Peter Bennett Dot Net

How To Get More Comments On My Blog, Part One

Peter Bennett Dot Net — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 19:00:50 +0000

There are a whole bunch of reasons why people often don’t get ‘enough’ comments on their blog – lack of exposure (i.e. not enough people actually finding and reading the blog), uninteresting content, lack of interaction with existing commentators. All of which are important issues which need addressing. This post however is more concerned with setting up an ‘optimum’ commenting environment to encourage people to comment and make it easy for them to comment.

Bloggers are often very down on spam, totally understandably but this needs to be met by appropriate measures and not overkill. I’ll go out on a limb here but in my view, with what is currently available, captchas are overkill especially for smaller volume blogging sites. Captchas usually take the form of those distorted figures which need to be read and entered and which apparently spambots are not very good at answering. A hard to crack capture might be the best thing to stop spam comments but it’s also quite good at putting commenters off their game – either stifling the first comment or drying up the conversation if repeated captchas (ok I admit that this is a subjective view but I think it’s broadly on the right track). So let’s look at the alternatives in WordPress, look also at registration/third-party logins, comment moderation, and see how things can be ‘luvved up’ with a couple of other add-ons.

An Ideal Blog Comment Setup?…

Relaxed Spam Control

I’ve been using ‘Keypic’ – a WordPress plugin. Daily attention is needed as 2 to 3 spam comments get through each day, but daily attention is always needed on a blog isn’t it? I use it without moderation (see below) and without captchas and it doesn’t require the commenter to do anything at all. As a result the commenter is given a completely ‘natural’ and unfettered commenting experience. I think Akismet now has a free version (I need to check) and probably does a similar job.
The Heck with Logins

I set up a system so that people could login via Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn and was a little surprised that no one used it. It turns out I’d underestimated how much those ‘authorize this app to access Facebook info’ etc. I certainly wasn’t getting any of that info but I didn’t want to go into what exactly the plugin coders were able to see so I just dropped it. It was of minimal value, and having no login or registration process needed to comment certainly assuages those fears and also encourages comments.
The Lord High Moderator

‘Your message is awaiting moderation’ is never really a turn-on, more so for a small scale blog. People can take that kind of message slightly personally and it also slows down the whole process… there’s something satisfying about seeing your comment online straightaway. And, as I’ve mentioned, using ‘relaxed spam control’ there’s a small risk of spam comments but you can delete those daily and in the time they’re up they’re not really doing any harm (long term having a lot of spam comments could hit your Google rankings but that wouldn’t be the case in the above example of blog maintenance). Moderation also makes more real-time type discussion less likely.
The ‘CommentLuv’ WordPress Plugin

This plugin lets commenters choose which link to display with their comment post, from their last ten postings. It also makes it easy to check that you’re giving the posters value with ‘follow’ links. As such it is forming a kind of ‘in crowd’ of people who recognize the CommentLuv logo and are more likely to comment because they know the benefits. Recommended!
the ‘ReplyMe’ WordPress Plugin

This plugin ensures that Worpress sends an email to the commenter each time you reply to a comment. Generally replies to comments can be overlooked by the commenter so it’s a great addition to your ‘commenting rig’

Anyway, that’s enough about comments… any comments? ;o)

The Benefits of a Small Business Blog

Peter Bennett Dot Net — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 23:21:18 +0000

It’s become a mantra: “you need to blog” as a way of getting a better web presence, draw visitors to your site etc. Small business owners’ eyes can glaze over when they’re hearing this ‘I don’t have the time’ being the most common objection, and that’s a natural reaction. So I thought it would be good to look at the benefits a blog delivers in terms of some specifics.

Long tail searches

Below I list examples of Short Tail, Mid Tail and Long Tail keywords…
- “Squirrel” – Short Tail
- “Flying squirrel” – Mid Tail
- “How to find flying squirrels in Michigan” – Long Tail
Clearly there are vastly more sites which include just ‘squirrel’ than ‘flying squirrel’ and again there will be many fewer sites which contain ‘How to find flying squirrels in Michigan’. There’s much more competition for the short tail keywords and Mr Small Business can’t really compete for the first page of results for that, similar story for mid tail but for the long tail, in practice, there’s room aplenty.

