September 2010

Scheduling Your Blog Week in Only a Few Hours

How To Blog, Social Media Advisors, WordPress Plugins, WordPress Tutorials

We do a lot of coaching with clients on how to start a blog and writing effective blog posts for SEO. Whenever I start the process of teaching the client how to do so, usually am met by the comment “I don’t have time” excuse, that I have to tackle instantly. Don’t get me wrong, I know writing blog posts can be time consuming, especially in the beginning when you are just starting. However, I always share that if you can set aside only 2-3 hours on a weekend while watching football, you can have a productive blog. Here’s how:

Before venturing into the world of WordPress, I used to share with clients to just place the posts into draft mode and then on Monday, Wednesday, & Friday Morning to just take a post and send it live. Then spend the rest of the day and a half just responding to the comments. For someone who is new to blogging, this is a good strategy because you are getting new content released every other day and starting to get you a build up of content which helps immensely with SEO.

Then I moved to the world of WordPress which helps make this strategy even easier. When you write inside WordPress, they have a scheduling function built inside the program. That means I can write this post on Saturday afternoon and schedule it to release on Monday Morning at 10:32 AM. By doing so, this means my post will now go live at that time and I don’t have to even be near my computer. In fact, I am nowhere around when this post went live in all actuality. I am out right now on a golf course doing my best impression of “lefty” Phil Mickelson. This is just one of many reasons why WordPress Rocks!

So give the scheduling function of WordPress a try if you never have before. It is a wonderful feature especially if you are on vacation, on the golf course, or tied up with clients. To your readers, they will never know the difference! 🙂

Google Instant and How It Will Change Your Keywords

Online Consulting, SEO, Social Media Advisors

Google Instant released today which I believe will be making some major changes in the way consumers search online. What this allows is for people using the search engine giant to begin the search process while you type in the term you are searching for. No longer to you have to type in the entire phrase and then wait for it to bring you back results. Because of this, I think there will be some major changes coming in the way keywords are determined for your website.

First, the Longtail Shift

Longtail Keywords have been a major player in the success of so many websites over the past few years. People have been able to generate large sums of business by skipping the major terms and focusing on all the other things applicable to their business. By doing this, you were able to rank well on specific keywords and get those people first and foremost. The quality of these leads are great and more likely to turn into a transaction. But, with the implementation of Google Instant, I think this will begin to shift. People will no longer take the time to type in longer terms like before. From playing with Google Instant most of the morning I found that after the first 3-4 words of a search term I was normally able to find something that fit what I was looking for. So the number of people doing 6-10 word searches will begin to drop dramatically. This means 2 things:

1. We will need to start learning more condensed keywords to do instead. So if my keyword before was “how to tie a full windsor knot video,” I need to now focus on the term “How to Tie a.” because when you type those first four words, Google has already displayed multiple videos that will show you exactly what you wanted to learn.

2. The quality of those still doing the extra long search will be even stronger.

Bye Bye Plural Words

One of the terms that our business has been able to always rank well because of it being part of the name of our company is Social Media Advisors. We’ve dominated page one of the search engines since almost the inception of our website. But, now when someone goes to Google and starts to type that term, they will get all the results they would want by simply typing “social media advisor” and will get all the results they need. They don’t need to add the plural S anymore to find what they want. In fact, you could simply type social media advis and find the same results. For our company, we will now need to change some of our keywords to rank on better terms.

This means for sites, your keywords will need to be updated. If you are in the real estate industry for example, you no longer need to fight to rank on terms like Myrtle Beach Homes, or Myrtle Beach Houses you can now focus on just Myrtle Beach Home and other singular terms. If you are some of the early adopters to these new sets of keywords you will be able to get established on the singular terms before others realize the change.

The Art of Typos

This SEO tip has been around for a while, but with the implementation of Google Instant, it becomes even more important. How many times have you made a typo when entering a search term in Google? If you are anything like me, it happens probably multiple times each day. Since the new search engine will auto-fill results without needing to correct the typos. So, while it may seem a little crazy to do, but focusing once in a while on typo keywords could bring you massive amounts of traffic with Google Instant.

Your competitors won’t be able to understand how your business is doing so well while they are struggling. All because you did a few simple typo error terms that are showing up ahead of them in the search engines. It’s a great source of traffic and can be an even great source of revenue!

So now that Google Instant has been released, it is time to revisit your keyword research for your site’s search engine optimization and figure out what the newest things we should focus on. As always, if you need our services to assist you with the search engine optimization of your site, you can contact us if you need help with your social media needs.

Photo Credit: Change Coming

Erasing Your Identity Before Throwing It Away

Online Consulting, Social Media Advisors

This past week I have spent hours erasing data from old computers that are laying around my house. At first I just thought, well, I can just go into the documents/settings files and delete things out and I would be good. But, after a conversation with my brother-in-law I realized that there is much more concern. From our discussions I learned rather quickly that when you get ready to dispose of an old hard drive, simply deleting the content is not really erasing it.

