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If I ask you what search terms have been holding the majority of the top 10 quickest growing positions in search engines for the last 3 years, you probably would think about some keywords related to political news or trendy cars, or energy sources, or something else similar in buzz or importance. Though big events, such as summer Olympiad in Beijing in 2008, do take their share of the top searches, this share is surprisingly small.

The reality is the majority of top keywords are not related to super-cool gadgets and uber-hot cars. Those top searches are related to people and social networks.

In fact, in 2007 people-related searches hold a lion 30% share of all searches in Google and Yahoo.

If you click on this link: Amazing Stats for People-Related Searches, you’ll see that two top links on that page point to reliable sources that proof this fact. First link will lead you to the article about People Search SIG hosted by Google on May 22, 2007 and presided over by Michael Arrington (TechCrunch).

Second one is related to the article published on well-respected webpronews.com

People search for celebrities, sport stars, political figures, for their relatives, for their classmates, a lot of different types of background checks are done online too. This list could go on and on, it’s almost endless.

There are phone searches, searches by social security and other identification numbers, searches by driving license, email searches and many other different searches you could ever think of.

In 2008 the share of people-related searches grew even bigger. If you look at 2008 Year-End Google Zeitgeist, you see that 7 out of 10 fastest-rising global searches were related to people or social networks.

In 2009 the tendency didn’t change a bit. Just look at 2009 Year-End Google Zeitgeist. Sure, now we see different names on the list. Sarah Palin, for example, lost first search position to Michael Jackson. Facebook and Tuenti (popular private Spanish social network, by invitation-only) are only 2 searches that manage to maintain their position on a top list of fastest growing searches for both years.

But this doesn’t really matter. What matters is that 7 out of 10 top searches are related to people searches and social networks, yet again. I don’t divide people-related searches and searches for social networks, because social networks are nothing more and nothing less than different ways for people to communicate with each other.

Social networks are created for people, built around people, and talk about people. Hence, for the purpose of this article, each social network could be considered a “person” with its own character, its own flavor, likes/dislikes, and so on.

Facebook, for example, appeared to be a young woman. To me “Facebook” sounds more like a male name, but hey the social network’s gender is defined by stats, not by my opinion. According to quantcast.com’s demographics, Facebook has predominately female audience, so I’ll refer to her as a “she” from now on.

This young woman is dedicated to build relationships and she is not shy in experimenting with new applications that would enhance her personality. She is not a stranger to fashion, like to be informed about latest news, has a sense of humor and somewhat interested in politics.

Myspace is a young dude interested in music and games. He is a little bit too chatty, curious about resources that might help him to enhance his education, he has a sense of humor, somewhat groomed about his appearance and believe in horoscopes.

LinkedIn is an older well-educated guy with a successful career and higher-than average income.

Twitter is a young confident girl and somewhat opinionated fashionista with strong leadership skills. She is humorous, influential, interested in politics, like to be informed, but not inundated. Usually owns latest gadgets, likes music and has an inclination to scientific or at least analytical approach in her life. Thoughts about bridal waltz also come to her mind from time to time.

Flickr is a technology-oriented young guy who likes to take pictures. He also likes sci-fi movies, newest technology brands, hot cars. He is politically active, has inquisitive mind, often involved in DIY home improvement projects and donates to charities.

Tagged is a middle-aged woman, most likely a mother who is worried about her job, about her kids’ future and their education in particular. In her limited free time she likes to take her mind of home chores by playing online games, listening to music, reading horoscopes or some fashion news. Sometimes she visits new places.

I just put a human face on a few most popular social networks. There are thousands of social networks, and soon there will be millions of them. And each has its own face, each one could be considred a “person” in its own right.

That’s why IMHO, people-searches and social network searches should be regarded in any search continuum as apples from the same tree.

The point is, this particular type of searches takes a huge share of any search pie. And of course there are many companies that gladly take a piece of this lucrative action.

If you’re interested in any particular type of search, you can easily find a company that delivers that particular service. And if company is smart, it also seizes the opportunity to considerably increase its revenue by creating affiliate programs for its services.

One company decided to combine different type of searches under one roof and built an impressive business opportunity, both for itself and for its affiliates. It gives people (for free) their own small “search engines” targeting different people-related search queries, with 9 built-in income streams.

