Category Archives: Web Stuff

Web Stuff

Empire Avenue – Social Media Or A Game?

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After kind of being cajoled into taking a look at this thing, I finally decided to join Empire Avenue so I could get a sense of what it was all about.

What I was told was that it was a system that would help you measure your social media status because it would allow people to buy “stock” in your online performance. What it’s turned out to be is more along the lines of BlogShares, something I signed up for years ago, where people would buy stock on the progress of your blogs, with the intention of helping you get people to visit your blog and thus increase your visits and, ergo, your blog’s worth.

BlogShares seems to have fallen on hard times somewhat. I say that because it says I’m worth $146 billion (yup, you read that right) and I really haven’t done much over the years, and somehow when I went there a couple of months ago I didn’t even own any stock, including in my own blogs. It may or may not still be viable, and thus it’s probably how something like Empire Avenue jumped in and has taken off… to an extent.

Why do I say that? Well, I’ll say this; there are some fairly active people on the site. However, there aren’t as many people there that I thought I’d know. As a matter of fact, overwhelming people are buying stock into my site that I have no idea who they are. And when I try to find out more about them, I notice that many of them don’t even have websites, let alone blogs. That’s kind of freaky, but it’s not needed.

That’s because as long as a person has an account on Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook, they’re good. They can also have an account on YouTube, Tumblr, Flickr and a couple other sites and still be considered as legitimately taking part in social media.

I’ve been a part of it for two weeks now, and I’ll say this; it could probably be addicting for many people, and I know by reading some of the messages in the Facebook group for EA, as some of the folks call it (that makes me think of Electronic Arts so I probably won’t use it again) that some folks are taking it way too seriously. See, you buy shares in people whose stock price seems to be rising, just like the real stock market. But the other side of it is that some people will sell stocks if someone seems to be falling, and some of those folks are losing their minds thinking other people aren’t being, well, loyal. Y’all know how I am about loyalty, but it’s a game. And let’s face this fact; if you don’t know those people, then when was loyalty ever built?

To this end my stock price has risen pretty quickly, and it says I have a pretty good net worth. I think where I’m benefiting is that it lets you list up to 5 blogs and I have 5 blogs, 4 of which I write something fairly regularly. You earn a certain amount of points for every blog post; rather, they call them “eaves”, though truthfully I have no idea what this means.

For that part there’s a lot of things said on the site that I have no idea what they mean. And I guess it doesn’t matter. I’ll tell you this much. The site will give you a chance to get backlinks to your sites, including your blogs. You can check people’s About page to see if they have blogs, as some people will check yours, and if you’re lucky they’ll endorse your blog. If they actually visit your blog after that, it’s all good; I don’t endorse any blog I don’t look at first.

The site has what it calls “community pages”, which is more like lots of forum pages where you can join one for things that interest you. I’ve only joined two, one for Syracuse and one for books, and for now that’s all I’m joining because it’s hard following conversations; I don’t like that part, and wish it was more like a true forum where, if you click on the link that tells you someone responded to you or wrote on a topic you wrote on that it took you directly to that topic; nope.

I’ve also found that it’s hard to engage a person on the site. They have kind of an email system but I don’t want to use their email since I have my own. They also have what they call the “shareholder’s email”, which I think you have to pay for in either real money or eaves; I’m not really sure what that’s all about either but I turned that off.

In any case I’m hoping it might turn into something that actually becomes more social as much as a game, but I’m doubting it. I can tell you this; the site hasn’t cracked the top 25 for any of my blogs as far as referral traffic coming my way, which tells me that many people are endorsing my blogs but not visiting them. Hey, whatever floats their boat, right? If you go to the site think of it as a stock market game and nothing else, at least for now; then you might enjoy it for awhile.
 

Web Stuff

Stop Falling For Scams

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Last week a TV pitchman that I’ve seen from time to time was indicted on charges of mail fraud, conspiracy, wire fraud, promotional money-laundering, and transactional money-laundering; nice laundry list, eh? His name is Donald Lapre, and he sold and franchised online what he called “The Best Vitamin in the World”.

major league creep

I see this stuff on TV all the time, all these commercials telling us how great something is that frankly looks pretty ridiculous. It seems to take time for law enforcement to decide how to handle these folks, and often their commercials disappear and they’ve moved on before criminal prosecutions are made. Still, I always wonder how people get scammed by this stuff so often.

I’ve talked about certain scams on this blog. I mentioned secret shopper scams, survey scams, website money making scams, internet marketing scams, domain name scams, Craigslist scams, SEO scams, and affiliate marketing scams. Frankly, I assume that most of the folks that read things I’ve said about scams can count themselves among the educated and aren’t falling for scams anymore; can I get a witness?

Yet, it’s not always so clear. Man, some stuff just starts sounding really good at times, doesn’t it? I’ll go on record and talk about MLM, most of it, as being some of the biggest scams on record. Some of you might not see it this way but in my mind, the Mary Kay model is a scam, and if you do the math you’ll see what I’m talking about. It’s just a scam with an air of legitimacy, and most women that sell Mary Kay will come to that realization in an epiphany one night as they’re getting ready to put in their next mandatory monthly order, even though they still have lots of inventory on hand, and feel, well, what’s the woman’s word for emasculated?

