The Caffeinated Blog

5 More Business Social Media Sites You May Not Know About

A couple weeks ago I posted 5 niche social media sites for business - so where broader social sites may not have worked for you, these could in driving more targeted traffic to your site as well as helping to establish you as an authority and build your brand.

The post received a pretty good response, because my goal was to list sites that were not necessarily on other social site lists (and there are a lot of lists out there).  Sure, a few of the sites have been listed before, but I think they deserve more promotion than they've received.  Anyway, this prompted me to find some additional business-niche social and web 2.0 sites - and find them I did.

Here are 5 more business social sites you may not know about (or possibly overlooked):

1. SmallBusiness.com: Yes, wikis can be a great way to leverage web 2.0 technology for your business.  Not only is it a great source of small business information (with user-generated guides on everything from starting your business, financing, and marketing to e-commerce and blogging), but it's also a great place to promote your business.  You can create a profile, and if you have any small business knowledge not already covered, then you can contribute to any of the guides.  If you offer services for small businesses, then you can add a link to your site or blog to any of the small business directories listed.  Note: wikis are not for link spamming.  It's advised that you take a good look at the information available and contribute if you have something solid and useful to add, and add your links in only the most relevant directories.
2. Briz: Briz is a social networking site where consumers can interact with local businesses.  As a business, you can create a free profile, which includes a link to your website, your business address, your phone number, and even your logo (among a plethora of other things).  Consumers can search for businesses in their local areas, send messages to them, vote for them, and bookmark them.  This is a great way for small businesses of all types that serve a specific geographic area to promote themselves to and interact with their customer base.
3. Hubspot: Hubspot offers a variety of tools to help small businesses use the Internet to effectively market themselves (such as keyword research, link building, business blogs, lead intelligence, and a ton of other tools).  They also have a beta site, titled Social Content for Marketing Mavens, where you can find and post links to articles about online marketing and vote them up or down.  Plus, if you're a marketer and have a profile on LinkedIn, you can join the Hubspot Marketing Mavens group.
4. KillerStartups: Do you have a startup?  Is it killer?  Add it to KillerStartups!  They review each new business added to their system, then post them on the site so visitors can vote on "the next big thing".  It's a great way to gain insight into the popularity and viability of your startup idea.  You never know - a potential investor may just find your business and think it's "killer" enough to finance.
5. Upspring: Like Briz, Upspring allows all types of businesses to create a profile, which potential customers can find.  It works for both B2C and B2B businesses, and customers can search by business name, location, or category (which, for some strange reason, Upspring has hidden at the bottom of their pages).  Unlike Briz, you don't get all the bells and whistles for free - the free basic profile comes with your logo, a link to your website and email address, up to 1 mb of photos, and your business hours, while the Premium Listing (at a pretty inexpensive $19.98 a month) gets you the ability to add videos, coupons, and testimonials, as well as interact directly with customers and create groups.

Again, I'd like to know what you think.  Have you used these or any other niche social media sites?  What kind of results did you receive?

Whole Lotta Link Love Friday, June 27

Wow, it's Friday already?  Well, you know what that means...another rockin' edition of Whole Lotta Link Love!

It's been an interesting week of web discovery ("surfing" is sooo year 2000).  Here's what I found:

1. Humorous Blog of the Week: MikeDoe.net (get it, Doe-net...cue rim shot).  Anyway, Mike is a standup comedian based in DC.  I haven't seen any of his shows, but his blog is definitely cause enough for me to go to one.
2. Looking for an easy way to manage your personal vs. business online profiles?  How about family vs. friends?  Use Moli to create different online profiles under one account.  Great for personal reputation management, company communication, or anything you can think of.  And it's free too!
3. It's a social networking site.  No, it's a search engine.  Wait a minute - it's both.  Searchles has a social networking site for a heart, but a search engine for a brain.  Content shared through Searchles is indexed so users can easily search for and find it later.  Share, vote, and search.
4. I found this handy free tool for converting my documents into PDFs.
5. WebProNews just launched Twellow, a handy directory of Twitter users.  Users are categorized by their one-line bio, which means that you'll have to so some keyword-stuffing in 160 characters or less to get listed in the proper categories.
6. With gas prices as high as an elephant's eye, it really surprises the hell out of me that so many companies are afraid to jump on the telecommuting bandwagon.  If you're trying to convince your boss that working from home is the way to go, here are 10 good reasons you can use.
7. LinkedIn is an excellent business networking tool...if used correctly.  Here are some tips for getting the most from it.

TTFN, dear readers.  Until next time...I'm gonna have myself a real good time.

Twitter Debate: Innovative or Gimmicky?

