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• Work.com - Articles for people in business. Submit your guides and tutorials, and be sure to include keyword targeted inbound links to your site. Guides that receive good ratings are also posted on business.com category pages for an added bonus.
• Squidoo - Create your own Squidoo ‘Lens’ with your guides, recommendations and expertise. Again, be sure to include keyword targeted inbound links to your site as your lens page is DoFollow.
• EzineArticles - This site hosts articles from a wide variety of topics. Links are DoFollow but images are not allowed. Articles posted here are available for other webmasters to post on their sites (hopefully with the backlinks still intact).
• GoArticles - Article search engine covering a wide range of topics. No images, text only, but links are allowed and DoFollow.

Please comment with your experience or to add any other great submission sites.

PageRank is a score between 0 and 10 which is calculated by the number of inbound links to a page. With a little effort you can reach PR 3 or 4, but the jump from 4 to 5 and thereafter is much more difficult.

Inbound links greatly affect search engine rankings, but it is commonly said that Toolbar PageRank has no effect. Why? Because it is only updated periodically and it is not the same as the ‘current’ PageRank Google uses when calculating rankings.

Curious webmasters can check their PageRank using this PageRank Checker Tool or simply download and install the Google Toolbar.

Post your thoughts about Google PageRank or the recent update here.

Three types of social media
There are three main types of social media: publishing, sharing and networking. Each social media service should fall into at least one of these categories. There will be some overlap, and services like Facebook can fall right in the middle.

What should I publish?
Publish everything you have, anywhere you can. Paul Lavenhar of PL Communications says:

Most businesses have subject matter experts with tons of “inside” expertise, which is often what they leverage to persuade new clients to buy their products or services. When that same expertise is “repackaged” as a blog entry or web content, it serves the same function to a potentially much wider audience. Plus, the content has the added bonus of helping with SEO.

Spend some time finding this inside expertise. Unlock it by turning it into web content such as a blog article or instructional video. Then, publish it! Here is a small list of popular social media sites where you can publish your content:

• Flickr - Photos
• Upcoming - Events calendar
• Yelp - Local reviews
• Google Groups - Discussions
• Wikipedia - Encyclopedia articles
• Podcast.net - Podcasts/audio
• YouTube - Video
• Twitter - Blogging
• Squidoo - One page guides

Publish whatever you have
Mike Volpe described how hiring an intern to upload YouTube videos helped SolidWorks, a former employer, increase business exposure. These 100+ (somewhat dry and technical) videos were already published on their company web site. By uploading them to YouTube, they generated an additional 10,000 views per month. Many people (particularly 3D CAD engineers—their company’s target market) found them useful, and the company’s brand awareness was improved.

Monitor what’s published
Sign up for Google Alerts and monitor what people are saying about your company or brand. Using an advanced search query like the following will allow you to be alerted whenever someone posts something about you, while still filtering out content from your own web site:

yourbrandname -site:yoursite.com

You can also search for your brand name on Technorati, a popular blog search engine. Subscribe to RSS updates for your search results and you will be able to stay current on what popular bloggers are saying about you.

When people say good things about you, promote it
Promoting flattering content is a good way of helping others in your social network while still helping to promote yourself. When another blogger writes a wonderful article about your product or company, promote it by submitting and voting for it on social news sites or by linking to it from your own web site. This is what social media is all about: making friends.

Tomorrow I will cover Part 3: How to Share, Network and Measure Results.

Please comment with your experience in social media publishing here.

Why is social media important?
Traditionally, we have practiced many forms of outbound marketing—we attempt to pull people in toward us. We have tried seminars, trade show booths, telemarketing, print ads, direct mail, email blasts, television commercials and radio ads. Sometimes successful, these types of marketing are expensive and are very easy to block out. We have Do-Not-Call lists, our DVRs can skip TV commercials and we even have handy ways to assassinate spam.

Social media is important because people do not need more marketing. Instead, people are now relying on recommendations from trusted friends in their social circle.

What is considered inbound marketing?
Inbound marketing could be search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM), blogging, social media, RSS, etc. Customers already know what they want, and they come looking for you. Ideally, when Customer A steps up to the Google search box, your site will rank high enough so that Customer A will find you (instead of your competition).

What is social media?
Social media is any form of media with a social component. This may be the ability to add to it, share it, comment about it, etc. Social media is permission centric and sometimes the ‘conversation’ has already started. All we need to do as marketers is join in at the right time and place.

What if I don’t understand all this social media stuff?
That is okay. The latest generations have had the opportunity to grow up with social media. Many of us have not. Try to think of social media as being similar to a business cocktail reception, except without the time or space constraints. Now, simply follow some business cocktail party advice like:

• Meet people and start conversations
• Answer questions and help others
• Ask questions and trust the advice of others

Become a real member of the community. Figure out how you can add value to the community. The great thing about online social media is that everything is well documented, other people can easily listen in to your conversations and you can be found by search engines.

Tomorrow I will cover Part 2: Three Types of Social Media and What to Publish.

Please comment with your experience in social media marketing here.

This free tool is packaged as a Firefox extension, making it quite reliable. You can manually check rankings for a list of keywords, and can even setup scheduled tasks to automatically fetch rankings at specified times and intervals.

This tool saves me a lot of time since I used to do this task manually. Digital Point provides a similar tool accessed through a web interface. However, it does not provide data from Google unless you own a now discontinued Google SOAP API Key.

Comment your experiences with Rank Checker or search rank reporting here.