Over the past month I have read a lot of blogs talking about horror stories of their premium content that they took weeks even months to write getting submitted by social media users that have poor quality accounts. They go on to talk about how they get jacked because the person submitting has no friends or they don’t know how to submit and their articles go no where but to the abyss of the dead pool.

Easy Solution: Change the URL
The solution is very easy, most of you know this I am sure, but I saw no one saying this in their posts or comments about how they had giving up hope on a particular blog post. If it gets submitted and goes no where, then change the URL, 301 Redirect the old URL and then submit it through a decent account. If you story gets 70 Diggs and is 5 articles from the front page on Up and Coming and doesn’t make it then you may be screwed, as a lot of people will have seen it and you will get buried for trying again. It can work though, you just wait long enough and vary the title and description :). If the story goes to the land of “One Voters” then resubmit it right away and reap the benefits. As your blog grows in readers this will happen more and more, just know that on the super premium content you don’t have to give up hope.

I don’t care what you say there is one thing that is an absolute about promoting content on social sites, and that is if you don’t have a good account with others watching your submissions, you will get nothing to the front page. The only exception would be you if the blog you submit is very popular with thousands of active readers, and they had the Digg this button on the site after you submitted it, enabling the readers to vote it from the site instead of on Digg or any others. It wont go popular on Digg or Reddit unless there are others to Read it and vote. The content has to be given the chance to be voted and if there are no friends watching or the story doesn’t make Hot in Up and Coming in it’s category then no one will see it.

Now StumbleUpon you can get by with a lesser account as the submission will get put in front of some people through the tool bar but if you are a lesser account it will need the Thumb Up of a power user or two in order to gain the traction you want. What can happen in SU like in the link int he first paragraph, is most people that are starting out don’t know how to use the category tags the right way. This will destroy a good submission. What usually happens is they go super quick and use a suggestion from SU on some super competitive tag, or they don’t think about the real content and submit it to a not so popular category.

One tip you can do at SU is if you have your own site, submit it then watch the traffic, and if it isn’t that good (in the hundreds) then edit your submission and switch some tags and categories and see if it improves. Rinse and repeat and you can get a good idea of what works. We once submitted a story on a blog related to surfing but about Eco-Friendly stuff, it was originally submitted to the surfing category, got maybe 150 visits in two days, we switched it to environment, and it exploded, new subscribers, comments, links and thousands of visits.

If you have a lesser account work on building up a trusted network of friends before submitting, then start with high profile news sites etc to test out your account. This way you will build your account faster and won’t burn the blogger trying to make a living from home in the meantime.

*Edit: I have been getting some hate on this from people that say they have “lesser” accounts at social sites. This post is not to rag on someone with an up and coming account. Everyone starts out with a junk account. This post if for content writers who unfortunately might have someone with no friends submit their stuff to social news, where it stays at one vote for it’s entire life span.

This is also not tips about submitting duplicate content, is it really duplicate content if no one but the submitter reads it?

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I really enjoy teaching people/clients about everything they can do to help them with their brand awareness and management, but there is something that does frustrate me. A majority of the time when I am working with a brand new (online) business owner, and I start to talk to them about the not-so traditional ways of marketing like Social Media to help them with their reputation management, they do not take me as serious as they need to be.

I want this to be the warning for every new to Internet business owner who is reading this post!

The reason a majority of the major businesses online have a reputation management problem is because they did nothing to combat it from the start. Lets face it, the bigger and bigger you get, the more people you are going to have that want to bring you down. It happens, and I don’t care if you are the “happiest place on earth” (like Disneyland) you will never be able to please 100% of the people 100% of the time. There will be problems, and you have to be prepared.

These new-to-Internet business owners tell me that they do not need to worry about their brand right now, because it does not make a difference and nobody knows them (or about their brand) anyway. Are they planning on failing, before they even get started? This kind of thinking could not be more wrong!

I can name a handful of companies off the top of my head like Wal-mart & Coca Cola who probably wish they had controlled their online reputation when they VERY FIRST went live online (if you visit the Google search results you can probably figure out why).

