Archive for 'September, 2007'

Web Worker Daily has a nice article How to Get Attention for Your Web Site. Give it a read – it will give you some good ideas. Often I read things on Web Worker Daily that are great ideas, and I always seem to wish their post had more meat to it. I’m dig a little deeper and give you real action points to drive real targeted traffic to your web site or blog and make it stronger than ever!

They touch on seven points:

1. “Invent a meme, then write a book on that meme.”
2. “Becoming famous for something is going to be your answer,”
3. Target women.
4. “Community is integral.”
5. “Be accurate.”
6. Provide information people can’t find easily on Yahoo or Google.
7. Get locked into a person’s “ritual.”

I’m going to tackle these one by one – so pay attention! I call this “7 Steps to a Waterfall of Traffic” because I think of it as a fire hydrant on the corner and you have the wrench. It’s your job to slowly use that wrench to turn on the water. It would be a lot of work – but with consistent effort you could probably turn that thing on little by little, and water would come out….a little at first, then a little more, then quite a bit, and eventually you’d have a river flowing in the street. These seven steps – when followed consistently and worked well, WILL turn your fire hydrant on and then on a river of traffic for you!

1. “Invent a meme, then write a book on that meme.” Ok this may seem redundant, but for those that don’t know here is a definition of a meme: “unit of imitation, catch phrase, fashion, ways of doing something, etc.”. “You might be a redneck if…” jokes are a PERFECT example of a meme. So are the recent wave of Chuck Norris jokes the last few years, and that’s a great example of actually taking a meme and doing something with it. Having a meme no one looks at as the same as a site with no traffic. If you invent a meme, it’s sole purpose should be to virally put your site on the map! Another way I think this should be described is to make sure your site has as targeted theme. Let me revise that – a highly targeted theme. And within that theme or niche – develop a meme.

You still may be confused. The meme is NOT your site theme or niche (usually, although it could be). To me, normally your site is on a topic and your meme is something that makes it unique (repeately). My best example is I Can Has Cheezburger. This site is HUGELY popular now and has been featured on many national television programs. The site posts funny animal pictures, and the meme is the funny mispelled captions. You could have a travel site with a section where people submit their “vacation gone wrong” pics, or a bunch of blogging sites could all collectively post “top 5 web sites I read every day”. Use a meme….imitation – repeatable…make it viral, turn it into traffic!

2. “Becoming famous for something is going to be your answer”. Basically this is the old “do one thing and do it well” rule. Many people have become incredibly wealthy by doing this online. Like the 17 year old girl who makes $70,000 per month, along with many others. When I listen to the radio I hear guys call in that own DVD Review or Music Review sites sometimes that they’ve built in their basement that have become their full time job. They focused on one thing and worked and worked and worked until it paid off. Look at Jump the Shark, which was another site “made in the basement” by one man for several years, and then TV Guide bought it from him for several million dollars.

3. Target women.. I think this point is wrong. It should say “target a specific demographic”. Don’t get me wrong – targeting women is a great idea. There are so many areas you could break into, from accessories, to jewelry, social issues, salary, jobs, kids, family, sex, relationships, and on and on and on. But the same could be said if you targeted teens, seniors, asians, Oklahomans, or NFL fans. A specific demographic will probably be visiting your site – find out who they are and cater to them.

4. “Community is integral.” This point is one of the most important, and the one most overlooked. Are you building a community in your web site or blog? How? First your site at least needs to be interactive and allow comments. You also need a contact form. Do you allow voting on posts? Do you reward people in any way for commenting? Do your run polls or contests? Do you allow guest posting? Do you have forums? Do you network with site owners that have the same types of content? Community is building reasons for people to come back other than your content. Someone with enough passion to answers strangers questions in your forum. Someone who want to comment, and then come back to see the replies. Someone who wants to write a guest post for you and then tell others about it. Other sites that will exchange links with your or review your site for the same in return. People who want to see if they won your contest or check out new submissions. Content is KING, but that KING has to live in a Community!.

