That’s a good question, and you should have as many people looking at your site, but it really won’t solve any problems with your site. You might get suggestions to fix little things, or maybe even a full reorganization. The problem is the critiques are coming from non-customers.

There is a big difference between getting advice and feedback from customers and from friends and family. The only way to truly understand how well your website works is for you to monitor your website and see how customers use it. Not only see how they are using it, but also fix problems you can see. Google analytics is great at letting you see how people find your site, what pages they click on, and what pages they leave from. Imagine finding a page on your site that causes 80% of the visitors to leave… I would guess you would want to fix that page.

If you are hands off and hire a designer, make sure you ask them how often they will provide traffic reports. Not just how many people visit the site, but drill down to understand your customers. The more you know the better.

Rules of thumb when organizing a website for your business.

I’m not going to talk about design issues. I’m talking about organization and they way you want visitors to navigate through your site and buy your products and services.

1. Set goals for your website. The great thing about Google analytics, is that you can set goals and monitor how many people reach your goal. The goal can be a thank you page after they buy something or sign up for a newsletter. EVERY WEBSITE NEEDS AT LEAST ONE GOAL
2. You will probably spend a lot of time on the home page of the website. The landing page it is often called. You will probably have a blog on your site too. If you have a blog, most of your website traffic will come in from your blog, in essence making it your most important entry point. Make sure you have all the call to actions and sections that show the visitors what you do, what you sell and how you can benefit them.
3. provide your readers a way to join your conversations. Don’t be scared of them bashing your products. If they want to bash, they will probably do it on a social network. You website is your home and you should make it very inviting to your customers.
4. Every page needs to allow the customer to contact you easily. This doesn’t mean you’ll be up all night answering phone calls. There are many ways to provide customer support, help sections, FAQ’s and other ways for your customers to help themselves.
5. Always be testing. Your website will need tweaks along the way. Monitor and tweak, monitor and tweak. Google analytics has a product called Optimizer that allows you to create split tests to see how different sections capture your customers. Always test and let the best pages win.

Blogging also takes a lot of time. You will spend hours writing blog posts, editing images, responding to comments and making sure your blog is running smoothly. Or at least I hope you are doing that.

I talk about monitoring your website all the time. If you don’t know where your visitors are coming from, what they are doing on your website and why they are leaving, your blog will not grow. I recently worked on a website that was 2 years old. It averages 8 visits a day over the last month.

Wow, a 2 year old website getting 8 visitors a day. That is almost impossible to do. You really have to try to NOT get traffic over that period of time. The reason why this is impossible to do is because Google picks up on all your website content and from that day on, your pages are in the search engines and people will find them and visit your website… Or will they?

Have you heard the term “Real-time” lately? It’s a buzz word that describes the current state of the Internet. We want everything to be real-time. Our news, our blogs, our TV, everything. Twitter handles most of our real-time information but Google is not far behind. The  problem with “real-time” for content creators is that it affects search results much faster then before.

If you monitor your website traffic, you will know that a tweet will get the most traffic within 10 minutes. After 24hrs the tweet is all but a memory. You can every retweet something an hour after the first tweet and nobody will notice. The same is happening with your content in the search engines

The sad truth is, most of the content and blog posts you spend hours creating get no traffic a few days after your post them.

Below is an example of a recent blog post from my blog

As you can see, it’s not getting any traffic anymore… Most posts are like this

Here is an example of a post that gets hits regularly

That’s more like it… You want to these types of posts in your archive. Imagine a hundred pages like this providing traffic to your website. Unfortunately, only about 10% of your posts will continue to grab visitors, so do the math… That would be 1,000 blogs posts or so. that’s a lot of work!

Of course there are some ways to increase your odds for success.

1. Create content that is timeless. I think there are 2 strategies when blogging. Blog a lot about current “real-time” events or blog about things that will be searched for over and over.  If you blog about current news, you will get more hits right away, but in the long run your posts will fade away. On the other hand, you can create educational posts or personal posts that will get searched for often and for a long time. I personally think there is too much work to create real time content. You have to blog all day to maintain high traffic numbers. This why blogs like this are made of groups of bloggers.
2. If you plan to have posts in the search engines, make sure they have the proper keyword density. Make sure people will be able to find them. Don’t forget the images in the posts. Google image search is a wonderful tool to generate traffic.
3. Try to bring older posts back to life. Use WordPress plugins to show related content or most popular posts from months ago. Retweet your archive. Like I said before, even if you tweeted it a month ago, nobody will remember.
4. Repost it. First check your stats and if it is truly dead. If you think the information is timeless, dust it off, re-word it and re-post it. Again, nobody will know.
5. Use older posts that are dead on article marketing websites. One thing to remember is that even if the post is dead, it’s probably in the search engines. Most article website don’t want duplicate content. First reword it, then submit it. You can provide a link back to the original post too… That will make a nice backlink since all the content will be related.

Bottom line get creative. If you have writers block, look to your old content to see if you can refresh it and grow your website traffic without having to work harder then you have to.

Action Plan

Start with a blog audit. Go to Google analytics and find the posts that are dead. See what keywords were used to find the posts and then use one of the ideas above to get that content back to life.

So you have a strategy for archived content? Please share with our readers

Points, rewards, badges, status, customizations are all little pieces of social media crack that keep us coming back for more. You might not believe that you fall for these tricks, but I guarantee, if you take away the “counters” and “totals” from your networks and you’ll see a popular website dissolve into nothing.

Foursquare is probably one of the best examples of using game mechanics for social networking. Even though Gowalla is a better service, foursquare is definitely the leader in location based services. Maybe because you don’t actually have to be anywhere near the coolest spots on earth

Twitter has been fighting this for years. Twitter is all about the number of followers someone has. What do you think would happen if Twitter stop displaying the followers counts of users?

What would happen if friend counts disappeared? What would happen if you didn’t see how many people liked something to retweeted a blog post.

Does retweet counts help you find good content? What about trending Twitter topics? Hardly. When I see Mashable and Techcrunch with hundreds of retweets within a few hours of posts… The first thing I wonder is how many bots are working the site, and secondly, I wonder what would happen if there was a dislike button on these websites for posts?

Who cares if someone, I know nothing about, has retweeted this story. You might think this argument  is pointless, but let’s look at more personal associations.

Leaving comments on blog posts is a huge part of social media. Everyone wants to leave their two cents when it comes to something they are passionate about. Recently, there have been some plugins that allow blog owners to easily let readers like or dislike other comments. I used IntenseDebate for a while, but since my blog gets little traffic, it was pointless. Techcrunch also uses the plugin and since that websites has many passionate readers, the comment streams grow to over 100 comments easily.

What happens when someone leaves a comment that gets tons of dislikes? Was it a bad comment? Sure it might have been spam, but let’s think about someone that actually takes the time to leave a comment that is not in the popular point of view… It will get shot down quickly and often overlooked by other readers. This doesn’t make it a bad comment, it’s just not a popular comment.

This is the bad side of game mechanics in social media. Missing both sides or views  of a story

the bad side of social media is when game mechanics are the sole contributer to popularity and success.

