Social Media Expo (SMX) Report from Long Beach, California April 22 and 23rd, 2008

KRONiS | April 24th, 2008

If you want to know more about SMX here is a link to their SMX News Feed.

I had a great time the past two days learning more about Social Media and meeting a lot of cool people. This is a much smaller community then most people think. This is likely because some of these larger conferences (like Webmaster World / Pubcon in Las Vegas) attract a lot of ‘wannabes’ who are on the outside of this industry and are often trying to figure out how to grow their own business without hiring a search marketing firm.

What’s nice about SMX is that most attendees are Search Marketers & SEOs or somehow much more closely related to the industry then some of the larger conferences. For example there weren’t guys there who are all about their online auto sites.

Some of the things I learned about more than I had expected to are listed below

1. I even learned more about the strength of lists in blog posts and on Digg.

2. I won’t make a list now, I was just practicing

Yahoo Answers

So, I’ve learned that Yahoo! Answers is a really great place to get traffic from. All you really need to do is know your own industry, then create a profile and start answering questions from the categories that relate to your site (or your client’s site). The longer you are on the site (by answering questions and participating) you will be rewarded with more abilities. I really like this model, just like SeoMOZ allows you to have ‘do follow’ links after you have reached a certain level of participation.

The important thing to understand here is that as you can gain credibility in Yahoo! on your topic, also be sure to give credit to your page. If your answers are voted ‘best answer’ then you receive points that give you more credibility in the community and increase the link love to your sites.

The help section also encourages you to simply ‘Ask’ your question if they don’t help you out with what you need either!

When answering questions, it is encouraged to site your sources, in which you would be best to put something like the following:

Source:
Aaron Kronis / Wpromote

http://www.wpromote.com

After 4 days, the ‘answering’ of posted questions ceases and everything goes into ‘vote’ mode. Most people don’t really care about the questions, they are just looking for answers so you can go in and simply vote for your own answer as the best – your competition will be with the others who answered and want the ’10 points‘.

Yahoo has a ‘scoring’ system where you start with 100 points and after 250 you can then start to click ‘thumbs up’ or ‘thumbs down’ on questions, for example along with more options like being able to ‘star’ a question more times then just 10 in one day. You get 2 points for answering, 10 for best answer and -5 to ask a question.

Extra special: from SMX – > Another sneaky tip for all you bloggers and SEO folks out there: In Yahoo! Answers, on the profile below the avatar you will see 3 tabs: Answer, Discover and Vote. Click on vote, look for your own questions and vote on them. Most people don’t remember or know how to do this.

Wikipedia:
It has come to my attention after SMX that the large community of Wikipedia can be an excellent resource for helping out your clients with their link-building efforts. If you find a very old picture on Wikipedia and your client has the same thing for sale and has updated photos that are ‘not going to have licensing issues surrounding their use’ – basically amateur photos – then you may be able to get them into Wikipedia.

This would be you helping Wikipedia grow its image database with newer fresher and more up to date images. You would give up the ‘rights’ to the images, but in exchange for a link when it is referenced on Wikipedia. I’m still researching the numbers on this, however it is amazing how many links you can actually get from this if your image is accepted.

Start learning about this at The Wikimedia Foundation, which consists of volunteers who edit “The World’s largest free online encyclopedia”.

Until next week,

Team SEO

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