Video! Columns! Fantasy! Sports sites set programming strategies aimed at boosting consumer traffic and in turn attracting more ad dollars

By ERIC FISHER

Staff writer www.sportsbusinessjournal.com

This year’s March Madness On Demand, offered up by CBSSports.com, was a bona fide, no-doubt hit.

Traffic more than doubled from 2007 to 4.76 million unique users, advertising revenue soared to more than $23 million, and cultural relevance from the offering spiked thanks to a series of related deals that placed tournament-related content in hot spots like Facebook.

But after all the time-honored watercooler talk and late-night jokes about how March Madness corrodes the national GDP, those raw online numbers pale in comparison to what happens on Mondays during the fall.

It is during those times when tens of millions of sports fans collectively log on to that same CBSSports.com as well as ESPN.com, Yahoo! Sports, FoxSports.com, SI.com and scores of other sites to catch up on NFL action, track their fantasy teams, debate and discuss the prior weekend’s sports action, and engage in a host of other activities.

“Daytime is prime time for us, and there’s simply never a lack of appetite for NFL content — ever,” said Ed Bunnell, Fox Sports Interactive vice president for programming and product development. “The online version of ‘The OT’ [Fox Sports’ NFL postgame TV show] is a big, big Monday vehicle for us, and then it spills right over into fantasy, our analysis and all our other coverage.”

Added John Kosner, ESPN senior vice president and general manager of digital media, “This August-September-October period is such a huge time for us, a crucial time. We get traffic spikes at other periods and around big events, certainly in March during tournament time, for example. But football is definitely the No. 1 thing for us.”

That dynamic is representative of several prevailing factors: the NFL’s status as the No. 1 traffic driver in online sports, with most major sites gleaning 25 to 30 percent of their total annual traffic from content relating to that league; the seasonality of football; a geographic spread for many sports sites that draws disproportionately from key NFL and college football markets; and the fact that most sports-related traffic happens during daytime work hours.

But as the Internet and the business models based upon it continue to mature, each of the major U.S.-based sports sites are actively developing new programming strategies based heavily on research data and newly developed metrics that seek to spread that white-hot Monday fan interest across the week and into a steadier and ideally larger flow of traffic and advertising revenue.

Some of those ventures involve simply extracting more content from existing name-brand talent, such as Peter King’s Tuesday columns and Thursday game previews on SI.com to complement his franchise product, “Monday Morning Quarterback,” or Bill Simmons podcasting on ESPN.com to add to his regular, highly read print columns. Other sites are extending their reach by serving fans of niche sports with additional content in those areas, also known in Internet circles as “the long tail.”

“Peter King and the ‘Monday Morning Quarterback’ is obviously big, big appointment viewing for us, and is still our No. 1 overall destination. But we’ve been very focused on having a strong lineup across all seven days of the week, and previewing games, for example, is just as important as breaking them down afterward,” said Jeff Price, SI Digital president.

“We now have a very deep bench with guys like Don Banks, Dr. Z, of course, and his power ratings, our scout Bucky Brooks and so forth. So the traffic gap between Peter and the others is now a lot narrower than you would think. And it’s not just football, either. We’re getting huge engagement from people like [baseball writers] Tom Verducci and Jon Heyman,” Price said.

Video is popular at ESPN.com, but isn’t a

strong traffic generator at most sports sites.

The last three years have seen an unprecedented explosion in online video, with high-profile aggregators such as the Google-owned YouTube, Joost and retail outlets such as iTunes standing along the mainline sports sites and league-controlled portals.

But for all that much-ballyhooed growth and the continued rise of broadband Internet connections, online sports video generally accounts for about 10 to 20 percent of the traffic among the major sites, with only a select few spots such as ESPN.com and MLB.com reaching meaningfully beyond that mark.

Those averages for sports sites at large, despite the heavy fan passion in which they trade, actually under-index compared with global Internet traffic figures compiled by Cisco. The Internet backbone company estimates that 22 percent of total worldwide Internet traffic in 2007 was devoted to video, with the figure set to rise to 32 percent by the end of this year.