If you want one of those, you can grab it here: Your Own People Search Engine.

If you’re wondering how your search engine might look like, here is an example: Sudden People Search.

Yes, I know, it looks very plain and even dull. But this particular design was thoroughly tested, and it delivers the best results.

So go get your own search engine and enjoy tasting a piece of this delicious pie!

Tagged as: Background Checks, Classmates, Cool Gadgets, facebokk, facebook, flickr, Global Searches, Google, google people search, Google Yahoo, Hot Cars, linkedin, Michael Arrington, myspace, People Search, people search engine, people search trend, Phone Searches, Reliable Sources, Sarah Palin, search for people, Search Position, Serps, Social Domination, social network, Social Networks, Sport Stars, tagged, Top Keywords, twitter, Zeitgeist

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Blog comments, why are they important? And why did I decide to talk about their value today?

I receive hundreds of blog comments on each and every blog post I write. Of course many comments are just a plain spam generated by comment bots.

Yet some blog comments are left by real people. Unfortunately, they don’t know how to write a comment that would bring blog the value of unique additional content.

Every blog owner is glad to read comments such as “interesting post” or “I like it” or “thank you”. But such comments are not really interesting to other people who visit the blog. And, as you may notice, only a few of those comments are actually published on this blog.

If you’re one of real people who left a comment that is not published, don’t get upset. I would love to post your comment if it’s done right.

So let’s discuss the right and wrong way to write a comment, and why it’s beneficial for a blog visitor to spend a few extra minutes to write a content-rich comment.

Why would you want to write a blog comment, and why spammers spend thousands of dollars on different blog spamming scripts?

There are three main reasons:

1) Quick Site Indexing and Link Discovery
2) High Quality Targeted Web Traffic
3) Potential Benefit of a One-Way Link from the Authority Blog.

Let’s dig a little deeper.

Quick Site Indexing and Link Discovery. If your comment is published on a blog which is frequently visited by search engine spiders, the link to your site (which you put in the “comment author” field,) is spidered too.

This means, search engines will visit your site or blog, and, if they like what they see there, index it. So comment posting is a good way to let search engines discover and index your site, especially if your site is new.

High Quality Targeted Web Traffic. When your blog comment is posted, people who visit the blog can read it, and click on your link. If you post comments on blogs that have some relevancy to your own (for example, they are in the same niche market), then you can get high quality targeted traffic this way. Those people are already pre-qualified prospects for your products and services.

Potential Benefit of a One-Way Link from the Authority Blog. The one-way link is “potential” because many blog owners use “nofollow” attribute while publishing your comment. Nofollow allows blog owners to publish links on their blogs without bleeding Page Rank. In this case you don’t get a PR benefit from the blog (though you still get indexing and traffic benefits described in 2 previous paragraphs.)

But many blog owners don’t use “nofollow” tag. In fact, many even don’t know what that is. So when writing a comment, you have a chance to receive a one-way link from the authority blog with high PR. This can substantially increase the PR of your own site or blog.

Here is how PR flow may look like:

That’s in a nutshell, why spam bots post tons of comments on millions of blogs. They want this link juice. Of course, if you have an anti-spam plugin installed, such as Akismet, it catches the majority of spam comments. So they are useless. But hey, not everyone has anti-spam tools on their blogs.

For actual blog visitors there is another reason to write meaningful blog comments (this one doesn’t apply to blog bots).

You can build a relationship with a blog owner.

Sure, you can build relationship through social networks. But this is just another way to get noticed. If you post comments that bring real value to the blog, not only your comments be published, the blog owner will be more inclined to hear what you have to say.

How to write valuable blog comments?

Read the post first, think what you can add on the same topic. What information is not covered in the post, but yet is highly relevant and useful?

To better understand what I’m talking about, here is the example of such blog comment.
Look at the comment left by a lady Lama Kalla.

She took time to briefly describe some of the techniques that should be used to build a relationship with followers. I use those techniques, but I didn’t mention them in the post she commented on, so this comment has a clear content value, and is beneficial to the readers of my blog.