5. “Be accurate.” You can’t overlook this one. When your writing content – verify and check your facts (twice). Think about this this a restaurant. If you have good service and good food – you might tell a few friends or family. But if you had bad service or bad foor your gonna tell everyone you can think of, and then some. As a matter of fact you might go on about it for a week – or months! If you write a great post with great details many will read, and you have a slight chance of having it picked up by digg or reddit or stumbleupon or something. But – if you write a bad post with glaringly wrong details – people are 5x-10x more likely to complain and forward it on. Who wants create a “negative buzz” and have people saying “can you believe what this idiot said”? For your own sake, get it right the first time.

6. Provide information people can’t find easily on Yahoo or Google. This a great idea, but maybe it could be stated differently. Think of it this way…did you ever need to figure out how to do something and you had to search, and search, and search on google to figure it out? You should immediantly write a great post or article about it so YOU become the expert on it, and then people searching for it (if you do the right SEO) will find you and not waste hours (like you did). You could also hone in on searches where people have to gather lots of into from various places. Make a “roundup post” chock full of all the info you could find on something. About.com has become very successful doing just this very thing on a zillion topics. You may have recently seen posts on WordPress topics over at Mashable.com, like this one: 50 WordPress plugins for Multimedia. I would have to spend a couple hours on google to get that targeted info, so that mashable pages gets VERY HIGH RATES of bookmarks and social site referrals. If you provide information that saves people time – you will not only get lots of bookmarks and social traffic, but if you stucture your post properly you will also dominate the search result pages.

7. Get locked into a person’s “ritual.” This one takes a little thinking, and actually is kind of part of some of the previous points. You want to have your site content in some way become part of a person’s online daily routine. For example, every day I visit bloglines.com. Everyday I visit eBay and my local daily newspaper’s online site. Have some kind of content that keeps people not only coming back, but often and routinely. That could be a contest, a “top 10 list” updated daily, “deal of the day”, “free code of the day”, “joke of the day”…you get it. Now if you can this into your community building efforts, make it a meme, AND something people can’t find on good – well, all the better!

I hope this helps you bring more people to your site and make it stronger than ever! Please if you have ideas that would help others, or want to add something to one of these points – please let us all know and leave your comment now!

Do you have a slow or sluggish web site or blog? I’m going to give you 5 things you should check that can help quite a bit. Also – I’ll have a few tips specifically for WordPress sites.

In my previous post about importing large mySQL databases I showed you how to use the command line to import to get big data dumps in a fresh database. In that particular situation I was moving from one web host to another. But sometimes you might have a different reason for wanting to move a web site to a new database.

I’ve had web sites before that seemed to get slower over time. There are a number of factors that could be causing this. If you notice your web site taking longer to load, becoming sluggish, or even producing random errors (like ‘mySQL server went away’), there are some things you should investigate.

Here’s a list of things to think about:

1. Are you getting more traffic? Check your stats for your site and see if you’ve had a sudden spike in traffic. If you are where is it coming from? Is it coming from a particular article or page? Is it from just one referrer or many? Is a robot or crawler hitting your site too much?
2. Do you have too many external calls? When your site loads in a brower, watch the bottom status bar to see (while it loads) where it’s hanging up and waiting for data to come back. Do you have items from Amazon, eBay, other affiliate sites, chiclets, technorati tags, mybloglog data, feedburner calls, or other items that come from outside your site? Try commenting them out one by ond and seeing how much faster your page loads
3. Are your graphics optimized?? Do you have any graphics on your pages that are excessive in size? Are you calling any graphics on remote sites that you could host in your site? Do all you graphics contain a height and width tag?
4. Have you optimized your database? A web site database gets thousands of transactions per day. Think of it like a moving piece of machinery – at one time or another something will break or get clogged up. Every now and again you should login to your web admin control panel and use your myPhpAdmin (or other mySQL tool) to optimize your db. Select all the tables, and then “repair” and “optimize” and watch the results to see what it did. You would be surprised how well this trick might work.
5. Is your web or database server overloaded? This can be a tricky one to figure out. If you don’t have telnet access, you need to call support for your web host and find out what the CPU and memory utilization is for the server you’re on. If it’s really high you may want to request to be moved to a new one. Most companies monitor this, so more than likely it could be your database mySQL server. Your myPHPAdmin tool might already have a tab or tool to bring up the server memory utilization, so you can see how high it is. If it’s not high, find out if your web host has a limit on concurrent connections (some limit to 150 or less) and watch your visitors per hour. Many times though, there are a just a few web sites hogging all the resources on a db server

