GuestPost Archives - Page 9 of 12

Guest post: Ten Ways to Generate Better Site Content

Content Management is a relatively new term in the web world. It’s a concept that has taken on particular importance as the marketing paradigm continues to transition to the digital world.

Before, your website was a static entity, a virtual sign post pointing to your brick and mortar business. Today, your website should be considered your virtual office. Your customers should be able to find out everything they want to know about you from your website, including a deep inference about why it is you are doing what you do. What makes you good at it? Why should they trust you? These concepts and more are conveyed by the content on your website.

content management

Your website content says things about you and your business.

Are you attentive to your customers?
Do you participate in community conversations?
Do you enjoy what you do?
What do your customers think about you?

All of these questions are answered by content on your site, and if you’re not putting thought and energy towards continually growing this information, customers will notice. When customers notice, search engines notice. Your website content should tell potential customers, either directly or indirectly, why they should work with you instead of the other guy.

Here are 10 tips for generating useful content for your website:

1. Prioritize Writing

Make writing a priority for you and your staff. You hired them because they are good at what they do. Expect them to deliver solid content that backs that up. If you do, you’ll benefit from their experience and help develop their talents even further.

2. Don’t Pass the Buck

Make the website somebody’s responsibility. If it’s not somebody’s job, it won’t get done. The buck will be passed until the buck stops coming back to you – okay cheesy metaphor – but you get the picture: without assigning ownership, good things get dropped.

3. Focus on Your Passion

Write about what you like. You’re in your field for a reason. You have a passion for what you do. Share it.

4. Frequency Trumps Overanalysis

Make small but frequent posts. Short and interesting is more valuable than long and dry. In addition, the search engines like it when they see more frequent posts while maintaining good quality.

5. Task Out Writing

Don’t take on all the writing by yourself. It can be tough to create solid, shareable blog posts and content. Instead, share the load. Give others an opportunity to flex their voice by offering guest spots in your news feed.

content is king

6. News Rules the Feeds

Write about things that are happening right now. Are you having a work related event? Share it with the web. Take pictures when you do things. Post about the story behind the picture. It makes for a much more interesting website or blog.

7. Get Social

At one time, one-way communication worked for businesses. Those days are gone. It’s time to integrate with social media outlets like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Let your audience engage with you and you’ll earn back dividends of trust…and business.

8. Link Your Stories

Link associated stories together on your site. They don’t call it the ‘web’ for kicks. Integrating an internal linking strategy into your content generation plan brings your site together as a whole. It also helps with search engine rankings.

9. Share Your Sources

Though a professional journalist may keep their sources secret, you don’t have to. Share the industry-related sources that you find interesting or insightful about your field. If you find it interesting, others will too.

10. Publish Case Studies

If you’re good at what you do, no doubt some of your customers can vouch for you. Share those success stories. Writing about specific cases benefits both the vendor and the client. It makes for great marketing material too.

All of these items can take you to greater content management heights. The search engines will love you, your audience will appreciate it, and your business will grow. Better content management helps everyone!

About the author: Kimberly Clark is a senior web designer at VIA Studio. You can read more helpful tips at the VIA Studio Blog.

Guest Post: Domain Names – EVERYTHING is registered!

I’m a member of a very large networking group in the UK, and recently I received a PM from a frazzled member saying she was, I quote, “so fed up” looking for domain names, to the point where she just wanted to “Register something or anything just to get started”.

Stop right there.

The thing about domain names is that they’re a very important component of your online business strategy – this is the domain name that you’re going to have to look at every day, the domain name that is going to be used by your customers and people who like what you offer to link to your website and more importantly, this is the domain name which represents your brand and the seriousness with which you take your online business.

Choosing a domain name for your online presence is never a decision to be taken lightly, irrespective of how frustrating it gets.

Anyway, enough of all this, let’s get to what you need to know when working through what can be an incredibly frustrating process.

The Extension

Image Credit: Blogging Bookshelf

You need to pay careful attention to your domain extension. Don’t overlook ccTLDs (country-code top-level domains) like.co.uk, .de (Germany), .es (Spain) and so on simply because you “want a .com”, in many instances I would say it’s actually preferable to register the ccTLD (especially if you only plan on operating in that specified country).

Once you register your domain name, it’s also worth registering all the other alternative extensions of your domain name (in particular .com, .co.uk (or your relevant ccTLD), .net and .org) – the last thing you want is another webmaster piggy-backing on your brand exposure.