One of my biggest pet peeves is when I see social media consultants use game mechanics to blindly create popularity for themselves. Many consultants will create webinars and tutorials that use the consultants personal blog posts as subjects with retweets, backlinks, and likes. They tell their pupils to go on Facebook and like their posts, or backlink to their blogs

I mentioned backlinks because as a webmaster I often look for little ways to boost my Pagerank… Yes, even Google uses game mechanics!

So, I’ve made my point about game mechanics in social media, but it goes far beyond that.

I got a free a coffee today because I have a card that gets stamped everytime I buy a coffee at Peet’s. I only have to buy a couple more sandwiches at Safeway before I get a free one. My Toyota Prius is like a video game. I’m constantly trying to get over 50 MPG in it because the display unit shows my status every 5 minutes.

It’s funny to think of the Prius, because that is a good idea right… Make a game for saving fuel. Well it works both ways. I also had a Mercedez C63 that got about 10 MPG and unlike the Prius, the whole point of the C63 was to see much gas I could waste. I was constantly trying to get it down to 8-9 MPG… It’s all just a game when you can see your results in real time

Man I loved that car

Going back a couple decades to when I was young, OldSpice was considered only for “Old Men”. I think my dad had some OldSpice right next to Hai Karate, English Leather and Sex Panther.

OK, the Sex Panther, he did not have, but I had to throw it in there… It’s time to musk up

Not only has the OldSpice brand seen a huge resurgence in popularity, mainly from making more products and more scents, they now reach a larger audience. It’s Ironic that OldSpice has always been a “older” Aftershave and now that I’m old, it’s a “younger” body wash, shampoo, deodorant, etc…

Anyhow, back to the funny commercials and genius use of social media. The video responses are now done after 3 days of hard work. Isaiah mustafa worked his ass off making video after video. Some of them less then an hour after the user asked the question.

I tweeted a question, along with thousands of others, spreading the brand name… It was fun, it was fresh, it was one of the best uses of social media I’ve seen. Now along comes the buzz kill.

Did you know that using OldSpice causes cancer, brain damage, infertility, birth defects, enlarged eye balls, suicide bombings, flat tires, acne, delusions, menopause in men, back hair, and your arms will get big and tan

Do I believe that OldSpice is harmfull, sure, along with probably everything else below my sink, in the bathroom, and in my fridge.

Reminds of news stories from a few years ago telling us that Saccharin caused brain tumors. Scary huh, since a lot of diet products including, one of my favorites, Diet Coke use Saccharin.

Studies in laboratory rats during the early 1970s linked saccharin with the development of bladder cancer, resulting in the United States Congress mandating that all food containing saccharin bear a warning label.

In 2000, the warning labels disappeared because scientists learned that rats have a unique combination of high pH, high calcium phosphate, and high protein levels in their urine. One or more of the proteins that is more prevalent in male rats combines with calcium phosphate and saccharin to produce microcrystals that damage the lining of the bladder. Over time, the rat’s bladder responds to this damage by over-producing cells to repair the damage, and this leads to tumor formation. This does not occur in humans, so there is no bladder cancer risk. Source: WIKI

I believe the actual findings were that you would have to drink 700 Diet Cokes a day to get the amount of Saccharin to cause harm… Of course you would die at from Diet Coke at about can 100

So when Grist.org jumps onto this bandwagon with a slightly controversial tone (link bait) to generate news of a harmful product that is being sold the public by a handsome, well spoken man, I have to wonder what the motives are. I’m pretty sure it’s not for public safety!

Here is the link that Grist.org refers to in their article.

According to the Environmental Working Group, all but one of the 92 Old Spice products pose a moderate or high health risk to consumers, or all those men you say smell like ladies.

I guess a hazard score 3 out of 10 (10 being the highest) constitutes a moderate danger and at the same time data gaps as high as 88% don’t seem to negate any findings at all? The “data gap” rating is a measure of how much is unknown about an ingredient. It just seems like a stab in the dark…

Nice buzz kill Debby Downer….

For example, my newsletter is trying to get people interested in making WordPress minisites, but some of my visitors could care less about being a webmaster, so it would be better for me, and them, if I just display some Google Adsense

I’m also a big tweaker… Not that crystal meth kind of tweaker, the website tweaker… If you’re one of the 4 people that read my blog regularly, better known as “my immediate family”, you will have seen different signup forms for my newsletter.

Getting newsletter subscriptions in one of the top goals for my blog. It’s surprising how many bloggers don’t have goals for their blogs. I take that back… Most bloggers have the goal to blog more, or start blogging, or blog more regularly. This is fine, but as soon as you make you first blog post, you have reached your goal, congrats.

Real goals involve making a plan, and then monitoring that plan to see if it is really happening. Does this sound familar… Sounds like a business plan to me.

I’ll be blogging a lot more about optimizing websites in the next coming months.

Monitoring Newsletter signups

I wanted to use Google Optimization (GO) for this, but found it to be lacking in features. Since I want to monitor across my entire blog, GO would not be a good fit, since it is geared towards doing A/b testing on a single page. My newsletter signup form is on every page in my website so I need to first find out what pages/keywords/categories are the most popular.

Since I use mailchimp, I was able to make a hidden field in my signup form and them pass the url to that hidden field. Surprisingly, it was not that easy.

Mailchimp has a nice website form builder. You can add many different types of fields, but when you add a hidden field, it does not automatically get added to the form. So you can’t just cut and paste to your website. You have to manually add the hidden field to your form, and make sure you use the same TAGID that was used for the hidden field. Just follow their help section to figure it out.

Once I added the hidden input, I then added some PHP to make the value of the input equal the url

<input type="hidden" name="TAGID" value="<?= $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']?>/<?= $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']?>" />

Now, when I get a new subscriber I can see what page they subscribed on. I can break it down even further to see what category that page was in, or even what tags or keywords. If you want to get really crazy, add some cookies and see how many pageviews or return visits that visitor did before they signedup.

This works great for finding out what pages are creating the most subscribers but what about some good old A/B testing. If you’re not familiar with A/B testing, it is the art of displaying 2, or more, different ads to see which ad performs better. As you can see above I have 3 backgrounds that I want to test. Actually, one is already out of rotation because it was beaten by the other background. I really thought my cute little baby boy would get me subscribers!

One way to rotate the newsletter subscriber form is to use OpenX adserver. Make a custom banner for each form and let OpenX display each form with a 50/50 impression probability and then compare results.

You can also use OpenX to make targeting zones that will only display a certain type of form for certain pages. I often target keywords in the URL to display specific ads.

FYI, Mailchimp has a build in A/B test for email newsletters. You can create a small subsection of your list and send out a A/B test to that subsection, then mailchimp will automatically send the rest of the list the winner.

If you don’t think so, everytime you are performing a Google search you are throwing out some keywords. Many people think of keywords as 1 or 2 words, but in most cases, people search using keyword phrases.

The more you narrow in your focus, the better results you’ll find. This isn’t rocket science. I know that if I search for “book”, I’ll probably not find what I’m looking for, while “book about modern art” will.

