Tamar Weinberg is a well-known author in the blogging community. She is also the creator of the blog Techipedia, covering internet marketing topics, social media and blogging. Tamar’s work and expertise has been featured in many publications, including Forbes, USA Today and Lifehacker. People like Ann Smarty founder of MyblogGuest, consider her a role model and early influencer in the internet marketing industry. Today, though not writing as much, she works as The Global Advertising Director for Mashable.
Tell us a little bit about your background and why you started Techipedia
Tamar: I think it’s fair to say I was an early adopter. I was living and preaching the benefits of social media since 2006. The site was started as a passion, mostly because I loved tech/social media and mostly because I wanted to be an author. A blog was fair middle ground and gave me a soapbox to express myself and tell everyone about why I love social media as much as I do. It took off 🙂
What are some of the projects you are working on right now?
Tamar: My main job is at Mashable as Global Advertising Director and is by far my biggest focus. I’m also the key force behind Namecheap’s social media direction and we’ve done some great things with donating over $30,000 to Save the Elephants, over $60,000 to the Electronic Frontier Foundation in protest against SOPA, and so much more. I have other projects that are smaller-scale via Techipedia’s digital marketing arm.
What popular social media or blogging techniques you disagree with and why?
Tamar: The biggest one: don’t have a blog. A lot of people have migrated their voices to products like Google+, Twitter, and Facebook. There’s far more interaction there, but your voice is lost in a sea of millions. Plus, you don’t own the site, so if it goes down, your content goes down too. There’s much to be said about owning your own domain name and web hosting and having a blog that is searchable in Google so that people can find you and learn what you’re about.
Frankly, I do both. I’m not actively blogging these days and solicit guest posts on my blog to at least keep the content flowing, but I’m still making sure it maintains its online presence. After all, I get clients and visibility that way that would not otherwise even exist without the blog.
Please share a few tips on how bloggers can increase their Twitter & Facebook followers
Tamar: Don’t buy your followers, especially on Facebook because that will kill visibility due to the EdgeRank algorithm. Share good content, network with individuals, and better yet, meet them face to face at events! Real-life networking is the icing on the cake. It truly reinforces who you are. I posted a blog post in 2010 called “how to get an influencer’s attention;” it might be old but every single thing is still true.
Between Facebook & Twitter where would you say you get the most visitor traction and why do you think that is?
Tamar: Both are used very differently. Facebook to me is a personal ground for sharing stories about my children and my passions; Twitter is my professional soundboard. (I won’t accept your friend request on Facebook if I don’t know you; you’re more than welcome to subscribe to my public updates, though.) , The interactions are vastly different, but I’d say that Facebook is better because Twitter is a sea of noise where the updates get pushed down after a short window of about 3 hours (and that’s with retweets). Facebook updates, if interacted upon heavily, can stay on the top of your news feed for quite awhile.
As a blogger If you could change one thing about Twitter & or Facebook what would it be and Why?
Tamar: Full disclosure: I’m not really a blogger 🙂 Not anymore, really. I’m keeping a low profile these days while I focus on my projects and be the best parent I can be.
But… if I had a gripe with the social networks, it’d be this: STOP enforcing limits. I recently discovered that you can only Like 5,000 pages on Facebook. Why not more than that? Some very expressive folks may not like that. Twitter, too, doesn’t let you follow more than 2,000 unless you have more than 2,000 followers. That’s more of a preventative for spammers, but limits create services that simply aren’t as enjoyable.
What is one thing you know now, you wish you knew before you started blogging?
Tamar: I wish I could defeat writer’s block. But alas, I can’t. The bottom line is that for some, blogging is going to stay with them for a long time. For others, it will fade. It may not come back. By then, you better hope you have a following who can build on the momentum you had going.
Starting out what the worst mistake you made as a blogger and social media consultant, and what did you learn from it?
Tamar: I said yes to too many things. It’s still a weakness of mine. As much as I love saying yes and appreciated the visibility it brought me, it caused relationships to suffer when I simply had too much on my plate and couldn’t perform up to par on some projects. You just can’t be good at everything. I consider myself an extreme workaholic: I have two children (3 years and 5 months old) and I actually worked through labor and did not take even a day of maternity leave. Yet, even I couldn’t do it.
From my last interview with Ann Smarty, she said you were one of the people she looked up to when she first started blogging. So who do you look up to and why?
Tamar: This is a hard question to answer since I’ve been forging my own path lately. But I’d say I recently read a great interview with the charismatic Gary Vaynerchuk. I may not want to own the Jets, but I aspire to be the best I can be so that I can create an amazing future for my family. Everything I do is for them.
Starting out as a blogger what was the best advice you were given and by whom?
Tamar: I was pretty much one of the first bloggers in the space, so there were few people to look up to for blogging advice. I realized early though that consistency was the key to keep the audience coming back.
What are your top 3 favorite tools & resources for Social Media?
HootSuite, Gmail, and Rapportive. Rapportive is by far the best thing in the social media world.
What is your definition of success?
Tamar: Success is finding that you can overcome challenges thought unfathomable just a few years ago.
What is your favorite entrepreneurship quote?
“Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it”. – Maya Angelou
Connect with Tamar Weinberg
- Twitter @tamar
- Facebook/tamarweinberg
