Start-ups, Marketing & StuffWritings, musings and generally lighthearted banter

• @nicolelindaman go home rest Plus there’s a bachelor finale on tonight (if that does anything for ya!) #
• @problogger I haven’t but I’ll definitely have a look this evening. #
• @nicolelindaman You and me both ;o) #
• Check out the #bachelor Vegas Odds, rumors and predictions – http://bit.ly/OKZ9K – Enjoy the show everyone #
• @nicolelindaman ditto ;o) #
• Whos watching the #bachelor season finale right now? Message me if you’re watching and twittering… #
• It’s a bit of an interestin social media test on #twitter – how many people are watching the #bachelor finale and twittering…neato gang #
• @DomesticChicky haha whatever works I’ll try not to give away the end of the #bachelor for by twittering #
• @nicolelindaman ahh the West Coasters have to watch out for us on #twitter eh? We might let it the ending slip… #
• RT @webaddict: SEO Strategies for Outbound Links: Do not Be Afraid to Link Out http://bit.ly/MIuq2 #links – this is great advice and true! #
• @domesticchicky I am live blogging the #bachelor right now as well want the link? #
• @domesticchicky http://tinyurl.com/cgcz44 that’s the live #bachelor blogging link #
• @nicolelindaman Haha no kidding! #bachelor #twitter #
• Melissa wins the #bachelor! So far…. #
• #bachelor theory. There is a shocking twist. Is #molly pregnant with Jason’s baby? There was the tent night. Does Jason dump Melissa? #
• Jason Mesnick dumps Melissa after 6 weeks! #
• @nicolelindaman I know right! Jason needs a timeout. What a douchebag! Dumping her on live TV #twitter #
• @aaronjbates The Molly being pregnant theory? #bachelor #
• #bachelor Melissa quote of the year “You’re such a bastard”. Classic Reality TV. #
• @nicolelindaman Jason Mesnick is douchebag! #
• Ok after a little live blogging I’m beat. Three hour finales suck but it appears to have been successful. #
• RT @dooce: “The Bachelor” needs to be renamed “The Insufferable Asshole.” – that is the best quote I have seen on here all night! Too true #
• @dooce Good one And totally agreed rename it to “The Never Ending Adventures of the Incredible Douchebag” #
• RT @timelam: RT @podcacher: Happy Square Root Day, folks! (3/3/09). Coming up: Pi Day on 3/14 #
• RT @mashable: Flickr Photos Become Stock Photography at Getty Images – http://bit.ly/c3d05 #
• Using Stumbleupon.com effectively and points to take into account when formulating your social media marketing: http://bit.ly/bc4ZG #
• Using Stumbleupon.com effectively and points to take into account when formulating your social media marketing strategy http://bit.ly/bc4ZG #
• I would like to know who ordered this freezing cold wind and winter blast in Ontario….*sheesh* #
• @jeanneleez Thanks for the complement Jeanne, glad you like it! in reply to jeanneleez #
• Signing off for the night. Have a good evening everyone. #
• @megste I started Honeypot back in 2002 but really kicked it into gear 3 years ago and the blog I’ve had forever – glad you like it! in reply to megste #
• For some reason my #twitter followers is stuck around 225 but I have 5-7 new followers a day which means I lose 5-7 per day for over a week #
• RT @mashable: Reading: “100 Twitter Tools to Help You Achieve All Your Goals” http://bit.ly/16fKFJ #
• Idiocy in action http://bit.ly/63sP why jumping over #niagarafalls even a temptation? #
• #google rebrands #googlevoice but will they index your chats, conversations , voicemails and text messages? http://bit.ly/15m207 #
• RT @SilverOakCasino: Know Nothing About March Madness? Win $10,000! ( http://tinyurl.com/dxmz4p ) #ncaa #basketball #contest #
• @onreact_com aww don’t get mad. I’ll take a link what’s it all about? in reply to onreact_com #
• @onreact_com Sure lots Google Analytics info over here. Do you have a draft of the post or a link so i can preview it? in reply to onreact_com #
• #ellen #degeneris is talking about #twitter and #tweeting and now she has +36K #followers #
• #ellens goal is to get 1 million followers by tomorrow. The girl is a laugh a minute. #
• @onreact_com dan.neelko@gmail.com in reply to onreact_com #
• @onreact_com Sorry! My email is dan.nedelko@gmail.com – busy day over here in reply to onreact_com #
• OMG best #seo dumbass quote ever! H1 should be used once on a page H2 should be used twice on a page H3 should be used 3 times on a page #

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Ari Fliescher went at it with Chris Matthews yesterday. I think Chris Matthews is right, 9/11 did happen on George Bush‘s watch and for Ari to say Matthews should be ashamed to point that out is ridiculous. The fact is the biggest terrorist attack in US history did happen on Bush’s watch and there are numerous additional facts showing that the Bush Administration failed horribly in ignoring consistent and persistent warnings about an imminent attack.

