We’re big fans of the City of Boston run group Boston Young Entreprenuers, having received excellent advice and met tons of awesome people via BYE. The featured company for November’s meeting has been announced and it’s Emergent Energy Group.

Emergent is all about finding the best alternative energy sources for landowners, developers, businesses, municipalities and academic institutions. They began as a wind power consulting firm and have since expanded to solar energy and other sustainable resources. Emergent was recently named one of the Top 25 Young Entreprenuers of 2009 by Business Week.

They’re based in Boston and are led by four individuals. November’s BYE meeting will be held at WorkBar, a great little place that combines fun with work.

Here are a few more details on the Emergent’s BYE meeting:

Date: Wednesday, November 11th
Time: 6:00pm to 8:00pm
Location: WorkBar, 129 South Street, Boston
RSVP: Devin.Cole.BRA@CityofBoston.gov or on Facebook

Hope to see you at WorkBar on the 11th!

So, you’ve designed and developed a great site that visitors find extremely useful and that search engines love to crawl. You no have no worries, right?

Wrong!

A great site that is search engine friendly and more importantly useful to your visitors serves no purpose if the server struggles and doesn’t keep the site up consistently and reliably. Monitoring your sites for uptime is a crucial aspect of running a successful web-site. If you’re not already keeping track of your site’s uptime, here’s five free tools to check if your site is up and running.

Down for everyone or just me?

You just tried accessing your web-site and it’s not loading. Uh-oh, time to panic? Not quite. The first thing you should check if your site is not loading on your computer is if it’s actually down or if it’s an issue with your Internet Service Provider.

Down for everyone or just me? is a great single-purpose web-site that will check any site on the web and report back if it’s actually down or if it’s just an issue with your internet connection.

Pingdom

While finding out if your site is down for just you or everyone is a great tool, it’s unreasonable to constantly refresh your site and then go and check if it’s really down. Site monitoring tools allow you to set it and forget.

Pingdom is such a tool, where you can point it towards your site(s) or server(s) and if the site goes down you’ll receive an e-mail, text message, or even a tweet or DM that Pingdom had trouble accessing your site. Pingdom can be set to check your site once a minute and it also has tons of graphs that show uptime and load time historically for your site(s).

You can sign up for a free account that will track one site or one server and send up to 20 SMS alerts.

Are My Sites Up?

What if you have more than one site but can’t afford a premium Pingdom account? Well, Are My Sites Up? is a great monitoring service that is free and allows you to track up to five sites with 25 daily checks. Are My Sites Up also offers a premium service that allows for more sites and more checks. You can receive alerts via RSS, text message, Twitter, e-mail or via a nifty iPhone application.

mon.itor.us

Similar to Pingdom, mon.itor.us will track your site’s uptime and offers a plethora of graphs to show site performance over time. The service is completely free and you can receive alerts that your site is down via e-mail, instant message, RSS or SMS.

Binary Canary

Last but not least, Binary Canary has a free monitoring account that allows you to watch up to 5 sites at a 15 minute frequency. If the site goes down you can be alerted via e-mail or SMS by e-mail. You can also purchase SMS and phone credits to receive alerts that way.

Ensuring your site stays up is an important aspect of running a successful web-site. With these five free tools, you have no excuse to not monitor your site’s uptime and load time performance. Have you got a favorite free monitoring tool you use to ensure your site is up? Let us know in the comments below.

So far, the Marketing workshops organized by the BRA and the City of Boston have been a great success. The crowd yesterday was awesome, involved and asked lots of questions. If you were at either of the events this week and have any questions or suggestions, feel free to leave a comment below or send us an e-mail.

Below are the slides from my SEO presentation at the Marketing workshops organized by the City of Boston. I’m planning on recording audio to go along with the slides this weekend and will update this post when it’s up. There’s two options below for viewing the slides, the first is a Google Doc, the second is a Slideshare doc.

And if you enjoyed the presentation, please subscribe to our blog, fan us on Facebook, and follow us on Twitter!

Google Doc

Slideshare

Member of The 42nd Estate, Justin Wright, today celebrates one year of self-employement. Head over to his blog and join in the celebration. He uses the occasion to drop ten self employment lessons he’s learned over the past twelve months that’ll come in handy whether you’re just starting out on your own or have been at it for a while.

Here’s two of my favorite lessons from Justin:

5. Money Isn’t Everything

However, working for myself quickly made me realize how unimportant money is. Yes we need it to survive, but that’s it. Other than food/water, clothes, and a place to sleep, we really don’t NEED much else. Instead, we WANT everything we see on TV. The key is to use your money wisely.

Very true. The less you spend, the less you need to earn, the less you need to work and the more time you have to enjoy life.

9. You Will Learn (A Lot)

Of all the things I’ve mentioned so far, nothing has been more enjoyable than learning. It’s absolutely amazing how many things I have learned over the course of one year. I can easily predict that I’ve learned at least 5 (maybe 10) times as much as I did from high school and college combined. I’ve learned valuable things about business, life, and everything in-between.