I just jumped on the Twitter bandwagon yesterday.  I've been resisting it for a while, despite reading all the Twittervangelism out there.  I finally decided to give it a try, and so far it's been quite interesting.  It has potential for the obsessive-compulsive in me.

I've now become intrigued with the Obama-McCain Twitter debate.  I found out about it watching Attack of the Show on G4 yesterday, where they had a highly intellectual discussion about it with a panel of spotty teenage guys wearing cowboy hats and huge sunglasses in front of Stickcams.  Only on AOTS...but I digress.

The discussion, as short as it was for the attention span of a 16 year old guy, was actually quite interesting because they talked about whether the Twitter debate was actually an excellent way to use current Web 2.0 technology to reach out to young voters, or if it was just plain pandering.  The two guys that responded thought it was the latter.

I also read this blog post from Sean Maguire at Marketing Pilgrim, where he predicts that Obama will win the presidency because he's "most savvy in online politics" (i.e. social media, texting, email, etc.).  The comments that follow are quite lively and slightly more interesting than the post itself - not because the post wasn't at all interesting, but because the comments (naturally) degraded into a debate that completely missed the point of the original post.  Having subscribed to follow-up comments, I witnessed the whole thing, blow by blow.

I'd like to hear your opinions: is the Twitter debate going to win over the online community, or will they see it as pandering and gimmicky? Will Obama win because of his online political savviness?

Whole Lotta Link Love Friday, June 20

Happy Friday!

I love the summer blockbuster season...I've gone to see a new movie almost every weekend for the past month and a half.  They've ranged from the mind-blowingly awesome (Iron Man) to the mind-numbingly disappointing (You Don't Mess With the Zohan).  Today, I'm going to see Get Smart, and I'm expecting good things.

I'm serving up a whole lotta link love today, ranging from useful to friggin' funny - so dig in!

1. As a foodie, I love finding new places to find all kinds of really good food.  WhereInDC provides restaurant reviews and tips for DC-area foodies, as well as excellent recipes for everyone.  
2. Check out how much money you could be saving on gas if you either took public transportation, or started working from home.
3. Don't have a website yet?  Google Sites lets you build a free site that you can use as a temporary solution.  I'm building one to temporarily house my writing portfolio (look for the link soon here on The Caffeinated Blog).
4. Humorous Blog of the Week: TiggyBlog.  It's weird, it's wonderful...just check it out.
5. We all want to work from home; but those three words have become as shady and slimy as MLM.  The folks at I've Tried That lose money on all those WAH schemes...so you don't have to.
6. Yes, another social media site...Sproose is a social search site where you can vote on search results in order to "improve" them for other users.
7. From the mind of Aaron Wall: the Link Harvester link analysis tool.  Used to analyze Yahoo and MSN backlinks, Link Harvester returns a bounty of information about the sites that are linking to you, including IP addresses, C block addresses, those coveted .edu and .gov backlinks, and tons more.

Have a great weekend everyone!  Until next time - doobie do, bop bop-ah do whoa.

5 Business Social Media Sites You May Not Know About

Yeah, yeah...we all know about Stumbleupon, Digg, Del.icio.us, LinkedIn, etc. ad nauseum.  Social media marketing can be a hit or miss for many businesses, depending on the niche and how cunningly it's utilized.  But with the mainstreaming of social media comes a wealth of niche sites that could yield better results for businesses than their more general 2.0 cousins.

Here are 5 I found that you may not have heard of (and if you have, then maybe they deserve a second look):

1. Biznik:  This business networking site looks (and acts) a lot like LinkedIn; but it has quite a few additional features that can turn the volume on your promotion up to 11.  For instance, you can write and contribute articles, link your blog feed up to your profile, and find and post local business events.  You can post a profile with your photo and one link to your website; but the downside is that you have to pay a monthly fee to access other premium features (like uploading a business logo, adding more than one link, and adding the aforementioned blog feed).
2. Small Business Brief: This social networking site has been around since 2007 and has been getting its props lately on other lists social networking sites; but it's well worth a mention here.  The target audience, for the most part, are small business marketers (the most popular content is pretty much about online marketing).  It's a great place to find advice to help you market your business, or post good, relevant content of your own.  Downside: lots of spam postings that have nothing to do with small business advice.
3. Gooruze: This is a social networking site for online marketers (get it - "gurus" except with the g-o-o from Google and z-e at the end?  Meh.)  Here you can post links to "news" about online marketing, your own original articles, or questions for other online marketers to answer - all which can be rated and commented on by other members.  Best part - it's all free.  
4. Design Float:  A niche social networking site for graphic designers, this won't suit everyone; but there is a Business & Freelancing category that has some pretty good articles posted for small businesses.  If you're a designer or a freelancer, it's worth checking out.
5. FreeIQ:  This is like YouTube for business - you can watch instructional videos about small business marketing, ecommerce, sales, or post your own.  They bill themselves as "The Marketplace for Ideas", and there's definitely a lot of useful information here (especially if you're more of a visual learner).

