Holy Crap! AT&T has brought 3G to Bloomington

Posted by Colin Clark on Aug 31st, 2009 | Comments home title

Well folks, it’s been a long (and I mean long!) wait, but I’ve just received confirmation that AT&T customers in the Bloomington, Indiana region are now blessed with the gift of 3G service.

This means that my iPhone will finally perform as it was intended to in my home city. Thank goodness.

AT&T, I thank you sincerely.

SproutBox Offers Entrepreneurs a New Form of Venture Capital (mashable.com)

2 Wordpress Plugins I just added to my blog site. Yay or Nay?

Posted by Colin Clark on Aug 28th, 2009 | Comments home title

Those who have been following my transition from my old blog (indyawesome.com), which is no longer active, to this new format, will know that it has really been a work in progress. One of the things I wanted to do is to not just copy all my old favorite plugins and settings from indyawesome to this new site.

I decided to add a few plugins recently that I think are really great additions to any site that strives to be socially functional. Plugins are a great way to set your site apart from others, but in the case of these two, I’m really following the lead of other bloggers that I respect (namely Kyle Lacy, Doug Karr, Kevin Hood, and Mashable to all of whom I throw mad props).

Intense Debate – Comments on steroids

I’ve been looking at this plugin for a while now. It basically adds some cool functionality to the comments area of each blog post. Its competitor, Disqus, is also cool (it’s what Mashable uses), but I chose Intense debate, because a lot of other local bloggers here in indiana are using it (Doug, Kyle, and Kevin all use it so it must be good).

TweetMeme Button

I’ve seen this plugin in action on Mashable and Kyle’s blog. It’s the button that allows you to easily retweet a blog post, and it also has a counter to tell people how popular the post has been already.

I know it’s not life changing, but it’s cool.

Does anyone have any other plugin recommendations?

Disqus V3 Launches: Publishers and Commenters Get Their Own Services (mashable.com)
You’ve Got Comments in My Search Results! (lijit.com)
Disqus Forks Into Two Products, Launches Revamped Real-Time Comment System (techcrunch.com)
Does social media need to be personal? | Corporate blogging news digest (socialmediatoday.com)

How often should I blog? How do I do it?

Posted by Colin Clark on Aug 28th, 2009 | Comments home title

It’s been a pretty fast-paced week in Tribeswell-land, and my blogging has suffered. This is only my second post for the week. I’m don’t stress about this, because my hope is that the people who really appreciate what I write will miss me (hopefully) and enjoy my posts even more.

This lack of production gets me thinking about the #1 question that my clients ask me about blogging…

How often should I blog?

The interesting thing about starting something new is that often you don’t know the right questions to ask. Better questions are, What should I blog about? Who will read it? How will I find new topics that are relevant to my audience?

So how often should you blog? It really all depends. If you are blogging so that you will win lots of Google searches, I would say that you absolutely cannot blog enough. I would get a minimum of 5 people in my organization blogging and I would have them post new material at least once daily.

Let’s say you’re blogging for your existing customers to give them relevant information that applies to their world. In this case (if you’re actually successful in getting them to buy into this), I would blog no more than once a week, especially if they’re getting alerts via email. As you can imagine, I don’t recommend this as a primary strategy for blogging. Often success by this metric is a by-product of another strategy.

My favorite approach is a combination of strategies. I try to get as many links out into the social web (twitter, facebook, etc) so that I can generate immediate traffic, as well as residual search traffic on these sites. Secondarily, I also get more juice from Google with each post I write. This involves blogging as close to daily as possible. Every other day is acceptable.

FriendFeed: Still Great At Social Search (philbaumann.com)
Some Thoughts on Blogging Etiquette (bloggingministry.com)
Managing the Online Reputation of Your Practice (casesblog.blogspot.com)

RSS Subscriptions are more valuable than ever.

Posted by Colin Clark on Aug 27th, 2009 | Comments home title

I was reading an interesting article today on Techcrunch which sounded the death of RSS.

It’s time to get completely off RSS and switch to Twitter. RSS just doesn’t cut it anymore. The River of News has become the East River of news, which means it’s not worth swimming in if you get my drift.

I haven’t been in Google Reader for months. Google Reader is the dominant RSS reader. I’ve done the math: Twitter 365 Google Reader 0. All my RSS feeds are in Google Reader. I don’t go there any more. Since all my feeds are in Google Reader and I don’t go there, I don’t use RSS anymore.

I still get at least half of my information from my RSS reader, although I definitely end up clicking on lots of articles from Twitter. Here’s my point though…

The fact that RSS is becoming less widespread means that your loyal RSS readers really want what you have. There might be fewer subscribers, but the value of each subscriber increases substantially.

The same is true of comments. Often I’ll tweet a link and get more comments on twitter than I do here on the site. I’ve noticed that there are fewer comments on lots of the blogs that I go to. Where you used to see 20-40 comments on a post, now you might only see 10.