The deregulation of Wall Street which admittedly began under Bill Clinton was accelerated by the Bush administration which is one of the major factors in the global economic crisis – which I think is going to be a long and deep recession.

Ari Fliescher does make some good points and some stupid points.

If the US gets attacked on Barack Obama‘s watch then yeah you would be able and justified to say that! That’s an idiotic statement by Ari Fliescher. This is a great back and forth!

In an interesting although expected move Google is about to relaunch GrandCentral as Google Voice with a few new features:

• Free voice mail transcription, which converts recordings into typed text. Users have the option to have these messages sent to themselves as emails or texts — enabling them to search through, sort, save, copy or even forward material from voice mails.
• Free conference calling.
• Cheap international calls, with rates competitive to online telephony leader Skype: $0.02 a minute to France or China, $0.03 to Chile or the Czech Republic, for example.
• Text message organization — texts are sent to whichever mobile phones you specify, including multiple ones at once. They are also collected into your Google Voice inbox, like email, and can be filed and kept — a first in mobile phone history, the NY Times observes. As is the case with Gchat on Gmail, back-and-forth texts will be kept as “conversations.”

Now that means that pretty much your entire digital communication stream can (and will) be captured by Google. It’s going to be in an index somewhere. I would be 100% certain that your Google Desktop Search will index these entries and Google will keep a cache.

I think I’ll stick with Skype. Is anyone else going to try this out? There is an inherent coolness factor but I’m not sure how much more information Google *cough* Big Brother needs about me. Check out http://voice.google.com

Social Network Marketing is currently a hot topic in the world of Internet Marketing. Many people want to integrate a social media and social networking component to their marketing mix. The most common problem I see is Social Media Marketing thrown together in an ad hoc fashion and poorly executed.

The key risk from a marketing perspective is this: poorly executed SEO will result in no rankings, poorly executed PPC results in wasted budgets, poorly executed Social Media Marketing can result in a bad reputation, negative buzz and angry users.

You need to be very cautious when executing a Social Media Marketing campaign – do not just throw something together and start talking to an online community, the ramifications could be not only worse than you expected they could be difficult to undo.

Planning, education and execution are critical to a successful social media program. I would suggest that you consider the following points before launching a social media marketing program:

1. Which social media sites will you be targeting? Is your content appropriate for that network? For example: Digg is extremely popular among technology and design audiences. StumbleUpon is popular for humor, entertainment and gaming audiences. Newsvine is popular among politcal junkies (these are fairly simplistic examples but you get the point).
2. What voice do you want to project for your product to these audiences? Direct marketing doesn’t generally work well. Informational, educational and interesting content is needed with a subtle hint towards promoting your product.
3. What are you trying to say to the audience? Social Media Marketing is really about starting an ongoing dialogue with an audience, it’s about building trust relationships that are subtle. Formulating a message is extremely important, continuing the dialogue in a genuine way is critical. If you are not going to do that then you need to reconsider leveraging this medium.
4. Social Media Networks are composed of and run by real people. Remember that. This is not traditional advertising. You are developing a conversation with real people.
5. Be prepared to hear things you may not like. You may get no reaction. You may in fact get a negative reaction. Ensure that you know how to deal with a negative reaction and always remember that someone who gives you a reaction is someone who cares. Engage them and sort it out, it will be worth it!
6. Be prepared to engage the community as a community member. Participate in a very real way, if you do any less your programs will not succeed.

Although I’ve gone off on a tangent slightly, I am laying the ground work for this screencast and discussing one of my favorite sites: StumbleUpon. I’m not going to introduce Stumbleupon in this article, I do that in the screencast below. You can also learn about StumbleUpon right here.

So enjoy the screencast and I’m sure I’ve missed something in my overview so let me know by leaving a comment. Click Play and watch my screencast on Stumbleupon, you might find it useful!

[media id=4 width=600 height=480]

If you are already on StumbleUpon or ready to join and get into it, add me to your friend list or subscribe to my stumbles.

Happy Stumbling!

I guess Barney Frank is not taking any crap from Bill O’Reilly which is awesome. This is how I look at this situation. Bill O’Reilly is not only a thug highlighting his lack of intelligence through bullying, he is an utter and complete disgrace to his profession. I would not even bring down the profession of Journalism by implying that he is a journalist, the way this utter and complete moron bring down fundamental principles of reasoned debate.