Furthermore, if you do register a global domain extension i.e. .com, .net or .org, and you plan on operating purely in a specific country, then it’s always worth geo-targeting your domain to that specified country via Google Webmaster Tools.

Generic Isn’t Always Best

Many, many webmasters register exact match domain names with the sole intention of increasing their visibility in search around a target term – an exact match domain name is simply one that matches a target keyword, for example an exact match domain for the term “wedding venues” could be weddingvenues.org.uk.

The first thing to remember about this process is that it doesn’t work across every single extension (in the UK it works best for .co.uk and .org.uk as well as .com, .net and .org) – however for those it does work for, it can give you a sizeable boost in visibility in search (depending on the relative competitiveness of the niche).

That said, the main consideration is in branding – do you really want your online presence to be known as weddingvenues.org.uk? I’m guessing not.

Secondly – microsites. Many webmasters jump on the microsite bandwagon, registering everything in sight and launching microsite after, well, microsite. This is dumb (and I say that from being one of the dumb people who applied this strategy for years and years).

If you find a great exact match domain name then by all means, use it for this purpose – but I recommend stopping short of creating a “microsite empire”; all you’re doing is diluting link building resources between a whole host of web properties when in reality, the resources could be used far more effectively if you targeted them to one property and one property alone.

Length

As soon as a consumer sits down behind a computer screen you are no longer dealing purely with a consumer – you are dealing with a five year old child (with the attention span of a two year old). Internet users are impatient and their mental capacity can drain from being afforded so many options and choices. You need to stand out.

Be careful with the length of your domain name – don’t create a brand name which is too difficult to remember, or even too difficult to spell (I know, I can’t believe I said that). Make it easy for your users and make an impression before they even land on your website from the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) by coming up with a memorable (and relatively short) domain name.

Gareth Mailer is an SEO professional – he spends most of his time picking out new ways for his client’s to generate revenue online and through search. SEO Manchester is the place to go to read more from Gareth.

Guest Post: How to Synch and Send Files Between Your Phone and Computer

Image Credit: Andrew*

How many times have you created a document on your laptop but aren’t in a WiFi-accessible area when you really need to send the file—or picture—to someone? If you have a cell phone that is Bluetooth(r)-enabled and you have room on your data plan with your cell phone provider, fear not. You can get that document or picture where it needs to go in just a few simple steps.

Step 1: Make sure your laptop is Bluetooth(r)-enabled. This is not the same as having a WiFi-accessible modem. If your computer is not Bluetooth-enabled, you might purchase one from a larger computer or electronics store. Most independent devices are connected via a USB port. Once installed or verified and on, continue to Step 2.

Step 2: Turn on your cell phone. (Yes, but it has to be mentioned for the dweebs who don’t think of it.)

Step 3: In your Bluetooth(r) options in your phone’s Tools area, click the Bluetooth menu listing.

Step 4: If your phone has a separate Visibility option, scroll and open it. Make sure your cell phone is “visible.” Make sure your laptop is “visible.”

Step 5: Once both are visible, either search for new devices or…

Step 6. In the same menu area, scroll and open Add New. Find your computer. You might also click Trusted Devices and search from that option. The end result will be the same. Also, you may have to enter a security code; if you didn’t change it from the default, most default codes are identical at 0000.

Step 7: Be patient. Sometimes it takes a few minutes to secure the link between the two and may take more than one attempt.

Once the two are recognized and communicating, called synchronized or just synched, your laptop should recognize your phone as an attached device through the Bluetooth connection. If nothing else, search your computer’s Directory via the My Computer icon to ensure its accessibility.

Step 8: Find the file on your computer. Right-click on it, scroll to “send to” and find your phone on the list of available destinations. During the transfer, you should see a progress bar on most phones. Again, be patient. Most phones display a transfer confirmation message when successfully completed.

Step 9: Simply send the file from your phone to its final destination.

Step 10: Pat yourself on the back for being a genius and strut to your favorite coffee shop in celebration.

If for some reason, you cannot synch your laptop and phone but have Bluetooth(r) successfully installed on the laptop, if you have the room on your data plan to duplicate bandwidth, email the file from your computer to yourself, often as an attachment. Access your email from your phone and forward it to your recipient.

