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SocialOomph – Twitter Time Saver

November 6th, 2009

Improve Your Productivity On Twitter! The more time I spend using Twitter the more I realize that I could easily use it all day long. Fortunately, a few months ago I started using SocialOomph to manage multiple twitter accounts. This time saving tool has helped me manage followers. Managing twitter followers takes less than 5 minutes to review and respond to more than 200 new followers every day across multiple accounts. But there is so much more that SocialOomph can do!

I have drafted several frequent tweets that I  schedule and modify as I see fit. This allows me to tweet while I work at my regular day job. Why would you schedule a tweet when the motto of twitter is What are you doing right now? Well, if I know I am doing something in a few hours I can plan accordingly. For example, I might arrive at a hiking trail and tweet while I am hiking. I know it is simplistic, but you can take it to the next level in business. If you are launching a product you can schedule regular updates, set a daily countdown, and announce when you are launched. This simple automation allows you to focus on the product and the launch while keeping your followers engaged. And after you launch you can quickly review the @mentions, DMs, and other keywords.

I know there is much more that SocialOomph and Twitter can do to help my business and my fun life. I am going to scratch a little past the surface soon!

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My Favorite Twitter Tools

October 10th, 2009

I use twitter on a regular basis. I won’t pretend that I am a Twitter fanatic (yet), but I do use it almost daily. The tools I use are all free. All of these tools have a free version and several have a more powerful paid version. In some cases the extra features are well worth the money. Try the free products and upgrade after you decide you want more.

As you look through the list you might notice that many of these tools perform some sort of automation. First of all, I want to emphasize that complete automation of twitter is NOT a good idea. The human involvement is what makes it useful and enjoyable. However, a little automation will save you a significant amount of time. A little automation combined with regular manual intervention will make twitter enjoyable!

SocialOomph – Boost Your Productivity

SocialOomph is a powerful web application. The beauty of SocialOomph is that it is fully automated but with a delay. The automation tasks generally run 8 to 72 hours after the event that triggers it. This allows you to intervene and change things before making a mess. It also allows you to go on vacation and let your twitter account continue to grow and flourish without touching it every day. Schedule a few things and take a long weekend because SocialOomph:

  • Supports multiple accounts
  • Automatically follow back and set parameters to ignore (or not follow) certain account types
  • Automatically schedule tweets and rotate through several
  • Automatically send direct messages to new followers

SocialOomph is by far one of my favorite tools and the paid account is well worth it.

Twitter Tools for WordPress

Twitter Tools connects your blog with your twitter account.

  • Configure a widget to show your tweets in the sidebar.
  • Automatically tweet new blog posts.
  • Create a daily or weekly twitter digest to post on your blog.
  • And tweet directly from your blog sidebar or administrative panel.

Seesmic – Build your Community

Seesmic is a desktop tool that works great on the Mac.

  • Supports multiple accounts
  • Post tweets to multiple accounts at one time
  • Search and save your searches for easy access.
  • Watch multiple streams at one time
  • and a whole lot more!

Tweepular

Tweepular is the ultimate follower management tool. See who is following you, see who you are following and perform actions on each of the lists. Build your popularity (tweepularity) by adding new followers.

Huitter – Bulk Follow Back and Unfollow

Huitter simply allows you unfollow anyone that is not following you back. It also allows you to follow anyone that is already following you that you are not already following.

Friend or Follow

Friend or Follow simply shows who you are following and who is following you.

Featured Users – Twitter Ad Network

Featured UsersFeatured Users is a way to display your name in front of more users. If you really need to get your name out there and be in front of customers become a featured user. Your small twitter add is then displayed in several different locations.

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Making a Search Engine Plan

July 3rd, 2009

Improving your search engine ranking is an ongoing process that can take quite a bit of time. If you spend the time to build a website you probably want to leverage it and make it an asset to you, your organization, or your business. The tried and true strategy is to write great content and continually add more great content to it. If you build it they will come – as long as it is good. Unfortunately, most people want to see quick results after spending many hours (or dollars) to build a website. There are many tactics used to generate some quick results. The best plan would have some short term tactics that compliment part of your long term strategy. This will give you a quick jump in the search engines and some motivation to put in the effort to continue to grow your website and improve your search engine rankings.

SEO vs SEM – Some simple definitions:

  • Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is the work you do to lead traffic to your site. This is the off-page effort.
  • Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the work you do to your site. This is the on-page effort.

See Weberz’s article on SEO and SEM for a little more depth describing the two.

So, is SEO or SEM more important?

The safe answer is “It depends.” However, I believe that SEO will give your more in the long run.

Let’s think about this for a minute. . .

To illustrate this let’s assume you have to choose one or the other. I know it is crazy, but bear with me for a few paragraphs.

What if you spend hours on SEM?

