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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.”

I had the good fortune of meeting a man named Frank Segura recently.  He is the SEO man behind AffordableRanking.com and we have been discussing traffic building techniques.  I wanted to bring him to your attention because here is a company that charges the unbelievably cheap price of $20 per month (19.95, actually) for web promotion services.

Affordable Ranking CEO Frank Segura

Ordinarily, I would not mention something like this on my personal blog, but I know many of my readers have their own websites, and I think this is something that should be jumped on, by anyone looking for more traffic to their blog or site.  Frank’s team works very hard to get better Search Engine placement for each of their clients, using some of the smartest techniques, Web 2.0 sites, content creation, and the biggest piece in the puzzle, Link Building.

Okay, okay, you say big deal… Lots of companies offer services like this, right?

Not like Frank does!  Most companies will charge you $50 to $500 per month for multiple keywords.  Frank targets 3 different keyword phrases to build links to your site and only charges a fraction of what the competition charges.  And the links that you will be getting to your site are pretty cool.  They will even create one video per month, as long as you are a subcriber, and upload this promotional video to YouTube, and this will be one of your links back to your site.  For most of us, we don’t have time to create videos and upload them to YouTube, but for the measely price of $20/month, you get one made for you as part of Frank’s package.

So if you have any desire at all to get more visitors, please give this company a chance, and tell him that Chris the Webovator recommended AffordableRanking.com — you won’t be disappointed!

To follow Frank on Twitter or become a fan on Facebook, use these links:

@SEOfranks

Affordable Ranking – Facebook page

My brother Chad at the Independent Short Film blog sent me a link to the Toilet Paper Entrepreneur’s article about the 3 types of clients:

1. Paying Clients

2. No Clients

I will let you go to his blog if you want to read the descriptions on the previous two; what I liked was the part about type 3:

3. Non-Paying Clients – Funny enough these are usually the most heralded clients, yet they can destroy a business. They often come with big ticket demands, and then never pay for the services rendered. It results in a double whammy. First you incur costs to deliver goods and services, then you don’t get paid. Do you see now? No Clients cost you a lot less than a Non-Paying Client.

The key to avoiding these black holes is looking at every prospects history. Yes you can request referrals about a prospective client… I mean they are asking you for referrals after all. (End quote)

The reason I decided to talk about this article today is because in the web design / development / SEO industry, we see this all the time.  I myself have run into plenty of clients who are not willing to pay.  They want to speak over the phone for hours before even committing to hiring you, or they do hire you, and after the work is finished, try to back out on the deal.  In fact, I had a client disappear off the map completely about two weeks ago, after I sent him the code for his site, and I am still waiting for him to respond to all of the IM’s, emails, and phone calls.  Fortunately, this was on a small project and I will be better off forgetting about him than to try to rank higher than him on Google for his keywords (Riley Heating and Air, Upper Marlboro, MD) and telling people about how he was a non-paying client, dishonest, etc.  I left him a message saying, it’s fine if you cannot pay.  Just contact me so that I can send you the rest of the files, that way it’s not a COMPLETE waste of my time, at least SOMEONE will get some use out of the time I invested for you.  No answer.

So the reason I bring this up is that I like the point made here in the article:  Get references from your clients, to make sure they have not cheated other web service providers in the past.  By not wasting time on clients like this, you will be richer in the long run.  It pays to be selective.  So why do we, as service providers, not naturally ask them to reciprocate?  If we must prove ourselves before being hired, why should a client not prove himself before we take on his project?

If you agree with this line of thought then you might like my previous blog entry, from several months ago, “7 Words That Changed My Life…“

Found this while doing a search for SEO and hiphop. Pure gold, he raps about link building and getting indexed by the search engines, along with design and coding, social media, etc. Check out his channel and subscribe, he’s gonna be famous someday.

