Businesses Without Websites
Posted by Mitch on Aug 25, 2010
Many of you know that I write blogs for others. One of the sites I write for is a massive real estate blog. It concentrates on home communities and home builders, though I also get to write some commentary here and there.
 by Anthony Mattox |
What surprises me is just how many home builders and contractors there are that still don’t have a website. Sure, they’re listed in some fashion via Yahoo maps and Google maps and Manta and other phone number tracking sites, but beyond that there’s no further information on these companies.
It’s frustrating for me because I try to find out more information about either a community or a home builder, and there’s nothing there. In many areas around the country they don’t have home communities, just neighborhoods, and sometimes it’s hard trying to figure out who built those homes. And when you can find them, there’s nothing about them, just a phone number. You don’t know if they build single family, multiple family, condominiums, townhomes… nothing.
Of course it’s not just home builders, but many brick and mortar businesses in general. My wife and I were trying to research snow removal companies that were in our area, but there were only two online, and neither one specifically near our home. Sure, there are plenty of numbers on the search engine, but it would be nice to know which specific neighborhoods these snow removal people like to work in because my wife leaves the house by 5:30 in the morning and it doesn’t do us much good if the builder is on the other side of our town most of the time.
A few years ago I wrote an article on my SEO website titled Should You Have A Website, and of course I come out on the side that says “yes”. However, I also mentioned some reasons why a business might want a website, and though I could see why someone might, my bet is that most of these companies that don’t have websites do so because they just never thought about it.
In this day and age, when so many more people are internet savvy and would rather look information up on the search engines as opposed to grabbing the Yellow Pages and looking at an ad, it would behoove any legitimate agency to have a website, put up some examples of what they do, and let their online marketing serve their business in ways they’ve never imagined before. It’s the wave of the future; heck, it’s the wave now!
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Mitch Mitchell
Setting Up Twitter Tools
Posted by Mitch on Aug 24, 2010
As some of you know, I’ve been using the WordPress plugin Twitter Tools for almost a year. I found it to be a great program to set up how I wanted it to send my blog posts to Twitter, and it was the only plugin I could find at the time that would let me post-date my posts and still automatically go out.
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Then some of you saw my post a few days ago talking about twitter plugin changes that are on the way, that actually have been on the way for months but most of us hadn’t heard a lot about it. As it pertained to Twitter Tools at least, suddenly you had to go into Twitter and set yourself up as a developer, each individual blog, and get these codes for the program to continue working. I had written the WordPress people about it and they didn’t offer enough help for me to be able to get it right.
Well, if you paid attention to the comments on that post, you’ll see that my friend Chris, a super techie, offered instructions on how to get it done. Man, talk about nick of time type of stuff! However, it might be difficult following along with the comments. I’ve now done it 3 times for my 3 blogs; I can tell you what you need to do to get it done right.
First, go to your Twitter page, then go to Settings. Once in Settings go to Connections. After that, look to the right of the page where it says Developers, and click on the link at the end of that little paragraph. You might not have anything on this next page, but you’ll see a link at the bottom left that says “Register a new application ยป”; click on that.
Now you’re on the page where you’ll register your blog as a new application. By the way, I’m not sure if you’ll have other plugins you use with Twitter than you’ll have to do the same thing for, but for Twitter Tools, this is definitely how you go about it all.
The first thing is asks for is an image; you don’t have to do this ever, since you’re the only one who’s going to see it, but you can if you want.
Next it says Application Name. This should be the name of your blog, but it can be anything. With one of my blogs it said someone was already using the name, so I had to modify it slightly.
Next is the Description box. Just write something short and sweet in there on what your blog is about.
Next is Application Website; type the entire URL of your website in there, including the “http://” part.
Next is Organization; I left this empty.
Next is Website; type the entire URL of your website in there, including the “http://” part.
Next is Application Type, and it should be defaulted to “Browser”; if not, that what you want to select.
Next is Callback URL; type the entire URL of your website in there, including the “http://” part.
Next is Default Application Type; this one is important because it’s defaulted to “read only”, and you want “read and write” instead.
Next, you want to check the box next to “Use Twitter for Login“.
Finally the captcha; get it right, although it will let you do it again if you get it wrong; I hate those things!
