Are people looking for Blog Designers?

Posted by Colin Clark on Sep 30th, 2009 | Comments home title

In a word… yes.

Recently I’ve found that I’m getting some relatively significant traffic on my blog/website for the search term “blog designer Bloomington, IN”

What this tells me is that people are thinking about the web differently. Increasingly, websites are able to strip down their page content in favor of blogging. Companies and organizations are starting to realize that there are some real advantages to blogging.

Blogs are a lot easier to update than traditional websites. Just post a few paragraphs and you’re done.
Blogs are easier to organize. With search, categories, and tags, it’s very easy for visitors to find what they want in your blog posts.
Google loves blogs. Why hire someone to ‘SEO’ your site when you can just blog a lot and accomplish the same goal.
Blogs cool and new.
Blogs allow you to rank for random things in Google searches. This doesn’t have much value for short-term conversions, but the long tail of this is huge. Over a period of months and years, your marketing message can be seen by lots of people who weren’t necessarily looking for you. You’ll likely pick up some business along the way.

Why Would You Want Search Engine Optimization (ronmedlin.com)
Blogging Remains a Great Tool for Small Businesses (myventurepad.com)
Is content really king when it comes to SEO? (browsermedia.co.uk)

‘Dream Girl’ the song I wrote as gift for my wife on our wedding day – Free Download

Posted by Colin Clark on Sep 29th, 2009 | Comments home title

me and my dreamgirl Every once in a while I like to throw a personal element on my blog. As well as being passionate about social media and internet marketing, I am also an active musician who plays in a few different bands.

When my wife and I were married last July, I decided to write a special song for us to dance to for our first dance. It’s called ‘Dream Girl’. It’s kind of a 50’s doo-wop style song that I wrote especially for her because I know she loves that kind of music (I’m a fan of it also).

Most of ‘Dream Girl’ was recorded at my good friend Ryan Beck’s home studio, and live drums and mastering were done at Farm Fresh Studios here in Bloomington. Special thanks to John Marque for his stellar drumming, Jake Belser for doing an amazing job engineering the track, Bill Headley for his great work on the keyboards, and especially to Mr. Beck for all of his help putting the whole package together.

Here’s the track in .zip format for free download. Just download the file and double click to ‘unzip’ it to listen to in your favorite player. It’s around 5 megs, so it will take a minute, but feel free to burn it to CD, share it with friends, or add it to your iTunes mix for your next party

Click to Download Dreamgirl by Colin Clark and the MWMC

Click to Listen first before you Download

Camino – A great little browser for Mac.

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

camino

Regular readers of this blog know that I am notoriously disloyal when it comes to web browsers. I’ve used all the most popular browsers, and I can honestly say that no one browser has it all, though Chrome and Firefox definitely come out as my favorites.

On Saturday I decided, based on a few articles that I’ve read recently to give Camino a chance. Camino is made by Mozilla (makers of Firefox), but it’s designed to be a stripped down, leaner version of the web browser. It’s also important to note that Camino is only available for Macs.

The main reason I decided to give it a try is that I’d seen a few posts saying that it could be considered a Mac alternative to Chrome (which is PC only). I wouldn’t go that far. Camino is exceedingly simple and cool, but it’s definitely not as slick or fast as Chrome.

With that said, Camino is definitely very nice and I’ll definitely be getting a lot of use out of it until Chrome is released for Mac. It’s pretty fast, very simple, no-frills, and it does a great job of displaying web pages (important in a web browser ).

Just an update on other browsers… I still rarely use Safari, and I never use Internet Explorer. Suck it, Microsoft!

42 Useful Portable Apps For Mac (maketecheasier.com)
While We Wait For Chrome For Mac, Mozilla’s Camino Gets An Update (techcrunch.com)
Chrome For Mac “Coming Along Fine” (techcrunch.com)

Google Maps – “Why arent more people using these features, I mean come on!”

Posted by Colin Clark on Sep 24th, 2009 | Comments home title

Rob Doty playing guitar on the porch

So my best buddy Rob Doty did something pretty cool with Google Maps today that made us say, “Why aren’t more people using these features, I mean COME ON!”

Last weekend Rob Doty, myself, and a bunch of other friend’s hopped in a full-sized Ford conversion van and drove up to Montague, Michigan for the wedding of our good friends Nate and Teresa. We had a killer time and took lots of pictures with our iPhones which we uploaded to Facebook in real time.

