Viral Content Buzz is a web site brainchild of Ann Smarty and Gerald Weber.

Both Ann and Gerald are very experienced on the internet and especially SEO. They have spent hours using social sharing sites themselves and found a few things that they wanted to improve to create a social sharing platform that fits the influential social media savvy user, as well as those just starting out. The result? ViralContentBuzz.comwas born.

Gerald Weber and Ann Smarty (weather permitting) will join the #SocialCafe Twitter Chat on Wed, October 31, 2012, at 3pm EDT / 8pm GMT to discuss Viral Content Buzz and answer questions. Also, you can enter to win 100 free credits at Viral Content Buzz. Click on #SocialCafe, above.

What is a Social Sharing Platform?

A social sharing platform allows the user to login to a web site and choose content to share via social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Stumbleupon, Pinterest, etc. There are also collaboration groups that do this on their own, via Facebook groups, Skype groups, etc. Some other examples of social sharing platforms include the quality sites of Triberr.com, EasyRetweet.com, JustRetweet.com, SocialBuzzClub.com. There are also community type sites like BlogEngage.com and BlogInteract.com and many more.

Many social sharing platforms serve as a collaboration tool where you can choose to share content and when you share content, you get points or credits that you can give others when they share content. At first glance, it appears like you are bartering the sharing process, and to some extent, in a legalistic manner, that may be the case. However, for many social media savvy users, it provides a platform the shows what other bloggers have available to share. For those people who are selective in the content they share with their audience or following, it allows them to “see what is out there” and choose the content that they would share anyway, even without the platform. There are always going to be people who share everything to get the most credits and that is fine, as well, since they, in turn have credits to provide others.

The key thing about a social sharing platform is that there is content, sharing options, and a choice on what is shared and what is not shared.

Not all social sharing platforms are alike and this is what Ann and Gerald found, when they tested these platforms extensively. They identified features that they wanted to change or add/subtract, and came up with ViralContentBuzz.com.

What Makes Viral Content Buzz Unique?

One of the key things that stands out about Viral Content Buzz, is the article quality guidelines process. The idea that Ann and Gerald had was that they wanted to limit the quantity of “spammy articles” and become a social sharing platform that is known for quality articles.

Many times, users are in a hurry and a headline may look good, but the article may not have the quality standards that the user is expecting. With ViralContentBuzz, Ann and Gerald applied similar guidelines and standards as what is used at Ann’s MyBlogGuest.com before a guest post can be made available in the MyBlogGuest.com article gallery.

Another thing that sets ViralContentBuzz.com apart from other social sharing platforms is the weighted credits for social influence. It is true that those who have more of a following, say, on Twitter, get more credits, but, at the same time, the new user with only a few followers is not left out of the game and is still able to participate wholly in the social sharing platform. As the new user gains more Twitter followers, the social influence increases and so do the credits at Viral Content Buzz.

Gerald Weber discussed ViralContentBuzz.com during a MyBlogGuest Hangout. You can see what he has to say about their project, queued up, in this video: 

One of the best things about ViralContentBuzz.com is that it is free and certainly worth trying out. If you are already sharing articles via Facebook and Twitter, you will find an easy-to-navigate web site presenting quality articles for you to share. It is a win-win when the content that you share is valuable for your followers and it provides you an opportunity to share your content with other audiences.

The story goes that curiosity struck over a common breakfast, in the techno city of Austin, Texas, three years ago. The topic? The question of how far a tweet would travel and how many people would read or retweet that tweet. Out of that curious conversation, the San Francisco based project, TweetReach, the brainchild of Union Metrics, was born.

Has this project nestled into San Francisco, to live solely in the great Silicon Valley? No. Similar to the concept of globally traveling tweets, it appears that it has reached its sister city of Los Angeles, as well, with anticipation of more to come.

TweetReach is a “Twitter Analytics” project, allowing people to sign up and review different analytics, including who their most influential tweep is, how far their tweet travelled, and who tweeted it, to name a few.