Most of us get scammed because we want to be trusting of others. We really think that most people are out there to help us. Yes, there are a lot of people ready to help us, but sometimes we need to be more circumspect in who we trust. Goodness, we have the internet; we have Google! Everything imaginable can be looked up online. The internet is replete with websites telling you about scams, just as it is with websites proclaiming that these scams aren’t scams at all, at the same time they’re trying to sell you something from that company.

The thing is that one has to do a few things not to be scammed. First, you have to take the effort to look stuff up. Second, you have to take the effort to sort out who’s trying to make money off something and who’s actually telling you the truth. Although this was a rant about hamburgers, it’s something that happened to myself and a friend of mine, it has pictures, yet there are a number of people that say “I love that place” or “that didn’t happen to me”. Yet, as I described in that post, the majority of people writing online had the same view I had. Who’s right and who’s wrong? Well, in this instance we’re probably both correct, yet a reader will still gain pretty good perspectives and know what to expect by reading both good and bad things about it if neither of us has an agenda.

And that’s how you avoid a scam; you have to determine the writer’s agenda. If there’s an affiliate link read with a bit of doubt if you don’t know the writer. If the person hates on a product or company but doesn’t give any specifics, don’t get all absorbed. But if you see multiple people in multiple places ranting about the same thing over the over, stay clear, run away fast, and go wash your eyes and your brain. Forget you ever had the thought about purchasing or joining whatever that was and go back to enjoying your life.

Heck; now I have to go wash as well. 😉

Web Stuff

Puppy Cams

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Twelve days ago there was a litter of six puppies that were born. That’s nothing new. It was the third litter of Shiba Inu puppies from the mother, also nothing new. And it was immediately set up on streaming video; also not really new, but new to me.

I found out about it via NBC News, of all things, where it was mentioned 4 days after they were born, and I tracked it back to this streaming video link I’ve been obsessively watching the live link except for this past weekend, when the live feed was taken down for a short period of time and instead we had a few videos to keep us entertained. Of course, once you’re gotten used to watching them live the videos just aren’t quite the same, even though the puppies are still cute as sin.

On the site are other feeds of litters of puppies and probably some kittens somewhere on the site; I’m a puppies guy. It’s been a lot of fun and really interesting to watch. They’re so cute you just want to bite them… lightly of course. I learned that puppies don’t open their eyes from anywhere between 9 days and two weeks; as I’m writing this a day ahead they still haven’t opened their eyes. They didn’t start making any noise until six days later, and it was the cutest thing as well, though I could never figure out which one was making the noise.

They sleep a lot, but never fully restful sleep; my wife and I aren’t quite sure why they keep twitching but they don’t seem overly troubled by it. Of course it must be difficult for any family to deal with multiples and hope they all stay asleep at the same time, and it’s the same here. One will eventually move and start crawling all over the rest of them, looking for warmth I believe as they always seem to be trying to find their way into the middle. At this point it seems one mainly sleeps on its back while one has finally learned how to sit. I just can’t tell any of them apart.

And every few hours the mother pops into the picture, cleans them in some fashion (after seeing that I put away the notion about wanting to bite one lol) and then feeds them.

I have to mention that this UStream site seems to be pretty interesting for anyone who wants to go live with a feed. If you have a camera it looks like all you have to do is create an account, pick a category, and then go for it. I think it’s a family friendly site, so none of those shower people need apply. 🙂

Anyway, I hope you check out the puppies; it’s a lot of fun.

Web Stuff

Are You Often Disappointed By “Free”?

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I think I give a lot of advice on this blog, as well as a lot of commentary. I’ve helped a lot of people by showing the results of research, or testing things so they don’t have to. I don’t believe I’ve ever really held back on a topic when I’m writing about something unless it was personal.


by Andrew Steinmetz

With that said, I’ve also sometimes wondered why none of the products I’ve created sell here. I know I said that I don’t expect this blog to make a lot of money, but I do expect it to make some. Many comments indicate that there are some relatively new folks who visit and glean information from this blog, yet I’ve never sold any of my books or my webinar from this blog, though luckily I’ve sold them from other places.

What’s leading me into this conversation? The other day someone who I follow on Twitter posted something that said you could learn how someone else made $8,000.00 while on vacation through membership sites, and if you followed the link you could learn how. Well, I thought that was intriguing, as I’ve thought about membership sites, and so I followed the link and got to this page that I’m not going to advertise right now. There was a short video which said if you gave your name and email address, there would be 5 videos that would explain how she’s able to make great money through membership sites. I figured that within 5 videos I might glean some pretty good information, so I gave up the information to one of my rarely used sites; that’s how I subscribe to many things.

