5 Ways You’re Messing Up On LinkedIn
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Nov 7, 2011
Back in April I wrote my first true introductory post about LinkedIn, giving tips on how to use it effectively. Well, it seems that there’s still a lot of folks out there that are using it incorrectly. How do I know? If it’s irking other people then you’re messing it up in my opinion.
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Frankly, when it comes to your business the last thing you really want to be doing is getting on people’s nerves. Most of these things are minor, but why get irritate people to begin with I always say. So, here are 5 things one should either stop or start doing.
1. Stop going with the default message when reaching out to new people. Goodness, this was my #1 gripe in the last post and it’s at the top again. How hard is it to write something different, even if it’s just “I think we might be able to do some work together so I’d love to connect with you on LinkedIn”, or “I figure this is a good time to connect with each other here on LinkedIn”?
2. When reaching out to people you want to connect with, don’t lie about how you know them. I cringe when I get a connection message that says “so and so says you’re friends” when I have absolutely no idea who they are.
3. Why don’t you have a picture? Unless I personally know someone I refuse to connect with anyone that doesn’t have an image on LinkedIn. My thought is that you’re either trying to hide something or you don’t have enough knowledge to know how to upload a photograph. The idea of LinkedIn is business networking; why the heck wouldn’t you put up an image?
4. Say something in a group every once in awhile. I don’t belong to a bunch of groups but every group I belong to I participate in every once in awhile, sometimes even more then once in awhile. Sure, it’s free, but what’s the point in being in something you’re never going to do anything in? I called people out in one group that has around 1,600 members yet only 10 people ever talk; that’s just a shame.
5. Make your profile more dramatic than a straight up resume. You’re not auditing for a job, you’re hoping to get some kind of business out of it. If there’s a service or product you’d like to highlight, then do it there. It’s a great opportunity to do something a little different that you might not want to do on your website.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Mitch Mitchell
The Fuss About Google+
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Jul 21, 2011
Google+ is all the rage these days as the next big thing in social media. In their own way, they’ve tried to say they’re not a social networking site, but that’s like saying vanilla pudding isn’t pudding (okay, I might say that from time to time since I only like chocolate).
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First let’s talk about what Google+ is, because so many people have different opinions. In a way it reminds me of Facebook when I first signed on. It’s fairly clean and crisp, probably too much for me. Most people who are there now either got there via an invite or have some kind of Google account other than just Gmail. Someone tried to send me an invite when I kind of didn’t care and then she told me about it, so all I did was pull up the link to the site, which is http://plus.google.com and it let me create an account.
When you get there, you’ll find that some people have probably already added you in some fashion to what are called “circles”. There are some default circles already such as Friends, Family and Acquaintances, and you’re allowed to create other circles. The purpose is to be able to categorize people so that you can then determine who you want to follow or contact specifically if you’re not in the mood to follow everyone. You can put people in more than one circle if you want to, something I might have to think about doing.
It also handles people you don’t know differently than Facebook. You can hide or block those people, or you can create a circle to put those people in if you so choose. I created a circle I call “Unsure Folks” until I can figure out if I know them or not. I’ve yet to determine if you can de-list those folks later on if you decide you don’t want them around, but I have learned that you can remove someone from any circle by dragging their image out of the circle and popping them into the netherworld.
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Actually, saying that makes little sense until you’re actually on the site, but you can either drag people’s images to a circle and drag them back or you can hover over people’s images and this menu comes up giving you the option of putting them into a particular circle. By the way, people never know what circle you’ve put them in or whether you’ve put them in a circle to begin with.
Okay, enough of that; you can learn more from many other areas, including the little video I’ve put at the bottom. Even in the video, the guy begins by calling it “Facebook killer”. Let’s explore this and other things I’ve been hearing.
There are a lot of folks touting this thing as the social network that’s going to kill Facebook, Twitter, and possibly LinkedIn, since MySpace is pretty much dead. I’m not sure I agree, and I wish I could see what everyone else is seeing.
For instance, I still prefer Twitter because it’s so “instant”; Google+ isn’t quite there yet.
