B6S.net

I’m not sure if it was a matter of focusing on other projects in work and life or just some innate conservatism, but the fact is, I was late in jumping on the social media promotion wagon.

When Facebook and Twitter started out, I just didn’t have the attention span for learning new tricks (does that make me an old dog?) I kept waiting and waiting, until the buzz was so loud, I just had to do it. Now, watching the rate at which my main Twitter account @israelimom is getting followers, I sometimes wish I’d started out much earlier, around when Twitter started.

My point being – with social networks, getting in early is a good idea. And with that in mind, I’d like to invite any blogger reading this to join Blog Engage. Blog Engage is like a social bookmarking network for bloggers. Once you publish a new post, you submit it to Blog Engage where fellow bloggers can see it and vote for it.

We all like lists, right? So here are six reasons why you should join Blog Engage -

1. Blog Engage is an active and well-moderated system. With new submissions pouring in, everything is carefully monitored and spammers get the boot, leaving more room for quality blog posts. Brian, the owner and manager, is very attentive and if you see something out of place and let him know, it’s handled right away.
2. You can promote as many blogs as you like. If it’s a real blog post and not spammy, you can submit it. It all goes under your profile, allowing your peers to check out your work across several blogs.
3. It’s an active and interactive community. I have discovered a wonderful group of fellow bloggers who interact with each other over blog comments, cross-posts and over Blog Engage too. Join in and gain new quality readers and commenters.
4. Direct links to your posts. Yes, I realize for many people this is the best part of Blog Engage. Your submission gets a direct dofollow link from Blog Engage. Deep linking is always a good thing for your SEO!
5. Revenue Sharing. Personally, I don’t use this feature, but it is available. Blog Engage displays ads next to your listing and you can get your share of the revenue.
6. You’re right on time! Going back to my first point in this post, this is just the right time to be joining Blog Engage! You’re in early enough to enjoy a lot of exposure and gain a stand in this fast evolving community.

So, what are you waiting for? Join Blog Engage, and become an active participant in this thriving and fast growing community! And don’t forget to add me as a friend!

Less than ten days after its release, and already I don’t really need to tell you what this movie is all about. I am willing to be most of you reading this post have seen it, or at least seen the trailer. If not, you can watch the trailer on my short post on Most-Amazing.com: Most Amazing Movie Ever.

As a Mom, I am well aware of the 3D cinematique revolution. Monsters Vs. Aliens, Up, and many other children’s movies were released in 3D over the past couple of years, and we’ve seen them all. Not to mention half a dozen amusement parks 4D movies (yes, I too wondered what the fourth dimension was. It means special effects in the theater: wind, “snow”, moving chairs, bubbles, smells, and so on).

Nothing prepared us to the visual effect of Avatar though. Director James Cameron brought on a technological masterpiece, where human actors and computer effects came together to create a perfectly believable world in three dimensions.

To quote my husband, we were given a look into the future. And to add another quote: this movie will be to 2D movies like the first full-length color movie was to the black and white movies. Nothing short of a revolution. Financially too, theaters now have a clear advantage. This is definitely a movie you want to see on a large screen with the full effects. And I’ll end with one more quote from my personal oracle: “I’m not going to any movie ever again, unless it’s in 3D.”

It’s not just my hubby saying that, mind! This article predicts that the market for 3D movies will go from $5.5 billion this year to $25 billion by 2012! And the British Telegraph is saying about 2010 that

Tt’s set to be a bumper year for 3D television, with both Sky and Panasonic confirming that they will release 3D TVs, and Sky announcing that it is launching a dedicated 3D channel.