If social media marketing hasn't worked very well for you on the bigger sites, then maybe you should dig a little deeper and check out some of these niche sites - you may be surprised at the fruits of your efforts.

Tell me about social media sites you've found that have worked for you.  If there are some diamonds in the rough, then I may be inclined to post them in another list. :-)

Whole Lotta Link Love Friday, June 13

I’ve decided to start a weekly post of sites I’ve stumbled on during my regular journeys down that rocky path known as the Internet.  These are all links that I’ve found interesting/humorous/valuable/cool, or otherwise notable enough to mention here, compiled in a handsomely-bound collection titled Whole Lotta Link Love Friday (and if you can’t tell from the title that I’m a Led Zeppelin fan, you will a little further down in the post).

So, here you are my kiddies…your first heapin’ helping of a whole lotta linky goodness.  Enjoy!

1. We all love free stuff, so if you need stock images, check out 123rf.com for free stock photos.
2. Pointless Banter is one of very few blogs that makes me laugh out loud.  Make sure to check out Kevin's Craigslist Creep of the Week.
3. Tech Suave is holding a contest for bloggers - enter to win awesome stuff like free Wordpress themes, free marketing, free web hosting, and even free traffic.
4. This story gives me new hope that I'll actually get to see Led Zeppelin in concert.
5. If you're a writer, MetaGlossary.com can be a very helpful tool.  It's a meta search engine where you can find definitions of terms, phrases, acronyms, and who knows what else.
6. Rebecca at Between My Peers was nice enough to write a blog post post, at my request, about what (ahem) "A-line types" should wear to flatter their figures.
7. And now, deep writing (about SEO content)...by Aaron Wall.

So, there you are.  Until next time...you need coolin', baby I'm not foolin'.  I'm gonna send ya back to schoolin'.

How accurate is Google's keyword research estimates?

The other day I found this great blog post from Yoast.com about the accuracy of Google's keyword traffic estimates.  I was in the middle of doing some keyword research for a client, and needed traffic estimates in numbers to provide him.  Joost de Valk makes the point that Google's estimates in it's keyword tool are waaaay off vs. what actual analytics show (Google Analytics, no less), about "110-220 to 1".

Now, I know that the estimated search volume (and estimated clicks) are, yes, estimates; but about 200 to 1?!  Seriously, Google could be a little more accurate, even with estimates.  If you're doing research on those all important long-tail keywords (like I was), this could throw you for a loop.

Has anyone else seen a discrepancy like this?

The Positive Side of Negative Keywords, Part 2 - Negative Match Types

Last week, I posted this introduction to using negative keywords to get better traffic and save money.

Now, I want to talk about (and get opinions on) another part of negative keywords that many Adwords advertisers may not be aware of - negative match types.  Here's what they look like:
Broad negative (default): -memory cards
Phrase negative: -"memory cards"
Exact negative: -[memory cards]

I wanted to talk about these here, because Google doesn't even go into much about these.  After much searching, I found this post on the Inside Adwords blog from November 2007.  It actually provides a pretty decent chart that explains the different negative match types.

This is really good information to have, as I found out managing a rather large Adwords account.  I had all broad negatives; but upon generating and checking several search query reports, I found that my ads were still being served on keywords I thought I'd eliminated with negatives. 

I eventually brought my costs down by changing all of my negatives to negative phrase match; but who know how many hundreds of dollars I wasted on those keywords!  It's really too bad that Google kind of hides it away, as many new, less experienced advertisers don't have that much of a budget to just throw away.

I'd like to get others opinions - how long were you managing Adwords campaigns before you found out about negative match types?  Once you started using them, did you see a significant difference?

Inspiration for Freelancers (or anyone, really)

I'm a member of a local group for women in tech/Internet-related careers called DC Web Women.  It's an extraordinary group, consisting of highly intelligent, incredibly talented, and really supportive women who are in various jobs (ranging from development and design to writing and marketing) and in various stages of their careers.  Being a part of this group has been such a God-send for me, as they provide an excellent local resource of information and help.  It's also a great place to find jobs.

As a member of DC Web Women, I'm on a Listserv list and receive tons of messages through the list, including job postings in the DC Metro area.  I saw one posted today which caused quite a stir among the group.  It was for a Web Project Manager position that was paying about $20 an hour.  I didn't pay much attention to it because it's not a position I would be interested in; however, I paid attention to the chaos that ensued as a few other members began to complain about the ridiculously low rate being paid for that position.  The person who posted it was not the hiring manager and had begun the post with a standard "Just the messenger" line; but nonetheless received the brunt of the criticism (although not necessarily aimed directly at her).

