Keeping your social blogging simple is getting more and more complicated.

You know there are a gazillion distractions these days, making it tough for your articles to get attention and tougher to keep it. You want your writing to pay off for you, so you optimize.

• You optimize a headline that offers a great benefit and/or arouses curiousity and/or is controversial.
• You optimize the first sentence of your blog post because if the headline got them this far, now you must hook them into reading the rest of your article.
• You study StumbleUpon and Digg and the other social bookmarketing media so you can optimize your entire blog post to capture votes, not to mention hearts and minds.
• With your keyword list in hand, you optimize your post to attract your target market searchers who use the search engines.
• You go back over each sentence to find the places where you can optimize the humor or irony or alliteration or word picture or plain old intellectual impact (See? Alliteration!).
• You optimize “you”s vs “I”s, so you are writing about your reader, not about yourself.
• All these optimizations have certainly left something messed up, so you go back over the whole thing and re-optimize spelling and grammar, so the darned thing makes sense.

Pretty good plan. Have we missed anything?

Well, yes. How about … was there a point to your post? In the midst of all this optimization to attract eyeballs, did you actually give them some valuable insight or information? It’s not that unusual in social blogging to totally lose sight of the fact that a real live reader is looking for actual value. And if you trick them into reading something without value, they won’t be back.

So, definitely keep it simple. But add one more optimization to your social blogging: make it good!

StumbleUpon can be a great traffic generator - if you give the Stumblers what they want.

It’s a 2-part puzzle:
1. How can you get a LOT of “Thumbs Up”?
2. How can you turn those folks into dedicated fans of your blog?

Here’s a 10-step StumbleUpon plan that works:

1. Focus on a very clear-cut, targeted niche market. Who are they exactly? Describe them. Which StumbleUpon categories appeal to them? Write your article very specifically for those categories. Get your posts submitted to those exact categories.
2. “Lots of significant detail, clear and concise.” As you write and edit, hold that thought. The StumbleUpon reader craves examples, but they don’t want your life history.
3. Your 3 most-likely traps: too personal, too complicated, too unrelated. If a bit of information is interesting, but you can’t make a simple, strong, direct connection to your article focus, get rid of it. And don’t “wax eloquent.” Get to the point immediately.
4. Model a title with impact AND curiousity value from a “swipe file” of great viral titles. Use strong, concise subheads. Make the article easy to start and easy to continue reading.
5. Carefully craft your first paragraph as a concise statement of every important detail that’s in your article … and then be sure the rest of your article fulfills that promise.
6. StumbleUpon users have a “horse’s mouth” fetish. You can certainly use someone else’s ideas, but make everything uniquely your own, in your own voice. Include bulleted lists, advice, links, and graphics that clarify and support your point.
7. The social bookmarking crowd gets ecstatic over lists (especially resource lists), detailed step-by-step “How-To”s.
8. Think “unique insight.” StumbleUpon users compete with each other to find and share the newest, most valuable guide, discussion, approach, or evaluation - especially if it’s easy-to-use - of whatever their #1 focus is. That’s a tall order, but filling it can give you a big payoff.
9. Start your article with a clear, related, magnetic, eyeball-sucking impact image.
10. Be an active Stumbler. Every day when YOU come on sites that fulfill most or all of these criteria, take a moment to give a StumbleUpon “Thumbs up” and a clear review of what is so valuable to you. You will gain credibility and make social bookmarking friends this way, and you’ll have a head-start toward bringing your own articles to the attention of a wider, friendlier audience.

The more social networking you do, the better you must get at reputation management.

“Social networking.”

The phrase sounds so … businesslike. Let’s try another one:

“Social backbiting.”

Ooh! Might be fun to eavesdrop on THAT one! Unless, of course, YOU are the one whose back is being bitten.

If you’re active in social networking, your ideas will be attacked by other marketers. You’ll be challenged by strangers. Or customers. Or even colleagues or friends.

Someone will rail against your thinking and try to intimidate you. They’ll be rude. They will try to look good by making you look bad. It’s important to have a good reputation management plan in place for these occasions.

So what do you do when you make what you thought was a helpful comment on one of the forum communities, and in return you get hostility - someone else in the community slams you or ridicules you?

