By Jessica Merritt
Twitter is an excellent, addictive tool for getting connected socially and building your personal brand. It’s also a simple tool, but there’s a lot you can do to improve upon it. Make use of these tips, tools, and other resources to make your Twitter experience better than ever.
50 Easy ways to Improve Your Twitter Experience
Good post just for nothing else to open your eyes at what you can do with 120 characters.
I went through an in-depth workshop with John Jantsch and the Marketing PlanPro guru's. To tell the truth, when I was looking at the Beta version, I was kind of ho-hum about the whole thing. But this looks pretty impressive as a finished product. Special offer on August 24th Release Date, details coming soon! Do not pre-order it. This will ruin my surprise. You will be able to download it instantly if you wait.
Amazon Says: Marketing Plan Pro powered by Duct Tape Marketing is a brand new release of the #1best-selling marketing-planning software from Palo Alto Software. Are you getting the results you want from your marketing programs? How will you grow your business this year or month, starting today?
Marketing Plan Pro powered by Duct Tape Marketing is the answer. We've taken the award-winning Duct Tape Marketing process and embedded it into simple software that will guide you through the process of creating a powerful marketing system that will help you grow your business. Duct Tape Marketing is a systematic approach to marketing that is as elegantly simple as that sticky and trustworthy roll of duct tape.
The Duct Tape Marketing system, developed by renowned small-business marketing guru John Janstch, shows you how to develop and execute a marketing plan that will give your business the life and longevity you always knew it could have. The Marketing Plan Pro software package integrates this powerful system into a step-by-step approach that guides you through the process of creating a marketing plan that will get results. Marketing Plan Pro will not only produce a great looking marketing plan, but a true action plan that you can start using immediately in your business. Every step includes detailed explanations, examples, and links to the forms and worksheets you need to translate your plan into action. Audio introductions, narrated by John Jantsch, are also included for major topics.
Marketing Plan Pro will automatically generate charts and graphs, and it guides you through the process of creating your forecasts, milestones and goals. Now you can have one of America's most respected small-business marketing experts - one who has helped thousands grow their businesses with a proven step-by-step system - actually guide you along the marketing path for a fraction of what others have paid for the same expert advice and coaching.
I like Ben's blog and he is always having good things to say.
From the Instigator Blog by Ben Yoskovitz
Paul Graham is well-known in the startup world for his past successes and most recently, the launch of Y Combinator. Y Combinator continues to garner a ton of attention, from a combination of the sheer volume in startups being launched through the program, the successful exits, and the way in which they’re shaking up the venture capital industry.
I’ma big fan of Y Combinator. I wish I could have gone through the experience. From the outside looking in, I see an insanely talented and dedicated group of people running the operation, who are working with a slew of bright, young, hungry entrepreneurs. I’ve met several Y Combinator folks and have been impressed with all of them.
I think Canada needs a similar model, although for a whole host of reasons, it can’t be quite the same. But that’s a topic of discussion for another time.
PaulGraham recently published his Fundraising Survival Guide, and I wanted to take a few moments to go through some of his key points and add my own thoughts and experiences to the mix.
- Fundraising is brutal.
- There are no secrets.
- Consulting is the only option you can count on.
- Creates an us vs. them attitude.
- Keep working on your startup.
- Raising money for the first time alone is almost impossible.
Ben offered some great comments and also other insights as well that I did not duplcate here. If you are newbie to raising money take a look here.
Getting ready to offer a Duct Tape Marketing Product Launch kit.
This was a LinkedIn question the other day. Read on!!!
Let's say for the sake of discussion, the Internet had a complete world wide failure this afternoon, and a new one had to be put together....how much do you think the world should collectively be willing to spend to get it up and running again? A million dollars? 20 million? A billion dollars?
Ok, let's see..All seeing, All knowing, and is everywhere. Not for this message to be misconstrued but after 12 years of Catholic education, I could see answering a question in a certain class incorrectly??
http://blog.impactyourcompany.com/atlantas_small_business_m/ – Scott Campbell
http://blog.distil.com.au/ – Joe Bowers
http://tornadomktg.com/blog/ – Adrianne Machina
http://www.marketaccelerators.com/blog – Michael Thompson
http://blog.1429design.com/ – Randy Vaughn
http://www.sellmoremarketing.com/blogs/marketing_matters/ – Bill Doerr – Marketing Matters Blog
http://ideasforsuccess.wordpress.com/ – Joe Costantino
http://www.getillumination.com/_blog/Illuminating_Marketing__Blog – Andy Schwartz and Rick Rochon
http://stickynotecoach.wordpress.com/ – Roger and Diane Morris
http://growyoursmallbusiness.typepad.com/ – Liz Walker
http://www.business901.com/blog1/ – Joe Dager
http://blog.rebarbusinessbuilders.com/ – Bill Brelsford
http://profitwithsandraleeblog.wordpress.com/ – Sandra Lee
http://outsourcemiracle.com/ – Varju Luceno
http://zugunruhecoaching.typepad.com/zugunruhe_coaching_llc/ – Tara Rodden Robinson
http://stickymarketingsystems.com/blog/ – Jeff Paro
http://blog.wemakemarketingeasy.com/ – Ken Partain – main blog
http://directory.leadmaverick.com/Infinite-Prosperity-Group/598/rss.aspx – Ken Partain
I love to find these gadjets. Not sure the value they all provide but if they get me thinking in a certain direction, they serve their purpose.
