Technotip.org - Part 31

Trust Agents – by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith

Trust Agents – Using The Web To Build Influence, Improve Reputation, And Earn Trust.

I think Chris Brogan and Julien Smith are the people who don’t need an introduction. But still, if you don’t know, here is a small snippet:
Chrish Brogan’s blog is ranked by Technorati as one of the top 100 blogs in the world. Advertising Age’s Power 150 ranks him in the top 15. He has been blogging since 1998. He is also co-founder of PodCamp and part of many other online projects.

Julien Smith has been connected to computers since the age of 12. He helped run early BBSes. He was one of the first people on the web to use podcasting in 2004, as well as being one of the first web personalities to get broadcast by traditional radio. He has since worked with and been interviewed by numerous media organizations such as CNN, CBC, CTV– and a bunch of others.

Before reading my review, know the fact that, Trust Agents the Book, in its first month, hit:
– the New York Times bestseller list (#13)
– the Wall Street Journal bestseller list (#8)
– the Amazon top 100 list (#30)

Trust Agents is a book which has 261 pages + some pages in the introduction part. And contains 8 chapters:

Introduction: Hey, I know You. Have We Met?
1. Trust, Social Capital, and Media.
2. Make Your Own Game.
3. One of Us.
4. Archimedes Principle.
5. Agent Zero.
6. Human Artist.
7. Build an Army.
8. The Trust Agent.

Index

In the first chapter, it starts with ringing the bell — “We read articles about how the person beside us at the bar ordering the Miller Genuine Draft is actually a paid buzz generator.” Shaking the Trust! and showing how this Trust factor can also be used to deceive people.

The book contains stories and examples of different kind of people, from mafia to gaming and wine shows and to Microsoft etc….a lot actually, and it connects all of them to the topic Trust Agent.
( Its a great idea to take a peak into their knowledge and years of experience, by just paying $16.47 )

There are some action tips in each chapter, which are packed with Chris Brogan and Julien Smith’s experience, with the web(and humans) all these years.

Some lines from the book:

Communities don’t want to be managed: They want to be cared for.

Those who succeed tend to be the ones who allow themselves to fail.

Be there, before the sale.

The Book also warns – By the end of this book, you’ll probably be a trust agent, too. Just don’t call yourself one.

One of Us:
Chris Brogan and Julien Smith have shared their story, of how they made the mistakes — and I must say, they showed a good example to be “One of Us“.
And reminds us to use the 3 A’s, when things go wrong – Acknowledge, Apologize, Act.

Chris the Social Media Guy:
If you are looking for pure social media related things, and the tools that will help you in rapidly building your social media, then this is not the book you are looking for. This book contains, how to be humans in using social media. How to treat people(online) like humans. Giving social media a different touch.

The downside:
1. The Book uses a lot of names, who you may not know, so it becomes difficult to catchup with the stories, if you get distracted.
2. Personal opinion: The language could have been simplified.

Other than that, the book is awesome and worth your time and money.

I am going to order some more books to some of my friends address, who badly need this book!

If you run a company/organization, then please get a copy of this book, spend some time to read and understand it and order some more copies for your employees/members/co-workers if you think its of use for them.

While I was reading the book, I felt like, I am practicing many of these things all these years, unknowingly. But the book is really a inspirational and motivational thing. It quotes some of the best examples of Trust Agents, and how they attained that status and how we can be Trust Agents too.

I know you want to know more, you can get your copy of the book at Amazon($16.47). I am sure, you will not regret.

Still not convinced ? Then read this Testimonial:

“Wow! Every once in a while you find a book that is a sit up in your chair, take notes, tell your friends, change your life breakthrough. This is that book. No kidding, you can trust me.” — SETH GODIN

If you have read the book. Please share your thoughts about the book.

Google Confirms “Keywords meta tag not used in its web ranking” — What next ?

After a long time of discussion online and offline, finally Google came to the rescue and confirmed that Google does not use Keywords meta tag in web ranking.

Source: Webmasters Tool

What does this mean ?
Now you can stop worrying about the keywords that you insert in the meta tag. Stop worrying doesn’t actually mean, to stop using meta tags! To be in the safer side(as we don’t know how other search engines treat meta keywords), it doesn’t hurt at all to use proper meta keywords.
meta-tags-description
And Matt cuts has clearly indicated in the above video that meta description is still valid and Google considers it while showing the snippet of description, if its nicely/meaningfully done.

