Susanne, I know you just started using Cinch. Could you tell me more about it? I’d like to know how you decide what topics to talk about and record, and what you think the best ways are to have your recordings heard by the masses and maybe go viral?

I just started using Cinch.fm as a result of a comment by Connie Ragen Green here on this blog. She looked at my to-do list for week one of our challenge and suggested I include some sort of audio content to allow readers to hear my voice. One of her recommendations was to use Cinch.fm as an easy way to get started with a mini-podcast of sorts.

Think of it as Twitter for audio. You have a profile on the Cinch.fm site and can record short little audio clips directly from the site or even from your phone.

The next question of course is what do you do with them and it’s something I’m still figuring out. People can follow you on the Cinch website and listen to your audio clips. You can also link directly to your profile page and individual audio clips.

A third option is to share them on your own sites by either embedding them or using a sidebar widget that shares your most recent recordings.

Here’s a clip I recorded yesterday about Passive income:

I also like the idea that I can promote my audios via Facebook and twitter.

I’m still at the point of just getting comfortable with audio, so for now I’m recording little tips and ideas as they pop into my head. I like the fact that I can share something much quicker than sitting down to write a blog post about. Most of my podcast ideas so far have come out of other things I’ve been working on including blog posts, articles and the guest blog posts I’ve been writing.

In the coming weeks I want to get a lot more strategic about how I market and promote these little audio clips. I don’t see a huge following directly on the Cinch.fm website which makes me think that the best way to get my recordings heard will be to share them through my established networks which include my blogs, Twitter, Facebook and my email lists.

Sharing some audio tips here and there via those channels should go a long way in promoting my clips while at the same time adding another dimension to the conversations I have with my readers and followers.

As far as getting clips to go viral, my strategy has always been to share great, helpful information and then work on getting the ball rolling by telling others about it. If you can get enough momentum and the information is worth sharing, it’ll start to take off and go viral.

I hope that answers your questions Peggy and has gotten you interested in audio podcasting and Cinch.fm. Do you think you’ll start using it?

P.S. Of course you can also listen to any clips I record directly on my Cinch page. If you’re a member as well, let’s connect there.

I figured I’d quickly check the rankings and see if we were still anywhere to be found in Google. I wasn’t expecting much since I’d paid absolutely no attention to this post after getting it to rank almost a year ago. What I found was surprising:

The second listing is for a Facebook note about the blog post (that also happens to link directly to Tracy’s blog).

Here’s what the Facebook note looks like:

The question is … can we get Facebook notes content to rank on a regular basis and drive targeted traffic back to our niche sites this way (along with growing our Facebook circle of influence).

I’m doing some testing but for now, let me show you how to quickly and easily create content on Facebook notes via your blog’s RSS feed.

I recommend you start by creating a Facebook page about your blog or niche website. While you’re editing the page, go to the Apps section and enable the “notes” app. Go to notes and look in the left-hand sidebar. Toward the bottom you’ll see a  section called “Subscribe” with a link to your pages RSS feed and right below it a link called “Edit Import Settings”.

Click on it and you’ll be able to import your blog’s RSS feed into your Facebook page’s notes. I recommend you set your blog’s RSS feed to only show a summary to encourage readers to click through to your blog.

Of course you can also share unique content (in other words, new stuff you’re writing) via Facebook notes along with articles. I’m setting up some tests this week with articles I’ve written in the past and will report on the results within the next few days.

If you have any experience with Facebook Notes, I’d love to hear about it.

P.S. To see this Facebook notes content import in action, visit my Daily Affiliate Tasks Facebook Page here. While you’re there, I’d appreciate a “like”.

Grab a cup of coffee and spend a few minutes (2:36) to watch this:

If you’re ready to learn more about making the most of these sites and extend your social media influence, grab your copy of the Social Media Sunday.

It’s a short report on one of my favorite new tools – Hootsuite.

