New Replacement for Wordpress

Update: going live with new replacement for wordpress.

 

Well, several - actually.

While this is very experimental at it's extreme ends, the key point is that Blogger not only allows you to have their blog with your domain, they allow you to take an existing domain and plug any number of Blogger blogs in as a subdomain (via CNAME).

As you tie this into Google+ pages, you then get a very nice recurring interaction which can improve your SEO markedly.

Add in Zemanta, and you have a great interlocking personal 'net of blogs which all begin direct-linking and making them look all authoritative and stuff - depending on if you silo your content and use semantic theming (just to toss in some geek-talk.)

The experimental line is in setting up several blogger blogs on the same template and navigation, so they appear to actually be one site.  Tricky in the details, but pretty simple to execute, actually. (This site is an example now.)

So I finally - years later - have a decent replacement for Wordpress, with potentially even greater SEO.

Good Hunting to us all!

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Marketing Insight - the return of mini-sites and mini-webs

(photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kwl/)

Just had to tell you about this one. Too neat.

(Warning: advanced terminology ahead - Geek Alert)

Dr. Andy Williams reminded me about it with his recent newsletter about site building.

I've been playing around with the idea of subdomains as minisites and have finally gotten it working. Mini-sites go back to the days of page-rank as King of SEO, and Michael Campbell (Striking it Niche, Nothing but 'Net, etc.). The idea is that you would build mini-sites around your niche and people would find all sorts of fascinating content within that mini-site and they'd bounce all around within it and build up your pagerank, making your SERPs improve.

Then you'd link these mini-sites together and you'd have a mini-web. Since the links were by related content, you could actually take over a major niche just on pagerank.

But the days of pagerank are ebbing, if not gone. Google doesn't think that metric is as important these days.

However, the concept is a fascinating one. It allows you to group your content by niche and then cross-link to related content on another site you also created and maintain. So link love can still be shared, along with subscribers (if you liked this blog post, other readers also found these blog-posts fascinating...).

Enter the idea of sub-domains. Now for the time being, Google still gives subdomains individual pagerank and treats them basically as their own site. Meaning that when you link from one subdomain to another, you are crosslinking sites. So you are giving authority to another of your own sites.

But this has been tricky to do, since other than hand-coding mini-sites, the best way to build a site was with WordPress (or some other CMS scripting platform). Meaning that if you wanted to set up a subdomain and install WP on it, you'd have several installs on your hard-drive with multiplicitous files duplicated in every subdomain.

Enter WordPressMU. (Multi-User.) It has the option of being able to create new blogs and assigning them a subdomain name - used on WordPress.com and many others. So each person runs a single blog, but the underlying program really runs them all as one huge mega-blog.

Here's the deal: Set up WPMU on a host and then create a new "blog" for each keyword niche. Posts in that blog are all germain to that subject and so build authority within that subdomain. Every subdomain is it's own subject - and so you actually build mini-sites again - and a mini-web, after a fashion.

What makes this really take off is that you can have completely separate look and feel for every sub-domain blog. It looks like it's own blog - which it is. And templates make it much, much easier to configure - but far more powerful - than mini-sites.

An example is Midwest Journal Press - this is set up as a main site for all the books I want to promote as a publisher. Every book is to have it's own blog. My latest project is How to Stop Telemarketers' Internet Scams. Note that the link goes to a subdomain on that main blog. I'm in the process of writing this book right now. And it will have all sorts of links off the site, but also to the other related books which I publish. It becomes an authority for the keywords of "stop telemarketers", if not "Internet scams".

The great part about it is that I can build an opt-in mail list just for that book (coming today, I hope) and so get subscribers on this particular niche completely independent of the other books I write/edit/(re)publish. Also, I'm not limited by a single template's foibles, but can actually grab and install various templates until I have the one which is appropriate to that particular niche. (A person looking to solve their "I've-just-been-scammed-by-a-telemarketer" problem will expect a more dramatic look and feel than the "I'd-like-to-lose-more-weight" person - who needs more reassurance.)

In short, WPMU looks to solve a variety of problems with a single install. Sure, there are some tricks that have to be mastered, but it's not a particular problem compared to learning HTML and coding pages by hand.

And to think - you probably heard it here first!

Your comments? Suggestions?

2 Reasons Affiliate and Bum Marketers fail

The 2 Reasons Affiliate and Bum Marketers Fail are simple:

1. Lack of focus
2. No Long-term orientation

Taking the first, where affiliate marketers fail is that they don't keep to one approach. They are constantly seeking and finding very lucrative, but narrow/shallow approaches. The products they offer are mostly of the same ilk - get rich quick, or these 30-page ebooks for $15 which are just one-off products.

The failure here is to keep looking for new things instead of really building up around a central, valuable theme.

This leads us to the second point. Affiliate marketers fail - or just continue struggling to succeed (same difference) as they don't consistently provide incredible value in a given niche. The knuckleheads I've dealt with along this line consistently bring me new products through my email portal, all of which are glowingly represented as being a "new way to make money!" or tell with lengthy lists of testimonials about how this new ebook or product will... But the products are all over the place - hair products, diet products, forex manuals, you name it.

What these marketers fail to do is to develop a line of products which services a single, narrow niche completely. The worst of the lot are the people selling marketing products to marketers. Because they are simply feeding this addictive, attention deficit problem. Most all of these new marketing approaches are the same, just tacked on and glossed up with new terminology.

Real successful marketers find a problem area they have a solution for and then sell variations and expansions of that system to those same customers and gradually expand that narrow niche slightly wider - or pick up a related niche and bring their old clients over to this new one.

This is having and building a "sales funnel" of a consistent line of goods. Any accomplished sales organization does this. These are called "department stores". And you can do the same online as in the brick and mortars.

