When you sign up for just about any social network, you have the option to upload an image that will represent you. No matter what the social site, you'll want to associate an image with your online identify. This image is your "avatar." It's your online persona. It's the way the online community will see you. With it, your profile appears more real, more tangible, more human. A good avatar will help people relate to you as a fellow human being, to take notice of you, to remember you, and to listen to what you have to say.

Sure, you could choose not to upload an image, but why would you? Then you'd be a faceless user that no one remembers or identifies with - making gaining traction in the network much more difficult.

You don't want to blend into the woodwork and be ignored, right?

Choosing your avatar doesn’t need to be difficult. Your image can be a simple picture of your face or just of something you like or identify with. Using the same avatar on many social networks helps brand you and helps people remember who you are. When people recognize your avatar across many platforms, they are more likely to want to be your friend and vote for your story submissions.

What avatar do I use? It depends. If it's a persona that I don't want necessarily tied to me / my company, then I go for an illustration - something distinctive. (No I'm not going to show any of them to you here.) If the profile is one I've associated with my own name, then I use this headshot photo of me:

With the amount of time needed to stay at the top of the game in social media, it is inevitable that you will eventually burn yourself out. No matter how much you enjoy being on these sites, and no matter how good of friendships you have made, after a while it becomes tedious. This happens most often to the users who have been trying to become power users, and it continues to happen to the super stars.

So what is the secret to no letting yourself burn out? Taking breaks. This might sound obvious but, if you are like me, social media can become an addiction if you let it. You enjoy the social aspect and you love the traffic benefits... and you constantly want more. You get so caught up in it; everything you do online revolves around getting to the front page of your favorite site.

There is an entire world outside of social media (believe it or not ) and you need the real one as much as you need the virtual one. It might sound crazy, but this weekend I'm going to be out in the sun WITHOUT my computer. I suggest you try it sometime. I might send a Twitter update or two from my cell phone, but don't count on it.

From a social media marketing standpoint, YouTube isn't an ideal social site because of the way it hoards PageRank (video pages can't have external links on them, and external links are nofollowed everywhere anyways, including on your user page), so it can't be leveraged to increase your site's rankings in the same way that a site like Digg can. That's why a lot of SEOs and SMOs prefer submitting link bait articles to social news sites versus making videos for YouTube. When a video goes viral, it's YouTube that tends to benefit in terms of inbound links rather than the original site. So, if the link juice and thus the search engine visibility benefits don't transfer to your site, what's the point you may ask?

True, YouTube limits your opportunities to add external links and then nofollows them. But you can be at peace with that fact. Instead, get the YouTube video itself to rank in the SERPs. Long live Google's "universal search"!

With universal search, YouTube now wields a lot of power to rank in Google's web search results -- which means that getting into video is a good idea. Video blogging or trying to create something that has the potential to go viral can be a great thing for your business.

I especially love the "plus box" in universal search -- the clickable plus sign in a YouTube video containing Google SERP that allows searchers to watch the video right there, without leaving the page. It's a great opportunity to make a brand impression over a course of minutes, while the viewer watches your video.

So how do you optimize video content?

Obviously the spiders can't see what you say in the video so how are these things going to rank? When you upload a video to YouTube, there are a few important areas to optimize are:

• the title
• the description
• tags (keywords)
• and your YouTube username

What you call your video, the words you use in the description, and what tags you assign it, will make a difference when it comes to its ranking in the SERPs and for which keywords.

Step 1: When coming up with a good title and description for your video, remember to use the words you are trying to rank for. This might sound obvious, but it's just like if you were writing good titles and descriptions for a regular page on a site you were trying to optimize. Do not be too exact, but don't be too broad either. YouTube has the ability to rank for some fairly competitive words especially if there are not many videos about it. At the same time, however, if you title your video "Sports video" you're just wasting your time.

Make copious use of tags on your videos (assuming the tags are all relevant to the content), spread your tags out among your clips, use adjectives to make your videos more visible to folks searching based on their mood, have some category descriptor tags (bearing in mind that YouTube's default search settings are Videos, Relevance and All Categories), match your title and description with your most important tags, and don't use throwaway words like "and" or "to."

Your YouTube username is an often neglected but important piece, because it can drive traffic to your site and help burn your brand in the viewer's brain. Consider the famous "Will It Blend?" videos from Blendtec, where they blend iPods, rake handles, light bulbs and the like. Blendtec cleverly set their username to "willitblend.com" to promote their microsite. Granted, it's not actually an external link (it still points to a YouTube user page), but it provides bloggers and journalists with a URL to use in their blog post or article besides (or in addition to) the YouTube video URL.

Read more on YouTube marketing in this article I wrote for MarketingProfs last year.