Turnkey Sports Poll
The following are results of the Turnkey Sports Poll taken in September. The survey covered more than 1,100 senior-level sports industry executives spanning professional and college sports.
What would you say has been the most significant development in online sports over the past year?
Streaming video of games and highlights	59.35%
Proliferation of fan and player blogs	13.08%
Legal decision that intellectual property rights do not apply to statistics used in fantasy sports	11.68%
Social networking	6.07%
The decline of dedicated sports reporters at newspapers	6.07%
No response/Not sure	3.74%
Which mainstream sports news site offers the best content?
ESPN.com	64.49%
FoxSports.com	6.54%
YahooSports.com	6.07%
SI.com	5.61%
SportsLine.com (CBS)	4.21%
SportingNews.com	2.34%
NBCSports.com	0.00%
Other	1.87%
No response/Not sure	8.88%
What Internet site do you most often wish you had thought of first:
Google	53.27%
eBay	21.03%
YouTube	9.81%
Facebook	5.61%
Amazon	4.67%
MySpace	0.93%
Yahoo!	0.93%
Other	0.47%
No response/Not sure	3.27%
Source: Turnkey Sports & Entertainment in conjunction with SportsBusiness Journal. Turnkey Intelligence specializes in research, measurement and lead generation for brands and properties. Visit www.turnkeyse.com.

There are several reasons for the gap between the sports number and the total global figure. The at-work element of much of the current online sports media consumption leads millions of users to seek out “quiet” content such as news, statistics and fantasy material that is not disruptive in group settings.

Some major sites such as SI.com do not have fully fledged video content strategies, and have instead devoted their resources to other areas such as original reporting, social networking and fantasy sports.

And most high-end video, such as baseball’s MLB.TV out-of-market package, is sold on a subscription basis where raw usage may perhaps be lower but yields a more stable and sustainable economic model.

“Video itself is not driving the business necessarily,” said Chris Russo, chairman and CEO of Fantasy Sports Ventures and a digital media consultant. “It’s definitely still early days.”

Also at issue are concerns over video quality and bandwidth in which some users, even with high-speed Internet connections, cannot process clips in a seamless fashion. “The bandwidth issue is a short-term one, but one we’re certainly dealing with at present,” said Jimmy Pitaro, Yahoo! Sports & Entertainment vice president and general manager. “Accessibility, relevance, quality, they’re all key factors as well. You can’t just put up whatever and expect people to consume it just because it’s video. It’s why we’re making a big investment in video, but it’s a long-term play for us.”

The last two years have also seen a major evolution in how Internet inventory is sold. Not long ago, many online sales were not at all integrated and were sold on a simple display basis.

The foremost buzzword now is multiplatform, with online sites now aggressively selling integrated packages that seek to move beyond simple purchase of inventory into fully fledged digital marketing efforts that blend online, mobile and, if possible, TV. And building off of title rights such as GMC’s sponsorship of King’s “Monday Morning Quarterback” three years ago, dedicated sponsorships of specific content elements also continue to grow.

But rather than simply purchasing title rights to specific writers, those dedicated buys are now focusing more on creating new content elements where the sponsor can be even more deeply involved, and in many cases, leverage other buys across the same outlet or sport.

Aiding those sales is a new wealth of metrics to evaluate the execution and placement of marketing campaigns. Third-party, panel-based data, the source of bitter industry debates for many months, remains something of a quagmire and generally is seen as something that provides value only on a raw directional basis. But beyond those monthly figures, audited internal server figures, numbers from ad-serving outfits, and a new realm of blended materials are all gaining favor and are being used increasingly to sell against.

ESPN and NBC, most notably, are actively developing blended user consumption data that either combines TV and Internet audiences, or in the case of specifically online statistics, mixes reach-based numbers such as unique users with engagement-based numbers such as time spent online. In ESPN’s emerging methodologies, other share-based data is also included.

“Raw uniques is such a blunt instrument,” said David Coletti, senior director of digital media research for ESPN, which is seeking industry consensus around some of its metrics formulas. “The digital space is ready for something more sophisticated. You’re certainly seeing marketers already get beyond just raw uniques in developing their programs, but we’re after a better set of tools and a much better level of transparency.”

Not surprisingly, the current big content and marketing push among sports sites is all around social networking. Already several years in the making, recent months have seen a marked uptick in social media-based ventures such as SI.com’s alliance with Citizen Sports Network on Facebook; the rise of Atomic Moguls, the brainchild of former NBA executive Brenda Spoonemore that also leverages the power of Facebook, MySpace and Bebo; the launch of SportsFanLive by former Yahoo! executive David Katz; and enhanced blogging and chat entries from ESPN, CBSSports.com and others.

The thought process behind the moves also is not difficult to understand: Capturing the under-25 audience is vital for the long-term survival of any sports property and requires a far different programming strategy than a traditional mix of stories, stats and videos.

“Everybody is trying to figure that out, and there’s certainly a ton of energy there,” Russo said. “The only one that’s truly succeeded to date is fantasy, and that’s obviously where [Fantasy Sports Ventures] has invested its energies, but you’re going to see more experiments, more moves into this space. The key is going to be in the execution and how real and impactful those offerings are.”

Published by Tedsgame.com

I am not even close to the “blogging guru” status by all means, but after hitting social media front pages a few times for the past month and reaching close to 70.000 page views in less than three weeks I can say for sure that I get to add my two cents when it comes to successful marketing of your product. On a market that’s over saturated with blogging tips, hacks, advice and wannabe authorities, many neglect the basic human factor. I do agree that knowing a thing or two about affiliate marketing, AdSense, SEO and all the techniques you can read about every day is quite mandatory, but I will state that the most important of them all is successful marketing through your connections, your friendly network that can bring you exposure, advice, help and sometimes even funny conversations all the way to real friendship.

You shall have a real connection to your social media buddies

This may sound quite trivial, but many of us that try to get some reach in our field tend to interact artificially with their social media buddies: I vote you, you vote me. I think a closer, warmer and friendlier relationship can get you a long way. You’ll be surprised of how those people are fun to talk to, smart, sarcastic and helpful. I made some great friends through social media and I can’t refrain from mentioning chris here, along with a bunch of other great guys that I have a personal connection with.

You shall know a “Make Money Online” blogger

Once you start to have a certain reach you will for sure want to make a bit of dough, at least to cover up for the hosting costs. An MMO blogger can get you a long way. No matter how much research about affiliate marketing you can get done in about a week or so, you still can’t beat these guys. They do it for a living. Make friends with one of them, add them on your favorite instant messaging program and feel free to ask them questions. You will get an prompt and direct answer and some of them will go as far as to give you personal advice after browsing your own website for a while. Trust me, it does way more for your monetizing needs than reading all of John Chow’s archive. My favorite friends in the business are the one AdSense expert Garry Conn and the all-around nice Canadian guy Mattaw.

You shall make friends with other bloggers

Rather than wasting valuable time researching for the best keywords and their output on your latest post, you should just go play into the blogosphere and meet some actual bloggers. What they can do for you is more important than any homework you can do by yourself: they can give you an honest opinion about your latest redesign, read your material before it’s published, point out small typos, notice that you might have missed an idea, add their input on the topic you wrote about and on a final note just give you a little “thumbs up” emoticon, meaning they want you to publish it, because they trust it. Believe me, it gives you a great feeling. Some bloggers that I have this kind of relationship with are cybrville, the Romanian wonder kid Tibi, varadinum or maxy. Send them a shout from me if you decide to pay them a visit.

You shall use instant messaging

Nothing says “friends” better than a 1-on-1 conversation on instant messaging. Personally I am quite tired of repetitive formulas like “hey, can you reddit/digg pls? thanks”. I thought web 2.0 was a great initiative in the first place because it promoted closer human interaction. Come on people, let’s add each other on instant messaging, let’s talk about weather in Alberta, chicks, cars, share pictures of our significant others or our dogs. That’s what this is about. As far as marketing is concerned, instant messaging is way underrated: you can mass-link a group of friendly webmasters, use your latest blog entry as your status message, meet your fans “in person”. In my opinion instant messaging beats twitter. (I recommend using Yahoo! Messenger for this, for many reasons that will be debated at a later time)

You shall know a programmer

Quite self-explanatory. For those days when you just can’t understand why stupid Internet Explorer just won’t display your beautiful new sidebar made entirely in CSS3 with the help of 25 images. They’ll know, they’ll laugh at you and tell you that you probably didn’t close a “div” tag at some point. And those 3 hours of wishing Bill Gates the flesh eating disease will go towards a better cause, perhaps even something crazy, like taking your girlfriend out for dinner.

Why SEO Needs Your Web Content

October 24, 2008 | Barry Wise | Search Engine Optimization, Web Design

A client recently approached me to discuss redesigning their website, optimizing it to rank well in Google, and contracting me for some basic marketing and promotion.  Now, this has happened to me a few times, so I don’t want to single out any one client (and I wouldn’t mention them by name even if you asked me).  But their thought process was, well, we’ve got about 100 or so pages indexed right now, but we want to get rid of them and pare that down to just a half dozen or so really sales-driven content pages.

My question, of course, was Why?  Why would you ever want to throw away valuable content (let’s assume for now that it was valuable content about their product and/or service offerings)?  The answer is always the same – we want to drive customers directly to the sale, so let’s push them there with a short, concise marketing message.  What’s wrong with that?