Yes, you could have done it that way to begin with, but almost every cell phone service provider has data plan limitations. If you transmit or send via the Bluetooth transmission to the Internet AND forward to another destination, you are mounting up the bandwidth quickly. After all, it’s not what you watch or play on your phone’s Internet bandwidth, it’s just how much you use doing whatever you’re doing.

Save money where you can. The Bluetooth(r) accessory for your computer is an expense, but it’s a one-time or one-off expense. Your (excessive) bandwidth use on your cell phone plan is a recurring one.

Article written by Holly Adams of Coupon Croc, where you can find Littlewoods discount codes for existing customers 2011 to save on this year’s hottest gadgets and electronics.

Guest Post: 4 Web Design Trends in 2011

With the unavoidable presence of mobile devices and social networking, 2011 saw some major changes in the way websites are designed. In order to have any presence in the new online experience, web designers have embraced a number of changes, but here are four trends that won’t be going away any time soon.

Image Credit: familymwr

Mobile Design

Today’s web designers have to create sites that work easily with mobile devices. More and more people are relying on their smart phones to navigate the Internet. The explosion of apps has also forced a change in the way websites work. Users no longer have to navigate browsers to get exactly where they want to be.

Since Apple holds a large part of the mobile app market, it makes sense that fewer and fewer web designs are incorporating Flash. It’s a tool whose time has past. It may look cool, but it tends to be a time suck. After all, if people are browsing on the go, then, well… they’re on the go! Flash is potentially too time consuming, thus making websites easy to navigate away from, due to impatience.

Social Media

It’s online suicide to not incorporate social media into a web design. Whether it’s simply putting Facebook, Twitter and RSS buttons in a prominent place on the homepage or whether it’s actually incorporating a Twitter feed, websites with plenty of traffic are those designed to make social networking a fluid part of their design.

The web designer has to also make sure that the website is valuable when the various social media outlets direct visitors back to the actual web page. Although Facebook is the “it” site of the moment, social media sites that do a better job of assimilating themselves into private websites are youtube.com and flickr.com. Both sites allow the users to easily place code into another website so that visuals can be easily accessed.

SEO

With the trend towards social media taking hold, SEO is even more important in web design. Basically, the content has to be very high quality, and it has to be something visitors will want to share. Without good Search Engine Optimization tactics, websites will simply fall off Google’s top two pages of search results.

Websites need to have good image content, and about 300 words per page. The words have to be quality content. That means the web designer or the client needs to brush up on fourth grade grammar.

Touch-Screen Friendly

Back to mobile computing. Mobile devices work with a touch-screen design. If the new web designs don’t incorporate this into the site, then the visitor will leave immediately. Therefore, whatever web building tool the designer is using has to provide up-to-date coding options.

Since most of these shifts are centered on mobile computing and the new changes in SEO rules, most web masters and designers can expect them to dominate designs for awhile. Fast, visual, easy to navigate and full of meaningful content will be the primary components of the most popular websites in 2012 and beyond. For the do-it-yourself web builder, look for templates that help optimize the new design trends. Joomla.com and WordPress.org are two good examples of web design sites that will help people keep their websites contemporary.

This is a guest post by Rodney Warner from the Denver Web Design Company Connective Web Design.

How To Automatically Create A WordPress Post from Your Tweets

We’re in a time where Twitter and Facebook have taken over the world. It’s pretty safe to say that almost every active Internet user has an account on one or the other or even both. Not a day goes by where I don’t see Twitter mentioned on a TV show (especially reality shows) or a commercial.

Twitter is the new way to find out what’s going on in the world and many people even use it much like a blog. They share interesting links that they’ve found, post inspiring quotes, talk about TV shows, give their opinions about breaking news and celebrity scandals, and much more. With all of this posting, why not create blog posts from your tweets and share with your readers? It only make sense since that’s where the real content is being posted.

Well that’s why the WordPress plugin Twitter Tools was created. It not only allows you to display in the sidebar of your blog and automatically post new blog posts to Twitter, but it also lets you create a blog post from your tweets. Let’s take a look at how this works.

Getting Started

After installing and activating the plugin, you’ll need to update the Twitter Tools settings in your blog dashboard. The first step here is registering your blog as a Twitter app. This is done by filling out a fairly simple registration form.

After completing your registration, you’ll need to copy and paste 4 things into the Twitter Tools settings: consumer key, consumer secret, access token, and access token secret. Finally, click on “Connect to Twitter” button in WordPress.