For example if you try googling: Microdata HTML Semantic Markup – A Quick Guide you should see my blog post (within a few weeks of the date of this blog post at least). So, if you compile a list of likely long tail search terms, you now have a handy list of titles for a bunch of new blog posts, which should get prominent Google listing!
Page Views = Closed Sales

Experience shows that prospects who have viewed many pages on a site (25+ views) are much more likely to close to a sale at subsequent sales appointments/phone calls. A non-blog website with lots of pages could in theory generate this many views but the conversational (strong editorial) impact of blog articles is much more likely to get this number of views. It also helps to generate a feeling of trust and involvement with the company on the part of the prospect, which is a key part of the sales process.
Sharpening Your Sword

The process of blogging involves analyzing your business, testing our products and services and forces us into considering what is working and what isn’t. This spins off into the sales process – both face to face selling and in creating new and more effective strategies.

Producing written and/or video content on a frequent basis give us ample opportunity to find winning, modern, effective language with which to further our mission.
Team Building

The task of blogging can be shared amongst other members of the company. This is much easier and less risky than farming out sections of a conventional website (by means of a CMS). This shared blogging process provides many benefits, the combination of teamwork and competition driving up quality of the articles and an enhanced feeling of involvement in the direction and success of the company

How to See Through the ‘Big Company Website’ Facade

Peter Bennett Dot Net — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 20:28:33 +0000

I’ve been slightly and pointlessly riled recently by a couple of websites, examples of thousands out there, that appear to be companies with numerous employees having meetings in conference rooms etc, with wide ranging resources but which turn out to be one guy, perhaps outsourcing work to moonlighting colleagues or virtual assistants in remote locations or whatever. It is more prevalent in the range of IT services – web design, seo, hosting etc than traditional offline companies.

Often the website is pretty well designed with all the bells and whistles. I’d post some examples but frankly I don’t want to give these guys the oxygen of publicity! Anyway let’s dive straight in to identify tell-tell signs.

Stock-photo conference rooms complete with engaged participants, stock-photo cute women in headphones etc etc.

Stock-photos have a kind of ‘smell’ about them – if you start looking with that in mind you soon pick up the feel. In itself not a huge giveaway as many bricks-and-mortar and other substantial businesses use them, but it’s Factor 1, part of the puzzle
Constant use of the pronoun ‘We’.

I just double-checked through some big name corporate sites and while there are still some ‘we’s’ and ‘ours’ there’s no compensatory scatter-gunning of those words like there are on a facade site
Crickets chirping on the ‘About’ page

Ah, a major stumbling block, the About page… A normal sole-proprietor page would naturally mention quite a bit about said person but the masquerader has a problem here… Putting in fictitious names is a risky business but leaving it devoid of any people isn’t good. The best be is maybe to list the Sole Prop as the ‘Company CEO’, but the biog details could give the game away.
Blogs: bland, boring and out-of-date

Unless he/she outsources the blog writing there’s not much time left after putting together a huge pseudo-corp site to write many interesting blog articles. Another handicap is that if the content is too personal and subjective it can also give the game away that there’s only one person behind the operation. So bland is what we get, whether cobbled together by the Sole Prop or distant outsourcer
Just too much stuff!

The company does EVERYTHING and often by 300′s – 300 links, 300 referrals or maybe 500 – 500 press release submissions. Proper companies will tend to gather this in to something more reasonable-sounding. This is perhaps the province of the ‘one-person-outsourcing’ company where the guy is just running a website hoping to pull a few clients in and just put them onto an outsourcing company but sometimes I think it’s just ‘cut n paste’ fever – just blasting the site and then do the wondering if a prospect gets in touch

Well, that’s my list for now – do you have any suggestions?