If you're a search marketer and you dabble at all in social media, there is one program you're probably already taking advantage of: StumbleUpon. StumbleUpon gives some great returns with a relatively small time investment. I've discussed StumbleUpon before, in the context of an interview with social media guru Neil Patel, but let's take a closer look at how it works...

With the StumbleUpon browser extension installed, with the click of a button you get sent to a random page. Once there, you can give the page a thumbs up or thumbs down and then move on to "stumble upon" the next random page. Think of it as channel surfing, but on the Web. You can select your categories of interest so that the random pages are more targeted to your tastes. You can leave a comment about what you like/dislike about any page.

It doesn't take very many thumbs-up votes to send hundreds if not thousands of visitors to your site - even if your site is brand new. It sounds easy, just start voting for your content.

But there's more to it than that... there are some important social media "tricks of the trade" that will help maximize the opportunity.

The most important thing is to have mutual friends. As you follow people on StumbleUpon, you will see more pages that they like. The idea is to follow people with similar interests.

The trick comes in when you begin to use the "Send To" option within the browser extension / toolbar. This option sends a site, along with a personalized message to your friend. The friend is forced to view this site before they can continue with their random stumbling. Do you see where I'm going with this? In the message you can ask them to thumbs up your page -- the more thumbs up a page has, the more traffic it will get from StumbleUpon. Your friends will probably ask for you to do the same for their sites in return. One hand washes the other...

What are your favorite tactics for maximizing your StumbleUpon traffic?

I'm in San Francisco for the Web 2.0 Expo. Tomorrow morning I present a 3 hour workshop on SEO/SMO along with co-presenter Muhammad Saleem. Then on Wednesday afternoon I present a breakout session titled "Best-kept Secrets to SEO Success: the Art and the Science."

This year I've come to the Web 2.0 Expo armed with Twitter. Last year at this time when I spoke at Web 2.0 Expo, I had barely given Twitter any notice. I'm looking forward to tuning in to the "back channel" and getting the additional perspective on the happenings of the show. (I just hope the Web 2.0 Expo wiki isn't an indication of what's in store for Twitterers at the Web 2.0 Expo: the Twitteroll only lists a dozen people.)

Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos is into Twitter. (He's on @zappos if you want to follow him). Tony blogged an idea that I quite liked:

Seeing all the Twitter comments about Zappos during the presentation, I thought for future presentations, it might be interesting to display all the Twitter comments in real-time, even asking audience members to vote on which topics to talk more about... It would be a way to make future presentations relevant to what each audience actually wants to hear.

His idea of displaying a live Twitter stream while presenting is a good one, and it reminded me of the IgniteWeb2Expo that I attended last year at the Web 2.0 Expo. It was a series of 5-minute lightning rounds, where each presenter had 20 slides, a hard stop at 5 minutes, and each slide advanced automatically after 15 seconds. It was based on the Ignite events in Seattle.

At IgniteWeb2Expo, they used Mozes, rather than Twitter, for audience commenting and voting on the speakers. The voting worked out great - the top four speakers were "promoted" to speaking slots at the keynote later in the week. One of those winning speeches was from my favorite authors, Tim Ferriss, in fact.

The attendees used Mozes for heckling too, to great effect. One snide remark in particular was really memorable.. One of the speakers was a guy in a bad suit that looked like he just walked out of a Miami Vice episode. When the message "don johnson called. he needs his suit back" appeared on the screen, the audience started cracking up. The poor guy didn't have a clue he was being mocked, he just kept on presenting!

As I have said before, Twitter is great! But with great things there are always downsides. With Twitter, these downsides come in a couple forms.

The first and most obvious is that it can be a time drain. I don't know how Robert Scoble has the time to follow 20,000 people on Twitter. According to one of his tweets today, he gets a tweet a second:

I just told @ev to turn off my autofollow script. 20,000 followers is enough. I'm seeing one new Tweet every second, I can't deal with more.

If Twitter alone was your full time job, you still wouldn't be able to keep up with such a barrage of tweets!

With a thousand things to get done every day, Twitter is the 1001st thing to keeps you from getting anything accomplished. This can be managed though, just don’t Twitter – get your work done instead. That's why you won't see me on Twitter sometime for days at a time. So that downside is pretty manageable.

However, there is a much more heinous downside: spam.

I happen to have a Twitter account that I do not even use and it still continues to gain followers – regardless of the fact that it never updates and has a total of 2 tweets ever. The growing trend in the Twitter world is following tens of thousands of people and hoping thousands follow you back – so you can just un-follow, rinse repeat.