In a future article I will cover each of the SEM items in more detail. A basic SEM plan will include:

  • Search Engine Submission – Submitting your URL to the search engines – At least the top search engines
  • Creating Press Releases – Writing, submitting and publishing Press Releases about your website.
  • Off-Site Article Writing – Writing articles for other websites that reference your website in some way.
  • Blogs – Creating a blog, writing blog entries, and commenting on blogs.
  • A link campaign – Convince or beg other websites to link to your site using either reciprocal links or one-way links.
  • Web Directory Submission – This is part of a link campaign. Add your website to free and paid directories.
  • Purchasing Text Links – Pay a broker to add your links on many different websites.
  • PPC Campaigns – Paid advertising using Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, MSN AdCenter or other search advertising.
  • Banner Advertising – Create a banner and influence others to add it to their site.

It is easy to see how you can spend many hours and a lot of money spreading your links around the internet to increase your google page rank. This will get you results but it won’t last forever.  For example, Press Releases and article writing take time and actually improve other websites. You are adding great content that they will benefit from.

What if you spend hours on SEO?

In a future article I will cover each of the SEO items in more detail. A basic SEO plan will include:

  • W3C Validation, good source code, proper html, etc.
  • Proper naming structure of files for search engines
  • Proper phrasing of the page title
  • Inclusion of a robots.txt file
  • Creation of a sitemap
  • 404 error handling page
  • Meta tags
  • Relevant site copy to page title
  • Site navigational structure
  • Keyword inclusion in your text

If you were to spend the hours to make your website content great you will get to a point where your personal link sharing effort will level out. You’ll spend less time spreading your links around the web since others will do it for you. If you have good content your readers will share it on Facebook, visitors will digg it, subscribers will tweet it on twitter, and much more.

I am not promoting that you just splatter your website all over the web and direct searchers to some junk-infested content. That will work for a short time, but in the long run the good content will always win out.

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Why a Church Needs a Simple Website

June 16th, 2009

In my constant review of Church websites I continue to notice a trend. Sadly, I see so many church web sites that are outdated and full of blank “coming soon” pages. Yes, there are the exceptions, but most times these exceptions are larger churches with a web staff (of dedicated people). Many of the volunteer-driven church sites take off with great starts but quickly go stale.

If you are planning to build a site for your Church (you are the volunteer) think about where the site will be in a few months or a few years. Will YOU be satisfied creating, begging for, and cut-n-pasting content on a weekly basis? You must take this continued task into consideration before you make the plunge. You could spend hours design a sweet, up-to-the-minute, dynamic, streaming church website only to find that it becomes a mess and has nothing new and exciting to entice people to return on a regular basis. Even worse, it might cause confusion with old event and service times and old addresses.

If you are the church asking for a volunteer’s help (rarely the case), are you relying on the volunteer to do all of the work? Will you regularly provide fresh content to your web volunteer to keep the site current?

A website does not need to be a lot of work, but you need to determine what you want on a site before you choose to publish one.

Here are a couple considerations in choosing a direction for your website:

  • Do you want a fresh dynamic site with regular updates? If you design a site intending to publish a weekly audio file (podcast), video file, pastor blog, events, etc. then you must be prepared to continue down that path. If the path is overwhelming and too much work then the content will not be available. Visitors will see your site and notice that it has inactive areas.
  • Do you want a clean simple site that provides the basics? If you choose a site that is more like a brochure you might find the site is more fitting and manageable. The content will require infrequent updates and should require minimal maintenance. This site could be static HTML pages with some pleasant graphics and pictures. A simple static church website may serve your purpose now, but you need to consider the chance of growth in the future.

WordPress and Joomla are great tools to get you started. There are numerous free templates and themes readily available. The community support structures are well established and very friendly. While both WordPress and Joomla are powerful, you can easily setup a simple site with either one. Your simple site will become the foundation you can build on in the future.

If you would like some help getting your web foundation in place, please let me know. I’d love to help you through the process.

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Calendar Plugins for WordPress

May 28th, 2009

There are several calendar plugins for WordPress. You can find most of these plugins using the WordPress Plugin Directory Calendar tag.

Events Manager

This event manager attracted my attention with a few cool features. It has Google maps integration, an RSVP mechanism and recurring events.

Events Calendar

This calendar has a nice look, but it is lacking recurring events. It is hard to convince churches that Sunday Service needs to be added to the calendar each week. Of course, one could argue that if it is truly a standard weekly event it may not need to be on a calendar. I don’t know which way I fall yet…I can argue both ways.

ICS Calendar

I like this calendar because it can use a Google Calendar. I don’t always convince users that Google Aps is the way to go, but when I do this is a great option. For those using a different calendar program, this plugin works with most common calendar programs.

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Directory Plugins for WordPress

May 25th, 2009

There are several Link Directory or Business Directory plugins for WordPress. As a long-time Joomla user I really like to use SOBI on my Joomla sites. In my adventures in WordPress I started to search something similar to SOBI. So far, I haven’t had a lot of luck. I did give each of following a good test run and started a comparison. There is hope in this area and I have patience. Each time I try one again I will update this page…and if you have some notable information to add to the comparison, please let me know!

