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The 12 Most Useful Social Bookmarking & Autoposting Tools for Your Blog
Sunday, March 16th, 2008
As bloggers, we’re always trying to encourage our readers to post our blogs to one of the many social bookmarking services… be it digg, delicious, mixx, reddit, stumbleupon or one of the myriad others. There are many different wordpress plugins for different social sites. The problem is that your blog ends up cluttered with all of those buttons, and it really gets annoying.
The solution has been the plugins that allow you to post to any or many of the social networks. Here’s an overview of all of the ones that I’ve found (with some of my lovely comments to boot). One of the most popular players - sharethis, has received $15 million dollars in funding!
Online Video for Small Businesses - Can I afford it?
Wednesday, March 12th, 2008
It all started with Youtube and Viral marketing. It spread to personal multimedia on websites. It continued with Rovion… For $3,000 you could have a professional nudge on your site bugging all your repeat visitors (but it looks cool). Microsoft’s bought it, and servicemagic has as well. The problem is that it’s really expensive. But, we’re nice people, and we want small business owners to benefit as well.
Want to put video on your site? Here’s a couple of resources:
USA Today’s Steve Strauss Encourages Small Business Owners to have Blogs
Tuesday, February 19th, 2008John Janstch alerted me to an article in the USA Today online that adresses whether business owners should have blogs.
Steve Strauss gives 5 reasons a small business owner should have a blog:
- You help build a sense of community - in other words, you build a relationship with the customer, so they see you as a real person… not just a webpage
- They allow you to plug products
- They help with SEO - I use the blog here solely for SEO (as well as to get new clients - I’ll get to the plug at the end
)
17 Useful Wordpress SEO and other plugins
Tuesday, February 5th, 2008- All in One SEO Pack - This is an absolutely vital plugin for every blog that you have. This allows you to change your Title, description and keyword metatags on each blog post to make them unique, as well as to make a default home page title and description. I credit this plugin with about 30% of the credit for my rankings on some of my keywords.
- AutoMeta - This tag kind of conflicts with the All-in-one SEO packplugin, as it automatically creates the titles and descriptions. I still have to see how this works with All-in-One SEO pack
Free Website Design Book from Newfangled.com CEO, Eric Holter
Monday, February 4th, 2008In doing some research for our companies website, I stumbled across an interesting site - www.newfangled.com. They created their own system for designing websites, which looks really intriguing.
As I have gone from merely doing marketing of websites to managing the design of websites,I’ve learnt how many different options there are, and how tough it is to convey something that is still an idea in your head. Eric Holter’s claim is that using the standardized way of designing a website- using wireframes and sitemaps, doesn’t effectively communicate what needs to get completed.
The Los Angeles Times Free Local Business Listing
Monday, February 4th, 2008While searching on Google for Los Angeles Business Directories, I found that the LA Times has a free one. I had never heard of it before, and it’s free, so I figured, hey, may as well give it a shot.
If you have a business in Los Angeles, go ahead and post it there.
Top 3 Questions from SmallBusiness Owners About Online Marketing
Tuesday, January 15th, 2008Local Business Owner Three Biggest Questions about search – and the answers:
1) Do people really search for local services online?
2) Can I afford to get traffic from the internet?
Blogging for Yourself, the User and the Search Engine - a 2008 resolution
Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008As you may or may not know, I am a big believer in blogging. It is a valuable way of
1)expressing your personality,
2)creating a connection with your users, and
3)getting valuable SE ranking.
The question is which one comes first? You might think this is a trivial question. It’s not.When I started blogging on About Results Marketing, I had merely bought a cool expiring domain for something I had wanted to do in the future - consulting in SEO, SEM and online marketing.
Why is Clever Hack Outranking Yahoo for “hack yahoo fantasy football”?
Sunday, December 16th, 2007Joy over at Clever Hack is curious why she is ranking number one for “hack yahoo fantasy football“.
I just did a little research, and I saw that not only is she #1, but number two and three and five are websites that just took her RSS feed!
Getting a little jealous - (hey I want number two and three for my keywords to be filled with my own RSS feeds), I promptly decided to sign up with the same sites that show up for number two and three and five -
Get Rid Of Duplicate Content on your Blog - Gain Ranking
Friday, December 14th, 2007Two weeks ago I went to a conference put on by Jeremy and Anik from PPC Classroom. It was a great networking opportunity. I bumped into Rian Brooklyn, who mentioned an issue of having duplicate content on your home page.
If you have Wordpress in default mode, then you have all of the contents of your first couple of posts on your home page, which makes those pages duplicate content. Not a good thing.
So I looked at how my site is indexed in Google. It wasn’t pretty. Almost none of my individual posts were indexed. Instead, only my categories were indexed. e.g. aboutresultsmarketing.com/
Facebook (Stupidly) Takes the Heat from Moveon, while Yahoo and Ebay laugh to the bank!