TweetReach is not alone, with twitter analytics companies, tools, and components growing. There are many such tools available, with varying degrees of complexity, detail, and price range. Some tools include the impressive up-and-coming HashTracking, and tools, which include twitter analytics components, like Sprout Social, Hootsuite, and Commun.it (Twitter relationship building tool).

Twitter analytics is the topic of an upcoming Twitter Chat, and one of the TweetReach founders, Jenn Deering Davis, will be making a guest appearance in this B2CTweet chat on Wednesday.

Los Angeles definitely has the tweets coming in and the tweets going out, and their very own @britneyspears ranks in the top 5 “most followed,” according to TwitterCounter.com.

TweetReach has some fascinating case studies of the reach of a tweet, with such events as the 2012 Grammy Awards and the Golden Globes, as well as a case study on Sunset Boulevard’s very own, The Roxy Theatre.

Where do your tweets travel? First, one needs to know the stats, the twitter analytics. Who knows? Maybe that Los Angeles tweet will travel around the world and back again, and twitter analytics companies, like TweetReach and the others, will capture the stats to prove it. After all, the distance between two points, in the global Twitter world, is only 140 characters and a millisecond.

It is a vicious circle, and I seem to fall into it often. That circle of Tweeting, Tweeting, Tweeting, and then “uh oh” did I remember to share Twitter gratitude and thank so and so for that RT? Did I tweet for so and so’s article, like I promised? Ok, so I may or may not be the norm, and this may or may not apply to you, but I’m sure I’m not the only one who has forgotten that “Thank You” or RT, now am I?

I had tried several tricks and tools and combinations of tools and spreadsheets to try to find the most efficient tool or process to handle all of the gratitudes and RTs in addition to my normal tweeting. Some of them worked for awhile and then I’d miss a day here and a day there and it was as if the whole world of Twitterdom was going to fall from the sky.

Enter Commun.it.

A friend recommended that I check it out and told me I’d love it. Ok, I’d try it. What is the worse case? I add it to the combination of tools I was already using? So, I tried it…

Twitter Relationships Made Easy

As if walking into a Twitter fairy land, the moment that I logged in, I saw the answer to what I was looking for in a tool! It said, “Unreplied Status.” Yes! Finally, a simple-to-use tool that showed me who I had not responded to! No more tracking tweets in a text file and trying to cross-reference who I had tweeted and who I hadn’t. No more using other online tools only to find that much of what showed up was spam tweets. Instead, with Commun.it I can easily scroll to those people I want to respond/reply/retweet and do it right then and there, keeping my time organized and using my time wisely and efficiently.

There is nothing about Commun.it that interrupts what I do already, but rather enhances and become not just another “Twitter Tool,” but essentially, a “Relationship Management Tool” in connecting with other people in my niche, other bloggers, people whom I already interact with on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and blog communities. Commun.it is like having a “checklist” without reducing friends and associates to merely a “checklist item” and allows you to use Twitter the way it should be used, as a relationship tool, whether those are personal relationships, business relationships, or a combination of both.

Commun.it didn’t stop there. They also built-in the metrics needed to be able to identify who is most influential in your Twitter community, and suggests who you may want to follow (also suggests you may want to unfollow).

Through the stats and insights, Commun.it breaks down your tweeps into subgroups of “High-Value Members,” including “Most engaged members,” “Supporters,” and “Influencers.”

You also have access to your Twitter lists, termed as “My Groups” in Commun.it’s tool.

According to Commun.it, the following groups are defined, as follows:

• Most engaged members:  “These members engage with you more often than others.  Engagement is measured across all activities…”
• Supporters:  “Supporters help you ‘spread the word’ by retweeting…”
• Influencers:  “The top influencers of your community, as judged by followers/following ratio and your engagement history.”

With each click on one of theses groups, you are presented with the opportunity to thank some of these people, with a box, pre-configured for you, that reads something like this:

“Thanks @GrowMap, @AskKim, @seosmarty – for being top influencers in my community this week (insight by http://commun.it)” complete with a button to send the tweet on its way.