Using Hootsuite To Manage Your Social Media Engagement (PDF)

And speaking of social media …

Ellen Britt has put together an amazing package of resources to learn more about this topic. She’s convinced several big names (like Connie Green, Jessica Swanson, Denise Wakeman, Christine Gallagher to name a few) to give her access to some of their best products on social media and she’s packaged them together into the ultimate learning tool.

And for the next few days, you can get an incredible deal on these courses (valued together at well over $2000)… but hurry, the price goes up every day!

P.S. I grabbed the Social Media Ice Cream Sunday package yesterday and still can’t believe how much I got. I’ve started working my way through the course and am VERY impressed. Unless you are already a social media guru, you can definitely benefit from this.

I love the fact that it includes ebooks, audios and videos so I can keep studying no matter where I am… I was listening to some of the audios while driving and am about to go sit outside with the pdf versions loaded on my kindle.

I can see how incredibly powerful it is, but I have a hard time staying focused at times and end up getting sucked into chatting with friends, watching cute puppy videos and worst of all playing Facebook games.

Enough about social media distractions though. Here’s how you can use it to grow your bottom line…

Getting Your Feet Wet With Affiliate Marketing

Social media is perfect when you’re getting started with affiliate marketing. Pick a niche, become active on Facebook, Twitter and the likes. Get to know your target market and over time, start promoting some affiliate links on occasion.

Note: I didn’t say spam your followers and friends with affiliate link after affiliate link. Join in the conversation, share something of value and then sprinkle in the occasional affiliate link if you have something you can whole heartedly recommend.

Connecting With Your Target Market

Social Media is also perfect for market research. Get to know the individuals that make up part of your target market and talk to them. Find out what they want to know more about, what they are passionate about, what problems they are facing etc.

Building Your List

Your next step is to build your list. Mention any “ethical bribes” like short reports, email mini-courses and the likes that you are offering people that sign up for your list and start converting followers, friends and people in your circles into email subscribers.

A great way to do this is via a Facebook page which is something I’m learning more about this month. (And yes, I’ll be blogging about what I find out works for me).

Building Your Blog Readership

Don’t be shy about linking back to good, relevant blog posts that you write. Get your social media audience active on your blog. Ask them to comment, share your link etc. It’s a great way to build your blog readership.

On the flip side, you’ll also get lots of good ideas for future blog posts from the conversations you have on social media sites.

Sharing Viral Reports and Videos

If you spend some time creating a short report or recording a video, share the links to them with your social media crowd and ask them to help you spread the word. Nothing will make a report or video go viral like a little social media attention.

P.S. Ready to learn more about social media? Grab Ellen Britt’s Ice Cream Social Media Sale. I just got mine and can’t wait to dive in and get better at using social media to grow my affiliate income.

There are hundreds of social networks out there, but only a few of them catch my attention. Google+ is one of them. While it’s a little early to decide if it’ll catch on and become a serious facebook rival, it does have a lot of potential. I’m spending some time playing with it each week.

Google Plus Basics (pdf)

Enjoy and have a great weekend. I’m still down here in Atlanta for NAMS. I’ll see if I can blog a bit about some of the things I’m picking up over the weekend. If not, it’ll definitely be on my to-do list after I get back home.

P.S. I’ll be tweeting, posting on facebook and of course on Google+ . If you’re using twitter, keep an eye on #NAMS.

Hootsuite

I have a bit of a love / hate relationship with twitter and facebook. I use them for a while, end up spending a little too much of my time there and then give up. (Remember we talked about momentum yesterday? Losing momentum with social media isn’t a good thing).

I needed a solution that would make it easier for me to manage my social media involvement. I’d heard of hootsuite a few times over the past months and finally took the plunge and signed up last week.

Thank you Denise Wakeman :)

Here are some of the features I’ve found helpful so far:

• only look at tweets you want to keep tabs on (i.e particular searches, lists, people etc.)
• easily follow entire conversations
• schedule tweets – makes it easy to tweet more regularly
• track how well your links get clicked

I also like the fact that it is web based with a mobile up for my phone. This means I can log in and use it on any of my computers and laptops and keep tabs on my social media accounts from my phone as well.

