Seven North Web

World’s coolest Social Media/Business Blogging authority Chris Brogan lets you in on a basic technique for grabbing attention:

So the trick is this: create “how-to” information that people want, and that people will want to share. The goal of this information is to be helpful, but subgoals include getting the information spread out to more people, and also getting more people interested in a business relationship with you.

Read the whole entry on Mr. Brogans always-useful eponymous blog. And keep reading: here is the Essential Brogan.

Or it will if you are using it right. Lee Odden makes the point in Online Marketing Blog

When you look at shifts in consumer information discovery, consumption and sharing, there’s no arguing with the intersection of search and the social web. Searchers expect to not only find what they’re looking for on search engines, but to interact with the results, whether it’s through commenting, voting or sharing. As a result, social media affects SEO in numerous ways, creating opportunities for marketers.

Read Lee’s whole take in the Online Marketing Blog entry. Related articles by Zemanta

• Dominating Your SEO Competition Through Competitive Knowledge (searchengineguide.com)

John Jantschmakes an important point about the necessity of self-education by successful entrepreneurs:

I’m going to repeat this – you don’t have to know how to do everything, you do need to know how to buy it and that means you have to invest in educating yourself.

There is so much incredible free or low cost information online that there’s no excuse to stay in dark about any important element of your business. Books represent the best investment, pound for pound, you can make in yourself and your business. I’ve touched on marketing, but this goes for management, finance, legal, every aspect – learn how to read a balance sheet, understand the laws and requirements in your industry, attend workshops on social media – even if you have a full org chart of people responsible for these areas.

Read the whole story in Duct Tape Marketing!

Virtuous cycle or stairway to heaven? Either way, Mashable reiterates the SMM basics:

From a marketing standpoint, you can look at the benefits of SEO and social media two different ways.

First, implementing a social media marketing program without optimizing content is leaving money on the table. Useful social content (blog, video, images, audio) that cannot be discovered via search is a lost opportunity to reach an audience that is looking.

For example, The Student LoanDown, the popular blog about student loans and college financing from Wells Fargo, identifies 29 keywords in its Keyword Meta Tag and doesn’t rank in Google’s first page for 26 of them. Those that do rank are variations of the blog’s name.

While there is a generous amount of cross linking within posts, a basic blog template optimization effort leveraging keywords and other minor adjustments could improve search traffic for this site substantially, without any compromise in content quality or user experience.

Social interactions and media sharing amongst social network participants create the kind of content that can improve a brand’s visibility within search results through profiles, videos, blog posts, or other media. A good example is Stormhoek wines’ first page Google (Google reviews) rankings including blogs, Facebook (Facebook reviews) and Twitter (Twitter reviews).

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Read the whole article on Mashable.

You ask me, they all look pretty good. Click each to see each banner.

This is probably the final design:

I love this layout. The graphic element was salvaged from a promo T-shirt; the rest is just two typefaces.