The film and TV industries will be the first to have to adjust in order to compete for viewers’ attention, but online media isn’t far behind. Even if the change in standards will take a few years, the Internet can be one of the first arenas to be effected. So what can the effects be? No time like the end of December to be making predictions, so here are my random thoughts about this:

1. 3D output – the first thing would have to be a glasses (or maybe goggles?) that can create good quality 3D output. Sony has very recently announced a prototype to be used with its 3D TV programs – to be released in 2010. Next, some sort of a unified web standard or plug-ins for our browsers to be able to interpret 3D content.
2. The Revival of Flash? – Flash was all the rage when it was launched. Those dynamic flashing graphics were just too pretty to resist. Overtime, mostly due to SEO and loading speed considerations, Flash became less common and limited to site intros. And the one thing every designer must have when adding a flash into is the skip button. Will that change once people get used to 3d visuals? Will Flash, or similar graphic design tools for the web become more common?
3. 3D Site Navigation Systems – the problem of tackling complex navigation systems has always bothered web designers. It gave rise to various forms of dynamic menus, drop-downs, tag clouds, you name it. Maybe it’s time to start thinking about 3-dimensional navigation systems?
4. The Return of Virtual Reality Gaming? - this isn’t online per se, but certainly influences the internet. Imagine playing World of Warcraft in real 3D. It won’t take long for online gaming to catch up.

So, what do you think? How will the 3D revolution effect the online world and how soon?

I can’t believe it’s taken me over a week to get back to my RSS reader and go over the latest headlines and bylines.

2009 Reports and Summaries

It’s December, the end of 2009 and some interesting end of year reports have been published.

Facebook published its list of trending topics this year. Rather than just showing trending keywords, they actually grouped some keywords together to reflect a trending topic. So, for example, “celebrity deaths” at number four reflects Michael Jackson, Patrick Swayze and Billy Mays.

Another interesting, and if I may say so, rather upsetting list, was published by Norton. It’s their list of the top 100 searches made by kids, based on data collected by their software across millions of homes. I can only hope people simply don’t know how to use their software properly, so that the data also includes searches made by adults. Otherwise, the results scare me, with porn being at #4 for kids aged 7 and under!

To end the lists with something nicer, if you’re a Mom Blogger, you should check Mashable’s latest feature: The Top 2009 Social Media Trends for Moms.

SEO Highlights

As always, lots of SEO related news on the web. I found these to be particularly interesting:

Randfish from SEOMoz reviews how personalized search results could effect your site’s traffic in his How Personalized Search Changes SEO (and Doesn’t). He predicts that big brands are going to get an even bigger slice of the pie and competition for those long-end phrases will become harder.

Bill Slawski discusses the use of synonyms in Google’s algorithm. Basing his post on quotes from the actual algorithm patent, he analyzes some examples to show you Google may or may not be implementing this in the SERP’s.  How Google May Expand Searches Using Synonyms for Words in Queries – well worth a read.

On a more practical note, I found this piece by Julie Joyce useful: 8 Steps To Avoid Link Analysis Paralysis.

And Some More

Jason Kincaid from Tech Crunch discusses a feature of Chrome which I really like: Google Browser Size Helps Keep Your Content Above The Fold. It’s so true. When I first tried Chrome, my initial reaction was, “There’s so much space on my screen now!” For marketers, this is a relevant issue and Jason provides a very neat link there, to Google Labs Browser Size Page.

Speaking of Google, this one piece here on Mashable discusses Google Wave’s Massive Potential for Business Users. Given Wave has been given a lot of bad rap lately, it provides a refreshing look at what’s supposed to be the ultimate social application of the future.

Last, (and maybe least), is this piece in Mashable again: HOW TO: Outsmart Phishers. The writers have disclaimers all over the place about this being a humorous article, yet  it is exactly what they do at 419 Eater. I’d never do it myself, but it sure is funny.

Uh oh… not another post about the dofollow issue?

Blame Extreme John who just posted about removing nofollow blogs from his RSS reader. Since even the mighty Google thinks I’m an authority on the subject (this blog is ranked in the top ten results for “dofollow blogs”), I figured I need to give my input… again.

In his post, Extreme John refers to mutual linkjuice gifts and a “you scratch my back, I scratch yours” concept. I’d like to present a slightly different angle on this. I don’t dofollow with other bloggers in mind – I dofollow with surfers in mind. Here’s why.

The Heated Dofollow Debate

If you look at Extreme John’s post and the following comments, you could easily get the impression that most webmasters passionately support dofollow. In my experience, this is not the case.

Take Sitepoint Forums. If you want to start thread with lots of replies, use the word “dofollow” in the title. Supporting dofollow on blog comments over there is a surefire way to get flamed (no pun intended). If the people are in a good mood, they’ll just tell you you’re wasting your time. They could also mark you for a spammer.

