Over .500 - we win

So the season went well. We started off very slow as we were finalizing our team and player mix. Marc did a great job managing the team and putting the right people in the right spots. We are looking to have a much better record in the Polar Bear season withthe right mix of players. I think that we have enough talent on the team to win this next season. If the bats are moving and we hit over .500 as a team we win…Ricky was batting off the hook. We need about 4-5 other players batting in the .600’s (Scott…hint, hint)

Once we get registered for the new season maybe we can get in a few practices that focus on ball placement, base running and double plays. I had a great time playing and cant wait to get this started up again.

Thanks for a good run…!

1.  If you are having any of your work outsourced to a different country and are wondering on how their great insight into your niche seems implausible it would a good idea to check their work in Copyscape.  It looks at the content and sees if it has been taken from any other source on the web.  Of course if you are looking for SEO tools there is a good chance that you understand duplicate content and its penalties. This will help in that effort to make sure that you are getting only original content on your website.

2.  If you want to get a quick idea of how your website links look to the search engines, it would be a good idea to be able to compare your site to a couple of your competitors. Use their link popularity tool to figure out how many inbound links your website has and that of your competitors.  This tool is good because you can look at your competitors and find where they are getting their links.  I would stick with what Yahoo says.  Google seems to hide a lot of the links. Yahoo will give you a good idea. And in Yahoo you can see if they are ranking because of a very good internal linking structure, paid links or actually are getting really good links.  The only thing that I don’t like is that it doesn’t give page rank of the link pages.  Although many SEO’s will say to not try to structure your links around PR and NoFollows, I still like to see it.  Old habits.

3.  If you want to get an overall look at all aspects of your website then it might be a good idea to checkout webmasters toolkit. It has everything from spider eyes to link checkers. This is a website that you will want to frequent often.  With all the great things they have in the arsenal, you can think of this place as the hub for your SEO needs.

4.  Google Insight is like Google Trends on Steroids.  I have heard from Google that Trends might be going to the wayside and Insight be the main sha bang.  This is a great tool if you are trying to see where globally, your keywords are being searched the most. It is also a good tool to figure out what are some rising keywords that you should take notice of. It is also a great tool if you are an SEO firm.  The reason is because you can look at the trends and graphs to see what news affected the dips and rises in the chart.  This way you can go to your clients with a better informed presentation because it will look like you did all kinds of research figuring out what is happening in their industry.  Which you should do anyhow to get a better understanding of your potential clients.  This tool just helps speed up the process.

Google Insight

5. Another really good tool that I like to use a lot is Rank Checker by SEOBook.  These guys have it down.  Aaron Wall is one of the top SEO’s that I know of and I try to listen to what he says and implement it in anything I am doing at the time.  His tools are by far some of the best in the industry and a couple of them are free.  This happens to be one of those tools.  It is a Firefox plugin and is great at searching for your top keywords and seeing where you rank currently in the search engines.

6. Again I will get some information from SEOBook.  These guys…have it down?  I sound like a broken record, but my vernacular is very very not large. But the tool that you also need to utilize is SEO For Firefox.  This is another great Firefox addon that will help in your efforts to figure out what your competitors are doing right and where you can get a competitive advantage.  However if you decide to utilize this tool you can almost check off MarketLeap.  This gives you all kinds of information that you can use to keep you busy.  Good idea to keep off when you don’t need it because it will slow down your searching speed.

7.  I know that we are getting to overkill with having all these cool tools that tell you page rank, but you have room for one more.  This one just sits in the bottom of your browser (firefox).  Another note really quick, if you aren’t using Firefox for SEO then your work might be hard.  Chrome is too bare, and IE is um… how do I say this nicely? I got it the devil.  Anyhow the tool is called Search Status and it tells you the page rank, alexa rank, compete and moz Rank.  I know that some serious SEO’s are saying “forget PR”.  Even Matt Cutts said that they throw in skewed PR’s just to mess with us SEO’s.  That is great, because I love wasting time.  But I still say it is based off trust and I tend to trust sites that have something rather than nothing (as I write on our blog with a 0).  We recently redid everything here and lost a lot of everything, PR on of those things.  But anyhow here is the link to that as well.

8. This last one is a great tool to be able to blog about stuff really quickly with the window open.  It is called Scribefire.  Now I know that this is actually a blogging tool, but in terms of being an SEO tool I consider it to be a great tool.  The reason is because you need to get fresh new content for your website and if you are able to gather from all sources for a new blog post then why not.  Are you saying you had an original idea?  I had one of those in the shower once.  But online there is a lot that you can use from sharing and expanding on current ideas to use in your own spin.  This tool helps to keep those original ideas there to put your spin on it.

The reason is because a lot of times what you and your co-workers think is the best keywords for your business might not actually be the best keywords. Sometimes you need to step out of your business to try to see it from an outsiders eyes. How would they find you? A lot of times you want to try to include the keywords that are buying keywords. But how to do you know which ones are the buying keywords? Too many questions?

I know it seems like a lot of info to digest. Let me let you in on a little secret though. Keep this between us and only the people that use the internet. Research your competitors that are getting traffic and see where they show up for their keywords. You can do this by using some free tools such as keywordspy. It will give you just the top keywords but you can dig deeper if you end up paying for it.  What you need to do is type in a competitor in the search bar and it will come back with some of the top keywords they are ranking for and competitors for those keywords.

Once you start to look at this data you will be able to get a better assessment of what keywords your business should go after as well.

Now once you get to the top of the search engines it will still not matter if you don’t know what it is you are trying to achieve.  Maybe you are trying to get more leads or maybe you are trying to get more sales.

What you need to next is to make use of that handy analytics program that Google provides.  Here is how you track your SEO efforts to know what is considered a conversion.

