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!

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

Some years ago, clinical psychologist Dr. Glenn Livingston was doing his job, just minding his own business, when - ZAP! - he fell in love with a marketer. His life has never been the same.

Dr. Livingston really likes numbers. And as a result of his wife’s background in marketing, he soon developed a regimen to use Google Adwords to build any business. Along the way, he figured out the “search continuum”, which is a really neat tool for anyone in business.

When people research something, they never do just one search. They search over and over again. Over time, they further refine and define what they’re searching for.

A friend was remodelling his bathroom. Instead of a “Hot” knob and a “Cold” knob, he wanted a balance knob, like a volume control on the stereo. He had been in Germany once and the hotel shower had a knob like that. He really liked it. But he had no idea what to call it. So he started typing things into Google, groping around, and he finally figured out that it’s a thermostatic valve. THEN he searched “thermostatic valves” and found only 6 brands. Then he searched for brands of thermostatic valves. Then he found one. Then he bought it.

That is the natural “search continuum”, and everybody does it. When a toddler first starts to talk, every piece of construction equipment is a tractor. Then he learns what “bulldozer” is. And what Glenn Livingston did was use Google Adwords to devise a method for figuring out the search continuum for any particular industry. When you know that, you can own your market, because whenever someone searches a particular keyword, you know what they will do NEXT.

Sam looks for this. Then Sam looks for that. Then Sam looks for the other thing. THEN Sam buys.

When you know the details, not only can you put yourself in front of the people right when they buy … you can also put yourself in front of people when they’re starting. You can know exactly what steps they are about to go through. You can get their email address and get them on your autoresponder series. You can actually start educating them just ahead of what they would find by themselves. So you can intercept people at the beginning, in the middle, at the end of the sales process.

And when you figure this out for your business, you will have a huge advantage. Your competitors will almost never even comprehend that this “search continuum” exists. They’ll never find it. It may sound like common sense - but at first, it’s not obvious at all. You find it by testing and tracking different keywords in your Google Adwords ads. Watch exactly what people actually do. Then you can know exactly where a prospect is in the buying process, and what you need to say to them next to move them to the next step.