Thursday, December 13th, 2007So we all know about the Facebook Debacle with Beacon - and the horrible mistakes stupid 24 year olds make (We really do love you Mark Zuckerburg) it’s just that young kids shouldn’t be running $15 billion dollar businesses.
Moveon.org and the EFF have been decrying the privacy issues. As I’ve stated in a previous post, I think that behavioral targeting is inevitable and coming soon. In fact, I wasn’t happy that Mike Morgan from Tacoda was being apologetic about it.
Los Angeles Writers Guild Strike Analysis
Wednesday, December 12th, 2007Can’t resist putting up a post about this. I live four blocks away from CBS, and see the strikers in front of the studio daily. Especially since Joe Marchesse had to make a post about it on Mediapost.
Here was Joe’s take about the effect of the strike on the industry.
- This would accelerate the search for monetization methods of digital content (OK, I didn’t think of that!)
- Less New TV content - I did think of this one as the big drawback for studios
- Surplus of digital media talent - I’ll pretend I thought of that.
Should an Ecommerce Website Have a Blog?
Thursday, December 6th, 2007(Disclaimer: I am extremely biased towards blogs. I have already come to the conclusion that blogs are always beneficial. Consider yourself warned!)
Here are the issues:
- What are the pro’s and con’s of having a blog on your ecommerce site (The Theory)
- What are the other experts in the field saying about having blogs on your ecommerce site
- What are the big guys doing?
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What are the Pro’s and Con’s of having a Blog on your Ecommerce site?
Los Angeles Internet Marketing - A Local Business Directory
Sunday, November 25th, 2007As you probably know, getting links to your website is the all important thing in getting better rankings (if you have an optimized website first, that is).
Many people use article directories, press releases, putting blog links on other blogs etc.
As a small business owner, there is a very valuable and often overlooked factor - getting your business listed in the local business directoriesI am in the midst of creating a list of sites to submit your business to, for local marketing. I’ve already mentioned a great resource in the Local Search Optimization post.
Is the LA Times Getting Closer to “Getting It”?
Wednesday, November 21st, 2007This is a follow up to my first post on the LA Times’s efforts to go “Web 2.0″, after meeting with Eric Ulken at a blogger’s event.
First off, a little disclaimer… My site is ugly, doesn’t convert, and definitely is not “cool”. So I really should have no right to criticize other companies’ efforts to “get it”. Especially since the LA Time site isn’t to badly designed. It has a pretty minimalist design, and very easy to find links.
The Importance of Local Optimization for Small Businesses
Sunday, November 18th, 2007I’m currently doing some consulting work for some clients - as well as for my day job… creating and implementing a plan of action for local search. I’m realizing how much I’ve underutilized it. In the next couple of days I will be creating a guide outlining the steps you need to take to market your business locally.
In the meantime, here is an important resource from Frank Fuchs, a “Yahoo” who seems to have no qualms about stating his impressions of the company publicly. He lists all of the Local Places to submit your business to.
Market Your Business Through Referrals, John Jantsch
Sunday, November 18th, 2007 “I
get at least a hundred times the referrals now as I did before I had a
referral
plan.”
~ Scott Hensley - Affordable Concrete Cutting
Today
I want to share with you, in it’s entirety, a copy of a letter I
received from a small business owner who implemented a number of
suggestions I gave him in the Duct Tape Marketing book.
I chose to share this not to point out how brilliant I am - writing this stuff is the easy part sometimes
- but to showcase how acting on what you read - the really hard part - can payhuge dividends.
A Sad Day - A Legal Decision Puts BroadFirst Out Of Business
Friday, November 16th, 2007Sheri Archidiacono in Sedo’s Newsletter (they don’t have it available online) sais this about “Website Terms and Conditions are Considered a Contract”:
“In the case of Southwest Airlines Co. v. BoardFirst, LLC, a Texas court held that a user of a website was bound by the terms and conditions of that website where the user has actual knowledge of such terms and conditions.
The Plaintiffs, Southwest airlines maintained a first come, first served, open seating policy, where passengers are arranged in groups. The Defendant, Boardfirst.com was an internet company that provided a service to Southwest customers whereby for a fee, a passenger could check in early and BoardFirst would attempt to get the passenger into the first boarding group.
LA Times Getting Social Media? Candid Discussion with Eric Ulken
Monday, November 5th, 2007Today I happened on the Mashable “Top 10 Blogger Events Post“. I noticed that BarCamp is having an event in LA today. Oops, good timing! I figured, what the heck, I’ll check it out.
I came down, and found an interesting setup. The goal is to have a conversation with the crowd instead of having presenter’s merely talk to the crowd. In other words, the focus of the sessions were wherever the participants took it.
The session that I found really valuable was the one from Eric Ulken from latimes.com. He was hosting a presentation on mashups - how layering data together can create a valuable experience for users. Eric identified three parts of a mashup: