Sometimes I forget that people don’t know about potential learning/work tools that may have been around for several years. Such is the case with Google Custom Search (which has been around now for more than four years).

Anyway…my catalyst for this post was a wonderful online workshop I did last week for AITD. They’ve got a nice line up of professional development opportunities and I was happy to be asked to present on one of my favorite topics – GOOGLE. (Note: Even if you’re not a member of AITD, I think you can could send an inquiry to see if you can sign up for an online event. What’s nice is I did it at US 8:00 pm ET / 5 pm PT (10 am +1 Sydney) so it’s a nice evening option for those in the US.)

One featured tool I had kind of forgotten about was Custom Search Engine. The name is pretty self-explanatory. You can create your own search engine using one or more websites or specific web pages, host a search box on your own website, and create a custom look and feel. You can add other people’s custom search engine  when shared by the creator.

One nice example I found was in Adobe’s Community site. They use it to selectively index Adobe learning and support content as ...

Hubspot has a useful graphic that makes sense when you think about it, but is still useful when someone comes to you asking for a Facebook page with 10,000 fans by next month.   The most popular Facebook pages according to Hubspot, involve movies, TV shows, popular books, bands and so on.

And at the bottom of the scale we have Govt pages, musicians (I guess unknown ones?), local businesses and Govt public services.

In fact, Inside Facebook says that entertainment sites are now driving a larger proportion of traffic to the social network, helped along by Facebook’s ‘like’ button that it unveiled the other month (and that I’ve finally got around to installing myself).

Inside Facebook quotes Compete stats that show that the whole boycott Facebook campaign over privacy issues was something of a non-starter, and probably a discussion point only among the minority of us that read the social media and tech press - in the US at least, Facebook gained 2.1 million new visitors in May.

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You’ve picked the domain, decided on the design and started posting great content that showcases your expertise. 

The hard work is over, right?

Not exactly—after all, you need people to actually read that useful content that you’re diligently cranking out. So how do you get those eyeballs to your site? There are literally hundreds of ways to drive traffic to your blog or website, but here I will highlight just a few of the ways to drive traffic and generate interest in what it is you have to offer.

Write articles: Most of the article directories online are free to submit your articles to. They usually allow you to add a resource box at the end, which can include a blurb about you and your business and a link back to your site.  Some of the directories I like to use include Ezine Articles, Go Articles, Idea Marketers and Articles Base.

Comment on other blogs: When you comment on other high-traffic blogs in your niche you not only get a link back to your own site, you’re also boosting your site’s visibility in front of the blog owner and the others leaving comments.

Social media: Provide links to your latest posts on sites like Facebook, ...

What’s SEO and what does it do? Do I need it? What’s PPC?

Those are some of the most common questions I’m asked when I begin working with clients small and large. Let’s start by defining them:

• SEO means Search Engine Optimization In short, this is getting a site to rank better in search engines using techniques that are both technical and marketing oriented. Some SEO is performed onsite, other aspects are performed offsite.
• SMM means Social Media Marketing Though this is a broad category including everything from blogging to YouTube to Foursquare and all of the social networks, we can understand it as using social tools on the web to foster interest, engage our target market and ultimately achieve goals – whether those goals are brand awareness, fundraising, sales, thought leadership, etc.
• PPC means Pay Per Click Advertising! The most common PPC campaigns are through Google AdWords, and this group is also commonly known as SEM or Search Engine Marketing, as many of the ads appear among search engine results.

Did that solve all your problems and answer all of your questions? All ready to go and handle your web marketing? No?

Let’s work with an analogy ...

Someone asked a question on a message board the other day, and it started me thinking again about something I’ve been noticing more and more lately.  The question was basically “Have any of you landed any business from your social media connections?”

It’s a perfectly valid question, to be sure—and I decided to take a moment to reply to it.  My answer was a resounding yes, but as I clarified, not in a “Hey, let me hire you right off of Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn etcetera” kind of way some people might be looking for.

In fact, it doesn’t usually happen that way, folks.

This idea that social media is somehow supposed to function as a direct sales channel goes hand in hand with what I have been seeing more of lately—people seeming to want to make social media a lot more complicated than it needs to be.

In the amount of time someone has gone back and forth debating how much time it’s going to take out of their schedule, worrying about what to say and stressing over whether “social media really works,” they could have already set up a profile, started connecting and be well on their way to seeing that yes—it really and truly does work.

Here’s how ...