Tip: If you go after 4 word keyword phrases, you’ll also pick up the 1, 2, and 3 word phrases too. But, if you go after 2 word keyword phrases, you’ll miss out on 3+

My point, go for the long tail when developing a keyword strategy for your website. Find high traffic keyword phrases of 3 or more words. Your traffic will be very highly targeted, but don’t forget to use  targeted advertising to increase you conversion rate.

Most of you already write blog posts with a keyword phrases in mind. You’ll make sure that your title includes that keyword phrase. Your meta keywords and description match the phrase, etc… You’ve heard all this before from the countless other SEO blog posts.

That’s all important, but the most important keyword phrase is probably not even on your website.

This is because backlinks not only build authority (pagerank) for your website, drive traffic to your website, and market your websites, but they also help Google understand your website.

As the Googlebot runs around the Internet finding stuff, it tries to organize the content in keyword matrixes. Every website has a keyword matrix. You can see you website keyword matrix using Google webmaster tools. Since every website has a keyword matrix, the Googlebot can easily find related websites.

When you combine a highly relevant website, with a proper backlink, you have the perfect storm for awesome Google Juice.

The Perfect Backlink Storm

1. Website with similar keywords
2. The backlink has your desired keyword phrase as the anchor text
3. The backlink has your keyword slug in the url
4. Your landing page has a high keyword density of your desired keyword phrase.
5. Of course the title, meta, headers all have the keyword phrase

Don’t expect other blogs to create perfect backlinks to your website… Just be happy that someone is linking to you. If you really want to take control of your backlinks, you have to guest blog and make the backlinks yourself.

Again, the IntenseDebate plugin is awesome. It’s built well, easy to use and most importantly works as soon as you activate it.

The reason why I stopped using it was because I wanted to use other commenting plugins and found it very hard to add them with IntenseDebate installed. I list the other plugins later in the this post.

Even though Automattic acquired IntenseDebate in 2008, the IntenseDebate commenting system has remained a third party plugin. I wish Automattic would have incorporated this commenting system in with WordPress as the default so we could still use additional comment plugins.

IntenseDebate adds some really cool features like comment like and dislikes, threaded conversations, moderation, multiple login connections. I even got some traffic from IntenseDebate.com because the website has some social aspects built in. The website allows people to see all your profile and read your comments from blogs that have IntenseDebate installed.

The biggest problem I found was that the featured don’t really help me out. While the commenting system is very good on TechCrunch, mainly with the likes and dislikes, I don’t get a fraction of the comments or traffic. So the likes and dislikes is pointless on low traffic websites.

I was going to try to edit the plugin, since you have access to all the WordPress plugin code. Maybe a few years ago, when I had a lot more time on my hands, I would have. Unfortunately, times have changed, and  when I started to work on the code, I just felt like it was too much work for the payoff.

Overall, great plugin. You won’t be disappointed if you install it!

Comment plugins that I like and use

Comment Redirect – After a visitor posts a comment they are redirected to a page of your choice. Great for setting up a thank you page, with a request to tweet or subscribe to your feed. Developed by a WordPress guru, get the plugin here

Comment Relish – Send an email to first time commentors thanking them for leaving a comment and welcoming them to your community. I found this plugin via John Chow, after I left a comment on his blog. Yes, it is a little spammy, but also effective. Not sure this plugin is supported anymore because the link from the plugin is broken, You can still get it here

Commentluv – This plugin has blown up since I first saw it. Now with a full social network behind it. This plugin allows your commentors to link to one of their most recent posts. Great way to give back to people that have taken the time to read and comment on your posts. Get the plugin here

Nofollow Free – Removes the rel=”nofollow” from commentors that have posted X times. Give your repeat commentors some respect and increase your readership. Get the plugin here

If you have a favorite comment plugin, please let me know about it!

The problem is, Google will eventually spider the new link, and now you have duplicate content which disperses the “Google Juice” for each link making each link less powerful.

The recommended way to redirect, according to Google, is with a 301 redirect. Better known as a permanent location change.

In a recent interview, Matt Cutts confirmed that 301′s do decay PageRank.

Eric Enge: Let’s say you move from one domain to another and you write yourself a nice little statement that basically instructs the search engine and, any user agent on how to remap from one domain to the other. In a scenario like this, is there some loss in PageRank that can take place simply because the user who originally implemented a link to the site didn’t link to it on the new domain?

Matt Cutts: That’s a good question, and I am not 100 percent sure about the answer. I can certainly see how there could be some loss of PageRank. I am not 100 percent sure whether the crawling and indexing team has implemented that sort of natural PageRank decay, so I will have to go and check on that specific case. (Note: in a follow on email, Matt confirmed that this is in fact the case. There is some loss of PR through a 301).
Source:  Eric Enge Interviews Matt Cutts

This might sound scary, especially for people thinking about their perfect WordPress category structure. I’m also looking to change my category structure again now that I’ve seen posts about staring with a “category” can hinder performance. I was thinking about using the post ID, then category. Supposedly, post id is faster, but if I have to give up pagerank for speed, I will keep the PageRank. Especially when the speed of “get_posts” is minimal compared to the 50 other files loading for your website.

I would bet that inner domain permalink chnages don’t affect your PageRank. What Matt Cutts is talking about is changing your domain name and trying to redirect your old blog posts to your new website.

Interview found through MarketingPilgrim.com

I noticed it a few weeks ago, when I saw the same non-relevant ads being displays on any website. I recently visited a mortgage website and from that day on, everywhere I browsed I saw that mortgage company’s banner. I quickly found out why… It’s called Remarketing and it’s simply cookie tracking

It’s no big surprise that Google tracks everything you do online.

I can see how this is great for advertisers ROI, but I’m wondering how it affects Adsense clicks on the Google Adsense content network.

On one side, you can argue that it doesn’t matter what ads are being displayed, since remarketing works on the concept of multiple views. You just have to be the lucky one that has the right ad displayed at the right time.

For me, that just doesn’t cut it. I want to be in control of my marketing. I want to display relevant ads to my content. Google Adsense used to do that, but with remarketing, it causes problems with my website. All the more reason to use Openx and server my own ads.

For all the people that are using Google Adsense to make money with your website, what do you think about remarketing?

Actually its a simple DOM javascript hack that allows you to edit any website. You can’t save your edits, of course, but you can take a screenshot like this:

I used to think that when I saw suspicious images like this, the guys had to photoshop it. I thought it had to take forever to edit. You have to get the right fonts and colors, but with this simple javascript you can pretty much do it in about 3 minutes.

Only works with the FireFox Browser
Just paste the following JS code into the URL bar of FireFox when you are on the website you want to edit.

javascript:document.body.contentEditable='true'; document.designMode='on'; void 0

Pretty simple. I would say the only other time I can see this coming in handy is to edit your online bank statements, then use that image as your profile image on match.com, or some other dating site… I bet it will work

I originally saw this trick searching Youtube for “javascript”.

