Fortunately, that’s not exactly true.

As  businesses scramble to set up Facebook, Twitter and MySpace pages, analysts are scrambling to discover how impactful their company’s SMM has been. For some, the answer is “we can’t measure this,” but others believe there are statistics that reflect their SMM’s effect.

As Aaron Uhrmacher, the guru of social media, recently said in an article on Mashable,   “Social media measurement is one of those topics about which everyone has an opinion, but nobody agrees on the solution.”  His suggestion – - as a beginning point – - is to simply decide on what to measure.

What’s Your Social Media Marketing Goal?

If your goal is to increase your reputation–get potential clients talking about you in a positive manner – -  then get out onto the social media sites and monitor what’s being said about you.

In a brief run-through searching Twitter, I found some very mean-spirited comments about a specific entrepreneur’s e-mail campaign. At another site, a customer was complaining that it took days for a company’s customer service department to contact her . . . leading her to wonder if  she was dealing with a real company or a scammer.

In both instances, a social media point of contact–shall we call it a czar?! -  could have reached out to customers via direct message or e-mail and turned a damaging situation into a win-win. After all,  social media is about “social” – - building relationships.

If your goal with your SMM is to measure traffic, then setting up a solid analytics program that tracks incoming links will tell you if your visitors are coming from Twitter, Facebook, etc.

Although Google Analyltics are excellent (and free), we also suggest Xinu, a free site that tells how your website is doing in terms of search engines, search engine optimization, social bookmarking, RSS, and other social indicators.

Measuring ROI on social media marketing isn’t a precise science; but what we know for sure is that businesses and entrepreneurs need to have a success metric in mind before jumping into the game.

If you run an online business, Google alert is the best (free) notification service around.  Using it, you can track topics in The other day I discovered a Google-alert type service for those of us who Tweet (you DO tweet, don’t you?) using Twitter.

The service is TweetBeep and here’s how it works. First, set up a free account by picking a username and password. Then, choose the keyword alerts you want to track, i.e. your name, company name, topic of interest. Unlike Google alerts, don’t use quote marks for exact phrase matches.  You can exact phrase match by ticking the box on your alert. Pick how often you want to receive alerts, and that’s it.

Oh yes – you can also set up your TweetBeep to only receive alerts from specific Twitter accounts – a convenience I like when I’m tracking conversations from a specific individual.

Whether you have a yen for yard sales or a passion for pets, there’s an audience hungry for your articles. I found mine during a trip to Roswell, New Mexico back in the mid-90s.

Since the “Roswell incident” of 1947, alien autopsies and government cover-ups have become cultural icons and hot collectibles-thanks in part to the unexpected popularity of WB’s Roswell. Who knew TV’s sexy aliens and their glow-in-the-dark hickeys would heat up the auction circuit as well as the small screen?

When I visited the alien-friendly city, I bought up t-shirts and commemorative pens, just like every other tourist. However, once home, I shifted into my “writer” mode and slugged out queries on the “story that wouldn’t die”. Within weeks, I’d sold a piece on collecting aliens and UFOs to eBay Magazine and another to Collectors.com. I even got e-mails from readers who wanted to buy my commemorative pins at any price!

Those Roswell pieces were the first of over 400 niche-or specialized-articles I’ve written. Tightly focused and packed with know-how, niche articles are some of the easiest for new writers to sell.

What does it take to succeed?

· Write about your passion. If you’re a yard sale junkie, turn your vintage finds into a killer piece about starting a home-based business, or how to tell the difference between treasures and trash. Then pitch your articles to collecting magazines and Web sites. Do a Google.com search on “collectibles” to find hundreds of potential clients.

· Actually read the magazine or newspaper you’re trying to pitch. Writer’s Digest past-editor Melanie Rigney says her magazine hasn’t published poetry for two years, and yet she sent out a dozen poetry rejections in just one month.