This absolutely will happen if you are an active social networker. Consider yourself fortunate. You now have an enormous opportunity to bond more closely with a lot of others in the community. Because they see that you are in a very uncomfortable situation, which is OK with them, because it should be pretty entertaining. They are watching closely to see what you do.

Your first reaction may be a kamikaze scream and attack. But remember, you are onstage, in the spotlight. You know these situations will happen, so you need a reputation management plan. Here are some choices:

1. Do nothing - which means you absolutely lose face in this group.
2. React defensively or angrily - see #1.
3. Pull the ol’ switcheroo, positioning yourself above this silly fray.

It’s like jiujitsu. When the other person attacks you, the force they use and their momentum always leave them vulnerable in some way. What would be really useful is for the whole community to picture you as your attacker’s infinitely patient mentor.

The key word here is “patient,” because along with expertise, that is what your market wants from a mentor. You will probably have the words for some clever counter-attack screaming in your ear. Resist it. When those words show up in print, they will put you right in the middle of the battle, not above it.

What words can you say to achieve “patient mentor” effect?

You might start with:

• “That’s a pretty common reaction” or
• “I forgive you” or
• “I respect your opinion. Here’s what I’ve seen …”

Then go on to very patiently explain why people often go off in this totally wrong direction. You’ve seen it a thousand times before. Maybe refer to the flawed reasoning that goes hand-in-hand with this flawed thinking. But do NOT attack your attacker. Let the community see your superior reasoning ability and your your infinite patience. Let them see that you are 100% unflappable in the face of a full-on attack.

Do you think THAT picture of you in their minds will create any new social networking opportunities for you? If you can keep that picture in the heads of community members, you will need to do very little active reputation management.

YouTube has moved up near the top of the charts of most popular websites over the last couple years. You can hardly turn around online without bumping into a YouTube video embedded on whatever sites you visit, but the YouTube folks certainly aren’t resting on their laurels.

According to Jim Patterson of Product Management,

Nevertheless, we worried that we weren’t open enough. So, we pulled some all-nighters and added some powerful new ways to integrate YouTube content and community into other websites, desktop applications, video games, mobile devices, televisions, cameras, and lots more.

Let’s review. With YouTube, you can

• join and upload your videos
• access all YouTube videos from just about any website
• quickly & easily manage, search, & play back videos
• network with YouTube’s huge global audience
• build traffic to your website
• improve brand recognition
• attract users to your site and give them a better social networking experience
• … and do all of this for free.

And since that wasn’t good enough for them, they’re adding new social networking features:

• Upload video responses to posted videos.
• Add/Edit user & video metadata (titles, descriptions, ratings, comments, favorites, contacts, etc).
• Fetch feeds (most viewed, top rated, etc.) for 18 international locations.
• Custom queries optimized for those 18 international locations.
• Customize player control (pause, play, stop, etc.) through software.

It’s pretty creative. For instance:

• You can use the Electronic Arts game “Spore” to create some crazy creature, then upload your creation to YouTube.
• University of California, Berkeley, is pioneering the automatic publication of free educational content videos to YouTube.
• You can use Animoto to create a music video from your own photo … and upload the video to YouTube.
• Tivo is now integrating YouTube videos into its TV platform.

Continuous social networking innovation going on at YouTube.

Effective social marketing begins long before you ever start the actual social networking, or before you ever link to a product or service.

One factor is absolutely essential for social marketing success. And ironically, it’s a step that most people just skip. The vast majority of people just decide to promote a product or service they like, or an idea that sounds exciting to them. But what they should REALLY do is …

ONLY promote a product or service with PROVEN high demand, one that people are desperate for.

You may be a master of social networking, but if you’re creating a ton of “know, like, & trust” relationships just to promote some “me, too” product, then you have wasted your time.

Or if you have to educate the market about why they need a product, or what it does, then you have a long, long, hard social marketing road ahead of you. If YOU have to create the energy inside every buyer, then you will struggle for every sale.

Life could be easy. Why make it so hard? Why not begin in a market where the prospects already have that energy bottled up inside, waiting to explode?