You may not be big now, and there may be no one searching for you at present, but aren’t you planning on it? If you control the first several pages of search results for your brand now, while no one knows about you, it is much easier and cheaper (to do so) then when you get big. I mean ALOT cheaper, (if it can even be done). There are some companies (that I know of) spending up to 10K a month just to help push down negative results.

Why not take care of this problem now, while you are smaller and the cost is a lot less?

Think about this - what if you are a company that dropships products, and you have 1000 satisfied customers, and you have one customer that did not get his/order on the delivery date you stated on your website. After investigation, you find out if was the postal (or shipping) company who was at fault, but yet the customer writes a negative review about you (before you even get a chance to make things right on a problem that you could not control), and your brand. Is this fair? It is not fair if that article ranks in the top 10 of the search results when people type in your brand name when you have had 1000 other happy customers. Think of how much business a negative result could cost you. However; It is your fault though, if it does rank because you did not do anything about it when you first created your business, and didn’t give a second thought to brand/reputation management.

If you can control the SERPs right now when you are new, and much smaller, this will not even be an issue years down the road because you have established your brand (for years now) and people only see the stuff you want them to. It will be really hard for a negative article to creep into the top 10 search results with all the content and pages that you have been establishing for the last several years.

Here are my suggestions -

1. Domain Names - Go and buy all the domain names that you can with your brand name in it. (of course all of the usual like .net .biz .org etc) but you can even be creative and use your name other ways too. Then write unique content for each one of the domains, and provide product information, product testimonials, maybe even some news feeds from related sources, or other related product review sites. Just do your best to establish these sites with good content, link building and Social Media as much as you would with your main domain.

2. Press - Pay someone who is a professional to write some amazing press about your business, have a contest, or launch a specialty line (something newsworthy) and submit it the proper sources like PR Leap (who allow anchor text links), Marketwire or oldie (but goodies) like PR Web. The most important thing you can do with press (for reputation management), is make sure you use the brand name you want to be found for (when people search out your name or brand) in the title of the press.

3. Create Social Media Profiles - You want to look for three things in a social media profile - Number One - Do they allow you to have a static URL (ie - www.squidoo.com/BRAND-NAME-HERE), Number Two - do they allow you to space for content, and Number Three - do they allow you to create links inside the content, and do those links pass any juice? You need to make sure you treat your profiles pages like you do (or should) the content of a website by mixing up the content and rotating the anchor text links you create. Specifically for reputation management purposes, these sites that allow profiles (or static URLs) do well:

a. Stumble Upon
b. Newsvine
c. Mashable
d. Del.icio.us
e. ClaimID
f. Squidoo
g. Facebook
h. EzineArticles
i. Technorati
j. MySpace
k. Twitter

Now there are many other methods that I use (and that can be used) for reputation management, but using all three of these methods mentioned above can really help establish your site for some time to come (especially if you keep it up, and don’t stop working on it). Controlling your reputation and brand this way is also going to cost you a lot less, then trying to clean up something negative after the fact.

I wrote this post to answer the question of those wondering why they need to worry about their brand, and reputation when they are brand new to online business, and I hope this helps clarify, even a little!

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Have you ever told yourself - “Man, those are two hours (or insert your number here) of my life that I will never get back.” Well, I feel like that today after spending several hours reading nothing but junk. So, with all this back and forth (debate) crap I have been reading about link buying, Google bashing, Pubcon 2007 and annoying reads (I mean we really have heard it all) I thought I would share something upbeat and funny that my son told me today. (It is also scary how much our kids absorb, and really do pick up from watching us.)

I don’t think I have ever really sat down with my 4 year old and talked to him about Google, search engines, SEO (or anything I do). Actually am 100% confident that I have never had any kind of talk with him about Google. However; He is always coming into my office and playing games on the other computer, playing with his toys or watching TV, but I never guessed he paid much attention to the things I talk about when I work.

So today, he walked up to me and asked if I knew where his picture was from one of the roller coaster rides at a recent trip to Legoland, Ca. I told him I was not sure where the picture was, and that I would find it for him later (when I was done working). He turned to me and said: “Why don’t you just Google it Dad, because you use it to find everything else”. I guess he does hear me (more then I realize) say stuff like “find it on Google”, or “look it up on Google” with everyday interactions with my wife, friends or clients! It was so funny, cute and genuine that I was speechless. I ended up finding his picture for him right then….