Bottom line, good blog comments are beneficial for both parties. They bring additional content value to the blog owner and give SEO juice to blog comment writers.

Now you know how to do this right. Good Luck!

Here are a few more useful posts on blog comments:

Spam Comments Could Threaten Your Blog’s Search Engine Ranking … – Spam is the bane of just about every blog owner on the planet, and it gets to be overwhelming at times and you just end up throwing your hands up in the air and saying “to heck with it, let it go through!” Well, Google thinks that’s a …

How to put blog comments to good use | Penelope Trunk’s Brazen … – I don’t usually write about my life in real time, because the difference between a blog post than reads like a diary entry and a blog post that someone would.

Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog: The comments policy here – I do have one, and it’s worked quite well, so much so that I am able to approve 90% or more of submitted comments (spam excluded!). But for those newer to the blog, you might take a look at it….

CommentLuv – Reward Commenters On Your Blog With Blog Links – That means that if you visit my blog and comment on one of my posts, you’ll have the option to have a link to one of YOUR latest posts right there, in the comment section of MY blog! The Wordpress comments plugin takes the website …

Tagged as: blog comment, blog comments, Methods of website linking, Nofollow, PageRank, Search Engine Optimization

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Are you a member of any social network – like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace or any other of hundreds (or may be even thousands) networks currently available on the Net?

Then one thing is for sure – you’re blogging! Blogging, which is the short form of a term web logging, is simply a message post in a form of personal diary and it could be done in many formats.

You can blog with micro-blogs, status updates, or full-blown articles. Your blog can contain audio files (podcasting) or video files (vlogging, short for video blogging). Or it could be a combination of all the above mentioned types, and then some.

Blogging format doesn’t really matter. What matters, is the fact that all those formats allow you to post frequent updates and syndicate this information through RSS feeds on numerous blogs and social networks.

Since search engines index very quickly the updates posted on popular blogs and social networks, blogging became not only the form of self-expression, it became a powerful tool for lead generation, building additional income streams into your business, and of course search engine optimization.

In spite of all those formats of blogging that pop up left and right, there are only 2 main types of blogs.

One consists of blogs and social networking pages that are hosted by corresponding blogging platforms and social networks. (Examples: blogs on Blogger or Wordpress.com, Squidoo lenses, Hubpages, YouTube Channels, Twitter pages, Facebook Wall, MySpace Blog, etc).

Another type is represented by blogs and other message-posting applications that you host on your own hosting accounts (whether it’s a dedicated server, VDS or shared hosting, it’s not important in this particular case). What is important, you have control not only over the content that is posted on such blogs. You also decide what to do with the site.

With first type of blogs control is out of your hands. You never know when a social network may decide change its policy or throw an advertisement on your blog or completely shut down your account for whatever reason.

Don’t get me wrong. Social networks are awesome. You can piggy-back on their high PR, you can enjoy a huge influx of traffic, and your pages are instantly perceived as the source of authority.

Just remember to funnel all this traffic to your own blogs. Otherwise you’re building a sand castle –something stunning but very fragile. And that’s not the way you want to grow your business, is it?

You probably want to turn your visitors into customers and transform your blog into virtual real estate. And if you know how to properly build, promote and monetize your blogs, this task is possible. (Just don’t forget to regularly do multiple backups of your blogs for security purposes, preferably utilizing at least a dozen different ISPs.)

To summarize, both types of blogs are necessary in order to build a thriving online business. Social networks could be used as a significant source of traffic, as a tool to build relationship and reinforce your brand. Your own blogs and sites help to solidify this relationship and turn your prospects into customers.

If you want to find out how to effectively use social networks to grow your business, just sign up to my Social Marketing Secrets.

If you want to master a second part of the equation and to learn how to make money blogging, then look at the new blogging method created by Jack Humphrey.

I’ve known Jack for a while, and he is a real deal. He created a system that could be used even by people who never blogged before, or by those who never see a monetary return on their blogging. Just click this link to discover how to make over $9000 a month with just 10 blogs ($30 per blog per day).

Jack even offers a free 7 day trial (well, it’s almost free, it will cost you $1).
When you combine my social marketing and Jack Humphrey’s 10/30 blogging method, you will have a system that is poised to succeed (no guarantees though, read the disclaimers on this site).

