Google's Malaysia site latest to be felled in DNS attacks
Google's website for Malaysia was briefly tampered with on Friday, underscoring continuing weaknesses in entities administering crucial website address database records.
The site, "google.com.my," was functioning normally later on Friday, but had briefly displayed a page put in place by the hackers.
A group calling itself "Team Madleets" claimed responsibility for the hack on Facebook. According to the group's Facebook page, it claimed to have modified Google domains for Serbia, Kenya, Burundi and Pakistan over the last few weeks.
The country-code top level domain ".my" is administered by the Malaysia Network Information Center (MYNIC). An official contacted Friday morning said the organization was investigating a DNS (Domain Name System) attack. It wasn't immediately clear how the group performed the attack.
The DNS is a distributed database that allows a domain name to be translated into an IP address that can be requested by a Web browser. Companies and organizations that hold those records have come under attack by hackers in recent weeks.
Attackers have found success in capturing login credentials for people authorized to modified the records through targeted email attacks known as spear phishing.
If a DNS record is modified, it can cause a person looking for a website to be redirected to a different one controlled by the hacker. That's dangerous because the site a person is redirected to could be engineered to attack a person's computer and deliver malicious software.
Team Madleets describes itself as an ethical hacking group on its Facebook page. In a post, it said the MYNIC hack was not the "result of any kind of hate."
Google did not immediately comment on the attack.
Top-level domains such as ".com" and country-code top level domains are held by a variety of companies and organizations. The security of those records is managed by those companies and is often mostly out of the control of the entities whose DNS records they hold.
A string of prominent companies have been affected by DNS hacks recently, including the New York Times, Huffington Post, Twitter and LeaseWeb.
Earlier this week, a pro-Palestinian group gained entry to Network Solutions' network and modified DNS records for the website of the security companies AVG and Avira; the messaging platform WhatsApp; RedTube, a pornography site; and Alexa, a Web metrics company.
View the original article here
Friday, October 11, 2013
Adobe's source code was parked on hackers' unprotected server
Adobe's source code was parked on hackers' unprotected server
The files were encrypted but still sitting on an open Web server, security expert says
By Jeremy Kirk, IDG News Service | Data Protection
Hackers capitalize on other people's mistakes. But they make their own as well.
Case in point: A massive breach of Adobe Systems' network was discovered after the source code of numerous products, including the Web application development platform ColdFusion, sat parked on a hacker's unprotected Web server open to the Internet.
The breach, which also encompassed 2.9 million encrypted customer credit card records, was announced by Adobe on Oct. 3. Adobe had already been investigating a breach when Alex Holden, chief information security officer of Hold Security, independently found what turned out to be the company's source code on a hacking gang's server.
Adobe's source code "was hidden, but it was not cleverly hidden," Holden said.
Perusing the directory of the server, Holden found a directory with the abbreviation "ad." It was filled with "interesting" file names, Holden said, including encrypted ."rar" and ".zip" files.
It's not clear if the files were stolen from Adobe in an encrypted format or if the hackers encrypted the files and then uploaded them to their server, Holden said. In either case, Adobe confirmed it was indeed source code.
Source code could make it easier for hackers to find vulnerabilities in Adobe's products, Holden said. But so far, no new zero-day vulnerabilities -- the term for a vulnerability that is already being exploited but doesn't have a patch -- have surfaced in the last couple of months since the source code was taken, Holden said. So far, the source code has not been publicly released.
In an Oct. 3 10-Q filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Adobe acknowledged the breach, but said it did "not believe that the attacks will have a material adverse impact on our business."
But Adobe wrote later in the filing that its efforts to fight cyberattacks "may not be successful" and cause the loss of customers, incur potential liability and cost the company money.
The server had already attracted interest prior to the Adobe find. It was being used as a repository for stolen data by a gang that also broke into the networks of data aggregators LexisNexis, Dunn & Bradstreet and Kroll Background America, as reported by security analyst and journalist Brian Krebs.
The Russian-speaking gang -- which doesn't have a name yet -- is still active. And there's more to come.
View the original article here
The files were encrypted but still sitting on an open Web server, security expert says
By Jeremy Kirk, IDG News Service | Data Protection
Hackers capitalize on other people's mistakes. But they make their own as well.
Case in point: A massive breach of Adobe Systems' network was discovered after the source code of numerous products, including the Web application development platform ColdFusion, sat parked on a hacker's unprotected Web server open to the Internet.
The breach, which also encompassed 2.9 million encrypted customer credit card records, was announced by Adobe on Oct. 3. Adobe had already been investigating a breach when Alex Holden, chief information security officer of Hold Security, independently found what turned out to be the company's source code on a hacking gang's server.
Adobe's source code "was hidden, but it was not cleverly hidden," Holden said.
Perusing the directory of the server, Holden found a directory with the abbreviation "ad." It was filled with "interesting" file names, Holden said, including encrypted ."rar" and ".zip" files.
It's not clear if the files were stolen from Adobe in an encrypted format or if the hackers encrypted the files and then uploaded them to their server, Holden said. In either case, Adobe confirmed it was indeed source code.
Source code could make it easier for hackers to find vulnerabilities in Adobe's products, Holden said. But so far, no new zero-day vulnerabilities -- the term for a vulnerability that is already being exploited but doesn't have a patch -- have surfaced in the last couple of months since the source code was taken, Holden said. So far, the source code has not been publicly released.
In an Oct. 3 10-Q filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Adobe acknowledged the breach, but said it did "not believe that the attacks will have a material adverse impact on our business."
But Adobe wrote later in the filing that its efforts to fight cyberattacks "may not be successful" and cause the loss of customers, incur potential liability and cost the company money.
The server had already attracted interest prior to the Adobe find. It was being used as a repository for stolen data by a gang that also broke into the networks of data aggregators LexisNexis, Dunn & Bradstreet and Kroll Background America, as reported by security analyst and journalist Brian Krebs.
The Russian-speaking gang -- which doesn't have a name yet -- is still active. And there's more to come.
View the original article here
Wednesday, September 11, 2013
HOW TO LEARN SEO
HOW TO LEARN SEO
The author's posts are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.
At Distilled, we define our purpose as "discovering, implementing and sharing the ways great companies succeed online". It should come as no surprise, then, to learn that (a) I think a lot about how to learn SEO effectively and (b) we try to build learning into pretty much everything we do.
"How should I learn more about X?" is one of the most common questions I get asked both internally at Distilled and from the community and
"How should I learn more about SEO? is probably the most common among those.
Paddy wrote a really useful post this week covering some excellent resources for those starting out in SEO. I wanted to add my thoughts about the most effective ways of learning:
1. Curiosity is your biggest asset
Firstly, and most importantly, it's entirely up to you. Nobody else can learn for you. The single lesson that I remember most clearly from my school days was from Mr. Wilson, my electronics teacher. Paraphrasing:
Always ask yourself 'how does that work?'
I think this is one of the most critical life skills you can possibly acquire. It might surprise you to know that I think it'll make you a better SEO if you spend your time asking yourself questions like these (Spoiler: answers at the end of the post):
How do they get cranes on top of big buildings?How come phone touch screens work through paper but not through foil?How does gmail's two-factor authentication work? [Side-note: please turn on two factor authentication - it's more pain-free than you expect]
This highlights one of the key distinctions I wanted to make in this post. Learning is not the same as training. If you are provided with formal training opportunities at work then that's great, but in my opinion it's never going to be more than 5-10% of your learning. You are responsible for you - I highly recommend this talk by Sheryl Sandberg who I think is one of the best speakers on getting ahead at work.
From an SEO perspective, I suggest applying this first to the whole stack of a search result - from crawling, indexing and ranking to the actual delivery mechanism (DNS, TCP/IP etc.). The more curious you are, the better you'll be.
Closely related to this, I highly recommend getting your hands dirty in order to try to understand how things work. I'm a big advocate that this is very rarely a bad idea - though sometimes you also need a sandbox while you're learning. (This was the motivation behind our interactive modules in DistilledU - when you are learning about robots.txt syntax or Google Analytics code modifications it's nice to take the very first steps in a safe environment).
Curiosity killed the cat
Curiosity strikes again
I would go as far as to say that if you are looking to get into online marketing from scratch, the very first thing you should do is get a small site entirely under your control - everything from registering the domain to adding the Google Analytics code. What could go wrong?
It can take a lifetime to dominate specific skills, but it's surprising how much you can learn in a weekend (or even a couple of hours).
I talked about the exponential nature of learning in my Searchlove presentation in London last year. See slides 18+ here:
Link building mediocre to great from Will Critchlow
In summary, my mental model for learning is not an evenly paced journey from beginner to expert but more like an exponential scale where it gets many times harder to get from each stage to the next:
No experience at all - complete beginnerBasic competence - you start to be able to complete basic tasks (perhaps with oversight)Core competence - you can handle pretty much everything in this subject area"Distilled expert"(*) - one of the people that those with core competence turn to for helpRenowned expert - wrote the book
(*) that's what we call it at Distilled - you can use your initiative to come up with your own name for this level
Side-note: this scale deliberately includes a little confusion between excellence and fame - I'm afraid the real world works this way as well. My thinking on the subject was influenced by Joel Spolsky's writing on the subject of developer compensation [PDF]
You can make this work to your advantage - even if you don't intend to become a world expert in something, there is huge benefit to learning enough to know what you don't know. In my own online marketing journey, I've enjoyed applying this to technical skills ranging from setting up a linux server to toying with client-side jQuery as well as creative skills like basic video editing and animation.
I think Danny Dover's checklist is a great place to get started with this kind of learning for SEO.
I've observed that a trait that appears to separate highly successful technical marketers (and knowledge workers in general) from everyone else is the ability to recall the existence of arbitrary details.
Not everyone is a trivia geek, but they all tend to remember enough about the subtleties of a problem to find the detailed answer they need to get their job done. Whether this is remembering that there can be a time-lag to DNS propagation, that googlebot only crawls from US IP addresses or that if you include a specific user-agent directive in a robots.txt file that robot will only listen to those rules(*), it's this skill that avoids disaster over and over again.
(*) this last tidbit was something I learnt while building the robots.txt interactive module for DistilledU.
I think the way you cultivate this skill is to read widely and to create things yourself (what @bfeld has been inspiring me to call maker mode).
On the "reading widely" front, I strongly recommend setting yourself up with something like Instapaper that allows you to remain curious and interested without getting sucked into reading articles all across the internet all day every day. Instapaper gives you a browser bookmark (and mobile app) that lets you save an article to read later - and formats it for easy distraction-free reading. (My favourite feature is its ability to send a weekly "magazine" to my kindle every week). Others at Distilled like Pocket which does something similar.
The need for maker mode is the realisation that you never really understand the subtleties of something until you've done it. I talk more about this later.
Of course, you probably need deep expertise in at least some areas as well (the notorious T-shaped inpidual) but I would counsel that you should avoid spending all your time learning minutiae. The internet is full of it, half of it isn't correct and for much of the rest, you are far and away better served by shipping real things.
I talked about this at our all-hands company meeting in London in January. I talked about the perils of letting yourself be the smartest guy/gal in the room (TL;DR get yourself into a different room - at least some of the time). I think most people who have been really good at something let themselves at some point get exposed to people who are really, really good. For me this happened when I went to college. I had an experience very much like that described by @mechanical_fish in this Hacker News comment where he talks about going to a math competition:
This was one of the most valuable experiences of my life and I heartily endorse it. Because here's what happened: I got my ass handed to me. My teammates were freakishly smart. It turns out that the distribution of math-contest talent is not at all normal, and that being in the top 1% of contest-takers doesn't mean that you're within hailing distance of the top 0.5%. Oh, no.