I thought we were pretty high-tech with our killer web 2.0 mini-vacation, but Rob Doty took it a step farther.

Rob used the ‘My Maps feature in Google Maps and plotted out every place we went on our trip with a short description of what we did there. He also shared the map with the rest of us so that we can all edit the map with our own additions.

This is way better than keeping a vacation journal or photo album. We’ve got the spacial context of the map showing all the places we went. We all help to tell the story. Best of all, we can always look back and remember the awesome time we had.

View Our Michigan Adventure in a larger map

I just installed Disqus for comments.

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

disqus_125 A few weeks ago I installed the Intense Debate wordpress plugin to help me manage comments here on the Tribeswell blog. Kevin Hood mentioned that he was using the plugin as well, though he also mentioned that he had better luck with its rival Disqus.

Well, here’s the bottom line. It seemed to me that Intense Debate wasn’t very much of an improvement over the standard comment functionality in wordpress.

I’ve decided to give Disqus a try. I’ll be honest, it didn’t seem particularly easy to install. It was a little unclear, however it’s up and running now. I’ll let everyone know how it’s working and if anyone else has problems installing, sent me a message in the comments and I’d be happy to help you figure it out.

What to do with comments (benway.net)
Manage Your Blog Comments With Intense Debate (bloggingot.com)
You’ve Got Comments in My Search Results! (lijit.com)
Disqus – Why 95% Of Bloggers Should Switch (andybeard.eu)

How big is your online sphere of influence?

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

I’ve engaged in numerous conversations about the importance of online visibility, but in a lot of ways a more important conversation is how big your circle of influence is online.

How much influence does Google have on your target customers? If you have an obscure solution to an obscure problem (a good business to be in), then Google should be your best friend. If you win several similar searches when your prospect types in your problem, they will naturally assume you have a lot of authority and therefore a lot of influence.

How important is social influence? Do you have lots of links out there on social sites? Are people engaging with your content. I personally use social bookmarking sites for finding cool stuff online. Pages that have lots of votes influence me much more than sites with few votes.

What about influence in your community? A lot of my business comes from being active in the local Bloomington business community. How can you utilize online tools to improve your influence in your community? Great strategies include having other professionals do guest posts on your blog, using your site to help promote local events, and talking up referral partners.

5 Best Uses for Your Keywords (craig-edmonds.com)
Google News Goes Offline (But World Keeps Spinning) (paidcontent.org)
YouTube is Now a Social Bookmarking Site (googlingsocial.com)
Yahoo enhances and broadens access to Search Pad tool (macworld.com)

Designing and Building Websites that Play Well with Social Media

Posted by Colin Clark on Sep 22nd, 2009 | Comments home title

Every once in a while I like to surf the web to just observe what people are doing in the web design space. Blogs like Smashing Magazine and Six Revisions are also great resources for web design insights.

I hope it’s obvious that I’m a big believer that your website should work hand-in-hand with your site. I’ve come up with a short list of tips for designers and anyone who’s looking to modernize their website.

Blog. The only way that you can really update your website a lot (good for search) is to have a blog. The other side to this leads me to tip #2…
Leverage RSS. When you post blog posts (make sure you use a good RSS tracker like Feedburner), you’re able to shoot your content out to literally thousands of outlets across the web.
Be a pro on a few social media services. I use Twitter, Facebook, Smaller Indiana, and a handful of other social media services to connect with partners, prospects, friends, and also just to be more productive. It’s important to make it easy for people to connect with you on the services you use the most.

Checking in: How do you get your news? (liveside.net)
Top 5 Business Blogging Mistakes and How to Avoid Them (mashable.com)
Using Social Media to market your Home Jobs (kiaso.wordpress.com)

If I unfollowed you on Twitter, please don’t be offended.

Posted by Colin Clark on Sep 22nd, 2009 | Comments home title

I wanted to fill all my followers in on a little project I’m undertaking on Twitter. I’m going through all the people I follow and eliminating those who aren’t relevant to my life and business. This is a big job.

So who will I be unfollowing?

