The Art of Enchantment: How Guy Kawasaki Will Change Your Business
I recently interviewed Guy Kawasaki, co-founder of Alltop.com and the author of the bestselling book, The Art of the Start. His latest masterpiece is called Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions.
In this interview we talk about what makes for great content, how he came up with the title of his latest book, what Enchantment means for business, why businesses need to embrace nobodies and how he promoted his book. (Be sure to listen to the MP3 of this interview below.)
Mike: Most of our readers are marketers and business owners. Can you explain what Alltop does for them and why they might find it useful?
Guy: One of the functions of marketers, PR people and social media people is they need to keep on top of things.
The vision of Alltop was that we should aggregate RSS feeds for people by topic and create essentially an online magazine rack so that you could go to one place and say, “Okay, these are all the social media blogs and websites aggregated in one place.” It’s the five most recent stories from each source, and we give you a preview of the first paragraph of each story so you can see if you really want to click through. 
8 Ways to Find Great Social Media Content
Do you want to know how to find the most valuable social media content? Are you looking for great articles and videos to share with your friends and fans?
Be sure to watch this edition of Social Media Examiner TV with our host Mari Smith.
In this episode, Mari introduces you to the concept of curating content and how it can help your business. And Mari also reviews 8 content curation tools to help you find the best information for your business.
Share your feedback, see the show notes and discover how you can be part of a future show below!
26 Tips for Enhancing Your Facebook Page
Are you looking for fresh ideas to enhance your Facebook efforts? Do you ever have days when you’re not sure what to post on your Facebook page?
This can be a real problem if you’ve made Facebook updates an integral part of your communications strategy.
These are the times when having a ready-and-waiting list of Facebook ideas will come in handy. In this post I’ll show you 26 practical ways to use good content for your Facebook pages, everything from A to Z.
Three Free Social Monitoring Tools Worth Exploration
We live in a world where the entire globe can have access to your name, IP address, photo and all of your public information with a simple search.
Now social media takes it one step further. I not only can find your past exploits online, but I can hear the conversations that the entire globe is having about you, right now, with a simple click (and maybe some typing too).
Twazzup, Addict-o-matic and SocialMention are three free platforms that allow you to measure your social media mettle—or more simply put, see all of the buzz or conversations surrounding your brand online, at any time. Never heard of these platforms? No worries, I’ve got your back!
How to Discover What’s Trending on Facebook
Since Facebook announced the Open Graph API, the response has ranged from “Facebook is the future of the web” to “Facebook is ending privacy as we know it.”
Matt Schlict definitely believes the former.
Matt saw Open Graph API as an opportunity to connect people across the web—not just through personal connections, but also by their connection to the most popular content. Instead of waiting for users to browse one of the 100,000 sites using a form of the Open Graph, he decided to post all of the most popular content in one place, on ItsTrending.com.
What Is ItsTrending.com?
Itstrending.com is a site that collects all of the content shared via Open Graph, and ranks it by the number of times it has been shared. This guarantees that everything on the site is the most popular content of its kind.
19 Tips for Driving Traffic to Your Blog
It’s the the perennial quest. How can you get more traffic to your site?
After all, without a steady stream of traffic to your blog, there’s little opportunity to engage your audience and convert readers to raving fans.
Methods change and evolve over time. When I wrote my first “how to drive traffic” post about five years ago, the list looked a lot different. There was no Twitter, no Facebook, no social sharing buttons, and no retweet button.
12 Social Media Secrets From World’s Top Superstars
It’s no secret that social media marketing is the most powerful business-building tool on the planet. Now any business can directly reach customers, anytime and anyplace.
To take your social media marketing to the max, here are hot social media tips direct from 12 of the top industry masters. You’re going to want to model their priceless advice:
#1: Engage Your Facebook Fans With Questions
13 Ideas to Inspire Your Blog Content
As a blogger have you ever thought, “I don’t know what to write about!” or “How am I going to come up with fresh content for my blog three times a week?”
This article will provide you unique ideas that will help you keep pumping out great content.
The following 13 content ideas are designed to help save you time and stimulate some new ideas.
The Secret to Growing Your Blog Following and the Pitfall You Must Avoid
Looking to grow your blog following? You might be surprised that the best way to gain a following is to focus on other people’s blogs.
Outreach is key to having a blog that actually works for your business, yet it’s the one element many professionals ignore. And it’s contrary to most competitive thinking because it involves spending time away from your blog.
Done correctly, however, reaching out to other bloggers in your field will actually create more business opportunities, increase traffic to your own blog, and enhance your business brand more than any other tactic you could employ.
Here’s how:
Top 10 Easy Steps to Starting a Business Blog
Though they had been around for many years, blogs burst on the scene as a hot marketing tool around 2003 when marketers discovered easy-to-use blogging platforms like Blogger, Typepad, and WordPress.
However, just because anyone can set up a blog, doesn’t mean everyone should, and many professionals and businesses start blogging without giving any thought to why, how and who will be doing the blogging.
Over 50 percent of blogs are abandoned within the first 90 days. While this isn’t really important if you’re writing a personal diary, political or celebrity blog, it is very important if you start a blog for your business and don’t keep posting on it consistently and with purpose.
When a prospect lands on a blog that hasn’t been updated in months, it’s akin to walking into a vacant store with busted windows and dust blowing in. It’s just not pretty; and it doesn’t look good for you, your business reputation and your branding.
Don’t let that happen to you. Start right, start smart and follow a few suggested guidelines. First, let’s review some basics:
