Blogging to Fame!

“Social media offers new opportunities to activate…brand enthusiasm.” said Stacy DeBroff, founder and CEO of Mom Central.

Social Again connects the dots to explore the reason why is it important for companies to go social, not only by creating compelling content but by engaging with people, encouraging them to share their ideas and knowledge. Also, Social Again will talk about latest industry trends, product reviews, events, blogging ;) , campaigns, communities, and lots more... I know you get the point.

I would be cross posting what we write on social again here. Having said that you can visit Social Again now.

Dan Zarrella with his book “The Social Media Marketing Book” introduces social media and guides on how best to use this media for the marketing of your business. Almost anyone can practice the workable solutions provided in the book, and make sense of the complicated social media environment.

For anybody who is new to social media marketing Zarrella introduces each basic building blocks of social media, including blogs; multi-media; microblogging; social networking; social news and bookmarking, in different sections. Within each section, Zarrella introduces a tool, talks about its history, and describes the protocols, features and functionality with the help of screenshots, graphs, and visual explanations.

The book is lean and with 224 pages of which half of them are screenshots and images, it is indeed a highly-tactical guide of significant value to any individual or organization looking to get into social media. The book also does a good job of showing the difference between different social media sites, such as pure networking (LinkedIn, Facebook), media sharing (YouTube, Flickr), blogs, microblogging, and bookmarking (Reddit, Delicious, Digg) and more.

Throughout the book, there is good advice and it tells you what works and does not work. Zarrella makes an observation that is crucial to ones success for a business use of Facebook. He notes that for businesses, the best social media marketing is always going to be done by your fans, not by you. on the topic of forums, he reiterates the importance of fans, writing that a business should not underestimate the power of networks of niche forums to drive impressive numbers of visitors to your site. Once again, the best promotion comes not from the business, but from its fans.

The chapters on strategy and measurement have some good piece of advice. He discusses of "call to action" (CTA) in which the marketer, tries to engage visitors on the website. He also stresses on the importance of goals and describes several tools you can use to measure return on investment and engagement as a result of your social media marketing efforts.

The book does justice to social media tools but could have also emphasized more on the social graph (people, relationships and conversations) the focal point of social media. The human element of social media could have been better explained on the interaction with consumers, clients, and potential leads through social media tools.

There are loads of interesting and useful tips in this book. Zarrella also provides anecdotes from various social media gurus and notables to share their wisdom along with classic examples of Comcast, Zappos and Dell.

About Dan Zarrella

Dan Zarrella currently works as a marketing product owner at HubSpot. He has written extensively about the science of viral marketing, memetics and social media on his own blog (danzarrella.com) and for a variety of popular industry blogs.

"There is a lack of practical, tactical advice on marketing bookshelves concerning social media," says Zarrella (@DanZarrella). Rather than talk about just 'engaging in the conversation' I wanted to give readers a hands-on introduction to the social web and what it can do to impact their business's bottom line."

He continues: "Young people today are spending enormous amounts of time on social networks and in the changing world of marketing their status as digital natives can make them valuable assets to businesses. This book can be the first step for turning social networking addiction into a marketable skill."

Guy Kawasaki, co-founder of Alltop.com truly says "Let Zarrella take you to social-media marketing school. You'll learn more from reading this book than a month of research on the Internet."

This is from my post in 2020Social Blog.

Labels: Review

Some people will not just stop fooling others. The more brilliant internet platforms prosper the

more scams you will find related to it.

I recently saw a banner ad below:

Curiously I clicked on the banner and which took me to the site of “Washington Reporter”...(http://washington-reporter.com/college-dropout-shares-secret-fb/?keyword=KAT_728_01) Sounds like a credible URL. To my surprize it was a scam from

someone promotin Twitter Cash Kit.

A not so intelligent search on Mike Steadman brought up the following results...

It’s strange that somebody will give you $25 per link you post even if you have absolutely no twitter followers.

Twitter Cash Kit is being promoted at all possible places in all possible ways, and even on twitter. The strange point is some people actually bought it.

I will put it as another scam which could only have a few people interested. If you do a quick search you will find people who bought it complaining on different forums like Get Saqtisfaction.

I can point many scams that are going on, in the online space, but I would rather let you know how not to fall prey to such spammers, specially if their is cash invloved.