Does it get any easier than that?

Twitter Reporting and Stats Made Easy

Commun.it doesn’t relegate the stats to the “Build Relationships” part of the panel and leave it there.  Commun.it takes it a step further, actually several steps further and allows you to analyze the stats for your Twitter profile to see for yourself the specifics of the metrics, and to identify items that you would like to monitor, and then review a report specific to that monitored item.  For example, it is a good idea to monitor your blog so that you can see how many people are tweeting your blog posts.  Ever get tired of looking up the stats, or clicking on the number on your tweet button to see who has tweeted you and only seeing a few of them show up?  This way, you can see it all laid out for you in an interactive report, one that allows you to sort by different columns.

>> I even noticed an associate that I wasn’t following!  The report was helpful in identifying obvious oversights.  It is like having a personal assistant that has a computer for a brain and doesn’t talk back! <<

Don’t forget to take note of your total impressions and total reach on your reports and you will be able to track different campaigns and gauge your social media efforts to see what is working and what is not working.

Twitter Management Made Easy

Am I suggesting that you never visit Twitter again, as you have this new all-in-one miracle tool to use?  No, but I am suggesting that there are probably a few tools or methods or processes that you perform that you can discard, as this tool will probably render those obsolete.  You can tweet, thank, organize, follow, unfollow, strategize, review, report, analyze, lead generate, reward, and, have fun, all with a simple easy-to-use tool called Commun.it.

Criteria To Choose a Publishing Blog

Ok, you have written this awesome, spectacular post and you have resisted the urge to post it on your own blog and you’ve decided it would make sense to find a home for it on a publishing blog with a lot more traffic than your own. How do you decide where to publish it? It would be great if Darren Rowse, of ProBlogger.net were knocking at your door for the next masterpiece of writing, or Pete Cashmore of Mashable.com called you up, personally, and said he cleared his schedule, in anticipation of the next article that exudes from your great wisdom. Yeah, ok, we can dream, right?

So, where do you start? The key is to do just that… start! You have to start somewhere and it is ok if your first, or twenty-first guest blog post is not published on Mashable.com. There are a lot of great blogs out there, just waiting to hear from you and awaiting the beginnings of, hopefully, a wonderful working relationship and friendship in the future.

The first thing is to start, but you also need to have an idea of what to look for in a blog. If you have very specific ideas of what you are looking for, and a long list, in particular, it is unlikely that you will find that blog that fits your entire list to a “T.” However, if you write out your list and determine, say the top three items, you can help yourself in making a determination of which blogs to contact when pitching your article, and which offers to accept from which blogs.

Here is a list of some of the things you may want to consider. It is not an exhaustive list, necessarily, but my hope is that it will get those creative juices flowing and you can add to the list, according to what is important to you.

1. Design: Look and Feel

Appearance

Is the visual appearance of the site important to you? If it is important, what type of visual appearance are you looking for on the site? Are you looking for fun? Business structure? Structured layout? This one is a very easy one to check, by simply visiting the site and getting a “feel” for the design.

Content

While the visual appearance of the site is very quick and easy to check, the content may take a little while longer. This may not matter to you either, but it may be something you want to check to ensure that you are not conflicting or contradictory with the content of the site, and that there is not any content that you find “offensive” or detracting from the content of your guest post.

Is your content a good fit for the publisher blog and is the publisher blog a good fit for your content?

Mission statement

Going a step further than the content of the site, if you are particular about the ethics of your content and how it fits with the blog, you may want to check to see if they have a mission statement, or read their about page. For example, if you are a vegetarian and the site promotes hunting, you may have an issue, and it would be best to find that out BEFORE you enter into a discussion without having all the facts.

Load Time and Performance

Loosely related to the above topics would be considerations such as load time and performance of the web site. Granted, this is probably not the first thing to come to mind when evaluating a potential publisher web site, but, if it takes five minutes to load the home page, it is very likely that readers will not wait for your article to load and no one will read your guest post. However, keep in mind that there are momentary issues, and the issue may even be with your internet service provider at that moment, so do check back later if you notice that the publisher blog is having performance issues, to be sure that it is a continuing or consistent issue.