Once you hit save, if it’s acceptable you’ll see a message telling you so. You’ll be on a new page, and you’ll have your first bit of information to put into your Twitter Tools settings on your blog. If you’ve updated it, open it up under Settings in your control panel on your blog. Once you have it open, you’ll see it asks you for a Consumer Key and a Consumer Secret. Both of those are on the Twitter page you’ve just been taken do. It’s best to copy and paste it in so you don’t mess it up.
After that, you’ll see you need information to fill in for Access Token and Access Token Secret. To get that, you go to this link, http://dev.twitter.com/apps and it will take you to a page where you’ll see the “application” you just registered, which will be your website. Click on it and you’ll go to another page where you’ll see a list of items to the right. Click on the one that says My Access Token and it’ll take you to the page with the information you need for the two items above.
Once you’ve put that in click Save, and if the plugin says it connected to Twitter you’re done with all the hard stuff, and just need to customize your settings based on what you want to do.
And there you go; whew! It turns out to look a lot more difficult than it really was. And I can’t think Chris enough for the help; you da man!
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Mitch Mitchell
10 Posts That Deserve More Attention
Posted by Mitch on Aug 23, 2010
Something that’s hard for a lot of people is self critique. We’re either too easy on ourselves or too hard on ourselves.
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I’m no different, although my parameters change depending on what it is. When it comes to this blog, I know that there are a few throwaway posts, where the post isn’t necessarily important to anyone but was entertaining to write. That’s part of my quest to give visitors something different to look at.
However, there are times when I write something that, in my mind, didn’t get enough attention or enough visitors for whatever reason. Every once in awhile, I like to go back to some of those posts and share them in one specific post, hoping that maybe newer visitors will see those titles and say “hey, I must have missed that one”. At least that’s what I hope. So, here are 10 posts of mine over the last 2 months of 2009 and first 6 months of 2010 that didn’t get many visitors that I feel deserve more attention.
5 Ways Poker Is Like Blogging – This was my attempt at being creative by comparing two of the things I love doing most, one of which is playing poker.
An Interview With Marelisa Fabrega – Marelisa is one of the top bloggers in the world, and I was able to secure an interview with her. This needs to be read by everyone.
Twitter Marketing – Do You Have A Plan? – I found myself again some days ago explaining to someone what Twitter was about and how it could be used for business, and this wasn’t at my workshop either.
How Can You Prosper Through Publicity? – Everyone who has a blog needs to understand just how much more prosperous they could be, either monetarily or personally, by figuring out how to handle their publicity better.
What Do We Expect For Free? – We all like free stuff, but are we taking it to the extreme for some things?
Are Writers Taken For Granted? – As someone who’s been writing to make a living for the last year, it seems that people devalue just how much of a commitment it is, even when they can’t do it themselves.
Content Is An Electronic Emperor – This was my response to a comment made by Rupert Murdoch, partially one of the most hated men in the world.
Web Courtesy – Don’t We Deserve That Much? – With so much hate that people spew in blogs and especially when responding to news stories, I question whether there is any courtesy anymore.
Are You Using Social Media For Promotion? – I wrote this last year, way before I ever started thinking about doing workshops on the subject.
My 10 Favorite Blog Posts Of 2009 – Okay, this isn’t quite fair, but at the end of the year I posted 10 blogs posts I liked that I wrote in 2009; so now you have 10 more to check out if you’re interested. 
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Mitch Mitchell
Sunday Question – What Do You Hope To Accomplish In The Last 3rd Of The Year?
Posted by Mitch on Aug 22, 2010
Man, that’s a tough question, isn’t it? Even though there’s one more week to go, the reality is that we’re 2/3rds of the way through this year. There’s so much more to do, but we’ve done so much already, haven’t we?
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When I took a look back to my goals for 2010, I can’t say that my progress towards them is all that pretty. However, it’s not a total loss like it was for 2009. So far, I have reached one of my goals, that being to get at least 3,000 real visitors a month coming to this blog. At the time I’m writing this, I’m averaging 3,200 visitors a month, which is pretty neat. And my Alexa rank did get to 106,000, so I was pretty close before it started going back up a little bit. But I still have a shot at that one.
I’ve also taken on some things I hadn’t planned on for the year as well, so it all balances out at some point. Still, I’d have to say that overall I haven’t quite accomplished what I was hoping for, though on 4 of the 5 I’ve improved over the beginning of the year.