To be honest, they have a point. Dofollow blogs can become spam magnets. Just visit the darker side over at the DP forums and run a search for dofollow blogs. Spammers all over the place, selling lists of dofollow blogs along with spam bots that will do the dirty work for you.

Thus, my first instinct was to go nofollow, because that’s what the “good guys” recommended. But then I gave the matter some thought and you can read more about my conclusions in this post. Bottom line – nofollow blogs get as much spam as dofollow blogs and it’s up to the blogger to click the “spam” link and trash the spam comments.

One more point for nofollow supporters to consider

Google (and other Search Engines) keep telling us that serving different versions of your page to surfers and search engines is a big No No. That’s why cloaking is a good way to get your site banned from the SERP’s.

I argue that the nofollow tag is in fact a form of cloaking. It’s showing your surfer one thing – a link to another site – while telling the search engine to ignore that very link.

If you think the link is bad, don’t have it on your blog. That’s part of your blogger duties and that’s why you should always monitor your comments and have spam filters in place.

If you think the link is valid, legitimate and useful to your visitors, there is no reason in the world to hide it from the search engines.

Nofollow has in facr become a tool for linkjuice channeling, aka link sculpting. By definition, it creates one picture of the web for users and another for search engines.

Now, if Google, or anyone else, wishes to devalue comment links in their algorithm, or to disregard them completely, that is entirely up to them. As a web publisher, I just want to have a clean page with no behind-the-scenes changes in the code that my surfers can’t see.

Back from a short but very invigorating holiday here. Took the family and headed out for the Israeli desert to escape local rainstorms. I made a Facebook fan page for my Israeli Mom profile, so you can see my pictures even without adding me as a friend. Lots of cool Negev trip pictures here.

Back to work here! One of the things I had to deal with was comments on my blogs. Some were approved and some tagged as spam. Now, sometimes it’s very easy to tell which is a genuine comment and which is spam, and sometimes it can be more difficult. I plan on making a post with my comment spam cues, but today, I’ll just share this one tip:

If you’re not sure if a comment is spam or not, Google for a sentence it contains. If you see the exact same phrase used in comments on other blogs, it’s probably spam.

That’s it for today. Thank you all for the constructive comments (all approved). If you left me a comment and you think you got marked as spam by mistake, please read my Commenting Policy to see what might have gone wrong and leave me a new comment.

Wow, has been a busy week for me here. It’s a holiday here as well (Hannuka in Israel). With the kids at home, I just don’t have enough time to do everything that I need to be doing. Still, having dedicated a couple of hours this morning to going over the webmasters headlines service (aka my Google Reader), I’ll try and share some of the more important ones here.

Facebook To Publish User Updates To Twitter This Week – After trying to get users to get more of their info open to the public, Facebook now wants to help you tweet your updates.

URL Shorteners Come To Google & Facebook – Google now has its own URL shortening service called Goo.gl. It currently works only from the Google toolbar and through Feedburner. Looks like Facebook is going to launch a similar service of its own real soon.

Google Wants You To Give Chrome For Christmas – a neat little application by Google that lets you virtually wrap a link to download Chrome. Of course, Chrome is free, so basically, a cute marketing trick and not much more. Still, I think it’s cute enough for me to use.

Predictions For The Changing Local Search Landscape In 2010 – I really suck at operating crystal balls, but I like reading other people’s predictions. This one is by Neg Norton, President of the Yellow Pages Association (YPA), a trade association that advocates on behalf of a print and electronic Yellow Pages industry.

Post to WordPress from Tweetie and Other Twitter Apps – Haven’t tried Tweetie myself but heard a lot of good things about it from people who use it regularly. What I find interesting is that people are encouraged to post tweet-long messages on their blogs. I wonder if it’ll catch up?

Ad policies — the year in review – I haven’t used adwords in years, but I thought this article might be of interest to those who do – so including it in this roundup.

Two new features enhance search beyond the results page – this could effect the way your Google traffic sees your page and where it gets to. Worth a read, especially if you’re doing affiliate marketing.