If all goes well, you should be taken to a new set of options with the message, “Yay! We connected with Twitter” at the top of the page.

Create Individual Posts

This next page of settings that you see is where set up WordPress to create a new blog post for each of your tweets. You’ll want to skip down to where it says, “create a blog post from each of your tweets” and select “yes.”

Next you’ll need to enter the category for your blog posts. If you don’t already have a category that you want to use, you can create one and then come back and select it from the drop down menu.

Next you can enter tags to be automatically attached to each of your blog posts. If you have multiple authors on your blog, you can select the author’s name that you want attached to each of the blog posts. Lastly, you can choose whether or not to include @replies. It’s probably a good idea to leave this to “no” since @replies are more personal and less important.

You can see an actual blog post below. This will of course look different depending on your theme, but you get the general idea.

Create a Digest

In addition to creating a new blog post from each of your tweets, you can also choose to create a daily or weekly digest for your tweets. So instead of having an individual blog post for each of your tweets, this will put all of your tweets for the day or week into a single post.

If you tweet a lot, this is definitely your best option. It will create less posts on your blog (and RSS feed) and I’m sure your subscribers would much rather read 1 post a day or week dedicated to your tweets, rather than 20+ a day to 100+ a week.

Lastly, you can setup a title for your digest and choose the order of your tweets.

Additional Options

The Twitter Tools WordPress plugin also comes with 3 other plugins: bit.ly URLs, exclude category, and hashtags. These are all deactivated by default. These can be used to enhance Twitter Tools and are mainly for those who are creating tweets from blog posts. So if you decide to automatically post new blog posts to Twitter with Twitter Tools, be sure to check out these additional options as well.

This guest post was kindly sent and written by Lior Levin who is an advisor to a psd to css company that does psd conversions. Lior also works with the main security faculty in Tel Aviv University.

7 Things Social Media Has Taught Me About Life

Guest blogger Mariana Fang Lin is an avid blogger and writes throughout the blogosphere. She’s most interested in social media, web hosting services, mobile marketing, and Internet marketing strategy.

Some things about Social Media Networking that offered real insight in this crazy little thing we call life:

1) LIFE IS WHAT IT IS. But Blogs have the power to change that. “Blogs can essentially be considered as ‘the literature of revolution’, outperforming the major media” – Frank Catalino.

Gone are the days when we are made passively to sit by the sidelines as news is controlled singlehandedly by radio and TV. With blogging comes the ability to influence change and challenge popular opinions. “Blogging democratizes expression and has proven crucial in the struggle by many citizens in repressive regimes to be heard.”- Jason Whittaker. Blogs were one of the powerful forces that exposed the falsification of documents that proved that George W. Bush’s service in the National Air Guard.

2) IT ALL ENDS AND BEGINS WITH LOVE. No matter what social media platform you choose, the basis of a healthy and growing community has got to be love. Love? You may spit out. But all I talk about in my blogs are horror movies and scary things. I aim to shock my readers not for them to love me. Oh yeah? Why do you think they keep coming back to your site then? Because they love what you have posted for them everyday. They appreciate your efforts. And most importantly, you must love your site enough to keep providing it with awesome content that can only come from much love for your subject matter.

3) JOY CAN BE FOUND EVERYWHERE. Ever notice how your great grand vacations always seem to fall a little short of your expectations? Whereas a moment of unplanned laughter with your sister or friend seems so much better in comparison? That is because in our hurry to chase after joy and happiness we fail to remember that it is everywhere and can be found even in the littlest of things. Same goes with the blog posts or videos that have the most tendencies to go viral. Oftentimes it is not the super complicated high tech talk depicting graphs and promises of world peace. It is usually the short clip of a baby playing the piano or a dog wearing a funny hat that is appreciated by many.

4) THE WORLD IS AN AMAZING PLACE. Sometimes we need to be reminded about what a vast and spectacular universe it is we live in. The power of social media lies in its ability to bring us to all corners of the world without having to leave our seat. Need a dose of creative inspiration? Let sites offer you some of the world’s best talents in music, art and word right at your fingertip. Used to be this wealth of information was only available to the well traveled or well read. Now everyone has access to the beauty of the universe and the strength of the human spirit. Check out sites like StumbleUpon.com or Digg see what is happening around us from the mundane to the extraordinary.

