What happened?

An event happened to a person in my family recently. What happened to this person in my family caused other people who knew them to be concerned. I’m glad that other people care about such things. I was concerned too.

One friend posted a message on their Facebook page about this event. Some other people, mutual friends, sent me concerned email, that I had to respond to and explain, not a task I was happy to have to do.

Since I have clients and co workers on my own friends list, and those people didn’t really need to know the personal issues of relatives of mine, I was not about to post anything on my own Facebook pages.

People tend to forget that anything you post to the Internet is there forever.

Someone, somewhere, has a copy of it. It’s in some archive on some obscure web site. There is no privacy on the Internet.

If you look hard enough, you can find comments that I made on a web site in 1996.

That sucks.

The balance comes when you want to tell some personal stories. People will be more interesting in what you have to say when you are “transparent” and “authentic”. How much information is TMI?

You don’t want to sound like a corporation. Happy things are always fun to share. Problems you have resolved that can apply to your readers in a way that helps them to resolve their own problems are good.

Personal safety is also an issue to be aware of. My wife and I go out of town one day a week, since we can’t take vacations (long personal story that you won’t hear).

We go lovely places and take pictures with great stories. Do you really think that I should post on the Internet somewhere that we are not home from Noon to 9pm every Monday? The window on the South side of the house is really easy to shake open, so come on in and take what you want! Yeah, don’t do that.

Here’s an article that I ran across the day after my Facebook incident about almost the same thing. Go read the whole article.

How much do we share online?

One of the most common questions I get asked by those in business for themselves has to do with personal information. We all have private lives. How much, if any, of that do we share online?

Some folks using social media for business take this to the extreme…they either share nothing about themselves, keeping their interactions on tools such as Facebook all business, or they get down to the minutia of life, sharing their day to day schedules, medical problems, emotional state, and more.

I believe the most effective amount of information to share in social networking tools falls somewhere in the middle.

While we must be very clear that we are using these tools for BUSINESS, and everything we post can potentially be seen by our customers, kids, and mom, we must also remember that we are in the business of building relationships.

If you lean too far towards the extreme of being all business, you rob yourself of a powerful tool to help others connect with you: your personal life.

Read the entire article at:
http://www.themogulmom.com/

He proudly told me that they finally “got on the Internet”. Their son, in his early teens, has always told them that it’s too hard and they wouldn’t understand it, so the dad had stayed away from it for years. Someone had given them an old computer a long time ago and that’s all they’ve had for years. They just recently got a new computer.

Do You Know Who Sees Your Site?

He was so proud when he told me that he knew how to click on “Internet”, type in where he wanted to go into Google, then click the mouse twice.

I had to work really hard to not laugh out loud. I’ve been BUILDING web sites since 1994 and he just now learned how to “click twice” to get there.

I told him that I build web sites and he looked at me with the look in his eye that said “I hear the words coming out of your mouth but I have no idea what you are talking about.”

“Websites! You know, the places you go on the Internet.” I told him. More blank stares. He didn’t know what a web site was. I tried to explain, but after a few more sentences, he said “Well, it was good to see you again!” and walked off.

I forget sometimes that not every one knows what I know. If you are reading this right now, most people probably don’t know what you know.

On one hand, that makes me feel smart, but on the other, it reminds me that we need to make our web sites, these places that you go on the Internet, as simple as possible, as obvious as possible.

I don’t want to insult anyone, but simple and direct will always work better. Think of how to use a TV or how you order at MacDonalds.

State what your site is about in big, bold letters. Tell user what you want them to do. I almost want to put a big red button at the top of the screen that says “Order Here Now!”.

What would your site say to the least knowledgeable among us?

The easiest thing that you can do is to build inbound links to your site.

Volume. More is better.

There are hundreds of ways to accomplish this, but the easiest way is to leave comments on people’s blogs. Go do some searches for sites that are on a similar subject to your site and read what they say. If you notice something cool, leave a comment. It will (should) link back to your site.

People are wary of people spamming them, as they should be, so don’t do that. Don’t drop by and say “Nice post! Buy my stuff!”. That’s just rude.

I actually had an acquaintance leave me a comment on a post that I linked to on my Facebook page. They said “I didn’t read your post, but I was wondering if you would be interested in” buying some product they were selling. I was taken aback. Really? You’re not going to read my post, but you’re going to try to sell me something? Yeah. No. I don’t think so.

Leave a useful comment. One that relates to what the person was talking about. One that adds some information to the conversation. This is all about relating to people, making that connection. It’s not just links.

Links are the byproduct of the connection, so make lots of connections and you’ll get lots of links and links turn into traffic.

Forums are another solid place for this activity. Connect and link. Any place that people are talking, go talk there too.

Focus on the inbound links. That’s the bottom line for building traffic to your site.

