Honest Marketing Secrets

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Many of my clients have been clamoring for web sites. Right now. Practically while they wait, even. Now that’s just crazy talk.

Or is it?

Setting this blog up has given me ample opportunity to spend lots of time working with WordPress and learning many of its ins and outs.

As it turns out, building a site “while-you-wait” IS crazy talk if you don’t know anything about web design, installing scripts, or any of that. However, if you are technically savvy, the 10-hour web site is fast becoming a possiblilty. Now, of course, when i say ten hours, that’s a bit of stretch for a fully customized theme with logos and graphics etc., but the part that used to take 20, or more hours of painstaking coding can be all but eliminated now by using WordPress as the foundation of your site design.

Now all you have to do is concentrate on customizing the features, graphics and loading the content. Frankly, it’s enough to make a grown developer wriggle about a bit and even, just possibly, run naked through the streets drinking Ovaltine™ on a Saturday morning. Er sumpthin’ like that.

Anyway, the point here is that there are some really great reasons to use WordPress as a starting place for your brand new web site and here are the ones I can think of right now:

Read the rest of this entry »

I am officially overwhelmed. But that’s nothing new. In fact, I’m sure you’re pretty blasé about being overwhelmed now too. Everyone’s been overwhelmed for the last few years and it’s only getting worse by the second as a new cornucopia of interesting and not-so-interesting blogs hits the net daily. But what to do about it. I need to keep track of everything happening in my area as best I can and I’ve been searching for a good way to do that for a while now. I found a few very cool answers.

Track Your Posts, Track Your Blogs
Need to track your own blog and other blogs you read every day? Wish you could track more easily? Want to find out how well a specific post is doing compared to your other posts? Want to quickly find the best posts ever made to your blog, or to any or all of your favorite blogs? Definitely grab an account over at aiderss.com. I just stumbled across these guys a few days ago and I’m thrilled with it so far. You can track trends, see the historical performance of your blog, or any blog you’re interested in. I could go on . . . but the best way to see why I’m so pleased with it is to just check it out. (You can also do RSS mash-ups here too.)
Check out AideRSS

Follow the Conversation
I mentioned before that marketing and blogging are all about conversations. Now I’ve found a great tool that helps you track blog conversations and will really surprise you with the alternate view it provides. It puts even older stuff you might have seen before into a different context that might trigger new ideas, or interpretations. Never mind the fact that you can watch what people are talking about in an up-to-the-minute sort of way about whatever key phrase is burning a hole in your brainpan today. This tool may be my tool-of-the-month, if I had such a thing.
Check out TalkDigger

Mash Things Up a Bit More: 2 Great Video Tutorials on Using RSS Feeds
If you were to take all the information you’re interested in and mash it up together and then sort it so the most important and relevant stuff popped to the top, wouldn’t that save you a ton of time? Wouldn’t that be cool? That’s what a feed mash-up can do for you and all you need is a good feed masher. There are a number of feed mashers out there, but I recently ran across an RSS tutorial over at John Jantsch’s blog that covers the how, but also suggests a site I hadn’t seen called mySyndicaat. I’m still having a go at mashing my favorite feeds and comparing all these tools, but so far mySyndicaat definitely seems worth checking out.

Alternatively, Jack Humphrey posted a great tutorial on another great feed manager called BlogRovr which you may find very useful. So far, this one is duking it out with AideRSS above for my favorite, but they do slightly different things and I can see using both of them.

Check out the tutorial at John Jantsch’s blog.
Check out the tutorial at Jack’s Friday Traffic Report
Check out mySyndicaat
Check out BlogRovr

Have fun finding yourself and others and have a great weekend! (Holy mackerel, I used an exclamation mark. What on earth was I thinking? . . . was that wise? Hmmm, we shall see.) [dang, WordPress won't accept my interrobang . . . argh.]

-Zack

A great blog, or web site, should stir great conversation. And really good conversation includes lots of ideas flying back and forth among participants about your subject. We want really good conversations on our blogs because if people are hashing out great ideas on our site, this will attract others who are also interested in that conversation.

So how can you encourage lots of great conversations? One way is to make it easier for people to join the conversation and another is to reward the folks who do take their precious time to hang out and “chew the fat” on your blog.

I’ve chosen just a few key plugins to help you get started. This is by no means comprehensive and if you want the BEST listing of comment related plugins I’ve ever found, (it’s overwhelming and that’s why I chose just a few here) check the end of this post . . .

Make It Easier with Good Settings

1. Get your WordPress Sorted
First, before you even worry about a plugin, make sure your WordPress settings are letting people comment without too much trouble. (I’ll mention my spam fighting methods later.)

Make sure that under Options > Discussion your settings allow commenting without moderation after the first comment by that author is moderated. Here’s how I have mine setup:

2. Make Comments Easier to Read

Nested comments can be very useful for quickly seeing who’s saying what about what. Try this plugin for threaded comments by Brian Meidell. I’m experimenting with it right now. Some people like threaded comments and some don’t. Check it out and see if it suits you.

Reward Comments with REAL Link Love

3. The Do Follow / No Follow Thingamabob

Next, if you haven’t noticed lately, there are a ton of these (or similar) icons showing up in comment sections everywhere. [I borrowed that image from randaclay.com]

In 2005 Google instituted the nofollow policy for comments and basically any link that anyone other than the author places on a site is not followed and indexed by the search engines. This means that even though you might leave your site address in your comment, if the blog, or site you’re on doesn’t reverse the nofollow policy, the major search engines will not follow your link and you will get no page-rank, or back-link credit for your post. This was done to combat spam, but it seems to have mostly combated great conversations on blogs, based on my research.