But the Internet also allows people to shallowly sell a wide variety of products and not have to build any base to actually get recurring customers.

And this route ensures that you are constantly looking for new stuff to sell and ways to sell it. And you are also always looking for new customers and clients.

The solution:

Build a base. Means you can actually drop all these various products into a blog or an ecommerce engine (and now you can host blogs inside ecommerce engines - they are built on the same code, basically).

That blog or ecommerce site then has all the data a person would need about a given product - and they could find, by category or search, what they were actually looking for. And then would come back to find other stuff they were needing.

The affiliate salesperson, would then keep looking for bargains and drop them into this base. Sure, they keep building stand-alone sales pages and mini-webs, but these then point to the ecommerce base or blog page where that person could then contact the affiliate sales line.

Essentially, they need an online catalog of all the various items they are selling. And when they send out emails, it's "look what I just found for you!" "Come see my site to see what the latest is!" It's not "here's what I dug up that you can buy now."

That's where I simply opt out of that person's mail list.

But people who do have some great content - really helpful stuff - I keep coming back to them, their blog, their ecommerce site. Because they've done the research so I know that what they offer is good stuff, or at least is amusing.

Solution Steps:

1. Know what you really like to do and how you like to help people.
2. Find stuff that will help people and offer it to them in return for something they want to give you. (Like a decent price, or an email address that works.)
3. Set up a base so that people can find out more about you and your products on their own.
4. Promote that base along with any product you are offering.
5. Keep building onto that base with every new product you find.
6. Streamline what you are doing and dropping old products that no longer sell, or drive customers away.
7. Turn long-term clients into working as affiliate sales people for you.

Luck and Good Hunting!

Creating the Optimal Social Media Magnet Site

You should be able to create an optimal social media magnet site, using what you know from SEO and Viral Marketing

Value is the real underlying scene. If you have great stuff, and have bookmarked it yourself, and made plenty of friends out there in social media land - plus consistently participate in making their blogs filled out with comments - and have all the easy social bookmark buttons available at the bottom of very blog post, as well as on the top or whereever they can find them easily,  then you should be able to make a real resource site that draws attention.

Relevance is the next key word. Your site has to contribute to what's going on.

Timely and Consistent come up next. You are going to have to have regular new data, and this should really be of a social media value, meaning podcasting, video, unique images from Flickr, etc.  Definately Slideshare's. Lots of content, regularly posted and valuable.

One approach to this I've recently heard of is to post a snippet to your blog, which links you your website for the full data. So you keep the blog-readers happy and also get traffic to your web. RSS readers should be able to get the whole thing quickly.

The world has gone social - get on board...

So, the question, “Should you pay any attention to social bookmarking?” becomes “How do I take advantage of social bookmarking?” And the answer is, make your site worthy of bookmarking. Bookmarks appear to web crawlers as links to your page, and that makes them very valuable SEO tools. For some search engines, the more bookmarks that lead back to your site, the more “votes” you have on their popularity scale.

So, visit some of the social bookmarking sites on the Internet. Learn how they work. And set up your own account. Then, create your own list of links that includes your web sites, as well as other web sites that users might find relevant or useful.

On the web-site side, be sure to include the code snippets provided by social bookmarking organizations that allow users to tag your site easily. Then, maintain it all. Don’t just forget your account completely. If you do, eventually it will disappear and all the advantage of having one will go as well. Instead, continue using social bookmarking. Over time, the rewards will be increased traffic to your web site.

SEO & Marketing Tips

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SEOmoz | Identifying the Linkerati

This nice post from way back in March 06, lays out some important clues as to who will be/is running and "guiding" our social media (more like trying to head cats - anyone who's worked with livestock knows that they lead better than they "herd".)

I don't hold this to be a sacrosanct list, nor are the importances the same they were in '06 - but this is a starting/jumping off point...

Oftentimes, when I describe the concept of linkbait to clients, it's critical to also describe those folks who are the targets of linkbait - I'll call them the "Linkerati". Let's explore the culture of these most valued of web-dwelling souls:
 * Bloggers - probably the most targetable and directly influenced folks, bloggers are an excellent source of traffic, links and the spread of your content's idea virus.
_ * Forum posters - although the links these folks put up don't often result in great search engine value, the traffic can be positive and the possibility that other likely linkers will come through to visit is also high.
_ * Web News Writers - a rare species, but exceptionally valuable, these folks control the news outlets on the web, including places like C|Net, Wired News, Yahoo! & MSN's online news portals, etc.
_ * Content Creators - These folks are building or beefing up websites and are seeking valuable resources to link out to. Most frequently, you'll find them linking to the sites they find valuable in the top 5-10 results at the search engines (another reason why "the rich get richer")
 _ * Resource Editors - Another rare breed, these folks work at government institutions, no-profit organizations and educational establishments and are looking to add content to their pages or directories.
_ * Social Taggers - These folks don't provide direct links, but if they and their friends at Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit & Furl love you, you're in for a real treat - thousands of visitors and the opportunity to be in front of hundreds of link-hungry bloggers.
_ * Viral Connectors - The viral crowd doesn't directly link to you, but by sending out a blast e-mail, posting to an IRC channel or telling their friends about your site over dinner, they're spreading the word. Some of them can be very powerful, and they're not demographically distinct - a well-connected grandmother may know people in the media, executives of businesses and other highly placed and valuable minds.
* Journalists - Online or offline creators of "news" content, these influencers are among the most valuable of all the linkerati. A reporter for the Wall Street Journal, New York Times or the Seattle Weekly all have reach and ability to create links to your site, although it's often in a second-hand fashion (as some sites don't directly link out, but many bloggers "pick up" news items and do).

Any others I'm forgetting about?

SEOmoz | Identifying the Linkerati

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