It took a little bit to get used to the new tablet. It’s a size bigger, which gives more freedom, but the proportions are off from what I’m used to. I played for an hour before I got comfortable.

My wife played with it after I did. She apparently got comfortable with it right away, because I came out to my computer this morning to see this image on the screen.

I melted.

My wife made this in Illustrator. She loves me.

Attract Customers Like Magic to Your Business Blog

Business blogs are often described as a way to reach customers, but it’s not true. Blogging does not help your business reach new customers.

It is the exact opposite which is true.

A business blog is a way for your customers reach you.

This is much more than a clever switching around of words. We have an entirely different dynamic at work, here. Understanding this dynamic makes a significant difference in how business owners understand the online customer acquisition process, set their marketing goals, and create the objectives to reach those goals. These must happen in order to attract customers, engage them, sell to them, and keep them.

“How do I reach customers with my blog?” is not the right question. Instead, ask, “How do I make my blog easy for customers to reach?

This leads us backwards to a preceding question: How are my customers looking for me, now?

And so the fun begins!

Your customers aren’t looking for you, precisely. They don’t know you exist, yet. They don’t know your name or your brand. All they know is they have a need or a problem, and they want answers. They’re looking for information to help them make a decision. They’re looking for trustworthy, authoritative information.

How do you make your blog the most attractive, most easily found “answer?” I’ve identified two major strategies:

Be everywhere your customers are, so they have a greater chance of running into you.
Have the most trusted, authoritative answers to their biggest questions.

How do we make these things happen?

Read the entire article at:
http://remarkablogger.com/2009/10/13/attract-customers-to-business-blog/

First, an illustration of the value of fun.

Creativity saturates this video.

This one is political and not what you might think. It will either make you very angry or very happy.

This is the entire play list of all 8 videos, in a row, one right after another. If you want to learn the basics of how to get around in Wordpress, take a few minutes and watch these.

If you want to watch each one individually on a little bit bigger screen, you can see them all by clikcing here: Wordpress Video Tutorials.

Are these videos helpful? Is there anything I could do to make them better?

Make sure your content is unique, use H tags for titles, use alt tags for images, use unique page titles and description meta tags, one topic per page and ensure your copy is free from spelling and gramatical errors.

I must point out that the word “grammatical” is spelled incorrectly on the original page. Yes, yes, it is. There are two Ms.

That’s why you should get your SEO information here. I’ll give you good advice, PLUS I’ll spell the words correctly!

Read the entire article at:
http://www.seobook.com/optimizing-bing

Beginners can learn how to use Wordpress with these easy to learn training videos.

It’s easy for beginners to learn how to use Wordpress with these short, basic, easy to learn videos.

• 001 Logging into Wordpress
• 002 Pages and Posts in Wordpress
• 003 Add a New Page in Wordpress
• 004 Add a New Post to Your Wordpress Blog
• 005 Add a New Image to a Wordpress Post
• 006 Insert Existing Image into a Wordpress Post
• 007 Posting in the Future with Wordpress
• 008 Editing a Wordpress Page or Post

Each of these listings will bring you traffic.

1. local.botw.org
2. www.dmoz.org
3. advertise.local.com/
4. listings.yellowpages.com/
5. selfenroll.citysearch.com/
6. www.google.com/local/add
7. botw.org/top/Regional/United_States/
8. www.localeze.com/manage/
9. www.dexsearchmarketing.com/
10. list.infousa.com/dbupdate.htm
11. searchmarketing.yahoo.com/local/business.php
12. my.superpages.com/spweb/products/business-listing
13. Friends, Family, Partnerships with websites. Ask if they would be willing to swap links with your website to help promote both of your businesses.

Like any project, the bulk of the work was done in a few days, then we started to edit. That took a week. More material was added, which took a few more days, then a second edit, which was two weeks worth.

We’re down to the last edit and adding the illustrations, so we’re THAT close to being ready.

But.

And like PeeWee Herman said, “There’s always a big butt.”

Tomorrow, Thursday night, Sept. 17, at 8pm, is the first episode of Survivor Samoa. That means that one of the 4 busiest days for my poor little web server will be tomorrow. After the show, I’ll have to update the site to reflect what happened and what everyone else said about what happened. On Friday, I’ll be interviewing the poor person who got thrown off the island first, then updating all of that new information. That will take up all day Friday.

Sigh. It’s a glamorous life, isn’t it?

The book should be ready by the beginning of next week. Or so.

It was nothing like that.

The first speaker was the one that I came for. Shayne Sanderson talked about using the WP-ecommerce plugin in Wordpress MU, the multi user version. I never knew that would work and apparently it wouldn’t up until a couple weeks ago. Huge shout out to Shayne for the presentation and then letting me bug him afterwards. He was very gracious and helpful, even as I asked more and more questions. Huge help to me and I’m very grateful.