It takes more effort to leave a thoughtful comment on a blog than it does to leave a 140 character Tweet. Comments are more scarce, and therefore more valuable.

Rest in Peace, RSS (Steve Gillmor/TechCrunchIT) (techmeme.com)
RSS Is Not Dead, It Has A Usability Problem (regulargeek.com)
Twitter and RSS – Peas in a Pod (saunderslog.com)
RSS, Human Filters And Real Time Streams (regulargeek.com)

Is there anything wrong with using Godaddy?

Posted by Colin Clark on Aug 23rd, 2009 | Comments home title

I’ve been using Godday for all my domain management and most of my (and my clients) hosting needs. Often when I talk to other web professionals they bring up all kinds of other hosting solutions that they believe are supperior for one reason or another. Here are the main reasons why I really like using Godaddy.

Support – Whenever I’m approached by some boutique hosting comany, they always give out the benefit that they have great support. Here’s the thing, whenever I relent to using one of these services I end up NEEDING to call support to get everything going. With Godaddy, I can still get through to a customer service rep if there is a problem (usually in under 5 minutes), but the biggest benefit is that I rarely need to use their customer service line because things typically work the way they’re supposed to.
Price – Godaddy is cheap! Hosting for under 5 bucks a month. You can’t beat that.
My clients get their own account. I’m not in the hosting business. I give my clients control over their godaddy info.

Now this isn’t to say that everything with godaddy is all smiles and roses. Here are my top pet peaves about the service that I’ve chosen to live with, but I still complain about them from time to time.

I hate their website! Seriously, if anyone from Godaddy reads this PLEASE FIX YOUR SITE. It’s so hard to find anything that you don’t do regularly. I know I’m not alone on this one.
They’re so slow! Way does it take so long to set up new mySQL databases and new hosting accounts. Not cool. I’ve used cPanel systems that generate new databases instantly. What’s the deal?
I’m going to repeat #1. I must have wasted hours looking for random controls that I don’t use that often. It’s rediculous that I should have to call support for something that I should be able to figure out on my own just because their website is laid out poorly.

Web Hosting (thindependence.com)
How to perform multi-account functions in WHM (5min.com)
GoDaddy Doesn’t Outsource Customer Service [Follow Ups] (consumerist.com)
Go Daddy! Domain Name Site Turns to Sex Appeal (abcnews.go.com)

If you’re spamming me on Twitter, please stop.

Posted by Colin Clark on Aug 20th, 2009 | Comments home title

The biggest problem with any site that attracts lots of attention is the possibility that spammers will infiltrate the network. This problem is compounded by sites that have open api’s like Twitter (that means anyone can write applications to run with their system)

Lately I’ve be getting lots of @ messages offering me affiliate stuff. I’m not above participating in an affiliate program if it’s going to benefit me, my viewers, my clients, and the affiliates, but I definitely don’t want to be spammed by them.

Is anyone else having this problem? If you’re the one doing the spamming, please stop. Do what you will, but please don’t ruin Twitter for the rest of us.

BeTweeted: Another Ad Solution For Twitter (blogherald.com)
Twitter Spam Invades Trending Topics (mashable.com)
Twitter Doing Some Housecleaning (thetechscoop.net)
On Twitter, Most People Are Sheep: 80 Percent Of Accounts Have Fewer Than 10 Followers (sp4ngle.com)

Doug Karr vs. Jason Falls – Awesome!

Posted by Colin Clark on Aug 19th, 2009 | Comments home title

I just left this super-long comment on a post at Doug Karr’s blog, so I thought I’d just include it as a post on my blog as well. ;)

Great post Doug. I’ve been thinking about this issue for a long time now. In fact I wrote a post the other day about the relationship between social and search importance.

I wasn’t at blog Indiana, so I have no frame of reference for this particular conversation. I think search visibility is really really important. My thought is that there are 3 critical factors in gaining search visibility, as it relates to blogging.

The first is content. When my blog got to over 100 posts I started winning lots of searches for various terms. I can only image how many searches you would win with over a thousand!

The second is internal optimization. I think it’s extremely important to make sure that your URL permalinks, title tags, header tags, and overall content contain your keywords so that your posts can be found on Google. I find that this is pretty easy to do if you understand the basic fundamentals.

The third most important factor is links, and I have to believe that building your brand on social media sites is by FAR the easiest way to get people to link to you.

So do I agree with Jason? Yes and no.

It makes no sense to me to completely ignore the internal optimization of your site. Why WOULDN’T you want Google to find you?!

But, I do think that it makes a lot more sense to focus more energy on your social presence, gaining respect from fellow bloggers, gaining authority through links, which by-the-way will help your search optimization in the long run.

What gets me upset is when people act like the only reason you should blog is to win searches. I just have to believe that it is SO important to put a heavy focus on your social strategy. If you blog a lot using your keywords you’re going to win lots of searches anyway.

Now, is Ghostblogging a noble profession? Sure! Is is scalable? No, not unless you’re managing a ghostblogging agency. If you’re the blogger, you can only do so much work and therefore you can only make so much money.

