How to Use Social Media & Actionable SEO Tips : Interview with Ann Smarty

As part of our Bloggers Ideas interview series, Ann Smarty  of InternetMarketingNinjas discusses how to use social media for marketing and figured out how to get links from difficult sources. Ann Smarty also writes for some of the top Online Marketing sites like SEOmoz, Mashable, Social Media Examiner and many more! I know  This interview is rather long, but is worth for all bloggers & webmasters ! Thanks so much to Ann Smarty for spending the time to answer all of my questions! 

Please introduce you to my blog readers? Explain who are you apart from blogging life?

I am founder of MyBlogGuest, the free community of guest bloggers preaching high-quality guest posting. I am also community manager at Internet Marketing Ninjas and co-founder of Viral Content Buzz.

My oldest site is SEOsmarty.com which is my personal SEO blog. That’s the blog that built my brand!

Please define terms “blogging” and “money making from a blog” your experience on them?

Wow, a tough one! Blogging means creating useful content regularly and sharing it with your audience. The content can be anything you have any expertise or interest in. For example, I started my blog when I was learning SEO and the main aim was to organize and apply the new things I was learning!

“Money making from a blog” is any way you can monetize your site (which I’ve never been too successful at).

What are your tips on traffic generation? Please reveal some must use techniques to get more traffic to new blogs?

The first step is to create content. It should be very unique (and I don’t mean just original). The content of a good blogger reflects his/her personality, taste and voice. If every new blogger just spent first 2-3 months of blogging just finding their voice and working on research and content creation, the web would have been a much better place!

Promoting and generating traffic comes next when you already have good content live. I’d suggest trying ViralContentBuzz.com as we are doing our best to generate valuable social media shares for your content!

Recommended: Importance of Social Media

How to get prepared for next Google updates and stay safe? What resources you read to stay updated?

I read and contribute to Threadwatch, I am also quite active at SEOchat. Those two would give any newbie a good update on what is going on in SEO world without too much cluttering.

As for getting ready… if you are honest to yourself and if you are putting high-quality content online, there’s not much you should be doing to get prepared. The only thing probably is to make sure you can filter FUD (filter, uncertainty, doubt) from real news and keep sanity!

Which social sharing sites your prefer and how to get more traffic from them?

Historically I am most active on Twitter. The best way to get results from Twitter is to participate in Twitter chats. TwChat is highly recommended for that as you can add favorite Twitter chats to bookmarks and use the calendar to plan your week!

What are your top favorite 3 tools for managing social media campaigns and why?

• Social media signals + Authorship: This tool allows me to quickly copy-paste my recent articles and measure their impact.
• Tweetdeck because it lets me tweet and interact while still actually working: I love the desktop updates and I have learned to read them without any sacrifice to my productivity
• Commun.it I love the reports there and the easy dashboard to track interactions.

Do you Pinterest for your business, what kind of Pinterest tools you use?

I am not using Pinterest too much apart from pinning images I like (basically I don;t have enough time to make the most of it).

I did cover some Pinterest tools here.

How Do You Conduct An SEO Experiment & What you do when you get your client’s project. First thing you would do is?

I don’t do too much experimenting these days as they tale time and I don’t have much.

The first thing I do when looking at the website is Google cache.

What kind of SEO Tools you are using right now.  Can you tell us?

Ironically, not many (“Ironically” because I write more on them than I actually manage to use) – mainly because I am not doing to much of SEO these days.

Here are a few:

Do you use Blackhat SEO techniques in a white hat SEO way, Like scrapebox  & Xenu’s Link Sleuth…

I have never considered myself a black (even gray) hat SEO. However they say white hat SEO actually doesn’t exist ?

I have used Xenu but only for “white” reasons ?

Do you think 3rd party blog post links and eBook submissions are playing vital role these days? How to use these opportunities?

Of course it works! I believe in guest blogging and eBook marketing. Both boost your content marketing efforts and build your assets.

On Reporting – What Kind of Reports do you Give to your Clients?

I am not doing reporting these days – All i am doing is basically blah-blah-blah (the fancier word is community management:))

On Social Media – What Kind of Things have you Done on the Social Side?

When it comes to social media, I don’t think there is such a thing as “Done”. It’s a continuous never-ending process. I did a Slideshare presentation on what I am actually doing:

What kind of Content Marketing tactics you are using to  increase user engagement? Why landing pages are playing important for increasing conversion rates?

My most successful content marketing tactic is a smart and creative re-packaging. You can turn text into an image, PowerPoint deck, video, etc. this opens up the whole new world of marketing channels (which you couldn’t have used with just text). I believe in this tactic and I think it adds value to the web while adding variety to your marketing tactics:

I hope you learned a lot from Blogging expert Ann Smarty. Dont forget to share this article in social media! You can also Join BloggersIdeas on Facebook & Google+ for getting similar updates.