Tagged as: Additional Income, Blogger, blogging, blogging for profit, Course Search Engine, Income Streams, jack humphrey, Lead Generation, making money, Message Post, myspace, Personal Diary, Podcasting, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engines Index, Self Expression, Social Marketing Secrets, Social Networking, Social Networks, Status Updates, Term Web, Vds, Video Files, web feed syndication

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I’ve been asked by many people how did I manage to get over 32,000 followers in a few short months. Do I use spam techniques? Did I find some magic bullets? Do I practice technological voodoo? Do I implement black-hat SEO tricks?

The short answer: No, I don’t spam. But I’m familiar with APIs of many social networks and with the newest tools and apps developed for those networks. And I use my own social marketing system to take a full advantage of those tools.

If you want to know the technical aspect of the story, then subscribe to my Social Marketing Secrets, and I’ll gladly share my knowledge with you.

Yet, the answer to quick and stable growth of your followers lies not as much within the knowledge of technology or marketing. It’s actually hidden within you.

You see, it doesn’t matter how many followers you are able to accumulate. What matters is, how many of them actually read your tweets and updates.

You need to have your own voice, something that differentiate you from the crowd and that makes your followers to pay attention to your tweets in the ever-growing noise of main Twitter stream.

This brings us directly to the matter of leadership. In order to stand out, you should think like a leader and act like one. It doesn’t matter whether you have 50 followers or hundreds thousands of them.

People who follow you form your own micro-community, and you become a leader de facto of this community.

Just remember that the leadership is given to you on a “trial basis”, so to speak:

• if you don’t deliver according to expectations,
• if you won’t give your audience unique content,
• if your updates lack newsworthy spin,
• if there’s no reason to believe that you’ll provide controversial/unordinary experience that they can’t get elsewhere,
• if you throw at them viral junk,

they will un-follow you, and have every moral right to do so.

You might be asking: “What messages are you referring to as a viral junk?”
There are quite a few of them, served in many different flavors. One example would be messages about daily routines. IMHO, this kind of social communications don’t bring any value to the readers.

Let’s look at a few “chef-d’oeuvre” of this genre: “I just get up and I don’t want to go to work” or “I’m so tired and I’m going to bed” or (My Favorite!): “I need to go to the bathroom”.

Yes, I know that Twitter is meant to be a tool of personal communications. But what value do you really bring to your followers by informing them about your bathroom needs?

Of course, I don’t see anything wrong with reading a “so tired” tweet once in a while if a person really provides good value, and is just wishing goodnight to her/his followers this way. But the percentage of such “daily routine” messages should be rather low.

We live at the times of information over-load when you don’t have enough seconds in the day to digest even the most useful and interesting bytes and bits.

So, I don’t know about you, but I certainly don’t appreciate when my precious time is wasted in such a barbaric way. And such “social communicator” deserves to be un-followed quickly.

If you’re wondering why you have a very small following, assess your messages. Do you really provide value or you’re just shooting the breeze?

On the other hand, if you manage to transform yourself into a social leader, your following will grow exponentially. If your resources are of the highest quality, your followers will gladly share them with their own audience.

Why? Because your followers are in their turn leaders of their own micro-communities, and when they share unique information, they provide great value to such communities.

If your information is helpful, and enough followers shared it with their audiences, there is a possibility of the positive chain reaction otherwise called the “word of mouth advertising”. “Word of mouth” not only brings in a new wave of followers, it also includes the benefit of social proof. This is very powerful.

In my experience, rare marketing strategy can compete with a “word of mouth advertising” in regard to social proof.

Just give your followers as much value as you can. So much value, in fact, that they would think: “Wow, I would gladly pay for this information!” It’s your task, as a bona fide leader, to deliver unique content and unforgettable experiences to your micro-community.

That’s all you have to do. Then the law of reciprocity and the word of mouth will do the rest, sky-rocketing your business to the new heights.

Tagged as: Apis, Apps, Followers, Leadership, leadership in social networks, Magic Bullets, Marketing System, social leader, social leadership, Social Marketing, Social Networks, techno-voodoo, Trial Basis, Tweets, Voodoo

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