Check it out and see if it can help you manage your social media campaigns and track how well they are doing.

Strategic Tweeting

Do you follow @LynnTerry on twitter? If not, you really should. She does a great job at tweeting very strategically and then displaying it on her blog. Let me show you an example. Here’s a screen shot of her blog that I took yesterday:

There are two things I want you to pay attention to that I think Lynn does exceptionally well.

She displays her latest tweet very prominently on her blog. The image above is the header of her site. You can’t help but notice it and it gives her readers a great way to interact with her via twitter. You can check it out right now at ClickNewz.com.

Secondly, follower her on twitter and pay attention to her tweets. She connects with readers and collegues for a while and then almost always “ends” with a tweet like the one above. In other words a promotional tweet that then becomes a little advertisement for her both on twitter and on her own blog. BRILLIANT!

I’m still working on figuring all this out and my tweets aren’t always very strategic, but one thing I’ve gotten into the habit of is to tweet about new products I’m checking out (if they are good). A few days ago, I tweeted this:

It worked like a charm and you can bet that from now on, I’ll be tweeting again each time I get a new issue. In fact, if I was smart, I’d go ahead and write up a few tweets about this and schedule them to go out over the next few months via hootsuite.

Bring New Readers To Archived Content On Your Site

Here’s a conversation I had on twitter just a couple of days ago:

What a great idea to occasionally tweet about older blog posts you’ve written. It’s a great way to introduce a new audience to some great content that’s just sitting in your blog archives.

You can either do this manually by occasionally tweeting about and linking to older posts, or who you can automate the whole process with a plugin called “Tweet Old Posts”.

Tweetmonials

I first heard about this at NAMS and to be honest, I couldn’t remember who I first heard this from. I remember both Jeff Herring and Denise Wakeman talking about “Tweetmonials”.

Tweetmonials are tweets you get that say something nice about you, your website or even one of your products. They are great social proof.

Update - Maritza Parra just tweeted me wit a link to a great video about how she uses Tweetmonials. Take a look.

You can use them like a regular testimonial and post screenshots of them on your website. David Perdew does a great job with this on the NAMS Workshop salespage.

The other thing you can do is to “favorite” those tweets right within the twitter interface. You know have your own little stream of testimonial tweets.

That’s it from me for now. Hope you found these twitter tips helpful and start implementing them. If you have another great tip, leave a comment below. I love hearing from you.

P.S. Here are some great peeps you want to follow on twitter.

Great  People To Follow On Twitter:

• Denise Wakeman
• Lynn Terry
• Nicole Dean
• Tracy Roberts
• Dan Morris
• Pat Flynn

Two nights ago we received a pre-recorded message from our daughter’s elementary school principal. We get these messages about once or twice a week, usually reminding us about some school event or an upcoming holiday. Not that night tough. Instead the principal rambled on and on about a facebook contest a local car dealer ship is running. The dealership set up a fan page with a short survey that includes a question about what your favorite local school and what your favorite Toyota is. The school with the most votes wins $1,000 from the dealership – thus the call from the eager principal.

Since facebook was down for a good part of yesterday, we received another urgent call from the principal last night. But it doesn’t end there… as I was walking up to the school just now I can hear him making a loudspeaker announcement to all students challenging them to go to facebook and fill out the survey. Remember this is an elementary school and students range from kindergarten to fifth grade.

I realize that schools are in desperate need of funding. I also realize that social media is the big new buzz word in local business, but if you ask me, this is social media marketing gone too far.

I also doubt that it will be very effective because, believe it or not, Toyota of Rock Hill, elementary students aren’t really your target market and by pushing your product on my child, I for one will not be buying a new car from you.

P.S. What are your thoughts? Am I overreacting or does this seem inappropriate and ineffective to you as well? Share your opinion as a comment below.

