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.

What typically happens is that the person gets lost in the weeds - caught up in the small details such as what the site will look like or what they are going to call it. That isn’t what I want to hear. You need to be able to tell me three things:

1. What the site does (Technical)
2. Who it is for (Target Market)
3. Why it’s better than what’s out there (Competition)

You can have the best idea in the world, but if you can’t answer these questions you have a problem. All the other details can be filled in after this. Sure it’s nice to have a conception of what you want your site to look like, but if you’re not a designer you shouldn't get too caught up with this because what you envision probably isn't web friendly or practical.

If you have an idea that has you excited enough to go out and try and find funding or someone to join your endeavor, that's fantastic. I don't want to be a killjoy here, but do it right or don't do it at all.

But while these prospects are trying to hire our firm they are also sending us a very mixed message: "We don't have any budget for SEO". These words make any SEO want to scream. It's like trying to hire a construction company to build your company a new headquarters and informing them in your first meeting "Just so you know, we aren't likely to have the money to pay you." This tells me that my and my colleagues' time - and expertise - are not being truly valued.

Maybe it stems from the misguided notion that they are entitled to the traffic - it's their right and anything blocking them from their rightful share of free traffic can and should be swept aside. Simply throw a few dollars at the problem (i.e. buy the minimum number of SEO consulting hours required) and make it go away. Then the tide of "free" traffic will wash over them for years to come.

It's my job, and the job of my sales team, to convince them that SEO is an ongoing investment, that it must be resourced properly, and - this is the most important part of all - that they should pay us for value received rather than hours clocked. You can't blame them for being stuck in the dollars-for-hours paradigm when that paradigm is pervasive: it's the modus operandi for accountants, lawyers, and consultants of all sorts. Tell me the minimum number of hours I need to buy from you in order for you to complete my tax return, to draw up a new legal contract, to retool my business process. The euphemism for this is: "Can't you just get us some quick wins on the board??"

It's time to think differently, folks! If you put a dollar in, and you can get 8 dollars back, you should beg, borrow and steal as much as you can to keep putting dollars in. Keep plowing money in - as long as you feel confident that you will get a good return on your investment.

There are hard costs and soft costs to which you must allocate budget. The hard costs include hiring staff, allocating internal resources, engaging an SEO firm, and outfitting your in-house team with on the tools of the trade (SEOmoz Pro, Internet Marketing Ninjas, SMX and SES conference registrations, SEOClass, SEOTraining SEMPO, etc.).

There are soft costs associated with SEO too, which are fuzzier and harder to define than the hard costs. These include the missed opportunity cost, time-to-market cost, and the cost of competing opportunities. For more on these, read my Search Engine Land article.

Getting to the top of the rankings isn't free. And guess what? Neither is staying there. Keep that budget up year after year. Making a "one time investment" in SEO is a recipe for failure.

Google searches are NOT case sensitive. All letters, regardless of how you type them, will be understood as lower case. For example, searches for george washington, George Washington, and gEoRgE wAsHiNgToN will all return the same results.

Yet, as my Netconcepts colleague Chris Smith recently noted, this is not currently the case. We get different results in the 8th position for “george washington” vs. “George Washington” vs. “gEoRgE wAsHiNgToN”, when expanding out the number of listings per page in the Google preferences.

In another example that Chris found, "fossil watches" and "Fossil Watches" returned different results. You can see this in this screenshot:

I found that the new "whois" shortcut query, which returns a domain lookup from domaintools.com as a shortcut at the top of the results, only works if the domain name is entered in lower case. You can see this to be the case in the following screenshot:

Could this be the start of a new era for the SEO industry - an era of case-sensitive rank reporting, case-sensitive keyword research and case-sensitive optimization? God, I hope not!

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.

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?