The How’s and Why’s of Working with Multiple Browsers

Peter Bennett Dot Net — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 03:28:02 +0000

Why work with all the big browsers – Firefox/IE/Chrome etc?

Like many people I started installing the various different browser types out of a) curiosity and b) the need to test websites I was working on using different browsers. Reason b) isn’t as strong as it used to be, the heavy lifting of cross-browser testing is now using ‘browser labs’ and reason a)… hey, not so much to be curious about now!

So… I’ve got a bunch of browsers installed, and y’know, I use 3 of them pretty much all-day, every day. Why?…

1. To handle separate logins

Websites generally control access to their sites using ‘cookies’ – small files stored by the browser. Now, Chrome knows nothing about IE’s cookies, Firefox knows nothing about Opera’s cookies and so on. You can see this in practice by logging into a website (e.g. Google, Facebook, Twitter etc) using one browser e.g. Chrome. Then open IE or Firefox and go the same site – you’ll be all not-logged-in (unless you’ve set up some auto-login).

Now go back to Chrome and open another tab and go to the site your’re logged in with in the first tab – you should find yourself still logged in because the website is ‘reading’ the cookie from the first tab. So let’s say you need to work with two Twitter logins simultaneously. No problem just access one in Chrome and one in Firefox and you can stay like that all day.
2. Handle different parts of your life in different browsers

I like to start the day checking out how my website/business has done since I was away. So I start Chrome and it’s configured to open tabs on Google Adwords, Google Analytics, Facebook, Statcounter (my preferred ‘granular’ website stats tool), MailChimp, vCita.com (a scheduling/contact tool), ContactMe (another contact tool), Google Plus and also a website tool. Where it’s possible I set these to login, where it isn’t I just manually log in. I now have a simple ‘my business’ console – I can leave it running all day and it has a nice Google Chrome icon so I can identify it.

Now, say I need to work using a client’s accounts to a set of websites. I just start up Firefox and log into the appropriate sites using the clients credentials and I’m there. Now I can leave that and I’ve got a nice big (and ugly!) Firefox logo to identify all the sites I’m logged into as the client.

Hmmmm…. that’s ok but now I need to check out how the client’s site is performing for Google searches. Google will show different results depending who is logged on to Google at the time. So I start IE9 and make sure I’m NOT logged into Google so I can check that out. Same for Bing and Yahoo etc (there are other steps you can take to further ‘depersonalize’ the searches but we won’t go into that here).

So, now I have another funky logo to click and have a bunch of ‘neutral’ search engine setups to work with!
3. It’s an efficiency thing…

You could take this further, e.g. using a different browser to simultaneously work with client #2. I can’t emphasize enough the efficiency of setting each browser so it starts with the group of tabs you need to work, rather than mess around opening tabs, clicking the favorites bar to get to the site and then logging in etc…
4. Disclaimer

A lot of websites – Facebook is a prime example – use up a lot of processor time and other computer resources plus bandwidth. Be aware of that – if you have too many browsers/tabs open it may slow down your computer that you need to compromise with your master-plan!

How to Spot a Ripoff – This Week: Internet Marketing

Peter Bennett Dot Net — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 23:28:06 +0000

Watched a webinar this week on a fairly specialized Internet marketing product/system. Many red flags flew in front of my seasoned eyes. Not saying it was criminality or anything, just some selling of mutton as over-priced lamb!