Your daily blog traffic will equal your number of blog posts

Do you check Google analytics every few hours? almost as much as you check email? Don’t worry, you’re not alone, many bloggers care about their website traffic because website traffic equals website revenue. There is nothing worse then spending hours writing a killer blog post only to have it evaporate in the black hole of the blogosphere.

I’ll be honest, I’m a pageview whore…

I check GA (Google Analytics) all the time. I wish they made a real-time Google analytics widgets for my desktop for all my websites. One thing I’ve noticed is that there are certain factors that effect your website traffic. I can’t give you a magic bullet to get crazy traffic, but I can tell you that blog posts equal linear traffic.

I’ve noticed that the typical blog posts gets a nominal amount traffic in the long tail of blog posts. Chris Anderson (wired magazine) coined the term long tail

It covered how the media and entertainment industries will succeed not by pushing only mass market hits that are popular among many but by also mining the “long tail” of interest among a few in less-popular books, songs, movies and more.
Source: Searches long tail

You probably don’t have a popular blog, meaning your blog gets 100K hits a months. Most of us don’t, so we live in a rat race to hit up long tail searches. Searches that have 5 or more words in the query.

The odds for generating large amounts of traffic are very, very slim if you rely on blog content.

I see so many new bloggers say they want to blog more, but does that really work? The answer is no. Why write more blog posts if your traffic will only increase by one visitor a day per blog post.

You have to figure out how to get more traffic to your blog without blogging.

Look at blogs that have 1 million page views a month. Do they have 1 million blog posts? Of course not. Look at blogs that get 5,000 visitors a month, do they have 5,000 blog posts… probably not.

You need to find ways to interact with the community, especially now that blogging backlinks are dead, and the social network is all the rage.

What’s going on here, is bit.ly taking all my link love? are they somehow a black hole for links?

The answer yes and no. URL Shortners are taking your link love. Since pagerank is built on quality websites linking back to your website, bit.ly most definitely steals some of your link love. It’s not bit.ly’s fault though. The blogosphere is has turned to social networks for moving traffic around. Pagerank has become less important.

It’s all about the pageviews, baby!

the most popular blog button is easily the tweetmeme button. It’s easy to install and it’s rock solid, meaning I’ve never seen or heard of any issues with it. You will usually see it next to a Facebook like button, Google Buzz button, Digg button, etc…

Twitter is very popular, with a reported 190 Million Users Tweeting 65 Million Times A Day. Of course, there are many people, me included that think the number is BS. There is countless spam bots and autoresponders, doing much of the tweeting. The human users are still in the millions though which makes Twitter a must use.

Twitter is not your typical website because the vast majority of Twitter users do not use the web. They use third party mobile and desktop apps. Therefore the referring traffic to your site it not seen as coming from Twitter. It mostly comes as direct traffic.

In order to monitor Twitter traffic you need to provide additional parameters to your links.  At the least you need to add a source identifier to your urls.

<script type="text/javascript">
tweetmeme_url = '<?= the_permalink()?>?utm_campaign=twitter&utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=twitter';
tweetmeme_style = 'compact';
tweetmeme_source = 'mattdunlap';
</script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://tweetmeme.com/i/scripts/button.js"></script>

As you can see, all you have to do is add a querystring to your link for tweets. Now when someone clicks on your shortened URL, the traffic will be recorded properly. The example above will track the source (Where they came from), medium (What they came from), and campaign (I wanted them to come from). Hopefully by looking at the example you are getting some ideas of how to fine tune Google analytics. Maybe change the utm_medium to “social networks” and then make some links for facebook only. Adding UTM’s to your links is a great way for recording social media campaigns

Doing a quick Google, I found a nice Firefox extension that lets you download entire Facebook photo albums.

The extension is called Facepad

What community blogging platform to use?

Worpdress (WP) and WPMU (WordPress Multi-user) are both great platforms for a multi-author blog. I have found that a normal WordPress website is good for a close knit group of bloggers, that communicate regularly and understand the overall strategy for the website. Examples on this type of website is Mashable.com. WPMU on the other hand is better for a blogging website where the bloggers don’t really know each other, but all have similar interests in the overall blog topics. WPMU powers wordpress.com.

A WP website is much easier to run compared to a WPMU site, but the WPMU site can grow to be much larger because a WPMU site creates subdomains for each author. Each subdomain can use different themes, plugins, etc, they are each individual websites. You can think of it as each website made by WPMU is a normal WP website.  WPMU will always be under attack by people trying to make a fake blogs and game your system, but there are many plugins and strategies to stop this.

An example of a WPMU structure will be as follows. maindomain.com will be main website and all sites built under it will aggregate to it. Now as authors start blogs, each one will have a subdomain. Let’s say this is a car site. honda.maindomain.com, toyota.maindomain.com are examples of subdomains.

If you really want to make your WPMU community take off, you can offer Top Level Domains. Basically the author that made honda.maindomain.com, can upgrade to hondacars.com… Now that author can have subdomains under them. CRV.hondacars.com… As you can see it can go on forever and can offer much more benefits that a normal WP install. Again, it will take more effort from the community manage to keep things running smoothly.

How to find Authors for your multi-author website?

When I get approached for a multi-author blog, The first question I ask is “How will you get people to blog or interact on the website?”. Most often, this causes a long pause…

Setting up a blog takes very little time, but the website owner quickly finds out that it is very hard to get people to commit to join their blog as an author or guest blogger. Try to make it beneficial to the authors and make a win-win for everyone. Most authors will have their own personal blogs or websites. It definitely helps if you have a large social following to start, In other words, build your community and group of authors before you start the website.

Rewarding Authors to make your community grow

Your website will live or die by the content and participation. You need to make it worthwhile for high quality authors to contribute. Points systems have long been used to indentify the best authors, but this doesn’t always mean you will get good content… and of course if you run a WPMU blog, you will find a lot of authors trying to game the system to get more exposure. Therefore, if you do use a point system, place higher points for creating conversations. Comments, retweets, bookmarks, etc… should get the most points, while blog posts get very few.

Make sure you provide ways to get your blogs’ authors content out into the wild.  The community manager should tweet every post, submit it to sharing sites, and make sure the website is running high SEO. Let your authors see the analytics so they can see what organic searches are used to find their content. Not only will they see that you (the community manager) is promoting the site and driving traffic to it, but they will also know what to write about and what people are looking for.

In Summary

WordPress is used by many top websites and can handle almost everything you throw at it, but when it comes to a successful website, the people working with the website are what really matters. Before you start the next big thing make sure you have the connections and network to find bloggers. The better quality of blog posts, the better the website will be, so try to focus on getting the best authors possible. When you find those authors make sure you reward them for their hard work. If you follow this strategy you will have a win-win for everyone involved.

Not only will this help get your creative juices flowing, but you will also be accomplishing so much more. If you have not become part of any question and answer forums yet, please do so. a few to look at are; linkedin.com, yahoo answers, answerbag.com. Google “question and answers” to find more sites.

Almost every industry will have them. For example, real estate has Trulia voices and Zillow advice just to name a couple.

I don’t recommend joining every social network that you see. It’s better to join one or two and become heavily involved instead of spreading yourself thin.

