Honest Marketing Secrets

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You know how you read a great blog post and get to the bottom of it and someone’s made a truly stellar comment? You know how you think to yourself, “holy mackerel, that was a good comment, who the heck is this person?” (Don’t tell me you don’t say holy mackerel! ok, ok, you probably say “shazam!” or “zoinks!”, but you get my point, ya?)

Anyway, let’s say you then attempt to click on the person’s name in the comments and check out their site. And it doesn’t work. The commenter mistyped the URL. Horrors! You’re sad. You can’t find out who this amazing person is. You’ll never know what else they might have to say. And the name they typed in was something like “Dan”. Argh, how will I ever search for that?

BUT you’re not half as upset as the person who mistyped their URL in the comments box would be if only they knew.

The commenter has completely lost the greater opportunity to join the conversation web-wide; they’re only conversing on that little blog post floating in the info-ether with no link back to their site. Such a great comment and they get no search engine, or pagerank credit whatsoever for having made the effort. And all because of a little typo. Now that hurts.

Here’s how I avoid this problem altogether: I use a text replacement application that fills in a complete text snippet whenever I type a key word.

So, for instance, I type “hms” (no quotes) and that immediately expands to http://honestmarketingsecrets.com. Can you imagine how much time I save? The most important things I type over and over again are deadly accurate every time. I will never go back to plain old typing.

In fact, the program I use tells me how many hours of my life I’ve saved since I started using it. So far I’m up to about an hour and I’m still adding snippets. I’ve actually saved over 22,000 keystrokes since I started using it.

And never, ever, not once have I gotten my URL wrong in a comment box. Every time I comment, I am guaranteed to get a working backlink to my site.

I think I’ve made my point.

If you’re on a Mac, get Text Expander and watch the excellent video demonstrating it over at TWiT TV.

If you’re on Windows, try Texter, or AutoHotKey.

Here’s a Texter video from Lifehacker that shows just how useful this can be:

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