If you have a WordPress site, I would also additionally check your WP theme and your WP plugins. First – remove any plugins that you aren’t using. Deactivate them and physically delete them from your web server. I read once that even deactivated plugins affect the speed of a site because the WordPress loop checks to see if they are activated or not. If you have plugins you specifically don’t need or use – get rid of them. You want your plugin page in the admin panel to have only plugins that are essential to your blog and they should all be active. If they aren’t – delete them from the server until you need them. Also, check your theme if you don’t write your own. Validate the code at W3C or another site and make sure that there aren’t major errors that are slowing the browser down. Just because you have a nice looking theme, (if you didn’t code it yourself) it doesn’t mean that the coder that made it had the most efficient code. If you have a lot of errors – maybe you should consider reworking it or just plain get another theme.

In my particular instance I thought I had my mySQL database hosted on a server that was too busy. At my host they have multiple database servers and when you create a new one it’s assigned at random. So I created a new fresh database – and of course it was on a different server. Then I exported my web site using myPHPAdmin, and I was going to import it in the fresh database using myPHPAdmin as well. But as it turned out my SQL file was 11MB, and some of the INSERT rows were very, very long. The import failed. But as I mentioned before – it was easy enough to use BigDump large mySQL db database import script for free to do the heavy work for me. In seconds I had a brand new copy of my site on another database server. So I changed my config file, and was up and running on another server quickly. In my situation this new server seemed to perform a bit better than the old one.

If you’ve experienced your web site or blog (especially WordPress) getting slow, bogged down, or getting random errors – try my list above first. If you’ve found your own solution, or experienced a problem that you can’t fix – please add it in the comments below now!

So yesterday, when I posted about the Viral Recommendation Carousel, I talked about that idea coming Marco Richter. I commented on his page that I was surprised he didn’t contact anyone about the project – and he commented back that HE TRIED to contact me, but couldn’t find a way on my blog to do that.

You know when they talk about the painter’s house being the one that needs a paint job? I feel like that guy – the one who builds web sites for a living, and doesn’t even remember to put a contact form on his own site!! So first, let me say that even now, after 10 years of creating web sites – I am still making simple blogging mistakes!! I guess that’s why I setup this web site – right? Now you can learn from my mistake…

It doesn’t matter if your blog or web site is for personal or business use, for products, services, jokes, reviews, or pictures of the family dog. Sometime someone will want to contact you for one reason for another. Maybe you have a broken link? Or someone wants permission to use one of your pictures? Maybe a member of the media found your site and wants to put in in a magazine, or better yet – someone wants to exchange links or advertise! If you don’t have a contact form NOW – then don’t delay, get one up today!

This is a WordPress blog, so of course I’m going to tell you what I think is the best way to put up a contact form – it’s the cforms II WordPress Contact Form Plugin I have used MANY contact forms – and this is THE BEST ONE there is available today.

Why?

• cforms II is easy to setup
• It’s flexible
• It can be used to setup as many forms as you want. You can create a simple contact form – or really complicated surveys with it.
• You can have any kind of form field
• It handles attachments
• It has built in Captcha to fight spam

So – don’t make my mistake, get a contact form up now if you already don’t have one. I recommend cforms II. And – if you want to contact me, by all means please use my new contact form! Oh – and Thanks Again Marco! You don’t know it yet, but I’ll be doing you a favor later this week…

So I’m checking my email today, and I get a google alert for “www.jtpratt.com”. In my next post I’ll talk about why and how I do that. I read the email and it had one link to Marco Richter’s Blog. Specifically his post on the Viral Recommendation Carousel. It’s a novel linkbuilding concept. In some ways it’s just a mimic of an old-school snail mail chain letter. But I think it’s more than that…

Remember chain letters? People have been sending those in postal mail for decades. In fact, believe it or not some people still are – I got two in the physical mailbox in the last year. Basically it’s a letter stating you can get rich just by following simple directions. At the end of the page are a list of 5 names and addresses. Usually it tells you to send either $1 or $5 to each person, and then make a copy of the letter. Erase the last persons name, and a new persons name and address on top. Then make 5 copies and mail the letter out to 5 people you know (new ones) with their name on the list as well (or something like that). Basically it’s like a pyramid scheme where if all 5 people send to 5, and then send to 5, and they send to 5 – you’ll get a bunch of money in the mail for free. Most people don’t follow through and you just get a couple bucks in the mail, usually not even enough to cover your time and effort.