The presenters (let’s call them Shelley and Steve) say ‘As you may have noticed, neither Steve or I are professional sales people’. Oh yeah, well what are you then, backroom technicians? Who spend their spare hours delivering slick sales presentations? You’re spending the rest of the week coding away at great systems.?? No, none of the above, the ‘I’m not a slick salesman’ reveals only one thing – that they’re not the MOST slick sales people but just averagely competent CHEESY sales people.
Testimonials from ‘John H., Wisconsin’ – oh come on… Anything other that validateable testimonials, preferably with links to websites or social media accounts or other contact info are pretty much a waste of time for any savvy participants in the webinar. If you really want to BS us all, a hired talking head (just an actor recalling a script) is better – it works on TV ads, after all! Big red flag.
‘The website, that hosts our fantastic system, is sooo amazing that we have to make it member-only, and not show any of it until you pay and sign up’ which, of course, you have to do today… Unless they’re Facebook or someone, how much sense does that make, in terms of promotion? None.
Then there’s the ‘you gotta buy today or it’s nothing doing’ ruse. This is surely schmuck central… How likely is it that they’re getting too much business and they have to ration it out like that and stick to a limit of ’35 subscribers today’ etc. It’s not at all likely they’re just trying to bump you into a sale by generating a buying panic. What’s the chance that they won’t take your money next week? None.
Finally – no checkable facts and figures. All that stuff about clients x and y generating masses of biz through this service. If they did offer websites and names to check out, they need checking really. In the absence of that it’s just there words. Salespeople’s words ;o)

Microdata Semantic HTML Markup – A Quick Guide

Peter Bennett Dot Net — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 01:58:53 +0000

Google, Bing and Yahoo announced support for Microdata as espoused by Schema.org. Microdata helps the search engines to understand the data entities that they’re encountering as they crawl html markup on sites. This helps the search engines get more accurate results for queries and present the results in a more appropriate way (that’s the theory, anyway). Will it actually improve SE ranking? Well, as the search engines gear up to Microdata it should do, I haven’t actually proven this yet but am gathering metrics. Given the current state of HTML editors and their use in the big name blogging and CMS platforms, plus the slowness of lots of people to update HTML code on static websites, for sure there’s an opportunity to ‘get the jump’ on the competition for some time to come by rapidly implementing it.

This blog post looks at Microdata and demonstrates coding up a simple example. Why am I pushing this – well it’s a way of getting competitive advantage in ranking. That’s not exactly a no-brainer, the theory is that it gives better rankings for local (or locality-based) searches and for ‘product verticals’

To implement Microdata requires three attributes, to be added to the appropriate HTML elements. The attributes are: itemscope, itemtype and itemprop. The ‘thing’ being defined by the Microdata, be it a book, movie, song, other product or person is the ‘item’.

itemscope: this is used as an attribute of the HTML element that encloses all the other elements pertaining to an item.

itemtype: this is the type of item as defined at Schema.org e.g. itemtype=http://schema.org/Movie

itemprop: this is one of the properties defined by the Schema.org page for the item type. Properties are derived from groups of properties that are selected as being appropriate for the item type, so for Movies the property groups are: Thing > Creative Work > Movie and for Books the property groups are: Thing > Creative Work > Book. In these examples the groups Movie and Books contain the movie- and book-specific properties.

So now an example. The following is a WordPress shortcode for a plugin to play a music file, we’ll wrap it in some html with microdata to let the SE’s know what it is who it’s by etc.

[mp3j track="Winter_In_LA_128.mp3"]

We can use the Schema.org page http://www.schema.org/docs/schemas.html and click on ‘MusicRecording’ to see all the properties that apply to this item category. First we’ll wrap the shortcode in a div with attribute itemscope:

<div itemscope>
[mp3j track="Winter_In_LA_128.mp3"]
</div>

Now we add an itemtype to define the above scope as being a MusicRecording: http://schema.org/MusicRecording

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/MusicRecording" >
[mp3j track="Winter_In_LA_128.mp3"]
</div>

And now we start with itemprops, how about a name (from property group Thing), author, datePublished and genre (from property group CreativeWork):

And finally two specific properties from the Music group: byArtist and duration:

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/MusicRecording">
<h2>Winter In LA</h2>
A new "<span itemprop="genre">bossa gringa</span>" track, press the play button to listen...
[mp3j track="Winter_In_LA_128.mp3"]
Music and lyrics by<span itemprop="Author"> Peter Bennett </span><span itemprop="datePublished">Dec 3 2011</span>
Performed and recorded by <span itemprop="byArtist"> Peter Bennett aka Dippingbird </span> Length: <span itemprop="duration">2'45"</span>
</div>