I’m not going to say I prefer Facebook but it’s a totally different animal. There are some groups on Facebook that have great interaction but many are fairly dead. People are saying group conversations on Google+ are much better but I think it depends on the group. For instance, there’s a group of Syracuse University folks who think this is the cat’s meow (I wonder where that phrase came from) but then they’re all talking amongst themselves and they already know each other so that works just fine.
For someone like me, though, well, I don’t already have a group of people that I automatically talk to. Right now the majority of people I’m connected to are you good folks that I blog with, but almost none of us have ever talked with each other directly, either on the phone or through video. This means we really don’t overly know each other personally. I’ve had a conversation or two here and there with some of you on Google+, but nothing like hundreds of ideas going on at the same time.
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Also, the site has something it calls Sparks, and I thought it might be like the Facebook groups where, if you say you happen to like something, it pops you into a group with like minded people. Instead, if you put in a topic it pulls up news stories or blog links and such, pretty much like Google would do; there’s no discussion going on about it, so what’s the point? I can just go to Google News instead.
Finally I keep hearing about the business part of it and how it can improve business relations. I’m missing that as well. On LinkedIn you can find people based on what it is they do. You can’t do that on Google+; you have to know people’s names, or someone else who might be connected to them. There’s this feature called Hangout which is their version of a chat room, and after downloading a small bit of software you can talk either through video, audio, or a combination. You can only have 10 people in a room right now. I like how smoothly it all runs; I don’t like that you can’t invite individuals. To get around that you’d have to create a new circle and add certain people to it, and then delete the circle later on once you’re done with it. However, it’s hard to complain all that much about another free service.
Will this be the death of Facebook? I don’t see it, but one never knows about people. There are no games and no groups, and I think a lot of people like those things. Will it be the death of Twitter? I don’t think so once again because I think Twitter’s value is its speed of conveying information to a ton of people all at once; it’s not going to work the same way on Google+. Will it be the death of LinkedIn? Once again I don’t see it, since LinkedIn’s value is in connecting with only business people and allowing you to search for people who are in your industry or that you might be able to do business with; Google+ offers Google search and that’s it; I don’t feel that’ll get it done.
And that’s what I have to say right now. Of course as people leap to Google at break-neck speeds right now we all might find that people are looking for something a little different than what we have now. If it allowed more of a pick and choose I might like it better than I do now. It’s early yet; let’s see what it looks like six months from now.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Mitch Mitchell
10 Things Not To Do On Twitter
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Oct 20, 2009
Twitter is the fastest growing social networking site in the world today. As with most new technologies, rules for proper use are written on the fly, and Twitter rules are no different, except, in this case, the rules aren’t quite written, and it’s the users that make the rules.
There are ten things that many Twitter people do that are generally considered as bad manners. Some of those things are:
* Not having an image of some sort with your profile. Unless people know who you are, they’re reluctant to follow anyone without some kind of image to give people an idea of who they might be.
* Using a tiny.url as the link to your website. Hiding a link to your website makes people suspect that you have an ulterior motive in putting it there, and if people don’t trust you from the start, they won’t follow you.
* Writing about every single step of your day. No one is interested in following every second of anyone else’s life, yet that’s how some people participate on Twitter. If that person isn’t your friend, you’ll probably drop them because they’re taking up too much of your time and space when you have other people to follow.
* Only posting links or quotes and not talking to anyone. People love information, but we hate being ignored when we want to talk to someone. If a person has 30,000 people following them, or if they’re a celebrity, they might get a break, but for everyone else, if you don’t ever engage anyone openly, people will unfollow you pretty quickly.
* Posting the same links over and over. Many people are on Twitter only to market themselves. If someone is following you and sees that you only post the same content all the time, you can bet they’re going to drop you as soon as possible.
* Using a lot of bad language. This is the bane of modern existence, people forgetting how to be courteous in public, but being consistently bad mouthed will get people to drop you like a bad habit, even if they use bad language in their real lives.
* Following a lot of people but only having a few follow you. This is a big red flag for most Twitter users, because it’s the tactic employed by spammers. Though there are often these big pushes towards increasing one’s followers, it’s better to increase both in a more organic fashion.