Last year I went back to my old high school to give a talk entitled "things I wish I'd known". As I said on slide 11, you come to resemble the people you hang out with, so you should choose carefully:
Things I wish I'd known from Will Critchlow
The desire to get smart people together and let them share ideas is one of the driving forces behind the way we have designed our conferences. It's why we go for a single-track event with social events afterwards - giving people a shared context to discuss the things they've learnt with people who've got a wide range of experiences.
You don't have to go to a conference though. I started out my learning journey in SEO hanging out in online communities. Back in the day it was cre8asite (I recently saw black_knight at a conference and had fun reminiscing about those days). More recently it was SEOmoz and Twitter. I don't think you necessarily should expect to learn everything from the social interactions, but hanging out with people you know and like who know more than you do about a subject helps to steer you to learn the right thing next.
I like to think about two very different kinds of learning:
Learning to drive - you remember the first time you drove (the first time you drove stick for my US friends)? The experience of going from "HOLY CRAP I HAVE TO WATCH IN FRONT AND BEHIND AND SIDEWAYS WHILE MOVING BOTH MY HANDS AND BOTH MY FEET IN HARMON...BOUNCEBOUNCEBOUNCESTALL" to "I barely think about the mechanics of coordinating feet and hands and have time to pay proper attention to the road"Learning the directions to a new place - this is more like the transition from: "Before I looked up the way, I didn't know which street to take" to "After I looked up the way, I knew which street to take"
Only one of those is transformational, isn't it? So focus on things that look more like learning to drive and less on things that look like directions to a new place.
Never written any HTML? That is a great skill for an SEO to know - a form of online "learning to drive". (I recommend Treehouse and Codecademy which complement each other nicely).
Don't know the specific way to mark up a date in the hEvent micro-format? Don't worry about it until you need it - it's a form of online "learning directions".
Another way of thinking about this is to focus on learning real-time and bicycle skills. It's worth noting here that both these forms of learning can come with the same endorphin hit, so you need to keep asking yourself if the things you are learning are the right things. This was the main reason I left my first real job. I was a "coder-in-a-suit" (Accenture-style) for a small company. As I transitioned from learning real things (we were working on financial software, so I learnt about general ledger, P&L, balance sheets etc. as well skills as diverse as SQL and business process mapping) to learning the specific way you deploy certain changes on an IBM AS400 iSeries, I realised I'd gone from learning to drive to learning directions and I had to get out.
By its definition, learning involves new things. Some new things go wrong.
This is the greatest argument for actually shipping things - it's not until you try to ship something that you discover whether it really is a success or a failure.
If you are in a position of authority, I believe it's especially important to allow yourself to fail publicly (at least openly in front of your team). I read a great article about management at Github that talks about a management style of:
Show what, don't tell how
The core point of the article is that you can lead a team by getting stuck into the team's work but holding yourself to a form of open-ness where you not only do, but are seen to do.
The author relates this mainly to core job skills, but I think it's equally important about life skills like learning. As a leader, it's even more important that you take risks and fail visibly.
My journey of learning presentation skills falls into this category. Many of you will have seen me get crushed by Rand in a head-to-head presentation competition. Slightly fewer of you will have seen the times when the learning paid off and I repaid the favour.
I fail in public
I'm a big fan of writing as a core part of learning. I was taught that writing things down helped you retain them in your memory. I suspect that is true, but the more powerful effect is that the act of composing your thoughts shapes them. Structuring and editing a piece of writing gets you thinking more deeply about a subject than anything else I know.
Perhaps most importantly, writing is designed to be published. And in a world of blogging and social media, it's easier than ever to get other people's eyes on your writing. This gives you a safe environment in which to fail, allows feedback and makes it easy to surround yourself with people who are smarter than you are.
Finally, remember that being the most effective SEO you can be has remarkably little to do with SEO knowledge. We find that once you're past the basics, the bottlenecks are increasingly likely to be what I'm going to call the "liberal arts" of marketing.
To be truly effective at SEO you need to round out your education with a whole bunch of wider knowledge including:
Regular marketingBusiness awarenessProject managementPresentation skillsWriting skillsLeadership and people management skills
I still love this post by Paddy at Distilled on his views of what it takes.
For each of these skills, you can apply the methodology outlined above.
Learning something deeply doesn't happen in hours or days. But I would really like to see people working on their own learning experience - so if you are starting from scratch, start with these specific actions from my first three suggestions:
Get curious - go and look up the answer to something that's been bugging you. How does that work?Benefit from a learning curve - challenge yourself to learn something in 2 hoursFile away the trivia - sign up for Instapaper
But also - update us here - I would love to hear your learning stories and any tips and tricks you have to share with the community.
The answers to my "curious" questions above:
Cranes that build themselvesCapacitanceA shared key and epoch time
I've been a bit quiet recently.
I've been spending a lot of time working on DistilledU - our new online training platform for SEO. It's in beta just until 22nd August (the middle of next week). Now's the time to check out the free bits (a free keyword research module and interactive guide to advanced search query operators) to see if it's something that'd help you do your job because if you sign up during beta you lock in a 50% discount for life:
DistilledU
We recently announced the line-up of speakers for our Searchlove conferences in London in October and Boston in November. If you have done all of the above and want to see presentations from people at the top of their game, we'd love to see you there. If you sign up now, you get early bird pricing (there's an additional £100 / $150 off for SEOmoz PRO members - get your discount code here).
PS - I mentioned at the beginning that I've been a little busy. It's not just at work. At home, the news is a new Olympic champion in the "smallest Critchlow" event - Adam Joseph was born just over a month ago. Here he is with his sister showing off presents from Rand and the moz crew - thanks again guys:
Moz's newest fans
Moz's newest fans - Rachel thinks all robots are called "Roger"
View the original article here
GEORGE TAKEI ON GOOGLE+
GEORGE TAKEI ON GOOGLE+, FACEBOOK PLUGIN, MS SURFACE, SPEEDLINK
speedlink weekly roundup
Hi everyone! Hope you all had a great and productive week. So, this week, we finally found out what the whole “big secret” Microsoft was hiding from the world. Surface, which according to Microsoft is “a great PC that works like a tablet, a tablet that works like a PC”, was revealed on Monday. Initial analysis indicates that the soon to be born PC/tablet, may just have what it takes to rival Apple’s iPad and other existing devices. Don’t know about you, but if the price is right and they get it to work properly (MS has always an oopps moment), I may just get my hands on one, as soon as it gets out. How about you? What do you think of the Microsoft Surface? Will consider buying one? Why, why not?
First look… You can also watch the full presentation here.
On another front, George Takei (Star Trek celebrity), talks about his experience with FaceBook and why he loves it over “other” networks. The interesting part about the whole story is the mission Stephanie Van Pelt launched on Google+ to convince George Takei to use the network. He said that if he got 250K people circling him on G+, then he may consider using the network, to prove that it is not a “ghost town”. As of today he already amassed 63K+ and counting.
Stephanie Van Pelt
All right all. It's here. It's #TakeiTuesday ! Help us get @GeorgeTakei to join us over here on G+!!!!
Send him a Tweet and let him see all the G+ love we have to offer!
Stephanie Van Pelt originally shared:
Hi guise.
I don't know about you, but I'd love to see #GeorgeTakei join us here on G+. Just putting the word out there that I'm on a mission to get his attention. I was thinking that on #TakeiTuesday it might be a nice time to try to reach him on Twitter @GeorgeTakei to show him how much love he'd see from this community.
All right my Trekkers, who's in? 12 7 Powered by socialditto
Finally, if you heard about the new FaceBook plugin, you may want to consider reading what people have to say first, before thinking of installing the plugin. It is very promising indeed and I am testing it on a demo site. For now, I am waiting for the next update, which I hope would address the issues mentioned by users on the forum. If you really want to give it a go, this quick tutorial, should help. Yeah, its not your normal install and activate plugin.
As usual, in no particular order:
That’s it! Enjoy and have a great weekend.
Related Content - Check them out:
Google Privacy Changes, Trust Triggers, SEO, Speedlink 04:2012Google+ Plugins, Video Sitemaps, Pinterest For Business, Speedlink 09:2012Ads Galore, Google+ SEO, SOPA, Social Web, Speedlink 03:2012Pinterest For Marketing, Google Fresh, SEO, Blogging, Speedlink 05:2012Pinterest, Google+ Search, Social Web, SEO, Speedlink 02:2012
View the original article here
Sunday, September 8, 2013
SUCCESS SECRETS OF 5 MULTI-TOPIC BLOGS
WEEKEND PROJECT 2: SUCCESS SECRETS OF 5 MULTI-TOPIC BLOGS
This guest post is by Natalie Webb of Leave Me to My Projects.
You try telling Martha Stewart she needs to pick a niche.
So why is everyone in the blogosphere telling you that doing just that is the key to achieving any level of success in blogging?
True, it is easier to build and write a popular blog when you stick to one topic. But now more than ever, there is an opening for multi-topic blogs to hit it big, if they do it right. Wait, you don’t see the opening? That’s funny, it has a big flashing sign pointing the way.
That sign says “Pinterest.”
If I need to tell you what Pinterest is, I’d be mildly concerned that you have been in a coma for the last six months. But what is it about?
Pinterest is about collecting. People love to collect things. In the big wide world of the internet, this impulse is no different. As a matter of fact, it can be amplified.
Pinterest is where people collect pretty much everything they like from all around the internet and pin it to categorized and organized virtual pinboards. Each “Pin” is a nice large image with a description, which tickles our visual cortexes ever so nicely.
People … who are totally not me … have been known to spend entire days off getting lost in the inspiration. With Pinterest, you can visually create the life you are planning on living as soon as you get the time and money to do so.
I’m talking about lifestyle, folks.
The Pinterest niche, as this writer seems to have coined it, is the wide-open lifestyle area. Much of Pinterest, and therefore the Pinterest niche, centers around DIY (as in, things you can make).
The most popular topics on Pinterest, and in the niche, are Home, Arts & Crafts, Style/Fashion, and Inspiration/Education, according to Mashable. While those are the most popular, there tons of other topics to choose from as well—the Wedding category is also immensely repinned.
Because there are so many good topics to choose from, Pinterest niche blogs are not difficult to differentiate from each other. All you need is a focus. We walked though how to find your focus for a multi-topic blog yesterday. Now let’s get to some real-life examples.
The blogs selected here were chosen not necessarily because they are the biggest and baddest on the block. Some are run by whole teams of staff, some by one little ol’ person. Some have been established for a number of years, while some are newer on the scene.
What they have in common are all of the elements it takes to make an impact in the Pinterest niche. So what are these elements? Who better to show you than the Grand Dame of the Pinterest blogs, Martha Stewart.
Martha Stewart blog
A blog centered around a lifestyle, as Pinterest niche blogs are, need a face to associate with that lifestyle.
Martha Stewart has this so wrapped up that when you even think about homemaking, hers is the first face that springs to mind. She may run a media empire, live a life so beautiful it can make one green with envy, and have more prison street cred than some rappers, but when your mind turns to homespun craftiness, you think of Martha.
Martha gives her readers and followers tools to simplify and beautify their homes and their lives through the power of DIY.
All of Martha Stewart’s work is geared toward moms with kids and pets. They are a little older, settled down, and they own homes.They enjoy entertaining, gardening, cooking, crafting, and simply making their lives more beautiful.
I hardly have to mention how much how-to power Martha Stewart packs into her website, blogs, books and magazines. She has literally written the book(s) on homemaking.
Although Martha Stewart’s photography resources are nearly unlimited these days, her photography has always been top notch.
The good news is, with as little as a smartphone, paired with a little creativity and practice, anyone can take beautiful photos these days.
Now let’s explore five innovative multi-topic Pinterest niche blogs, including those all-important five secrets, the important stats, and what they are doing so well.
Hello Giggles blog
Personality: Founded by Zooey Deschanel and two friends, Hello Giggles has some serious starpower behind it in the indie darling. She is known to have coined the phrase “Adorkable.”Message: Entertaining and empowering inspiration for young women. Girly feminism, if you will.Reader: Young women in their “finding themselves” phase of life.How they help: Hello Giggles features tons of reader-submitted work and guest posts on a huge range of topics and creates a positive, female-friendly environment for reader interaction.Photography: A combination of professional and reader-submitted photography keeps the look of the site both polished and approachable.Topics: Entertainment, Treats, Beauty, Cuteness, Home, Social Issues, Opinion, Parenting, Humor and more.Twitter Followers: 97,492Facebook Fans: 165,000Bloglovin’ Followers: 3,138
Secret: Besides the starpower behind the blog, the best thing Hello Giggles has going for it is its feel-good factor. It absolutely oozes “Yes you can,” and that is what keeps its readers coming back.
A Beautiful Mess blog
Personality: Perhaps it is no coincidence that the force behind A Beautiful Mess looks so much like Zooey Deschanel. Elsie, however, is more vintage indie than cute and dorky indie. She is always incredibly positive and upbeat, and lets you inside her life, home and business in such a way that readers powerfully connect with her.Message: Pretty things that you can make and wear.Reader: 20-somethings living in apartments or other semi-temporary residences who love to make things themselves.How they help: Loads of tutorials and inspiration, as well as comprehensive ecourses.Photography: Elsie is a fantastic photographer, and uses everything from Instagram to vintage cameras to fancier photo-takers.Topics: Projects, Outfits, Treats, Beauty, Photography, Decor and more.Page Views Per Day: 170,859Page Views Per Month: 5 millionTwitter Followers: 29,412Facebook Fans: 35,399Pinterest Followers: 23,312Bloglovin’ Followers: 32,600
Secret: Elsie (and her sister Emma) over at A Beautiful Mess own a vintage clothing boutique called Red Velvet. While their business may be clothing, the blog is all about inspiration for the vintage, indie lifestyle. Elsie lives and displays the beautiful life her readers aspire to, and shows them how to create it.
Cupcakes and Cashmere blog
Personality: Emily is a girl who makes chic style look easy.Message: A guide for defining your style, reinventing your space, and entertaining with ease.Reader: The late 20s-early 30s married professional woman with no kids.How they help: Cupcakes and Cashmere is about personal lifestyle refinement with plenty of written and video tutorials featuring both Emily and industry pros.Photography: The photography here is spacious, simple, and beautiful.About: Outfits, Recipes, How To, DecorTwitter Followers: 56,769Facebook Fans: 61,439Pinterest Followers: 22,945Bloglovin’ Followers: 8,1505
Secret: Although Emily is sweet as pie, she brings a serious sense of authority to her style mentoring. She more than walks the walk herself, and she brings in the pros to truly help you up your game.
The Dainty Squid blog
Personality: Brightly colored hair does have a certain draw, and Kaylah the thrifting queen, amateur mycologist, cat lady, and collector of many many things goes through so many shades. She also has a cat named Dr. Octopus that lets her dress him up. Full of personality, this one.Message: Explore and be colorful.Reader: Shy, quirky, quiet, studious 20-somethings with insatiable curiosities and a love of multi-colored things. And they also love cats.How she helps: Inspired style inspiration, lots of laughs, detailed tutorials, and thought-provoking explorations.Photography: Kaylah is a photography fiend. Her style is whimsical, creative, and curious, and it always makes you think of her skipping around in the woods and fields with multiple cameras swinging around her neck.About: Beauty, Cats, Crafts, Fashion, Food, Hair, PhotographyGoogle Friend Connect: 6,104Twitter Followers: 5,278Tumblr Followers: 28,400Facebook Fans: 5,241Bloglovin’ Followers: 3,350
Secret: It is all about the personality. Kaylah is a shy girl (she even says so on her about page), and that is the kind of reader she attracts. The fact that she is so bright and colorful and outgoing on her blog is an inspiration to her readers, and she shows them step by step how to bring her carefully curated aesthetic into their lives.
Sincerely Kinsey blog
Personality: Kinsey is a wedding photographer who exudes and air of calm and tranquility that you can feel in every aspect of her blog.Message: Inspiration and exploration of the small, simple sweetness of life.Reader: Festival-going flower children that live with a camera in their giant hobo bags.How they help: Inspirations and tutorials for a creative life.Photography: There is a dreamy quality to all of Kinsey’s photography. She weaves magic with morning sunlight.About: Fashion, DIY, PhotographyPage Views Per Month: 265,000Google Friend Connect Followers: 2,434Facebook Fans: 1,077Pinterest Followers: 2,647Bloglovin’ Followers: 2,662
Secret: Kinsey makes this beautiful life look effortless. Her style, crafts and tutorials are presented in a way that makes them incredibly accessible and doable. On top of it all, her light, energy and passion shine through on every single page.
Whether you already run a multi-topic blog or are thinking about starting one, you really can have it all, if you do it right.
If you can identify and focus your personality, message, and reader, provide them with real, concrete help and back it up with beautiful images, you will have a lifestyle blog that readers yearn to emulate and will come back to again and again. Why? Because it feels like home.
What are your favorite multi-topic blogs, and what keeps you coming back as a reader? What are your secrets to multi-topic success? I’d love to hear from you in the comments!
Natalie is a truly Edward Scissorhands living in a Martha Stewart world. A Chicago-based writer, barber and obsessive DIYer, she blogs over at Leave Me to My Projects about her adventures in the DIY lifestyle with loads of how-tos and inspiration. She also spends way too much time on Pinterest.
View the original article here
IMPROVING SOCIAL &
IMPROVING SOCIAL & SUBSCRIPTION CALLS TO ACTION - WHITEBOARD FRIDAY
In this week's Whiteboard Friday, we'll be discussing ways that you can improve your social and email calls to action to make them more effective. Often times, when wandering the web, you'll find web pages that are filled from head to toe with all the possible calls to action that are available. By limiting your usage of these calls to action and by placing them purposefully, you will a significant increase in your conversions.
As always, don't forget to leave your tips, tricks, and pieces of wisdom in the comments below. Happy Friday everyone.
Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're talking about how to make your social and email calls to action more effective. I've drawn out a page here that I think represents what a lot of us see on the Web, what a lot of us do, particularly when it comes to blogs, but also when it comes to a lot of e-commerce types of pages, pages on the Web that we use for B2B types of content, really, any pages that you find where there's social calls to action, calls to action that want you to take some . . . subscribe to me, follow me on Twitter, subscribe to my email, become our fan on Facebook, follow us on Google+,
post to our Pinterest Board, whatever it is.
All of those types of actions that are generated on the Web often follow this format where you see, okay, here's a site. Here's the menu. There's a page title. And then they'll be just littered, literally littered with calls to action. I'm going to highlight in red all of the places where I see social calls to action oftentimes simultaneously. Over here on the sidebar, we'll use this left-hand nav that kind of pops out. Then we'll have some areas up here that have got a few. Oh yeah, make sure to put our Facemash on the right-hand side to show off all our Facebook. Oh, and let's have our tweets. Then we'll have the subscribe to email. Oh, at the bottom of the post we've got to have it there too.
Are you kidding me? I know you really, really, really want people to follow you on these social services and subscribe to your email. But is this the right way to go about it? Imagine if it was an e-commerce page, and it was just littered with buy buttons. Everything always said buy, buy, buy, add to cart, add to cart, add to cart. Kind of crazy. Right?
There should be one place where there's that one call to action, but instead we've overwhelmed. We've let the social web overtake our normal logic, our better knowledge of UI and UX practices, and we're delivering an experience that is essentially, "Where's the content man? If I subscribe to you, it's because I want to follow your content, and all you're telling me with your page is, 'Follow me.'"
This is a little overwhelming, and so I wanted to provide some best practices, some ways, some tips to help streamline this process and make it a little bit better. Let's walk through those. First off, as you can imagine, one of my top tips, one of my best ones is limit the choices. Don't overwhelm. I mean this two ways. I mean, number one, limit the choices in terms of decide where you're getting your best usage, your best customers. Limit your network to those places.
If Twitter and Facebook are the place for you, great. If it's Facebook and email, great. If it's Pinterest and it's LinkedIn, fine. You can provide, if you want, and a lot of people will do this, where they'll put one section up in the top right-hand corner. That's got the little icons for each network so that all of those are findable, sort of like the contact us page and the about us page or the terms of service and legal use and privacy policy. Those things are findable. Great. That's fine. That way, someone can go to any page on your website and, "Hey what's these guys'
Twitter? I want to tweet something at them. Great. There it is, right there."
In terms of calls to action, things where you're actually trying to get the subscription, where you're saying, "Hey, here's our Twitter box, and subscribe to us, follow us on Twitter, subscribe to our email," in terms of those calls to action, limit those choices. I would highly recommend max, max one to two. Really, seriously, you should only be trying to drive one or two social email actions on a single page. That should probably be relatively consistent.
You also probably don't want to overwhelm, meaning there's no reason to have this many. If you've got one box that's got them all somewhere on the page, in the footer, near the header, at the top, great. Then you want to have your one call to action in the place . . . this is tip number two. Promote where the action is most likely to happen.
I'll give you a great example of this. If you follow OkCupid's blog, which is called "OkTrends," I urge you to check it out. They have lots of phenomenal, interesting content there. What OkTrends has done is a ton of testing to see what's most effective. They found Facebook to be their most effective channel. What happens is, as you scroll down and are reading the page, in fact you'll see something like this. I've reached the bottom of the content, right, so all the content's up here. They have great graphics and images. Then here are the comments starting down on the bottom of the page. What you're going to see that's fascinating is as I've scrolled down, as soon as I reach the bottom here, where I've essentially said, they can detect via the browser, via JavaScript, hey, this person just reached the bottom of our content, the end of the blog post. Now is exactly the moment where we're going to drop down this little blue thing up here, and it's going to have a message sort of written in here that's like, "Subscribe to us on Facebook," or "Like us on Facebook."
Brilliant timing. They know which of the right call to action is to make, and they're making it at the time when you've finished consuming that blog post and you are most likely, because clearly, you've been engaged throughout reading the post. Think of asking for this at a time in normal conversation before you've even given the value proposition. Right? It's not like I tell you, "Hey, I want you to share what I'm about to tell you with all your friends." "What is it? Why do I need to share it before I know? Shouldn't you ask me that after you tell me what it is?"
And that's exactly what OkTrends is doing here, and that's what I would urge you to do as well. Make it happen at the call to action time. If there's content that makes someone scroll down a page, I really like having it at the bottom. At the same time you're asking for the add a comment or make a purchase on a page, that's the time to ask for that sharing activity. Prior to that, it's just a little odd. It's a little out of place.
Customize. Don't just use the standard calls to action. Right? Standard calls to action would be like the Tweet Me button, or the Facepile, embed, or those kinds of things. Those can be fine. Those can work. You can certainly test them, but I really like customizing, because the problem with the standard ones, especially those Facepile, Tweet Me, and that kind of stuff is that those buttons, those images, those graphics, those embeds, they start to look the same across page and sight and all over the Web.
When that happens, ad blindness happens, banner blindness happens. This is the same sort of thing that advertisers talk about with branding advertising that the ads just don't stand out anymore. People stopped noticing them. If you can customize, if you can make it unique, you can add your color scheme, you can your brand, you can add clever messaging, you can make it unique and different from what everyone else is doing on the Web with their social, that's when you'll stand out. That's when you'll have a much different experience that makes people stand up and pay attention to what you're showing them.
Number four, create an expectation and then, please, fulfill it immediately. This is most important with things like email, but it's also important with tweets and Facebook, etc. What I mean by this is if you have a call to action that says, "Like us on Facebook and get updates like this," or "Be notified when we do these kinds of things," your Facebook feed, the Facebook page should be a list of a lot of those things with not a whole lot else. It should be doing exactly what you say.