Best plan? Go to the forum communities that serve your market and see what people are talking about. This is the social marketing homework that can really pay off for you. Monitor these discussions for some period of time. Look in the archives. What do the hard-core widget lovers really want? What about the widget market really frustrates them? What makes them scream with pain?

Network with some of the most vocally frustrated widget-lovers. Talk with them. Get more details of the ideal solution to their problem. Get a deep understanding of what this market is looking for. Then either find or pay for someone to engineer the ideal answer to their pain.

Then go back to your widget-lovers and ask them to be beta-testers. Get them involved in your social marketing plan. Have them tell their friends about your new solution to their pain. Even before you sell the first product, you have a huge social marketing buzz.

When you know you have a product or service that the market craves AND you completely understand their pain and frustration, you have the ability to communicate with your prospects the exact points that will really motivate them. You’ll be able to really leverage your social marketing efforts. Your success then is pretty much a matter of just doing the work.

StumbleUpon and the other social networking sites can certainly be part of your branding and lead-generation strategy. But a lot of businesses get frustrated with the social media as a sales tool. And the reason is … of course, they aren’t sales tools. Instead, they are a gazillion little campfires, where people go to tell stories and to listen to stories and to have fun and learn and be part of a community.

While social media can be tortured into helping you make money, build your brand and generate leads, it’s a place where storytelling is what is expected and wanted. So why not just go with the flow?

Remember sitting around the campfire at night … somewhere … with friends, swapping stories? The memory is magical for a lot of people. Those campfires - and the stories - have been warming our hearts and minds for thousands of years. They have built lifetime emotional bonds. Even today, you can probably remember who the really good storytellers were.

The power of a good storyteller is obvious at the campfire or at StumbleUpon or anyplace else. The most effective salespeople always have great stories with impact. For instance, I tell you that $50 for a month of your vitamins is too much.

And you say, “It’s not cheap. But you know, I went to the drugstore the other day and sat near the cash register way in the back. I listened to several customers paying for their prescriptions. The least anyone paid was $85, and it went on up to over $300. Have you ever spent that kind of money on drugs after you lost your health?”

In just a few words, your vitamins now look like a bargain. You could never have “sold” me into changing my mind. But a pointed story can put my objection in a whole different light.

StumbleUpon and the other social bookmarking and social networking media give you the chance to tell your stories 24 hours a day. Campfires are everywhere. What will really pay off for you with the social networking media is to keep a diary of every great story you come up with (related to your business or product).

Be subtle. Don’t beat anyone over the head. Get good at telling those stories in print. Share them in StumbleUpon and your other chosen social networking communities. It’s way more effective than selling.

7 Tips To Achieve Viral Marketing With Your Blog:

1. Define exactly who your market is and what they want more than anything. In every market, there is certain information people search for and have a very difficult time finding it. Which makes it very valuable to them. Don’t assume you know what that information is. Find the real people and ask them what they want. Ask them what they search for and just can’t find. Then give it to them.
2. Technorati ranks blog posts by how many inbound links they get. It’s a great viral marketing indicator for you of what information people are most desperately looking for. Search Technorati to see who are the real “power bloggers” in your niche and which of their posts generate the most comments. What do the visitors say?
3. Keep a record of these really popular posts so you can link to them in your own social blogging, giving you the chance to get traffic from trackbacks. And with each of these popular posts, consider how you might effectively take the exact opposite position in your own article. Controversy can be a viral marketing reader-magnet.
4. Schedule ahead and stick to your schedule. Which days will you post? Your readers will be more comfortable and predictable when you have them on a schedule. Get articles ready in advance, so you eventually are 3 or 4 weeks ahead. If something major comes up, you can write about it and insert it immediately, and move back the other lined-up posts. If you don’t stick to a set schedule, you will discourage your readers.
5. Tell your story in your “About Me” page. Display a photo. Engage your reader. Write your bio so she can see that you and she are kindred spirits.
6. Set up a constant stream of resources on Google News or on your RSS feed, so you have a lot of ideas to choose from. Grab the best ones and react to them in writing. Come from a different angle. You want your readers to see you as one-of-a-kind, a viewpoint they just can’t get anywhere else in social blogging.
7. As you look over the new daily idea feeds you’ve set up, consider how to use them to frame a resource list or list of “how-to” tips. These are your best bet to be a viral marketing hit with readers.