The failure, or disconnect, or whatever you want to call it, is always in the misunderstanding of the purpose and viability of the business website as a sales medium.

Marketing on the web is not like marketing in person, or on a phone call, or via any other medium.  If you were making outside sales calls I would say yes, you’ve got the right idea.  Make your pitch fast and focused and close the sale before they hang up.  So let me make this analogy – do you think customers will call you to listen to your outside sales call spiel?  No?  Then why in the world do you think they would take time out of their day to find your website to read it?

This particular business website, like so many others, suffers from a particular shortcoming I like to refer to as the “sales brochure” website.  They want just 5 pages on the site – one that talks about them, one that says where they’re located, maybe even has a spiffy little mapquest map, one page with their product listings, a contact form, etc. – you get the idea.  And again I make the comparison – what do you do when someone you don’t know hands you a sales brochure full of pitch?  That’s right – you put it in a scrapbook and save it for posterity to peruse later.  No, you don’t?  Really?  Then I guess you’re not surprised that your visitors aren’t going to bookmark your site and come back later to reminisce about your amazing sales pitch.

There’s a very easy solution, both from a marketing perspective and from an SEO standpoint.  Add actual valuable content to your website!  Not pitchy crap, but actually useful information.  You may find that your potential human customers will really think that it’s worthwhile, thereby giving your site the reputation as an authority in your market.  You may find that they return to the site to read more or begin emailing their friends about your great resource.  But more importantly for the promotion of your site, you will definitely find that Google and Yahoo love it.  And nothing assists in the promotion and marketing of a site like ranking in organic search results.

With more web content updated on a regular basis comes increasingly more attention from the search engine crawlers.  Pretty soon your site will be indexed faster (usually within minutes of publishing new content) and will begin ranking for all kinds of organic search terms you didn’t even know would attract customers (that’s what we call the long tail keyword effect).

Then you won’t even need to hire a NJ SEO like me!  Not really.  Content is just the first step, but it is the most important.  If you find an SEO that tells you otherwise, turn and walk away.

Why SEO Needs Your Web Content – Barry Wise NJ SEO and Marketing Consultant

That is what I should have expected from someone with 39 years of experience in the industry who last year took the helm of an ad-supported resource site for grandparents.

Jerry’s previous title, Ambassador Plenipotentiary to Madison Avenue at Yahoo!, was another reason I took note of everything he had to say about online advertising. As Ambassador Plenipotentiary, Jerry’s job was to develop and oversee Yahoo!’s strategic relationships with the advertising agency community in general.

Here are some bits of wisdom he shared:

-Too often marketers/advertisers want to market to a demographic instead of a life stage. This is a mistake. “To focus on any particular demographic means you’re cutting out a huge section,” he said.

-The solution to the said dilemma: always try to discover what consumers in a particular life stage have in common.

For grandparents, for example, it’s their grandchildren. Grandparents might be different ages, with different interests, incomes, and activity levels, but the one thing they all have is grandchildren.

Tactic: Instead of focusing on grandparents in online ads, try showing pictures of grandchildren and focusing messaging about how grandparents can interact with their grandchildren. Or focus on what their grandchildren might want or need.

-Too often marketers stereotype grandparents as old, gray, and inactive. The modern grandparent is quite the opposite. The average age a person becomes a grandparent in the U.S. is 48.

These grandparents spend a lot of cash, $50 billion, on their grandchildren annually.

Source: Grandparentopia.pdf

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I read a lot of blog posts and articles about “how” to use Twitter to productively market, promote, converse, or network. I read a lot about Twitter etiquette and about how to get followers, or provide value to followers, or be interesting there.

But I hear less about the “why”: Why use Twitter at all, when there are already so many other distractions to your workday, or your home life? Why bother talking to people you won’t ever meet, when you have real-world friends to keep up with? What kind of relationship can you hope to form on Twitter, anyway? Is there something wrong with you? Do you have ADD? Are you lonely, anti-social, weird? Or are you just needy?

I spent an unusual amount of time offline the past few weeks, first traveling and then recovering from minor surgery. And I found I missed Twitter — maybe not quite as much as I missed eating solid food, showering, and walking unsupported, but I missed it nonetheless.

So I started to wonder about Allen’s question. I started to wonder what it is, exactly, that I like so much about Twitter. I follow about 12,500 folks on Twitter, and most of them follow me back. But why? What’s its value? What role does it play for me? And, to Allen’s point, “Why do I use Twitter, anyway?”