Anyone related to affiliate marketing, network marketing, MLM, etc. I’m not currently interested in these programs, and even if I were, I wouldn’t use Twitter to find opportunities, I’d ask people I know.
Anyone affiliated with the pornography industry. This isn’t that much of an issue since I blocked a lot of these unsavory characters as I built my following, but I’ve found a few that I missed.
I’m also unfollowing any social media consultants that look like spammers, or that don’t seem particularly interesting. Seriously, how many SM consultants to I really need to follow to get the information I need? Not many.
Lots of folks who don’t make sense to follow based on geography, industry, or if they just don’t interest me that much. This is the vast majority of the people I’m unfollowing. There’s no way I can build relationships with these people and they hinder me from using twitter effectively.

What am I hoping to get out of this? / Why am I doning this?

I bet there are lots of great people who I’m following that I don’t even know about because of the massive overflow of people I follow. I’ve already found a few, and I know there are many more out there.
I’m trying to live a more minimal, less cluttered life. Following too many people disrupts my ability to focus on the important onine relationships in my life.
I’m following a lot of spam and inactive accounts. This is unnecessary, so I just want to shed some of the weight.

What if I accidentally unfollow someone important?

If you believe I have unfollowed you in error, just send me an @ message and I’ll re-follow you. I want this exercise to make my experience (and the experience for those who I’m following) better, not to offend anyone.

I’ll keep everyone posted on the status of this project. I’m going to try to unfollow around 100 peeps per day, so this is going to be a gradual thing. My hope is to wittle the 4200 people I was following down to about 2000 and see where that leaves me.

Twitter releases a new Terms of Service, might be interesting but we’re not sure yet (inquisitr.com)
Classic (And Evil) Twitter Spam (markevanstech.com)
Facebook Competition, Murray Newlands Fan Page Facebook Competition (costpernews.com)
Twitter’s 20 Most Prolific Spammer Avatars [Pics] (mashable.com)

Sensationalist Headlines Worth it or no? (i.e. how to craft post titles)

Posted by Colin Clark on Sep 17th, 2009 | Comments home title

Since the advent of the printing press there has definitely been a trend towards using sensationalist headlines in newspapers, and more recently in blogs. I see more and more blog post titles that are clearly made to encourage people to click through from Twitter or other social networks. The title of a blog post is important for several reasons. From a search engine optimization standpoint they matter a great deal.

Here are 5 reasons they’re important followed by 5 tips for creating great post titles.

5 Reasons post titles are extremely important to your blog

You want keywords in your URL. If you’re smart, you’ve already optimized your blog so that your keywords automatically end up in your permalinks (URL). The next step is to make sure that your keywords end up as titles.
Post titles often end up as H1 or H2 tags. H1 and H2 carry more weight than the paragraph <p> text on your site. You want keywords here. Search engines don’t get humor or sensationalist remarks.
You want your site to work well with social. If you’re smart, you’ve already optimized your website so that your blog articles automatically feed to a variety of feeds and social networks. You want people to click on these, but if they click an exaggerated headline and feel that you’ve misled them, you lose trust. Not cool.
What if someone looks through your archives. How would you feel if you looked through some-one’s blog archives and saw title after title that was just sensationalist fluff. Not too impressive, eh?
It’s not cool to inflate expectations. See yesterday’s post about being cool online.

5 Tips for crafting excellent post titles

Know your keywords. Make a list of them and look at them often. Use them in your post titles whenever it’s prudent.
Think about what types of things you type into search engines. Most people have a certain style they use when they’re searching for information. Try to write post titles like you would type a search into google (if that makes sense).
Be creative. Try mixing your keywords with some humor. Out in the social media space, you’re still going to want to have attractive titles or no one will click on your links.
Re-read your title before you hit ‘publish’. Have you ever written a post title, then written the post and found that the post content had veered in a different direction from the content. Make sure they match before you hit ‘publish’.
Work smart not hard. There are tons of plugins that make Search Engine and Social Media optimization a snap if you blog regularly. There already lots of blog posts that tell you how to optimize if you don’t already know how.

Blogging Remains a Great Tool for Small Businesses (myventurepad.com)
You: SEO & Social Media Readiness: 6 Questions to Evaluate Your Agency | Brian Solis: Social Media Expert – PR 2.0 (briansolis.com)
Microsoft and SEO Optimization (arnoldit.com)

Finally – The new Tribeswell logo

Posted by Colin Clark on Sep 16th, 2009 | Comments home title

It’s been a long time coming, but I finally got a sweet logo put up on my website. Mad props to Jill Harding from Boundless Design for her amazing logo design skills. What do you guys think?