If you tell them, "Subscribe to our Moz Top Ten email" - we have a Moz Top Ten email - one of the things that we should probably do is as soon as you subscribe, we send you the last one. We don't do that right now, but we should. We're working on it. That way you get this sense of, "Oh, look, it's just what I asked for. It's as promised. Here we go. This is great."
Now they're delivering on the expectation they've created, and that creates a sense of trust immediately. Excellent way to go about this.
Use relevant social proof, number five. A lot of times people will say, "Oh great, I'll put the Facepile in, or I'll show them who else from their network is following me." Sometimes that's good. Sometimes it's not. Social proof is very case specific. For example, if I am going to be going out and buying a consumer product, maybe I am interested in what my friends are doing. But if I'm going out and I'm buying a product for my business, I might actually be interested in what people like me, who are relevant, who are at companies I know and like and trust, who are influencers and authority figures, their opinions may be much more interesting and important to me than, hey, your friend on Facebook, or hey, your LinkedIn connection bought this. That's kind of less interesting.
So I would urge you to figure out what the social proof is that's case specific to you and then apply that on these pages. If it's we are followed on Twitter by . . . I don't know if we are but Danny Sullivan or Avinash Kaushik or Richard Baxter or Will Critchlow, whoever these people are that you sort of go, "Oh, I know those guys. I really respect what they say." I will also follow SEOmoz or whatever your business is.
This is UX 101. Make the process dead simple. I have started to see these more complex social subscription, particularly email ones, where it pops up in a box and it asks you for more information, wants you to confirm before you do this. If you can, make it dead, dead simple, meaning, if you have an email box, I want it to look like this. Your email, subscribe. When you click subscribe right here, you get a little popup that says, "Thank you. We've just sent you an email to confirm your address. As soon as you click on the confirmation, you'll receive your first email from us." Amazing. Dead simple. Took me, literally, my email, a click and a confirm. Done. Sold. Easy. That dead simple process, that's the kind of thing you want to create, not just here, but anytime you have calls to action, because simplicity will promote higher conversion rate, better funnel mechanics.
Number seven, eliminate the noise from your social and email feed. If you are sending a lot of email blasts to your subscribers, if you are sending a lot of tweets, you're doing a lot of Facebook status updates, and you're looking and seeing the click through rate and conversion rate and engagement rates are low on a number of them and then occasionally high, gets a little spiky, try to focus on the spikes. Get rid of the noise and focus on curating that content better so that you have essentially fewer messages, but more high quality messages.
This works extremely well as people who subscribe to these services start subscribing to more and more. In the early days, very early days of Facebook, early days of Twitter, early days of email, way back in the day, people didn't get as overwhelmed and, therefore, more messages were more welcome. Now signal to noise ratio matters a lot more.
Finally, number eight, so, so important, if you can at all, measure the channel ROI that you're getting. What I mean by this is measure the difference between the value of someone coming from Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn or Google+ or email, or whatever it is, your RSS feed. Look at those different channels and say to yourself, "All right, I see that when I get someone subscribing to our RSS feed, that is just a huge value ad, because they come back to us on average 5 times in a month, and within 3 months, they become a buyer, and 60 percent of the people who touch our RSS feed, within 6 months will buy something from us." Fantastic.
Figure out what those different numbers are, and then focus on the channels that matter most to you. It might seem weird sometimes, but I've seen a lot of B2B case studies where LinkedIn is the highest referring. I've seen a lot of case studies where email is a much higher converting source than Facebook or Twitter or any of the other social networks.
Pay attention to this and make sure you focus on the ones that matter most. Don't be persuaded by popular media, social media, technology media that says, "Oh, Pinterest is the next hot thing." And you think, "Oh no, I don't have a Pinterest board. I've got to get people signing up for my Pinterest board and following me on Pinterest." Whoa, whoa, whoa, hold your horses. Is that actually a valuable channel for you? If you don't know, you should test. You should spend some time there. If you do know, and it's low, well, don't bother. Maybe that's not your demographic. Maybe that's not your psychographic. Maybe your customers just aren't there. Maybe, for some reason, the medium and your media don't connect well. That's okay. If you focus this, then you can do a great job on limiting the choices, promoting the right actions, and all of these other things.
All right everyone. I hope to see some fantastic calls to action for your social and email campaigns in the future, and I'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.
View the original article here
ADD PROGRAM SHORTCUTS
ADD PROGRAM SHORTCUTS TO YOUR DESKTOP CONTEXT MENU WITH YOUR MENU [WINDOWS]
add program shortcut desktopIt’s not difficult to spend a day downloading free new programs and notice that your entire desktop is suddenly cluttered. I know plenty of people who are very OCD with the appearance of their artsy, visual desktop and they’re simply unwilling to compromise and let a new shortcut in. That’s fine though, because there are plenty of other methods of quickly launching applications.
There’s the Quick Launch bar, the Start menu, several different application launcher programs you can install, but there’s also the context menu. The context menu seems too often overlooked as a great way to fire up programs faster than you expected. Today, I’m going to show you how to add applications to the context menu by using Your Menu.
The context menu is the menu that pops up whenever you right-click. You have a context menu specific for the blank desktop area, a context menu when you right click shortcuts, a context menu within Firefox, etc. With Your Menu, you’re able to launch applications by right-clicking anywhere on the desktop.
There are a lot of different ways to play with the Windows context menu in Windows 7. The most effective way is to probably just go right through the registry, where you’re able to edit context menus of all sorts, for your blank desktop area or for certain file types. That can be a long process though. If what you’re wanting to do is just place a shortcut to an application or file in your right-click menu on the desktop, then Your Menu has what you need.
add program shortcut desktop
Upon proceeding, you’ll reach a very simple screen that allows you to select what type of context menu item you’re trying to create: a single context menu shortcut or a cascading menu with multiple items.
desktop context menu
If you select to add a single item, again, the process is very painless. Menu Name would be what the name of the item is that you’re trying to add. It will be displayed as such in the context menu. From there, click the next field and a prompt will open for you to select which file you want to associate with the menu name. It can be any file, not just an executable.
Also, you can click into this field and cancel the opening of the prompt to manually type in a path or additional parameters. This is good if you want to open a program silently, windowed, etc.
desktop context menu
Afterwards, click the button to generate the registry file. Two REG files will then be placed on your desktop, for installation and uninstallation. Click the file to install the registry tweak, confirm the prompt, and then right click on any empty space of your desktop.
desktop context menu
You’ll notice that the new entry is immediately there in your context menu. If you want to create multiple items within this context menu, you’ll have to do it one-by-one, and they’ll begin to stack beneath each other.
Creating cascading menus is the same exact process, and a preview of that can be seen near the header in the application window.
add program shortcut desktop
If any part of this process is confusing to you, just send leave a comment and I’ll be sure to help. This tool is designed, and has only been tested, for Windows 7, so that’s where I’d recommend you keep it.
View the original article here
add program shortcut desktopIt’s not difficult to spend a day downloading free new programs and notice that your entire desktop is suddenly cluttered. I know plenty of people who are very OCD with the appearance of their artsy, visual desktop and they’re simply unwilling to compromise and let a new shortcut in. That’s fine though, because there are plenty of other methods of quickly launching applications.
There’s the Quick Launch bar, the Start menu, several different application launcher programs you can install, but there’s also the context menu. The context menu seems too often overlooked as a great way to fire up programs faster than you expected. Today, I’m going to show you how to add applications to the context menu by using Your Menu.
The context menu is the menu that pops up whenever you right-click. You have a context menu specific for the blank desktop area, a context menu when you right click shortcuts, a context menu within Firefox, etc. With Your Menu, you’re able to launch applications by right-clicking anywhere on the desktop.
There are a lot of different ways to play with the Windows context menu in Windows 7. The most effective way is to probably just go right through the registry, where you’re able to edit context menus of all sorts, for your blank desktop area or for certain file types. That can be a long process though. If what you’re wanting to do is just place a shortcut to an application or file in your right-click menu on the desktop, then Your Menu has what you need.
add program shortcut desktop
Upon proceeding, you’ll reach a very simple screen that allows you to select what type of context menu item you’re trying to create: a single context menu shortcut or a cascading menu with multiple items.
desktop context menu
If you select to add a single item, again, the process is very painless. Menu Name would be what the name of the item is that you’re trying to add. It will be displayed as such in the context menu. From there, click the next field and a prompt will open for you to select which file you want to associate with the menu name. It can be any file, not just an executable.
Also, you can click into this field and cancel the opening of the prompt to manually type in a path or additional parameters. This is good if you want to open a program silently, windowed, etc.
desktop context menu
Afterwards, click the button to generate the registry file. Two REG files will then be placed on your desktop, for installation and uninstallation. Click the file to install the registry tweak, confirm the prompt, and then right click on any empty space of your desktop.
desktop context menu
You’ll notice that the new entry is immediately there in your context menu. If you want to create multiple items within this context menu, you’ll have to do it one-by-one, and they’ll begin to stack beneath each other.
Creating cascading menus is the same exact process, and a preview of that can be seen near the header in the application window.
add program shortcut desktop
If any part of this process is confusing to you, just send leave a comment and I’ll be sure to help. This tool is designed, and has only been tested, for Windows 7, so that’s where I’d recommend you keep it.
View the original article here
ADD PROGRAM SHORTCUTS TO YOUR DESKTOP CONTEXT MENU WITH YOUR MENU [WINDOWS]
add program shortcut desktopIt’s not difficult to spend a day downloading free new programs and notice that your entire desktop is suddenly cluttered. I know plenty of people who are very OCD with the appearance of their artsy, visual desktop and they’re simply unwilling to compromise and let a new shortcut in. That’s fine though, because there are plenty of other methods of quickly launching applications.
There’s the Quick Launch bar, the Start menu, several different application launcher programs you can install, but there’s also the context menu. The context menu seems too often overlooked as a great way to fire up programs faster than you expected. Today, I’m going to show you how to add applications to the context menu by using Your Menu.
The context menu is the menu that pops up whenever you right-click. You have a context menu specific for the blank desktop area, a context menu when you right click shortcuts, a context menu within Firefox, etc. With Your Menu, you’re able to launch applications by right-clicking anywhere on the desktop.
There are a lot of different ways to play with the Windows context menu in Windows 7. The most effective way is to probably just go right through the registry, where you’re able to edit context menus of all sorts, for your blank desktop area or for certain file types. That can be a long process though. If what you’re wanting to do is just place a shortcut to an application or file in your right-click menu on the desktop, then Your Menu has what you need.
add program shortcut desktop
Upon proceeding, you’ll reach a very simple screen that allows you to select what type of context menu item you’re trying to create: a single context menu shortcut or a cascading menu with multiple items.
desktop context menu
If you select to add a single item, again, the process is very painless. Menu Name would be what the name of the item is that you’re trying to add. It will be displayed as such in the context menu. From there, click the next field and a prompt will open for you to select which file you want to associate with the menu name. It can be any file, not just an executable.
Also, you can click into this field and cancel the opening of the prompt to manually type in a path or additional parameters. This is good if you want to open a program silently, windowed, etc.
desktop context menu
Afterwards, click the button to generate the registry file. Two REG files will then be placed on your desktop, for installation and uninstallation. Click the file to install the registry tweak, confirm the prompt, and then right click on any empty space of your desktop.
desktop context menu
You’ll notice that the new entry is immediately there in your context menu. If you want to create multiple items within this context menu, you’ll have to do it one-by-one, and they’ll begin to stack beneath each other.
Creating cascading menus is the same exact process, and a preview of that can be seen near the header in the application window.
add program shortcut desktop
If any part of this process is confusing to you, just send leave a comment and I’ll be sure to help. This tool is designed, and has only been tested, for Windows 7, so that’s where I’d recommend you keep it.