Avoid the Confusion
Do not confuse this with “using the proper keywords” in the article. Using keywords in the article will get you up in the search ranking(if done properly) — If not UP, your article will be shown for the keywords, that you are using in the article. But as always, play safe. Don’t try to inject irrelevant keywords into your article. This will do more harm then any help, in the future.
Do not believe in people who call you and tell that – they will get your website in the first place of Google search ranking. Many of these guys still think that Google use the keyword tags to assign ranking and that they can trick!

Whats your stand on meta keywords, meta description or meta tags in general ?

Does TRUST Play any Role in SEO ?

I don’t know, whether Trust is one of the factors in getting the results up in the Search Engine Results Page, but I certainly know that Trust will help you get more traffic even from Search Engines.

Benefits of building Trust
Building Trust helps in making people to act. The desired action might be:
1. To subscribe to your blog updates.
2. To subscribe to your News Letter.
3. To purchase your ebook or print book.
4. To make a sales (affiliate link or any other kind of sales).
5. To make them share the article link with their friends and family members.
6. To make them link to your article.
7. To make your brand name stick in their minds.
8. Build authority.
9. Show your passion.
10. Get their feedback and to get their opinion on any issues (make them comment on your blog and to learn from your visitors). Etc etc etc..

So with this Trust factor, you can build readership and you all probably know that, it brings in repeat visitors to our blog. Hence, increase in traffic.
But this Trust can boost Search Engine Traffic too. Its been working all these years, but most of us might not have noticed it. Here is how it works with me:
Google ranks websites based on its algorithm and no one outside Google probably know all about the algorithm.
Google is famous for its testing, like A/B split testing, change of background colour of Sponsored ads, change of width of Search result page and search box etc. And usually Google shares many of the test results with its users, in the form of reports.
And it is known to most of us that, the result shown in the first position of the result page gets more attention and click, than that present in 3rd, 4th, 5th and so on positions. And the results in the latter pages get least clicks.

But if you have seen a blog and Trust that blog, then you are more likely to click on it and go to that blog for information, then that ranking much higher.

Looking at the above image, you may be thinking Sony Ericsson is a bigger brand than fonearena. But if you have been reading fonearena for quite sometime, I bet you would click on it for reading the review before making a purchase.

So branding and Trust can increase the Search Engine visits too. You may be thinking it takes a lot of effort to get a small amount of traffic. Yes, it takes a lot of effort to build such Brand and Trust, but once done, you will get a lot of traffic. Its all about Trust, even if you are not a big brand yet, you can build the brand with the trust factor, which will have a long lasting effect on the minds of internet users.

Do you think, its late to join the bandwagon of building Trust? Might be a little late but better late than never 🙂

20 Tips To Optimize Your HomePage

Everybody talks about optimizing the website as a whole, but it is of equal importance to optimize this single, most important page – HomePage (face of your website).

For almost all the websites, the most ranked and visited page is its homepage. So optimizing it makes a lot of sense. If you feel the same, then continue reading..

Here are some of the aspects that you can tweak, inorder to optimize your homepage:

1. Do not show full article on your homepage. If you are showing 10 full articles on your homepage, then it will take a lot of time to load.
And from users perspective, they may not have the patience to scroll down and digg your website looking for good content. Internet is full of information overload and they may just leave your website and go somewhere else.

On the downside, people need to do an extra click to get to the content, if you start showing post excerpts.

2. If you are showing only excerpts on your homepage, then try to limit it to 8 or 10 post excerpts. If you show 20 to 25 post excerpts on your homepage, then the user experience will again be bad.

3. Use less images on your homepage.: Images consume most of the bandwidth. Images can be used wisely to grab the attention, but if we do not take that extra care to optimize the image, then we will surely have to pay for that latter. It would be better to avoid more images on the homepage.

4. Use less advertisements on your homepage or no advertisement on your home page: The best example for this is Google. Google.com is the simplest and most used search engine in the world and still it doesn’t have a ad on its homepage. Get a clue from it.

5. Optimize all the images that you are showing on your homepage, using some image optimization tools.

6. As far as possible, try avoiding if-else programs on your homepage. Ex:- Showing one ad to facebook visitors and other for Search Engine visitors and another for people coming from Twitter!

