Adding a good blog to your web site, in many cases, can dramatically increase your web traffic. We’ve seen it work. Let’s look at the strategy here and related costs.

First – the direct costs are almost zero. You can use an open source and free blog such as WordPress for many hosts. It’s also easy to install and use. Support is provided through a forum. You’ll have lots of people trying to spam your blog with unrelated comments, but you can add the free Karma 2 spam filter that takes out almost all of the spam at the host level.

As far as indirect costs – to make a blog work takes time. You’ll see from the strategy here it takes lots of time for both writing the blog and researching to write it.

This author posts in three blogs and comments in others. You may feel that what you have to say can’t have much effect in the cyberspace with over 19 million blogs out there now. Quite the opposite. Let’s take an example how it works. I got ripped off by Vonage, a VoIP company, for over $8,000 dollars when they dropped my business line in transferring it from Qwest. A quick search on Google using “vonage problem” +blog showed they were ripping a lot of people off. Letters to Vonage, Better Business Bureau, FCC, FTC, SEC, Federal Attorney General, and a lot of others had no affect. If fact, it seems the Administration arm of the Federal government has rolled over and died.

As a starter, we put our primary correspondence online with a page on our business web site. Anyone can read and see for themselves how bad the situation at Vonage and the Federal Administration is. Then we scanned Google again and located all those blogs about the problems at Vonage and added our comment to each, with a pointer to our web page. In a short time (no Google sandbox stopping this) we received many emails with others verifying what we had experienced and the traffic on the Vonage web page we created zoomed to the stratosphere. We posted the testimonies people sent us online with our page.

Reports of the problems at Vonage have now been reported in the Wall Street Journal (6/8/2006, page D1), and the stock price has dropped to less that half of the price when the IPO was launched a few months ago. Vonage is dying. It’ll be much like Enron, however, only with less noise. A lot of people will be left holding their losses because the Bush Administration did nothing.

The point here is that one person can create what is known as a blog swarm. The effect snowballs through what is referred to as the tail of the blog. The total traffic in the tail of the blog is far more that that of any major blog that gets those high traffic counts.

Want another example? For years the Southern Baptists has been run by a political force of old wineskins. In June of this year, the Southern Baptist bloggers scored a major victory by getting their candidate to win the election in an upset victory. Check it out. How much change takes place is still up in the air, but the bloggers have started it. There are lots of similar stories. Our blogging e-book has a few more. Get your own copy.

Blogs make your site dynamic, and you’ll see your blog posts showing up in the Google index within days if you already have a strong site. To make it really work, however, you need to visit the other blogs and comment there, pointing to your blog posts and pages.

Two big words of caution, however.

1. Stay on-topic. Over 99% of the comments coming into our blogs are killed at the host and the IPs black listed because they are trying to sell prescription drugs, casino games, and fake Rolex watches.

2. Make sure your facts are right and the writing has good grammar and correct spelling. One bad fact can destroy your entire argument.

Remember that when you enter a posting, or tweet as they are called, to Twitter that you are broadcasting information to anyone that meets either of these conditions unless you have secured your tweets on your profile.

• Those who are following you will see the tweet as soon as they go to Twitter and log in.
• Others will be able to see it if they search on the relevant subject area.

You will receive only the tweets from people you are following unless you are searching on a subject. When doing that, you receive the tweets relative to that subject.

Security Issues:

You should exercise caution when entering your posts if your postings are not secured – the default mode. If you are leaving on a trip, don’t advertise it on Twitter. There are those who scan Twitter to see who won’t be home for awhile and take advantage of that. DO tweet about your trip when you get back. If you are getting a divorce, one of the first things your lawyer will do is scan your postings to see what you have been doing online. If you are looking for a job today, there is about a 50% chance the prospective employer will scan the Internet for information about you. In the same way, it is not wise to post company information or your concerns about your employer.

Many people violate this rule. I try to honor it. Even if I’m out for the evening, I tweet about it AFTER I get back.

You can set the security of your tweets so that only those who follow you can see them from your Settings option. If set to private, only followers can see your tweets and Twitter will not index them.