I use linkedin.com only. Each question topic has it’s own RSS feed. I added the technology and marketing feeds to my Google reader. My reader is open all day, so I can keep up with new questions. I really try to be the first person to answer. I also like knowing about the question as soon as it is posted because if it is a really good question that I can make a blog post about, I try to make a quick blog post and them use the permalink as a reference in my linkedin answer. You’ll be surprised how fast you can write a blog post if you have a question to answer.

Business karma

The new mantra of business is “help others first”. Listen for problems and help people solve them. The more you give the more will receive. So jump onto a Q&A website and start helping people, making connections and building relationships.

Finding popular topics

You’ll notice as you follow all the questions that are being asked, you will see trends and common problems that need solving. Use these trends to create blog posts that you know will be popular. Remember to restate the question in your blog post because that is probably what people will type into the search engines.

Use your blog posts as references

A good blog posts can be used a reference. Instead of retyping your answer everytime, just post a link to your blog post that answers the question. Great way to kill two birds with one stone, help some one out and drive traffic to your website.

For example, Everyone wants to blog once then have every social network get the link and drive tons of traffic to there site. Problem is, this doesn’t work. I’ve been doing it for years with little to show for it.

There are tons of websites that will automate everything for you. Some are free and some charge outrageous monthly fees. The thing about the internet is that everything is a click away. you don’t have to drive all over town to go from one website to another. If you spend 5-10 extra minutes manually tweeting, or adding your blog posts to facebook, you will see much better results…. Here’s why.

Twitter allows for 140 characters, but most automated tools and plugins don’t care. They only tweet your blog post title and the short url. In most cases you still have about 60 characters to work with. You NEED to use that extra space to make your tweet stand out. Use #hashtags (don’t spam hashtags) and keywords.

Make your tweets stand out!

Tweet this: “I’m thinking about how tech is ruining our lives and making us work harder and hurting my professional image http://bit.ly/asdasds ”

Not This: “New blog post: Why Automated Blog Tools are Ruining Your Professional Image http://bit.ly/asdasds ”

in the first example I have used almost all available space. In the second example, I have 43 characters left…

Don’t waste your  friends time on Facebook!

On to Facebook… there are plugins that will post to your facebook wall but they all suck. the reason is becuase they just add a plain jane link with no explanation at all. They are a complete waste. When you add a link to your wall Facebook makes it look great. Theygo grab images from the page and let you add an extra description.

In the above image I just copied and pasted the url to a blog post of mine. If I was really posting this to my wall I would remove the link and add my own description.

Automation = repeat links!

The last reason it’s bad to automate everything is that you get many repeat links. FriendFeed is awful when it comes to repeat links.

Image Source: ppchero.com

Lead generation forms insights

1. Only the #1 adsense spot will have the lead generation form. Of course this will cause more advertisers to bid more to get top placement.
2. The advertiser does not get the contact information, Google does. In order to contact the lead you have to use a special Google phone number with a pin number. Sounds like they are trying to integrate more uses for Google Voice
3. The advertiser can add up to 3 questions for the customer, but Google decides how many the potential lead will see in the contact form.

I don’t think I would ever use this.

First of all, You can get better ROI by placing 2+ in Google Adsense placements. Secondly, when I click on Adsense, I do it specifically to go to a website. I have never clicked on Adsense, then tried to find the contact form on the resulting website. Of course, If a customer does fill out the contact form the conversion rate will be much higher.

Less people will use it, but it will have a better conversion rate…

this screams, I have absolutely no idea what internet marketing or social media is all about. If you follow this plan you will not be blogging in June of 2010.

Here is the secret, instead of saying “I’m going to blog more” or “I’m going to blog everyday”, change your mindset and say “I’m going to get 10 new subscribers every week”. Do you see the difference?

One is goal oriented and one is task oriented

Goal oriented let’s you forget about the minuscule tasks it takes to reach a goal while task oriented puts all the focus on the little things that take up all your time. a few months later your hitting all your tasks but none of the results are manifesting. Why is that? It’s because as soon as you finish a task your done, there is no big picture, there is no reason, you just know that you have to do something.

What’s more important a blog? that has 10 times more content then all the other blogs in the same topic, or the blog that has the most readers, subscribers and fans. Content and fans do not go hand in hand. people don’t read blogs for a lot of content, they read it for information, ideas, views that they will not get anywhere else.

So, really, I think blogging is a great idea, just make sure you have your priorities set straight on why you are blogging at all.

If you really want my honest opinion about blogging, especially if you don’t have a blog and want to start one now, would be to really think about upcoming forms of media… most notably, video. I’ll be blogging about this soon, but the way we consume information is moving from text to video. I’m getting on the video bandwagon. I got a new pocket cam coming in about a week, and vlogging is my #1 reason why I got it.

Providing good customer service to make happy customers tell their friends is nothing new. What is new is the way that companies can now use tools like Twitter to basically say “Everyone, look how we provide good customer service” Seems a little like PR to me, but that’s social media. These tactics can go either way. If the community thinks you are playing one over them, they will retaliate and let other know what you are up to.

This got me thinking…

How do you feel when you see a company that you had a bad customer service relationship with in the past, jump onto Twitter to basically broadcast their new social media strategies?

I was thinking about bestbuy and their tweelpforce, and comcast cares. I’m pretty sure there are people that got poor customer service from them in the past. I saw a question on linkedin about someone that tried to communicate with comcast via email and got no response. When he complained on Twitter they responded immediately… I feel that is because they want to broadcast it to the public.

About 4 years ago, I was frauded for $2,000 from a seller on bid4assets.com. I tried and tried to get a hold of someone at that website to ask for help, with absolutely no response. Today, when I was thinking about this post, I wondered if they have a twitter account. They don’t… and good thing.

Personally, I would be furious if I saw a company that treated me so poorly in the past now using social media to show the world how they know how to use web 2.0 and social tools. Even if they have completely new management and culture, I would still be pissed and it would take a lot to win me over as a return customer. I’ve never used bid4assets.com again, an never will.

One thing to note about bestbuys twelpforce. I cannot find anything about the twelpforce on bestbuys website. The front page has nothing, and so does their customer service section? I thought they were doing a huge push for it?

I find myself doing this all the time. While, the main purpose of this blog it to reach out to small business owners and teach them how to use social media to promote their business, I often find myself blogging about technical issues. I find it very enjoyable to blog about WordPress hacks, SEO, and Website development. Most of my blog posts go way over the head of small business owners, but other tech bloggers use my blog posts for references. The problem is, other tech bloggers aren’t my customers.

Not all goes in vain. By reaching out to other professionals in your industry, you will build relationships.

I’m a big believer in the 80/20 rule, where 20% of your actions will bring in 80% of your business. Problem is, that 20% is the hard part. It is really easy to do the other 80% and get very little return. When you are not blogging to your customers and blogging to impress your competitors, you are doing the 80%. It’s hard to blog with real messages to people that need your services and provide education and training.

Here is my solution.