100% true. I’ve personally learned a lot more working at The 42nd Estate than I ever did in college or high school. A lot of people struggle with this concept of learning (more) after college, but it can be true. If you’re in a cubicle, you can slide by without learning anything new. With entrepreneurship/freelancing, it must be true or else your skills become irrelevant.

Congratulations Justin and here’s to another year for you and another year for The 42nd Estate!

Wordpress 2.8.5 has just been released. The main additions are security tweaks, which makes the update a must download. The updates in this release include:

• A fix for the Trackback Denial-of-Service attack that is currently being seen.
• Removal of areas within the code where php code in variables was evaluated.
• Switched the file upload functionality to be whitelisted for all users including Admins.
• Retiring of the two importers of Tag data from old plugins.

The Wordpress crew is also recommending users download the Wordpress Exploit Scanner plugin to search for any exploits that might be installed on your server. We use the exploit scanner on several of our sites and it’s a good step to take to harden your Wordpress installation for security.

Debbie Merion from Essay Coaching was referred to us for help turning her existing Flash-based site into an easy to manage Wordpress setup. Moving from Flash to HTML/CSS wrapped in a wordpress installation helped optimize Essay Coaching for search engines and human visitors and gives Debbie an easy way to post updates to her new site.

A New Design

During the course of the project, the focus began to shift from mimicking the existing site to transforming it into a new design with new functionalities. Using Debbie’s existing logo and color scheme as a base, we built upon the flexible and efficient Thesis theme, allowing for easy upgrades in the future and a solid SEO foundation to promote from. The end product is an XHTML 1.0 Strict compliant site that looks great, is optimized for search engine traffic and highlights Debbie’s great essay help services.

Take a look at the site below:

Essay Coaching for College Admissions

Web Presence Consulting

Debbie was looking to streamline her online work process with the new site. In addition to the new look, we added an appointment form, contact form, and payment form to enable her to perform her coaching services online from start to finish. As a writer, Debbie also wanted to showcase her book. Visitors to her site are now able to easily find Debbie’s book and read an excerpt before deciding on making a purchase.

We also helped Debbie emphasize her online video coaching sessions, by featuring them at the top of each page’s sidebar. Debbie also looked to The 42nd Estate for consulting help, particularly in the promoting her site and services online. During our ongoing sessions we’re helping Debbie draw traffic to her site via quality content optimized to showcase her talent and experiences to all visitors.

So far, Debbie reports an increase in appointments scheduled, books sold, and an overall improved web presence. Contact Debbie today if you’re a parent or student looking for help with college admissions essay.

This Monday (October 19), I’ll be speaking about SEO at a marketing workshop organized by the Boston Redevelopment Authority. Leighann Farrelly from Yelp will also be on hand to discuss social media, including Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, LinkedIn, and Plaxo. Two other presentations will cover negotiating a lease and organizing informational exhibits. It’s sure to be an extremely informative and useful workshop and the best part, it’s free!

This Monday’s workshop is the first of three. If you can’t make it out on Monday, check out the below schedule for all three workshop days and times:

Monday October 19, 2009

• 2:00 PM – 6:00 PM
• SEO Session: 3:30 PM
• WGBH, 1 Guest Street, Brighton, MA

Friday October 23, 2009

• 2:00 PM – 6:00 PM
• SEO Session: 3:30 PM
• Hampton Inn & Suites, 811 Massachusetts Avenue, Roxbury/Newmarket, MA

Monday October 26, 2009

• 9:00 AM – 1:30 PM
• SEO Session: 10:30 AM
• Suffolk University Law School, 120 Tremont Street, Boston, MA

Hope to see you there! If you’re attending one of these workshops and have a specific question you’d like me to cover, just let me know. I’ll put up the slides of the presentation online afterwards too.

We’ve witnessed and received reports that after upgrading the wordpress.com stats plugin, wordpress.org blogs will not record stats unless you go into the plugins section and activate the plugin. No error messages are given during the upgrade, and it appears to re-activate correctly, but if you browse into the dashboard Blog Stats will not be listed.

I ran into this a couple of days ago on my personal blog, and didn’t notice it for a couple of days. Since then, I’ve noticed this bug on a few sites we manage and a few of our clients have reported the same bug.

The fix is quick and easy, but if you go about batch upgrading plugins you might not notice stats are not being collected for a few days and end up getting a flatline drop like I did (pictured above).

Top Ten Bingo

You may have heard that lists are a great way to generate traffic to your blog. Well it’s true. People love lists because it gives them easily digestible information in a step by step format that encourages them to take action. One of the most popular list post type is the top X ways to do Y. Giving your visitors a single awesome tip on how to save money will likely turn them into subscribers. Giving them ten top tips on how to save money will make them evangelists.

But, how do you go about writing these how to lists, you may ask? Perhaps you’re doubting your ability because you’re not an expert in a massively useful topic. Well you don’t need to be! What you need is the ability to collect information and organize it in a way that is helpful and actionable. Though, as you’ll see below in our top ten ways to write a top ten ways post list, having expertise or creativity can help too.