And here’s the finished result:

Winter In LA

A new “bossa gringa” track, press the play button to listen…

Music and lyrics by Peter Bennett Dec 3 2011
Performed and recorded by Peter Bennett aka Dippingbird Length: 2’45″

5 Easy Search Engine Optimization Tips

Peter Bennett Dot Net — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 04:48:43 +0000

1. Relevant High Value Inbound Links

In bound links are really crucial for good ranking. The higher ranking the linking domain the better (e.g. high Google Page Rank) and also the more relevent to your niche the better. Links from low value sites are not nearly worth as much, likewise with irrelevant sites.

2. Alt Tags for Images

Search engines currently don’t really look at the images when they crawl a site. Alt tags are important in enabling the search engines to index what the image represents, so it is important to use appropriate alt tag content. As well as doing better for a regular web search, you’ll be at a specific advantage on an image search.

3. Title Tag

The title tag is what shows for a page in a browser tab (rather than the URL to the page which shows in the address bar). Getting it right is very important, it should be keyword-rich. SEO stats also indicate that, unless your company name is a ‘household name’ it is best to lead with keywords in the title rather than company name i.e. put the keywords in the left hand side of the title.

4. Keywords in Domain Name

If you’re starting out with a business, certainly give some thought to naming it from relevant keywords with a URL to match (if available). Especially if you’re looking for global domination on those keywords. If you have a domain name already, don’t tear it up for this reason though!

5. Anchor Text

Anchor text is important – it’s a major element in the search engines’ complex algorithmic formula that helps to determine the rankings of websites.

It’s really important that you don’t use ‘click here’ or similar. The anchor text should include important keywords that you want to be found in searches, e.g. if your link is to a site ‘mysitename’ which sells fishing tackle, the anchor text could be ‘buy fishing tackle here’ while the url points to the site. Another example with an actual link: SEO and Social Media tips

Search Engine Optimization for Social Media

Peter Bennett Dot Net — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 00:20:53 +0000

A new training video where we look at how to get placed in search results from social media sites – Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube. This module will be in 4 parts, this is part 1.

Keyword Analysis to Boost your Social Media Management

Peter Bennett Dot Net — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 20:41:41 +0000

Traditionally, keyword research relates primarily to website and blog content. The same principles also carry over to Social Media – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube etc This post looks at how they can be applied for your business, whatever that business is, on these platforms.

1. Researching keywords

First – researching keywords. You may have some already in mind, which is good, but you can quickly find keywords and phrases using Google Adwords keyword tool. A key point to bear in mind when looking for keywords is that we want to identify likely words which prospects will use when searching/querying for our product or service. As an example below I’ve started a search for keywords based on the idea fine perfumes…

Above we see a range of keyword volumes – the simple keyword ‘perfume’ is mega-high others are high volume e.g. ‘best perfumes’ , medium volume e.g. ‘discounted perfumes’ and long tail such as ‘fine fragrances’. Choice of when to use high, medium or long tail is based on a variety of factors e.g. if using pay-per-click or using in combination with locality keywords, we won’t examine that in depth here.

1. Analyzing Keyword use on Social Networks

We can now cross check the above selections in a social tool for each social network. For example for Twitter there is a tool Twazzup which shows the ‘tweets per hour’ of a given term. The stats (at the time of writing) are: best perfumes 2 TPH, discounted perfumes 0 TPH and fine fragrances 1 TPH The mega high volume keyword perfume is up there at 784 TPH

We can the implement these findings in our postings on social networks by included a varying selection of those proven search terms also including them in photo and video tags. It is also a great idea to include a varying selection from the medium and long tail search terms – these will have less competition in global type searches and will in particular be more likely to get your social posts onto the opening page of a Google, Bing, Yahoo or other search site.

Topsy:

this is another useful tool for analyzing keyphrase frequency on twitter, photo and video sharing networks.