For lead based businesses you will want to pay attention to

1. The number of unique vistors

2. Number of leads (set this up in goals)

3. Your conversion rate

For sales based businesses you will want to pay attention to

1. Number of unique visitors

2. Number of sales (goals)

3. Conversion rate

4. Total Online revenue recieved

5. Page visits

6. Avg Time on the Site

This will help you know if you are actually getting the value out of having a high ranking in the search engines.  Then and only then will you be able to actually appreciate the importance of having a high ranking.

There are other plugins for Firefox that you can use to see what is happening in your facebook account but they slow down your browser a little bit. Overall if you haven’t been using tweetdeck yet then you are missing out.

Contains 6 “refurbished / new” old-school gas pumps and 6 “rusted / aged” gas pumps. Enjoy!

How you do this is what we are going to cover. First thing you will want to do is setup twitter accounts around your certain niches. For example if you are in the weight-loss niche. It would be a good idea to setup your main site, youtube account and then your twitter account. Once you have this setup it is time to go to hootsuite. Add your twitter account there along with the other ones you may have as well.

Now that you have done this, go to wefollow.com. Here you will be able to search tags that might be around your niche. Try to think of the most popular people in your field and search for them.

Once you find some of those top twitters with thousands of followers, follow them. What happens after this is that under their followers you will show up first until someone else follows them. And you will slowly work your way down the page until you are not there any more.

The thing that is cool about this is that these people that have thousands of followers have people constantly checking their profiles. A percentage of these people will go and look at their followers. Only to see your smiling face right at the top.

Make sure that you have some tweets in there that you have done so that they will show up. Try to make all of your last couple tweets something that is geared towards that niche. Others will see this and think that you may know a lot about the niche you are in. A small percentage will follow you and you will start to get your list built up.

Please make sure that you have a picture of yourself. People will be more likely to follow you this way. Also make sure that you are linking to your site that you want to get traffic on. And if possible make a nice looking background. You can find all kinds of places on the web that offer you free backgrounds that you can use.

Another thing you might want to do is to start following the people that just followed the person you just followed. The reason is that these people just recently started following this person and the subject is on their mind. There is a high likelyhood that they will also follow you back. Some will some won’t and some have autorefollow tools on.

Now just repeat this process with the top people in the niche you are wanting to get into. What will happen is that you will start to build your twitter accounts with people that you know are interested in that specific subject.

From there YOU MUST provide quality content. I didn’t tell you all this to start spamming people. Unfollowing is so easy that your efforts will be wasted otherwise.

Now you may be asking how do I provide quality content? Well that is quite easy actually. Go to www.alltop.com or www.popurls.com . Then on these sites do a search for your keywords and see what comes up. What will show up is the top information around that subject that is current. Check it daily and then setup tweetlaters of the top subjects daily. Post the same thing at 9am, 3pm and 7pm. There is a good chance that all the people that are following you will see it.

Once you have done a good job of establishing trust, maybe you could send out a link to your product. But don’t send them to squeeze page or sales page. Send them to your Youtube page with you doing some type of demo, explanation or testing of whatever it is you are trying to sell. Then in the video mention to go to the squeeze page. Some will go and out of those people, some will purchase.

But also make sure in your videos that you are providing the viewers with something of quality. You don’t want them to never click on your link again.

Then for a final touch, in the video ask people to retweet your video giving it the exponential exposure that you want.

You can usually find their phone numbers as well. And this can all be found in the INFO tab inside facebook. Click on this and you will see all the information that they allow you to see. From there just copy it and send them an email or give them a ring.

The thing is that nowadays people are checking their facebook emails a lot more often then their regular email. The reason is because there is considerably less spam emails coming in that way. The people that are sending them emails in facebook are their friends and everyone loves to get an email from a friend.

Hope that helps in your search for all your buddies email addresses.

So to make sure that you don’t get banned here are some things to take into caution when you are on Facebook.

Basically it comes down to what Facebook considers spam. This can be difficult if you have a huge list of friends. Because you might be sending a mass message to your friends to tell them that you just had a baby or got married. But Facebook might not read your message and start to think that it is a spam blast.

Here is a list of what Facebook considers spam.

1. Sending too many friend invites in a day. Try to keep this to under 100 people in a day. Because honestly you might be the coolest person on the planet but adding over a 100 people a day is a stretch to anyone. I usually try to increase my friends in my industry. But I will do this a little at a time. Usually around 20 a week. If you are just starting out on Facebook then you might just find one of your friends that has all your buddies on there and you send a friend invite to all of them. But just be careful when you do this.

2. This one is the most obvious and will be blantently viewed as spam. That is sending out the same wall post to a lot of people. This used to happen all the time on Myspace. Where you would see all kinds of spam on peoples wall. An example, is those posts of someone getting a new purse and it came from your manliest friend. You know it is spam. Besides that there shouldn’t be a reason for you to send that many wall posts to all your friends with the same information. The reason is that if they are your friend you can just do an update and they should be able to see it.

3. You send too many indentical emails to all of your friends. This will be considered spam. I don’t know if you have encountered this, but you can only send a message to around 20 or 30 people at a time. This is Facebooks’ way of keeping down on spam. And it works well. A good way to send a message to all of your friends is to do an event invite. Or you could categorize your friends into different groups and send them a message that way. Just make sure that each time you send that mass message that it differs a little bit from each email that you send out. Maybe change the subject line, or incorporate something that will make it sound a little bit more geared to that group.

4. Basically sending out anything in mass, that includes – group invites, pokes, events and promotional links.

The main thing to remember is that Facebook is considered a “social network”. Just like your offline social network you wouldn’t send a bunch of crap to people that you care about, there should be nothing different when you are doing it online as well.