1. Try to blog everyday to your customers. Blog about the benefits of what you do, and how your services will help them. You don’t have to sell anything, let your benefits sell themselves.
2. To make connection with others in your industry, go read other blogs, and comment. Let them blog to other professionals. It might seem tricky, but in reality what you are doing to encouraging them to blog to their competitors. When you blog to your customers you will get very little comments, but when you blog to competitors, you will get more comments which is turn makes you feel like you are doing something worthwhile.
3. Be social on Twitter and Facebook. Make friends, build relationships and business contacts.
4. Answer questions on forums and Q&A boards.

In summary, I you should set out a plan and stick with it for a while. Don’t continually change at a drop of a hat. Blog to your customers, and then go get social with your competitors.

• The main blog post - People love lists in their blog reader. 5 ways to do this, top 10 ideas to do that… you get my point. In this example you have a belt that has many ways to be worn. Your blog post should be in a list format.

5 ways to look drop dead gorgeous in a red leather belt – Blog title taken from something you would see on the cover of Vogue.
Notice it is catchy for feedreader, and you want to make sure that you hit on your keywords. In this case “red leather belt”. I could have just used belt, or even leather belt, but we want long tail search results. There are people out there that type in  “red leather belt”, you have a better chance for them to read this post.

• Article Sites – Articles sites have been around for a long time. Many have really high pagerank, which means a backlink from them is worth a lot. I use Ezinearticles.com mostly. They have a PR of 5/10. They have a good admin area and they seem to try to control the articles and moderate them so they offer higher quality articles then other article sites.

  Your main goal for the article site is to get some backlinks to your blog post. You need to take one of the five ways you wrote about for your main blog and expand on it a little. For example, your #1 way to wear the belt was to not put it through your pants loopholes… Expand on that and remember to make a link to your site somewhere in the post. The link should point to your main blog post and the text for the link should have “red leather belt” in it. As you can see your building highly targeted keyword links pointing to your site for SEO.

• Guest Blogger – Go find a fashion blog and ask the blog owner if you can write a guest blog post. Again, you will take another item from the main blog post and expand on it for this guest blog post. You will also make another backlink to your main blog post.

  You’re probably saying to yourself, why not just use the same copy from the article site. They will find out you are duplicating content and probably will not let you post on ezinearticles or be a guest blogger anymore. It really is not that hard to exapnd on already made content. It will take only a few minutes to do it.

Try to find more then one article site and blog to submit your articles to. Use prchecker.info to find out the pagerank of the site. You can also download Google’s toolbar for firefox and use the pagerank tool directly from your browser.

You have successfully extracted every drop of worth out of your blog post about belts. You will truly benefit from the additional work it took to extract points from the main blog and use them as articles and copy on other websites. Backlinks are like gold on the internet, the more you have, the more people will find your blog and the mote customers you will get.

I’ve been on boths sides of the fence when it comes to generating traffic for your website. Most small businesses will want to GET CUSTOMERS NOW. The idea of going out to social networks and slowly building relationships doesn’t sound like a good idea. For the most part I agree. You should get business as soon as possible and therefore should set up tried and true advertising and marketing plans when you launch your website.

Remember, your website is not marketing. Your website is not the end all, it is the beginning of your new venture onto the internet. Just like opening a brick and morter store, nobody will find you without advertsing. One word of advise, make sure you are ready to dish out cash for ads. Make sure you have a system set in place that can monitor the traffic you get from your advertsing. You have to measure your return on investment.

Enough about paid ads, you should also go out and build authority on the web by joining communities that are built around your products or services. Of course facebook and twitter are find, but you really need to go out and prove that your are reliable, experienced and personable. Very hard to do that on Twitter, IMO.

Here are a few ways to build authority for your business

1. Your Business Blog – nuff said, I know you have heard this a thousand times. No matter what type of product or service you sell you can write about it. Actually the more obscure your product is,  the easier it is to blog and get noticed. Of course the consumer following will be smaller for niche products but the following might be a lot stronger.
2. Question and Answer forums – Linkedin and Yahoo answers are great places to start. I prefer Linkedin because you can match up your answers with your Linkedin Profile. I find Yahoo not as easy to match up your yahoo profile. Set up an RSS feed of new questions that you want to answer. When you check your blog reader you will will see the answers as soon as they are posted. Remember your goal is to help people, not promote your services. If you service helps, then they will see it, but don’t push it on other members.
3. Community forums – Forums have been around a lot longer then most social networks that we talk about today. You have to do a search to find the community that fits your business. There are not as many questions for you to answer on a community forum, but you can just hang out and make relationships. You will be able to answer a question every now and then too.
4. Other blogs in your niche – Be a guest blogger. Go find other blogs that are related to yours and ask the webmaster if you can be a guest blogger. They will probably as you to write the post and send it to them so they can review it. Do not try to sell your product or service. but do provide at least on link back to your blog with related information.

In summary, I give people a turnkey website that has a few income streams on it. The website makes money from Ebay affiliates, amazon astores, google adsense, etc… All the new owner has to do is add their affiliate id’s. The websites are built with wordpress because of the blogging capabilities and the RSS feeds. The website has an automated blog poster that pings my server every day or two to get a new blog post. The blog posts are all article (ezine) style, with a backlink to my website. So the person that I give the website to has a website that can make some money with no manual labor, and I get a backlinks… All the new webmaster has to do is generate traffic.

I think the concept is easy to understand, but there are a few problems, and I’m wondering if it will really work.

Pro’s

• I will get a lot of backlinks from all the websites I give away
• Since it is wordpress, I can syndicate the blog posts on all the remote sites to Twitter, Technorati, facebook, etc…
• leverage the crowd the help get a job done. It would be too hard for me to make several websites and manage, but if you get people to help it will be better. It has to be a win-win though… The new webmasters have to get something out of it.
• The new webmaster can make money with very little work and the website runs on autopilot

Con’s

• Duplicate content -  I have thought about altering each articles to make it a little different, but really don’t want to make this too complicated.
• Have to rely on the new webmaster to generate traffic to their site… Since I give the site away, many will not try that hard because nothing to lose.
• The websites will probably have PR=0 or very low Page Rank
• Too many backlinks from low PR sites can be bad

That’s basically it.

Will it work?
Is it a good idea?
Anyone want to try it?

You’ll find many posts around the net about selling products on Ebay, but what if you just want website traffic? Digital products are the way to go. A while ago Ebay stopped digital downloads, unless you have a classified listing, but you can still sell digital items on Ebay. You just can’t let people download them, they have to be shipped on a CD, but that’s ridiculous. Just don’t mention anything about shipping in your listing. When posting the listing, just select the shipping options “see description”. in the international shipping, set that to “see description” also, and this will display another option for listing in U.K. for about 10 cents.

If you don’t want to post listings every 7 days, you can just post classified ads. The listing fees are much higher, around $9.95, but you can really guide people to you site. Ebay pretty much allows anything to go on a classified listing.