I came down to four reasons:

1. Twitter gives me an immediate pulse on news and events, and what people are talking about, often before any news outlet. maybe it’s the former journalist in me, but I love getting sense of things as they are happening, real-time, before they are picked up by the news sites and wires.

While I was offline last week, USAir flight 1549 landed in the Hudson River. Janis Krums from Sarasota, Florida posted the first photo of the floating plane on Twitter from his iPhone. Thirty-four minutes after Janis posted his photo, MSNBC interviewed him live on TV as a witness. His kind of “citizen journalism” has happened before, with the Mumbai attacks, the California wild fires, Sarah Palin’s debate wink, and more.

My sense is that Twitter’s usefulness will only improve as news outlets begin to figure out ways to harness that immediacy: Last week, Yahoo engineer Vik Singh created TweetNews, a mashup of Twitter and Yahoo that takes Yahoo’s news results and compares them to emerging topics on Twitter, in effect using what’s most popular on Twitter as an index for determining the importance of news stories. In other words, Wired says, “TweetNews uses Twitter to rank stories that are so new they may not have enough inbound links for algorithm-based ranking systems to prioritize them.”

2. Closer to home, Twitter gives me a pulse on how MarketingProfs is being received, or what people are saying about us. Most folks love us here at ‘Profs: When we released a new product called a SmartTool this past week for our Premium members, I heard lots of great feedback reverberating through Twtiter. Like this:

melgallant: @MarketingProfs i love, love, love the smarttools blog marketing toolkit. definitely demonstrates the value of membership. thx!

evansmom @MarketingProfs Just downloaded blog tools AND email report; I love being a Premium member *preens*

sschablow: @AaronStrout Thanks for the heads up on the Sony case study. I love my MarketingProfs subscription.

Meryl333: @MarketingProfs Just signed up for another Premium year of MarketingProfs. Gets better every year.

lynnelle: @Meryl333 I agree! @marketingprofs premium membership a good
value.

But sometimes I get negatives comments — people complain that we charge for some of our content. Sometimes we get accused of sending too much email to our audience.

I take both the good and the bad. Either way, I get a chance to see it and respond to both praise and criticism directly. Is there another tool out there that allows me that same kind of immediacy and access? Is there another tool that offers our audience direct access to us?

3. Twitter broadens our reach to a wider community — and lets me learn from them, too. I’ve connected with people on Twitter who didn’t know a whole lot about MarketingProfs, and who now are subscribing. If they are not, they at least know we exist. Granted, the 12,500 followers I have on Twitter are mostly social media types, so its weighted heavily toward a particular profile of reader or potential subscriber. But still.

I get lots of ideas and feedback from folks on Twitter, and I learn a lot there.

Can I tie my Twitter usage to real ROI? Well, yes. Sort of. There were five or six people who came to our Digital Marketing Mixer in Scottsdale last fall because of the pre-conference buzz about it on Twitter. But I can’t claim that was only because of the MarketingProfs presence there: lots of our speakers and other attendees were also talking it up on Twitter.

Tying results too precisely to a specific tweet or two makes me a little uncomfortable — , and makes me recall what Rohit Bhargava said to me once, “What’s the ROI of social media? Well, what’s the I, exactly?”

From my perspective, it’s enough for me to know that there are many people who know about MP now, who didn’t previously. And some of them put their butts into seats at our conference. And Twitter helped.

4. Twitter is my water cooler, of sorts. I didn’t invent this metaphor, but it’s an apt one. Twitter gives me a chance to take a break and chat with folks informally, about serious and not-too-serious stuff. Sometimes that’s about business or marketing, sometimes it’s not.

Some of the folks I connect with on Twitter I’ll eventually meet. Sonny Gill, Donna Tocci, Beth Harte, Amber Naslund, Frank Martin, Pam Martin, and Frank Eliason all came to the Scottsdale event, and I met them first on Twitter or Plurk, another microblogging platform, but many other folks I might never meet in person. Nonetheless, Twitter allows me to “meet” them just the same, which in some ways is the allure of online generally, for me: it connects me with people, cultures, businesses, events outside of my physical world.

* * * *

So how about you? Are you on Twitter? Why?

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What’s a Welcome Mat?

So, what do I mean by “welcome mats”? Well, for me, they come in many different shapes and forms but are essentially places on the web where you invite people back to your website or blog by introducing yourself (through something you have written yourself or via someone else’s reference or recommendation) and making contact with them. Essentially a “doorway” back to your site indicated by a “welcome mat”.