View the original article here
Friday, September 6, 2013
TO CATCH A SPAMMER: UNCOVERING NEGATIVE SEO
TO CATCH A SPAMMER: UNCOVERING NEGATIVE SEO
Google recently updated its claims regarding the ability of other webmasters to affect your rankings via negative SEO. While questions about the efficacy of negative SEO continue to exist, it does not seem to be slowing down the growth of what is arguably the most contemptible part of the search industry.
On July 9th, a good friend of mine reached out to me with a problem. As a very risk-averse webmaster, he constantly plunges into the numbers, especially anchor text diversity, in order to make sure his site is as penalty-proof as possible. The latest updated data in SEOmoz's MozScape revealed a massive shift towards anchor text over optimization for several primary terms. It took only a few minutes to identify the culprit.
Diagnosing the Damage
The first step was to dig down into all the link data to identify just how deep the damage was. We downloaded all the links available on SEOmoz, MajesticSEO and AHrefs to make sure that we had every possible outlet covered. It didn't look good. On a primary keyword, the number of unique linking domains with exact anchor text went up 20x in a matter of two days. Below is an example of one of the spam posts.
example of spam
Now the leg work began of identifying as many negative links as possible. But this is when it got interesting. We were able to quickly identify that there were several sites involved in the attack.
Wait, what? Did you just read what I read? Distilled, the venerable white-hat SEO company was being attacked along side several bingo sites and an insurance liability website. This was too interesting to give up. At that point, I knew my day was shot.
Footprints, Footprints, Footprints
Let me go ahead and get this out - if you are thinking about doing negative SEO and are not a regular practitioner of black hat SEO, you are going to get caught. Sorry, but you just haven't thought it through enough to cover your tracks. What follows is a perfect example of that.
After digging through several of the XRumer spammed backlinks, most hitting up old .cgi guestbooks and bulletin boards, I noticed a handful of sitewide links coming from poor quality blogs. My first instinct was that these were from hacked sites.
gotcha
But something was different about these. Normally hackers hide their links in the posts with display:none tags so that the webmasters never actually see the bad links. It is a very effective strategy, but in this case they were fully exposed. So I checked another site that seemed to follow the same pattern.
network 2
In this example, the links were included in a post. It is very strange for a "hack" to follow such different patterns, sometimes dropping links sitewide and other times just in posts. So, it was time to investigate these anomalies. Off to one of my favorite sites, DomainTools.
For some reason, people still think that private registration is enough to cover all your tracks. Sure, it helps if you register a new domain and establish private registration at the point of acquiring the domain, but if at any point in your history you had accurate domain registration data, we can get to it. Anyone can. Using the DomainTools Registration History, we were able to track down the original registrant email address to info@-------.com
A Quick Note on Outing
As you have no doubt noticed so far in this post, I am not going to out the perps. We know the motive, and we know the likely perpetrator, but I can't prove that the parent company knew of the actions, nor even that the SEOs responsible for their accounts were aware of the actions taken on their behalf. I will not allow myself to be responsible for the downfall of a company that may have merely been ignorant rather than malicious, and I certainly won't open myself up to false flag attacks. That being said, the likely culprits are members of this community, and I believe they have much to lose if they continue in their ways. I can't prevent you all from connecting the dots, but I won't paint the picture myself.
So, back to the Investigation.
Now that we had a domain, we had a strong position from which to catapult our investigation. We quickly turned the domain into a twitter account, a twitter account into a link building company out of India. Aside from Distilled, a seemingly random business liability website was lumped into the attack. We were able to determine that the likely culprit owned a site which competes directly with this business liability insurance site. But we were stuck, until my good friend came through and did a quick analysis of the perpetrator's follow list on Twitter.
network 3
After a cursory look, he was able to identify a stinging indictment. Of the 41 individuals the likely culprit was following on Twitter, two worked for a direct competitor of the targeted bingo sites, one of which was the CEO of the company and the other the head of Web Marketing. He also followed Distilled, perhaps waiting to see how they responded when the attack was revealed.
the connection
This isn't quite the smoking gun yet, though, because the connection is not reciprocal. It is a strong indication, but not a nail in the coffin so to speak. But, alas, twitter is only one social media site. After digging deeper and deeper, we were able to find direct conversations of a personal, non-business, nature between the head of Web Marketing for the competitor sites and the likely culprit on Google+.
connection 2
Of course, this still only shows a link. But, as if the icing on the cake couldn't get any thicker, here is a nice comment the Director of Web Marketing left on a post about negative SEO just a few weeks ago. As you notice, he is contemplating Google's updated statement that negative SEO is possible. Seriously, could you make this any easier?
contemplation
So, what exactly does the evidence tell us...
A negative SEO attack was launched between May 20th and May 22nd of 2012 against several bingo sites, Distilled, and a business liability insurance site.The attack was likely created by an individual from India who owns a link building company.We know that who ever performed the attack had direct access to websites owned by the individual from India.That individual has direct connections with the CEO and Director of Web Marketing for a bingo website company.The Director of Web Marketing has reciprocated communication on social media sites with the individual likely responsible for the attack.The Director of Web Marketing responded with curiosity to Google's updated notation on negative SEO.
What do we not know?
We don't know, for certain, that either the CEO or Director of Web Marketing requested these actions be taken.We don't know, for certain, that the individual who owns the link building company was directly responsible.Why did they target Distilled in the campaign? Did they assume Distilled was an SEO of record for one of their competitors?
The Aftermath
If you are a victim of negative SEO, there are a handful of steps you simply have to tag to prevent potential damage to your site.
Download a complete list of links pointing to your site from Open Site Explorer.Mark any links in this list that came from the negative SEO attack.Submit these as a preemptive reconsideration request or via the feedback channel in Google Webmaster Tools.Use the Bing Webmaster Tools Disavow Tool immediately.Finally, if necessary, begin removing the bad links wherever possible. There are several tools to help out with this, including Virante's Remove 'Em, rMoov, or Richard Baxter's Excel Tool.
The Good News
At least at the moment, it appears that the negative SEO attack has been as effective as their ability to cover it up. For the time being, none of the sites appear to have been dramatically impacted by the campaign. However, with looming updates to Penguin, there is no telling. The best bet for any SEO is to stay on top of their backlinks, watching closely to make sure nothing nefarious makes its way into your profile.
Editor's Note
After the author wrote this post, Google announced a way to download your most recent links in Google Webmaster Tools that could prove very useful in this situation.
View the original article here
THE IMPORTANCE OF YOUR ESSENCE IN BLOGGING SUCCESS
THE IMPORTANCE OF YOUR ESSENCE IN BLOGGING SUCCESS
This guest post is by Alden Tan of Alden-Tan.com.
So you got your blog started up. It’s time to put everything in place.
You start to study the market and conduct all the research needed. You read up on other blogs, scout forums, and buy an ebook that’s supposed to help you succeed.
Having bought into the hype, you actually force yourself to apply all the tactics you learnt, even though you don’t have a good feeling about them.
You’re basically basing your work on others’ success!
Already you’ve fallen into the category of tired bloggers who’ve tried everything and yet not seen any success. And then you’re attracted by other “gurus” who advertise “the real deal”. It’s a vicious cycle.
What’s lacking? What is that one, invisible quality that the top bloggers all seem to have? You may be spending too much time doing what others are doing, when the real problem is this:
How much energy are you expending on your blog? I don’t just mean writing, designing, optimizing SEO, or using social media.
I mean how much of yourself are you putting into your blog?
The power of your self, injected in your blog, can take you far. It’s about bringing forth your beliefs to the world and sharing your vision with people.
And it all fuses together to create your “why”.
The goal is not to do business with everybody who needs what you have. The goal is to do business with people who believe what you believe.”—Simon Sinek, Start with Why
This attitude goes beyond merely following your passion and showing people you’re doing what you love. It’s also a step ahead of putting personality in your writing.
It’s the belief and vision you need to create your purpose. And with purpose, you’ll never be lost again.
In order to find your blog’s essence, you’ve first got to find your own purpose in life.
Remember, your blog is you. You aren’t a ball of marketing tactics and business strategies. You need to continually express yourself in your blog to get all that essence out there.
I found and fine-tuned my purpose with this little exercise I did at RyzeOnline. This powerful exercise can help you to zoom in on your very being, building the strong roots needed for both yourself and your blog.
Furthermore, one of the things the exercise teaches is to be fully proud of your essence and loudly proclaim it to the world. You can easily do that by writing and portraying that on your About Me page, and in all your articles.
Ever since I completed this exercise, I’ve only written with purpose. To put it another way, I don’t write if I’m not inspired. I stopped churning out content just for the sake of having an update for my blog. Not only does it feel a lot better, but my articles have been receiving greater response in terms of comments.
Do the exercise now to create your blog’s roots.
Now, with your purpose and essence found, you need to as yourself: who will I bring this to?
Forget about finding a target audience or a demographic. Ask yourself this:
“Are you being completely you when having an intimate conversation with someone or when you’re addressing a large group?” You should be.
There is a fantastic article on finding your one person (or customer) over at Firepole Marketing, complete with a free worksheet.
Finding your one person makes it a lot easier for you and your blog to communicate your essence. It relieves the pressure of marketing and managing your entire blog.
For me now, when I write, everything is directed to my one person. And combining it with the first point—my why—I know for sure I’m on the right track.
So find your one person now, and write, blog, and talk to them.
Every blog has a layout and design—otherwise it’s just a wall of words.
But does your blog visually scream your essence?
Good marketing for a blog would mean readers would know what you’re all about within just three seconds of landing on your page.
Your content and writing definitely plays a big role, but the fact is, people’s attention span fluctuate a lot, so you definitely have to get your blog’s look alone to grab attention. And when you do grab it, make sure the right messages are going through.
Zenhabits has a minimalist look and it works wonderfully. Firepole Marketing, with its tagline, “Marketing that works” easily tells us of the brand’s speciality in marketing.
I just went through a blog revamp myself. When I started out, I thought of taking pretty pictures of myself with a good camera, thinking that it would look good anyway. Now, the pictures of me easily tell of my life. Let me know if you get that.
Does your blog visually tell your story? If not, tweak it!
When I started my own blog, I just thought I’d write and see what comes along, because I knew I was a good writer. But I ended up writing random articles that were at most entertaining.
It was only when I dug deeper into myself and find out why I wanted to blog that I found real purpose in blogging.
Not only does it feel good doing what I do everyday, but people eventually recognized me for that. I got personal emails from readers asking me for real advice. And all my “winning” strategic platforms thrive on their own—now I have more Twitter followers, more Facebook likes and more opt-ins.
Are you a little sceptical in the importance of essence? Essence is not some magical, cosmic energy at work in which the universe rewards you for the passion you have. It’s just building a strong foundation in your blog or business.
Remember, with strong roots, your blog will bear great fruit. And what better way to build your roots than by being yourself, being passionate, and being original?
Alden Tan is a rock star blogger who writes about personal development, passion and inspiration. He gets most of his essence from doing what he loves despite what others think of him. If you want to learn how to get your own essence out, check out his email series on learning how to stop caring about what others think and start living!
View the original article here
This guest post is by Alden Tan of Alden-Tan.com.
So you got your blog started up. It’s time to put everything in place.
You start to study the market and conduct all the research needed. You read up on other blogs, scout forums, and buy an ebook that’s supposed to help you succeed.
Having bought into the hype, you actually force yourself to apply all the tactics you learnt, even though you don’t have a good feeling about them.
You’re basically basing your work on others’ success!
Already you’ve fallen into the category of tired bloggers who’ve tried everything and yet not seen any success. And then you’re attracted by other “gurus” who advertise “the real deal”. It’s a vicious cycle.
What’s lacking? What is that one, invisible quality that the top bloggers all seem to have? You may be spending too much time doing what others are doing, when the real problem is this:
How much energy are you expending on your blog? I don’t just mean writing, designing, optimizing SEO, or using social media.
I mean how much of yourself are you putting into your blog?