You create a new site and its content heavy,
With the right amount of pictures you believe it’s ready,
So you launch it trying to put money in da bank,
But when you search and try to find yourself, you can’t,
So you thank until your mind goes blank,
Got titles and headers but no page rank,
Sooner or later it will show if I wait,
In the meantime make sure my code validate,
And it do,
Hmm, now what I’m supposed to do,
Add meta information and alt tags too,
Still don’t get listing,
Something must be missing,
Brad and Chuck recommended doing link building,
So you start hunting down sites like a predator,
Doing back links on all your competitors,
Whoever linking to them need to link to me,
Is it free, do we swap, or do I pay a fee,
Well take it from us, before you take that step,
Some things about the site that you might want to check,
Did they use a link farm or some dirty tactics,
Could have a bad effect on your site that’s drastic,
Could’ve link baited, look at what they created,
Compare it to yours, is it even related,
Take the time, go inspect and see,
Take advantage of paid directories,
If you follow all the steps with a little bit of patience,
Get links from relevant sites that are favorites,
Update your content on the regular basis,
I’m confident you’ll make it to first page placement

This entry is from an email conversation that I was having with Kim Kolb, at the High Touch blog, Filter The Noise. I thought I would re-post it here, because it might be of some use to some of my readers. (If not, feel free to throw tomatoes at me in the comments area).

Kim says that inbound marketing relates to creating content on a niche topic, putting blogs and articles up on that topic, using organic SEO to get traffic, rather than blasting your link out with emails or tweets to people who are not interested anyways.  Sound familiar, 30 Day Challengers?  This is the same stuff we are talking about on the Team Rockstar group…  anyways, here was my response.

“Conversation marketing is basically marketing to people by building relationships with them instead of bombarding them with links and sales pitches. A lot of this relates to blogging, Facebook, Twitter, and actually becoming friends with people (although this point in itself is controversial, because many relationship marketing experts say you are NOT trying to become friends with people, you are trying to learn about them so that you can figure out what their interests and buying habits are, and then sell what they are interested in).

But with all the social sites and blogs working together synergetically to build your reputation, the goal is to be the first one people think of, so that when one of their other friends on facebook for example posts something that says, “Does anyone know a good ___________ service? Then their friends will jump in and say “Yeah my friend SO and SO does that, here is her website”.

This is the type of marketing that interests me. It is one reason the world of SEO is changing. I believe in 5 years Google won’t have a stranglehold on the markets anymore, but instead people will buy based on recommendations from their friends in the social media sphere.

Inbound linking is still a very necessary strategy. SEO, blogging, and bookmarking are all still good strategies to use to build traffic. But the two halves ideally will work together to create a cohesive, strong campaign that works well over the long term.”

Social Media Butterflies:  What is YOUR favorite site/tool?  I want to know, so leave a comment, with your vote.

Taken from http://firefoxsuck.blogspot.com/

I have been having all types of problems with Firefox 3 lately.  When I go to shut it down, sometimes it takes more than a minute to completely close out the process, so it prevents me from re-opening the browser unless I open up the Task Manager and manually kill the process.  This is annoying enough, but recently, I have noticed something even worse:

Firefox has been eating up all of my memory!  I look at the sidebar widget on my desktop and notice that memory usage has been going all the way up to 99%, and this causes all my other applications to freeze up: Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Illustrator, Excel, Combat Arms, TweetDeck, you name it.

I found a couple of solutions that should come in handy, bearing in mind that the #30DC recommended browser this year is Firefox, not Flock.  This link describes how to minimize your memory usage, and set the disk cache size, as well as direct memory usage to be reduced upon minimizing your window. To do this you will open a new tab and type in “about:config” and follow the instructions at the above link to make your computer run better when using Firefox.

Another fix that I implemented today was getting rid of the Google Toolbar, which was only useful to me for the PageRank indicator (which is inaccurate, and redundant since my other SEO add-ons will already give me this information). To do this, you can’t just remove the Google toolbar by unselecting it under the View menu, but instead you must actually go into Tools -> Addons and disable it (then restart Firefox).

Finally, I noticed that I was no longer able to use CTRL+T to open a new tab, NEITHER was I able to open a new tab by selecting File -> New Tab.  This is extremely annoying, since I usually have between 10 and 20 tabs open at any given time.  The solution?  Disable the AVG Free toolbar (which is forced upon you each time you install/update AVG Free.  I love AVG, I have not ever had a problem with a virus since I started using it three years ago (NORTON SUCKS!) but the toolbar is unnecessary and annoying.