Google It

It’s unlikely you’re treading completely new ground with your top ten ways to do X post, so fire up Google and take a look around. Do not copy someone else’s post, but use it as a base to make sure you cover the basics while also injecting new methods into your list.

Don’t Google It

Or, you could avoid Google completely and go entirely off your memory. It’s dangerous as you could accidentally mimic someone else’s popular post, but you might also find inspiration to blog about a few methods no one thought to mention before that came to you naturally.

Search Twitter

Since Twitter is real-time, searching it for your list topic could generate some fresh new ideas that were literally just thought of. If you find someone tweeting about a relevant step for your list, be sure to give kudos to the twit by linking to their message.

Ask Twitter

Got a big list of followers on Twitter? Ask your tweeps for ideas! Again, do be sure to give credit where it’s due, but your tweeple should be a great pool of new ideas, especially if many of them are in the same field as you.

Find The Missing Step

Look at other top ten lists and see if any of them are missing a step. Perhaps someone wrote a top ten ways to secure Wordpress post but failed to mention a plugin or how to back up your database. Find the missing step and inform your readers about it.

Streamline It

While doing research, perhaps you found a few great posts already listing out the steps of your topic. But could they be improved upon? Could you drop 5 steps and streamline them so they’re easier to implement? If you can find a way to save your readers time, they will appreciate it.

Link It Up

Perhaps the topic you’re covering is very broad and tough to thoroughly go over in a single list of ten. That’s OK! Creating a link list that summarizes each step and points the reader to more expansive resources for each step is a great way to create a one stop article for your readers to get all ten pieces of information in one article. Then, if need be they can follow up with each link on their own.

Get a Guest Poster/Freelancer

If you know someone who has expertise in a field, utilize that connection! If your site is popular enough, you should be able to easily find guest posters willing to write a top ten list revolving around their field of expertise. They get a traffic boost, you get a free list and your readers get a great resource and get exposed to an expert. It’s a win-win-win.

Don’t know anyone with expertise in the field you want to cover? That’s OK. Hit up Elance, Craigslist, Twitter and other freelancing job boards. For $40-$80 you should be able to find a great writer who can create a compelling list that’s sure to draw eyeballs.

Get Expertise

Sharing with your readers how you learned something is a great way to build a list. Read a book, research online, or just hack away until you learn something and then share with your readers how you learned it.

First off, the fact that you used this method to learn something knew shows proof of the method’s effectiveness. Second, if they’re reading your blog then they’re likely already on a similar wavelength with you and would love to see how you learned more about that topic. Some of your readers may even be more experienced in that field and offer more helpful tips.

Hypothesize

It seems obvious posts are overtaking the blogosphere. Go in the other direction and approach a modern dilemma from a theoretical perspective. Maybe you’ll be wrong, maybe you’ll be right but if you write it right it’s sure to generate a discussion around the idea. For instance, write a top ten ways to create world peace post. Or go super geeky and write about the top ten ways to break the speed limit barrier and travel across the universe. Do let your readers know you’re just brainstorming or hypothesizing about possible solutions, not claiming any expertise or factual solutions. Sometimes it’s OK to pretend and aim for the impossible.

Going through the above list, you should be able to knock out top ten ways list posts in no time that are useful and beneficial to both you and your readers.

Have an additional tip for how to write great how-to lists? Share them below in the comments so we can all learn how to improve!

Top Ten Bingo photo by pigpogm.

We’re unveiling a new feature here called Spotlight. The Spotlight category will shine the light on some of the work we’ve done across the web. We’re thinking it’s a good way to introduce you to some of our work while we get a portfolio section integrated into our new design. We’ll also keep the Spotlight feature once a portfolio is up and running as it’s a nice way to give additional information on each project. First up in the Spotlight is Dish It Out Boston!

Dish It Out Landing Page

Dish It Out approached us for advice on social media and Search Engine Optimization for a site yet to launch. The first thing we noticed was that their site did not resolve to the dishitoutboston.com domain name. Instead when you punched in that domain, it forwarded you to a mac web space area landing page. Within a day of contacting us, we set up hosting to resolve the domain name to dishitoutboston.com, installed a wordpress installation and created a unique landing page with a Boston backdrop. Doing so allowed Dish It Out to start acquiring links and building a subscriber list to help with their future launch.

Here’s a look at the Dish It Out pre-launch landing page:

The Dish It Out Boston pre-launch landing page

Boston Businesswomen Community

Dish It Out is an organization designed to connect and help Boston based female business owners. Its owner Catherine Howe has tons of great ideas for the new site and is a natural networker. If you’re a women in the Boston area and your run or own your own business, make sure to head over to Dish It Out and subscribe to their feed to get updates on the new site’s progress.

Check out the landing page we created for them and make sure to subscribe to their feed to be updated on their progress. And a big hearty thanks to werkunz1 for taking the awesome photo of Boston and posting it under the CC BY-SA 2.0 license so we could use it as the cool backdrop for the site.