Search Engine Results Page (SERP) is what really matters. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is simply one method of getting there. Recently I commented “SEO is maybe 1/10th of SERP”. Okay, admittedly I pulled that number out of the air thus the inclusion of the word “maybe”.

When I author content for a customer for SEO that is all I concentrate on. I make sure there is an acceptable ratio of keywords, the content is comprehensible by a human reader and the spelling is correct. That’s about it. The content does help and I have watched customers go from no results in major search engines to being number one on all three majors in a matter of weeks or even days. But those customers are not SEO only customers. Read the rest of this entry »

Real Estate One Green

Real estate agents, small business owners, or anyone will find this robust WordPress theme called Green 1 very simple to use and compatible with the most recent version of WordPress.

(This is also a test of the new PayPal WordPress cart plugin.)

Anyone who has opened a business has likely had friendly criticism. Family, friends and neighbors are always available to point out your errors and shortcomings. Occasionally a sage will offer wisdom that is constructive, innovative and empowering. Your competitors and customers may not always be so kind.

What happens when your brand comes under attack?

With today’s powerful search capabilities almost everything posted on line is indexed and readily available for global consumption. The same tools that can lead to your success can also lead to your demise. Just ask United how they have changed the way they handle customer complaints post “United Breaks Guitars”.

So you are not United and you are a local plumbing company. Here is a fictional account of what may happen in a brand attack and a brief on a possible response (the names are fictitious to my knowledge). This?fictional? post may be found on a fictional customer complaints site: Read the rest of this entry »

Getting paid for writing blog posts is the dream of many social media enthusiasts around the world. Sorting through the scams is the tough part. When I first told my wife she could get paid for checking out a few items then reviewing them or taking a survey about them she thought I was nuts. Not anymore!

Okay, so I get paid to blog by contract from small and midsize businesses. Sometimes I earn as much as $120 for one blog posting. I spend many hours getting information out about my services, negotiating agreements, researching my prospects … a lot of work! For a while I even toyed with the idea of introducing companies to friends who blog but discovered there are other services who already do this and do it very well. In fact one of the newest sponsors of TwitterBits provides this service quite well and they are offering a 10 day trial signup for access to their list for only $2.95 cents.

Earn Up To $315/day blogging from home!

Here is my suggestion: Sign up for the 10 day trial and immediately treat it as though you just spent your last $3, pick the opportunities, do the research, submit the articles and get your money! If you happen to get an opportunity that pays really well that’s fantastic! But, let me tell you I still write articles for as little as $1 each. Yes, one dollar each. Furthermore I don’t get paid on those until I have written $50 worth and I can only submit one article per day to one company. But guess what? It only takes about 5 minutes to write the articles so even those “low paying” writing gigs put money in my pocket. Every gig is not a home run but every article you write can be in your portfolio and resume. In fact all of those little articles helped me get the contract I just got which pays $1500 every two weeks.

Take the test drive of the new sponsor and invest the $2.95 in your future. Treat it like a real business. Listen to Social Media Edge and join in on Tuesday Thunder. I will help you as much as I can because I want you to succeed!

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Back in the mid 1990s when I was approached by Swarovski crystal collector’s club Crystal Fanatics to create their member’s only site I was relegated to tons of hand coding using a mixture of Perl and JavaScript (which as very new) to hack out a fairly advanced site including a forum with trees! Imagine the awe my client would have! Negative. Though Pat King was one of my favorite clients she was just barely awed at my greatness. Which is okay because I do remember her delivering a fairly sizable remittance. Not enough (in my mind) by far too much (in her mind)!

Try out the forum mentioned in this story here

Today is a completely different story. This week alone I have shown you the Facebook “Like” feature, the Twitter feature and a couple of weeks ago the Zemanta feature. Not to mention there is a plugin for almost everything in WordPress … all for free. Now I have another very (did I say very?) simple solution that works on any (almost) website even simpler than some of the other plugins.

Want a forum on your WordPress blog? Call me and I will create one for you for around $3500. Fully customized with membership levels, administrative levels and a bucket full of other features. Or, click here for a robust (yet simple) forum app that will run in virtually any website with no cost, no programming or coding experience and within, no joke, two minutes.

The forum is indeed feature rich and allows the user to insert links, images, quotes and even embed other application calls within posts! The site owner (must be the first to login) has full control with the ability to create categories, make a post sticky, close a topic, ?browse members, assign moderator, ban users, and choose how to let people login. I logged in with my Twitter account but Facebook, Yahoo, Google, and other choices are available.

Catch? Yes! Only the 15 most recent topics are available (plenty), only the first 200 replies to every topic are viewable (a lot) and you can have only 5 forums (cool) without upgrading. Biggest drawback? I haven’t seen an affiliate program to pay me for my space writing about them. But hey!

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Embeddable tweets, one of the newest “hot topics” for social media enthusiasts, sprang on the seen on May 4th and by the morning of May 5th there were already dozens of offerings of ways to make grabbing the HTML code for embeddable tweets simpler.