7. Remove the widgets and badges from the homepage. Retain only the most important.

8. Avoid animated contents from your homepage, inorder to speedup the load time of your pages and to not divert the attention of your reader, from the beginning.

9. Choose a proper webhost, with good uptime, speed of servers and support.

10. Make use of custom Excerpt option in WordPress and make the excerpts on your homepage more meaningful. Create enthusiasm or the need to read more situation to someone who reads the excerpts on your homepage!

11. You can lessen the ads on the homepage and put link or banner to your own interesting articles or categories of articles. This will give the user more options to navigate. And you can engage your reader for more time, showcasing good articles.

12. Remove the digg, tweetmeme and other buttons from the article excerpts. Show them only on the full post, if necessary.

13. Use labels: Label all the things properly on your homepage. Ex: Recent articles, Popular posts etc, for better user experience. Visitors must not feel, as if they have landed in a wild forest!

14. Test your optimized homepage: Testing is the only way to go. Big internet companies like Google rely only on its continuous testing. But Google, Yahoo, Microsoft has a lot of employees for testing. Now how can you do testing with your website/blog? Most of the times, owner of the blog gets blind to many components on the blog, like, the widgets, labeling, etc. So it is a good practice to arrange a party for your friends(who don’t know about your blog) and tell them to surf and give feed back about 2 or 3 websites(one of which is yours!). Keep doing it once in a while. Do not over do it. You may just endup in testing and may forget the main element of the blog, which is content.

15. Menu bar: Most surfers are used to the menu bar placed at the top, than on the sidebar. So it must be clearly placed in a prominent position and do not mix it with your categories and other stuffs.

16. Show navigation menu or main menu both in the header as well as in the footer.

17. Make sure to have “Popular Articles” or “Recommended Articles” list on the homepage. So that first time visitors know where to look at, for the best contents on your blog. And with the best content, they are more likely to stick to your blog.

18. Show your subscriber count or Twitter follower count as a social proof, if you have some significant numbers.

19. As far as possible avoid flash contents from homepage. You may annoy and drag your readers out of your blog even before they read any of your stuffs!

20. Make your website/blog logo clickable and link it to your homepage.

Please share your optimization tips with us. So that everyone of us can improve our website/blogs.

Do you want Premium quality content for FREE ?

Being a student I know how tight our budgets will be! I was in the same position a year back, before starting blogging. So I love to share about good quality, free content from trusted sources.
Yesterday I read a very good ebook and I recommend it to all bloggers who are stuck at some point in blogging and can’t afford to pay for an online course.

The name of the ebook is Make Money Blogging, by Daniel Scocco. The book is well structured and is worth reading.

make-money-blogging-premium-quality-content

Daniel Scocco has been involved in entrepreneurial projects on the Internet since 2005 and he knows his stuffs. His famous blog DailyBlogTips.com was nominated under the “Best Web Development Blog” category in the 2007 Weblog Awards, and currently it is ranked among the 500 most popular blogs in the world (according to Technorati) and among the 100 most popular marketing blogs in the world (according to AdvertisingAge).
Daniel has also provided consulting services for many companies and organizations (including the United States federal government), and he is the founder of the online marketing and business training program Online Profits.

So Daniel and his works are really worth to be followed, if you want to be a successful online entrepreneur or blogger.

Daniel has worked for about two months and has packed this ebook with all his experience and has made a really valuable ebook.

Many people, including bloggers want answer for this question — How to make money blogging?
This book also concentrates and explains other aspects of money making, that is generating quality content inorder to get the traffic and to gain authority(over time), and then the money aspects, which is exact inline with how things have worked out to many bloggers.
It contains some real suggestions and tips, which most online courses teach.

The ebook contains:

Introduction (which also contains very valuable information’s)
1. The Content: Know the 3 important things that make good content. Good info about Headline and about finding idea’s or inspiration for content creation.
This is the most important aspect for any blogger to know. You can just download the ebook, to read this one chapter, if you don’t have enough time.

2. Design and usability: This chapter contains some list of Usability Mistakes, which are worth noting down and correct them one by one, if your blog is making those mistakes.
Other things like call for action and the action priorities.

3. Networking: Contains some short email templates, that you can use for your networking purpose!, but I suggest get your own. Templates provided by Daniel are just an example. You can make yours more personal and catchy!
Small excerpt from this chapter:

In most professional fields, who you know is at least as important as what you know. Blogging is no exception.

