3/02/2008

Creating a Web 2.0 buzz - on "2008 presidential candidate election"

10 steps to creating a viral social buzz for your product (or anything else).

Here's the steps (and links) to building a Web 2.0 buzz.

Now the results, even 24 hours after I started, are not what I expected - let's get that out to begin with. My own critique would be that I started with keywords created after the press release.

Here's the video:









The essential sequence:
  1. Get a bright idea.
  2. Outline this and work out your keywords for that subject - find your niche.
  3. Create a mini-web for that niche keyword and post it.
  4. Press Release it as news - link to mini-web.
  5. Blog about the press release - link to press release and mini-web.
  6. Social bookmark your blog (and press release and mini-web index page separately).
  7. Create a Squidoo lens with all of the above linked.
  8. Create a video about your buzz keyword.
  9. Blog about the video.
  10. Social bookmark video and new blog post.

Then start over and get a new bright idea.


Get a bright idea.

For me, this was reading a PDF book by Colin McDougal, which I got through Michael Campbell's newsletter.

What I cover in the video is a brief mention of Malcolm Gladwell's "Tipping Point".
And I cover this in a section on viral marketing in An Online Millionaire Plan. (That's a direct link only.) I plan to review this material (at least the section on Viral Marketing) in light of what I'm now learning through social bookmarking.

Outline this and work out your keywords for that subject - find your niche.
Not all that hard. I say to outline it at this point, since you don't particularly know right off which way you are going to publish it. Probable that this would be a mini-web, but it isn't anything you want to nail down right now. If you post it as a blog (as long as that blog is monetized) you'll do just fine. But you want to leave it open for use as an article(s), video, etc. The point is to get it out of your head and so you can look at it.

Keywords are in using your favorite keyword finder (lots of these online) and then narrowing down to a niche which has a lot of traffic (high demand) but few pages that are optimized for it (low supply). Then you use a script or another online tool to find your "theme" for it, which are the associated words which Google calls Latent Semantic Indexing - and uses to defeat spammers. Essentially, you want a lot of synonyms and associated words in your copy, not just that key word phrase over and over - write for people, your users, not computers.

Create a mini-web for that niche keyword and post it.

I use a very nice program (you have to buy it) from Dr. Andy Williams, called http://seo-website-builder.com/. And if I were smart and ambitious, I'd have this as an affiliate link. But for now, there you go. I recommend it, as someone who has spent hours (and on one project, months) designing and building websites - and they were nowhere near optimized. With this tool, you can simply optimize for organic SEO, which is a simple basic if you are serious about getting paying traffic to your site.

Press Release it as news - link to mini-web.

Here, you don't have to go crazy. Work up a press release (see my latest release from An Online Millionaire Plan - or search "A Midwest Journal" for details on this).

Right now, the best free press release sites I've found are: www.free-press-release.com, www.i-newswire.com, and www.1888pressrelease.com - there are many others, but these post their releases quickly and show up prominently in Google. Just throw them into an article submitter program (hope you have one that will let you add them...).

Blog about the press release - link to press release and mini-web.

Pretty simple. Blog it and then put in your links. My own style is to write a comment section at the top, then include the press release. At the end, I put a mini-sales page about one of my books with a link to my Lulu storefront. (One of these day's I'll get my Clickbank account running so affiliates can help me out with sales.)

Social bookmark your blog (and press release and mini-web index page separately).
Here's where all your social bookmark plug-ins come in. I use Stumbleupon, Digg, De.licio.us and OnlyWire for this - as it gets a lot of stuff out there quickly. Onlywire contacts about 17 or so social bookmark sites all at once.

You bookmark your blog by navigating to the permalink location and then using your plug-ins (you are using Firefox, aren't you?) to bookmark everything simply.

Bookmarking the first press release site to come up and only your index page of your mini-web are also good ideas, though probably not vital.
Create a Squidoo lens with all of the above linked.

Guess what - yes, this is another type of social network site - one for marketers. AND it has a nifty plug-in for Firefox, so you can simply create a new lens or add your links to an existing one. There are a lot of theories on whether making new lenses or updating older ones is better. The key point is that you will have a lot of linking going on - and so this is a transition between organic SEO and social networking. And it's free, plus you can get paid for it - check out the lens for 2008 Presidential Candidate Election choices.

At this point, you could go onto a new project. But wait, there's more...

Create a video about your buzz keyword.

Why not? You have all this data and can show it off to the world. Plus, videos reach people differently - and on different networks. Check out the video above, and you'll see that it has all these sites live at the time I made the video (after a hard afternoon's work posting and bookmarking).

Just checked in for my keyword above (in quotes) and I've got the top two spots - both showed up within 3 hours of being posted (might have shown up earlier - I don't live on Google...)

Blog about the video.

Makes sense, doesn't it? Embed the video in your blog. Link to it as soon as you can. This is what you are reading here.

Social bookmark video and new blog post.

And there you go again, letting people know about your stuff and what you are doing. You bookmark the video and people will stumbleupon it, or digg it.

Again, bookmark the permalink post, not your whole blog.

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Of course, the results I got are not the same as earlier Long Tail niches like "Online World Peace Lecture", where I show up with a few variations of that keyword - and five of the top six spots in Google - weeks later.

It's all in your keywords.

So the buzz you want to create is about a niche, if you want search engine standings. On the social networks you probably want to start moving up in the tag-clouds. More study to do on this point.

But I leave you with an outline and example of how to do it.

Good Luck and Good Hunting!

- - - -

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Update: 080307

Another reason video is last - it takes time to create, upload, and their processing. The original video linked above (embed-object from my original creation) doesn't show up and is going to have to be replaced - however, the replacement isn't ready on YouTube yet.

So your faster approach is to put up text and images - and perhaps a slideshow, then social bookmark these. Video comes in last, as a second wave.

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