1. Before buying a product, always research about the company or individual selling it. You may try putting product's name in quotes + scam. For example- "Twitter Cash kit" + Scam. And for a change you will find yourself learning from other's mistakes :)
2. Do not fall pray to "Your distant relative died and left you cash" emails, and don't ever send your personal information to them.
3. While making a payment always do so through secure payment gateway.
4. One of the most famous scams are Job Scams. One explained above may fall in this category. Avoid jobs that ask you to buy something or pay a security before you can join. These will turn out to be scams or otherwise worthless anyways.
5. Do a search on Scam.com for the name of the company, which is a great forum where people complain about being scammed.

Hopefully this post will get atleast one person saved from getting scammed. Go get your luck out there.

Labels: Spamming

Citing a Gartner study there are eventually "200 million people call themselves ex-bloggers." That's a ton of dead blogs but it won't matter to most blog readers. Lots of these ex-bloggers want to get back to scene. Quoting a question by David-

So, I am not sure how to go about this, but I need to know what everyone thinks. I have a few blogs that I have let fade away, but I really want to revive them, and over the next two weeks especially, I feel like I have the time, energy and hopefully continual focus to make them part of my daily routine.

Do I just start writing on them again and act like they never faded? Do I give up on them, and start again fresh without any of the baggage and the apparent break in posting? What do you think? What is the best way to revive a dead blog?

To start with- This post is about reviving your old blog… and Not starting Afresh.


You may not have been blogging well for a year. Or Your blog has been one of the known blogs of its time, but now everybody seems to have forgotten it. Even I did not blog at regular intervals and other things in life took priority. What happened to “blogging to fame” could have happened to anybody in the blogosphere.

Now you want your readers back. You want them to know about your coming back to the blogosphere. What do you do to revive your dead blog?


Do this and bring your blog back to life…


1. Start Blogging- A No-Brainer you would say… It may sound obvious, but, it takes time. Bringing a blog back to life is not easy. It needs the same energy and enthusiasm that you started your blog once with. Give your blog some time.


2. Reconnect with fellow Bloggers- Blogging is all about relationships. Make your old fellow bloggers remember you. Talk to them, comment on their blogs, and re-build your relationships. Oh great! If you have already kept the friendship alive, but if not, now is the time to do so.


3. Blog Networks- If you blogged earlier, you would be most probably be a member of sites like MyBlogLog and BlogCatalogue. Spend time on them (the site), and with them (the blogger members). Use Twitter, and other sites to get your voice up and going, and trust me, you are definitely going to feel good about it.


4. Redesign for a fresh feel- A full facelift. Like starting a new day, this will help you to get your creativity to flow again. This is totally your choice. You can continue with the old one.


And this time maintain your commitment to blogging... :)

All the time that I got busy with something else… My blog suffered the most.

New Year did not get any special post and neither did I declare my resolutions till now. But if now this blog does not get the love it deserves it will soon be dead. Which, I will never let happen.

I pledge to remove my laziness and give my blogging a tequila shot… Cheers to a new day… A New Year and ways to go forward...

Think Beyond Optimization

Define Objectives: Plan effectively, develop your funnel, be motivated.

Million of blogs take birth and die. This is because bloggers do not define their objectives properly. After the initial push, they find other priorities, and interests.

Blog is not about posting articles. Sometimes a well researched post and thoughtful content may not be enough to make the blog successful. The need is to define the very reason of the existence of the blog, and communicating with your readers.

Blog don't Splog

One can splog for various reasons- for earning money, for bringing search engine traffic or for building backlinks. Whatever your reason be, do NOT do it.

If your objective is to make money, sell your product/service or you want to sell affiliate products, a blog cannot be your online store. Internet is great direct selling machine, but unfortunately Blog is NOT. Blogging is not a sales channel but a marketing one. Most successful blogs which are monetized are done essentially from advertisement.

To do this you need to work to get articles (truth actually need not to be very original, but need to be very you)

If you want get traffic or build backlinks, there are ethical ways to do it. You will be able to find lots of articles online to follow. Any splogging in the long run do not benefit anyways.

Understand SEO vs Social Media

As one of the very popular posts of this Blog on Search Engine Domination, things eventually came true. SEO is good if you can dominate in search engine rankings on popular and on demand keywords. You have a great inflow of targeted traffic. But if not SMO can help you out.

As Rohit Bhargava said “The concept behind SMO is simple: implement changes to optimize a site so that it is more easily linked to, more highly visible in social media searches on custom search engines (such as Technorati), and more frequently included in relevant posts on blogs, podcasts and vlogs.”

It helps you increase linkability and helps your content flow to the people interested. If you are interested to know the rules of SMO, please go through “5 Rules of SMO”.