4. Promotion: This is the chapter which I liked the most. It contains some really good information. It tells the importance of guest blogging, social bookmarking sites, Twitter, Facebook and ways to promot your killer content.

5. Monetization: Which stresses about the creation of authority, before trying to make money. And gives 2 important tips for making money with Adsense. Also talks about direct advertising, CPM ads, Affiliate marketing, email marketing(“the money is in the list!”) etc.

In the introduction of the ebook, Daniel says – “If you already have a blog and know the basics, feel free to skip to chapter 1.” But out of curiosity, I read the introduction and I must say, Daniel has packed good info from the very beginning of the ebook.
Although the introduction was valuable, I feel that I had already read it on DailyBlogTips.com!

Introduction goes on with the inspiring revenue figures of TechCrunch, Mashable and Haffingtonpost etc, but at the same time warns not to get into “get rich quick” concept! Here is an excerpt from the ebook:

yes it is definitely possible to make money blogging. At this point many people ask: “but is it easy or quick?” Well, that is a completely different question, and unfortunately the answer here is a big “NO”.
Making money blogging is no different then making money with any other venture, be it online or offline. As such it will take time and require a heck lot of work.

Much like his News Letter(which is kind of personal, valuable and to the point), the ebook also doesn’t contain any fluff, you get the meat directly, so its time saving apart from being valuable.

Finally, if you are a blogger or somehow related to blogs, then you will find the ebook valuable. Do not miss to download, read and implement the tips in the ebook.
To download the ebook(which is Free), you will have to signup for his news letter here.

And also tweet about this ebook to all your friends, fans and followers, I am sure, many of them will find it helpful. And who knows you may even win a laptop! — yes, Daniel is holding a contest and is giving away two laptops to two lucky winners. Tweeting will get you one entry, and blogging about it will give you 5 entries. Nice trick to get the words out. Though I decided to write about the ebook, after reading it and finding some valuable info there. And more over, I always recommend Daniel’s work, as he is a brand built around trust.

Related: 5 Freebies Up For Grab

Interview with ReTweet.com

Differences, controversies (ReTweet.com v/s TweetMeme.com) apart, today we have Mesiab Labs Chief Operations Officer Tyson Quick. We thank Tyson for taking time for this interview.

For those who don’t know about ReTweet.com: As you might have already guessed by its name, it is a new service that shows popular links being shared(tweeted) and re-shared (retweeted) mainly across Twitter.

They surly have got a killer domain name ReTweet.com and a super URL shortner rt.nu.

Here is the interview:

1. Please tell our readers about yourself and ReTweet.com service.

Retweet is the official place to find real-time news on popular stories, images, and videos. We provide this service by scanning thousands of updates on the worlds most popular micro-blogging service, Twitter.com and with the help of users like you whom have added our retweet button to your blog. The word retweet has now become one of the most popular terms online and describes the action of repeating or sharing someones original tweet / story. We now live in a world where for the first time in history real-time news is possible thanks to modern web technologies and crowd sourced content creation, retweet is here to leverage this modern way of announcing and discovering news. We pride ourselves in providing “news for the people, by the people”.. meaning we do not decide what news finds it’s way to the home page of our site.

Retweet is still a baby ( thus the BETA ), expect to see many improvements over the next few months as we have great things in store. In the mean time, help us improve the service by adding our button to your blog.

2. Some history behind the service ReTweet.com

Retweet.com is a side-project, as our software products are priority. We purchased the Retweet.com domain name 4 months ago for a substantial amount of money knowing exactly what we were going to do with it. At this time tweetmeme ( our main competitor in this arena only had around 200k monthly visitors ).

3. What inspired for the creation of a service around Twitter.

I ( Tyson Quick – COO ) thought up the idea around the same time the plane crash happened in the Hudson river and it was first reported via TwitPic… real-time “crowd-sourced” news was being born. I was also a fan of DIGG.com at the time and saw how twitter could essentially be used the same exact way. Believe it or not, our team had this idea before we ever saw tweetmeme.. although they were obviously the first ones to jump on the bandwagon.

4. What are the long term business plan and business model for ReTweet.com?

I cannot expose our business plans for retweet.com at this time, although we do have a well planned business model ( note: this does not rely on us ever passing tweetmeme in traffic ) – Although this is one of our long-term goals.