More tips:

Setting Up Your Account

• In setting up your account, use some variation of your first name. Using a variation of your last name is not personal enough on something like Twitter. And keep it short, which gives you (and those that reply) more message space. And your Twitter account name is important in the optimization of your tweets in the search engines.
• Use a picture that shows a close-up of your face is normally best for your avatar. Smiling face, of course. With only the default clipart picture Twitter uses, don’t expect people to follow you.
• Be sure to fill out your bio information. Use your full name. Use keyword phrases there that will trip those you want to meet. Share your personality here. You have 160 characters.
• If you set the tweets to private, only your followers can see them. In addition, Google and Twitter Search will not index them.
• When twittering for a company, these rules still hold. Use the logo as the background. Use a personal photo as your avatar. Let the bio show the company’s identity. Post as a person, not a depersonalized organization. Be sure to follow company policies on your tweeting for this account.

Using Twitter

• Click the Reply button in the lower right of a tweet to reply only to that individual. Click the Retweet button if you wish to tweet their tweet to all your followers.
• You have only 140 characters for a posting. Use them wisely. Tease and motivate the reader, then lead them to Facebook, your blog, or your website. To save characters, use web sites such as http://bit.ly to shorten the URL for the destination.
• Use your cell phone as an extension of your computer postings. The twitter address is 40404;. For example, to send an direct twitter message from your phone to another Twitter account, you would enter: (To) 40404; and (body): d accountname message. Great for keeping up with friends when traveling! You can also send to a list.
• You will quickly learn the abbreviations your friends are using: great becomes gr8, before becomes b4, you becomes u.
  Keep your postings interesting. Who cares what you had for breakfast? If something relational happened at breakfast, you should tweet on that.
• When someone tweets that they are following you, send them a thank-you, you will see this in your normal email. Reply to them direct mail from within Tweeter. (Remember you cannot direct mail someone unless they are following you.)
  You will notice that some of your followers occasionally will tweet a posting that is a thank-you to a list of friends. Looks boring, but it is important. Scan their list in their post – you may find a new friend there and you can click and follow. The reverse is also true. If someone helps you on Twitter, thank them.
• How often to tweet? Everyone has their own answer on this. Don’t tweet just to be tweeting or your people will quite following you. If you don’t tweet for a day or two, watch your visitor traffic fall off to your account, the web site, and your blog. Keep your life interesting and tell people about it.
• Save tweets you wish to explore or use later. To do this, click on the time line that is under the tweet that shows how long ago the tweet was initiated. This brings up the tweet. The URL that is displayed now in the browser is the URL for that tweet. Save it in the browser Favorites. Another alternative is to save that tweet URL in an external program such as delicious.com or related tool.
• To find if someone is on Twitter from Google, search on firstname lastname Twitter. Use caution here. The results returned may not be a real person (C. S. Lewis, for example, is no longer alive but has a fan page.) Or it may not be the person you expect. Or a fake account on a real person.
• There are lots of good plug-ins for your Twitter account, but use caution. Some plug-ins are malware. Check with friends and get reviews first.
• Here’s a good URL to find tools for Twitter: http://oneforty.com/. Twitter’s mobile web site is http://m.twitter.com.
  If you are running a conference on Twitter, Have everyone agree to a hashtag and tweet against that using an application such as TweetDeck.
• Use http://MrTweet.com (@mrtweet) to find other interesting people to follow.(At the moment this is down until 9/10/2010.)
• Link your web site to Twitter. Link Twitter to your web site on your Twitter profile page.
• Check your “grade” on twitter at http://twitter.grader.com.
• Use Twitter to tease people into your blog. Twitter entries are indexed immediately.

Need consulting help on this or related issues? Contact us! http://www.netadventures.biz

Certain web sites are now providing personal information on YOU including private information (such as your credit card info). They do this by, among other things, farming data into their database from multiple social networks and other sources. One such site is http://www.SPOKEO.COM. Try it out – enter your name and see what info is there on you. Since this is illegal and the current administration has no interest in protecting your personal data, we suggest you hackers out there that are running the white bot nets take these jokers down.

To remove your own listing from SPOKEO, first search the site on your name. Then copy the URL to your clipboard. Go down to the bottom of the page and click the Primacy option. Paste your URL from the Clipboard to the text box there and follow the directions. Better check again occasionally.

Remember that some social networks, such as Facebook, run with NO secrecy. This includes the various games on this site. ANY information you put there (including credit card info) is not secure.

Here are some links from Chris Brogan for good sites to help you with optmizing you site. We’ve already been using the first for some time:

Website Grader from Hubspot. This tool is a really great way of seeing how you stand with typical SEO and social engagement scoring. Start here. This is also a favorite with Carl.

Google Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide (pdf). You can use this to understand the basics behind the scenes on how search engines like Google see your website or blog.

Google’s SEO Report Card (pdf) – Useful for knowing what Google sees when they look at your site. A lot of what’s covered in here is measured by the Website Grader tool mentioned above.

