reach

Infographic: Visualizing the true reach of social media personalities

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Social sphere of influence is an important factor in determining marketing clout

What would a graphical representation of the "social sphere of influence" for some of the world's most popular social media and Internet marketing personalities look like? Click on this image to expand it and find out.

The problem with most social metrics used to determine reach, authority, or influence online is that there is such a massive disparity in the scale of influence from one person to the next. To give a true representation of the size of people's followings would mean spitting out numbers that simply don't make sense to most people - they're huge.

Social influence: About my klout and Klout's klout

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Klout provides insight into your social reach and influence

Klout is a service that provides insight into your social reach and influence. It hooks up to your twitter and Google+ accounts (among others) and uses information like who and how many people are following you to put a number on your "influence".

Now, the phrase "influence" is really subjective here. If you look at my previous article that provides sales figures for the world's best selling business books for the week starting 22nd of January, 2012, you'll see that despite racking up huge amounts of sales, the authors of said books had little to no social reach or influence at all.

How to drive server crashing traffic

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Writing content to drive server crashing web traffic. Photo by malawimullac

One of the most exciting aspects of working in the online medium is that the rewards can be sudden and substantial. A traditional business can have busy days, or even busy weeks or months, but there is a fundamental limit to their capacity. These physical limitations can often be overcome online, so if a thousand people simultaneously decide to visit your site, they can.

The trick to getting a thousand people to visit your website or blog at one go relies on writing great content and sharing it in the right places at the right time. Oh, and remember to make sure your servers can handle the traffic without crashing. One of my articles, entitled "Are SEO services worthwhile?", crashed after 800 visitors arrived simultaneously to read the article.

Real life transcript of an Internet marketing consult for a small business

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Internet marketing consultation for small business owners

I recently did a one hour consultation with Stephen Conroy, the owner of cong IT in New York.

Stephen had requested a meeting to give him a feel for what he should be doing in order to market his new business.

We chatted on Skype and at the end of the hour had covered quite a lot of ground. Poor Stephen had his ear bent by me for most of that time.

But it occurred to me that seeing a real-life marketing consultation that deals not only with good marketing practice (predominantly Internet based, in this case), but also shows the other side of the coin - interaction and thoughts from the business owner himself - might be really interesting to everyone else.

"Reach bait" blogging for unbeatable publicity

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reach baiting can provide publicity for untapped markets. Photo by chenevier

In the article entitled "Viral content using reach bait" I introduced the concept of "reach baiting" and compared it to link baiting.

In a nutshell, reach baiting and link baiting are more or less the same thing, but with one crucial difference. Whereas link baiting is designed to attract tonnes of backlinks and responses from anyone and everyone who might come across the post, reach baiting is specifically designed to leverage the reach of a particular site or blogger.

Buggy Technorati is practically useless

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technorati account information showing phantom blog

Under normal circumstances my modus operandi would be to encourage everyone to claim their blog on technorati in order to help increase reach and the chances that blog posts go viral. However, I guess it's also important to have cautionary tales like the one I am about to relate.

When claiming a blog on technorati, you:

  1. create an account (I won't link to it here, because I'm no longer recommending it)
  2. add your blog URL in the form provided
  3. add the claim token they supply you with, like this one "ZSBU8N29W5TE"
  4. wait for verification

Viral content using "reach bait"

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Writing reach bait instead of link bait. Image by RBerteig

Writing great content can be really frustrating if you aren't generating the kind of buzz or hype your posts deserve. If you've ever looked at articles that go viral and wondered what it is they have got that your articles don't, the answer (content quality aside) is more than likely reach.

Producing content without an audience is a tough, lonely job. But it doesn't have to be that way because there are plenty of people out there who do have an audience. You just have to find a way to put the two together.