Marco’s concept is much the same, you copy his text of what the Viral Recommendation Carousel is, and in the list of recommendations you add a blog your like to the top of the list with a short review (leaving your review intact of course). The “viral” part is the “pass-it-on” effect of the blogosphere. Now that I’ve read this on his site, I’m flattered to have been on the list of blogs he reads, and even though I don’t know him and haven’t come accross his blog before (and didn’t know he read mine), I’m writing about his post and becoming part of this Carousel. Hopefully many of you that read this post on my site will do same and become part of the viral backlink train.

In theory you look at this (like the chain letter) and say – that’s just cheating (for linkbuilding that is)!! But is it? It’s a little different on the web (and the blogosphere). In addition to viral linkbuilding Marco is building community. I didn’t know he or his blog existed, but now I’ve visited his site and read many posts. There are millions of blogs on the web and I only see a few new ones each week. Marco has some good posts on blogging and WordPress – I’ve added his site to the feeds I will read and I left a comment on one page today. He has prompted me indirectly to become part of his “network” or “community”. I’m sure he’ll comment on this post, and I found out through his initial post he’s already a part of my community. Sure this Viral linkbuilding exercise may seem like a chain letter, but it’s “long tail” causes us to look at, review, and become part of new blogs and sites. We will gain new subscribers, visitors, and start new comments and conversations as a result of this exercise.

If you are reading this post now and own a blog – I encourage you to become part of the “Viral Recommendation Carousel” and part of my (and Marco’s) community. Together we can connect and network with all kinds of new bloggers! All you have to do is copy from the red line below to the ending red line, and follow the instructions and paste into your blog. One last thing though…DO NOT be tempted to merely paste this in a post as-is without a lengthy explanation as I’ve done. The last thing you want to do is have the Carousel instructions become the bulk of the text in your post, because google will just label your page as “duplicate content”, and you may lose all the benefits to participating in the first place. Don’t cheat! Write a meaningful post explaining why you are participating and what you think the benefits will be to those that want to participate as well. The better you explain it – the more people will try it, and the more recommendations you will get!

– copy and paste from this line (including the line) —

Why this will work

• It provides value through personal recommendations
• Links to your blog with linktext of your choice
• Backlinks come from within a dedicated content about your blog
• Rotating content will prevent it from penalties from search engines
• It is viral – more participants means greater effect

How it works
Simply follow these few steps to make this one working for you:

• Create a new post on your blog and start it with a few words about how you came into this carousel.
• Copy and paste the entire text between the red lines
• Check if all links are working after copy and paste
• Remove the very last recommendation from the list
• Add a recommendation of a blog you love to the top of the list with at least 2-3 sentences about why you love to read this blog and add a little note, that you recommend this together with a link to your blog. Here is an example:

MarcoRichter.net is a blog, I love to read on a daily basis. It provides latest information about blogging, linkbuilding and blog seo issues. From detailed how-to articles to some ultimate ressource lists, Marco covers a wide variety of information for your daily blogging routine. Recommended by: JTPRATT’s Blogging Mistakes

Blogs I recommend because I love to read them daily:

• shoemoney.com – run by Jeremy Schoemaker a blog about making money online and web marketing tips and tricks. As CEO of ShoeMoney Media Group his claim to (initial) fame is earning over $100,000 in one month from cell phone ringtones. His most recent success story is the creation of “Auction Ads”, and obtaining over 20,000 affiliates in under 6 months – and then selling the company for a huge profit. I believe Jeremy is a web marketing genious, and reading his blog is not only entertaining, but insightful. He is the average person’s Donald Trump, and one to keep a very close watch on the next few years… Recommended by: JTPRATT’s Blogging Mistakes
• canimakebigmoneyonline.com – run by George Manty is the definite ressource when it comes to monetizing your blog. Being more than 2 years on the scene, there are several hundreds of articles on making money online. Take your time to read through them all – it´s worth it. Recommended by: Marco Richter
• bloggingtips.com – More than 10 authors contribute interesting blogging topics to this site. If you want to stay updated on what´s hot in the blogosphere, this blog is a must read. Recommended by: Marco Richter
• bluejar.com – run by Sarah Pacopac does more than blogging topics and goes out to browser relates issues and also provides some design and affiliate marketing information. Recommended by: Marco Richter
• jtpratt.com – run by John Pratt is a quite new blog about blogging mistakes and how to avoid them. John has been running websites for more than 10 years, so he knows about the hard way to learn from mistakes. Recommended by: Marco Richter
• OneMansGoal.com – run by Bryan Clark is a good stop for bloggers wanting to learn more about generating visitors for their own blogs. He adds some time management topics for those among us looking for optimization of their daily routine. Recommended by: Marco Richter
• topsecretblogger.com – This one is a completely community driven project. Everyone is invited to sign up and write a post on the blog. Many contest will be attracting other bloggers to come in and join the project. I think this will become even more influential in the future, it´s definitely worth taking a closer look. Recommended by: Marco Richter
• probloggersmatrix.com – Mark´s blog is well-established and concentrates on topics about the relationship between bloggers and their readers. His posts are often titled as questions, what helps starting a conversation with the audience. Recommended by: Marco Richter

This carousel has been started by Marco Richter on viral linkbuilding – the basic concept is a slightly adjusted version of Alex Sysoef´s reciprocal review carousel.

– copy and paste up to this line (including the line) —

Please join the Carousel and add your recommendations for favorite blogs and personalities on the web. If you add someone, you should probably let them know so they can join in as well! The blogging mistake here (for me) is not reaching out to other bloggers to join my community sooner!

There are all kinds of stats plugins and services available to track your web or blog. They all do various things well, and I’ve personally used quite a few of them. After installing and uninstalling many of them in my WordPress blogs I’ve settled on two that I used all the time, the bsuite plugin, and Google Analytics. But Automattic (the people that bring us WordPress) has released an official WordPress plugin “WordPress.com stats“.

Before I tell you about WordPress.com stats – I’m going to tell you the features I like best of the two stats collecting mechanisms I use now.

bsuite is an awesome but quirky plugin. It’s easy to install and setup, and it not only gives you stats, but has other features for highlighting keywords and search terms when visitors arrive from a search engine. This is the bsuggestive portion of the plugin. The feature is “highlight search terms and offer search help”. You can also enable a “pulse graph” of activity for dashboard use, or include it on any page by editing your them which will display a nice graph, hits for the day, and avg hits. Another very nice feature is that you can filter incoming search terms using comment moderation and a blacklist. This fights spam because many splogs and spam bots will hit your site for various “bad” keywords looking to get listed in your logs. But the feature I like the most (also under the bsuggestive portion) is to “suggest related entries in the post”.

Other than the features bsuite provides (like multiple plugins rolled into one), it also tracks your blog activity and gives a nice one page snapshot of stats. You get a quick list of daily page loads, avg daily page loads, a prediction for the day, previous 10 days and best 10 days. You also get to see most read pages, top movers, search and non-search referrers in addition to comments and trackbacks. The only bad things is that bsuite tracks “hits”, and not page views, and it tracks ALL hits. So your numbers are going to be much higher than say google analytics or AW Stats – because it even tracks all hits by search engine robots. But once you get used to this it’s easy to view trends and activity.

I say bsuite is quirky because for the most part it installs easily and works well. But it seems to have some kind of conflict with either certain versions of WordPress or certain plugins (or both). A few blogs I have generate a database mySQL error for search referrers, and I can’t seem to fix it. The other features continue to work flawlessly.

