Category: News & Trends

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Social Media – a Candid Review Is It Worth the Time?

Well you will love or hate this post on my very candid take on social media at Web-World Watch. If you are using social media and don’t agree with my view, make sure to leave me a note.

I think that social media is interesting but a time pit and wonder just how busy some of these people are in their business that they have literally hours to work and add to their network.

From my experience the people I see actively using it are people who really intend to spam their friend network by broadshotting job postings (if they are head hunters) or mass mailing all friends about new listings (if they are in real estate).

The blog is candid and unvarnished. Click in to see if you agree or diagree.

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My Very Candid Review of Social Media

Candid is right, you may want to click the post title to go to my rather lengthy and acid review on social media at Web-World Watch. You may agree or rabidly disagree, but let the discussion begin!

Is social media worth the time effort? Are you simply being spammed by people in your network? Are you really getting new clients from this avenue? What is the benefit from simply ranking high organically on your name and not on keywords? These are just a few very pointed questions that I look at. So click in and let me know your thoughts – is social media working for you and how?

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Feedburner Tips

If you are not running your feed through Feedburner, you are missing out on great information to help you cater your content to your audience.

I used to be a big advocate of not using Feedburner when RSS news feeds first became important several years ago. I did not want to lose my domain branding on my feed by having it be wrapped by Feedburner.

But now, I recommend that you use Feedburner as feed stats at the PRO level are free now that Feedburner has been purchased by Google. It’s easy to create a free account. You simply enter in the URL for your blog in Feedburner and it creates a new feed URL for you. If you are using Blogger, you enter this new feed address in the feed tab of the settings. For WordPress users it is more complicated. Typically I will hard code the feed into the meta tags, but you may actually now be able to find a plug-in that will allow you to install the Feedburner feed automatically from one of my last plug-in searches. I haven’t checked it out yet, so if you have, leave me a comment.

I monitor my Feedburner stats to see what is happening in regards to broad subscribership. Remember however, Feedburner only provides stats on your RSS or Atom feed. It does not provide page views when people visit your blog using their browser or a link from your website. So, you will still need to review stats like Google Analytics or Urchin for the full picture of the popularity of your blog.

It is important to understand that according to industry reports that still only 7% of all readers are reading blogs via feeds so your real traffic will still be coming in via a browser. So make sure you have regular web stats enabled for your blog to track all of your traffic.