The more of these proven, tested elements that you consistently combine in your blog articles, the better your chance of creating a viral marketing boost to your business.

Web 2.0 and social networking are not advertising. As you’ve probably noticed, real social networkers get very upset when they expect to be networked with and instead, they get advertised to. For a true social networker, it’s like you’re at home at the dinner table with your family, when that BAD, BAD man bursts in, uninvited - he didn’t even knock! - and tries to sell you a used car.

You’d get testy, too. Some even get vindictive and vengeful. And yet, a lot of businesses see the internet, including Web 2.0, strictly as another advertising medium. Better … it’s FREE advertising! Which leads many of them to exuberantly present their products and services to you at your dinner table, as you try to have a conversation with your online “family.” Talk about a bull in a china shop!

The true business value of Web 2.0 and the internet is the opportunity to easily start and to then continue to build relationships with a LOT of people in your target market. When you focus on the numbers … the click-throughs, the inbound links, Google Pagerank, etc. … instead of the relationships, then you are putting the emphasis on the wrong syl-LA-ble.

Can you get customers online? Absolutely. You can get a ton of them.

Can you advertise directly? Not in Web 2.0 you can’t. But you can sure sit down at the dinner table and join in the conversation with a lot of like-minded people. You can build a relationship with those people and then casually let it slip what you do. And since people do business with people they like, you will get business.

But they have to see that you like them first. That is what will get you the business rewards of social networking. Web 2.0 means you must go in with the pure heart of a social networker … or risk getting your heart removed and served to you by the inmates.

Robin Good reviews the new video marketing tool, Freescreencast.com:

“I really don’t have the words to express the excitement that this new service has given me. This is absolutely a major breakthrough for online publishers, educators, trainers, marketers and communication professionals of all kinds. This is a service that anyone of the major Internet companies wanting to get more traction in the social media space should seriously look up to.”

A few of FreeScreenCast’s video marketing features:

• High-quality Adobe Flash means easy, inexpensive screencasts for your blog.
• Simple to record your whole screen or 1 window or 1 screen section.
• Automatically captures your microphone audio input and mouse & cursor movements.
• Use your mouse to move & size the recording area.
• Color depth of 256 colors.
• One-click upload for your clip; download it anytime as a .FLV file.
• You instantly get an embed code. With a simple copy & paste, you can use the clip for video marketing on your own site.
• No file size limitiations.
• Record your full screen anytime you want.
• Keyword-tag each screencast to make it easy for search engines to find you - a real plus for your video marketing campaign.
• Free hosting at freescreencast.com, for any file size or resolution.
• Future profit angle - pay to keep your content private.
• Works only on PC with Windows.
• Soon to be added: search & comments for all screencasts.

Will this tool improve your social marketing? Read Robin Good’s complete review:

Screencasting Recorder: Upload, Share, Publish, Embed -FreeScreencast.com Is Here

Here is a simple 7-step social marketing strategy to help you build a stronger prospect base:

1. If you haven’t done so already, specifically define your very tightly focused target niche market. Use your favorite keyword tool to find the most-searched keywords for your market. Use this list to help zero in on exactly what niche you want to appeal to.
2. Make sure your social networking site profiles are focused on this very specific target. The more focused you are, the more your visitors will see you as a specialist. And we all want to be mentored by the specialist, the expert. The more focused you are, the more appealing you will be to your target market.
3. Go to MySpace or FaceBook or whichever social networking sites you favor. Check the groups on those sites against your keywords. Find groups that are related to your very focused specialty.
4. Add members of those groups to your friends list.
5. Start your own group on MySpace and Facebook and other sites. Again, be very specific. This will stamp you as a leader and will help to raise your profile on that particular social networking website.
6. Invite your friends and those in other more widely-focused related groups to join your group. Keep an eye on these larger groups. Every time someone signs up, contact them to tell them about your group and invite them to join.
7. When you add to your networking website - or your personal web page - send a short, descriptive comment to each member of your group to let them know, and invite them to read the full article. This is especially effective when a comment shows up on a member profile page, so it can be viewed by the public.