· Got a hot tip on saving money? Find a way to twist it into a niche story, like how to pinch penny’s when buying top brand dog food (pet focus). Or, how women can avoid getting ripped off on car repairs (women’s magazine).

· Learn your way around the Internet. If you need to interview an expert on raising independent kids, do you know where to look? (Profnet.com) Or, can you construct an advanced search on AltaVista.com to track down statistics on child care?

· Find mailing lists on your specialty topic, then join in the discussion. This is where you’ll find those great anecdotes
other writers are using. Check out Yahoo http://groups.yahoo.com/

· Persevere. Editors want to buy from you. But sometimes they have a backlog, or they’ve already made a similar assignment.If you get rejected, immediately go back and suggest other topics. I pitched one publication for five months before they gave me a chance. Today they’re one of my bread and butter clients.

How Do You Find Clients?

Get on the Internet and use your favorite search engine to track down potential clients. For example, go to Google.com and type in “alien and collectors”. Then, go to the Web sites you think are appropriate and write the Webmaster or site owner about your background in the subject.

Then, tell them that you specialize in writing about “alien collectibles” and would they be interested in hiring you to write a few trial articles for their site?

Be sure to pick sites which are viable–but that I mean, don’t pick sites that are clearly hobby sites or sites which haven’t been updated since 1999. Look for sites that are selling alien collectibles and stress that your articles would add relevant Web content, which is useful for drawing visitors, and for getting higher search engine rankings.

If the site doesn’t offer a free newsletter to site visitors, suggest one–and suggest that you be hired as the writer. Remember, much of being a successful (paid) writer is about selling your ideas.

You can also find clients by subscribing to WritersMarket.com or by visiting your local bookstore and just scanning the racks for magazines you think would be open to your specialty.

THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX!!!!

If you write about cats, don’t pitch just cat or pet magazines. How many ways can you find to sell a cat article?

I challenge you to go to the bookstore and find at least 15 magazines you can pitch a cat story too.

Hint: As an example, how about a parent’s magazine and an article like “how the family cat can help teach your child about responsibility.” Get the idea?

Or–if you love music, how about pitching a piece on the growing trend to buy musicians’ autographs or instruments at auctions.

What if you love outer space? Would you think about pitching a piece on kid’s space books of the 1950s? I did. In addition, I also wrote an article for Astronomy magazine on collecting “space stuff.”

Do you see where this is going? Take a topic and find how many ways you can spin it.

On Monday, June 29, 2009, I purchased the domain name.

On Tuesday, June 30, 2009, I installed a WordPress Blog and plugins and set up my Feedburner feed.

Components used were:

• Education Theme by StudioPress
• Akismet
• Add to Facebook
• Feedburner
• Google Analytics for WordPress
• Google XML Sitemap
• Khanh’s Quick Feeds (this allowed me to pull in a related RSS feed from Dept of Veterans Affairs)
• Mobile Press (for viewing on mobile phone)
• WP-Polls (which I may remove)
• StatPress

The rest of Tuesday I started building out categories and content

On Wednesday, July 1,  I added more content.  By late Wednesday Google had indexed the site.

On Thursday, July 2,  I added more content, and by Thursday afternoon the site was on page #1 of Google for 3 of my main keywords and on page #2 for the other 2 keywords.

By Friday, analytics showed that I was already getting search-engine based traffic.

What’s the Magic?

There is none.  Are you disappointed? Don’t be, because if there is no magic, my success is duplicatable.

My thoughts about the quick success:

1. The site used WordPress, which we know gets indexed quickly by Google
2. The site has a laser focus
3. My target demographic was well-defined (meaning I knew exactly what information they were seeking)
4. My content was totally relevant to my focus and demographic

I believe the key to quick indexing was using the WordPress platform

and the keys to getting on page #1 for my keywords are:

• a laser-focused site
• knowing your demographic so well that you know exactly what information they need

Let me know what you think.

Will E-Books Rule Them All?

