan pages and personal pages. Creating events is just another time that line blurs.

If you’re trying to create a personal event, you’ll find the quick setup at the right hand side of your homepage.

If you’re trying to create a fan page event, start by going to your fan page. Then follow these steps:

1. Click “edit page”.



2. Scroll down to the “Events” section. Click edit.
   



3. Create your event, edit the details, then invite any of your (personal) friends.
4. You can’t send fans an email like you can with group members, but you can send them an update. Go to your event page, and click “Update fans of [your fan page]“.
   



5. Craft a message to go along with your event invite and send!

That’s all there is to it. Now get out there and start creating some events!

Nicki Hicks
Invite your fans, not your friends

Last week, a client asked if she should look into YouTube search stories, after seeing one used by a colleague on LinkedIn.

Having never heard of search stories, I took a closer look. As it turns out, the videos are quick (it takes about 10-15 minutes to create one) and easy.

The better news? If you don’t already have a YouTube channel, this quick video is a great way to make your video debut.

How to create a search story

The steps are so easy, I really don’t need to share them. But what fun would that be?

1. Start by deciding on seven different search queries.  You can further leverage them by changing the searches to web, blog, news, image, and more. (I caution you: make sure you choose searches you rank #1 for, as the video will zoom in on that query! Don’t worry, you’ll get to preview your choices in the window below.)



2. Choose your musical selection.



3. Review and publish!

And you’re done. Wasn’t that easy?

Don’t stop now. Keep creating video content because if a picture is worth a thousand words, how many is a video worth? Also, make sure that if you’re creating your first YouTube channel you brand it.

Here’s the flyte search story video.

Nicki Hicks
Quick and easy video