Before You Start

Before you go out and start working on back links, you need to decide what you want each page or blog post on your site to rank for.

If you are not familiar with this process,  here’s a post on what keyword research is and why you need to do it. Once you’ve done your homework and decided what you want to rank for it’s time to make sure the page (or post itself ) is optimized for that keyword or keyphrase. Make sure you are using the term you want to rank for in your page title and at least once or twice in the content of the page.

Now it’s time to actually start building links. Here are three simple things you can do to get some back links pointing to your website.

Participating in Forums For Back Links

A great and very easy place to start is on forums. Go out and find a few popular forums in your niche and just start participating. Most forums will allow you to set up a signature file that includes your name and link to your website. Start with that and then as you answer questions, slip in the occasional link to an article on your website that provides more information on the topic of that particular post.

Note - not all forums will allow you to add a link. Be sure to read their rules before you start posting. At the very least they should allow you to set up a profile page that allows you to include some links to your website. Be sure to do that and then focus most of your time and energy posting on forums that allow you to at least link to your site from the signature file.

Submitting To Directories For Back Links

Especially when your site is new, you want to spend some time submitting it to various link directories. One of the first things I do once I have some decent content on my site is to submit it to the DMOZ Directory. Submission is free, but it can take quite a while before your listing is approved. Make sure you submit to the correct category and put some thought into your title and your description. It can easy take 6 months or more to get approved, but since there is no cost and it is a pretty powerful link, it’s worth spending the time to create the listing.

After that, look for some link directories for your niche. Do a Google search for your niche + directory or link directory. Make sure the directory is still crawled and cached by Google (both on the home page and on the listing pages).

I also like to use a service called “Directory Maximizer” that will submit your site to hundreds of different link directories. You don’t have to submit to all of them at once, but try to get a few in there every month. It will help your sites ranking and authority over time.

Setting Up Social Media Profiles

Last but not least, you want to set up some social media logins and add your website to the profile pages. Here are a few sites to get you started:

• Twitter
• Facebook
• Digg
• Reddit
• Stumbleupon
• Kaboodle
• Maxx

Sign up for a free account with each of these and then add a link to your website in the profile page and start to participate in each network a bit.

That’s it for today. Get started with those three link building strategies and we’ll discuss some more over the coming weeks. Of course you are also welcome to sign up for my Link Building Class.

By the way … do you have any questions about link building? If so, leave a comment and I’ll do my best to answer them in an upcoming post.

P.S. Ready to learn more about link building? I’d like to invite you to join my 13 week beginner link building class at www.EasyLinkLove.com .

In addition to my own ideas, I’ll be picking the brains of @NicoleDean and @Tracy_Roberts . They both happen to have a bigger following than me already and more importantly, they are much better than me at tweeting on a regular basis.

How To Grow Your Twitter Following

From @Susanne Myers

• Tweet regularly. This means at least a few tweets most days.
• Follow the followers of other main players in your market.
• Follow everyone that follows you.

From @Nicole Dean

• End your best tweets with “Please RT”.
• Post valuable information that people will want to retweet.
• Talk directly to people, start conversations.
• Include “Follow me on twitter” in your articles, blog posts and free viral pdfs as well as in your info products.
• Mention your twitter link in your guest blog posts.

I recommend you get Nicole’s Blog Tour Guide to take your guest blogging to the next level. It will help you with incoming links and traffic. Building your twitter following is a nice added benefit.

From @Tracy_Roberts

• Search for key terms in your market or niche. Then join into conversations that you have something good to contribute to.
• Build those into solid relationships. This will get their followers to follow you.
• Build “Defined Lists” to keep track of the different groups of people you meet.
• When you go to events, or participate in online events, keep track of hash tags and follow the lists set up for those events.
• Follow Celebrities.

Here’s your “homework”… pick and choose a few of these and start doing them regularly. Keep track of the number of your total followers and see how much it that number grows on a monthly basis.