Dear Bill,

In order to give an individual with an alternate point of view a chance to speak you need to shut up. You violate everything that makes open systems of political speech and expression the amazing system they are.

You cover yourself in patriotic self centered ego driven media sensationalism and fundamentally have no common decency or respect for the alternate views and opinions of others.

You violate everything your country and your profession are supposed to stand for, degenerating to your level any further is just the thing you want people to do.

It’s sad, it’s classless and you are nothing more than a demagogue.

I have personally run into two people in my life like you personally. One of whom I’ve written about here, the other is not even worth discussing. Have a look and tell me what you think:

I am pretty active on LinkedIn and have been for quite some time. I really do my best to try to answer one question per week and participate heavily in that community. It’s a good way to connect with others, make contacts and also use it as a sounding board for input to my ideas and thoughts on SEO, Search Marketing, Internet Marketing and what I do for a living both with Honeypot Marketing and with my own projects.

I figure since I am posting there I should also share some that with this audience. So the question that was posed from LinkedIn was this:

“How can you calculate the ROI of further SEO Investments for online project? Is there a model that can be used?“

That is a darned fine question since typical ROI models do not stand up well when it comes to SEO and Organic Search for a couple of reasons:

1. Investments are indirect. You invest in link programs, content etc and it doesn’t directly drive traffic. The engines drive the traffic but the investments are there to help increase your authority in those engines. It confuses alot of people as to the logic.
2. Most companies fall flat in terms of customer acquisition models. They are not correctly tracking a converted visitor from search, which makes it impossible to optimize your converting terms from the engines. I have seen many instances where terms which you wopuld not think are big converters in fact are massive converters (especially in tail of search). If you dont know this information then throw out your ROI model, you’ll be guessing anyhow – you could lie I suppose but then again that would be even worse and since SEO’s never ever lie (I’m ducking from the lightening!) that would never be a problem.

Given those two factors I’ve come up with a fairly decent model that I find works and here for your viewing pleasure is the overview. If you disagree with me or if you think I’m wrong then register and comment or email me.

One of the key things to consider is that calculating ROI on Organic Search is different than traditional media. Here is the layout I utilize:

A Total Amount of Search Traffic
B Total Amount of Converting Search
C Conversion Rate from Search
C Life Time Value of a Conversion (is it CPA or LTV)
D Converting Terms (focus on these)

Determine total Search Traffic = 1000
Determine the Converting Search Ratio: B/A (10/100) = 0.10
Use the Total Converting Search Numbers = 100
Determine the value of the Conversion: C = $200

You have profited $20,000 from organic search.

Total current budget : Link Building $1500 per month plus other monies spent (I am not sure what these are)/

Your profit of $20,000 from all search engine optimization programs is being generated by $1500 of spend to acquire 200 customers. Your cost per customer is $7.50

Your spend is generating a 13:1 profit to cost ratio. Now you know your budget to work with and you can shift your overall tactics to increase the overall number search joins as you wish.

I’ve used this model (with much more detail) successfully in the past on numerous projects in the online gambling industry including online sportsbooks, casinos, generic ecommerce sites, online dating, lead generation and ebook marketing industries. It provides for a strong ROI model, justifies SEO budgets and keeps the business people happy since they understand what the goals of the program really are.

I would love to get your input, comments and suggestions on expanding the ROI model for Search Engine Optimization. Please comment below and let know, even if you think I’m completely wrong!

Cheers,

Search Engine Optimization is still a significant component of my daily Internet Marketing work. I refuse on this blog to discuss basic SEO techniques, I will cover fundamental concepts like Hilltop, LSI and techniques which will make your sites make sense to the engines.

I’m going to cover the idea of using a series of subdomains around a main domain to increase the breadth of search terms and the overall prominence of your site in the engines. From a number of perspectives creating a series of subdomains with related content can be an extremely powerful technique.

