Link post to an article about good karma in blogging that I wrote on the Yahoo! Contributor's Network. I'm a member of the Contributor's Network and you can view my profile there.

Interesting Post From Another Blog

Similar in focus to this blog's purpose is an interesting post from Sea Genes Family History & Genealogy Research blog. I'd post it here, too, but since it's copyrighted ...

Nirvanic Marketing

Give birth to a thought that preempts all other thoughts. The goal is to achieve nirvana.

An incomplete nirvana to be sure, but a form of immediate or instant gratification. In marketing terms, this instant gratification impulse, or thought, is the goal.

By making the reader/viewer stop on a dime and buy your product or service.

Doing a good job, a fantastic job, of marketing to the nirvanic impulse means being totally honest and transparent about that which you are selling. The transparency of your efforts must be completely honest. You must completely believe in the product through experience, otherwise the viewer will instantly see through the effort and click away.

Curating Content

Content curation, or maintenance, is more important for regular web sites than it is for blogs sites. Why?
Even though you may use a content management system (CMS), the content for the main “static” pages can become dated.

Blog are more “news” oriented so the expectations of readers is lower. The older the content is, the less likely it is to be read. Back links to earlier posts are less newsworthy.

Maintaining a blog, however, is sometimes necessary to keep a theme, or idea, moving over a long period. Series of articles, or a contest, may need to be updated to remind and update readers as to the happenings since they were written.

Making Time for Social Media Marketing

Finding your voice on social media and content marketing outlets takes a bit of work. You need to know what you will be blogging/tweeting/talking about on your topic. You also need to pick which outlets you will use (Google+, LinkedIn, Tumblr, etc.). The timing is the most important thing to consider, though, since we are all busy all the time.

The demands for each outlet you choose are different. They each have different audiences and they each have different times of day, days of the week, and months of the year that are appropriate for your product or service. Which ones you pick depend on your:

1. Product or service
2. Time you can devote to the other members of your community
3. What they are interested in now
4. How they like to get that information
5. Why they like to get that information on the particular outlet.

Time Management

How much time you can devote depends on what you are selling or promoting. If the product you sell (or service you provide) is complex, then the time investment will be greater than for a simpler item.
How do you time your content campaign?

Plan a few micro posts or tweets and note how much time it took to prepare each. One thing I like to use for this is Google’s Alert service. The alerts turn up interesting items that have been talked about in the past few days or hours (or week) and can be prompts for your own contributions on the subject.

Use the time data you noted and make an estimate for a schedule. You’ll see from the data how long you need to get to the point when you actually tweet or post. The sum product of this exercise is that you’ll have an idea of how long you will need to devote to your marketing campaign.

Set aside an hour or so at the beginning of every day or two to work out your schedule and stick to it. Scheduling time like this makes the process easier in the future as you get into the habits of effective social marketing.

What is your audience reading right now?

The Google Alert’s also show you what others have already written/tweeted or posted elsewhere so you’ll have an idea of what’s been done. Working from those ideas, you can create your own contributions to the global conversation; chipping in with your two pence, in other words.

How does your audience prefer their content?

The sites that generate the content from the alerts also give you an idea of where your audience is and, how they like it. Is it visual? Go to Tumblr or YouTube. Is it text? Go mobile.

Tools to use

One tool I like is HootSuite. It can connect you to FaceBook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other outlets easily and all at the same time. Using HootSuite, or TweetDeck, you only need to use one interface to post to multiple sites instead of visiting each one individually.

The time savings with HootSuite don’t end with its interface to different outlets. You can schedule your content for different times of day, and even days in advance, if you want.

My strategy

My own strategy is to take a few hours every few days to write blog posts and schedule them for posting over several days. On the days the posts don’t appear, I spend the same time working through the recent alerts and gleaning interesting ones to comment on or expand on with my own voice. I broadcast the most interesting posts through Twitter and use the rest as ideas for posts and longer comments on GooglePlus or FaceBook.

It’s a simple way to manage a social media and content marketing editorial calendar. By using your collected postings on various sites, you can get an idea of how and when the most popular of your content is being used by others.