What do I hope to accomplish by the end of the year? I hope to take my social media marketing workshop to another city. How I’m going to do that is still up in the air, but it’s a goal. I want to hit another milestone figure, that being $300 in one month online. I think my highest month was around $225, so it’s not totally out of range. Yeah, my goal for the year was much loftier, but at this juncture I just want to show progress. I have ideas; no I’m not sharing them. But if something succeeds, you’ll be the first to know.
I’m backing off my goal of 500 RSS subscribers for the moment and I’m going to shoot for 200. That might be attainable, as I was at 161 one day last week, and as of January the highest I’d ever had was 126. It will take a lot of factors to happen, but one can hope.
I also want to continue working on growing my influence locally, since, at least for now, I think I’m covered online. I think that if I can do better locally, my financial standing would drastically improve, and I’d feel more free to take time off to go to Barnes & Noble here and there just to have some time to myself out of the house. I work a lot; rather, I sit here at the computer doing a lot.
So there’s my bit of sharing; what would you like to share?
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Mitch Mitchell
Would You Be Missed?
Posted by Mitch on Aug 21, 2010
A couple of weekends ago I took a little test on Twitter. I wanted to see if I didn’t start off engaging anyone if I’d be missed. I did know that one of my blog posts was scheduled to post late morning, but I was curious if anyone would pick up on the blog post or send me anything.
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When I finally looked later in the day I did have messages. A couple of people had retweeted the post. A couple had responded to the post. And one person had written me a welcoming message to the day. I felt pretty good because I think it shows I do have at least a little bit of impact, or influence, online. Of course, my local influence is still nothing, as everyone who wrote me was from somewhere else, but that’s okay; I’ll take what I can get.
Our lives are so much different now than they used to be. In the past, there was some sense of community, of knowing the people who lived in your community. You’d see people in the neighborhood and know everyone’s name. You’d shop at the same stores and see each other there.
Nowadays, we have more ways to communicate with each other, yet instead of spreading the sense of community, for the most part it’s become more restrictive. You only message so many people because you don’t want to pay for extra time if you go over your minutes. We don’t have to leave our homes to go meet people because we can bring people into our homes electronically.
It’s a shame, but that’s pretty much my life. I work from home most of the time, so I don’t have a need to leave the house all that often. I’ve learned that my wife and my elderly neighbors across the street think that I’m getting old before my time because I don’t leave the house. My mind says not to spend money unnecessarily, and that includes gas for my car. It’s less expensive to stay home, so I do. I leave when I have something specific to do; just getting out for the sake of getting out makes no sense anymore.
This leads me to wonder sometimes if I would be missed by many people if something happened to me. If I stopped twittering, left LinkedIn alone, got off Facebook, and pretty much just withdrew would people notice I was gone. Sure, I know a few would; I do luckily have a few friends, and of course my wife, mother and grandmother. I do have my newsletter. But would any of the “masses” really miss me? Would I even have a legacy that someone would say “that was a good guy”. Unless my wife sent something out, and that’s not going to happen, would people reach out and say “hey, where are you”, or would time just move on?
It’s an interesting question. The second question is if you’d want that sort of thing in the first place? As I’ve talked about this concept of influence I’ve thought about the second half of that, which is once you have some influence can you ever have a private life again? Then I came to a resounding “yes”. We had this CEO of Hewitt Packard have to resign and get out of Dodge because of an alleged sex scandal, and I realized that I had absolutely no idea who this guy was, yet one could imagine that his influence had to be pretty high. If it wasn’t for the scandal, he’d have never crossed my mind at all. And yet, because of his influence, his indiscretion (alleged; yeah, right) was big news, and plastered all over the media. Almost Tiger Woods bad, but that kind of thing is hard to top.
Do you think you’d be missed by the masses if you suddenly stopped writing or doing whatever it is you do online? Do you care? Or would you like something mixed, like the treatment Ben Vereen gets from the Muppets in a performance of Mr. Cellophane?
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Mitch Mitchell
Twitter Plugin Changes Coming
Posted by Mitch on Aug 20, 2010
Well, it seems the gravy train is over, or at least temporarily derailed. I’m not as tekkie as people think I am, so I didn’t know this until I tried to update Twitter Tools the other day, and learned that you now have to go through some interesting steps in trying to get it to work with Twitter; I still haven’t figured it out.