According to Ebay’s link policy:

Links to pages off eBay that provide information about your store or service, as long as you’re not promoting non-eBay items
Source: Ebay Link Policy

1. Make an E-book and sell it for a penny. The listing fees will be about 15 cents, and with the right keywords you will get some good traffic. The secret is to put a link to your website in the auction listing. You are allowed to link to external content. Point the link to a testimonial page on your website, or to a blog post about the e-book.
2. Sell website code, or wordpess templates. Use the link in the listing to point to the demo website.
3. Make an about me page and make sure you have a link to your website. You can link to your website, and even sell items from your personal site as long as they are the same price, or more, then your Ebay items. You can also add basic javascript or an iframe to your about me page. With some simple javascript you can add you most recent blog posts to your about me page.

I’m a programmer at heart. I know to be successful in today’s world you need ot reach out and help others, but there is an underlying problem. I program and therefore I automate things. Writing code for me is to make things run better and with less interaction. My favorite applications completely automate the entire process of human input and data syndication. Meaning I love to grab (mash) data from all over the web and then spread that data to other places for fun and profit.

I can see that this problem doesn’t just effect me. Most programmers that want to make money on the internet know they should blog, even though from what I see, blogging is probably the slowest way to achieve an income online. Programmers know they have to blog, so they download WordPress and start to blog, but spend way more time coding the site. Making plugins, coding themes, etc…

Another problem with programmers is that they know anything can me done on the internet. With all the tools out there, I can do anything you want and so I never say NO. This gets me in a lot of trouble because of course I can’t deliver when the projects stack up. So what starts out as an awesome social media play, has turned into a huge letdown and no benefit for all parties involved.

It’s hard to quit the habit. It’s hard to not program all day and try to make connections. You (the programmer) has to look at your daily routines and see if you really are making connections, building relationships and growing your authority.

I have huge plans for some really cool websites, but realize that just throwing the content out there is not working. Making a new community or website that helps the community is useless if the community doesn’t know about it. We (the programmers) are valuable resources, when we have relationships with people that can put it all together on a human level

My Social Media Discoveries… Obvious to everyone but programmers.

1. Programmers get mad because we all know that the internet was social way before Facebook or Twitter. The internet was made to join people together, so in essence, the programmer is the smartest person on earth. So most of us have a chip on our shoulder because we already knew the internet was about social media. Problem is, nobody every asked us about it! Now it’s time to shine and show what we can do.
2. Find you top social networks and make connections instead of changing the color of your WordPress theme. Start slow, spend 50% of your time commenting and conversing with other people. I’m looking for a netbook right now so I can just sit and watch TV while tweeting. Am I being productive… Absolutely not. I should be coding and getting things done.
3. Don’t automate everything just because you can. I’ve done it, I got millions of Twitter followers across many accounts. Connected fully automated blogs to them so they “tweeted” every hour… It was a fun weekend project and I learn a lot about Twitter which I use in other applications, but as far as extending my social capital… not so much.
4. Stop multitasking – designate time to blog, to answer emails, to code, etc… Don’t try to do them all at once. I think my 10 month old baby boy has taught me this… because when he is awake, there is no work being done… it’s 100% baby time.
5. Don’t hate Twitter because it sucks and you know there are better applications out there. I fall into this trap all the time. 140 characters seem really dumb to me, but if Ashton and Britney likes it, so be it, don’t fight it. But, really my time will come, and with RSSCloud or PubSubHubBub on the horizon, I’m really excited to see a new evolution in “real” real time. None of this 140 character, with short urls so you have no idea what link you are clicking crap.

Are you a programmer? tell me what you think

being that we spend nothing on marketing, the marketing that she does involves thing that she can do for free. Mostly emailing her newsletter. I’ve very happy that at least she has a newsletter. Most Realtors don’t and they are missing out on valuable touches. The problem is that her email newsletter is all about getting her face in front of past clients to keep her in the front of their brain. This is what every Realtor is taught when they first  join a brokerage. Repetition wins.

Send out postcards and you will get absolutely no response, but keep doing it, and eventually you will be in their brain and they will use you… Maybe. This is what they tell you to do at real estate brokerages. She treated her newsletter the same way.

She is always complaining that she has no time to blog or tweet, but then spends hours grabbing links from wall street journal, realtor.com, sfgate to put in her newsletter. I make me furious, but it’s not worth the argument… I’ve tried telling her to blog about the links she finds and then link to those blog posts. Kill two birds with one stone…Well, I finally got her to change!

I normally use Aweber.com to send email newsletters. They are highly rated and very good. The problem with Aweber is that you have to opt in all your imported users. So for my wife to move her email list to Aweber, they would all get an opt in email, and she would probably lose 3/4ths of them. Therefore I decided to try mailchimp.com. You can import your list without opting them in, but there are warnings, and you definitely can’t import a commercial list.

I really had to take control of this because again, she only cares that the email goes out… With that being said, she was using outlook to send to groups. Of course she also doesn’t realize that people could be reporting her as email abuse, or putting into their junk mail. As soon as I set her up she could see the importance of being able to monitor that.

Here are the biggest mistakes:

1. No Tracking – most importantly you are not removing people that are complaining because you don’t know. They have to reply back to you, but most won’t. The problem with this is as people accuse you of abuse, the ISP get’s updated and eventually you are going to get blocked. So if your sending emails from your primary business account, with too many complaints it will stop working
2. No Tracking – I know #1 was the same thing… In this case I’m talking about link tracking. What are people clicking on. This is very important because you can build trends. If everyone is clicking on your mortgage information, then blog more about mortgages. You will engage more readers when they see you blogging about the things they care about.
3. No Tracking – Ok, it’s nut funny anymore, but do you get my point. Email newsletters can provide so much information about your clients. Who opened it, who clicked on what, who opened more than once, who forwarded to a friend. All these are so important.
4. No text version – when you send with outlook, not only does the HTML look bad, but there is also no way to make a text version for people with none HTML email clients. They get a big glob of code they can’t read. This is also helpful for getting around spam filters. Most spammers don’t take the time to really make a text and html version, so if you have one, you must be human

Technically, mailchimp is very cool. Has tons of reporting and features. We used the A/B test,  which allowed us to created 2 subject lines, send out to 50 random people on her list. The subject that got more clicks, was then sent to the rest of the list. Very good feature. The other feature I liked was that I could design the email online, and just point the url to the email body. This will allow me to dynamically update the email newsletter and just resend the campaign saving a lot of time. You can see the email newsletter here

We use the free version which allows 500 emails, and 3,000 emails per month. They just put a logo in the footer of the email, which we don’t mind at all.

Many early twitterers follow everyone that followed them. They are now having a hard time managing all their Twitter friends (people you follow) because of the twitter noise. Are you one of them? Do you need a way to delete them all?

Here is a simple PHP script that allows you to delete all of you friends in one big swoop or in tiny increments. It makes an array of all the people you follow, these cycles through them deleting each one until the limit that you set is reached. It will delete all, so if you want to save some users, you should make a list and then re-follow them when you are done deleting everyone. I didn’t add that feature to this script to keep it simple.

Installation:

1. unzip the file and upload the PHP file to your webhost
2. point your browser to the file, example http://yourdomain.com/delete_following.php
3. enter your Twitter username, password and how many to delete.
4. Click submit and let it go… Warning, it can take a long time to delete users if you delete thousands at a time.

