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Web Ovations #1: SEO Zombies

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You have probably already seen the Tweetmeme plugin on countless blogs.  It’s the one that creates the Tweet button to the right of your post title.  If you already use Sociable as your main bookmarking plugin, the TweetMeme plugin isn’t COMPLETELY necessary, but it makes it a lot easier for people to retweet your post because the image is at the top of the post, not the bottom.  Another advantage it has is that it keeps a count of the number of RT’s you get. Just go to Plugins, Add New, and do a search for TweetMeme and you can install it automatically in seconds.

Another cool idea for your blog is to Change the Categories sidebar widget title to “Topics”.  I don’t have a link for you, but on Tim Ferris’ blog he said that the word Topics actually encourages more people to keep reading further articles when they visit your site. One simple word change, can increase your visit time.  That’s pretty cool.

If you are moving your blog from a free host to your own domain, you might also want to check out some of the WP Permalinks Migrator plugins.  There are several good ones, to choose from, but basically these plugins do a search for posts and pages ending in the same slug (if you change your permalink structure, you don’t want the visitor to end up on the 404 page; this prevents that by redirecting the visitor to the correct location.

Stay tuned for Part 2, where I will mention a few other cool Wordpress plugins, and ideas for niche marketers and bloggers.  If you are interested in learning how to make a little extra cash online, I am starting a free newsletter full of SEO tips and social media trends to look out for.  The newsletter is completely free.  It will be about once a month. Click here to opt in and get your copy.

A Michigan university proposed a list of word that should not be used anymore. It’s quite humorous. In addition to the the examples in the title of this post, there were examples such as obamanomics, shovel-ready, transparency (in one sense of the word, not in general).

My take is, if people are going to use words like “unfriend” (to remove someone from your friends list), let them. It saves time. Time is money. Why waste words, why not abbreviate what we are trying to say? In keeping with the spirit of abbreviation, that’s the end of my post.

Click here for the full story.

RETWEET CLUB: Twitter-Team

If you are an avid blogger, and love posting your new blog articles to Twitter, then this may be of interest to you.

Edit: IT IS FREE; all it costs is your time. It is a Google Group, open to everyone (but only the first 100 people), where we can all just help each other by re-posting our team members’ tweets (ReTweeting) so that our followers can read the blogs. You only RT what is of interest to you, or what might be interesting to your friends.

There is no doubt that Twitter is a great place to find free traffic.  Twitter has drastically changed the face of online marketing over the past two years, by connecting people of similar (and diverse) interests, who would otherwise never have been able to find each other.

Twitter has been a great place for me to meet other web designers, musicians, Christian business owners, and others who share my interests, and every once in a while, when I have an article that I believe is interesting or informative, I post it on my stream, and it instantly brings anywhere from 30 to 50 visitors.  If someone retweets my link, then the potential traffic grows.

Getting retweeted is one of the best ways to increase your traffic, and as long as you are retweeting ethically (meaning you only RT things of value, and that you have ACTUALLY read the content before RT’ing it), it’s a nice way to spread the love.

My brother @HeidelbergChad, a co-founder of the Team Rockstar Google Group (Facebook page here), told me about a Retweet Club idea that he read about on Daily Blog Tips. They allowed 100 members, and to join you must have 100 followers.  Members of the team can submit one link for retweeting per week, but they must retweet 75% of the team members’ links, in order to remain on the team. The first RT club filled up very quickly, so to fill the need for those who didn’t get in quickly enough the first time around, we decided to organize a second Retweet Club, called Twitter-Team.  We will operate under slightly different rules, though: 100 members will be allowed to join, but instead of one Tweet per week, you may submit as many as you want.  But you need to RT 5 links for each one that you submit. This will ensure that those who are submitting RT requests are RT’ing a proportionate number of other team member’s links.

Theoretically, you will not be doing any more work than if you were just retweeting your own link 5 times (not recommended anyways), but the results should be exponentially better.  If you have 100 followers, you might get 100 visits to your blog by yourself. But as a member of Twitter-Team, with 100 team members that have 100+ followers, you could get 10,000 hits to that same link.  Of course, many of our team members are going to have thousands of followers, but 100 is the bare minimum, so this is just an example.