Learn Facebook Page SEO Mastery In 7 Easy Steps (allfacebook.com)
How To Get More Traffic To Your Blog (howtospoter.com)
SEO tips: anchored backlinks (aaronchua.com)
Article Directories A Great SEO Tool For Blog Promotion (wassupblog.com)

5 Easy ways to grow your business.

Posted by Colin Clark on Aug 18th, 2009 | Comments home title

Think about ways you can ADD value to your customer’s experience with your company and raise prices.
Find complementary products that match your product offering that you can sell with what you’re currently selling.
Buy a competitor.
Spend more on smart marketing. Instead of spending more money, try spending more time. Create more web content. Make friends on social networks. Go to local networking events in your area.
Find a new market, a new customer base, a new geographic region, or a new demographic that you (and your competitors) haven’t thought of before.

Business Tips: More Things You Will Not Learn in Business School (womensblog.score.org)
The Benefits of Article Marketing (wealthyways4you.com)
Dos and Don’ts of Email Marketing (craig-edmonds.com)

The Biggest Advantage Social has over Search. Will Google’s Caffeine bridge the gap?

Posted by Colin Clark on Aug 14th, 2009 | Comments home title

Sometimes several inspirations hit me all at once based on the influences in my life that lead to some pretty interesting insights.

socialvssearch

I’m listening to Jeff Jarvis’s “What Would Google Do?” (book on CD) and he outlines a pretty interesting advantage that Social-focused information sharing has over a search engine.

When something new comes out on the web, a Google has to take the time to index the new information. Then, it has to rank that information based on its algorithm which involves other content on the site, pagerank, backlinks, and a host of other factors.

Now, to be fair, Google is extremely good at doing this quickly and efficiently, however, it is not currently (heck it might never be) as good at picking great content as humans.

If a big catastrophy happens it can spread on Facebook and Twitter to almost everyone in the online world within a matter of minutes. Will a search engine ever be able to do that? How would that even work? Not all content is search-dependent. Some things are just important and get talked about.

So, I was stirring with ideas about this and my good friend TJ Furman asks me last night if I’ve tried the new Google Caffeine update yet. I hadn’t heard about it, so I did some research this morning.

Caffeine is a significant upgrade to Google’s algorithm that allows it to index pages faseter and organize information better (although Google exec Matt Cutts admits that most users won’t notice a difference). Upgrades like Caffeine (and any future upgrades) will allow Google to approach the speed of Social information. But can it ever catch it?

Right now if I want to know what’s happening, in real time, at an event (like BlogIndiana which is going on right now) I can type the (#)hashtag into a Twitter client (like TwitterFall) and get up-to-the minute information about what’s happening there.

Search engines are simply not set up to work like that.

These critical differences are precisely why it is so important to have a Social communication strategy. Yes, search visibility is extremely important, but Social sites work in the opposite direction of search engines.

As I say all the time, if you follow a few easy blogging guidelines, you will win searches. It’s time to start thinking socially.

Google reveals new speedier search engine (telegraph.co.uk)
[Book Review] What Would Google Do? (andreavascellari.com)
Google RSS Reader finally allows social bookmarking (sociallyminded.co.uk)
Google gets caffeine injection as search speeds up (guardian.co.uk)

Is search traffic the only reason to blog? Really?

Posted by Colin Clark on Aug 12th, 2009 | Comments home title

customer-loyalty-200 I’ve written about this before… probably a few times actually. What should you be focusing on as your primary metric of success with your blogging strategy? Let me start with a simple question.

Is it better to focus on the quick and easy or the slow, meaningful big picture?

What does it mean when a customer finds you as a result of finding you via a search engine?

That customer has little or no brand loyalty to you or your competitors in your industry.
Your new customer is impressionable. From this point on your website appearance, checkout and fulfilment process, and customer service can either be your worst enemy or they can make very little impression at all. Referral experts will tell you that it is extremely difficult to create brand evangelists as a result of good customer experience. To make a real impression the service has to be exceptional. This is expensive. Most companies can’t afford it and it’s not exactly what I would call a scalable strategy.

I propose an alternative strategy.

A more scalable approach is to make exceptional PRODUCTS which are much better at creating customer evangelists. Think Seth Godin’s Purple Cow.
Create a blogging strategy that focuses on reaching out to thought leaders in your market. Make them pay attention to you and get some buzz going. Follow them on social networks. Comment on their blog posts and share their links on Twitter and Facebook.
Blog regularly and encourage current customers to interact with you online, leave comments, and subscribe to your RSS feed so that you can continue building a relationship with you (that’s what some experts call building your brand).
Blog ABOUT your best customers. Tell their stories. They’ll each tell 10 friends how cool you are.

Here’s the best part…

If you do all this you’ll win searches anyway!!!

So quit worrying about those people finding you via search and start building a brand that’s going to last beyond that first sale. Am I right?