Read This! — October 2012

October 8th, 2012 by Search Influence Alumni

Spoooooky October greetings to you, faithful SI readers! We’re back with another Read This, our monthly roundup of the best news you can use to take to the Internet and support your business. Let’s dig in!

• Content Recall: Stop Creating Great Content and Produce Memorable Content Instead — Blind 5 Year Old

The mantra of the Internet is “great content floats to the top,” but the exact definition of “great” is a whole ‘nother rodeo. Instead of flailing around trying to define your content’s greatness, focus on a more advertising-centric metric: memorability. AJ Kohn of Blind Five Year Old takes us through just how you can tweak your efforts to make them more “sticky” and fundamentally appealing to the reader. It’s worth point out that the post itself is a great example!

•  Google Analytics Guide: 4 Easy Tips For Getting Started With Analytics & Website Goal Setting — TopRank

So you have Analytics running on your website, but you don’t know how to leverage the facts and figures to get more traffic. Never fear! This concise and handy guide can tell you the important points of setting up alerts, goal tracking and more, helping you to sort through the morass of data and create a game plan for your site with the help of Analytics’ clearly-defined user data.

• A Marketer’s Guide to Reddit [Infographic] — SocialTimes

Reddit.com, the self-proclaimed “front page of the Internet,” is a bastion of memes, cat pictures, self-referential humor and a whopping 2.5 billion page views per month. The mostly self-policed community displays its content based on the votes of its users, so a popular link that’s deemed worthy of the front page can attract huge view numbers. Does that mean that a savvy businessowner can’t utilize it to promote his or her brand? Of course not — check out this handy infographic from SocialTimes for some interesting statistics and handy tips! The main takeaways? Don’t spam, do participate, and above all make sure what you’re bringing to the table is relevant and interesting to the 40,000,000+ strong Reddit “hivemind.”

• Promoting Your Brand on LinkedIn Groups — AboutSocialMedia.com

LinkedIn is the preeminent social network for professionals, but did you know that you can go beyond just networking with colleagues? LinkedIn’s Groups features provides a space for you to share content and connect with potential partners and customers!

• Social Media ROI: How To Define A Strategic Plan — Search Engine Watch

We all know that participating in social media helps your business, but finding out where to start can be overwhelming. Take a look at this Search Engine Watch piece that goes over the process of creating a map to clarify your objectives, select your tactics and follow through by measuring the success with defined metrics.