The power of your self, injected in your blog, can take you far. It’s about bringing forth your beliefs to the world and sharing your vision with people.
And it all fuses together to create your “why”.
The goal is not to do business with everybody who needs what you have. The goal is to do business with people who believe what you believe.”—Simon Sinek, Start with Why
This attitude goes beyond merely following your passion and showing people you’re doing what you love. It’s also a step ahead of putting personality in your writing.
It’s the belief and vision you need to create your purpose. And with purpose, you’ll never be lost again.
In order to find your blog’s essence, you’ve first got to find your own purpose in life.
Remember, your blog is you. You aren’t a ball of marketing tactics and business strategies. You need to continually express yourself in your blog to get all that essence out there.
I found and fine-tuned my purpose with this little exercise I did at RyzeOnline. This powerful exercise can help you to zoom in on your very being, building the strong roots needed for both yourself and your blog.
Furthermore, one of the things the exercise teaches is to be fully proud of your essence and loudly proclaim it to the world. You can easily do that by writing and portraying that on your About Me page, and in all your articles.
Ever since I completed this exercise, I’ve only written with purpose. To put it another way, I don’t write if I’m not inspired. I stopped churning out content just for the sake of having an update for my blog. Not only does it feel a lot better, but my articles have been receiving greater response in terms of comments.
Do the exercise now to create your blog’s roots.
Now, with your purpose and essence found, you need to as yourself: who will I bring this to?
Forget about finding a target audience or a demographic. Ask yourself this:
“Are you being completely you when having an intimate conversation with someone or when you’re addressing a large group?” You should be.
There is a fantastic article on finding your one person (or customer) over at Firepole Marketing, complete with a free worksheet.
Finding your one person makes it a lot easier for you and your blog to communicate your essence. It relieves the pressure of marketing and managing your entire blog.
For me now, when I write, everything is directed to my one person. And combining it with the first point—my why—I know for sure I’m on the right track.
So find your one person now, and write, blog, and talk to them.
Every blog has a layout and design—otherwise it’s just a wall of words.
But does your blog visually scream your essence?
Good marketing for a blog would mean readers would know what you’re all about within just three seconds of landing on your page.
Your content and writing definitely plays a big role, but the fact is, people’s attention span fluctuate a lot, so you definitely have to get your blog’s look alone to grab attention. And when you do grab it, make sure the right messages are going through.
Zenhabits has a minimalist look and it works wonderfully. Firepole Marketing, with its tagline, “Marketing that works” easily tells us of the brand’s speciality in marketing.
I just went through a blog revamp myself. When I started out, I thought of taking pretty pictures of myself with a good camera, thinking that it would look good anyway. Now, the pictures of me easily tell of my life. Let me know if you get that.
Does your blog visually tell your story? If not, tweak it!
When I started my own blog, I just thought I’d write and see what comes along, because I knew I was a good writer. But I ended up writing random articles that were at most entertaining.
It was only when I dug deeper into myself and find out why I wanted to blog that I found real purpose in blogging.
Not only does it feel good doing what I do everyday, but people eventually recognized me for that. I got personal emails from readers asking me for real advice. And all my “winning” strategic platforms thrive on their own—now I have more Twitter followers, more Facebook likes and more opt-ins.
Are you a little sceptical in the importance of essence? Essence is not some magical, cosmic energy at work in which the universe rewards you for the passion you have. It’s just building a strong foundation in your blog or business.
Remember, with strong roots, your blog will bear great fruit. And what better way to build your roots than by being yourself, being passionate, and being original?
Alden Tan is a rock star blogger who writes about personal development, passion and inspiration. He gets most of his essence from doing what he loves despite what others think of him. If you want to learn how to get your own essence out, check out his email series on learning how to stop caring about what others think and start living!
View the original article here
WHAT IS SEO, AND WHO CARES
WHAT IS SEO, AND WHO CARES?
what is seo
Unless you don’t have a blog or a website of your own, chances are, you have heard about the term SEO (search engine optimization) before. SEO is the process of improving a sites online visibility on search engines results. That really is the simple and short version of what SEO is all about (here’s a longer version of SEO).
As for the “who cares” part, it is no surprise that all who are serious about building an online presence cares about it. Yeah, SEO is far from dead, otherwise, what’s the point of Google and Bing, coming out with a lot of new stuff just to help webmasters improve their sites visibility?
Here’s a quick roundup of what’s new (or relatively recent) and suggested SEO resources:
Webmaster Academy – Webmaster Academy provides practical and easy-to-understand lessons for webmasters to help you improve your site with topics like getting your site indexed, providing search engines with helpful information about your video and image content, and understanding Webmaster Tools features.
SEO for startups in under 10 minutes (June 2012) – Maile Ohye from Google advises your startup as if she had only 10 minutes as your SEO consultant.
Webmaster Tools – The new webmaster tools of Bing is, guess what, mainly all about SEO. If you have not tried it yet or have forgot all about it, I am sure that you will find the “new” version much more interesting than before. From fixing on-page SEO problems, to their disavowing links, Bing has features for everyone interested in search engine optimization.
Here on iBlogzone
Yeah, I got my own SEO resource page, that I regularly update. It has “tons” of articles, videos, and guides, that are targeted for the DIY SEOers. If you are new to SEO or want to learn a bit more, start there. I am sure that there is something that you will find useful.
As mentioned above, you can easily come to the conclusion, that both Google and Bing’s webmaster tools are mainly geared towards search engine optimization. Hopefully, that will answer the question about whether or not, SEO is something that you, as an aspiring problogger or small business owner, should care about. Just remember the balance (YIn-Yang), provide quality content for users and optimized them for SEO. After all, you do want your quality content to be found, right? On the other hand, what would you SEO, if you don’t have content?
Anyway, if you are still are not convinced that SEO is something that interest a lot of people, maybe this study, presented in the form of an infographic, would shed a bit of light. This infographic, courtesy of BlueCaribu, shows just how big the SEO industry is. Some interesting facts, include India, being the largest community searching for related SEO topics, and Thursday being the most popular day for looking up on SEO.
SEO search industry
What about you? Do you care about SEO?
View the original article here
what is seo
Unless you don’t have a blog or a website of your own, chances are, you have heard about the term SEO (search engine optimization) before. SEO is the process of improving a sites online visibility on search engines results. That really is the simple and short version of what SEO is all about (here’s a longer version of SEO).
As for the “who cares” part, it is no surprise that all who are serious about building an online presence cares about it. Yeah, SEO is far from dead, otherwise, what’s the point of Google and Bing, coming out with a lot of new stuff just to help webmasters improve their sites visibility?
Here’s a quick roundup of what’s new (or relatively recent) and suggested SEO resources:
Webmaster Academy – Webmaster Academy provides practical and easy-to-understand lessons for webmasters to help you improve your site with topics like getting your site indexed, providing search engines with helpful information about your video and image content, and understanding Webmaster Tools features.
SEO for startups in under 10 minutes (June 2012) – Maile Ohye from Google advises your startup as if she had only 10 minutes as your SEO consultant.
Webmaster Tools – The new webmaster tools of Bing is, guess what, mainly all about SEO. If you have not tried it yet or have forgot all about it, I am sure that you will find the “new” version much more interesting than before. From fixing on-page SEO problems, to their disavowing links, Bing has features for everyone interested in search engine optimization.
Here on iBlogzone
Yeah, I got my own SEO resource page, that I regularly update. It has “tons” of articles, videos, and guides, that are targeted for the DIY SEOers. If you are new to SEO or want to learn a bit more, start there. I am sure that there is something that you will find useful.
As mentioned above, you can easily come to the conclusion, that both Google and Bing’s webmaster tools are mainly geared towards search engine optimization. Hopefully, that will answer the question about whether or not, SEO is something that you, as an aspiring problogger or small business owner, should care about. Just remember the balance (YIn-Yang), provide quality content for users and optimized them for SEO. After all, you do want your quality content to be found, right? On the other hand, what would you SEO, if you don’t have content?
Anyway, if you are still are not convinced that SEO is something that interest a lot of people, maybe this study, presented in the form of an infographic, would shed a bit of light. This infographic, courtesy of BlueCaribu, shows just how big the SEO industry is. Some interesting facts, include India, being the largest community searching for related SEO topics, and Thursday being the most popular day for looking up on SEO.
SEO search industry
What about you? Do you care about SEO?
View the original article here
A GUIDE TO HIRING A FREELANCE WRITER FOR YOUR BLOG
A GUIDE TO HIRING A FREELANCE WRITER FOR YOUR BLOG
freelance writer
According to most dictionaries, a writer is a person who writes, yet when this definition is extrapolated to the online world, a writer becomes so much more than just someone who can write. A writer becomes the voice of your brand, they become a credible resource, and they become your entire online presence.
With the rise of Web 2.0, content marketing became a huge factor in determining the success of a brand. This content came in the form of articles, whitepapers, ebooks, vlogs, podcasts, and blogs. Blogs became a way of connecting with readers all around the world – they provide an insight into what your brand does, how to use your products efficiently, and provide readers with useful strategies and tips.
All this sounds cool, but blogging can be tough work, more so if you’re a small business owner. A small business owner has to wear many hats, and blogging is one aspect that requires a certain degree of skill.
Professional Content
professional freelance writerWhen you hire a professional writer, you receive professionally written, well researched content. A professional writer spends time understanding your business and then creates content that not only resonates with your target audience, but also helps you acquire more readers.
Before hiring a writer, ask them for examples of similar content they’ve written for other clients, or how they plan on researching content for your website.
Market research and industry insight
When you’re busy looking at other aspects of your business, a writer can draw up statistics and data for your business, and even conduct interviews. This adds a lot of credibility to the content you write, again increasing readership. A good writer will always add their own ideas to your content plan, and also share best practices with you.
Most writers are also very savvy using social media and other methods of content marketing, so you can entrust this aspect of your work completely to them.
Affordable Costs
Hiring a freelance writer is cost effective compared to hiring a full time person on your team. Because the nature of the work is remote, you are not pressed for finding a great writer in your local area.
Before hiring a freelance writer, look at their rates in terms of the value you are getting. Freelance writing rates tend to vary depending on how experienced a writer is and how much research they are willing to do on your project.
The Editorial Freelancers Association has a rate list that can be used as a guide, or see this interesting infographic.
What factors should you look at apart from rates?
PortfolioClient recommendationsAcademic qualifications – though not completely relevant, academic credentials can make all the difference in case of medical or technical writing.
While the above listed points elicit the advantages of hiring a freelance writer, it may not be the best option in all situations. For example, a retail e-commerce with hundreds of products and constantly changing inventory should consider hiring a full time writer. A freelance writer may not be able to allocate 40 hours a week to your work, in which case there are chances that products may need to be put on the website without an accompanying description.
Though there aren’t many ways you can go wrong with hiring a freelance writer, there are some things you must keep in mind:
Always ask for recommendations from previous clients. A professional writer will always have these available.Ask to see portfolio of work. This gives you a good idea of their writing style.Look them up on LinkedIn. LinkedIn recommendations and bios provide a good insight into the writer’s work style and business ethics.Browse their blog or website. A freelance writer will most definitely have a blog or website which provides more information about their services.Ask for a video or phone call. This helps develop trust and enables you to understand how the writer plans to handle your project.Freelance job boards such as Elance, Guru, and oDesk have a large directory of freelance writers. You can post your project requirement on the website and wait for interested writers to place a bid on your project. If you choose to take this route, remember to hire a writer based on the value you’re getting. Cheap is not always the best, and the best may not be cheap.Problogger has a job board where clients can add their projects for a onetime fee of $50 for 30 days. It is one of the most widely read blogs in the world so the chances of your RFP being spotted by interested writers are pretty good.Your local Craigslist is also a great resource for finding local talent or you can post your RFP and wait to receive proposals for interested writers.Do a LinkedIn search for writers and send them an email (if their email address is publicly listed), or contact them through the LinkedIn message board. You can even ask for writer recommendations through LinkedIn Answers.