The content of your blog cannot be MLM, get rich quick schemes, nor can you submit ClickBank hoplinks or other affiliate product sales pages.  But if you have a link that is informative, or entertaining, we will all help you out by passing it on to our followers. Twitter-Team will be 100% ethical, and doing anything spammy will get you banned. But as you have heard before, Together Everyone Achieves More.

As I get ready to publish this blog entry, the Twitter-Team Google Group is still completely open to anyone who wants to join (provided you have 100 followers on Twitter), but ALSO, anyone who joins has the rights to send invites to their friends and followers.  We will only allow 100 people to join, so if you are interested, now is the time.

Click here to proceed to the JOIN PAGE. And when you are done, please RT this blog article so that we can launch quickly.

Copy and paste to your twitter stream:
RT @webovator Want me and 98 other people to R/T your stuff? Free retweet club, only 90 spots left. http://tr.im/F2HM Please Retweet this!

Does your company really want to hang out with me?

Take a moment to read the above link. If you are trying to entice people to buy from you by making conversations with people on Twitter and Facebook, you might be guilty of doing exactly what Derek is talking about in the blog post.  If you didn’t read it just now, here’s the synopsis.

Have you ever gotten someone’s number that you thought was attractive?  And then when you called them all they did was try to sell you on some MLM or other business opportunity?  How angry were you?  Right.  It’s the same thing with social media.  If you make small talk for a few days and then start blasting links, it’s going to do nothing but turn people off.

Can social media be used to increase business? Yes, of course.  But not if you are annoying people.  And not if they put up a wall, because they can smell your ulterior motive.

I regularly add people on Twitter who have a cool quote that I liked, or if they said something interesting that caught my eye.  And I regularly find obnoxious Affiliate Marketing tweets clogging my stream, causing me to go back and look at who I am following and delete some of the guilty parties.

So my point is this: if you are going to use social networks, blogs, forums, and bookmarking sites, to market your company, fine. But if you are not careful you will be the black sheep.  If you post 50% self-promoting links and the rest is fluff, you are not really doing anyone any favors.  If you are running a sale and want your followers to know about it, cool.  Post it.  But DON’T post it 50 times a day, DON’T auto-DM it to people who have no idea who you are, and DON’T try to trick people.  It will backfire.

A better way to market yourself is by saying hi, here’s what I do, here’s what I offer.  If you want it come get it, but I am not going to hound you everyday, because I am not trying to better myself at your expense.

I have posted status updates on Facebook before about web design and SEO, and people who didn’t know about Webovator have sometimes said, “Oh I didn’t know you were a [designer/SEO/insert-whatever-obscure-career-you-want-here], that’s cool, can you blah blah blah…?”

That is much more effective.  Don’t push your business on people.  Let them come to you IF they have a need.  They will be much more likely to feel lucky to have you in their circle of friends, not only because of your expertise but ALSO because you are not an obnoxiously annoying nuisance.

Don’t be the trickster; be the treat.

Here is a link to someone who left a very insightful comment on the above blog entry:

“Amen. Golden Rule time. Don’t like being sold at? Don’t sell at people. People will do business with people they know and like—*whether you ask for their business or not*
Really, do the folks you interact with on MySpace NOT know you have a CD for sale? Do the folks who visit your business blog NOT know you’re a consultant, or you sell vegetable slicers, or whatever? Of COURSE they know. You can mention it without pitching, just like when someone at a party asks what you do and you say “I sell vegetable slicers.” When people get to know you and like you and TRUST you, you will not need to pitch. You will not need to sell. They will come to you. Like the high-dollar web deal I’ve done this week, with a friend who I’ve never pitched in any way, shape, or form. He came to me, because he knows what I do for work (business consulting and web dev) and when he had a need, he knew where to go.

No pitch. No ‘close’. Just trust, and a painless sale.”