Do you remember in Lord of the Rings how the Age of the Elves was ending as the Age of Man began? I think we’re seeing the same colossal change as the Publishing Empires of Old fade (so sorry, Elron), and the Era of Digital Media blossoms.

E-books have long been the step-child of the publishing world; tolerated to a degree, but looked down upon by those who wrote and published “real books”.  With the launch of Amazon’s Kindle 1, 2, and now DX (and of course, Sony and Plastic Logic), not only are “real books” available in digital format, but anyone who wants to write an e-book can knock one off in an afternoon, publish on Lulu, Kindle, or their own site and (in effect) toss a virtual rock through Barnes and Noble’s front window, along with a note declaring “just try to keep me out!”

So how can an author or entrepreneur benefit?

There has never been a time in the history of man (or elves) with such an information-hungry audience.  As infopreneur Eben Pagan notes in one of his vids, we have left the culture of manual labor behind and have moved into the era of “mind-work”.  And with that era comes the need for information—and lots of it.

For you authors reading this, that means more and more eyes on your work (and hopefully bucks in your pocket).

For entrepreneurs, the outlets for digital media provide you a) a legitimacy that comes with having your name on a published work; b) cash; and (perhaps the most important) c) being seen as an authority in your field. Why? Look at the “authority” figures in your own industry – - you listen to what they say, you read their blogs and newsletters, and buy their products, hoping to emulate their success.

Plus (and this is a bonus) – - when media folks search Google for an expert in a field and your name keeps coming up, who do you think they’re gonna call?

[note: Because I'm known in a particular little niche (Internet genealogy), I've been interviewed by the New York Times, Kiplinger's, Better Homes and Gardens, plus numerous websites).  Trust me . . . it PAYS to be seen as the industry expert.]

Action Steps

I loathe going to meetings and coming out without any action steps, so:

1.  Dust off the articles, special reports, or books launguishing on your computer

2.  Polish, edit, update

3.  Sell on your site, format for Kindle, and pop them up on Lulu.

4. Let everyone you know that you have valuable information for sale.

5.  Once your stuff is on Kindle, gets your pals to leave you a glowing review on your Amazon page.

6.  Wash, rinse, repeat

That led, as many of these talks do, to a discussion of SEO content.

Like many website owners, our client didn’t want to invest any cash into even basic SEO tweaks, didn’t care about looking at site statistics (and even fought us on installing Google Analytics) . . . but worse (IMHO) was their inability to comprehend that they were writing “vitamin” content instead of “pain pill content”.

Huh?

Vitamin content is good stuff – but doesn’t solve a problem, and pain pill content serves up info that solves a problem.

For example:  If I were writing about flying a stunt kite, vitamin content would tell you the benefits of being outside, the fun of stunt kite flying, or the history of stunt kites.

Pain pill content would show you how to put a stunt together together without tearing out your hair, or how to do loop-de-loops without killing innocent bystanders with an out-of-control kite!

Simple concept, eh? But one we often forget because we get so wrapped up in the theory, not the “how to”.

Want more examples? Check out Leo Babauta’s Zen Habits blog – - notice how many “pain pills” he writes about, i.e. How to Make Gmail Your Ultimate Productivity Center. Since most of us use Gmail, and most of us have time challenges, Leo’s post had information that solved e-mail overload and time deficit – - pretty good post don’t you think?

Does this give you an idea for writing some of your own articles or blog posts? Comment below – what’s your best pain pill?

(And if this “pain pill” concept is yours please contact me – it’s great stuff, but I can’t remember where I first heard about it!)

Type in your search phrase using the standard Google search box.  Next, on the left under the Google logo, click the link that says Show Options. At the bottom of that list is the link to Wonder Wheel – you can’t miss it – they used Google’s circus colors for the letters. Once you click the Wonder Wheel you’ll see your central keyword (search term) surrounded by spokes with related keywords. Click any of the related keywords and Google will dig deeper and deeper into your niche, returning more keywords. How far down will Google dig? If you keep clicking, Google keeps looking.