Here is a link you can use to check load time of the publisher blog (or your own!):
Load Time

2. Credibility: Relationship and Professionalism

Reputation

What is the reputation of the blogger and the blog? Have you heard some negative things about either? And, before you run off making a judgement call only on what you have “heard,” have you verified for yourself (assuming that this is an important criterion to you).

One way to get an idea about the reputation of the blogger and blog is to interact with him or her (or them) directly. BlogEngage.com is a great way to interact with other bloggers and get to know them, read comments that they make on other stories, follow links to their blogs and blog comments, etc. Also, another idea is to get involved in a Facebook group and interact with other bloggers there. You should be able to get a “feel” for reputation by using one of these methods.

Quality of Website

This relates more to professionalism of the site than content. If you visit the blog and there are broken links and missing images all over the site and it looks like a ghost town, it may be that the blog is not maintained. This may not be a direct correlation to professionalism, necessarily, but certainly if the blog looks like it has been abandoned, it probably isn’t going to get the exposure that you desire.

Domain

Is it important to you that the blog have its own domain? Pretty easy to check this out, with a quick visit to the site and checking the address bar. Keep in mind, there may be some awesome blogs that are on platforms such as Blogger, but you should decide whether having their own domain is a requirement or not, for you.

Up and Coming

It may be that the blog has a low PR (discussed below), but it is an “up and coming” blog. Similar to real estate speculation, you may want to consider guest blogging on say, a web site that will be featured on a television talk show in the coming weeks, ascertaining that it may get a lot of hits with the new found publicity. In this case, you have the opportunity to get in on the ground floor. This is not as easy to ascertain from a quick visit to the web site, but something to keep in mind if you are feeling psychic and can predict that this is the next best thing since the invention of sliced bread.

Future Potential

Based on your interaction with the blog owner and the community of bloggers on the site, does this seem like a “good fit” for the long haul? Possibly this is a site that you could visualize yourself partnering with in the future. You may want to give bonus points to the blog, if that is the case.

3. Practices: Culture and Procedures

Frequency of Posting

How frequently does the publishing blog have new articles. Does it look like a regular schedule? Is the regularity of the schedule important to you? If they haven’t had a new blog post in a couple of years, possibly this is not the blog for you, as it may not have enough exposure.

Social Media Practices

Is the blog well integrated with social media sites? Do they understand the difference between “connect” (i.e. buttons at the top of the site, bottom of the side, side column), and “share” (i.e. buttons near the post)? Do all of the buttons work and behave as expected? Does the Twitter link show “via @sharethis” instead of “via @publishingBlogNameHere” (demonstrating a need to configure their share buttons). Does it look like they passed “Social Media 101” and it is important to them? Possibly social media isn’t important to you and you can pass on this one, but if it is important, you may want to take note of how well integrated and easy-to-use the site is, as well as number of shares on the social media counts. This topic could be another article, in itself, but this should get you going.

Commenting Practices

How many comments are on the site and do the authors tend to respond to the commenters? Are the comments a value-add (demonstrating thoughtful commenters) or do they look like spammy comments where the spammers didn’t take the time to read the article or interact? Also, does the publishing blog require you to respond to comments? If so, are you ready to commit to doing so?

Does the web site require a login for commenting? Do you feel that this limits the number of potential comments on your article? Keep in mind that if it is an extremely popular blog, chances are that the “regulars” are already registered and those who are not registered won’t mind doing so, for the sake of the popular blog.

4. Influence: Ranking and Stats

Many times this is the most important aspect in deciding on a blog, and sometimes the only thing that guest bloggers look at, when deciding.

Google Pagerank

For some time, Google Pagerank has been the guiding light on determining whether the blog is a good investment for advertising dollars and subscriptions, as well as worthiness for guest blogs. Google has had updates (i.e. panda, penguin) which have affected some blogger’s pageranks in ways that may or may not accurately represent the value of the web site. So, use Google Pagerank with care, evaluating how important this criterion is for your overall evaluation of the publishing blog. You can click on the image, above, to check pagerank now.