* Not having any posts. If you never write anything, or almost never write anything, why would you expect people to follow you? Twitter is all about people interacting with each other, and if you’re not interacting, or you have one or two posts and they’re both talking about the latest product you’re marketing, you’ll never get any followers.
* Getting into an argument with another person. It can invariably happen to anyone, but it’s considered bad practice because the participants never know what they’re going to say, and at some point they might say something that offends a big number of people. It’s usually best to try to let it go as soon as possible.
* Saying something in the open that you’d never say in person. Last year, a reporter for the Chicago Sun Times wrote a negative post about too many fat people on the train he was on. Within an hour, he had been vilified worldwide, and many people had already sent letters to the newspaper demanding that he be fired. Back in January, another person lost a job he’d just been offered because he made a derogatory comment about taking the job without realizing that the person who offered him the job was following him on Twitter.
These are just some things that people need to think about when they’re going to participate on Twitter. Avoiding these ten things can make your Twitter experience a pleasant one.
Massive Traffic To Your Website/Blog?
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Mar 14, 2009
During my surfing party this week, I came across another article on how to drive massive traffic to your website. I don’t know why I keep reading these things because they all tend to say the same thing. However, this one just made me stop and decide that I wanted to comment on all of its points. The article is titled 20 Simple Ways to get Massive Traffic to your Web Site (at least it was; seems the title has been changed) by Penny C. Sansevieri, and it’s not that it’s a bad article, just that, in my opinion, at this time and place it’s somewhat misleading. It’s no more misleading than all the other articles I’ve read that say the same exact thing, but she’s listed her points, and I’m going to address each point individually. I do hope you go and read her article, though, which I’m not going to quote here, only her 20 points, with my commentary on each.
Before I begin, I want to make sure I get my point across. There are many things we can do to try to increase traffic to our sites. I’ve mentioned in the past how Twitter helped me increase traffic, and how commenting on other blogs helped also. For my main business site, I haven’t talked much about how I got that one going, but I did some of the things mentioned in this article. The thing is, I did increase in traffic, but massive traffic? I don’t know that if I go from 5 to 25 visits a day that I consider that massive traffic. Massive traffic to me is 1,000 visits a day, and I don’t mean unique visits, which I get, but real live visitors that Google Analytics tells me about, or more. Still, let’s look at this list of 20 to see what I’ve done, or my opinions on them:
1) Write articles: believe it or not this is an incredible tool for driving traffic.
I have 10 articles on Ezine Articles and Evan Carmichael, and, according to Analytics, I’ve never gotten a single person to any of my sites because of them. They’ve been used elsewhere, though, so I’ve gotten links, but traffic,… nope.
2) Social bookmark *everything* – and I do mean everything
This one can take awhile, but I’ve done two things. One, I add the majority of articles I write on my three blogs to Delicious, and I also have every new blog post I write on all of my blogs showing up on my profile on Facebook. I know that at least two people have visited this blog because of a Delicious posting, but I only know of one person who’s even seen my blog listings on Facebook, and Analytics has never shown anyone coming to my blogs from there.
3) List yourself in the best directories
In this post, she was talking about paid directories, but I’m leery of many of these really big directories to begin with. As opposed to what I tried to do with my Services & Stuff site, you could end up in a category on a directory that has nothing to do with what you really do, or want to be known for, but you’re also then competing, at times, with hundreds of other people who do the same thing. I don’t know that I’d pay for it, let alone overly worry about the non-paid ones. My main business site is listed in over 300 directories (I checked), and I certainly didn’t ask to be listed on that many directories, and I’m listed for diversity training on almost all of them. Thing is, I tried to go in and change some of them to something else, but you can’t, and they’ll only list you under one category for the most part. Hey, I’ll take the one way link, but traffic,… nope.
4) Get yourself listed at: DMOZ.org
At this point, DMOZ is kind of a joke. It’s so big, and they don’t have enough people working on it, that if you decide to try it might take 3 or 4 years before someone got around to adding you, if they decide to add you at all. My main business site is there, though I can’t remember how to find it, but none of my other sites are there because I didn’t even try to put them there. I’m lost in the shuffle, and, of course, almost no traffic has ever come from there.