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What’s going on? Twitter announced in April that they were going away with what’s called basic authentication because of all the spam and other ways that people were connecting to and abusing Twitter. They’re going to something they call OAuth, which will require all kinds of registration steps, special keys, etc. In other words, this is now a big deal. It’s a big deal because, based on what I’ve read, on August 31st all those things we presently use will be inoperable, unless the folks who developed those things decide to get the information needed to continue their usage.
What does it mean for us? It means that we don’t know if any of the things we presently use will be working after the 31st. Actually, the only one I think we know will be working is TweetMeme, and that’s only because Twitter just bought it. So, we’ll be wondering if any of the other things we use to post to Twitter, have others retweet our stuff to Twitter, use to check out Twitter followers or comments or posts or whatever else, will work the way they do now without more information from us. Twitter wants to move away from people only having to put in a username or password to get information; isn’t that interesting overall? They’re going the route of protecting their interests while Facebook goes the route of finding new ways to erode our privacy.
Actually, I did come across one plugin, but you then have to sign up for an account online that they charge you for, so I’m not even mentioning them. However, this might be the wave of the future, having to pay for access to Twitter through options that aren’t truly associated with Twitter. That also will prove to be interesting.
Either way, I guess we’re all in the same boat if we have Twitter accounts; let’s see what’s in store, and which white knight will ride to the rescue.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Mitch Mitchell
Are You Restricting Your Influence?
Posted by Mitch on Aug 19, 2010
I know you didn’t think I was done talking about influence, did you?
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Last week, Kristi retweeted an article someone else put together titled The 100 Most Powerful Women On Twitter. It was an interesting list for two reasons. One, I knew very few of the names on the list. Two, it was amazing seeing the high number of followers some of those people had that weren’t celebrities. The woman at #1 is super young, though super cute I must admit, and a singer whose music I’d never heard.
The list was compiled using Twitter Grader, which I’d written about back in September 2008. I hadn’t been to that site for awhile, so I decided to go over and check my rating. Out of 100, it says my rating is 99.3; I love that figure, and I decided to pop the badge onto the blog, which you can see there to the right just above the bird. However, it also said that out of around 7.6 million people, I rank around 49,500.
I thought about it a little bit, and then I realized that I have gone to some lengths to limit my opportunities for growth without realizing it. And I don’t just mean Twitter. But let’s start with Twitter.
I’m very strict with who I follow on Twitter. I’ve talked about some people who are twitter selfish, which irks the heck out of me. I’ve talked about people who only work on grabbing more twitter followers as if it’s only supposed to be a number’s game. And I talked about why I don’t follow some twitter folks. And I asked if people were being social with social media.
But I also talked about having a twitter marketing plan. One thing I never talked about in that post was how you might have to lower your standards a little bit to gain more followers without compromising all of your standards. For instance, something I could do is to start following more people with bonafides that aren’t quite as social as I like people to be because many of those folks retweet stuff they see, and maybe those folks would see some things I write and retweet them to their audiences. That would alter one of my standards, but it would be better than my going out and just following everyone I see, hoping they’ll follow me.
That sounds like an odd strategy, but I know it’s a working strategy a lot of people have, following someone with a lot of followers to hopefully get into their stream of consciousness. Frankly that seems like pandering to me, but people have done much worse to get noticed.
Then I thought about Facebook. With all the changes they’ve made, and my deciding I wanted to protect more of my privacy, I have my account set up so that if you’re not connected to someone who I’m connected with you can’t find me on Facebook. I don’t know too many people who’ve done that. Somehow, I still have almost 475 friends, but I don’t get those random former friends from my past finding me anymore; I’m not sure that’s a good thing, but I’m also not sure it’s a bad thing. Sure, there are some people who have more than 5,000 friends (it seems Facebook is always changing its rules on how many “friends” one is allowed to have), and I have a feeling I could have way more friends, but at what cost to some of my privacy, though we’ve talked here about there really being no privacy anymore?
Can you have influence online if you’re not Seth Godin and don’t make yourself more accessible? I think you can, but it takes a bit more work in other ways. You have to reach out to people you know in different ways. You have to find a way to have people thinking of you as an authority in some fashion. And you have to be as engaging as you can be and be ready to take advantage of opportunities when they come your way.
Hey, no one ever said working on being influential was easy!
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Mitch Mitchell
I'm Just Sharing is where I share my thoughts on internet marketing, writing, blogging and many other things. You never know what I'll be posting on. So keep coming back, read, enjoy, and buy! ;)
