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Seeking Guest Designers and Guest Programmers

I’ve been enjoying being a guest blogger for a couple of years now. I don’t do it that often, but just recently joined Dan Schawbel’s Personal Branding blog as a contributing writer, and have written for Doug Karr’sMarketing Tech blog a couple of times. (I even started my career as a writer by writing a guest column for my friend Joel in our college newspaper.)

Really old computer about the size of a pipe organ with people or sitting or standing around it.
Can you work a computer? Then, oh boy, have we got an opportunity for you?!

In fact, I like the guest blogger program so much, I think we’re going to take it that next logical step forward, and invite people to be guest web designers and guest programmers for our Professional Blog Service website.

Think about it. As a guest blogger, I get to write a weekly blog post about whatever topic I want, as long as it falls within the editorial direction and guidelines of the host blog. People see my name, I get some backlinks to my own site, and I get to promote my own efforts, like my own personal branding book, Branding Yourself (affiliate link).

Our guest designers and guest programmers will get to feature their own work on our blog, where it can be seen by all of our visitors, who will ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ appropriately, marveling at the cleverness of your work and your skill. You’ll get viewers and consumers of your work, which could lead to some exciting new opportunities for you! Plus, we’ll create a backlink to your website on one of our blog posts. (Maybe the one about social media strategies for soil conservationists.)

While you are free to create or design anything, our goal is to specifically find guest providers who can:

  • Help us get the Agency theme working on the Genesis framework.
  • Write a WordPress plugin that will properly sync my speaking calendar to a sidebar Google calendar. (I can’t get any of the other ones to do it the way I want.)
  • Write a cool mobile app that lists all independent coffee shops in U.S. Sort of like the Starbucks app, but for indie shops. (Android only; you can create an iPhone version for yourself later.)

You know, simple stuff. However, unlike guest bloggers who don’t get anything, guest designers and programmers will get, I don’t know, a pound of coffee or a case of Mountain Dew. You guys like that caffeinated stuff, right?

So, if you’re as excited about this amazing opportunity as I am (if that’s possible), please leave us a comment and let us know what you would like to contribute.

The preceding was meant to be a feeble stab at humor, and not an actual call for designers or programmers. It’s also not a veiled slam against guest blogging, which I think is very valuable for bloggers. I was just in a weird mood this morning.

My book, Branding Yourself: How to Use Social Media to Invent or Reinvent Yourself (affiliate link), is available on Amazon.com, as well as at Barnes & Noble and Borders bookstores. I wrote it with my good friend, Kyle Lacy.

Photo credit: National Museum of American History (Flickr)

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How Can Google Determine QUALITY Blog Content?

Google’s latest changes, thanks to the JCPenney/Searchdex debacle, has a lot of search engine optimization people scratching their heads, worrying about what it will do to their search rankings. Google has also declared war on content farms, going after the black hat backlink builders that build crappy sites who try to game search engines by filling websites and blogs with lots and lots of useless, poorly written content.Black Cowboy Hat

Don’t ask me how they’re doing it. Google’s remaining mum on the situation, saying only:

Many of the changes we make are so subtle that very few people notice them. But in the last day or so we launched a pretty big algorithmic improvement to our ranking—a change that noticeably impacts 11.8% of our queries—and we wanted to let people know what’s going on. This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on [emphasis added — Erik].

It’s this last statement that has me intrigued about how Google is going to recognize some of this. How will they know whether sites have original content, do their own research, or provide thoughtful analysis?

I think the answer lies in the foundation of semantic search.

Semantic search, says Wikipedia, “…seeks to improve search accuracy by understanding searcher intent and the contextual meaning of terms as they appear in the searchable dataspace, whether on the Web or within a closed system, to generate more relevant results.”

In other words, semantic search tries to figure out what you mean, not what you said.

For example, if you’re doing a search for “bark” and “dog,” a regular search engine may give you results not only about dogs, but about the bark of a dogwood tree. But semantic search will know that you’re inquiring about a dog, and return only those results that meet your requirements.

Right now, Google is looking at content farms as a group and dropping them — as a group — from their search index. And that’s fine. For the most part, it shouldn’t hurt anyone who is writing original, thoughtful content.

But what happens when Google decides to take a look at some previously ignored places where people are writing bad content trying to game the system? What happens when they look at WordPress.com and Blogger.com, two favorite targets of the search spammers, who dump crappy article after crappy article into throwaway blogs? Google isn’t going to dump their own blog platform (Blogger) from their index, and they won’t do it to WordPress.com without hundreds of thousands of people crying foul. So how will they do it?

