How to Expand Your Online Network Successfully
Expanding your online network has never been more important than it is today and luckily for you and I, it has never been easier. Take a look below and keep in mind the rewards that come with successfully marketing yourself and your business online.
Take advantage of social networking sites:
Do the obvious first and set yourself up with profiles on Facebook, LinkedIn and Google +. Import the contacts you have already made by syncing with your email contacts list. Create a list of specific keywords you need for your company. Use this list to find people that match the audience you want your brand or business to attract.
Make a networking plan:
Anything worth doing is worth doing well as the saying goes, really this couldn’t be more important than with online marketing. There are many free online tools you can use to create a networking project plan or contact list. Put this on top of your to-do list and make it a priority.
The likelyhood is, you have probably underestimated just how many contacts you already have. Start with these, and section them into different categories; friends, family, business contacts, clubs and groups you belong too. Once this step is completed you will be ready to put your plan in action. [Read more]
8 Recipe Portals You Can Leave Bookmarked in the Kitchen
It’s not that cookbooks are a thing of the past. I have a ton of them at home and they sure weigh a ton and become an inconvenience to carry around. By experience, we usually tend to stick to one or two good cookbooks for recipes, bookmarking them with a piece of paper. On the other hand, the age of the tablet has allowed chefs — whether at home or at the commissary to prop up a tablet on the kitchen counter and browse through an endless list of recipes on the Internet.
Here are 8 great recipe portals you’d want to keep in mind.
All Recipes
Considered a staple by people who cook, All Recipes has been around for quite some time. All the recipes are generated by community members who sign up for a free account.
RecipeLink
Yes, we know RecipeLink looks like it as left behind in the days of Geocities, but that doesn’t mean you should ignore it. If you look beyond the ugly design, RecipeLink boasts one of the most active online communities through old school forums and message boards. You will most likely get any question you have about your kitchen answered here. The site also boasts a “copycat” corner where people post recipes to almost-exact replicas of dishes you can find in popular restaurants and cafes.
Epicurious
What happens when two of the biggest recipe authorities combine forces to form a mega site for food? Epicurious is a product of childbirth between Bon Appetit and Gourmet, two of the most popular recipe brands known worldwide. With over 15 years worth of recipes, apps for your tablet (yes it even has a Windows Phone 7 app) can easily be downloaded and browsed while you’re preparing your meals.
Food.com
Formerly known as Recipezaar, Food.com is the resource for finding thematic recipes, alongside being a very decent recipe portal. Festive dinner themes, 10 minute preparation meals, and the ability to filter search by members and types of recipes make this a powerful recipe finder.
Food and Wine
The name says it all. If you’re looking for a site that helps you with Vino 101, wine pairing, and chef features, this is a resource worth visiting. Food and Wine is the web version of the magazine and they have also since expanded to versions on the iPad and eBooks.
Martha Stewart Living
OK we may have our different opinions about Martha Stewart but we have to admit that she’s really built an amazing brand around the home, with a lot having to do with the kitchen. Martha Stewart Living isn’t just a recipe finder site, it’s also a portal that helps you build an ambiance around your recipes: from table setting, to themed designs, to floral arrangements, to kitchenware and dinnerware pairing. If you’re looking for the total homemaker package, this site is for you.
Food Network
Everybody knows The Food Network. It is only the most popular TV Channel that features cooking show after cooking show, gastrononic treats, food travel and celebrity chefs.
Recipe Finder
What differentiates Recipe Finder from all these other sites is its orientation — more than being a portal, this is the ‘Google of kitchen recipes’ having indexed over 1,100,000++ recipes and counting. So, if you don’t know where to start looking but already have a particular type of dish you want to prepare, rather than use a typical search engine like Google or Bing, Recipe Finder filters out all the irrelevant stuff and gives you only recipes.
Has Digg Been Buried?
As Facebook and Twitter continue to grow in popularity, social bookmarking sites like Digg have seen their own traffic and usage wane. The question of late has been whether or not a site like Digg is still relevant. It’s not a secret that for years Digg has been the subject of controversy as users complained a small group was controlling submission popularity. Regardless of how that battle went down, one thing is for certain — Digg is not the powerhouse it once was.
In response to steadily decreasing traffic, Digg launched Digg v4, a newer, sleaker, cooler version of the once groundbreaking social bookmarking site. A new CEO, Matt Williams, was brought on board, and there was hope for Digg’s future. Then Digg v4 launched and Digg’s problems exploded. Suffice it to say, the new version of Digg had performance problems, missing pieces (for example, users’ submission histories disappeared), and a renaming of critical elements (for example, submissions that users could previously ‘bury’ if they didn’t like that content, they could now only ‘hide’). Confusion and complaints from the Digg user community were loud, and Digg has been trying to pick up the pieces for the past month and a half since Digg v4 debuted.
Yesterday, Digg CEO Matt Williams published his response to the Digg v4 controversy on the Digg blog. He wrote:
“As many of you know, the launch of Digg v4 didn’t go smoothly, and we’re deeply sorry that we disappointed our Digg community in the process. Thank you for your patience and your extremely candid feedback — we hear you loud and clear. … Digg has always been a place where users help one another find out what’s interesting, fun, and important. Unfortunately, our re-launch managed to get in the way of that happening. I don’t need to tell you that without the Digg community, we’re just another news web site. So we’re working hard to quickly improve the Digg experience. Our top priority is to make Digg as good as it used to be. Then we plan to make it even better, through innovations in both Top News and My News.”
It’s interesting that Williams would refer to Digg as being “just another news site” without the participation of the Digg community. He’s absolutely right about that. Many social bookmarking sites have become little more than aggregators. Now, the question is whether or not Digg truly will come out of this controversy as a better business, brand and site. In other words, will Digg still be relevant a year from now or has Digg been buried?
