Jan 23 2012

Upcoming Marketing Conferences I Am Attending

Published by under Information

Now that 2012 is in full swing there is  a new season of conferences ahead. I am excited to be attending the following conferences in the upcoming weeks. One is fun but I had to throw it in since I am so excited about it and the other two are geared around website marketing, search optimization, social media and analytics. It is my philosophy in order to build a better website all these factors must be taken into consideration.

Due to costs and budgeting I try to attend conferences that are close to where I work and live. There are more coming up later in the year Google IO has moved to the summer and the first International Joomla Conference will be in San Jose this fall along with WordCamp in San Francisco for WordPress.

Stitches West

 Stitches West! One night and two days yarn and yarn related products.

This is one of the premier knitting conferences in the US. Knitters, crochet, spinners and weavers take over the Santa Clara Convention Center. This is the weekend for yarn inspiration

 

Now down to business:
SMX West 2012

SMX West Three Days of Search Marketing

In my opinion another one of the best conferences in the US for Search Engine Optimization, Marketing and Social Media. I always wish I could be in two places at once at this conference.

 

GaugeCon Google Analytics Conference

GaugeCon – Two Days of Google Analytics

I attended this conference for the first time last year and came out with a better understanding of GA and what each of the different tools can do. GA was recently updated and has an entirely new UI so there are more features to take advantage to analyze data and get the best conversion rates.

 

I have done some live blogging in the past not sure I will do it for these conferences.

If you are attending any of these conferences please introduce yourself it would be nice to meet you IRL.

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Dec 05 2011

Simple List On How SMB’s Can Adopt Social Media Today

Published by under social media

Most small to medium businesses (SMB) feel that social media is a time drain and they don’t have time to do it. The other question is the return on investment of time. Most marketers would tell you that you don’t have time not to do it. Most SMB’s wear a lot of hats and now they are expected to somehow integrate social media into all the other job responsibilities

Below is a quick to do list of what any SMB can do right now to become part of that conversation. There will always be a learning curve, but we have to start somewhere and then build from that.

Getting started:

  1. Email – Choose the email account you are going to link all your social media together. I have found it is worthwhile to set up a special email (gmail or other) account just for social media.
  2. Avatar – Pick a consistent image or avatar across all Social Media platforms
  3. Build a profile and like your Avatar be consistent in your message.

Twitter-

  1. Open up a twitter account if you don’t already have one.
  2. Learn how to use it to your advantage.
  3. Why?
    Because you want to be able to monitor and listen to conversations about you, your product, your company, your industry, your customers and your competition.
  4. How do you do that?
    Use a third party application like TweetDeck (or HootSuite) this allows you to organize your twitter streams into categories.
  5. What is the advantage?
    If you don’t want to have conversations you can mine valuable information or data. You don’t have to sit there and wait for information to unfold. You can peel back the tweets and the information that interests you.

Time: Less than an hour to set up and even less if you already an account. You will want to build your profile and add an avatar.

Facebook business page

  1. You can have unique url’s or a “vanity url”
  2. a great opportunity to grow your business using the basic Facebook features
  3. Take your customer base and start connecting with them on Facebook. At the least it allows you to promote offers, ask questions and engage your customers.

Time: Minimal set up is about an hour.

LinkedIn profile and or Company Profile:

LinkedIn has some unique features and it is made especially for businesses. LinkedIn is marketing Business 2 Business at its best. LinkedIn features allow you to network with like minded professionals, look for new resources and partners, connect with current and past work colleagues and maybe look for a new job.

  1. Build a company profile page.
    This is much the same as your facebook business page
    a. What do you put on here:
    Blog posts, twitter feed, press releases, video’s

Check out the questions and answers sections on LinkedIn and Groups

Time: Setup may be a little longer two hours.

Google+

  1. create a profile and a business page.
  2. Why because it is google and it is more fuel for google to know more about you and index your information correctly
  3. Beware: Something is public on G+ it will be on the search engines.

Time: Set up hour for both

Link your social media together.

  1. Twitter account to facebook
  2. facebook account to twitter
  3. Link your twitter updates to LinkedIn
  4. If you should have a blog link your blog posts to all sources.

All your updates are flowing across each network and you don’t have to re-post to each of your accounts separately.

Time: One hour

Involve your Website

  • Add the links or icons to these social media sites to your website.
  • Make them prominent so that people know where you are
  • Those who may be looking for you and what you offer can find them.
  • The point is we want to make sure that we are providing as many ways as we can for customers and prospects to talk to us.
  • Your clients or customer base are your lifeblood and they are using social networks with or without you.