My prediction is that Google will be able to figure out what’s good and what’s bad by using the semantic search technology. They’ll determine what’s well-written and what sucks, what’s original and what was barfed out of an article spinner.

We’ve seen some examples of this technology already. Anyone who has ever run the grammar checker on Microsoft Word (which was apparently written by my 7th grade English teacher) has seen how this works. It checks the grammar and usage in your documents to see if there are any serious errors. It’s not great, and often delivers inaccurate or outdated grammar errors, but it can at least find some problems.

So why can’t Google do this? By using semantics, a good grammar checker, and a thesaurus, Google could determine what is original content and what is crap. By examining the language used, Google may be able to determine the intent of the content writer, and whether they’re truly creating original, thoughtful content, or just trying to game the system again. They could raise up some content while flagging or penalizing others.

The best part is this strategy would encourage people to create valuable content, rather than just trying to stand on the shoulders of others and steal theirs or spin it as a way to game the system. It means your stuff has to be well-written. You need a decent grasp of the English language, and the ability to string more than two sentences together.

(Of course, this could have a detrimental effect on people who just can’t write, don’t speak English as a first language, and teenagers who insist on writing in text speak, but that’s a post for another day.)

What do you think? Will a semantic indexing system help bloggers who are trying to do the right thing, or will it hurt the industry as a whole? Do you think people will mistakenly be caught up in a new semantic system? How would you avoid it, either from Google’s view or the writer’s?

Photo credit: arbyreed (Flickr)

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315 Million Reasons Why Writers Shouldn’t Write For Free

The online newsies of the world all pointed and shouted with excitement, “See?! SEE?!” when AOL bought the Huffington Post new blog for $315 million. Newspapers and journalists all hunched over and typed a little faster when they heard the news, hoping they too could be the next major acquisition by the online giant-emeritus.

But it’s only recently that people began realizing that Huffington Post built its success on the backs of unpaid writers — writers who want to be compensated, even just a little, by the news source they built. (Simon Dumenco has a good wrapup of how Huffington Post is screwing their writers.)

I understand the appeal. The writers were promised the one thing every startup publication offers plenty of (but usually has none): exposure.

“We can’t pay you, but we’ll put you in front of all of our readers,” they promise. “Once we start to get money from ad revenues, then we’ll start paying you for future articles.”

But Huffington Post aside, those 9 million other magazines and newspaper startups never see enough revenue to pay for the celebratory kickoff party, let alone paying the bankruptcy attorney when they fold three months later. Besides, it doesn’t sound like HuffPo ever offered money. Ever.

It’s real simple, writers shouldn’t write for free. In that link, scifi writer Harlan Ellison rants about how writers are constantly getting the short end of the payment stick, thanks to the mistaken idea that what we do is somehow easy.

What we do is not easy. We’ve only done it for so long, we make it look easy. It still takes work to string together 500+ words, make sure they’re spelled correctly, are coherent thoughts, and are assembled into something that’s both easy and enjoyable to consume. (If you think it’s easy, take a whack at 500 words on any topic, and send it to me for an “honest but thorough” critique. I dare you.)

Look, if you want exposure for your writing, and you want to write for free for Huffington Post. Go ahead. But don’t do it in the hopes that they’re going to come up with a little thank you gift for all your hard work. You knew it was free going in, and that was the deal you made with them.

I don’t mean to sound unsympathetic, because I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve been screwed by an editor or potential client. I fervently believe that Huffington Post should do the nice thing and show a little love and gratitude to the people who made them worth $315 million, but I don’t think it’s something they have to do. Not because it’s their party, and they made the rules, but because the writers never had the expectation of getting paid, and went into the relationship fully expecting to never receive money.

(Update: One friend who runs a very popular community blog said if he gets a front page placement on Huffington Post, his site get 10,000 – 50,000 extra visits from the story. Otherwise, he runs around 2,000 extra visits. For a site that makes money from selling advertising, writing for free for Huffington Post is worth it, because it helps him serve up more ads, which makes him more money.)

If you want fame and exposure, write your own blog. Work your ass off in that niche, become famous, and work on your personal branding to find new readers. Then leverage that into paid bylines in real print publications, public speaking gigs, and even a book, like say, one on personal branding (affiliate link).

