The Cutting Edge of Online Marketing

Many of us spend a good deal of time online – marketing, listing properties or products, blogging, social networking or just surfing the web. It’s that last one that can cause some problems.

When you conduct a search for something on the web, how can you be sure that the site you are about to visit is free of malware, viruses and worms or actually has the content you are looking for – not just another Viagra ad or surprise porn?

And how do you influence what your kids see when they click try to visit a site or a link on a Search Engine Results Page (SERP)?

Web of Trust (WOT) is a community-powered web rating service that I wrote about in Safer Surfing – That’s WOT it’s about at BobStovall.com this morning.

They give you a free add-on for Firefox, Internet Explorer or Google Chrome. Once you’ve installed the add-on, every website you visit and every Google search result will display the WOT “donut.”

(If you use Safari or Opera, there is a bookmarklet that you place in your bookmarks toolbar. Clicking it brings up a window in which you can rate websites.)

If enough WOT members have visited the site and rated it (on trustworthiness, vendor reliability, privacy and child safety) the WOT donut will show green for highly rated sites, yellow for sites with some reservations and red for sites you should avoid.

One great feature – if the child safety rating is low, you can use WOT to block viewing the site.

You can even see a site’s rating before you go there as WOT ratings will show up on Google Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). Here’s an example of a search term that tends to draw red flags.

If you or your company have a website or blog, you want to ensure that you have a green rating for all four rating criteria. One idea for doing that, is to get your WOT add-on, rate our website – then, add your website’s URL in the comments below and ask other readers of this post to rate you.

Because there is no influence over others rating your URL, we don’t have to worry about bad sites wasting our time asking us to rate them.

You can get your WOT add-on at the Web of Trust Downloads page. While you’re there, take a few moments to find out how the system works and how you can put it to work for you.

When we think of “multi-tasking”, we usually think of someone doing more than one thing at a time – performing multiple tasks in the same time space. Well, I’m here to tell you that “multi-tasking” is one of the biggest time-wasters in our lives.

It’s impossible to focus on two things at once. In fact, one of the definitions of focus is “an act of concentrating interest or activity on something”. Something, not somethings.

We can only truly focus on one thing at a time, so most “multi-tasking” is actually just jumping from one activity to the next without finishing the first. And each time we do that there is a period of transition as we phase out of one task into another. If you do that twenty times in a day, how much time have you wasted winding down from one thing to ramp up the other?

I’ve always been amazed when praise was heaped on someone who finished two four-hour tasks in ten hours, but worked on them alternately all day. “He’s a great multi-tasker” is often said. But the “people-pleasing” tendency to half-focus on tasks and take longer to finish them (often at a lower quality level) does service to no one.

“OK.” you say. “You believe multi-tasking is a sham, but what does this have to do with online marketing? You DO remember the name of your blog, don’t you?”

Yes, I do. And marketing online is one place where you can put “multi-tasking” to work for you without the downside.

When you create a truly effective online marketing plan, several pieces need to be set in motion. Website, blog, email and social networking all come into play. Building a plan where they supplement each other allows you to have several marketing applications all working for you at the same time. And THAT is truly “multi-tasking.”

So how does this work at it’s simplest form? Let’s say you’re about to have a Ground Hog Day Sale on widgets. (No occasion right now? Make one up!) You post the widget sale to your blog. A plugin on your blog posts the Sale headline and link to your Twitter account. Facebook draws from your Twitter feed and posts it to your Facebook fan page. LinkedIn pulls it from that same Twitter feed. Your email program pick up the original feed from the blog and emails it to your entire mailing list.

You just made one post and used 5 different online methods of reaching your market. How’s that for “multi-tasking”?

So how do you go about assembling the pieces to do this? Same as eating the proverbial elephant – one step at a time. The first thing you need is the blog. If you already have a website, a blog can be added to it. If you don’t have a website, pull yourself out of 1997 and get one. You can use a blog as your website. It’s fairly simple if you know what you are doing. If you don’t have the skill or the time to invest, get someone to do it for you.

To really make this work for you, you need a “self-hosted” blog using WordPress. That means no free WordPress.com or Blogger blogs. They are fine when used for personal blogs or feeders to your real blog, but they lack the flexibility of a self-hosted one.

If you are really interested in learning how to setup your own blog using WordPress there are specialized video sets to help through the process of getting a web hosting account, installing WordPress, configuring it and getting started.

All of the other parts of setting up your own auto-pilot “multi-tasking” machine will be covered in future posts to this blog.

For now, as in all things, getting started is the first step.

If you’re reading this on an RSS feed or republished on another blog, please see the Cutting Edge in Online Marketing Blog at MHMSM.com for more posts like this one.

Faith Barnard gives some very useful tips for setting up a Facebook Fan Page as a way to build a following of folks interested in manufactured housing in your location. Although there is no specific info on marketing housing, this is 4½ minutes of solid tips on doing business on Facebook.

A quick video tip on the key points in creating your fabulous Facebook Fan Page. I recommend key points that are not technical in nature that you can apply right away to setting up your page. My intention with my short Facebook video tips is to give you pragmatic and helpful tips that help you optimize your networking on Facebook and grow your business.