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You can use Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit and Mixx to increase your sites traffic, links, and branding which has a result on your bottom line, you can network in Facebook, Linkedin or Myspace to get more leads and referrals, but, what can you do to make a buck with Twitter?

Twitter users out there I’m sorry if I offend, but I am too busy to use anything just to tell my long lost cousin where I got my lunch, I am too busy to do anything online that doesn’t have a direct result in ROI for my business, projects or clients, thus I have never seen the need to sign up for Twitter. The only way I have heard about monetizing Twitter has been things where people link to a coupon with an affiliate link to something they supposedly did.

I was thinking about some possible new strategies the other day to leverage Twitter to drive a lot of traffic, followers and hopefully $$ back to you. These are not tested, and if someone has tried it I would love for them to post in the comments what they did and if they saw any direct result to their bottom line.

This could work for a lot of industries, I’m going to lay it out in seo and real estate, but the idea is the same for virtually any industry.

Make a Name in SEO
If you are an up and coming seo/viral marketer and you have some serious skills but you don’t have the rockstar status yet, you could set up a twitter account with one purpose, to track every single step and decision you make in order to market a site to the number one spot in Google.

This will only work if you have serious skills, but what you would do is pick a super competitive industry like Cancer, or Work at home, etc… and start with everything from keyword research to domain registration. Every day after you tweak a page, get a new link, front page digg etc… list it in Twitter. You would have to be see through so if you buy a link from Yahoo Directory, or “negotiate” a new link make sure you talk about it. Say, “I just got 6 links, one sitewide, 3 contextual, and two footers and I used these anchored texts…”

You wouldn’t have to give out the domain to start instead you could do a weekly or monthly update on the traffic and ranking changes and then when it reaches the top 3 you release the domain so all can see. This could generate a lot of buzz in itself, if you start saying, “I’m number 8 after 3 months I should be able to release the domain in a couple of weeks stay tuned.” People will make sure they check back often to grab whatever tid bit of info they could use to better their rankings.

It is an idea, but I bet a lot of people would subscribe to it, and watch it. I wanted to do this myself but we are just too busy and we are already getting more business then we could ever want. If I did do it I would do it with nothing but bought links and directories or something controversial like that, to get more attention and to prove that I could get something top 3 with nothing but paid links.

Real Estate and Other Industries
This could work for a real estate investor that wants to sell consulting or coaching. Set up Twitter to show every call you make, from finding the deal, to visiting the property and securing a loan. Tell it all, “I visited 4 properties today, here is what I found….” Despite what you think about the current real estate market I have some close friends that are killing it right now, making a lot of money, if they wanted to sell that knowledge they could promote it on a day to day site like Twitter.

This could work with a service business franchise, or web design, or really almost anything if you tweaked it right. You could do it for weight loss, or endurance training. It would work for cooking, or stock trading.

You could document your day to day activities on building a powerful Digg or SU account from scratch.

Dugg 50 Stories, half from friends 10:15 am

Added 7 new friends 10:45 am

Became a Fan of 10 top 1000 Diggers 11:15 am

Submitted 3 Stories, 1 from NY Times, 1 on Ron Paul :), 1 random site I saw on Reddit, Did this using Social Media For Firefox (shameless plug) 12:10 pm

Dugg 200 Stories, started with friend submissions, went through FP’s for the last 2 days. 1:10 pm

Deleted 5 friends that have not been active in over 30 days. 1:35 pm

My stories are just over an hour old, NY Times has 12 diggs, Ron Paul reached the front page :), Random Site has 6 diggs. 1:40 pm

My stories are not on up and coming yet, but all have 39 plus diggs, maybe too many friends vs non friends ratio. Need to send some emails 12:30 pm

Like I said I have never used Twitter as a publisher, I have read other Twitter pages, but I am no expert on it, if there is such a thing. I thought this idea had some merit and I am too busy to do it, so I thought I would share it.