I got immediate access to all 5 videos, and I started watching them; took me an entire day, as I had other things to do as well, but eventually I got through all of them. And when I was finished? The only thing I got out of it was that she’s got all of her membership sites set up for recurring billing; that’s it. She talked about concepts, about statistics, and showed a lot of other people’s blogs, but never got to what I wanted to hear, which was just what someone might put into a membership site.

For instance, she mentioned a website where people could get together to talk about autistic children. Okay, that sounded good, but is there content in there? Are there videos or podcasts? How much? Is any material original, or gleaned from other sources? See, to me that’s pertinent information; that’s the type of thing that would help me decide if I wanted to not only create a membership site, or even to join one. I’ve actually joined a couple here and there in the past, only to be disappointed by one thing or another.

Now here’s the thing. Within hours of getting the link to the videos, the emails started coming about a course on how to create a membership site. At that point I pretty much figured I probably wasn’t going to get anything out of the videos, but I found it amazing that, in total, the videos were about 80 minutes long. How can anyone talk for 80 minutes and not say anything, and not be a politician?

The strange question to ask then is are you ever disappointed in free things, and do you deserve the right to be? I’m of two minds. One, if it cost you nothing and it didn’t work quite right, then you got what you paid for. Two, if something took up a lot of your time and at the end you got nothing out of it, then that’s something entirely different. That’s like sitting through an entire presentation geared to get you to pay someone thousands of dollars to create multiple websites for you by telling you how much money other people make and not telling you how other than “they sold cat brushes and made $100,000 in a week!”

What are your thoughts on this type of thing? Do you like the tease to buy, or will you buy if someone can at least offer you something up front that maybe you didn’t know?


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Web Stuff

How Influential Are You Online?

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On Twitter yesterday, one of the folks I followed asked who they thought were the most influential Syracuse social media people. There were a few names bandied about, but I have to admit that somewhere along the way I was hoping that someone would mention me. However, it wasn’t meant to be, and as disappointing as that was, it seems to follow an interesting pattern.

We as bloggers spend our time writing our posts, hoping to drive visitors to our sites to read what we have to say and see what we have to show. Some of us hope to make a dollar or two here and there, if not necessarily through the blog itself, then by doing speaking engagements, workshops and the like, or having someone see what we write about and decide to pay us for it. However, to get all of that, it takes influence, because that’s what’s going to determine just how many people are going to come see what it is you do.

What I’ve noticed is that I’m more influential outside of my home area than within it. Though I’ve lived in this area for 35 years, I find that I’m kind of the great unknown. Now, a part of that is my fault because I don’t get out all that much anymore, and in the days when I did get out, there was no internet. It’s hard becoming a local cause célèbre, if you will, at age 50. Indeed, the local net community in general probably didn’t even know I existed until I went to my first tweetup last year. Oh, I had a local client here and there, but all because I participated in this consulting group; any local work I’ve done has come through them.

Just to spread this even further, most of my consulting assignments in my main profession have also been out of town. Do local facilities need the types of services I provide as much as out of town facilities? Yes. Do they even look at me? No, I’m pretty much ignored, even at health care networking meetings (I finally decided to drop out after being a member for 15 years), though I do still market to them from time to time. Not memorable enough? Me?!?!?

Back on the 22nd, I did my first workshop on social media marketing in central New York. It’s actually the first time I’ve given a presentation in this area that I’ve been paid for, and I’ve given enough presentations. Goodness, I’ve been in the local newspaper, local business newspaper, once on local radio (I don’t count seeing myself in the background on the local news, though I did laugh), and it seems no one really knows who I am around here; that’s a shame.

Of course, I kind of see it as my fault. One of the things about social media marketing is that when you do it, unless you’ve finitely targeted yourself to your local area, your message tends to spread everywhere, and let’s face the fact that there’s a lot more people “everywhere” than at home. The most consistent comments I get on this blog or any of my other blogs come from people “elsewhere”. The people who have bought products I’ve created are from “elsewhere” (well, I did have one guy I knew who bought one of my products, but he’s the only one). Any web work that didn’t come from my consulting group, or writing work, that I’ve gotten have come from “elsewhere”. Goodness, the article I wrote about one of our tweetups, where I mentioned about 30 names, only got 2 comments, luckily from local people, though I know a few more did see it at least.

Ah, I know what you’re asking; what about the topic about influence online? In that fashion, we at least have some tools we can look at. For instance, I’m sitting at an Alexa rank of 112,591 for this blog. My main business site is around 392,000, my other site is around 1.3 million. For my main search terms on my main business, I come up in the top ten, if not at #1. For my other business, I’m in the top 40 for half of the terms, but if Yahoo was the main search engine I could actually claim a bunch of top 10 slots; I’m going to figure that out one day. For my main business site, it’s linked to more than 3,000 other websites, and my other business site almost 3,000; for this blog, more than 14,000 links elsewhere. As a point of comparison, I popped in some other domain names, and I don’t see anyone else linked to that many sites that I know.

So, in a weird way, it begs the question what is influence anyway, and how does one use it? I think I’ll tackle that one next week. But I’ll ask this question again; how influential are you online?

Ultimate World War II DVD Collection

Ultimate World War II DVD Collection