While that strategy is much, much harder than knocking out a few blog posts for Huffington Post, it also protects you from being totally screwed when the website is sold to a giant conglomerate and you don’t get anything. At least when you’re writing your own little blog, you’re getting nothing anyway, but without the painful screwing that the Huffington Post writers just experienced.

There’s no reason you have to write for someone else, especially when all you get is a byline. Thanks to all the different free blogging platforms that are available — Blogger, WordPress, Posterous — you can have your own blog and write for free to your heart’s content. And when someone makes an overture to buy you for $315 million, you don’t have to share it with anyone at all.

My book, Branding Yourself: How to Use Social Media to Invent or Reinvent Yourself (affiliate link), is available on Amazon.com, as well as at Barnes & Noble and Borders bookstores. I wrote it with my good friend, Kyle Lacy.

Photo credit: Daniel Borman (Flickr)

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11 Great Blog Plugins for Mobile Browsers

Is mobile browsing really only 5% of all website visits?

According to Stat Counter, from August 2010 to January 2011, mobile browsing versus desktop browsing of websites is 5%. While that may not seem like much, that’s actually pretty huge. The previous 8 months of 2010, mobile traffic accounted for 2.5% of all web traffic.

Source: StatCounter Global Stats – Mobile vs. Desktop Market Share

 

As a mobile user, I have to say, I’m a little frustrated when I visit certain websites. Chances are, if websites and blogs were mobile compatible, I bet the 5% would be so much higher. How often do you get a Tweet that sends you to a website, only to to have to adjust the content to fit your screen, or scroll back and forth just to read the site? I don’t even stick around, so I’m sure that I am a bounce on a sites statistics.

My favorite soccer blog, Soccer by Ives, is very active on Twitter. Whenever I click through to one of his articles on my iPhone, I am always annoyed that his Typepad site is not mobile compatible. I also access my other favorite site, Match Fit USA, via Twitter and my iPhone, but it had the same problem, so I tweeted and suggested the blogger plugin he needed for mobile browsers. He obliged, installed it, and Match Fit USA is now very easy to read on my iPhone now.

If you have a WordPress blog, it is easy. There are 10 for WordPress plugins for mobile browsers:

  • WP iPhone: This is our favorite. If you visit Professional Blog Service on your phone, you’ll see a beautiful, clean layout that actually works on all mobile phones.
  • WordPress Mobile Edition
  • Wodpress Mobile.mobi
  • WordPress Mobile Pack
  • MobilePress
  • Mobile Admin
  • Mobilize
  • Mowser
  • Wetomo WordPress to Mobile
  • WP viewMobile
Erik Deckers' Laughing Stalk QR Code
Erik Deckers' Laughing Stalk QR Code

Blogger now has a beta for mobile browsers, as well. Erik uses the new Draft Mobile Platform for his Laughing Stalk blog. Check it out. (They even have a QR code, which you can access from your phone. You can try it here.)

Typepad also has a mobile browsing option, although we haven’t tried it out yet.

It is time to provide your mobile users the ability to read your site content without pinching or swiping — or worse — just ignoring your blog post updates. Update your sites for mobile browsing, and your followers will love you for it.

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Search Engine Optimization is NOT Gaming the System

I’ve heard the question so many times, I want to shout at something: “Isn’t SEO just gaming the system?”

Andrew Hanelly wrote a great post for SocialMediaExplorer.com about why search engine optimization would be important even if the search engines stopped running.

And he makes a solid argument for why we should practice SEO techniques, even if we’re not actually trying to win search.

But I want to respond to the people who think SEO is somehow distasteful, or even cheating. Those critics and nay-sayers who think SEO is “just gaming the system.”

No, it’s not. It’s participating in the system that’s already in place.

First of all, this is the system. You go to a search engine, you search for something like “Italian wedding soup recipes” or “how to repair a bicycle tire.” The search engine tries to deliver what you want, because it knows what it should deliver. It looks for certain clues, like the title of a website — “1,001 Italian Wedding Soup Recipes” — or keywords in the body copy, and gives you the results that it thinks will most effectively meet your requirements. That’s the system. If you want to succeed in the system, you have to do the things that tell the search engines you can provide exactly what the users are looking for.

Second, the search engines can tell if a site isn’t very useful. It gets rid of sites that are pretty much useless. So even if someone wanted to game the system, if they’re not providing useful or valuable content, the site will soon be dropped when no one visits it, so the system weeds out anyone who isn’t giving users the things they’re looking for.