5. What new features can we expect from ReTweet.com in coming days?

We will first be matching our competitors features 100% and then adding additional features we thought up ourselves. I also cannot release these details at this time. But, i’ll assure you our users will like them.

6. How big or small is ReTweet.com, as a company?

Retweet.com is run by Mesiab Labs: Mesiab Labs is an LLC established and registered in Boise, Idaho. The company was initially funded by the now dissolved software company Easy Ad, owned and operated by Kevin Mesiab. The executive team consists of Kevin Mesiab ( CEO ), Tyson Quick ( COO ), and Sean Boone ( Director of Design ). Mesiab Labs builds market leading software and web based applications in various markets. We have a total of 4 people on Staff. All our projects are self-funded, we have never accepted VC or outside funding.

7. How important do you think the numbers game in Twitter (I am talking about the follower count)? Do you think it matters?

If you are a Business, then numbers are extremely important. When it comes to marketing, businesses rely on how many potential customers they can reach.

8. What do you have to say about Twitter banning @retweet account.

We believe Twitter Banned our @retweet account because they are trying to trademark the term ( we have a pending trademark as well ) and because of their up-coming launch of their internal retweet function. From Twitter’s standpoint they might be worried about a 3rd party owning an account on their platform that is associated with the 2nd largest twitter term ( 2nd only to tweet )

9. What are your thoughts about Twitter getting the copyrights on Tweet and ReTweet?

Well the term tweet has already been denied and we believe the same will occur with the term retweet. We are confident that we will be granted it if anybody gets the trademark because of the related domain name and the fact that the domain has been registered for over two years before we purchased the rights to it.

10. How do you think, you stand out from your competitors?

Right now we have not added many features that differ from our competitors, we first have to play the catch-up game. We have many features planned that have yet to be implemented. Right now the main thing that stands out about our company is our brand power and our extensive experience in online marketing. We also own our own url shortner rt.nu that is being implemented with retweet, as well as checkretweet.com

11. If you want to tell something else to our readers, you can tell

Retweet.com will remain an extremely social site, holding monthly competitions, etc.

Its left to you which service you use on your blog, but its always good for bloggers to know the alternatives and its pros and cons. Take the interview positively, and we love to see a positive competition between ReTweet.com and TweetMeme.com, Wishing them best of luck. Hope you enjoyed the interview.

What You Need To Know | Matt Cutts WordCamp San Francisco 2009

This is a video + presentation from Matt Cutts at WordCamp San Francisco 2009.
Matt Cutts is the head of the webspam team at Google where he specializes in search engine optimization (SEO) issues.
Matt Cutts blog is a number one source for many webmasters and SEO guys. Hope

This is a video + presentation from Matt Cutts at WordCamp San Francisco 2009.

Matt Cutts is the head of the webspam team at Google where he specializes in search engine optimization (SEO) issues.
Video:

Please refresh and wait, until the video loads..
Presentation:

Matt Cutts blog is a number one source for many webmasters and SEO guys. Hope this video and presentation from Matt helps.

Source:Mutt Cutts blog

Assign Password to a Directory via cpanel

It is said that, no data online is safe. Someone can enter and see/use your online data. But we can always try our best to stay safe. Some of the things that we need to ensure is, a secure software (Ex:- like WordPress as a CSM) and a strong password. But at the end, backup of our website and database are the only hope for recovering the data(if some unfortunate things happen).

After receiving 3 to 4 emails with the same question, I thought of writing it on the blog. So here is the procedure for password protecting the directory through cpanel.

Log into your hosting account cpanel. Navigate to “Security” section. Click on the “Password Protect Directories” link.

Next a popup will appear, select the web root and click GO.

Select the directory that you want to password protect. This may be some what a puzzle! for first time user.

If you want to password protect a directory inside another directory, then click on the folder icon beside the link of main directory (see above image for better visualization).
Password-username-protect

Once you navigate to the directory that you want to password protect, click on the directory name and enter a name (any name), usename and password.

You can select and delete any of the older users by selecting the username and clicking on the Delete User button.

Why Password Protect ?
Password protect those folders which you want to secure.
For Example:- If you have a payment gateway, where you process your customers credit cards, then do not take chance or do not compromise with the security aspects. Its not your security, its your customers security, which is of prime importance!

Password protecting such sensitive directories is crucial. Customers would never feel comfortable to be your guest, if you are not serious about their security!