Irrespective of the platform you choose, make sure you write a detailed description of your project. This will help the writer understand your requirements clearly, and will also avoid any future scope creep problems for you and the writer.
Related Content - Check them out:
12 Tips To Create Your Content and Beat Writer’s BlockFresh Ideas for a New Blog Post – Content Creation Made EasyHow To Make Money Without A Blog: Ghost Blogging7 Ways To Kill Your BlogSpeedlink V33/2011, Keyword Rankings, Blogging, Social Web, And Awesome FaceBook Guide
View the original article here
freelance writer
According to most dictionaries, a writer is a person who writes, yet when this definition is extrapolated to the online world, a writer becomes so much more than just someone who can write. A writer becomes the voice of your brand, they become a credible resource, and they become your entire online presence.
With the rise of Web 2.0, content marketing became a huge factor in determining the success of a brand. This content came in the form of articles, whitepapers, ebooks, vlogs, podcasts, and blogs. Blogs became a way of connecting with readers all around the world – they provide an insight into what your brand does, how to use your products efficiently, and provide readers with useful strategies and tips.
All this sounds cool, but blogging can be tough work, more so if you’re a small business owner. A small business owner has to wear many hats, and blogging is one aspect that requires a certain degree of skill.
Professional Content
professional freelance writerWhen you hire a professional writer, you receive professionally written, well researched content. A professional writer spends time understanding your business and then creates content that not only resonates with your target audience, but also helps you acquire more readers.
Before hiring a writer, ask them for examples of similar content they’ve written for other clients, or how they plan on researching content for your website.
Market research and industry insight
When you’re busy looking at other aspects of your business, a writer can draw up statistics and data for your business, and even conduct interviews. This adds a lot of credibility to the content you write, again increasing readership. A good writer will always add their own ideas to your content plan, and also share best practices with you.
Most writers are also very savvy using social media and other methods of content marketing, so you can entrust this aspect of your work completely to them.
Affordable Costs
Hiring a freelance writer is cost effective compared to hiring a full time person on your team. Because the nature of the work is remote, you are not pressed for finding a great writer in your local area.
Before hiring a freelance writer, look at their rates in terms of the value you are getting. Freelance writing rates tend to vary depending on how experienced a writer is and how much research they are willing to do on your project.
The Editorial Freelancers Association has a rate list that can be used as a guide, or see this interesting infographic.
What factors should you look at apart from rates?
PortfolioClient recommendationsAcademic qualifications – though not completely relevant, academic credentials can make all the difference in case of medical or technical writing.
While the above listed points elicit the advantages of hiring a freelance writer, it may not be the best option in all situations. For example, a retail e-commerce with hundreds of products and constantly changing inventory should consider hiring a full time writer. A freelance writer may not be able to allocate 40 hours a week to your work, in which case there are chances that products may need to be put on the website without an accompanying description.
Though there aren’t many ways you can go wrong with hiring a freelance writer, there are some things you must keep in mind:
Always ask for recommendations from previous clients. A professional writer will always have these available.Ask to see portfolio of work. This gives you a good idea of their writing style.Look them up on LinkedIn. LinkedIn recommendations and bios provide a good insight into the writer’s work style and business ethics.Browse their blog or website. A freelance writer will most definitely have a blog or website which provides more information about their services.Ask for a video or phone call. This helps develop trust and enables you to understand how the writer plans to handle your project.Freelance job boards such as Elance, Guru, and oDesk have a large directory of freelance writers. You can post your project requirement on the website and wait for interested writers to place a bid on your project. If you choose to take this route, remember to hire a writer based on the value you’re getting. Cheap is not always the best, and the best may not be cheap.Problogger has a job board where clients can add their projects for a onetime fee of $50 for 30 days. It is one of the most widely read blogs in the world so the chances of your RFP being spotted by interested writers are pretty good.Your local Craigslist is also a great resource for finding local talent or you can post your RFP and wait to receive proposals for interested writers.Do a LinkedIn search for writers and send them an email (if their email address is publicly listed), or contact them through the LinkedIn message board. You can even ask for writer recommendations through LinkedIn Answers.
Irrespective of the platform you choose, make sure you write a detailed description of your project. This will help the writer understand your requirements clearly, and will also avoid any future scope creep problems for you and the writer.
Related Content - Check them out:
12 Tips To Create Your Content and Beat Writer’s BlockFresh Ideas for a New Blog Post – Content Creation Made EasyHow To Make Money Without A Blog: Ghost Blogging7 Ways To Kill Your BlogSpeedlink V33/2011, Keyword Rankings, Blogging, Social Web, And Awesome FaceBook Guide
View the original article here
BLOGGING AT THE PAR OF STEVE JOBS
BLOGGING AT THE PAR OF STEVE JOBS
Steve Jobs blogging
All too often, as bloggers, we get caught up in this morbidly disgusting mindset that we’re doing okay. Some seem to think that there is no room for improvement.
In reality, we often are looped in this mind game that we are who we are, the best are who they are, and everything is good in the world. Quiet frankly, it’s not.
It stops being about improving the quality, and more about keeping it at the same playing ground because, hey, it works. As Steve Jobs once said, though;
Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.
Steve Jobs died at age fifty-six, yet managed to completely revolutionize the computer, phone, music, and film industries.
Whether you like his products or not, a note of respect is demanded – he’s far better than you ever were and, most likely, ever will be.
Before journeying on in this article, I’d like to reference his 2007 keynote that brought a mystical household gift we all know today – the iPhone.
I’ve watched the entire keynote several times (you can quiz me on it later if you’d really like), but the entire presentation is clearly built on three points:
There was always just “one more thing”.He thought he was the best and showed it.He wasn’t afraid of the “big boys”.
When it came to the phone industry in 2007, RIM and Nokia were the top dogs – nobody at the time was brave enough to mess with them.
Steve, though, was smart enough to work on a beautiful product for nearly three years before-hand. The revolution was new to society, but old to the creator – pretty neat.
With just a swift hour and twenty minutes of presentation, he easily tore down an entire industry and overwrote it with tomorrow’s technology.
Steve wasn’t afraid to do it for one simple reason – he knew he was better. Why? He had better ideas.
The problem with most people of today’s society is simple – they incorporate one (or maybe two if they’ve gotten that far) big ideas into a product, work on it, and then deliver it.
Steve, however, took hundreds of ideas and put it into one product:
Touch screeniPodFull HTML web-browserFull HTML eMailCustom interface(Watch the Keynote (; )
That simple style of “I just showed you the coolest thing you’ve ever seen, but here’s something better” is what allowed Steve to dominate an entire society.
As a blogger, it may be difficult to gather what you could ever learn from a man like Steve Jobs.
As every A-list blogger will tell you, your website is a business – Apple is a business, too. It’s really easy to make the connection there, then.
The playing field is shrunken… By a lot. The point, though, is still valid – if you aren’t willing to fight to become the best, you don’t deserve to be called the best.
Out of the hundred-thousand [or so] websites created every single day, barely 100 will ever be called anywhere near decent.
Being that one that stands out and provides the yardstick of quality is the one that will stand before the others.
As many of Steve’s employees would say, Steve stood for nothing less then perfection – entire projects would be redone if even a minor flaw was apparent.
Are you willing to make that commitment? The payoff it pretty great. Obviously the point here is not to be the same or better than Steve Jobs, but rather, to have the same mindset, which ultimately is what blogging for business is all about.
Related Content - Check them out:
Speedlink V32/2011, Bing SEO, Google Plus, Blogging, WordPress And DMOZ
View the original article here
Steve Jobs blogging
All too often, as bloggers, we get caught up in this morbidly disgusting mindset that we’re doing okay. Some seem to think that there is no room for improvement.
In reality, we often are looped in this mind game that we are who we are, the best are who they are, and everything is good in the world. Quiet frankly, it’s not.
It stops being about improving the quality, and more about keeping it at the same playing ground because, hey, it works. As Steve Jobs once said, though;
Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.
Steve Jobs died at age fifty-six, yet managed to completely revolutionize the computer, phone, music, and film industries.
Whether you like his products or not, a note of respect is demanded – he’s far better than you ever were and, most likely, ever will be.
Before journeying on in this article, I’d like to reference his 2007 keynote that brought a mystical household gift we all know today – the iPhone.
I’ve watched the entire keynote several times (you can quiz me on it later if you’d really like), but the entire presentation is clearly built on three points:
There was always just “one more thing”.He thought he was the best and showed it.He wasn’t afraid of the “big boys”.
When it came to the phone industry in 2007, RIM and Nokia were the top dogs – nobody at the time was brave enough to mess with them.
Steve, though, was smart enough to work on a beautiful product for nearly three years before-hand. The revolution was new to society, but old to the creator – pretty neat.
With just a swift hour and twenty minutes of presentation, he easily tore down an entire industry and overwrote it with tomorrow’s technology.
Steve wasn’t afraid to do it for one simple reason – he knew he was better. Why? He had better ideas.
The problem with most people of today’s society is simple – they incorporate one (or maybe two if they’ve gotten that far) big ideas into a product, work on it, and then deliver it.
Steve, however, took hundreds of ideas and put it into one product:
Touch screeniPodFull HTML web-browserFull HTML eMailCustom interface(Watch the Keynote (; )
That simple style of “I just showed you the coolest thing you’ve ever seen, but here’s something better” is what allowed Steve to dominate an entire society.
As a blogger, it may be difficult to gather what you could ever learn from a man like Steve Jobs.
As every A-list blogger will tell you, your website is a business – Apple is a business, too. It’s really easy to make the connection there, then.
The playing field is shrunken… By a lot. The point, though, is still valid – if you aren’t willing to fight to become the best, you don’t deserve to be called the best.
Out of the hundred-thousand [or so] websites created every single day, barely 100 will ever be called anywhere near decent.
Being that one that stands out and provides the yardstick of quality is the one that will stand before the others.
As many of Steve’s employees would say, Steve stood for nothing less then perfection – entire projects would be redone if even a minor flaw was apparent.
Are you willing to make that commitment? The payoff it pretty great. Obviously the point here is not to be the same or better than Steve Jobs, but rather, to have the same mindset, which ultimately is what blogging for business is all about.
Related Content - Check them out:
Speedlink V32/2011, Bing SEO, Google Plus, Blogging, WordPress And DMOZ
View the original article here
7 SINS OF INTERNET MARKETING
7 SINS OF INTERNET MARKETING YOU SHOULD AVOID
internet marketing mistakes
Getting started in internet marketing has been made easier with today’s current technology. Years ago, starting an online business would require substantial investments, and in some cases, impossible. That’s no longer true, as today, there are free resources that makes it possible for anyone with the drive and determination to start and build a successful business online, regardless of its size.
Now, here’s the downside. With all the tools, guides, tutorials, affiliate networks, several monetization methods, etc. that are available, comes the problem of competition. There are literally millions out there trying to make something out of the internet, and the question is, how do you stand out from the rest? Well, you can start by avoiding some common mistakes that some business owners make. Avoiding these mistakes, or sins, as I call them, will most definitely help you stand out from the rest, who are still doing it.
These sins may not earn you eternal damnation, but your business will most likely fail if you don’t shun these internet marketing sins.
This is where most people fail online. It’s an art being a good procrastinator. “You must avoid posting that post at all cost.” “You must keep from growing your social network.” “Surely there must be something better to do then work on your dream?” So we all procrastinate and I believe it’s the deadliest internet marketing sin, but how do we keep from being cursed by it. Here are some tips to avoid the pitfalls:
Write down your ideas as soon as they come to you. Even if they are jotted down. Then religiously come back and make a post out of it.Cut out all the other things in your life that hold your success back. Perhaps you smoke… cut back and quit. Stop watching so much TV… etc.Designate a time to work on your blog.Designate a time to drive traffic to your blog.Designate a time to work on your social network.
internet marketing mistakesWhen it’s your time to be working on your business a lot of us tend to have our Facebook open and e-mail. Then heck lets go check to see if we made some money over on Clickbank, Amazon or Google AdSense. No. You know what, lets look at our analytics’… that’s always fun. Sound familiar? People…Stop! Close all the noise off and work on your business and when you get your goal done. Then go check your e-mail, stats and social drama.