He also shared with me that when you take a computer to an electronics store and they say the hard drive is fried that I should be asking for it back to take with me. You never know where that piece of equipment might end up and you could be in serious trouble if it ends up in the wrong hands. Think about it, how many times have we punched our credit card number into a website to purchase a product, filled out a form with our social security number, saved private personal information onto a computer? I know that nowadays I pay all my bills online. I hate wasting paper, buying stamps and even just the walk to the mailbox. Instead, I enjoy being able to sit down at my computer and within 15 minutes pay all my bills for a month. But each time I make that payment, something is being stored onto my hard drive.

When your machine is now obsolete and longer being used, what do you do to dispose of them? Do you simply take them to the dump and throw them into a bin with the other few hundreds of computers? Do you recycle them? Either way, before taking them in, do you take the necessary steps to remove all your data to protect yourself against identity theft?

Hackers are becoming more intelligent and learning better ways to hack into old computers. They say that until a hard drive is written over multiple times the data can actually be recovered. This is how organizations like the CIA & FBI are able to get data from a computer that seems to have been cleared and solve cases.

How to Protect Yourself

There are several different programs that are around for clearing your hard drive once you are finished with a computer. The first way is to use a giant electromagnet and wipe it clean. There are companies that will do this for you for a few dollars, or you can buy a machine to do it yourself for a few thousand dollars. The second option would be to remove the hard drive and physically destroy it with a sledgehammer, drill, saw, etc. While this option seems like it could be more fun, it is a little bit more dangerous. The third option is to use some simple software to destroy any info on the hard drive.

The program though that I have have found for erasing old PC’s is Darik’s Boot and Nuke. This program will re-write over a hard drive 7 times which leaves things almost impossible for a hacker to find your old data. This way, when you take your computer to the local computer shop for recycling, you do not need to worry about your personal identity and data falling into the wrong hands.

What about other items with Hard Drives? Did you know that machines like a basic copier machine have a hard drive in them? How easy is it for your information to fall into other hands on this type of machine? Well, from the video below, it looks like only about $300 and a free program from the internet. After that they can have any and all information that was ever stored on the hard drive of this machine.

So before you dispose of your next computer or old copier machine, make sure to take a little bit of time and erase your identity before throwing it away in the dumpster.

22 Businesses Called and NONE Answered!

Online Consulting, Social Media Advisors, Social Media Training

Yesterday my dad sent me an email and said I needed to watch this video he just saw. I clicked the link and it directed me over to the Think Big Work Small blog which is developed to help real estate agents. The video was discussing the importance of answering the phone. You can watch the video here. They called 23 different real estate agents around Syracuse, NY just to see how many it would take to answer the phone. The one that did answer hung up on them the minute they said hello. If you are like me, you were shocked to see this. Especially after so many sites make these claims of “We’re #1” and “We deliver the best customer service” yada yada…

Before you start branding your business as “We’re #1” or “I’m busy with other clients, but your call is important” you need to first figure out what you want your business model to look like. If you want your clients to talk to you through services like Twitter, Facebook and text messaging, then you need to make that clear on your contact pages. Add statements that say “if you need a quick response or assistance, the best way to contact me is at:” That way clients learn quickly that this is your preferred method. If they do not like using those forms of communication, then they know to move onto another business that will communicate with them in the ways they like.

Will you lose business? Possibly, but you could also pick up some clients that think the same way you do. The one thing you will accomplish is the ability to work with the types of clients you want and have targeted in your business model. For us here at 210 Consulting, we are pretty open to any means. Both Jason & myself are constantly on just about every social media platform there is. Our contact number is listed on the site, and you can email us too if you prefer.

Call me back please!

Even though technology continues to change the ways we do business, the telephone is still one of the most effective ways to communicate for our business. Every day I spend at least twice as much time on the phone with clients as I do emailing, or sending direct messages on Twitter & Facebook. Why? Because when on the phone I can answer any & all questions that person might have. When I just reply to an email, that doesn’t always happen. Maybe the reason you despise the phone so much is that you can’t stand dealing with the difficult phone calls. If that’s the case, read 5 tips to handling difficult calls. You might find something valuable in it.

Whatever means of communication you prefer, the same principles hold true. When a consumer contacts you, they expect responses. And they expect them to come quickly. If it is taking more than 24 hours to respond you run a very high risk of losing them. If this is the case, then you need to either hire an assistant to deal with your incoming messages from consumers.

One of the ways we gain new clients several new clients that write rave reviews about us without us even asking, is because we deliver fast and reliable service. Normally when someone emails me, they get a response within 2 hours. On busy days that might go as high as 12. One thing though I rarely do is leave my office at night with stuff sitting in my inbox or phone calls not returned from the day.

So, how many times would I need to call your business before you answered?

Photo Credits:

Open 24 Hours & Phone

Archives for September 2010

First, the Longtail Shift

Bye Bye Plural Words

The Art of Typos

How to Protect Yourself

Call me back please!