The example I am putting forward is this:

Splitting http://www.yourdomain.com into subdomains with an outline like:

http://news.yourdomain.com

http://images.yourdomain.com

http://shopping.yourdomain.com

http://forums.yourdomain.com

http://products.yourdomain.com

There are a ton of reasons why this is the case, and here are only a few of them:

1. Content is segregated so that your customers understand where they are within your website. For instance shopping.mydomain.com or news.mydomain.com or press.mydomain.com can help to clarify the purpose of the area on the site.
2. It allows for design and creative freedom within the various areas of your site. Look, feel, user interface design, visual appearance are all key to the process. SEO does not stop when the user hits the site, in order to be effective as a search marketer you must work through the process to the ’success event’ – whether it’s a join, deposit , purchase or signup, it doesn’t really matter.
3. You have the ability to highly structure various areas of your site using various tools that exist. This includes blogs, forums, image galleries, content management systems (all using basic SEO techniques). This is a huge benefit for the search engines since when you strongly structure your site content the engines can quickly and easily index your site(s). This is of huge benefit for search optimization.
4. Linking becomes incredibly simple since you can easily manipulate the inbound links to your site(s). You also have the ability to saturate the engines which means you can then attack major keywords without ignoring the tail of search at the same time. This is critical since if you have a decent ranking with a major keyword on the main domain then optimizing for the tail of search on the subdomains becomes simple. You can easily own those keyphrases on a massive scale.
5. Modular site design. This is a straightforward concept that is quite often missed by the general design world. Keeping in that mind – having the ability to create a building block style site will make your life much easier. Both from a software development perspective (modularity is key) and also from an updating and urgrading point of view you will have the ability to update one module without adversely affecting any other portions of your site.
6. Network structures are the hgh level model of many authority websites which is what you want to mimic in every single way possible. By modelling your site in similar ways to larger sites you are effectively telling an engine that your site carries the same properties as an authority site. Now don’t forget to do the rest of the things neccessary to make your site an authority.
7. You have the ability to create multiple points of syndication from all areas of your site. I would strongly suggest you do this under any circumstances. XML and RSS feeds are beginning to integrate seamlessly into many aspects of both the internet, desktop computing and handhled devices. Creating numerous feed touchpoints is a huge point towards your search engine ranking.

Networks are important, fundamentally the internet is one giant network and the engines are the ones that trying to find site which are strongly related to specific content. The engines look for format, topicality, linking structure (both in and outbound).

Creating a structured solid network with subdomains can help to ensure that you are one step closer to seach dominance in your particular field. Also keep in mind that it is critical to structure each of the subdomains as if they were completely unique domains (pull them out and they would function independantly) then strongly link from there.

Good Luck!

I use two Blackberry phones, one is a Blackberry Curve and the other is a Blackberry 8800 so that when I travel I have a local number in both main areas. I also tend to get a little worried if one starts acting up.

Well as per my worries, the “y” key started acting up on me. Do you have any idea how difficult is to type without the letter “y”? More difficult than you might have thought.

After searching for a bit I found this gret video from PDAParts.com and though I would post it here for everyone to use if they ever had the same problem.

For all you Blackberry 8800 users you might want to have a look at the Blackberry 880 take apart instructions here, once again from our good buddies at PDAParts.com – I strongly suggest purchasing parts for your Blackberry from them. I’ve had to order a number of Pearl kits and batteries from them.

Hope that helps you clean your Blackberry, it took me a while to track down this info – if you have any questions or extra resources, please comment here and let me know.

March 4, 2009 Update: My plan has worked out very well and everything is back to normal without too much of an interruption. My request for Google site review took a total of 12 hours and it was completely handled through Google Webmaster Tools. Google spidered the entire site for about 6 hours checking every existing page on the site from Mountain View California. Around 6pm EST I was given a new notice in my Webmaster Control panel that the notice would be removed with the next update which took place about 90 minutes later.

I’d like to thanks a few people who gave me some good advice. If this does happen to you make sure that you:

1. Remove any old plugins may have or update them.
2. Ensure the source of the plugin is using best practices for PHP coding. If the plugin is not listed In the Official WordPress Plugins Directory then be careful.
3. Add the following plugins: WP Security Scan and WordPress Firewall (Thanks to Ruud Hein for the suggestion!).
4. Backup your content, themes, and plugins on a regular basis so a roll back is easy in the event that you are attacked again.
5. Be careful of who you send your site to on Twitter! See the end of the post for the official Twitter email I received and this was the source of the attack.
6. This one is obivious but make sure you WordPress version is current as many security fixes are implement in point releases (ie 2.7.1).
7. Secure you Web Server or have your System Administrator or Web Host ensure that everything is in order.

/Update.

I woke up this morning ready to get to work and as per usual I check my sites indexes in Google, Yahoo and MSN. Even though it’s a beautiful sunny day outside I was shocked to see the following:

Bad News for Tuesday Morning to be sure. So the question is what do I do and how do I get this bad message off my Search Listing?

I’m not too concerned to be honest except for the fact that my site is vulnerable to this injection attack. I would love to smack the hacker that instituted this attack.

So first things first:

What is this message all about? Well when I viewed the source of my site I saw what is called an obsfucated injection attack on the footer of every single one of my pages. This is a bit of a pain since I am using WordPress MU with a number of plugins.

That means that  the hackers could have injected their little code block into my theme, my plugins into the core WordPress MU files. Not a pretty thought to have to go through all of those areas to remove these individual code blocks. Bottom line: my site got hacked. What steps do I take to repair the damage that’s been done?

My plan to remove the PHP injection attack:

1. Identify which files on the web server are compromised.
2. Identify if the compromised files are plugins, comments, themes, or WordPress Core files.
3. If the compromised file is a plugin then determine if the plugin should be removed completely (is it the source of weakness?) or simply a victim and should be reuploaded and reactivated.
4. Upload a clean version of WordPress MU core files. This prevents me from having to wade through all of the compromised files.
5. Go through comments and identify any potentially malicious links to malware sites. I am very lucky since I have recently moved the domain to a new server since my previous horrible host disabled access to the phpMySQL instance through the cPanel (yes EMC Web Hosting Sucks NEVER use them). This will not be a huge issue.
6. Go through my theme which is a customized version of Revolution Theme by Brian Gardner. I frequently backup this theme since it is a a simple matter  of uploading the theme to the web server.
7. Visit Google Webmaster Tools and submit a request for Google to audit my site to remove the malicious tagging on my site.
8. Audit the entire site to ensure the malicious code in completely removed.
9. Back up the theme again, ensuring I have the ability to restore clean code in the event that I am on someone’s hacking list.
10. Harden WordPress MU to ensure that this does not happen again.

That’s my plan. I am about half way through it but there are some serious issues at play here since it is not only Google which is tagging my site as malicious (bad for business!). Check out the number of blocks which exist:

Google Malicious Message:

I’m not Malicious but Google thinks I am so next step is to click on the SERP that’s when Firefox jumps in:

After clicking the SERP Firefox jumps in and says I am an attack site. How fascinating but just wait. It’s not over yet when I get to the site:

Firefox toolbar warning

So clearly the powers that be and the tools on my computer are working hard to identify malicious sites. It is very clear that this site could be malicious and even though it was through no intent on my part the bottom line is that my site was hacked and turned into an attack site. This is a good line of warnings to any user and in the time frame that I am repairing the site and hardening my WordPress to ensure this does not happen again I don’t really mind having these messages there.

They are good for users.

Update – Twitter just sent me the source of this injection attack:

Uh oh! We found a bad apple in your Twitter feed.

We detected a link in your account pointing to a phishing site or other harmful material that we identified as malware. Here’s the troublesome post:

“@BlogDuJour hey there try out my blog [ your unsafe link was here ] – I am in the process of redesigning now but should be back to normal soon!”
March 02, 2009 22:07

We removed this update from Twitter. Please be mindful of others in the Twitter community, and post only safe links on Twitter.com.

Thanks! Twitter Support

Related articles

• How to Upgrade to WordPress 2.7 Safely and Ensure Compatibility (list-your-blog.com)
• Notes from the Search Masters Conference at Google (labnol.org)
• Search Engine Tips For Your WordPress Blog – WordPress SEO (kisaso.com)
• How To Make My Site Findable And Visible Inside Google SERPs? Here Is The Google SEO Formula And Visibility Toolkit (masternewmedia.org)

• RT @sengineland: Search Engine Land: Google Testing Single Line Sitelinks? http://tinyurl.com/c8ztdz #
• Morning everyone, someone’s got a case of the Monday’s =P #
• I’m in love with the new Safari Beta – http://www.apple.com/safari/ using it for 20 minutes and it might be a Firefox contender… #
• RT @stuntdubl: RT this if your pissed off that your twitter profile page doesn’t pass any link juice – @andrewwee http://tinyurl.com/bh35zc #
• RT @SilverOakCasino: The Vegas 6 Pound Burrito Challenge ( http://tinyurl.com/bgcfok ) #
• Just joined the SEOs Twitter group on @buzzable. Check it out: http://buzzable.com/SEOs #
• @BlogDuJour hey there try out my blog http://www.dannedelko.com – I am in the process of redesigning now but should be back to normal soon! #
• On a positive note. Melissa will be the next Bachelorette for sure. #
• God what a long day. Thank god workday is almost over and I can just update my blog, some quiet time. #
• @problogger I’m actually looking for people who are interested in blog work currently. It’s not easy to find good people out there #
• RT @oilman: Excellent summary of the mile long sales letter: http://cli.gs/04Pggm #
• @oilman that’s a damn fine summary of a Sales Letter. At the end of the day as amazing at it sounds, they really truly do work… #

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