5) Review: if you can review hot new products or books within your market, head on over to Amazon.com and start positioning yourself as an expert.
I can’t say I’ve done a lot of this, but I am listed as a reviewer on Amazon, and I’ve reviewed a few things. However, no one has ever followed any of my reviews back to any of my sites.
6) Offer a freebie on Craig’s List: you’ll be amazed at how much traffic you get from a single Craig’s List ad.
This one I’ve never tried. I have listed services I offer on Craigslist, and have received very miniscule traffic to one of my sites, but otherwise I’ve been pretty much ignored.
7) Create a “recommended by” list on your Del.icio.us page
As I mentioned, I submit my articles to Delicious, but I’ll admit I haven’t done any kind of list except for my own stuff. Still, if no one is even looking at what I post there, why would I expect anyone would care about a list I create?
And speaking of your email signature line…do you have one? If you don’t, create one.
This is an absolute for publicity, but the truth is that most people tend to miss it when they decide they want something. I can’t believe how many people will ask me for a link to my website, or when I send business email out, a phone number, and it’s right there in the signature line. People ask me for an address from my business site, and I have my address on every single page! This is important to do, but it’s never driven “massive” traffic to me.
9) Lend a helping hand: you can be an answer person at Yahoo Answers (http://answers.yahoo.com/)
I’ve set up to do this, and I did it fairly faithfully for a week. Number of visitors to my blog; zero. Now, maybe it takes more time than that, but, oddly enough, you find that there really aren’t as many questions you can answer as you might think there are, and sometimes, when you do find one, many other people have already answered it.
10) Set up a social networking site using Facebook.com, Linkedin.com, or Squidoo.
I’ve already mentioned Facebook, but I’m also on LinkedIn, Ryze, Izania, and about 4 or 5 others, and I’ve gotten little traffic from any of them. Ryze has probably been the most productive, but I’ve invested a lot of time there, and for what I got back, “massive” wouldn’t come close to describing.
11) Make sure your blog has an RSS feed
Heck, y’all know I have a RSS feed because of that RSS contest I tried to run at the beginning of January. I have that feed on all of my blogs, though I haven’t put it on all of my sites; might have to think about that one some more. Still, I haven’t gotten massive subscribers, and I’m doubting massive would describe traffic generated from those feeds either.
12) Join relevant groups at Yahoo groups (http://groups.yahoo.com/).
This I did, and then got out of. I think Yahoo Groups had its day, but it’s on the decline now, as there’s more spam related postings than anything else. As for traffic,…
13) Podcasting is another great way to drive traffic.
This one I’ve never done; the closest is adding the Odiogo widget to my blogs. I haven’t erased podcasting off my list of things I might want to do later, including video of some sort, so I’ll have to say I’m not sure how well this one would work, and I have no real history with it.
14) Start a blog and then once you do, start commenting on other people’s blogs, linking to them from your site or adding them to your blogroll.
Goodness, isn’t this what we always talk about around here, and amongst ourselves? This is the one thing I know has created more traffic to my blogs. Massive? Well, I still wouldn’t go quite that far, but interest and visitors, definitely.
15) Inbound links: don’t squander your time (or a perfectly good link) on smaller low-traffic sites. Instead spend your time going after high traffic, high quality sites.
Nice idea, but in general how would you know? I think we’ve debated whether it’s worth commenting on a big time blog with hundreds of other comments that don’t give a dofollow link versus commenting on a blog that might not have any other comments, but is a dofollow blog. We’ve even debated whether relevance in topics has to be there or not (I tend to believe it doesn’t matter as much as dofollow).
16) Start an email newsletter
I write two newsletters for my business, along with many other newsletters, but don’t have newsletters for my blogs. Man, that would be a lot more to deal with, wouldn’t it? However, there’s always been the question of whether newsletters drive traffic or sales. I think traffic would be stretching it because, with a newsletter, a reader doesn’t really have to visit your site unless you make it a condition of reading an entire article, which I consider as being somewhat smarmy. Now, you could send out a weekly “newsletter” telling people what articles were written on your blog or site for the week, with links to all the articles, and I guess that would be okay, but is that driving massive traffic to your site or just bringing back people who are looking to read what you’ve written back for another look? And, in this day and age, aren’t more of those people probably subscribing to your RSS feed, as it pertains to your blog?