Time: One hour

Get into the stream of social media

Even if you are not a content machine or a great writer you can still carve out a niche for you and your company.

Here are a few of the rationale why a local small to medium business should engage in social media. These are comments  from various people polled on twitter.

@swanny_s engage with local business, community, opportunity to maximise local search (google place page, google +) x-marketing opps, links

@MediaPA_NZ cause it’s cheap, it’s direct, targeted, it’s not pushy, more people are reading social media than newspapers or magazines

@JadedTLC smb social media = relationship building. Competition means be different. Best Buy can’t do that.

I will hire a small biz if I think they care. Walmart doesnt care. Make your SMB care thru social media. #loyaltyStillExists

@KevinEkmark the biggest question is whether they know how to and if they have the time to do so. They all should though

**This is an excerpt from a talk I gave to a local business networking group.

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Nov 03 2011

Intellectual Property for Websites and WordPress

Published by under Website Design,WordPress

My Brain and Intellectual Property Rights Everyone wants to protect what they create or own from copycats. Within the online communities of social media and blogging sharing words and images is both common and popular. Information, be it text or images, placed on the internet can travel swiftly with tools like twitter, fb and reblogging of websites. In this blog post I am specifically focusing on WordPress.com not the self hosted WordPress.org even though many of the points pertain to both.  With WordPress.com a web site or blog is hosted by WordPress all one has to do is open up an account. This is also true with tumblr where content is quite viral.

If WordPress hosts a blog or website all the content posted belongs to the site owner and is their property. According to WordPress “Terms of Services” they have permission to publish the information and to post the website content. That is the service they provide along with the tools to do it.  If the site owner chooses to use additional tools on WordPress community tags, to be in the search engine and so on they also have that right. These are avenues to get content promoted and published or out in the world.

Protecting Website and Blog Content

The site owner assumes the responsibility for the content on the site. Below are ways to protect on line content.

  1. Adding a notice of copyright that should be clearly posted and can help prevent theft.
  2. Obtain a Creative Commons license that has a standardized way to grant copyright permissions to creative work.
  3. Photos and images should be watermarked to deter theft from the site.
  4. Comments on posts are the site owners’ responsibility and they own them. It is the site owners due diligence to make sure comments are not harmful to anyone or anything in any way.

At the same time blog/site owners are responsible for protecting the content of others by asking  permission to post another’s content. If a website owner quotes or uses an image from another site it is expected to give the creator or the website credit and add a link.

Reblogging

Reblogging is a method and a tool on some websites like WordPress.com and tumblr to promote and publish a websites content. People like to reblog information they find compelling. They do have the right to use text, images or other content from a site hosted on their servers to help promote the site but again they do not own it. This method of republishing content gives credit to the content creator and at the same time additional publicity. You can learn more about reblogging on WordPress.com by clicking the link.

If one is worried about any content being republished or copied the only effective way is not to publish it or use a private blog with password protected posts. Read about page visibility .

I hope this helps ease anxiety when placing content on the internet. I do not claim to be an attorney or expert in this field. If there are more concerns you may want to consult a professional in this area.  Additional thoughts or comments on this subject are appreciated.

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Sep 18 2011

Connecting WordPress to Twitter, Facebook and Social Sites

Published by under WordPress

I am live blogging from a WordPress meetup on looking at different ways you can post to and from various Social Media sites. Attendees will be sharing what they have done. Meet up starts at 1:00 PDT. I will use the hashtag #wpeb for my tweets.

13.49

After introductions the WordPress Q&A from the group.#wpeb

Q: how to add feeds
A: Go to the website http://www.sillybean.net that has hidden WordPress feeds that you may not know about

Q: Good books for creating themes.
A: Beginning WP 3 has good information for building themes.
“How to be a WordPress Rockstar” – shows how to build a theme in photoshop and then turn into a WP theme

Q: Subscribing to the site options. (person is really not sure what they need. These are some of the ideas)
A: WordPress plugin called Subscribe To which is RSS to email. Membership plugins and people pay to be members. Feed Burner was also mentioned, people can subscribe to certain content.
MailChimp RSS to email. Ratepoint.com is easier to use than MailChimp. MailChimp can be a little quirky

Q: Backing up your blog and website what is the best
A: Files and database: Plugin BackWPup, latest version works best with 3.2. Not free “Backup Buddy”.  Be aware if your site is really big the web host can time you out during the backup, may want to stagger the backups.
Plugin: WordPress Database Backup also emails you a backup

Q: Web Hosting is good
A: EC2 – good webhost
Don’t use goDaddy. They are very slow. Only allows you to use their installer. Long operations it will log you out.