Brace yourself for the real-time Web – a very good concise review of real time web searches – why and how.

That’s it for today – hope you find it useful and if you do – give me a thumbs up on Blog Engage, will ya?

I’ll be resuming normal blogging, hopefully, next week when this holiday is over. Happy Holidays everyone!

This post is for people who are new to Wordpress and are not webmasters or computer geeks. If you have a Wordpress blog that your host, or maybe a friend, installed for you and you’re looking into customizing it, read on. Steve and Aviva, this one is for you!

I will start with a general tutorial about how to add plugins followed by one about widgets widgets. Once we’re over that, I’ll do a separate post specifically about adding Facebook and Twitter widgets to your sidebar.

You folks don’t know just how lucky you are. I still remember the days when you had to hack at ugly PHP code to make changes to your Wordpress sidebar. Yeah, I am THAT old. These days, everything is automated, so you don’t have to know any code in order to customize your blog.

What’s a Wordpress Plugin

A plugin is a component that can be added to Wordpress. It is optional and does not come with the basic software, but it is created to fit in, or plug into the application, hopefully seamlessly.

Plugins can customize your basic Wordpress installation in literally thousands of different ways. You can find a huge library of plugins right here on the official Wordpress site. You can download any plugin and upload it to your Wordpress installation. Once you have it online it should show up in your Admin Interface under the Plugins menu where you can switch it on or off as you wish.

How to Add a Wordpress Plugin to Your Blog

An Illustrated Guide for Beginners

Essentially, you have to choose your plugin, upload it to your server into the right location and unzip the files. Fortunately, the entire process is built into the latest versions of Wordpress. Let me walk you through the steps:

Step 1 – Access Your Plugins Panel

On the left of your admin panel screen you’ll find the collapsible navigation menu. It has titles such as “Posts”, “Media” and so on. If you click any of them, the menu opens up to show you the options for that item. Find the one that says “Plugins” and click on it.

Step 2 – The Plugins Interface

You now see your Plugins Management screen. Here is where you see the list of all your installed plugins. You can activate or deactivate any plugin from here and tweak the settings for some of them. Your next move is to click where it says “Add New” in the Plugins menu box to your left.

Step 3 – Choose Your Plugin

From this screen you can potentially upload any plugins that you had previously downloaded elsewhere on the web and saved to your own computer. However, in this tutorial, I’ll show you how to do everything from within your Wordpress installation: you can even find your plugins in here.

Just enter your search term (or the name of a specific plugin) into the form and your Wordpress will search the entire plugin collection. For example, write “Twitter” in the search box and hit the “search plugins” button.

Step 4

Voila! Wordpress has retrieved every Twitter-related plugin available in the collection. You can view descriptions and rating and choose the one you wish to try out.

Found something you like? Just click where it says install. For this example, I decided to try the “Twitter for Wordpress” plugin. It won’t quite install it right away though, but would just bring up a pop-up window with more details:

Don’t be intimidated by the fine print. De-activating a plugin and deleting it is fairly easy. Unless your plugin is designed to do something drastic like deleting your entire database, you should be fine with giving it a try. So, go ahead, click the red button. It won’t explode (hopefully).

Step 6 – Connection Information

Wordpress now asks you for your account FTP information. It needs it in order to upload the plugin for you. Don’t be shy about it – this is not a form of identity theft, just an online utility.

You need three bits of info here, your FTP hostname, your account username and your account password. Note: these are not your admin login details.

For these, you need your host. Most likely, this information can be found in the email you got from your host when your hosting account was set up. If you don’t have it – it’s time to drop them an note and ask for just these three bits of info.

Once you have them, just enter in the form and hit “Proceed”.

Step 7

This is pretty much it! Wordpress can do the rest now. Go do something else for a bit. Depending on the size of the plugin, this could take a few minutes and finally show you the screen above. All that you have left to do is activate the plugin.

Note: you may encounter a problem at this stage. Do not panic (and always carry a towel, of course). If you get an error message at this page informing you that Wordpress couldn’t upload the files, you are almost certainly dealing with a permissions issue. In plain English: every file and folder on your server has a set of permissions which define who can change/add anything to it. You can read more about it here. If you know nothing about this and don’t want to know anything about it then just contact your server support and ask for their help. Tell them you need to make the /wp-content/ on your domain name writable and let them take care of that for you. You would only need to do this once for all future plugin installs.