To avoid being suckered by these spammers, some good advice is to thank them for following you and say hi. If there is no reply you can either choose to just not follow them or block. Another way to find these spammers, that may have replied to you but unfollowed you later. Twitter doesn’t have a “who unfollowed me” notification, although there is a cool little program called Twitter Karma that shows you who is just following you, who you just follow, and who is a mutual follower. Using this program is a great way to help manage your Twitter feeds and not get suckered by the spammers!

When anyone first gets into social media, on any site, there is one thing they all notice quickly – there are power users. Power users are the ones who submit a ton of stuff, comment on everything, have hundreds if not thousands of friends and followers. To someone just diving into the world, it’s rather intimidating. How can you compete with that?

This is the wrong question to ask. What you should be asking yourself is how are you going to network with these power users. Sure you could just be their “friend” and vote their stories up… but that isn’t going to get you noticed and it for sure isn’t going to put you in a position to ask them for favors. To the new user these power users are “famous” and what happens is the new user doesn’t try and connect – they don’t think they can. They see these power users as unreachable.

The truth of the matter is these power users got to where they are, have tons of friends and followers, because they are social people. Some of the nicest people in the world are the power users of social media sites. As I have said before, social media is about being social – not anti-social.

If you’re just starting out on a new network, give it a try – reach out to the big guys and get yourself noticed. You might just be surprised by the results.

When you use any social media outlet, one of the major hurdles is making friends. How you go about making friends will make or break your reputation on whichever service you are on. One of the best ways of making real friends and connections through social media is using instant messaging.

You can find users AIM/MSN/Yahoo names generally in their profiles and can start sending them messages instantly. They have their usernames listed so people can find and talk with them. They do not have them listed to just be spammed with “vote for this please, thanks” messages. If they don’t know you, why would they vote you up just because you asked them?

A good way to go about first contact with anyone on a social site is to be genuinely interested in them. After the initial "Hello I found you through X," ask them about their latest blog post or what they thought about something you saw they voted up or down. Ask them about their business, what they do, what they are interested in, how they got their start.

I chat with people every day and when someone is actually interested in what I do (or at least seems that way) I’m more likely to be interested in them. I’ll take a look at their profile on whatever social site they found me though and maybe check out their blog or website. When people just spam me with “vote for” or try and start a conversation without introducing themselves and just looking for free tips – I ignore them.

(Unless you're a Trekkie like me, you may not fully appreciate this post's title... "First Contact" is a reference to the first time Earth's inhabitants made contact with aliens, specifically the Vulcans.)

SEO is an ever-changing landscape and it's hard to stay current. Keeping up with trends involves work. You have to be out there at least every few weeks reading blogs, looking at what your competition is doing, and testing different theories of your own.

This has been talked about to death on blogs across the internet so I’m not going to say any more about it. What I want to talk about is keeping up with your social media profiles and the massive time investment it takes to be on top.

While you can get behind on SEO by stepping away from the world for several months, all it takes to lose connections in the social realm is several weeks.

Social media is something that if you want to stay at the top of the game you have to be in it, constantly - every day with massive amounts of time spent weekly. You could be the top Digger but leave for three weeks or more and you’re all but forgotten. It’s a constant struggle for the coveted few top spots that most people just simply cannot invest the time in.

Sure, when you do go back to your social media sites after being away for an extended period of time it takes less energy to regain your crown than just starting from scratch - but it is still a massive time investment to get back to where you were.

Being a power user on social media sites can send massive traffic and links to you or your clients pages – but for those truly committed social media isn’t a hobby – it is a "lifestyle".

There are a lot of “social media experts” out there screaming that “YOU HAVE TO USE LINKBAIT!!! YOU HAVE TO SUBMIT TO SOCIAL MEDIA SITES!!!” Sure there are definite advantages to doing these things... quick traffic, a few new links, etc but… do you really have to?

I am going to have to say that no, no you do not. I hate to say it, but the overused cliche really does apply: "If you build it (great), they will come." By this, I mean if you really want a large audience of viewers that read, talk about, share with friends and really LOVE your work - you only need to write great content. Great content will be found (and linked to) no matter how you promote it.

Case in point: I was honored to discover last week that this blog has been included in the SEO category of "Alltop" - Guy Kawasaki's new site. I hadn't sought this out, submitted by blog to be included; it happened by itself.

This is easier said than done of course; you actually have to know what you are talking about and, as I have said before, you should have a passion for your writing! That is what makes people read your blog day in and day out. Striving to write better, more informative posts is what will make your blog a success. It's not the one-time traffic surge of StumbleUpon or Digg; it's the writers who day in and day out produce great content that is helpful for their readers.

Here are just a few great blogs where the authors really get that content is what it's all about: SEOMoz, ProBlogger, DoshDosh, WolfHowl. (I subscribe to hundreds of great blogs in my news reader; I wish I could list them all here!)