Top 5 Inbound Marketing Stories of the Week: Flickr's Business Value

Why yes it does, and the top article on InboundMarketing.com this week, by Rohit Bhargava, offers an insider's guide that includes tips on how Flickr can be used for small business marketing .

1. How to Promote Your Business on Flickr

Author: Rohit Bhargava on OPEN Forum

Before Rohit shares his insider advice, he deeply stresses the importance of producing and posting quality photos in order for his marketing tips to work.  Because Flickr is largely a community that appreciates high-quality photography, the only way to achieve enough credibility on Flickr is to produce photos that make the grade.

Once you're generating images that you can be proud of, you can use some of Rohit's 10 tips, which include creating collection homepages, tagging properly, sharing in real time, joining and contributing to groups, and actively promoting and approving reuse.

Lesson: Your marketing efforts will only succeed if you're creating quality content.

2. What to Do When Your B2B Company Rejects Social Media

Author: Jeffrey L. Cohen of Social Media B2B

What do you do when you just can't convince the boss to use social media , no matter how hard you try?  Go into stealth mode. Warning: you may need to visit OZ for your fair share of courage before implementing the advice referenced in this article.

If you think social media can benefit your company but the boss really isn't biting, Jeff's article offers several tips to help you prove its worth, which include setting up a personal Twitter account, blogging about industry topics, answering questions on LinkedIn, passing along leads to Sales and test-driving monitoring tools using free trials.

Lesson: You can't really prove something until you actually prove it.

3. What to Do When Your Search Rankings Drop

Author: Darren Rowse of ProBlogger

"I just lost all my Google traffic -- help!" Darren's article serves as a general response to all those who find themselves making this exclamation at one point or another.  The fact of the matter is that Google is constantly changing its ranking algorithm, which results in blogs being lowered in search rankings or even completely disappearing from search results.

So what do you do if this happens to you? First of all, Darren advises you not to panic or make any drastic changes to your site's SEO too quickly.  He also recommends you review your SEO techniques to ensure you haven't done anything black hat and encourages you to diversify your traffic by building it from other sources besides Google.

Lesson: Google may be super powerful, but don't rely on it as your only source of traffic. Also, play by Google's rules (black hat SEO will cost you).

4. Social Media Analytics: Twitter: Quantitative & Qualitative Metrics

Author: Avinash Kaushik of Occam’s Razor

If you read yesterday's interview with Avinash Kaushik , you know that he's a firm believer in the fact that trends in Web and marketing analytics are constantly changing, which means we all need to keep abreast of the latest changes in order to stay on top of the game.

In this article, Avinash's focus is on Twitter and the uniqueness in measuring it as a new media channel. He discusses a few third-party Twitter tools that he thinks are on the right track in their use of new media analytics, and emphasizes the need to put aside stale, current Web analytics thinking and be much more critical when analyzing new media channels.

Lesson: New channels require fresh thinking.

5. 7 Simple Truths of Social Media Marketing

Author: John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing

In my last "top 5 stories" article , I referenced a blog post entitled " The 7 Harsh Realities of Social Media Marketing ." In direct response to that post, John's recent article argues that such a negative post might prevent social media-hesitant small businesses from jumping in with the audacity they should.  Social media marketing involves hard work and effort, yes, but he argues that's what marketing is about.

In rebuttal and to exemplify that social media marketing isn't that rough, John offers seven simple truths.  Some of my favorites: "listening is the best way to develop a strategy," "sell awareness and money will follow," "networking hasn't really changed," and "it makes your offline play stronger."

Lesson: Don't knock it 'til you try it.

Photo by Shahram Sharif

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