Q: update plugins do I have to do it
A: yes you should always update your plugins.

14.06

List of Social Plugins to add to your WordPress Site #wpeb

  • Share and Follow: Has all the icons for different social media sites. Also has the side bar. Share and Follow also has a widget.
  • Social Media Widget: Install it and then you have it in your widget area. Must be customized. They like it for the simplicity of the design.
  • Social Plugin for WordPress: This is good so that users can sign in with fb or twitter to leave comments. No much known about it.
  • Discus: Beware you do not own your comments. They own your data.
  • Add This: Is a service that you go through.
  • JetPack: bundled plugins from Automattic from WordPress.com. Some thoughts that it may later be a monitization vehicle later.

Types of sharing: You share your content and visitors share your content on their sites. The plugin that you use depends on your site

  • Digg Digg: this shows you how many people have shared.

14.16

Twitter Plugins for your WordPress Site. #wpeb

  • Tweet Old Posts: Will go through old posts and randomly post them on twitter. You can time them and the age of your posts, choose which categories to post and not to post, also age of the posts.
  • WP to Twitter:
  • 1-click/retweet/share/like
  • Twitter Widget Pro
  • BlackBird Pie: quote people’s twitter streams on your site

14.29

TwitterFeed is an external website. Feeds any RSS feed from any site (you don’t have to own it) #wpeb into it and have it auto feed into your twitter and facebook. #wpeb You don’t have to own the RSS feed that you use on TwitterFeed. Http://www.twitterfeed.com
These are basically automated tweets into your twitter and facebook. This is not specific to WordPress since you can do this from any RSS feed or site.

On the site the tagline is: Feed your blog to twitter, facebook and more ….

 

14.37

  • Feed Delay – set it not to update your RSS or twitter. Until you feel good about your post #wpeb
  • Push Press: Uses push subhub protocol. Publish a blogpost and have it immediately show up in our twitter feed. Auto posting service. Links Alpha supports Push Press

14.51

Moving onto facebook plugins at #wpeb for #wordpress:

  • Simple Facebook connect: Allows people to login with their facebook. Problem is it is not that simple. Need to go into facebook and develop an application. Can have a link to your fanpage instead of your profile. This is mainly for the users to sign into your site with facebook.  Also sets up a like button and share button.
  • Wordbooker: Like button, share button … will post your posts onto your facebook page. Comments from facebook to WordPress. Takes your blog post and pastes it on your profile page. Will also pass on images. Some of the people at the meetup really like this plugin. Wordbooker gives you a lot more control. One person for him this is the best.
  • Embed Facebook: embeds part of your fb profile onto your wordpress website. Great for status updates and photos. An album or gallery in facebook and displaying it. Currently no way to get your wall feed into your site  ’cause facebook changed the API.
  • Facebook Grabber: No longer works well. It was a mirror of your facebook wall
  • Photonic: for bringing images from flickr and Picasa to display on your site.

14.54

Here is the link to the Blog Post for Social Plugins  Meetup for #WordPress #wpeb http://www.tonicarr.com/blog/connecting-wordpress-to-twitter-facebook-and-social-sites/

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Aug 27 2011

Tweet, Social Media, Crowd Sourcing Added To Websters Book Of Words

Published by under social media

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary has been updated to add Tweet as both a noun and a verb “a chirp note” or “a post made on the Twitter online message service.” They have also defined social media as:

forms of electronic communication (as Web sites for social networking and microblogging) through which users create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages, and other content (as videos)

Other newcomers that have made the list are:

  • bromance – a nonsexual friendship between men
  • helicopter parents – overly involved parents in their children’s lives
  • boomerang child – the one in adulthood that returns home for financial reasons
  • cougar – arghhh! (“a middle-aged woman seeking a romantic relationship with a younger man”)
  • crowd sourcing- the opposite of out sourcing noooo!
    “the practice of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people and especially from the online community rather than from traditional employees or suppliers”
  • fist bump – I am afraid to look this one up, not so bad
    “a gesture in which two people bump their fists together (as in greeting or celebration)”

Here is the link to more words New Dictionary Words for 2011

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Aug 14 2011

WordCamp San Francisco Day Three

Published by under WordPress

State of the Word 2011 presentation by Matt Mullenweg

Live Blog Notes from  WordCamp Day One and WordCamp Day Two

09.09

Text has evolved and is real text not images. Would never have seen this before web fonts.