WordPress SEO. If you’re using WordPress for your website or blog, this is a really useful resource. It’ll take a while to pore through, but you’ll find some value in it, for sure. My friend, Yoast, also has a WordPress SEO plugin that you might find useful.

Chris also use Scribe (affiliate link) to help him with his SEO on his site.
Carl also uses the Search Engine News and the analyzers provided with it.

Wanna read a hot book? I read several reviews on it from leading people (like Seth Godin, Chris Brogan, Joel Peterson – chairman of JetBlue) and finally decided I had to get it. The book is: The Dragonfly Effect: Quick, Effective, and Powerful Ways to use Social Media to Drive Social Change, It’s authored by Jennifer Aaker (a Marketing Professor at Stanford) and her husband, Andy Smith, a business consultant.

The dragonfly is the only insect able to propel itself in any direction – with tremendous speed and force – when its four wings are working in concert. When people do this, they can make a tremendous impact disproportionate to their resources. There are really only four chapters here, each representing the four wings of the dragonfly. (1) Focus – how to hatch a goal that will make an impact (2) Grab Attention – how to stick out in a noisy world with your message (3) Engage – how to get people to connect with your goal and (4) Take action – how to empower and enable others to cultivate a movement. They researched lots of people doing this and the book is loaded with example stories. They drive their message from their stories. The Amazon book listing has a very good interview with the two authors if you scroll down after finding the book. You can order book here

We recently launched a website for a political PAC for a city as part of a larger agenda to add an amendment to the city’s constitution. We used the Econoweb model, which gave us a very dynamic website in a week that cost very little. The content and news on the website could quickly follow the evolving events. The opposition could not. Newspaper reporters were watching, and soon there was plenty of media coverage (three newspapers). To quote one reporter, our own website was better than the website the city had. The work, however, was really a community effort – what Jennifer Aaker and Andy Smith in their book call “the dragonfly effect”. The website a Tualatin initiative for a city amendment to protect local parks (Measure 34-186). The vote is coming up March 8, 2011. The Econoweb website is at http://www.protecttualatinparks.org. If you wish to see what one of our Econoweb sites look like, check out this one. If you live in Tualatin, don’t forget to mail in your ballot.

The blog of this website (netadventures.biz) has already been converted to a similar type of blog. During the next few weeks we plan to convert the static part of this website to the Econoweb format. During this conversion you may see the static part at least partially down at times. The blog will continue to be up and updated at times, and can be reached during this change directly at http://www.netadventures.biz/wordpress/. This bypasses the static component.

This is a test for web design.

Wanna read a hot book? I read several reviews on it from leading people (like Seth Godin, Chris Brogan, Joel Peterson – chairman of JetBlue) and finally decided I had to get it. The book is: The Dragonfly Effect: Quick, Effective, and Powerful Ways to use Social Media to Drive Social Change, It’s authored by Jennifer Aaker (a Marketing Professor at Stanford) and her husband, Andy Smith, a business consultant.

The dragonfly is the only insect able to propel itself in any direction – with tremendous speed and force – when its four wings are working in concert. When people do this, they can make a tremendous impact disproportionate to their resources. There are really only four chapters here, each representing the four wings of the dragonfly. (1) Focus – how to hatch a goal that will make an impact (2) Grab Attention – how to stick out in a noisy world with your message (3) Engage – how to get people to connect with your goal and (4) Take action – how to empower and enable others to cultivate a movement. They researched lots of people doing this and the book is loaded with example stories. They drive their message from their stories. The Amazon book listing has a very good interview with the two authors if you scroll down after finding the book. You can order book here

Getting Professional SEO help is an essential part of getting quality web traffic today. With billions of web pages out there, don’t expect you site to magically draw the traffic you want. Here is an SEO ad someone spammed me with a few days ago:

Rule #1 is simple. If this guy knew how to do SEO, he would not be using spamming email to get his visitor traffic. Spam is at the bottom of the list in terms of effective advertising, and he is simply telling me he can’t do SEO.

A second point here is that NO ONE can guarantee you a top spot, as this company is trying to do, in the search results. To quote Matt Cutts, the Google Hero

Some SEO firms say they can rank people in first place. Can they guarantee this?