5) BE CAREFUL WHICH THOUGHTS you invite in your head. Thoughts are much like clouds they aren’t fully yours until you pull them in and claim them as yours. So in the event that some dark or discouraging thoughts start floating nearby, you have every right and choice to shoo them away. Or if you think they offer something beneficial to you along the lines of teaching you a new experience or reality, you may invite them in for a closer look. Then you can ask what wisdom you can get from that particular thought. Same goes with managing your social media platforms. Be careful which thoughts you tweet about post for you influence and mold a large audience. As much as possible offer thoughts that provide wisdom and room for learning. Use your influence to help and inspire rather than crush and discourage.

6) YOU CAN LEARN FROM THE GOOD, the bad, the ugly and the beautiful. Don’t be so quick to judge other people on the basis of appearance alone. Sometimes you will be faced with a difficult situation, a companion you can’t bear, a truly deceiving being and you will learn from each one of them the same. Don’t be too quick to shut certain aspects from your life because they don’t fit with your current mold. Embrace situations and people as they happen, they were put there for a reason. Same goes with stuff that floats on the webosphere. There might be some blogs or sites that leave a sour taste in your mouth but that shouldn’t mean discounting them completely. They can teach you valuable lessons in social marketing or in life if you only had enough patience to discover what they are.

7) THERE IS MORE TO LIFE than social networking. And this might prove to be the most valuable lesson of all. No matter what happens, do not forget that you still have your real life, your real friends and your real world. They will never fail to provide you with the comfort and warmth that social media networking, no matter how awesome your blog community, can’t. A real hug will always be more precious and more valuable than a real hug. A real conversation over real coffee will always be better than a virtual chat in a digital café. More than that, all the valuable lessons can only be found in reality in living and in loving.

What’s New in Dreamweaver CS5.5?

by Dhruv Kapoor

Normally with a point release you expect a couple of minor improvements but that is definitely not the case with this version of Dreamweaver. This new version has a heavy emphasis on features for multiple screen resolutions and mobile devices. This upgrade hosts a wide variety of fantastic surprises that hone most of the available features of Dreamweaver CS5.

This is definitely a must-have for anyone looking to develop applications for mobile devices and can be a great tool for advanced web designers. New features available in this release include:

FTPS support
jQuery code hinting
Full jQuery mobile support, together with over a dozen mobile widgets
A preview of pages at different screen resolutions without leaving your document window
Powerful phone gap integration that lets you use HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to create Android and IOS apps
Web font support
Total support for all CSS3 selectors
New tool for the creation of drop shadows and rounded corners in CSS3

In the New Document box, starter pages are available for jQuery mobile that enables you to make an easy web app that is compatible with all major platforms in a matter of minutes. If you want to create something a bit more complicated, you will be required to make your own code. Luckily, Dreamweaver CS5.5 provides you with full jQuery mobile and jQuery core code hinting. This streamlines the process and makes it much easier to reach your goals.

One of the most impressive features of this release is undoubtedly the phone gap integration. Simply build your app in HTML, CSS, or JavaScript and Dreamweaver will build the native version and install it into a simulator. For now, it can only be used to develop applications for the iOS and Android operating systems but there are plans to expand this capability to include other mobile operating systems later on.

Other enhancements that may not seem as major but are still infinitely useful include the ability to create image-free drop shadows and rounded corners using CSS3. Live View allows you to immediately see the effects of your design changes without switching between a browser and style sheet. It also now supports hsla() and rgba() color formats, making it much easier to use transparent effects on your web creations.

Of course nothing is perfect and Dreamweaver CS5.5 is no exception to the rule. For one, you must be careful about where you insert mobile widgets. Instead of splitting or moving outside of an element as Dreamweaver normally does, it inserts new code at whichever point you happen to be at the time. Though not a major failing, this can be highly irritating over time. It can also lead to disaster for those who are not experts at writing and understanding code.

Additionally, it has a way to go with HTML5. Though full HTML5 code hinting is available, you can only insert HTML5 parts by making code in Code View. Some also consider the $199 upgrade price to be a shortfall of this release since it is still a bit behind Netbeans and PHP storm. Of course, those options require hand coding so many users may consider the price difference to be worth it. Love it or hate it, Dreamweaver CS5.5 is a point release that offers the benefits of a full upgrade.

This Guest Post is by Dhruv Kapoor. Dhruv is an employee of Offshore Ally, a company providing the best virtual assistants and link builders online. He is passionate about gadgets, graphics, and technology in general. Connect with him via Twitter.