The New Yorker is now using web fonts – every headline used to be cut images no longer with web fonts

Martha Stewart using web fonts

2008: 18 web safe fonts – kind of sad
Images are not the right way for creating fonts on the web

What is the right way

@font-face { font-family:   
src: url ‘ …..’}

All the major browsers now support this ability to link to web font files

09.12

Services like Typekit stepped in with a solution that protected the interest of the owners of the site.
They serve up the fonts and you pay a subscription fee.

A lot of web services now:

  • Google web fonts
  • FontSpring
  • Font Squirrel
  • Kernest.com

09.05

Good morning #wcsf setting up for my last day of live blogging.

09.15

Jeff Veen @veen #wcsf Talking about how beer has become local and some establishments are serving it warm.

How The Web Works – Talking about entrepreunerial experiences of the past relating to the making and distributing ice.

Now he is talking about the West Gold Boom – much like the internet boom

09.27

@veen started typekit Evolution of Fonts changed when browsers could link to a font #wcsf

Typographers worried about putting their fonts on the web the same as the music industry has worried about distribution of music on the internet.

WordPress.org plugins are available to use Typekit

09.38

Fundamental way the web has moved forward rough consensus running code @veen #wcsf

1993 the img tag with a source attribute was made available on mosaic this was rough consensus that got running code in front of users. Important to move from abstract to concrete.

“The velocity and responsiveness of your team to user feedback …

Showing development of typekit and how they developed the business model

09.42

Today @veen uses twitter everyday to search for their brand name to see how it is going #wcsf

Twitter has been good at listening to what their users are doing

Google first versions were not that spectacular but they got it out there quickly

Amazon is another one first site did not have books on it. Get it out there and get feedback.

Speed of iteration beats quality of iteration

09.43

“Speed of iteration beats quality of iteration” get your stuff out there on the web #wcsf jeff veen

09.46

Free software or open source software model that works today in a free and open way to move development forward #wcsf this makes tremendous change.

09.50

We need to protect the openness and freedom of the web. #wcsf Need to have belief the open and free web is the way.

09.59

Next up at #wcsf Sheri Bigelow Top 10 Features You Aren’t Using – But Should Be!

10.04

@designsimply works for Automattic – talks tips and tricks is designed for beginners#wcsf we will see

10.25

#wcsf See list here for top ten features http://www.tonicarr.com/blog/wordcamp-san-francisco-day-three/

  • Zen Mode introduced in WP 3.2 Full screen button
  • Kitchen Sink – A whole new row of buttons on the editor
  • Keyboard Shortcuts for the Editor mouse over and it will give you the tool tips also look at the help button
  • Short cuts for comments – has to be turned on. Use Help Tab for more info.
  • Embed video – Auto Embed video links by just using the url. Just drop in the youtube link. Check media settings. Search WordPress AutoEmbed will show which services you can embed
  • Screen Options – your space your way. For each screen you can turn things off that are on the page. Change the number of columns.
  • Press This – It is a book marklet. In the tools section and drag up to bookmark bar. Any media can be dropped in. For super fast blogging.
  • Pagination – More tag. Posts with a lot of content <!– nextpage–> Put in html of post Link to page styling in the codex
  • Internal Linking – let’s you make links to past content. Link back to something. Use link icon and it will show past content.
  • Single Column Gallery – put size in short code ie large
  • Old Slug Redirects – wordpress is smart enough to know to redirect
  • Drag and Drop – widgets, menu items, inside the gallery you can drag your images around and reorder
  • Coming soon in 3.3: Drag and drop media file for uploading media into media thingee.
  • Post Revisions: WP keeps track of your past revisions – you can do comparisons, then you can restore if needed

10.47

basetrack.org – WordPress site following Marines in Afghanistan #wcsf All pics with an iPhone. WP site pushed out to FB page to interact

11.04

In theory no censorship on basetrack.org reporting initiative. If info is removed there would have to be justification. #wcsf Later didn’t like to do it because then they would have to explain why removing content. Wanted to use journalist self sensor.

Operational security issue (LOL) marine is not fully shaved

FB page became the real problem. Families were speaking their hearts and minds. Families expressing stress, family members getting legs blown off. They wanted them to pull the facebook page. Security started to really like the WP site better than FB because they could not sensor. They did not shut down the FB page because they did not like the tone of comments. Bottom line they ended up getting kicked out.  “Marines Boot Social Media Pioneers From Afghanistan” .

Swarthmore College doing in depth conflict reporting on the project and exonerated the project.

