Internet Marketing Tips from Denise Wakeman

Content Ideas: Poll Results

A few days ago I wrote a post about creating content and where to get content ideas for your blog posts and articles. I set up a quick poll on Poll Daddy (so I could test their site). I tweeted the link a few times and it was featured in my Facebook status bar a couple of times. You'll see I got 21 responses. Not a scientific sampling to be sure, but interesting nonetheless.

One of the options was "other" and this is where the good stuff is. Check out the results and various ways people find inspiration for their content.

Here are some of the "other" ways bloggers find inspiration:

• Life experience (2)
• Other experts
• Books
• Private Label Rights (purchase content)
• What people type into Google
• Watching people live blindly and with apathy (!)
• A variety of sources
• Photographs (check out istockphoto for great images)

Anything you want to add to this list?

Video: Engage Your Blog Readers in Multiple Ways

Here's a quick business blogging tip for you...

Links mentioned in the video:

12seconds.tv- easy online video
Utterli- easy audio posting
istockphoto- royalty-free images

Related posts:
What's Stopping You From Using Video to Promote Your Business?
12seconds.tv: 8 Tips for Creating Video Tips

Tweetworks Gives Twitter Focus

One of the challenges of Twitter is managing the stream of seemingly unrelated content that flows by from the people I follow. How do you find the conversations you want to follow or the exact people with whom to have that conversation? Yesterday, I learned about Tweetworks from my pal Mari Smith who always seems to know the latest and greatest in social media.

This is a twitter tool that has huge potential.

Tweetworks is designed to make micro-blogging more useful for people and businesses. Tweetworks is based on the simple premise that people like to talk about stuff with other people. And it is the stuff (ideas, questions, politics, sports, arts and so on) that brings people together and around which they form community.

The big deal about Tweetworks is that you can create and participate in groups. And groups can be public or private. Plus the conversations you have in the groups are threaded so you can follow the discussion AND you can choose whether or not your conversations get pushed out to your twitter stream for all your followers to see.

I got pretty excited about the prospect of having private groups...

9 Tools for Leveraging the Web

Last week I spoke at an event in San Diego totally focused on using social media to increase sales. My topic...how to get the best out of your business blog.

Aside from the fact it was a great event, lots of buzz, got to connect with new friends, meet clients in person, and reconnect with wonderful gal pal Mari Smith, a ton of content was covered. Maybe even too much for one day, but it certainly had the audience excited. There was a lot of sharing of tools of the trade.

Paul Colligan spoke about how to use syndication to leverage social media. Not only is Paul a dynamic and funny speaker, he provided a lot of value. The big hit was when Colligan told people about Ping.fm, a service I've been using for a very long time.

Ping.fm enables you to be more efficient when you update your social networks. In one place you can update your twitter and Facebook status as well as Plurk, MySpace, LinkedIn, FriendFeed, Del.icio.us and 24 other social networks. One post, updates all over the web and you don't have log into each site. Very cool. Very efficient.

That got me thinking about the other tools I use to extend my visibilty on the web. Here's my list, in no particular order of importance and they're all free:

Manage Email with Gmail Task Lists

A couple of days ago, via Twitter, I learned that Gmail had introduced a new featured called Tasks.

Essentially this is a task list that floats at the bottom of your screen and is integrated with Gmail.  I use Gmail exclusively for my email management and love the filtering, labels, themes, and other features.

Loving to experiment, I immediately enabled Tasks. Click on Settings (at the top right of your Gmail home page) and then click on Labs. Select "Enable" then scroll down and save your changes.  You can have the list visible or minimize it.

What's cool is that you can add an email to your Task list. I don't know about you, but most of my action items are generated by email! You can also add non-email related action items.

If you enable Keyboard shortcuts (under Settings), then all you have to do is hit Shift T to quickly add an email to your task list. Sweet!

I'm also using the Task list to quickly add ideas for blog posts. I think of stuff to write about all day long but if I don't write my ideas down, they're gone. Now I have a running list of ideas. Whether they get written and posted is another story...

If you use Gmail, I highly recommend checking out Tasks and then let me know what you think.