There are many loopholes and suggested traffic heists. When I first started I tried everything I could to get a sale. The long term dedication to make a real business just wasn’t there. So I started spamming Craigslist and to this day I have trouble selling a car or a washing machine. I think I made $5o bucks or so with all the spamming I did. I started getting into some of the sophisticated software’s and methods. It’s fascinating to see all the Black hat Ninja software that people can hack out.
“If a person would spend the time on their business that they spend trying to take shortcuts, they would have already succeeded. “
Internet Marketing PitfallsOk, I confess that I’ve tried loads of niche’s. This is sort of a grey sin area. There is nothing wrong with having multiple niche sites as long as you can make them successful. Yet a real business person needs a brand and a central hub to gather a big enough following… and why a following and a list? So that in the end you can make your own products and have a large enough audience to make it a success. So find your main niche for your business and keep at it until it’s a success.
With all the content on the internet, it’s easy to be drowned out. Especially if your content is mediocre. Not only does your content need to be unique it needs to be super good. The days are over when you could throw a post together and expect to get traffic. Below are some suggestions to keep your viewers on their toes:
Make a superb headline for your articles that will pull people in and keep them reading.Make the content of your posts enjoyable so they keep reading.Cover controversial topics.Provide a different slant.Include Q and A in your posts.Make a poll as part of your posts.Be funny and intelligent.Paint a picture as you write.Be brief…Get the reader to perform an action at the end of the post.
There is so much to learn when it comes to building an online business. Don’t be afraid to learn something new (as long as it’s ethical.) Keep up on the latest trends, but don’t be boggled down by them.
With all the one click wonders and ninja traffic heisting mechanisms that fill your inbox, it’s easy to be caught up in the get rich schemes. I’m here to tell you that that stuff don’t work. There is no autopilot millionaires. Those people work hard to get your e-mail and swap it back and forth with each launch. Most of those products are re-written, re-branded and then re-launched. There is nothing wrong with software that will make your business online easier and a success though. As long as the product is inline with what you are already doing and it semi-automates some of the workload for you.
Has your business been suffering from one or more of the above? It’s time to turn from the dark side my friend. It’s time to turn from your black hat…procrastinating… autopilot riches ways. It’s time to give the Google god what it wants. Real good content … Before Google runs out of animal names to name it’s updates after.
Related Content - Check them out:
5 Worst Mistakes You Can Make In IM (internet marketing)10 Common Mistakes to Avoid When Running a GiveawayFaceBook For Business, Using Their Marketing Tools To Your AdvantageFive Tips For Video Marketing That WorkFour Things Blog Owners Should Avoid Doing With Guest Authors
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HOW TO FIX ON-PAGE SEO
HOW TO FIX ON-PAGE SEO PROBLEMS USING BING WEBMASTER TOOLS
bing new webmaster tools
Not so long ago, Bing has introduced their updated webmaster tools. If you have not been using Bing’s WT for a while and log in, you may notice that it does not look like an update, but rather a completely new and redesigned webmaster tools. If you have never used it before, then you may want to seriously consider doing so, specially after you finish reading this post :) .
Webmaster tools are designed to help anyone to improve their online visibility and gather valuable search data for analysis. These includes, keywords that are driving traffic to your site, inbound links, crawl errors, traffic sources, most viewed pages (for better conversions), sitemap errors, indexed pages, among other things. These tools help you understand how users interact with your site and figure out ways to improve users experience, content marketing tactics, etc. You may be already using Google’s webmaster tools, which is great, and may be wondering why use Bing’s own tools too?
One reason I can think of right of the bat, is that having two sets of data to analyze is always better than just one. The reason being is that the basis of analysis that both webmaster tools may differ from each other, so the more information you get, the better. In addition, it is a good way to confirm what one is saying, in comparison to another.
But that’s not just that. Bing has introduced many cool features, the link explorer (similar to Yahoo’s site explorer, keyword research tool, a bunch of diagnostic tools, etc.). If you watch the video of Duane Forrester, you will know what I am talking about.
Watch Rand Fishkin and Duane Forrester talking about Bing’s New Tools
on page SEO analyzerThere has been some chatter on the web that SEO is nearing its end or that it is actually dead. I won’t be elaborating too much about the issue, but IMO, it is far from that and Bing as it appears, agrees with that too. Otherwise, they won’t be introducing new new tools, that are exactly tailored to improve your SEO.
Anyway, this bring me to talk about one of my favorite tools that Bing provides, specially to improve your On-Page search engine optimization. The SEO analyzer is a report that Bing runs automatically every week or so, provided you already have your website added and verified. The analyzer is like an audit report that assesses best SEO practices and identifies on-page optimization problems and gives you recommendations on how to fix it. Not only that, it tells you exactly where the problem is and the severity of the SEO violation. Absolutely cool!
Great, is it not? The report is really a tool that I highly recommend, and see absolutely no reason why should not use it. Unless, you think that all your pages are already “error” free. In any event, it is always good to run a diagnostic, just in case. In addition, if you can’t see any reports yet, or want to assess specific URLs, you can use the SEO Analyzer.
This feature is an on-demand tool to crawl a URL, and assess it against a series of on-page search engine optimization best practices. The resulting report will provide you with guidance as to whether you are in or out of compliance with the best practices. You can use this tool for any “verified” domain in your account.
link explorerLink explorer – This feature allows you to research any type of links pointing to any URL. You can use this tool to understand which links point to a specific URL, and filter those links between internal and external. Note that this tool can be used for any URL you wish to enter.
Keyword Research – Bing’s Keyword Research tool allows you to understand what volume of searches happen for any term you enter. You can research multiple keywords at the same time (up to 20), and filter the results by country, language and export all data. Data is held over a 6 month historical period, and is refreshed every other week. Note that results are returned based on data that comes from organic search at Bing and not from their AdCenter alone.
keyword researchSearch Keywords – This tool provides you with a list of search terms (keywords) that enabled users to find your site. For each keyword displayed, you will see the how many times your keyword appeared on their SERPs, how many clicks, etc.
There you have it! Bing’s new webmaster tools are 100% free. Some of the features are actually available on other sites, difference being that they are most likely paid services or with limited results. Obviously, there is always the matter of data accuracy and some bugs that may occur once in a while. Bing does mention that some tools are in beta and are constantly being tweaked for maximum performance.
So, have you used Bing’s new webmaster tools yet? What do you think about the SEO reports and SEO analyzer?
Related Content - Check them out:
Bing Webmaster Tools Revamped, Better?Google Algorithm Changes, Bing Webmaster Tools, Password Leaks, Speedlink 23:2012Best SEO Tools For 2012Page Timings, #OnlyOnTwitter, FaceBook Moments, SEO, Speedlink 12:2012Speedlink V40/2011, SEO, Social Web, Blogging, Bing And Microsoft
View the original article here
Thursday, September 5, 2013
COMING TO #MOZCON?
COMING TO #MOZCON? TIPS FOR YOUR CONFERENCING.
I'm so excited to meet all of you coming out for MozCon this week. Like many of you coming for MozCon, it's my first one too.
MozCon 2012 audience
Here are some n00b tips (and a few refreshers for those long-time MozCon attendees) to help you out.
You're probably wondering what to pack in your suitcase. Should you bring an umbrella and rain jacket? Should you pack shorts and sunglasses?
My recommendation: both. This week's weather is predicted to range from mid-50s to the 80s. In Seattle, bringing something for the rain is never a bad idea. Plus, you'll be indoors at the Westin -- hotels are some of the few places in Seattle with air conditioning -- so you'll want to factor that in.
MozCon Weather
Don't worry, we'll have a coat check on the fourth floor for your stuff.
If you're wondering about dress code, it's true that we wear flannel and blue jeans 365-days a year. Dress in what makes you comfortable around your industry peers. Whether you're tailored to perfection like Joan Holloway or look more like a lumberjack, you'll fit right in. I'll be wearing jeans and my staff shirt for all three days.
There are going to be ~750 people at MozCon this year. Bigger than ever!
One of the most wonderful things about MozCon is the chance to meet other SEOs and inbound marketers. Whether you're saying hi to someone you only knew on Twitter or making a new friend while tossing a bowling ball, you'll find yourself rubbing elbows with geniuses all week long.
Plus, there will be SEOmoz staff a-plenty for you to chat with. Feel free to ask anyone wearing an "I'm with Roger" t-shirt what it's like to work at the Mozplex or just where lunch is.
Jackie and Aaron: SEOmoz staff
These people are here to help you!
We're super excited this year to use our MozCon Live site: http://www.seomoz.org/mozcon-live. (Sorry, friends, this isn't quite ready for you to see!)
Here, you will be able to see agenda, find out more information about parties and the speakers, watch the Twitter hashtag #MozCon, and download the speakers' slide decks as they present. Also, you can ask your q&a questions for the speakers here! For those community members who can't make it, you can join in a bit of the fun and knowledge.
Our Registration area is located on the second floor of the Westin. There you'll be able to pick up your MozCon badge and swag. All you need is a print out of your ticket or photo ID.
Your MozCon ticket comes with breakfast, lunch, and two snacks. Due to popular demand, there will be bacon for breakfast one morning. We should have plenty of options for all sorts of people: carnivores, vegetarians, vegans, lactose intolerant, etc. Or those who only eat ice cream and cupcakes.
Breakfast and lunch will be located on the second and first floors of the Westin. (The main hub of activity, including the main show, is on the fourth floor.)
Additionally, at our night meetup on Wednesday at the Hard Rock, we'll be providing appetizers. On Thursday for the big Garage bash, we'll have food, drinks, karaoke, bowling, and more.
Would you eat this adorable pig?
On the Twitters, we're #MozCon.
Don't forget to RSVP on our Google+ event page.
Roger will be making appearances so you'll be able to get a photo op with him. Don't be shy as Roger's thrilled to meet you. Give him a hug!
His photo booth is located on the fourth floor, and there will be a sign with all the times for his appearances, so you won't miss him.
Katie & Erica love Roger
Those of you who went last year probably remember that we had issues with wi-fi. We're working to make wireless happen, but we need your help.
To make our wifi connection strong and out of courtesy for other attendees, please only hook 1 device up to our wifi. Also, refrain from using mifis, hotspots, or any other personal wireless network creator as with over 1,500 wireless devices in the room, these signals may work for you, but degrade the main wifi signal for everyone else.
If you are having a problem connecting to our wifi signal -- and you seem to be the only one -- please ask any SEOmoz staffer to assist you.
There will be table tents with wireless network and password information.
Need to do some heads down work? On the fourth floor, we'll have the 5th Avenue room open for you. There will be a live feed of what's happening on the main stage. But if you need a break or a corner to tuck in for a while, this is a great place.
The fabulous Laura Lippay from How's Your Pony? will be emceeing MozCon. She'll be introducing our wonderful speakers, sorting through q&a, and generally keeping the show running. If she asks you to jump, time to jump.
Laura Lippay
Check out Jon's recommendations for coffee shops and Rand's recommendations for food. Seattle is ridiculously amazing.
Photos of SEOmoz events by Rudy Lopez.
About Erica McGillivray — I'm SEOmoz's Community Attaché! You may have seen me hanging out on Q&A, playing on LinkedIn, popping up in your inbox via e-newsletters, working on MozCon, or reading your questions on webinars. I do a little of everything. In my spare time, I run a non-profit called GeekGirlCon, review a lot of comic books, and watch genre TV.
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