Mom’s are the best photojournalists. Mother’s sister’s wives were sending them photos

In theory project should be long over but the sites are still active and the FB page

They also have a flickr stream video’s on vimeo audio on sound cloud – The content is open source so you can use it in your work

contact info: teru@kuwayama.com | twitter/skype: terukuwayama

 

 

11.18

Next up @photomatt – then lunch I am hungry. #wcsf

11.36

State of the Word by Matt Mullenweg cofounder of Automattic. The growth the inovation and evolution. #wcsf

11.39

PressWork theme has front end editing #wcsf

11.49

What people like about WordPress #wcsf from WP poll

  1. Ease of Use
  2. Community – updated often, contribute with forums

Complaints

  1. Plugins suck – 15,000 plugins in the repository

11.50

If a plugin has not been updated in two years they will start to hide them not delete. #wcsf

11.57

WordPress looking for the most elegant human user experience with the Zen Editing Screen #wcsf

12.05

WordPress 3.3-What’s to come #wcsf – Admin, NUX, Better Media Handling

  • Make the admin responsive
  • NUX- new user experience, people coming for the first time. Dashboard is intimidating start to guide people through
  • Better Media Handling – likes uploading images in Google +. Dragging and dropping images from your phone

12.09

92% of people are using WP as a CMS. Hourly rates range from  -2000 people building sites. Avg hourly . Not in CA

12.10

WordPress is not only growing it is accelerating. #wcsf

15.16

e-commerce #wcsf presenter Jonathan is the lead developer of the Shopp e-commerce plugin for WordPress.

15.18

Start shopping cart Merchant Account process 3-6 mos. ahead of deadline. Don’t wait to last minute. #wcsf

 

15.25

SSL Certificate choices for e-commerce #wcsf

  • Verisign – costly
  • Comodo – moderate
  • goDaddy – cheap
  • NetWork Solutions – cheap

15.26

wordpress security best to use a pass phrase rather than word for website e-commerce #wcsf don’t use admin

15.28

For security keep everything updated, WordPress, Themes and Plugins BACKUP everything #wcsf

15.33

eCommerce alternatives for WP #wcsf

  • WP eCommerce-has been around the longest. Can get paid add ons
  • cart66.com – uses shortcodes in posts and pages, has a free lite version
  • shopplugin.net – completely skinable

Slides available at http://www.slideshare.net/ingenesis/ecommerce-word-press

15.45

SEO is more than optimizing page titles & a few plugins #wcsf Need right site architecture social signals domain authority site speed & more w/Sujan Patel

16.21

SEO for WordPress in 2011 #wcsf @sujanpatel

SEO Fundamentals:

  • keyword research
    uses google search to discover new keywords
    find keywords around commercial intent
    Long tail keywords – have less competition, high probability of conversion
    good tool is AdWords, Keyword Discovery, Word Tracker
    First position get 18% then goes down from there done by independent study by slingshot
    Google Traffic Estimator to estimate number of clicks if you rank position 1
  • content post panda-An update by Google to get rid on content farms or large content sites
    Released in early March and ongoing
    Good content is king
    Best to remove pages that are not getting traffic
  • site structure and internal linking
    Good site structure good SEO – no page more than 3 clicks away from homepage
    Internal linking to pass seo value. Only link out when relevant
    good to only have two or three links per page
    canonicalization – don’t want to have duplicate pages in your site redirect non www to www pages
  • social signals
    everyone sees different results and how your google account is tied to you social accounts
  • Don’ts since Panda update
    use tags, stop using tags – cause duplicate content. They need to be no indexed.
    have broken links  or 404 pages- check on google webmaster tools
    have duplicate content on very similar posts
    too many ads or affiliate links
    irrelevant linking or link exchanges
    low quality pages (less may be more. Better to have quality pages)

SEO Plugins

  • Yoast SEO
  • RSS Footer- prevent scrapers from affecting your site. Allows you to add a text link to your rss so every scraper links back to you
  • SEO Smart Links – Automatic Internal linking based on keywords
  • Google XML Sitemaps – auto creates sitemaps every page/post you add. Good for all Search Engines
  • Redirection – helps you to redirect 404 pages
  • SEO Friendly Images – automatically adds “alt” and “title attribute”
  • W3 Total Cache – Increases site speed by caching your site
  • Social Media Buttons Digg Digg, Sexy Bookmarks, Get Social

Ways to get more traffic:

  • Write list post 30+
  • Infographics
  • Guest Blogging
  • Less Content
  • Build relationships
  • Comment on your favorite blogs
  • Top Blogs in XYZ – know the top blogs in your industry and mention them.

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