WordPress Link Directory

This is the first directory plugin that I installed and the first one I put into production (see the Pet Directory). It configures simply and works great. It has a nice landing page that shows all of the link categories. The only catch is that you have to trick it a bit to make permalinks work. Creating a custom style sheet took less than two minutes and I haven’t hit any errors yet.

Notable Features:

  • Nice Directory landing page.
  • Automatic Page Rank Checking.
  • Featured listing option. Make some revenue from your link directory.
  • Reciprocal link checking that can be configured based on page rank.

Wp-Directory-List

This Directory plugin is OK. It appears that the version that I downloaded didn’t populate the directory page and the submit form layout. This just meant I had to create the submission form and layout page manually. It would have been nice to have a default page created. This is not a big deal, but it does take several minutes to setup. The configuration is well organized. Links can be added through the admin pages, but each link must be activated — no matter who enters the link.

Notable Features:

  • Captcha enabled
  • Collects address information, but only displays it — doesn’t do anything with it yet.
  • Shrink the Web Image enabled

Business Directory

There is not much functionality available in the administrator area. At first glance it is confusing as the installation requires going to the developer website.  You need to manually create two pages, one page for the directory and a second one for the submission form. There is not any configuration available through the admin area. To add a link, go to the submission form on the front end of the site. There are quite a few fields including: Name, email, org name, org description, keywords, org website, org email, phone and address. After submitting the entry, you can review, approve or delete the listing in the admin area. The new entry appears in the directory. The address information does not appear to do anything at this point in time.

Notable Features:

  • Address information is collected, but not used. I’d expect a future update to activate this.
  • The layout is clean, but it links directly to the site rather than a secondary information page.

WP-Business Directory

I was not able to make this one work.

zeList

For an internet directory this should become a good option. When I first tried this plugin it seemed to be buggy. It is not ready for use, but looks like the developer is packing it full of features. The author is definitely making progress with this plugin.  I like how the links were part of the standard WordPress links. The part that initially confused me was finding it there. All of the other link directories had their own area for links and I was just “trained” to look in a different area.  It also did not have a nice landing page showing all the link categories, but the revision created a list at the top of the directory page. There is some styling necessary to clean it up, but this is still a young plugin. I expect some great things from this link directory.

Notable Features:

  • Features include checking for dead links — Nice!
  • Allows creation of link tags

Open Links Directory

This is a simple directory with a nice layout. It took me a couple of minutes to figure it out and it did not produce any errors. I submitted a site and it took a little time to figure out how to  make it appear in the directory. This one has some potential and I plan to look at it again in the future.

Notable Features:

  • Nice Directory landing page
  • Page rank checker

Which WordPress directory plugin do you use and for what purpose?

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Church Domain Name Registration

March 24th, 2009

Register your Christian Domain Name at a great price. As a Christian consumer, you don’t need to pay more for a web address than the rest of world. Don’t let others fool you into spending a lot of money on your Church domain name. Our goal at HolyWebMaker is to help small churches and faith-based non-profits make wise choices with the resources provided by God. We are confident that an affordable Church web address is available for you. If you have difficulty choosing a good Christian web address please ask us for help. We will spend the time to help you expand God’s kingdom on the internet.

A a good Christian domain name is the first step. . . Let us help you make the first step a wise one.

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How to Choose a Domain Name

February 27th, 2009

Before you spend time choosing a domain name take a few minutes to prepare. Think about some of the following questions and make note of the answers. The more information and descriptive detail you have for your organization the better you will find the best available domain name. Don’t let the search discourage you. There are still many good names out there.

  1. Is your organization a church, business, non-profit club,  family, or something else?
    • Non-profit clubs and churches may consider using .org instead of .com. While .com is by far the most popular Top Level Domain (TLD) there are many other reasonable choices. Even though many users are “trained” to enter example.com instead of the other TLDs. If your target market is already part of your group then the TLD is less important. If you are really looking to grow our organization using the .com TLD is much more important.
  2. Where is your organization located? You may include the town, state, region, etc.
  3. How do you verbally tell others about your organization? Can you do it in a few short sentences?
    • What keywords or other attributes do you use to describe your organization. Is it “on the hill” or “east of the river.” Is it “family oriented”, “bible based”, “professional or amature”
  4. Is your organization part of a larger parent organization?
    • If you are a chapter of a larger organization you may want to use the parent in the domain name. If you are part of a particular denomination you may consider using Baptist as part of the domain name.
  5. What acronyms have you used in the past?
    • Is your organization a long name that is often referred to with an acronym?
  6. How do your employees, customers, members, etc refer to your organization?
    • Nicknames may be a good option.
  7. Do you have a mascot?
    • If you have Larry the Lizard as a club mascot he might come in handy during your search.
  8. If you were searching for your organization what would YOU search for?

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Email and Newsletters

February 8th, 2009

We offer help with setting up a constant contact account and integrating your subscription links into your site.

We also have a completely integrated email newsletter option if you prefer something that works well on a small scale.

If you prefer, we offer Express Email Marketing through www.holywebhosts.com.

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