I plan on taking this technology and making it available to you. We’ll be working on a new site that will allow you, or anyone, the ability to create a new blog, pick a theme, and have an inventory system to load all of your products into, then sell them in a shopping cart. We plan to only charge a monthly fee and not a transaction fee like some people we know.

We’ll back all of that up with some training material to help you through the process of setting up your own business of selling your own products.

We’re aiming this at crafters, but it will work for anyone who needs an ecommerce site, a site that sells stuff and accepts payment.

Imagine being able to work in your own home. You can have your own web site to sell your products and make enough money to meet your goals.

It’s possible and it’s coming. Subscribe to our news letter to be the first to know when it’s available.

Back on track. The next speaker was Ben Huh. He’s the CEO of the company that publishes I Can Has Cheezburger and the FAIL blog. Go ahead. Go read the sites. I know you want to, so I’ll wait here.

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

You’re back? Cool. He’s a funny guy, as you might imagine and I didn’t expect much more than that, a good time. He proceeded to explain their business methodology. MPH stands for Mr. Potato Head. It means that if a part of your business falls off, it’s ugly, but nobody dies. It also means that if you add a part to your business, it’s ugly, but everybody lives. He said that they focus on exactly what they need to do to get the job done and no more. You need to let go of the ego, kill the sacred cows, and lose the attitude. Be lazy. Do what your users want and that’s it. They outsource everything they can.

The results of this apparent slacker attitude? 8.2 million page views a day. He wouldn’t talk about how money they make, but the company has 21 employees.

Micah Baldwin talked about Failure being job one. The difference between failure and losing. If you have a failure, it’s only an event along the path to success. If you lose, that’s the end. There is no more. He pointed out that America loves a failure who succeeds, but hate a loser. Don’t be a loser. Get back up and fail again.

Andrew Warner talked about how to put video on a web site. I figured that I knew everything about video. I own and use Final Cut pro. I’ve put together some nice stuff out there. Oh, wait. None of my stuff is on the web, not really. He showed some crazy easy ways to produce good stuff and put it on the web. There are tools that I wasn’t aware of. Now I am. Now I’m hot to do video. Training videos. Blog post videos. I’m gonna do it. Watch this space.

John Hawkins ended up by talking about how to develop a plug in for Wordpress. I always wanted to get around to learning that someday, but I knew it would be hard and I would fail and I wouldn’t like it. He was the most technical speaker, but I kept up and he made it look easy. I’m encouraged. I can do this thing. Look for a plugin coming sometime soon too.

During all of this whole day, I was hanging out with my old friend, Doug Wade. We used to go to MacWorld together, back in the early days of the Internet. I have a lot of friends, but he’s one of the few who get this part of me. I really appreciate him. I didn’t realize how much I missed him until I saw him there. Check out his blog.

Working with a search engine is similar to training with a puppy.

This process of reading web pages is called “crawling” a site. After it crawls one page and evaluates it, the robot “indexes” the page. Indexing means that it puts the scores for the page into it’s index, so it can find it when someone searches.

It’s not a human, so it can only guess what the page is about, using calculations based on what it finds. What does it look for and what is important to it? How would you determine what a page is about?

If you looked at a page in your favorite browser and looked at the “source” or the actual HTML that makes up the page, what would you see? Most of us see a bunch of gibberish, but that’s HTML.

The robot sees that same code and tries to figure out what the subject of the page is, based on what’s there. Robots have no nuance or intuition like we do. They are pretty dumb and pretty literal. They only see what they see, which is really just a string of characters.

Robots also look at and track the links on a page and all the other pages on the Internet. They use what they can figure out about these links that are pointed at your page in determining what your page is about also.

Each web page that’s indexed in the search engine has various scores associated with it. These scores are based on, 1. what it finds on the page and, 2. what links it finds elsewhere, that point to the page. When someone types a keyword into the search engine, it goes through it’s index of scores and finds the pages that score the highest for that keyword. It doesn’t read all of the web pages and calculate the scores when someone searches. It only reads the scores that it’s already calculated.

Since how these scores are calculated is a company secret, and probably changes weekly, so we can’t know exactly what they are or how they think. We do know the general idea is that the search engine looks at all of the scores for pages with the specific keyword, then returns the list of pages, the SERPs, to the user in the order of the scores. The page with the highest score for that keyword will be the first result. Our goal is to increase those scores for your pages.

This is not a spatula. This is a ramp of people falling into a pit. Look again.

I’m constantly surprised when reading reports on traffic for related keywords. There are always phrases and keywords with what I think is way too much traffic. Don’t people understand the best way to search? Well, no they don’t. You have to look at what people ACTUALLY search for and optimize for that. It doesn’t matter what goodness and truth is. It doesn’t matter what you know is the right way to search. It only matters what THEY actually search for.

by Jolina

2. Write It & Forget It
Website content is not a ‘set and forget’ project. Rather, web content should be treated as a living organism which needs ongoing care and nourishment (read new content).