What do you think? Leave a comment and weigh in on the debate.
Image: stock.xchng
Mini Mantras – Which is Your Favorite?
I’ve seen these become pretty popular on Twitter as of late since most fit within the 140 character limit. I’m talking about mini-mantras. Small statements or phrases that are repeated over and over again. Take these for example:
- Be The Resource
- Conversation is a Behavior, Not a Commodity
- Mistakes Are Tuition
- It’s Noise Prior to Entry, Signal Upon Engagement
- Struggle Sits at the Doorstep of Breakthrough
Mike Sansone over at ConverStations.com has published his list of mini-mantras he has saved over time. After giving his list a read through, let me know which is your favorite or tell me one you enjoy which isn’t on the list. Also, do mantras help you at all either mentally or emotionally?
How To Breathe Life Into an Inactive Forum?
In my opinion, a forum is one of the best ways to build and manage communities online. Truth be told, I’ve actually found myself to have been addicted to forums at certain points in my life. I’ve actually made real life friends and business contacts from the various forums I’ve been a member of. These days, though, while I don’t feel compelled to checking for new posts every half hour, I still visit my favorite forums at least once a day to check on new conversations and reply to ones I feel I can contribute to.
I find that niche-based forums bring together people of like interest. But sometimes, this extends past interests. Long after i’ve given up on some hobbies, for instance, I still visit the forums I’ve been part of just for the conversations. Even if the technologies and software being discussed in certain forums had been long obsolete, some might still be active because of the virtual friendships formed.
Sadly, however, not all forums can survive the test of time. For one, members might move on to other interests. Or in the case of forums that mostly involve professionals and enthusiasts in certain fields, people can become busy with their own concerns.
I wonder what could help breathe back life into forums that have slowed down. Should the forum give incentives for new members (such as freebies like ebooks and other downloads)? Or maybe great content can be dug up and re-posted as fresh. Should the moderators get in touch with each individual member to check how they are? Or in the case of exclusive, closed forums, will being open to the general public help in revitalizing discussions?
I think netizens these days have grown to have very short attention spans, especially with character limitations like those imposed by certain microblogging services. Will forums survive in the long run?
How To Say No To A Friend
Skelliewag has a great post on one way to politely tell your friends no
There is a way to turn the experience into a positive for both people. Next time you have to say ‘No’, recommend someone else to help.
Make this someone you know online (or offline) or someone you would like to get to know. Not only are you giving the person a helpful recommendation, you’re potentially sending a new client (or reader, or viewer) someone’s way.
Not only does this make perfect business sense, but it’s a great opportunity to network with people as well.
Social Networks Of The Future
Daniel Scocco of Daily Blog Tips posed an interesting question today. Will Websites be the Social Networks of the Future? Daniel makes three assumptions. The first is that most people will need or want an online presence in the future. I believe this to be a no brainer. At some point, people will NEED to be on the web in order to move up in the world.
His second assumption is that people like to own their own stuff. Now this is an interesting point in and of itself because currently, we’re seeing a ton of people producing content and hanging out on sites/profiles they do not own. Most of which could be deleted from the net at any time the company seemed fit to do so. When will the revolution take place where people end up going back to doing things they can control and own versus giving the breadbasket away. Or is this not an issue?
Assumption number three is that technology will evolve, bringing social features to any website. Here is where I see WordPress and MovableType setting the stage for this to occur sooner rather than later. It wasn’t long ago before Six Apart purchased the social networking service Pownce. Now, the software is already starting to show up in recent versions of MT to allow the software to be more socially oriented. On the other side of the aisle, it has been confirmed that at some point in the near future, BuddyPress will contain a bundle of plugins for the stand alone version of the WordPress software essentially allowing people to easily self-host their own WordPress powered social network.
All in all, Daniel is on to something. One of his assumptions is already coming true and I think one and two are the ones we have to wait for. I also believe it’s a matter of when, not if, these things occur. How about you though? Do you think that websites will serve as the social networks of the future?
Taking AllTop To A Personal Level
It was announced in an email on Monday sent out by Guy Kawasaki that the popular site Alltop.com would be launching version 3.0. This new version contains a slick new feature called MyAlltop that basically enables users to create their own personal collection of Alltop feeds. Each MyAlltop page that is created is public meaning all of them are shared. Each Alltop page you visit, the RSS feeds will have a plus sign in the top right corner. Clicking on this plus sign will add that particular feed to your personal Alltop page.
I can see how Alltop could be used as a simplified aggregation page for anyone who doesn’t want to deal with say Netvibes or iGoogle. I’m interested in knowing if you’ll be using MyAlltop or, if you use Alltop at all to keep tabs on specific topics?
Replace Donate Button With A Wishlist
I don’t link to him often but Jeremy Schoemaker a.k.a. Shoemoney had an interesting topic today in that, perhaps you should replace the “Donate!” button on your site with an Amazon Wishlist! instead. His opinion is that, the donate button with a set amount or one of those buy me a coffee buttons which is practically the same thing doesn’t really allow for someone to give back. While it might feel great donating a couple bucks to someone, personally, I’d feel great if someone were to purchase a product for me that I either want, or need.
I’ve donated some cash here and there to WordPress plugin authors but I don’t do it very much. Have you? Would you rather see a list of items that the person needs or wants and simply buy one of those? How has the donate button performed on your own site?
Can You Relate?
As I was watching the stream of information pass through my Twitter client, I noticed a particular Tweet that resonated with me. It goes as follows:
definetheline: The weekend used to mean ‘no work’. Now it means ‘stop working on the things you don’t want to do, and work on the things you want to do’.
I can totally relate to that statement and I was wondering, can you?