So I have decided to turn off nofollow on my blog until further notice and this means that when you comment here, you’ll get search engine credit for it. I encourage you to do the same. Obviously we don’t want to reward spammy comments and interestingly enough some of the bigger bloggers in the sphere haven’t really weighed in on this. For instance at problogger.net, all comments are still nofollow encoded (as far as I can tell. Please correct me if you note otherwise!). Check the sites you comment on and see if they use nofollow or not. I have the Search Status plugin for Firefox installed and it does this and much more for you.

Right now I’m using Dofollow by Semiologic. It’s very simple and just turns off the nofollow deal in WordPress. However, if you want to make certain only real humans who like your blog are commenting, try Lucia’s Linky Love plugin. It offers a lot of flexibility in configuring nofollow as it allows you to set the number of posts required before nofollow is removed from a commenter’s comments. This encourages only real people who are interested enough to return to your blog to comment and discourages drive-by commenters. It also has quite a few other settings and is my second choice for now because, the only caveat, it does put one more barrier between the commenter and the comment. Since this is a post about making it easier for folks to comment . . . I’ll let you know how Dofollow goes though if there’s a problem.

There are quite a few plugins out there already for disabling nofollow and Andrew Beard has already gone and done us all a huge favor by posting them here: ULTIMATE LIST OF DOFOLLOW & NOFOLLOW PLUGINS – BANISH NOFOLLOW FROM COMMENTS AND TRACKBACKS Take your pick!

UPDATE: I had some trouble with the semiologic plugin not working and I’m so swamped right now I don’t have time to troubleshoot it. So, I found this excellent alternative called DoFollow 4.0 that has some great options inlcuded by Kimmo Suominen (kiitoksia paljon!) and it worked perfectly right off the bat. Definitely check it out!

4. Commenter’s Most Recent Blog Post

Here’s a great way to help your fellow bloggers and yourself. I found out about this over at Suzanne’s blog and absolutely love this idea. Use this plugin by Andy Bailey to add a commenter’s most recent blog post title and link at the bottom of the comment. I love this idea as it really encourages even more interaction among our blogs. And it’s a great way to reward loyal commenters.

BONUS Idea # 5 (wow cool, I can turn too much typing into a bonus! see how I did that? )

5. Email Responses to Comments

Finally, place the option for commenters to tick the box if they want to be emailed about any responses to their comments. This is wonderful way to invite your readers to return to the conversation again and again. Often I can’t remember where that blog was, or which post I commented on and this is handy way to deliver that link and save time and effort for all.

I use the plugin Subscribe to Comments by Scriptygoddess and now managed by Mark Jaquith.

OK, this post is never going to end. There are more things I want to suggest and more plugins you can use to enhance your blog’s conversation power, but it will have to wait. I’ll do a whole series on conversation power, in fact. Yeah, that’s it, what a great idea! Or maybe someone else can join in. Maybe you already have! Got ideas for generating and sustaining great conversations on your blog? Share ‘em! Let’s create a great resource.

I’ll also do a complete list of my plugins soon as well and maybe that will be of interest and use to you. If you have any questions at all about this stuff, please leave a comment and I’ll do my best to answer . ..

until next time . . .

PS – Here’s that link I promised to a vast treasure trove of comment plugin goodness over at Lorelle on Wordpress.

I found a great site courtesy of my friend, Daniel, that gives you free, step-by-step tutorial videos for blog building, web development, internet marketing strategies and tips and legal issues for content producers and marketers.

My favorite tutorial right now is the 7 Must Have Killer WordPress Plugins

If you can’t figure something out, check here first. Really well done, these.

Internet Marketing Videos from Tubetorial

In my last post I mentioned the importance of having hosting that never fails you. I also mentioned that even though you may have set yourself up with fantastic hosting, even with one of my recommended hosting companies (Liquid Web for ultimate dedicated and premier shared hosting, and Hostican for lower-priced and huge storage, but still very reliable shared hosting) you still might have your WordPress blog die a sudden death when all those curious Diggers, or Stumblers hit your page because you didn’t know how to prepare for that kind of traffic.

And finally I mentioned a great resource for prepping your blog for massive traffic. There’s nothing that sucks more than finally getting everyone to come see what you’re on about and having the door suddenly slam in their face. Ouch!

Only thing is, that resource I mentioned is pretty technically challenging for all but the more geeky of us and so I was still looking for something a little easier to use.

So imagine how thrilled I was to discover this fantastic plug-in that caches your WordPress blog for you and speeds it up dramatically when heavy traffic comes to call . . . Great! Yes, there may be a little bit of configuring to do, but usually all you have to do is upload and activate.

I’m referring to the marvelous WP Super Cache created by Donncha O Caoimh. If you haven’t installed it yet, what are you waiting for!

Check it out here: http://ocaoimh.ie/wp-super-cache/

All the best,

-Zack

PS- in case you’re wondering, yes indeed, I’m experimenting with a couple different themes right now and working on a custom one. Don’t wig out though when the appearance changes around a bit. This is an experimental blog where I test all these crazy new ideas and software tools and report back to you on it–so expect lots of change! More about that later . . .