Not on Google. No one can guarantee this, not even Google, since our ranking algorithms are often updated. I’ve seen scams where the “#1 placement” is really buying ads. I’ve seen scams where the “keywords” that they sell are really for people who have scumware hidden in their browser. I’ve seen stuff where the guaranteed keywords are 5-6 word phrases that only have nine results, and no one would ever really type that really long, specific phrase. I’ve seen situations where the guarantee is that they’ll try to get a #1 spot, and if they don’t, then they’ll try again. Cold calling and cold emailing is a bad sign in the first place, frankly. So I’d be skeptical of that in the extreme, and read the fine print carefully.

Also, remember that SEO today is vastly different that a few years ago. Reciprocal links (swapping links to boost your pagerank) is out. Doesn’t help. Also, buying links to your site in most directories is out. That doesn’t help, either. What does work? You’ll find a few clues in this blog. For one thing, blogs and social networking is VERY important. Why not let us help you with your SEO strategy?

In doing web sites, I often get the question asked: “How much will it cost?” Let’s look at different types of web sites and relative costs. The price numbers here are from industry-wide reports.

The Minimalist Web Site
This is a low-cost web site designed to give you a presence on the web for a minimal amount of financial cost. The site has very few pages; yet even with this design is important to get professional help to keep your site from getting lost among the billions of web pages out there.

In addition to the home page, this type of site generally has an About page, a Contact Page, and perhaps a few others relative to your services, product, or vision. The total page count is low, perhaps no more than eight pages. This type of site is often used for a restaurant, barber shop, or shoe repair store.

Typically this type of web site cost about $800 – $3200. If professionally designed, it can be attractive with good content. The About page is often designed as being just as important as the Home page. It should contain a lot of the keyword phrases that would drive visitors to the site. The problem, however, is that this type of site rarely ranks well in the search engines. They have poor search engine optimization. If the site caters to a niche market, it is possible to reach the niche market, however.

Any business should have some type of web site today for those who will try to reach it on the Internet, even if it is a Minimalist. This type of site can meet that need.

The Content Management Site (or CMS)
This is a type of web site that offers strong support for a user that has content that is constantly changing. Examples include restaurants posting menus and specials, PACs, churches, and electronic stores. Most businesses today realize we live in a fast-moving world and have to adapt their message to this. Years ago when a hot news item on the evening news related to a health item I marketed, a friend would call me and ask me to get a web page up immediately to target from that.

Unfortunately, I told my friend, it would take Google over a month to find that page. Today, if you have a CMS web site with a good blog, you can blog the information and Google will find it overnight. Google loves dynamic sites, and CMS gives you that dynamic.

The cost for a CMS site? Figure about $7000-$31,000. Our church got multiple bids at about $7000. By working a bit we got a design company down to about $5000. We do CMS sites as low as $2000 including the blog. These sites are a combination of Minimalist and CMS, which eliminates the search engine optimization problem and gives you great positioning in the results.

E-Commerce Web Sites
The e-Commerce web site has the facility to take orders and payments online, shipping directly. Amazon.com, of course, is the more famous of these and is doing a great job of killing the local brick and mortar book stores. These E-Commerce web sites cost about $15,000 – $150,000 or more to build.

For a high end e-commerce site, you set up a merchant account with a bank that supports e-commerce. A second product, the shopping cart, supports your database of products or services with prices, information, and pictures. A “gateway” product connects the two. The order page on your web site simply drops the client out to the shopping cart, and that system handles everything from that. There are, then, three components in addition to the web site: the shopping cart, the merchant account, and the gateway.

For a low end e-commerce site, you can use PayPal. Your web site developer writes the shopping cart pages and PayPal handles everything beyond that. In fact, this is often the best way to start with a new e-commerce business. No merchant account is needed. In fact, your client does not even need to have a PayPal account. All they need is a credit card to make their purchase through the PayPal site. The disadvantage is that you web site developer has to rewrite your shopping cart pages whenever you change products or prices.

It is important in developing an e-commerce site that you minimize the work on the client’s part when they order. They click, you ship. If they have to mail you a postal order, you have lost the client. Also you should have your geographic mailing address and other contact information on your web site in case something goes wrong with their order.

Other Aspects

There are also many other web site features that can be added and will increase the cost of your web site.

• We can do extensive search engine optimization on an existing or new web site to improve your search engine results. For a serious web site, about $300-$500 can help a lot here.
• We can add more graphics, logo design, movies, flash, or animation on a per project basis. In other words, we can add a lot of complexity to the pages even with the Econoweb design. That can cost extra.
• Cost can vary with the number of pages on your website.
• You can add pull-down menus and a large selection of pages for extra cost.

Our advice is start simple, design well, and search optimize like crazy. Then blog as much as you can. Then expand based on where you see the most blog response.