17) And speaking of offline efforts: if you’re ever quoted in a magazine or other publication, make sure and mention your URL as its appropriate to the topic.
This I’ve done, but it’s never brought massive traffic. Like when I posted on my business blog the last interview I did (which can be found by going here, or downloaded and listened to as a MP3 file here). It got a lot of hits, but mainly because I sent it to all the people in my address book and they popped over to either listen or download. That was a one and done, and all those people knew me already. Anyone who didn’t know me,… nothing massive there. Still, it’s pretty good publicity that will always be there for me.
18) If you have products to sell why not get a store on eBay?
This might be a good idea, but more for making money than driving traffic to one’s site, unless you own a commerce site. It certainly wouldn’t drive massive traffic to your blog.
19) Load a video on YouTube and 57 other video sites.
Once again, something I can’t comment on since I’ve never done it. Of course, I do put up a post that’s mainly videos here and there, but without posting something I’ve created on my own and uploaded somewhere, I don’t know how well this works or not. I think every person has the opportunity to go viral, though.
20) If you’re going to go through all the trouble of getting traffic to your site, make sure your site is converting this traffic into something. Get folks to sign up for something, your newsletter, the RSS feed on your blog.
This one’s already been addressed in other comments above, so it’s more of a wrap up of other points than something new.
Anyway, those are my thoughts on these 20 points. I’m not saying they’re not good to do anyway, because publicity is publicity, and one or more of these might do wonders for you. And if one of you gets massive traffic because of it, then you’re just magnificent. But for the rest of us, the regular folks, unless we already have a big time following this isn’t what’s going to get it done.
What will get it done? Not that I really know, since I’m not there, but the two things I’ve found that seem to work the best are, of course, commenting on other blogs, and writing posts on a consistent basis, so people know you’re not a “hit and run” poster, someone who’s not going to write much of anything with any consistency. Those two things have helped me the most, and though I don’t consider myself as having massive traffic, I do have growing traffic, last week Feedburner actually told me I had 84 subscribers (though today it’s back down into the low 70′s; I wonder what drives that).
Okay, your turn; what do you think about these 20 points, and please, go read the other article for comparison?
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010-2012 Mitch Mitchell
Thoughts About Facebook
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on May 17, 2008
On my Reviews of Everything site, I wrote a review on Facebook, around the same time they started advertising.
Now I’m more months into it, and I’m still wondering about the overall value of Facebook as a true social networking site. Here’s my issue; there’s not much networking going on at all, let alone socializing. The site is replete with groups that either are set up to recruit people to become friends with, or groups whose overall purpose is to satiate their lascivious tendencies (go look that one up; not a word I get to use often).
I’m certainly not a prude, but there are only be so much of this sort of thing before one gets bored. I’ve created two groups of my own there. One is for support of people who have diabetes, as I do, and the other is for people to post their blogs and talk about blogging in general. On one of the groups, I have maybe 25 people who’ve signed up, but mainly it’s just me talking and posting links to news about things related to diabetes. I can’t get a conversation going to save my soul. On the other group, some people are finally sharing their blogs, but no one wants to talk about anything, only to share their blog. On that group I don’t necessarily mind so much, as I love looking at new blogs, but I can’t believe people would join these groups, then have nothing to say.
I only have one friend on Facebook who’s actually found a group that has people who have real conversations, and it’s more of a group that does the same work as she does, so of course they’re talking shop. I’d love to join a group in one of the industries I’m a part of myself, but every group I looked at had no one talking to anyone, only a lot of people posting links to try to sell something.
Frankly, if this is what social networking is about online I’m kind of depressed. There was more conversation back in the old BBS bulletin board days; how many of you remember that? Facebook, LinkedIn, Friendster, Black Planet, Izania,… nope, so far I’m not all that impressed.
Of course, I’m not leaving Facebook any time soon, because of only one thing; that Scrabulous thing, the game that’s actually Scrabble. Now that I can’t get enough of, and if that’s all I have, then so be it. It’s not overly social either, but at least it’s fun.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Mitch Mitchell
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