A ‘set and forget’ mentality when it comes to web content will only keep you successful for so long. Eventually, competitors catch onto to the benefits of SEO as well and if they are creating new content they are likely to trump you for target keyword phrases.

4. Focus on Ego Phrases
Some clients make the mistake of hanging success of the entire program on what we call ‘ego phrases’. i.e. wanting to rank for a particular phrase because they think it is important, not because data predicts it will drive traffic

Read the entire article at:
http://www.toprankblog.com/2009/09/seo-pitfalls/#comments

Here are 10 steps to better testimonials.

Make your customer happy.

2. Ask before you’re done. If you are working a project for them, during the project, ask them how things are going, what their thoughts are and if there’s anything you can do better. If there is, do it better, then ask again. If they say you’re doing fine, write that down. Progress reports are good for the project and for you.

3. Ask after your done. After the sale or the end of the project, ask for a testimonial. It’s easy to let this slip away. Half of being successful is showing up, so show up and ask. The main reason that you don’t have a testimonial now is that you didn’t get up the nerve to ask for one, right?

4. Be specific. “Oh, you were great!” feels good, but doesn’t sell you to the next client. Ask what they liked the most about your services, about working with you, about the results they got. If they can give you statistics, that’s golden. If you can tell people that you increased a client’s sales 32% by redesigning their web site, the result is huge credibility. If it’s a statistic, it must be true, so stats are money.

5. Be persistent. Without being annoying, ask specific questions over and over again until you get an answer. A lot of people have positive feelings about you, but don’t ever quite get around to writing them down for you.

6. Ask for permission to use their comments. If you just saved emails or comments they made along the way, show them what you have and ask for permission to use it.

7. Interview them. Set up a time to call them and ask them about their thoughts. Record the call, letting them know that you are. After the call, listen to the recording and write down anything appropriate.

8. Edit their comments. You can imagine what some people will say. You don’t want to put all of that on your web site. You want to edit and pick the best parts. Think about what they do to movie reviews on movie posters. Shorten it up until there’s nothing left to edit out.

9. Ask for a photo if they have one. Words on a page are nice, but adding a photo adds credibility, which is what we’re aiming for here. Most people hate photos of themselves, but ask anyway.

10. Don’t make stuff up. The goal is to gain credibility, not prove that you are a lying liar who lies. It may look great on your site to have glowing testimonials, but if someone asks about them and you can’t back them up, then word gets around that you can’t be trusted. You might as well get a job at MacDonald’s in that case.

Do You Use Etsy To Sell Handmade or Unique Products Online?

If you would be interested in answering some questions, here’s what I’d like to know. Feel free to skip any that you don’t want to answer. If you want to copy and paste these into an email and send them to me that way, please do so. You can also use the Contact page.

Depending on the responses I get, I may group the results and report only the composite information, or I may want to publish individual responses if they are interesting and valuable.

I may have follow up questions, based on your responses. I promise to not do anything with your name and email that you don’t give me permission to so. It’s just so that I can follow up with you.

Please tell me if you give me permission to publish your responses in my blog, either with or without your name. I can link to your Etsy store if you want me to. Entirely up to you.

Thank you very much for your time and patience.

1. How long have you been selling things on Etsy?

2. Have you tried selling any place other than Etsy, online or in person?

3. What venue works the best for you and why?

4. What tips do you have for people who want to sell on Etsy? What is the best way to sell there?

5. How technical would you rate yourself, on a scale of afraid of computers to building your own web site?

6. What do you like the most about Etsy?

7. What do you like least about Etsy? (You knew that was coming.)

8. Any advice about things to watch out for when selling on line?

9. Have you ever tried using your own web site? Did it work? Why? Why not?

10. Any advice for a person just setting out to sell their own handmade products?

11. Any other stories, advice, or comments that you’d like to make?

Since search engines have to crawl your site and try to figure out what pages exist, they spend time on sites that are updated regularly. Sites that are not updated regularly, can be indexed anytime, so they do the “hot” ones sooner.

Blogging is good. Must. Blog. Now.

HubSpot’s Inbound Internet Marketing Blog

If you blog, you know that it’s good for your business.

But how — and how much?

To answer to those questions, I looked at data from 1,531 HubSpot customers (mostly small- and medium-sized businesses). 795 of the businesses in my sample blogged, 736 didn’t.

The data was crystal clear: Companies that blog have far better marketing results. Specifically, the average company that blogs has:

* 55% more visitors
* 97% more inbound links
* 434% more indexed pages

Read the entire article at:
http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/5014/Study-Shows-Small-Businesses-That-Blog-Get-55-More-Website-Visitors.aspx