3. Related Search Terms

An important process to bear in mind throughout is to test that we’re ‘in sync’ with the real world so that we’re sure we’re using keyphrases that are really out there in use by our prospects when they’re looking for our products and services. For this we can go to Google correlate – it’s a great tool but does come up with some weird correlations so needs some human selectivity at the end! For example looking for correlates for ‘best perfumes’ gives:

‘cologne for men’ is just the kind of thing we’re looking for but ‘butter for shortening’ probably isn’t hitting it!

4. Seasonal Trends and Localization/Regionalization

The graph above from Google Correlate has some seasonal information for the term ‘cologne for men’ – we can see seasonal peaks for the term – towards the end of each year, the holiday season, there is a major 4 or 5 times peak. We can drill in via Google Trends to get more detailed regional information as well:

A more specific tool re social networks is Trendistic which shows tweeting trends over a more day to day timescale. In the shot below we see a peak over the weekend of Oct 22/23 – if that were repeated over several weekends I think we’re seeing a believable peak for that type of tweet over the weekend shopping peak!

5. Wrap-up

Thanks for reading! I’m interested in drilling deeper in localization techniques, for small businesses to improve their efficiency in capturing local interest in their social networking activities next time!

What to do with your Facebook Page?

Peter Bennett Dot Net — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 19:31:49 +0000

The ‘best thing to do with a facebook page’ issue is up-in-the-air right now. There was always some ambiguity and the recent launch of the ‘subscribe’ button muddies things further. I’ll refrain in this post any of those ‘x is what facebook wants you to do’ There have been false trails before from fb and I think ‘pages’ is one of them. In particular, for ‘solopreneurs’ and small business the benefits of going for a page likes over adding friends are dubious, and now that subscribe buttons are there, still more dubious. A benefit of pages was held to be that they push the DBA or other name of the business out there, but that can be done on a personal profile and that’s made easier with the deeper profile picture which is now possible. On a personal note, I’m now in favour of personal name rather than business name for businesses that are, or start out as one-person businesses anyway.

Sooo… what to do with your page? You’ve slogged it around and got enough likes not to throw it away. Meaningful discussions never materialized on the wall – maybe your client base is too small and uninvolved to hope to produce that. Right now there seem 3 possibilites:

1. Email opt-in funnel Make an appropriate opt-in signup page with bait to get signups from ‘likees’ or casual visitors to the page. That seems to work.

2. Sales funnel page. If you have something that can be sold quite quickly upon landing on a page then this is a possible. Thinking of digital info product or small tangible. There are plenty of specialists in the field doing it and it works for them, but beware that specialism may be needed to get this kind of page off the ground and working.

3. Put your website into the page. If you have a website you’re happy with and don’t have particular ambitions for options 1 and 2 this may be the ‘no brainer’ and as far as I know only recently possible with Webees – who have a free-with-ads version. This leverages facebooks seo-like capturing power directly for your website stats. I’m looking closely at it for the first time just now – getting ideas for tighter fb integration with the website, which I hope will be the subject of the next post. The page is at: http://www.facebook.com/peterbennettdotnetpage

Peter Bennett Dot Net

How To Get More Comments On My Blog, Part One

An Ideal Blog Comment Setup?…

Relaxed Spam Control

The Heck with Logins

The Lord High Moderator

The ‘CommentLuv’ WordPress Plugin

the ‘ReplyMe’ WordPress Plugin

The Benefits of a Small Business Blog

Long tail searches

Page Views = Closed Sales

Sharpening Your Sword

Team Building

How to See Through the ‘Big Company Website’ Facade

Stock-photo conference rooms complete with engaged participants, stock-photo cute women in headphones etc etc.

Constant use of the pronoun ‘We’.

Crickets chirping on the ‘About’ page

Blogs: bland, boring and out-of-date

Just too much stuff!

The How’s and Why’s of Working with Multiple Browsers

Why work with all the big browsers – Firefox/IE/Chrome etc?

1. To handle separate logins

2. Handle different parts of your life in different browsers

3. It’s an efficiency thing…