Still not clear? Well, let me give some of the forms that they can take. Some of the principal ones that come to mind are:

• Website pages which appear as Search Engines results
• Blog posts (individual, categories etc.) in Search Engines and Blog Search Engines & Directories
• Social/Business Networking Profiles pages and the posts or comments you leave on these sites
• Bookmarked articles on Social bookmarking and Crowd Sourcing sites
• Links coming from other websites or blogs
• Blog comments you leave where the “name” will link back to your blog
• YouTube profiles linking your videos back to your site
• Reference to your post from a Twitter message (either your own or someone else’s)
• AdWords (PPC) Adverts
• Directory entries
• Articles posted with a link in the signature file
• Forum / Bulletin Board signatures

In each of these cases, you are effectively creating a Welcome Mat – something which provides information about you and your business, and then extends both an invitation and the means to find out more about you, via a link back to your site.

So, how will people find me?

As people use the internet for research, social interaction, fun, information gathering or whatever they individually want, they “cross the internet” in a variety of different ways – just how they go about it, is totally out of our control. In fact, it’s likely to change each time and so the ‘route’ that they take will be different too.

Our mission – should we choose to accept it! – is to make sure that we give ourselves the best chance possible to place a welcome mat in their path and make it attractive and relevant enough for them to follow and read our information. No small task!

Where do blogs fit in?

The trouble is that creating Welcome Mats is all well and good but the internet is vast and there are a lot of people vying for attention – so you have to take the time to make them relevant and to make them stand out. They have to demonstrate why they should spend time on your site rather than someone else’s. Blogs have two key roles to play in this scenario.

In the first instance, they are a great way to create welcome mats. For example, each time that I write a post which I hope will first and foremost be of interest to people who read my blog, I also know that it will also automatically:

• create 5 or 6 new pages (individual post, home page, archive page, 2 category pages) – 5 potential Welcome Mats on the main Search Engines;
• ping 35 blog search engines, directories and RSS directories – let’s say at least 10 Welcome Mats;
• if it is well written, it may be fortunate in having 5 people reference it in addition from their blogs – giving another 5 Welcome Mats;
• add to Feedburner’s Headline Animator which I use when I post on Business Networking sites which displays links to my RSS feed – on average another 5 Welcome Mats;
• perhaps referenced, tweeted or dugg on relevant social media sites if the post is something that people believe is worth sharing.

So, by posting on my blog and focusing purely on my key aim of writing something which will prove useful and interesting, it is also likely that I will automatically create over 25 new Welcome Mats. That for me is a bonus rather than the primary reason that I write … but is also an additional reason to encourage businesses I work with to get their own business blog.

In the second instance, blogs are also a great place to refer people back to – so not only do they fulfil the role of information creator and distributor, they are also a great place for all of these welcome mats to lead back to, rather than a static website. This is particularly true when it comes to social media and the interactive nature of the blog acts as a central focus for the other tools such as video, microblogging or social bookmarking. There is no better place for someone to get to know you (and decide whether they want to do business with you) than on your blog – so let it reflect the information and values you wish to communicate.

So, go for it!

It’s no longer the case (if it ever really did work this way) that you can simply put up a “roadblock” and divert people automatically to your website. This smacks of so called “interruption marketing” and as such gets short shrift from the net savvy users that we have become today. Today, we have to use our powers of attraction and our networks instead to help to deliver our message and information to the people interested in it.

The ‘Welcome Mats’ of today need to be much more based upon four of the principles of social media – creating, sharing, participating, involving – than on the advertising bias of a few years ago. These also offer many more opportunities. So take the time to look at your own and see whether you are creating attractive invitations that people are going to want to follow and share with others – if you find that you’re not, then I’d suggest that now’s the time to start.

Tags: Business Blogs, Social Media, PPC, Pay Per Click, Emarketing, Internet Marketing, Mat Making Machine, Search Engines

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Two Accounts You Must Have to Play

It seems like I log in to dozens of accounts all day as I market my business, use online and social media tools and participate in social networking communities.

Although it may feel like I bounce from place to place it finally dawned on me that most of my online business needs are increasingly met with just two accounts. Not sure if that’s good or bad, but I do know you must have access to the tools housed in these two places if you want to play in today’s online world.

Google – gmail, Goodle docs, Google Calendar, Google Reader, Feedburner, AdWords, Analytics, Alerts

Yahoo – delicious, flickr, mybloglog, stumbleupon, upcoming

So, when one of these two buys, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Wordpress we may see a single sign on for life.