Site Evaluation

There are various tools available to check out the stats and ranking of a web site, and, similar to the social media topic, above, this could be another article. Here is a free online tool that I found recently, that you could use as an evaluation of the publisher blog: Website Evaluation.

Klout

Another tool that is useful is to check the Klout rating of the blogger. Klout factors in influence across several social media sites (i.e. Twitter, Facebook, etc.). While it should not be the only factor, it may be interesting to check the Klout score. If you know the Twitter link, an easy way to find the Klout score is to replace “twitter” with “klout” in the address bar. Also, if you use a tool such as HootSuite, you can click on the profile and view the Klout score within the HootSuite dashboard.

Google Page Rank Trend

Is the Google PR going up or down, in particular, at a rapid pace? For example, was the blog a PR7 and dropped to a PR2 over time? Now, keep in mind, especially with recent Google updates, that there may be an explanation for this, so don’t cross the blog off the list just because you noticed a drop. First, determine if this is important to you. Second, if it is important (the change in PR), ascertain, to the best of your research skills, WHY the change in PR and then re-assess the level of importance to you.

5. Reciprocation: Authorship and Attention

Google Authorship

When you search for an article, many times there is an avatar that shows up in the searches, called Google Authorship. Is this important to you? In other words, in many cases, because of how the blog is set up, the avatar will be the owner of the blog and not the author of the blog post (or no image at all). Whether this is important to you or not, you need to be aware of it, and if it is important, seek out a blog with the technology in place to insert YOUR avatar into that spot. The technology to do this is dependent on your Google+ profile, so you will need to find a blogger who has their end set up and you need to be ready to take steps to get your profile set up (if it isn’t already). My experience is that it is common (and easier) to have the blog owner avatar, so you may want to put this item lower down in your list, if you are interested in having a larger selection of blogs to choose from and who will choose you.

That said, an example of a blog that does honor the Google Authorship and has the ability to show YOUR avatar is Ms. Ileane’s Basic Blog Tips. Let me demonstrate.

At the top of this section, you will see a snapshot of the Google search engine results for one of my articles. It shows the link to socialwebcafe.com and the avatar is my avatar. Now, take a look at the image, below. This is an article Jeevan Jacob John on Ms. Ileane’s Basic Blog Tips. Do you see the avatar? It is Jeevan Jacob John’s avatar and not Ms. Ileane’s or the icon for BasicBlogTips. This is an example of where Ms. Ileane has “gone the extra mile” to ensure her guest authors get the exposure when they guest blog on her blog.

Bio Placement

Another concern is the bio placement. Now, I have seen some articles where the author does not seem to be that interested in exposure for themselves, as authors, but rather links to their employer or brand, etc. In that case, maybe the preferred position for the bio (if there is a bio), is at the bottom of the post. However, if you are the type of author who likes exposure and branding and you want people to view you as a subject matter expert or guru and recognize you (branding), you may love it if the bio is at the top of the post. And, here is an example from Ms. Ileane, in this case showing her bio, but representative of how she highlights the guest author at the top of the post. Notice that the bio is right below the title of the post, shown in the image below:

Bio Format

I saw a web site, recently, and I won’t list the site because I don’t want to draw attention to it, but the bio was so tiny (4 pt font?), that I had to zoom in to read it. If it important to you that you be “seen” check on these details, as well as how the post is coded (the blog owner or “Guest Author”) and whether the blog offers the ability to have a gravatar, social links, etc. in the bio. This, too, could be another article!

Your thoughts about finding a publishing blog

So, there you have it. A list of criteria that you may want to consider (or not consider) when choosing your next publishing blog (or accepting a guest post opportunity). Over to you, let’s here your thoughts on the topic?

The post Ultimate Guide: How To Choose a Publishing Blog appeared first on Basic Blog Tips.