She replied with a truly inspirational story that rallied everyone (even those who initially complained) behind her.  Here is that story (it's a little long, but well worth it):

"I know there is some talented tech diva out there looking at a $25 or $30/hour gig and wishing they had it, because sometimes when you're trying to keep a roof over your head, put food on the table for your kid, and keep the phone from being turned off (again), being able to pay SOME of the bills is better than paying no bills at all. I've been there (except the kid part).

"Back in 1999, before I had any clients to speak of and when no one knew my name, I was undergoing a painful transition myself. I had totally burned out on my retail e-commerce business. I knew I needed a change and wanted to transition to freelancing/consulting but wasn't quite sure what to focus on or how to go about it. To pay the bills while I figured it out I took a $18/hour temp job. Not a web temp job, but a receptionist, go-make-copies, please-format-my-Word-doc temp job. I did such a stellar job making crystal-clear copies and being on time that I got bumped up to $20/hour. Oh, joy. The climax of that miserable three months was when some office big wig wished me a 'Happy Secretary's Day. Or whatever.' I didn't know whether to laugh, cry, or wring her neck. Actually, I did cry. Pretty much daily. I was feeling worthless, hopeless and the bill collectors were calling non-stop.

"I was trying to get out of there and applying for gigs all over the place. I was registered with all the web staffing agencies. I got all excited when I landed a decent-paying 2-week consulting gig through Aquent, but then it was right back to temping when it ended.

"What saved me was the DC Web Women list.

"Someone posted a 'freelance web producer' gig on the list. I couldn't believe it -- it was like the job was written JUST for me. It needed my specific but rare blend of writing AND design skills, and it was for a topic that was close to my heart. And it was for a major, big-name organization.
And the pay was...Guess what? $20 per hour. It was ridiculously low, insanely even. No benefits. In fact, it wasn't even a staffing agency doing the recruiting and taking their cut -- this was a post directly from the company itself. And it was offering the EXACT same rate I was making to befriend the photocopy machine and phone.

"Even though the pay was pretty insulting for the skills required and for the kind of project it was, I applied anyway. I knew that position was for me. I figured at least it wasn't LESS money, and given the high-profile nature of the project and the prominence of the organization, maybe I could get my foot in the door for something better. At minimum, I would have a big-name client on my resume. I had nothing to lose.

"I was offered the 3-month on-site contract. Desperate for a little more money, I talked them into paying me $3 more per hour by ditching the payroll processing firm they used for freelancers and letting me invoice them directly. They agreed. Ooh-wee, a whole $23 per hour. I was feeling bold, so I also asked for free parking so I could cut back the overhead required to service their project. They agreed to that, too.

I" went in there and did that job like they were paying me $123 per hour, not $23. The project went well and was a big hit. They extended my contract for another 3 months. Eventually, that project went on to win a bunch of national awards. But before that happened, my phone was already ringing. My work got noticed. Big name people were calling me for projects, and I had to pretend like it was no big deal that I used to watch some of these people on TV or read their books. But they were calling little ole me. They all assumed I was making respectable money, so that's what they offered. Once I even tried to apply for an 'HTML coder' gig and got turned down -- they said that 'we have a much better use for someone of your talents' and a month later offered me a more senior project with fantastic compensation. And the folks at the original project were more than happy to give me glowing recommendations. And even a few more small freelance projects (with more money).

"If I hadn't taken that measly project that offered a mere $20 per hour, I wouldn't be here to type this long-A email today. That project jumpstarted my career in a big way.

"Don't get me wrong, I've been through lots of business ups and downs, but I'm happy to say that, with the exception of those 3 months of temping hell, I have been continuously self employed for 11 years, 5 months, and 2 days. Considering that I'm just 34, I can't complain.

"That is why I always forward job posts and freelance gigs to DCWW, even when the pay is ridiculously low. As long as it's web related and in the DC area, I'm posting it. I'm very fortunate that I don't need the gigs right now. But I KNOW someone else does. It's rough out there. There's some really talented woman out there, struggling, just trying to make it. That low-paying gig (or even high-paying one) might be just the break she needs.

"Don't get me wrong. I think many of these companies need to GET A GRIP and start paying people what they're worth according to their valuable experience and skills.

"I guess I just took a long way to say just two things with this email:

1) If you're struggling, keep your head up and your eyes open for possibility. There is hope. If all you see around you is lemons, find a way to make some friggin' fantastic lemonade.

2) Thank you, DCWW, for all that you have done for me. This continues to be THE BEST professional network I've ever belonged to, hands down, online or offline."

Thank you to Jamila White, the E-Commerce Diva, for posting this really awesome story.  I think that no matter what profession you're in, what level you're at, or what gender you are - this should ring true.