With some plugins, you may need to adjust some settings before you start using them. These should be available in one of two places -

1. The Settings menu of your Admin panel. They will show up as a new item there only after you activate the plugin.
2. The plugins management menu, right next to that plugin name.

That’s it! Everything you ever wanted to know about installing plugins in Wordpress and never knew who to ask.

I plan on writing another tutorial about widgets which should complement this one and help you manage widget-related plugins too. Please leave me comments/feedback and if you found it helpful, spread the word!

I try to make this part of my daily routine (not always successfully): going over the latest headlines for webmasters. To do that, I subscribe to feeds I like and those I think are important (such as Tech Crunch and Mashable). Going over them today, I figured I’d share some of the gems here. May or may not become a regular feature – let me know if you like the concept.

Some thoughts on SEO – blogger Chris Dixon shares some thoughts about SEO. An interesting debate follows in the comment section about content vs. promotion with some good SEO tips thrown around for good measure.

A million stamps licked … and counting – Google Wave’s official blog reports the one million invites landmark. My biggest problem with Wave when I signed up was having no one to wave with. Things have changed and it’s quite noticeable when I log into wave. Still need a Google Wave invite by the way? I have a bunch of them available here.

Some more Google News – Matt Cutts provides a quick overview of some of Google’s latest updates including Google Goggles and the new real-time search feature.

Report: Bing Searchers Still More Click-Happy Than Google Searchers When It Comes To Ads – Tech Crunch reminds us that when it comes to Internet marketing traffic from Bing, Yahoo and AOL can be much more valuable than tech-savvy Google traffic.

Google Now Personalizes Everyone’s Search Results – Danny Sullivan covers the new personalized search results in Google in great detail, including screenshots. You should also take a look at what the webmasters community is saying about it in the SEORoundTable’s summary of forum responses.

Mashable’s Social Media Guide for Small Businesses – this welcome summary is an awesome link to have. Know someone who needs a hand with Social Media marketing? Just send them this link.

This is it for now. Hope you enjoy the links – leave me a note with your thoughts.

I’ve been a web publisher for over a decade now. I have “regular” websites and I have blogs. Often, both formats have the same basic functions: providing information and generating affiliate sales.

Static websites have their own advantages. They can be simple enough to be written in plain HTML code; they can be (nearly) hacker-proof; they don’t need updates and can be a “launch and forget”  project. And yet, with more and more projects I find myself opting for a blog, rather than a static site.

Why? because I think in today’s online environment blogs are easier to promote.

Static websites and blogs do share many promotion techniques. For example, you’ll be wise to do your basic SEO for both; and direct advertising will be just as effective for either form. However, with a blog, you get a few additional features which I will review in this article.

RSS Feeds

Blogging platforms all come with RSS feeds built into their system. Once you set-up a blog, whether using Wordpress, blogger or another platform, an RSS feed is automatically created. Encourage your readers to subscribe to your feed and make it easier for them to do so by offering it through Feedburner too. You can also use your feed to promote your blog on Facebook, Twitter, and similar services.

Directory Submissions

Yes, you can submit any kind of site to most directories. However, “regular” directories with endless static lists of links are so 2004. The have been drastically de-valued in terms of link quality and, with a few exceptions, they send very little traffic, if at all.

With blog directories, the picture is slightly different. For one thing, you have an array of niche specific blog directories providing you with more places to submit to. Moreover, with blogs, you have more dynamic directories which list specific posts and often offer a social media platform along with it. You get more traffic from these, and in some cases, like with Blog Engage, you also get valuable link juice.

Blog Comments

Most blogs encourage their readers to comment on posts and you can leave your link along with the comment. While most blogs place the nofollow tags on comment links, many still offer dofollow links (like this blog!). Even with nofollow, your link is still valuable and can drive more targeted traffic to your site. Yes, I said site, and not blog, because you could also promote a regular site this way… which brings me to the next item.