Google Analytics is installed on every blog I have. I don’t look at my stats here all the time, but I do as regularly as I can. I like the way the reports are laid out and the multitude of reporting options at my fingertips. However, I don’t like the fact that I have to click through tons of screens to get what I want. There seems to be no way to get a quick “dashboard” of stats (everything I want to see quickly anyway) in Google Analytics. The one feature it does have thought, that no other package has is the ability to see (and drill down) geographically who is hitting your blog. If you have any local content at all – this feature is EXTREMELY helpful. You can drill right down to a state level and see the actual counts by city where users are coming from.

Now enter this brand new plugin from Automattic WordPress.com stats. Previously the ability to get stats from WordPress.com was only possible if you had your blog hosted at wordpress.com. For those of us that self-host WordPress blogs with a hosting company, you had to collect stats some other way. This is why plugins like bsuite were developed. I think that Automattic was VERY smart to develop a plugin for self-hosted WordPress blogs, and here’s why…

I installed WordPress.com stats quickly, and then had to input my “Wordpress API key” (the same one you use to enable Askimet). To do this you need a WordPress.com blog or at least a login. Although I don’t use it often, I do have a WordPress.com blog. I installed the plugin on all my WordPress sites. I was logged into WordPress.com when I got my API key, and after installing the plugin on various blogs I own, I had to refresh the WordPress.com page for some reason, and I noticed the tab “My Dashboards”. Maybe this tab was there before – but I didn’t remember it, and when I moused over it listed ALL my self-hosted WordPress sites!! Glory, glory, hallelujah…I had been waiting for this day for a VERY long time, where I could go to ONE PAGE and access all my WordPress blogs!! My wordpress.com account just because a thousand times more useful! And because I will be visiting that page every day – I probably will post to my wordpress.com blog much more regularly (I think they had counted on this)!

Once you install the WP stats plugin it takes about 20 minutes or more for it to collect anything (and you’ll get a message to that effect). And you access them by going to the “Dashboard” tab, and then “Blog Stats”. This is a very well laid out snapshot stats page…you’re going to see first a graph that can be configured for days weeks or months of activity, top posts (by view), referrers (by view), search engine terms, and incoming links. The one thing is this stat report I gained that I didn’t seem to have in any other was “clicks”, which you can use to see what people are clicking on. I never had access to stats on my outgoing clicks before. There are many plugins that track this, but I’d never installed any (for yet another report).

There are two features of the WordPress.com stats plugin that really nail it for me. One is “Stats Access”, where you can add the email address of any WordPress.com user and grant them access to your stats. Keep in mind that this is a “Wordpress.com” user and NOT someone registered to your blog. This is great I think because you can just tell someone to get a WordPress.com login – and they have instant access to your stats without the need for you to grant them access to your blog. The second is the top right dropdown (if you have more than one blog) and the “Switch” button. You can switch between stats on your different blogs right there (without having to visit multiple dashboards and wp-admi pages). That’s a TREMENDOUS time saver for me!

All in all I think that the WordPress.com plugin is the cream of the crop. I am very happy to have it installed on all my WP blogs – AND to have them all tied together in the dashboard and in my WordPress.com account. I think that everyone should have this plugin. I will, however, keep the bsuite plugin because it goes beyond stats in that it suggest related entries for each post and provides search help and highlights incoming search terms. Google Analytics I will keep because of the geographic drill down capabilities and the extended reporting options. I can honestly tell you though, the WordPress.com stats dashboard page will be the one I look at on a daily (or more frequent) basis for my sites.

I hope this review of the WordPress.com stats plugin helped you, and if you have similar (or negative) experiences to share, or want to suggest other stat tracking alternatives – please comment and share with all of us now!

One of the biggest blogging mistakes you can make is not paying enough attention to your SEO techniques. With WordPress it can be even worse, since out of the box WP really doesn’t do any SEO at all and doesn’t make for a very SEO friend web site. Most of us that have been using WordPress for some time will tell you that we have multiple plugins to achieve various SEO tasks in our site(s). I have three or more installed in this blog now, and probably have tried a half dozen others that I’ve since deleted.

However, today I came across a new WP SEO plugin that few seem to know about and I wrote about it on my Search Optimization School blog. From this point forward (unless I find something better), I will be using this new plugin on all my sites to perform nearly all SEO tasks. Read the post, I hope you find this plugin as useful as I did!