Third, using black hat SEO tricks is gaming the system. It’s cheating, because it uses tricks that have been banned by the search engines. Using tiny text or invisible text to cram keywords onto a single page is cheating. Building link farms with thousands of links on a single page is cheating. People who do that are immediately banished from the index, and will never show up on the search engine results. So the system eliminates cheaters and Internet ne’er-do-wells.

Search engine optimization is just the way Internet marketing is done. It’s no more gaming the system than buying a targeted direct mail list, or translating a website into Spanish to reach Hispanic customers. There’s nothing wrong with it, and people are going to continue to use it, because it works.

Even the people who think “gaming the system” is somehow wrong use their own life optimization techniques without batting an eye.

Would you turn in a half-finished crappy resume, because writing a good resume is “gaming the system?” Would you submit an RFP that didn’t meet all the requirements, because turning in what you’re asked for is “gaming the system?” Is practicing for a sales presentation gaming the system?

Of course not. So why is search engine optimization — a common business practice — somehow gaming the system, when that’s the only system that’s available?

Until you find a viable alternative, this is the only system we’ve got.

Photo credit: VizzzualDotCom (Flickr)

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Five Reasons to Use Posterous as a Social Media Distribution Point

I’ve been enjoying playing with Posterous for about a year now, and while I don’t recommend it for everyone, it can be a great tool for some people. You should consider using Posterous if you are a:

  • Beginning blogger
  • Social media specialist
  • Mobile blogger
  • Crisis communicator

Posterous is an email submission blog. You send your post as an email to your own Posterous.com address, treat the subject line as the headline, and any attachments you send are incorporated into the post itself. It’s not pretty at times, but if you need something fast, this is it. Plus, you can go in and edit stuff to make it look better later.

Posterous.com Screenshot
My Posterous.com blog

I’ve often said, “Using a blog interface is a lot like sending an email.” Now, thanks to Posterous, it really is sending an email.

Here are five reasons to use Posterous as a blog platform and social media distribution point:

  1. It’s ideal for mobile phone users. If you’re constantly on the go, and want to blog about the things you see, Posterous allows you to upload photos or videos to your site, along with any accompanying text. Posterous takes advantage of the overall computing power of today’s mobile phones. When I need to demonstrate Posterous during a talk, a few minutes before I go on, I’ll snap a picture of the gathering audience on my mobile phone, attach it to an email, and type in a couple of lines. Before my talk begins, I tell the audience, “I’m going to hit send on this email right now. You’ll see why it’s important in 10 minutes.” Then, when I get to that point in my talk, I show them my Posterous page, which has the picture of them. If you’re a crisis communicator or a mobile blogger, this is an ideal tool for communicating with the public on the fly.
  2. Posterous will automatically send videos and photos to other sites. I have tied my Flickr, Picasa, and YouTube accounts to my Posterous account; it also sends videos to Vimeo. Whenever I take photos or videos, and send them to Posterous, they are automatically uploaded to the appropriate networks. I don’t have to upload them first, and then download the embed code. The downside for anyone who is concerned about search engine optimization is that your digital properties are on Posterous, not on YouTube or Flickr, so you lose any search engine juice that would normally come from a well-optimized video or photo that links to your site. There are workarounds for this, but they take some extra time after your post has been uploaded. If you’re a social media specialist, you’ll love this feature.
  3. Posterous will automatically repopulate content to other blog platforms. You can tell Posterous to re-send your content on to your WordPress, Blogger, Drupal, TypePad, LiveJournal, Xanga, or Tumblr site. Publish a post on Posterous, republish it on your “official” blog. Yes, there are plugins and apps that let you email your posts in to these platforms, but they won’t necessarily upload your video and photos to YouTube and Flickr. Again, crisis communicators or mobile bloggers who need to get information out to several networks will love this feature.
  4. Tell Posterous NOT to post to certain networks. The default setting for Posterous is to repost everything to every network you want it to (i.e. email my post to post@posterous.com. But what if you have a photo you don’t want to send to Flickr, or you don’t want a post to show up on your WordPress blog? By using a specific email address — for example facebook+youtube+blog+twitter@posterous.com — I can tell Posterous to post to my different properties, but leave out a specific network. In this example, I’m leaving out Flickr.
  5. Posterous can automatically notify Twitter, Facebook, Google Buzz, etc. about new blog posts. Tie your Posterous blog into your different social networks, and notify your followers when a new post is up.