Straight Talk & Tech Tips to Online Success

Overheard on Twitter

[ Add Comment ] 11/19/08 | Kathy Drewien | Filed under: Social Networking

Random Tweets I’ve seen this week on Twitter:

I should be a real estate agent, the shit people try to pass off as photos of a property are shameful.

Is it me or is the Social Media PR person the new Real Estate Agent type of a fad. Everyone seems to be one these days.

Waiting for my real estate agent. She’s late again.

Tracking ‘real estate agent’ on Twitter reveals chest thumping agents and disgruntled clients.

What can we learn and improve?

 

When Twitter Leaves You Wanting More!

[ 4 Comments ] 11/04/08 | Kathy Drewien | Filed under: Technology

Sometimes, Twitter just isn’t enough for me. I’m left wanting more from the relationship.

I Want More!

When I’m trying to get a group of folks together for a discussion,
Twitter gives me no satisfaction.

So, I went on a search for conferencing tools.

My requirements are straightforward:

Three programs I found are Basement Ventures, Talk Shoe, and Free Conference.

BASEMENT VENTURES is an affordable and convenient solution for conference calling, hosting free, on-demand conference calls with a 250-person capacity. Conference call recordings (saved as mp3) are available online within 90 minutes of your conference call and remain available for a minimum of 30 days.

TALK SHOE hosted community calls (up to 250 participants) can be discussions, conversations, talk shows and podcasts. Recorded community calls can be listened to, downloaded, or subscribed to.

FREE CONFERENCE provides fully functional recording and storage capabilities, including both telephone playback and easy to download, play, manage, and store MP3 files. Limited to 150 participants.

I’ve used TalkShoe in the past, as a moderator and as a participant. A feature I like is the ability to enter text for questions and comments during the call.

What about you? What’s your experience with conference calls and discussions. What features do you prefer a moderator offer during a teleseminar?

Photo Credit: wjklos


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Internet Marketing Skills for Virtual Assistants

[ 4 Comments ] 11/02/08 | Kathy Drewien | Filed under: Technology

Some of my best friends are real estate virtual assistants.

So, I immediately thought of them when I ran across this video-based program called the “Internet Marketing VA Training Certification”. The program is designed to equip virtual assistants with the skills necessary for today’s online businesses.

According to the VA Classroom site:

There is an emerging demand for an Internet Marketing Virtual Assistant Training Program that equips virtual assistants with the specific skills internet businesses need, today and beyond.

Businesses are frantically looking for versatile, productive, web-savvy virtual assistants, with the skills to perform an increasing variety of crucial internet marketing support services including:

  • Blog management and support
  • Social media marketing and submission
  • Article submission
  • Online competitor analysis
  • Web analytic tracking and reporting
  • Effective keyword research
  • Press release submissions
  • Internet market research strategies
  • Email auto-responder management
  • Online Project management
  • Video editing and marketing support
  • Podcast editing and submission
  • Online survey set-up and management
  • … and many other services!

With VAClassroom’s IMVA Certification, you’ll know exactly how to effectively perform and market all of these services and many more.

Now, my team knows a lot of this stuff. But, hey; it’s not always easy to teach what you know.

We’re gonna take the course to:

  1. Learn what we don’t know, and
  2. Learn how to share the information effectively.

What do you think? Are you struggling to keep up with social networking, video, and online reputation? Would you hire a virtual assistant to monitor that part of your business?


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“404 Not Found” Page Kills Spiders

[ Add Comment ] 10/22/08 | Kathy Drewien | Filed under: SEO

Free Links to Your Site

I can’t believe a new feature from Google isn’t getting more notice, because it converts already-existing links to your site into much higher quality links, for free. The Google webmaster blog just announced that you can find the pages that link to 404 pages on your site. Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google and SEO

When someone comes to your site from a broken link, like PropertyLinesAtlanta.com/seiwi, the server generally returns the dreadful error code - 404 Page Not Found. Unless you have created a custom page, you might be driving visitors away.

Let’s talk about spiders for a second. You know, the same technology that the search engines use to index your pages. When’s the last time you ran one on your own site? Did you know that your custom “404 not found” error page could be driving them away?

You’ll want to sic a spider on your own site, before letting MSN, Google or Yahoo get at it. Why? To make sure its spiderable, that’s why! Huh??? Didn’t think about validating your linking structure, did you?

There are many page whackers available that download a whole site to your hard drive, but who knows what kind of “forgiving” spidering technology they’re using. The best one, the one that replicates the crawling spiders like Google and Yahoo the closest, is a tool like OptiSpider.

Here’s a tip, if OptiSpider can’t spider your site… neither can Google. That’s right, it’s probably just about the best reason to get and use a tool like OptiSpider, just so you can see the same stuff the spiders see.

If you manage multiple sites for clients, it’s a great weapon in your toolbox! I can’t count how many times I’ve done coaching sessions for clients who claim search engines are not finding all their pages. A few seconds later - using OptiSpider - I can tell them… dude!!! You didn’t link to the pages properly, or your custom 404 not found page is killing the search engine spiders.

No Google, Yahoo or MSN spider is going to find all your pages, when you put the crawler in an endless feedback loop. You’re lucky if the spiders ever come back.

Stop doing whatever it is (even if it’s reading this article ;-) and go look at your custom 404 page. Everyone loves to use them. Unfortunately, many people use them badly. The biggest sin of all - even I was guilty of this - is using a relative link on the 404 page. It’s so common that relative linking should be banned altogether.

Imagine the spider is several directories down in your site and encounters a missing page or broken link, up comes your custom 404 error page. Too bad sucker! You used a relative link instead of an absolute one. The spider is totally miffed at your site and resets, leaving all the rest of your pages behind… unspidered, unindexed and unfound.

Stop whatever it is you’re doing and go do it now. Put an absolute link on your 404 page, one that includes the http://www. and your full .com web address to your home page. That way, when your custom 404 error page comes up, the spider won’t choke. Instead, it finds your home page from the custom 404 page and continues spidering like normal.

If you want to make spiders happy and be sure they can crawl your entire site, then use a spidering tool like OptiSpider to test your internal linking structure. Just don’t be surprised if you end up getting a whole lot more pages indexed by the search engines. What’s on your 404 page?

by Michael Campbell

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