Web 2.0 Assets And Other Social Strategies
Even if you haven’t heard the term “web 2.0 assets” before, you’ll no doubt recognize them when you see them.
The phrase first came about when social bookmarking became popular, and then expanded to include micro-blogging sites and content aggregators. Nowadays, the Web 2.0 encompasses a wide variety of platforms and sites that you can use outside of your website and blog to help promote your content to a wider audience.
While these shouldn’t become a big priority over other strategies, such as email marketing or social media activities, they’re worth mentioning here because they can still be beneficial for you.
So, let’s take a quick tour of some of the best ones you can use as a professional photographer.
Social Bookmarking
Social bookmarking refers to sites where a network of people share bookmarks to content across the web, and members can then vote those bookmarks up and down in popularity.
I don’t recommend spending too much time on these, since the traffic you’ll see as a result may not be very targeted (resulting in higher bounce rates for that segment), but it can sometimes be of benefit to submit links to your resource pages or posts if they might appeal to a wider audience.
There are literally hundreds of social bookmarking sites, but some of the most popular ones include:
Blog Amplification With Triberr
Depending on how much time and effort you want to put into it, Triberr can be an effective way to amplify the reach of your blog content.
The concept can be a little hard to grasp at first, but Triberr is basically a community of bloggers where the aim is to help share and promote each others’ content.
Bloggers with similar interests form themselves into tribes, each tribe having an owner (“chief”), followers and members.
When you post content to your tribe, that content is then seen by your fellow tribesmen who can then choose to share that with their own Twitter networks, potentially multiplying your reach significantly.
As with social bookmarking, you will probably find that the visitors you see as a result are not highly targeted, and they may bounce more than normal, but Triberr does have the added benefit of increasing social shares of your content, especially via Twitter.
I would consider Triberr to be an advanced marketing strategy, and not something to use right away from the beginning before you’ve established your base social networks through Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google+ or Twitter.
Tumblr And WordPress.com
Tumblr and WordPress.com are what I often refer to as “satellite” blogging platforms.
They are not recommended as places to run your primary blog because you do not control the domains, which could be taken out from under you at a moment’s notice, and any SEO you accumulate on there belongs to them and not your domain where it belongs.
However, both of these platforms do make great secondary blogs where you can post excerpts or smaller versions of the posts from your main blog and then link back to the main post.
Here’s a diagram to show how this can work in practice:
Content promotion map for Tumblr and WordPress.com
- First, you create your primary posts on your own blog as you would normally (and you would share those through the regular channels too, of course).
- Next, you can create shortened excerpts of your posts that you then post to your accounts on Tumblr and WordPress.com, making sure that they are not identical.
- Your new excerpt posts should also include links back to the actual post on your blog (not just to your home page). These links are “followed” links, meaning that they will pass SEO value to your main blog post – this is one of the reasons these are so valuable to have.
- You can also share your Tumblr and WordPress.com posts via social media to help them get noticed by Google and to help boost the value of the links they contain.
LinkedIn Publishing
This one is very new, and it’s too soon to tell just how useful or otherwise this is going to prove, but it’s worth including here so you can at least check it out.
LinkedIn is opening up its platform to allow its members to publish full-blown articles that can potentially reach many thousands of people. I’ve tested this out myself with a few article and the results so far have been encouraging.
One of the keys to success here is having a large LinkedIn network, so I encourage you to start expanding your network of connections and joining relevant groups if you haven’t already done so.
As with Tumblr and WordPress.com, you can include links in these articles to your blog, your resource articles or anything else you would like to draw attention to, and those links (for now, at least) do appear to be “followed” links.
For the moment, this feature is available on LinkedIn by invitation, but you can get started by applying here.
YouTube And Vimeo
YouTube is the second most-used search engine after Google, which can make it a great resource for promoting your content. Most people think of videos as being one-off slideshows or presentations, but you can also re-purpose your blog posts and resource pages into videos, either as screen presentations, slideshows, or with you talking on screen.
Some things to bear in mind here:
- If you are targeting keywords in your post or article, include them in the video title…
- You are allowed to add a URL to the description of your video, and that will be turned into a link when the description is shown on YouTube or Vimeo. The link should be the URL to your post or article and you should make the link the very thing in the description, so that it shows prominently…
- Also add keywords to the description – in fact, you can use a brief excerpt of the post or article you want to promote in the description as a teaser…
- If you are a Vimeo Plus or Vimeo Pro user, you can also specify a URL to be shown on the screen after the video has finished playing – very handy as a call to action!
Guest Posting
We talked about guest posting in the previous unit on link-building but it’s worth nothing here that you can use guest posts on other blogs to promote your resource pages and your best posts, by selecting the URL to a page you want to promote as the destination for your byline link in the guest article.
Commenting On Related Blogs
Lastly, we have blog commenting. This is an easy strategy to implement, although it can take some time, since you’ll need to write a useful and unique comment each time.
You can usually enter any URL you like when you leave a comment on someone else’s blog.
However, when you do leave a comment, as shown in the screenshot here, you can use the URL to any page or post on your blog as the destination for the link created by your name when the comment is published.
The idea here is to find other blogs that publish posts that target the same or similar keywords that you do, and then leave a comment using the URL of your own post or page on that topic.
To find related blogs is quite easy – just head over to Google and do a search on the keywords you’re interested in.