What you want is to create a core following of raving fans. This social networking strategy isn’t going to get you huge traffic, but if you give really useful information in a focused niche, you can definitely build a strong fan base that may be very lucrative to you over time

Here are some changes you might test to see how they affect your social blogging results:

1. When a visitor arrives, one of the first social networking features they should see is a Feedburner subscription icon …
2. And they should immediately see (prominently displayed) your “About” page and contact info. Many visitors will leave in a hurry if they can’t quickly see who you are.
3. Remove clutter from your sidebars, such as “Recent posts” and “Recent comments” modules - both are wasted space, potentially distracting visitors from your social blogging content. The fewer distractions, the easier it is for the visitor to simply scroll down your homepage posts.
4. Have a manageable category list - maybe a dozen categories. People get overwhelmed by those huge category lists you find on some blogs.
5. If you have a “Reviews” module (visitor reviews of your blog), feature it prominently.
6. Feature “Best of the Blog”, your all-time classic reader-loved posts.
7. To make your blog the most “social marketing-friendly”, test displaying just the first few sentences of a post with a “More …” link. Visitors who click your social media buttons will then be bookmarking a single article, which is a much more effective traffic-generator than bookmarking the blog homepage.
8. Effective social blogging requires a good headline swipe file to help create strong blog post headlines. (Search “headline swipe file” if you don’t already have a good one.)
9. Displaying a good eye-catching, related image will usually increase readership of any blog post.
10. Test writing less frequently, but offering longer, more detailed posts … maybe “Top Twenty” lists. These types of post are popular with many of the social media users.

These are some creative tests that long-time bloggers have used to improve their social blogging results.

LinkedIn Status is a pretty simple idea. It’s a feature that allows you to inject more personality into your profile, and it’s been available on other social networking platforms for a long time. But this is a noteworthy upgrade, because LinkedIn is such a widely-used tool.

It’s a relationship thing. LinkedIn wants to make it easy to see at a glance what your network is doing. The more frequently you update your LinkedIn Status, the more attention you are obviously paying to networking, and the more social networking - worthy you become.

And what do you say in your updates? What is important to your network? What questions do they ask? What news and blogs do they read? when you update your Status, focus on these thoughts and others that provide value to your connections, and your LinkedIn network will get stickier.

It’s simple. Go to your LinkedIn profile. You’ll see a link to enter your status, under your name. Chris Richman, Senior Product Manager at LinkedIn, has made a YouTube video describing how to use LinkedIn Status & other social networking features. To watch, click here:

LinkedIn Status Video

You find so many social networks these days that give you viral social marketing opportunities. How do you take advantage? How do you go viral? It’s the eternal marketing question. What can you do that will make people laugh at your YouTube video and say, “Holy mackeral! THIS is incredible! I have to email THIS to everyone.”

Add to the mix the fact that all your competition wants to do exactly the same thing - before you do - and the whole puzzle gets stickier.

First, you need a viral social marketing model. Recently, an incredible photo made the rounds through email. It showed a naked man on a hospital gurney, attendants standing around. What made this man’s photo remarkable was the telephone pole sticking out of his butt. It had been been sawed off, so it was only about 3 feet long, and it looked to be about 8-10 inches in diameter. The article with it said he had been thrown from his boat while bass fishing. You can picture the rest. He survived, but had some serious soft tissue damage. Oh, man. I’ll bet he did!

So think of the TV show “America’s Funniest Videos.” People send in their home videos of friends and relatives doing really stupid things, which often lead to incredible pain … which causes the audience to laugh like crazy. And that is exactly the effect you want to create (the laughter - not the pain), so the clips on this show may be a great model for your own viral marketing campaign.

What if your business is … say … accounting? Or anything else perceived by the public as totally boring? How can you possibly go viral?

How about THIS YouTube video: “The Death-Defying Adventures of Accountant-Man!”

1. Accountant-Man, dressed in superhero garb, sits at a desk. A dog comes up and lifts its leg, peeing on Accountant-Man’s foot.
2. Accountant-Man, smiling and all full of himself, tosses a baseball to his small child. The child hits a line drive right into Accountant-Man’s … (you’ve seen this before, right?). And Accountant-Man doubles over and drops to the ground in agonizing pain.
3. Accountant-Man rides his bicycle. You yell, “Hey, Accountant-Man! Are you on your way to save another victim of bad arithmetic?” And Accountant-Man looks at you and nods vigorously and raises his hands in triumph … and crashes into a tree, getting thrown off his bike.

If you’ve ever watched “America’s Funniest Videos,” you’ve already seen these clips, and a lot of others like them. People do dumb things, they get hurt, and the audience cracks up. At home, you take it viral. You call your family into the room. “Watch THIS! This is incredible!”

So next time you watch this show, take notes. What you have here is a perfect viral marketing model for any business or product or service, no matter how essentially boring it may be.

The recruitment website Milkround.com recently surveyed 500 students and graduates about their use of the social networking websites MySpace, Facebook, and Bebo. Results:

• Facebook: 97% of the 500 respondents use it; 93% of respondents favor it
• MySpace: 44% use it
• Bebo: 23% use it

Grads and students were asked to rate the 3 social networking websites on a 1 to 5 scale for

• Contact with friends
• Photo & video sharing
• New relationships
• Social planning
• Networking for jobs
• Overall entertainment

Overall Ratings:

• Facebook: 3.5
• MySpace: 2.3
• Bebo: 1.7

Interesting Results:

1. Only 6% of the students & grads have used their Facebook, MySpace, or Bebo profile in a job search. Overwhelmingly, these sites are used strictly for social networking.
2. 82% of respondents use privacy settings, restricting who can view their profile. Half of these use the most restrictive privacy setting.

MOST Interesting Result:

Results of this survey indicate how difficult it would be for another social networking utility to take market share from Facebook, MySpace, & Bebo. Only 19% said they might switch to a new site with a bunch of whizz-bang gizmos. These students and grads made their original choice of favorite site because that’s where their friends are. A majority would ONLY change if their friends did, and most of these prefer not to change at all, having already invested time & emotion in building their profile.

“Despite suffering its first drop in traffic following 17 months of successive increases since July 2006 in January, Facebook is still immensely popular among students and graduates. It’s clearly ahead of its competitors in terms of staying in contact with friends and sharing files online, Bebo and MySpace will need to improve their usability to come close to toppling the Facebook dominance. However, all of the major three sites would benefit if they could encourage users to meet new people or even think of ways to help users find a job.” - Milkround.com spokesman Mike Barnard

In effective social blogging, you write about your experiences which strongly connect with some picture in the minds of your readers - your target market. You share some common problems with them, and you need to keep these in mind when you write.

Who exactly are your readers? What drives them? For your social blogging success, you need to dig and really understand what problem it is that your readers are most desperate to solve. What problem do they have that they keep searching for answers to … but have a devil of a time actually finding anything that helps?

Read a lot of other blogs with the same audience as yours. Read the discussions in forum communities that draw your target market. What problems do the participants talk about over and over and over?

Communicate with your current readers. Ask them what their biggest bugaboo is, related to your blog focus … which they’ve been unable to find a satisfactory long-term solution for. Your readers are beating their heads against the wall over something. It may be obvious, it may not be. You must find it for sure. And then you solve their problem.

You can also get an idea what people really want by using your favorite “search” tool to see what terms they search for. For example, a friend in the network marketing arena says that of the top 20 search terms in that business, 15 of them involve “leads.” Do you think that getting good leads is a problem those people just have not solved?

When your reader has a problem they can’t solve, a problem that totally stops them in their success track, they get really frustrated. They post their question in forum communities. They search and search and search, but it seems like the information they want is buried someplace where they can’t find it.

And in comes you, the Knight on a White Horse. You know the problem, because you have focused your social blogging on finding problems exactly like this. You understand the problem, you can explain every detail of it (including some that your reader may not have even thought of), and you can give them the tools they need to solve that problem.

You can build a big fan club if you know what it is that your readers want, but which they just can’t find. THAT is social blogging that will build you an unbreakable network.