Why I Do What I Do

Social media has become an integral part of today’s society. From people connecting with old friends and making new contacts, to businesses advertising digitally, people now lead virtual lives that are just as tangible as their real lives. It is projected that in 2010 marketers will spend 2.2 million dollars worldwide in the social media arena with Facebook claiming almost a quarter of that.  Look at some of the stats: Facebook gets 700,000 new members per day, and 45 million updates go through their servers every day. Twitter does 5 million tweets per day and there are 900,000 new blog posts per day.

Back in May a couple of old friends and I started the JustUsLeeg. We wanted to get together a social group of area geeks for beers and good conversation. When that group started growing we wanted a way to easily get our

information to each other.  A website was born. JustUsLeeg.com was the way for us to talk about the things that we were interested in. We had no idea that so many would be interested. We changed the format to more of a web based magazine and started doing a wide variety of posts, from movie trailers to robotics.  In the beginning the site received highly limited hits. How do we increase the hits for free? We had and still have little to no cash to put into advertising.

Do it yourself SEO was my way to go. SEO stands for search engine optimization, or how do we get ourselves in the number one spot on Google? Not just Google though, Yahoo, Bing or any of the available search engines out there.  We needed to get recognized without any infusion of cash. First we looked at our meta-data. Meta-data is defined as data about data or the information describing our site. It appears on the HTML pages of any website. We got as descriptive as we could, including our names, where we are globally, and key words about our site. We tagged every page and every post.

Next we looked at links. One of the best ways to get recognized is to link other sites. Some of this was done out of necessity as we were citing information gained from other sites. Some was done out of appreciation for other sites that we wanted to emulate in one form or another. The point here is if you want sites to link you, and you do want those links, you must link them. This increases your digital footprint by networking your information across a broader sphere.

Then there are posts, we posted like crazy. With those posts came more metadata in the form of tags, and more links. Aside from linking other blogs we broadcast our posts to many social media sites, twitter, digg, Facebook, Stumble, and Reddit to name a few. Since May, we have racked up 15 pages on Google alone and receive up to 1800 hits per day, and yes number one on Google.

Along the way I noticed how others were advertizing their product, or site, or whatever it was that they were trying to get out there.  What I saw, was a lot of what I call billboards or shouting. Some social media accounts showed updates, and I mean every update, to the effect of, “Don’t pay for whiter teeth, look at my product”, or “Buy my product, it will fulfill your life”, or I have the answers you’ve been looking for”. First off, bullshit, no one has the all your life’s answers, as they’d have you believe, and I don’t think that anyone believes that they do. How many times did I click on these links? Never, not once. I don’t think that I am alone here, either.  Pay per click doesn’t work, people just aren’t listening.

So what makes some successful in social media advertising and others not. The answer was simple, content. Those who took the time to form real relationships across the social media platforms receive more hits to their sites. Those who don’t scream on these sites, but talk about real world things receive the hits. They become trusted so that when they do choose to talk about what they are selling, on those rare occasions, people listen, and more importantly, they buy.

I started Anocial for a very few reasons. I’m tired of billboards, I want to reach those who don’t have a digital footprint, and help them create one. I want to help them learn how to get people to listen. I want to change how people look at social media and how they interact with it, with those real human beings on the other side of the avatar. I want to focus on Local SEO, to help people get notice right in the area that their business is. Let’s face it, when you need a plumber you don’t need the best that Timbuktu has to offer, unless, of course, that’s where you happen to live. Most of all, I did it for me. I enjoy this. Steve Jobs said, “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.” I’m living mine.