As I mentioned above, FSJ started out as a joke. "It came out of two things," Lyons said. "Really it was a stupid prank. I can't believe I'm here giving speeches about this stuff. I really thought I would do it for a couple weeks and then shut it down. But the first factor was boredom. I had this job at Forbes covering enterprise tech -- IBM, Sun, EMC -- I know that sounds like a scintillating, exciting job to deal with those guys all the time, but believe it or not it sometimes gets dull, and I had a lot of free time on my hands and not much to do with it. The other big thing was fear. Basically I saw my business getting disrupted. The funny thing about being a tech writer is we cover all this disruption and we're really fast to tell companies like Sun, "You've got to embrace the destruction of Linux," but suddenly when the cannons are turned at our own business -- at the media business -- we freak out. What will happen to us? I realized that I had to learn about the Internet, I couldn't be in print the rest of my life, and I was too young to retire."

Fake Steve wasn't always in favor of blogs -- in fact, he laments his much-maligned 2005 "attack of the blogs" piece on Forbes.com, but admits that blowback from the article caused him to see the power of blogs and bloggers.

If you're short on time, you can zip ahead to the 7:30 mark in the video, where it starts getting really funny. Lyons covers three primary points about the Fake Steve Jobs blog: why he got into blogging (fear and boredom), why he chose Steve Jobs (he's narcissistic, Apple has bad PR, and Apple fans tend to be so, well, fanatic), and why it works (it's the audience!).

"I think what's happening in media is profound and interesting. This thing [Fake Steve Jobs] is all very wrong, obviously very stupid and primitive, right? But it's a great way to learn about how new media might work. I think the biggest change we're going to have is the involvement of the audience. Where Internet media is going to get interesting is when we start really exploiting the uniqueness in it rather than paving a cowpath. First generation Forbes.com was: take the print magazine and put it online. Hulu was: take TV shows and put them online. But when we start involving the audience, and having people form a group to entertain themselves, I think that's going to get really interesting."

Best-selling author Tim Ferriss is one of my heroes. His book, The 4-Hour Workweek, was an inspiration to me. In my podcast interview of him, he dispensed some life-changing advice.

So when I saw that Tim had laid out a plan on his blog for outsourcing one's inbox and never checking email again, I was psyched. I spend waaay too many hours each week on email and I'm desperate to free up some of that time.

I was hopeful that India-based virtual assistant firm Get Friday (one of the firms Tim recommended in the interview and on his blog) would be up to the task. Unfortunately, no such luck.

I was assigned "Nitin" as my VA. His English fluent not so much.

To illustrate, one of Nitin's emails I nearly deleted by mistake, thinking it was spam:

Subject: Results can be even worthier than you pay!

Methinks Nitin must also serve as virtual assistant to some offshore spammers!

Here's the rest of the email...

Dear Stephan,

Very Good Evening!

I am really exicted about our newly build relationship.I will be even happier if you will be assign me some tasks to assist you,to save your time and give value for your money.You have not assigned me any task till now,kindly take some time off and please assign me some tasks as still you have 37hrs left in your account for this month of April.

I am sending you a weekly report for the time period of 14th April to 19th April as an attachement,please have a look over it.

Your feedbacks are the keys to give you best possible service so kindly give your feedback on my work and please let me know that how can I assist you in best possible way.

Waiting for your reply!

Regards,

I shudder to think of this guy acting on my behalf, replying to my business-critical emails in Borat-speak. So I fired him, and his firm.

I realize now I could have avoided this whole debacle. Hindsight's 20/20, as they say. Rather than blindly trusting in GetFriday and their VA assignment process, I could have instead followed Tim's procedure for selecting a virtual assistant:

• Make enough inquiries to receive 20-30 proposals.
• Look to hire multiple virtual assistants; never hire a single individual -- you don't want your project to fail because someone got sick, took a vacation, or quit on you.
• Immediately delete any boilerplate form responses.
• Then assign an easy 20-30 minute task to the top 3-5 candidates to test for reliability. This will eliminate around 50% of them.
• Then, if your project takes 20-30 hours, assign the task to all three and ask them to stop after three hours and send you what they have done -- and you will know who performs best.

I found another VA, this one based out of Canada. She's a lot more money, but you get what you pay for. And no, I'm not going to tell you who it is -- she's mine, I tell you, all mine!!