Embedded tweets are simply an HTML snippet in your blog or webpage. What Twitter did special was to make the HTML code for tweets more user friendly. Don’t panic if you have no idea what I am talking about because you’re about to get a demonstration and the link to the simplest embedded tweet HTML grabber you can find.

Problem solved

With BlackBird’s drag and drop bookmarklet getting the embed code is done in three steps. Here is a sample of an embeddable tweet:

Grab the BlackBird bookmarklet from the twitter embeddable tweets article.

One thing I did was remove my Twitter background from the embeddable link. The background I use is a left aligned, non-repeating background. Since the background does not behave the same in the embeddable tweet I simply removed it. Yes, you can manipulate the attributes of the code to change the appearance of your embeddable tweet.

This is the actual HTML used to place this embedded tweet in this article:

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For well over a decade the web has been powered in great part by three pieces of server side software: Apache, PHP and MySQL. If you knew (know) how to use these tools you should expect to be able to create amazing server side solutions for yourself, your company and your clients. (Learn PHP in 17 hours.)

Back in 2000 I was hired to create some pretty amazing things online using PHP/MySQL in combination and one of my favorites was for a company named PC Vision in Lawrenceville, Georgia. They needed a web interface for their monitoring cameras placed in day care centers, fast food restaurants and other facilities. They needed security so the parents of the day care children could log in and view the children remotely or the owner of the laundry mat could watch their facilities.

That venture took some weeks to create but it was fun and very rewarding! It also lead to many other PHP/MySQL solutions which got really interesting. The point is knowing PHP early on and learning how to use it to satisfy the needs of my clients created a very rewarding business for my growing small staff and me.

Those solutions were done mostly on PHP 3 and PHP 4 but now we are well advanced and Rasmus Lerdorf’s simple set of Perl scripts has turned into a powerful server side machine. While it works well alone it can also work with JavaScript, Flash, AJAX and many other powerful tools. PHP can run on Windows or Linux machines and is very easy to configure and manage. Read the rest of this entry »

We know how difficult it is to run a business when none of the partners or associates live within 300 miles of each other. In fact our consulting group is spread from California to Texas to Miami to South Carolina’s coast to Atlanta. We rely on video web conferencing to keep up on the same page and going in the same direction. When I say we have tried web based video conferencing systems from A to Z it’s no stretch! Then we found this solution.

100% Browser Based Video & Web Conferencing services. No downloads, no headaches. This system allows companies to connect across the globe with their employees, prospects and clients. Free live demos provided by our sales staff.

What is video conferencing?

Most people will already know what video conferencing is just by the name but what is a better question is “how can video conferencing help a small, medium or large company be more productive?”

One of Inc. 500s top pics for video conferencing is completely web based. There are no downloads, users can have up to 16 live video windows and VOIP is integrated for seamless audio.

Imagine collaborating with a handful of people from across the nation, just like the staff at Social Media Edge does every Tuesday, on a project, plan or strategy and being able to look at each other, share video and audio, and interact almost like being in each other’s presence.

After testing literally dozens of options we came across a video web conferencing system regularly named as the best choice for solutions and now we have partnered with them to provide an opportunity for you to test drive this incredible system.

2009 Inc. 500 Winner
Discover Why MegaMeeting.com was voted The #1 Video & Web Conferencing Company on the 2009 Inc 500 List!

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My Treo was long my favorite smart phone. It did the business things I needed it to do and wanted it to do. It was the first to allow Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents, it had a great map feature and was the first with a 1.3 megapixel camera. The first in my collection that is.

The challenge happened when other smart phone started doing something very smart: opening up to open source development and encouraging developers to create applications for their phones.

When the iPhone first came out I had a Treo 750. I had about a dozen apps I had downloaded for it and none of them were “snap”. In fact they were all business applications that really didn’t make the average college student say, “can I see it?” Then came the iPhone – the ultimate Geek Toy.

Blackberry had been around for a while and I knew the business function, speed and power of my Treo was still what I wanted. Reps from other companies would come into the office and show me some cool flash game or mail reader for their Blackberry they had recently downloaded for free. It did not make me want to switch but it did make me a bit jealous. I wanted apps. The appearance of the iPhone and the 10s of thousands of apps really made me jealous. Still, I did not change.

Read the rest of this entry »

Got a self-hosted WordPress blog on your server? Wonder where all the “stuff” happens? So you have taken time to dig around in all those .php files and you really aren’t sure exactly what happens where. All you want to know is how to change the header image or the font and it doesn’t really present itself with flashing lites and big red arrows pointing to the file and code line.

While there is no way we can dig far enough under the hood of the WP files in this short Twitterbits article we can look at the two examples mentioned earlier. For the sake of ease let’s start with changing the font in your theme. You’ll only need to dig around in one file (unless your theme has mutliple files for various browsers like mine). Read the rest of this entry »