CommentLuv

CommentLuv is a popular Wordpress plug-in which automatically generates a link to your last blog post. While CommentLuv links are often nofollow, they do carry some SEO benefit, since they use your long-tail post title phrase. For long search queries, with little competition, these links could make a difference.

Blogroll Exchange

Some people will tell you link exchanges are dead. True enough, most webmasters, myself included, tend to ignore your run-of-the-mill link exchange requests that pour in via email. Blogroll exchanges, while technically just as much a link exchange as any other, are treated differently.

Interacting with a blogger, via comments, and then offering a blogroll exchange can be a very effective way to build links. In my experience, this is especially true in niches that are not related to web publishing.

A Sense of Community

While blogs have some technical features that make promoting them easier, the thing that really sets blogs apart from static sites  is the sense of community. When blogging, you showcase yourself as a person, creating a sense of intimacy not just with your readers, but with other bloggers as well.

When you’re “a blogger” rather than just a webmaster, you become part of the bloggers community. In the end, this is what makes blog marketing easier: when people sense a “you” behind the site, they are more likely to share and help you promote your blog.

Got more techniques that are unique to blog marketing? Please do share them here in a comment!

Got plenty of ideas but not sure what to write about and how to go about it? Maybe try and think form before you think matter?
I find that thinking about the format actually helps me come up with new original blog posts. With that in mind, I made myself this list of possible post formats – I hope it’ll help you come up with some cool unique posts too.

Keep in mind that there are no hard and fast rules here. You certainly can mix it up and add your own spices and variations.

The Personal Story

These posts usually illustrate a point by using a personal story shared by the blogger. I have seen long soapy ones, meant to move and inspire, and judging by the comments, they often succeed. Shorter versions, where you use a personal anecdote to drive a message can be quite powerful too. And sometimes, you really do just share a story, without conveying some sort of a “lesson.s

Make a List

The nice even breaks and the ability to chain together practically anything make this one an extremely popular format for online writing. Whatever’s on your mind, you can put it into a nice list and then name it something like “Seven top techniques to gain eternal happiness”.  Or, if you want a more recent example: Lists on Your Blog – Five Things to Consider.

Link Collections

A great solution for when you can’t come up with your own insights Or when you really do want to review other sites, pages or even posts on your own site. This can be either in a form of a list, or ingrained into written paragraphs like I did here.

Pros and Cons or “Should You…”

The “weighing” posts. This is where you evaluate something – a method, a product, an idea – by listing its pros and cons. You could end by reaching a definite conclusion, or with an open end that lets your readers figure out what works out best for them. For added focus on your reader, you can present this as a “Should you…?” dilemma like I did here.

How to’s and Guides

Another all-time favorite in online writing. So much so that entire websites like ehow.com are built around it. You do actually  need to know what you’re talking about to write this kind of a post (or thoroughly research your topic). Feel free to get creative, add pictures or videos where relevant. The important thing here is to be clear and concise, so that your readers can follow your guide and arrive at the same results. Keep things simple and don’t be afraid to state that in titles such as “How to Create Raised Flower Beds in Four Simple Steps”.

Questions & Answers

A great solution for when you’re flooded with questions from your audience about a certain topic, this also works as a strictly design/formatting method, as I used it here. It has the benefit of breaking up your topic into smaller chunks that should be easier to address. You can still create a dialog using Questions & Answers, by referencing answers in following questions. Interviews, whether real or fake, use the same format, as do the good old FAQ pages.

The Case Study

This is a scientific (or pseudo-scientific, depending on how it’s done) format where you pick a case study to test a theory with and dissect the results. If you can create a controlled experiment like this SEO experiment here, that’s excellent. If not, just trying to get some data and analyse it also works - see this example.

The Rant Post (aka Attack)

Someone got on your nerves and you have a relevant blog? You could try and get it out of your system by posting about it. Try and make it interesting for your readers: What added benefit can you provide them with? Making them smile always works, or providing them with a heads up. Keep in mind that you are liable for what you write – steer clear of potential libel suits.

Announcements

A benign post type where you announce something. Make sure it’s of value for your readers. A new blog launched, a new freebie or contest, or a new feature on your site, can all be reason for a short focused announcement.