I am a huge fan of interactive tools as a way to generate a World Wide Rave (when people are talking about you and your company). The best interactive tools tend to be free, are easy to use, and provide meaningful data. And when they do all those things, people talk about them and share them.
For example, HubSpot has two great tools, Website Grader and Press Release Grader. The simple and free tools have been used to grade hundreds of thousands of sites and press releases. And tons of bloggers have talked about the tools, generating thousands of inbound links.
Last week, Douglas Karr released on his Marketing Technology Blog a Tuned In Calculator. The idea is deceptively simple. It takes your RSS feed and analyzes it for how often you use egocentric words like "we" and "our" compared to how often you talk about your readers, your buyers and their problems. As Douglas says, "If you're always talking about yourself, you may not be Tuned In!"
Here is a link to the Tuned In Calculator.
When I first tested this blog, I got a 9 (awesome). But a few days later when I tested, I scored an 8 (caring). I'll need to figure out why the difference! Maybe Douglas tweaked his algorithm yesterday.
Thanks Douglas, for taking an idea in our book Tuned In and creating such a great tool.
This is syndicated from Web Ink Now, and written by David Meerman Scott.
By Ted Needleman
You have to wonder sometimes. As laptops get smaller and lighter, their run times often suffer due to fact that smaller laptops have smaller batteries. Improvements in battery technology and the development of power-sipping CPUs help somewhat, but it’s rare to find a laptop that can run much more than two-and-a-half to three hours without a recharge.
Considering the amount of time that you probably spend in airports waiting to board a flight, not to mention the time spent on the flight, unless you can do your waiting near an AC outlet, and fight off all of the other users who want to share “your” outlet, you’ve got to figure that your in-travel productivity is probably going to be severely curtailed.
From the Nonprofit Times but very pertinent to any businessman.
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32 Most Important SEO TipsFollowing these simple tips will definitely boost your traffic and search engine rankings for free.
- Make sure your site is not under construction, incomplete, with little or no unique content.
- When your site is ready, submit it to Google, Yahoo, MSN and ASK.com.
- Submit your sitemap to Google, Yahoo, MSN and ASK.com
- Offer sitemap to your site visitors for easy page navigation.
- Create unique and rich content sites. Avoid duplicate content. Do not create multiple pages, sub-domains, domains, mirror sites or sites with different domain names but same content.
- Check your keywords and make sure they are relevant and actually are contained in your site. Avoid keywords stuffing.
- Use text instead of images in your content, links and important subjects.
- Make your TITLE and ALT tags descriptive, simple and keyword rich. Avoid irrelevant and repeated keywords.
- Title tag should be 60-80 characters maximum length.
- Meta tag description should be 160-180 characters including spaces. (about 25-30 words)
- Meta Tag keywords must be 15-20 words maximum.
- Optimize Pages with Headings containing your site's primary keywords.
- Validate your CSS and HTML. Check for errors and broken links.
- If your site contains dynamic pages make sure you use SEO friendly URLs. Search engines' spiders having difficulty indexing dynamic pages.
- Maximum links per page must be fewer than 100. Avoid the risk of being flagged as link farm by search engines.
- Use Lynx as text browser to check your site. (http://lynx.isc.org/)
- Allow search bots (good ones) to crawl your sites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site. Using these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of your site.
- Check your web server/host if it supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. It tells search engines whether your content has changed since last crawled your site. It will save you bandwidth, resources and avoid server overload.
- Use Robots.txt file to manage and control search engine spiders in indexing your site. You can allow and disallow spiders and choose directories you want to be crawled and indexed. But with bad bots or spam bots you need to modify your HTACCESS file to properly and effectively manage bots or spiders.
- Do not attempt to present different content to search engines than what you show to your site visitors.
- Avoid dirty tricks and exploiting loop holes to improve search engines ranking.
- Avoid links to bad neighborhood such as web spammers, link farms, phishing, hacker, crack, gambling, porn and scam sites. Linking to them will greatly affects your search engine rankings.
- Do not attempt to join in link schemes, excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging and link exchange web rings.
- Do not use unauthorized programs or online tools to submit your site, check page rankings and other automated queries. Avoid the risk of being flagged as spam.
- Do not use hidden text and links. Show to search engines what you show to your vistors. It will greatly affect your site's reputation.
- Do not attempt to create pages that contains phishing, scam, viruses, trojans, backdoors, spyware, adware and other malicious programs.
- Make your site useful and informative.
- Improve your link building. Link to high PR websites. Quality of relevant links are far more important than quantity. Links will greatly improve your site's visibility, popularity and rankings. Search engines consider links as votes to your site.
- Check your page link structure. Every page should be reachable by a single static text link.
- Be extra careful in purchasing SEO services. Some uses illegal and questionable ways to improve rankings.
- Do not buy or sell links.
- Do not create sites that contains purely affiliate links and no valuable content that are useful to the users.