Download the script here

Any questions or concerns, please leave a comment

Many bloggers shutter at the thought of writing a guest blog post, because they can hardly come up with good content for their own blog. You shouldn’t think like that. Good content is good content whether you have it on your blog or on another blog, as long as you get credit for it. Remember you can always make a section in your sidebar that links to all your guest blog posts around the net.

1. Build authority – Especially if you can get on a well read blog or news source. In my post about old media moving into new media, many newspapers are starting social sections of their websites. This is a great place to try to get a guest blog post. newspaper websites typically have very high readership and high page rank. Also try to guest blog for educational sites with .edu domain names. Make sure you are blogging on a website that is about your topic. Don’t blog about the Chevy Volt on a blog about Gardening
2. Make new connections in the blogosphere -  A guest blog post often looks like a testimonial to you. If the blog owner that allowed you write a post on his blog trusts you, so should his readers. Don’t try to oversell in the guest blog post. Your goal is to make their blog better and for you to gain more readers on your blog.
3. You control the backlinks – The link text is very important when the Google spiders look at backlinks to your site. When you control the blog post you also control all the keywords and links back to your site. When you combine a similar blog website, blog title, blog content and backlink text, you have a very powerful backlink.
4. You’ll get more syndication – The readers of the blog will most. Blogs are not the end all for your content. Whenever you write a blog post, whether it is for your blog of for someone else, you want you content to be shared with other readers. You want the readers to Retweet it, digg it, email it, bookmark it, etc… So if you think about it, you’re not just writing your content for one blog, your writing it to get passed around the internet.
5. You become a go to guy – You will be asked to either write more guest blog posts for other blogs, or you will start to get guest blog post requests for your blog.

If you want to get started guest blogging there are a few ways to go about it.

1. contact the blog owners and ask if you can be a guest blogger. include the topics you will write about.
2. write the guest blog post and “shop it” send it the blog owners and see if anyone what to post it. Make sure they do not all post it tough.
3. start with ezine websites such as ezinearticles.com, articledashboard.com, etc… you can get some good backlinks and practice your skills on writing.

I made Twitter Spy to do just that. Deliver any type of message feed from Twitter to your WordPress blog, in real time.

Features:

1. Real time refresh using jquery. As soon as it’s tweeted, Twitter Spy will display it on the website
2. Unlimited feed options. You can create search queries for the news to deliver based on keywords and/or location.
3. Advanced query options allow you to deliver the exact news feed. For example, Let’s say you have a blog about parenting and babies. You can set up a query like “baby #baby -Celtics”. This query will get all tweets about babies, and not deliver tweets about “Big Baby”. Big Baby is a basketball player for the boston Celtics. I doubt any moms are tweeting about him.
4. Low memory usage. I’ve let it run for hours on my browser with no problems.
5. No database install. I use cookies to get the most recent news so your website is not downloading large files.

Built with jquery spy. It also uses Google geocoder to get the longitude and latitude for location specific news feeds. You also need php 5 because I use simplexml

Example of plugin

Download the Twitter-Spy plugin here

How to use:

1. Install just like any other plugin.
2. Once activated, go to settings > Twitter Spy and configure it. The plugin makes a WordPress page for you. Both keywords and location is optional. Meaning you can make a news feed about real estate without a location, or only get the tweets about real estate within x-miles of your desired location. You can also use only location without keywords to get all the tweets from people in a certain area.
3. There is a sidebar widget that will use the same keywords and location as the full page plugin.

You can only make one twitter spy page with this plugin, but you can manually add the function if you need more then one page with different search criteria.

display_spy('spycontainer', '"real estate"', "Real Estate", "37.7723230 -122.2148970", "The Bay Area", "50mi", 20);

Oakland CA geolocated is 37.7723230 -122.2148970

There are a couple bugs I’m working out.

1. the tweets are suppose to fade in… but something with WP is breaking that.
2. since I use cookies, sometimes, the most recent tweet will get tweeted twice on page reload…

Please try it, and let me know what you think. I’m also open to any future additions to it.

So, I want to get the most bang for my buck since naturally I’m a developer not a writer. Good thing we have software like WordPress and the huge community that develop plugins. These tips will work on webpage, but since most small business marketing will be built around blogging,I’m going to focus on both wordpress internal functions and a couple plugins. You only really need to get the SEO all in one pack plugin.

One important thing to note about doing research on SEO… Make sure your information is up-to-date. You will notice that Google’s search algorithm has some inherent problems. Google’s algorithm is built on popularity, meaning the more incoming links to your site the more authority it has. You can understand that older sites have more incoming links. When doing searches for SEO, or anything else, you will probably run across websites that are over 5 years old. This might be fine for most searches, but with SEO it’s not because the rules change all the time.

1. Think of the keywords you want to target before you write your post. I have about 5 keywords phrases that I want to target. Not only does this help you brainstorm content for your website, but also keeps you focused and targeted. Google loves niche websites.
2. Title Tags – Refers to the HTML tags used to display the page title in the browser.
   
   [Experts Say] Keep it to around 65 – 70 characters. Make it catchy since it is also used as titles in blog readers and in search results on the search engines. There are some arguments as to whether put the website title before or after the webpage title to improve branding.

   [plugins] All in one SEO will rewrite your title tags automatically using your blog posts title and rearrange the title so the blog post title will appear before the website title. This plugin also lets you rewrite all page titles in your blog.

3. Header tags. Very similar to title tags, but header tags are in the content of the page.

   [Experts Say] Keep it within the keyword targets for the webpage. Should be very similar to the title tags. make sure the tags are <h> tags (<h2>blog Title</h2>). Do not use <div style=’font-size:22px’>

   [plugins] All in one SEO will use the blog post header tags in the title tags.

4. Meta tags (keywords and description). these tags are not displayed in the browser. They are used only by search engine spiders to get a context of the webpage.

   [Experts Say] many opinions… most will say they are not used anymore. Don’t go out of your way to edit these. If you do, make sure they are around 65-70 characters and include the targeted keywords for that webpage.

   [plugins] All in one SEO will give you a choice to fill these tags automatically with categories, tags, or you can edit manually.

5. Keyword density. How often your targeted keywords are using in relation to all other words on the page.

   [Experts Say] Keyword density is one of those SEO topics with a lot of arguments whether it works or not. It can take a lot of time to go through your blog post and make sure your targeted keywords are 5-6% keyword density. In order to keep it simple, if you have defined your targeted keywords, your blog post will have at least 2 or 3 targeted phrases in the content, which should be good enough.

   [Websites] There are a few keyword density checking websites. seochat.com. Also try tools that allow you to enter the keywords that you are targeting. I personally like this approach better becuase it is much easier to understand. keyworddensity.com

With these 5 tips, think about how you will write your next blog post. Remember most of this SEO will happen automatically. Start by thinking about what to write about and the keyword targets. Make sure your blog post title has your target keywords, and the main content has the target keywords too. The rest is automated…