Brian Keith May » Search Engine Optimization

100 Sites To Submit Guest Posts

Brian — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 16:09:39 +0000

All of the guidance and hype around blogging for the last several months has focused on Guest Posting and how it can be used to drive a high traffic blog. Guest posting helps with referral traffic as well as search engine optimization due to the links back to your site from the blog where your guest post is hosted. The biggest mistake that is being made is that everyone thinks they are going to get their post on one of the A-list sites, therefore a lot of time and effort is wasted as these sites turn down over 90% of guest post submission request. Must bloggers that do not have a high traffic site and something they can reciprocate to the A-list site should find other sites closer in size to their own as guest post targets. This will help each site grow together and has a higher likelihood of being accepted than just submitting to the top sites.

I have compiled a quick list of sites that would be good targets for guest posts. These sites are in a variety of categories and vary in size, but all have setup a page on their site for guest posting submissions which means they are open to it which a huge time saver in itself. You can also find sites to submit to using the guest blogging community. If you have any additional sites that are good for guest posting, please share them in the comments.

What Effect Will Google Analytics Premium Have On Non-Paid Version?

Brian — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 19:22:05 +0000

It appears that Google Analytics Fast Access Mode may have been the Trojan horse that forces it’s high volume users in to consider using their new Google Analytics Premium Version that was announced today. The new premium option is targeted at enterprise clients and the messaging is that there will not be any change to the regular Google Analytics as it stands today and that the Premium version offers advanced features and phone call technical support. It may take a little bit of time before we know the real impact, but from everything I read and based on what happened a few months ago when the the system failed for a couple of week, here are two possibilities:

1) This is strictly aimed at companies like Webtrends, Coremetrics, and Omniture to offer the kind of support and guarantees that are necessary for some large enterprises to adopt Google analytics.

2) This could be a way to force existing large volume users to adopt the premium version. When the problem occurred a few months ago, it was because of a switch to “Fast Access Mode” which meant that Google Analytics was taking a sampling of your real data to build reports rather than usual all of the actuals. If they roll this out as default on the non-paid version, there may be a need to switch to the paid version to get consistent reporting.

The cost of Google Analytics Premium is in the $150,000 range which makes it very competitive with the other web analytics software providers.

Here is the announcement from Google and detailed write-up from Search Engine Land:

http://www.google.com/analytics/premium/

http://searchengineland.com/google-analytics-premium-better-support-goodbye-data-sampling-94997

Depending on the changes that are made to the standard version, this could have a tremendous impact to site reporting and the analytics industry as sampling data used by Google Analytics fast access mode has been seen to given a very inaccurate view of the actual events taking place on a site. this may be an opportunity for another company to offer a free analytics platform that rival GA and gets a mass exodus due to changes.

What impact do you think this may have?

Why I Doubt Google+ Will Replace Facebook

Brian — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 00:39:14 +0000

It’s possible, in a few years from now or sooner I will have to eat my words, but based on my early review, Google+ will not be to Facebook what Facebook was to Myspace. The differences between Google+ and Facebook are small feature differences that are not that significant in my opinion as opposed to a total different user experience when Facebook is compared to Myspace.

The additions to Google+ that has the media raving about are hangouts and circles. Hangouts allow a person to video chat with up to 9 of their friends or business acquaintances at the same time and is a very clean user experience. Circles allows you to group people in to different “circles” so that you can send different updates and share different items with different groups. So family pictures could be shared with your “family” circle while industry news could be shared with your “work” circle.

Both are good features, but the Google created excitement for these features is not enough for people to switch from Facebook is my opinion because it misses the point that most people don’t share many items on Facebook so the benefit of different circles goes away. There are a lot of items shared on Facebook, but a large majority of shared items are done by a small percentage of the people. Most people are just “lurkers” who are interested in what others post, but rarely update themselves. So for these people, there is nit much benefit to circles.

Besides maybe a few occasions a year, I can think of when I would want/need to video chat with more than 1 or 2 people and almost never would I need 10. This may be a good business application, but for everyday users not sure how popular it will be. The one-on-one chat offered by Skype and now Facebook will be adequate for 95% of video chat needs. The option of multi person video chat is intriguing, but lnot likely to be heavily used.

Besides those two features, Google+ is like a mirror image of Facebook. So then the question becomes is it worth it for Facebook users to go through the effort of rebuilding their profiles and reconnecting with all of the their contacts on a different platform? I don’t think so. Myspace had problems with page load times due to the self designed pages as well as they had become overrun by spammers. Facebook has some of that, but not really that bad considering the scope of the problem. People had become fed up with myspace and that is why the switch made sense. I can not say that this is the case for Google+ and Facebook. People may be leaving Facebook, but mainly for boredom, not because they choose Google+.

Do you think there is a chance everyone will leave Facebook to switch to Google+ or is the most that Google could hope for is that users will update two networks?

Do You Have What It Takes To Be An Entrepreneur?

Brian — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 09:32:28 +0000

Most people have this great idea in their mind that they are certain, given some money to fund the idea or more time to develop the idea, it would instantly make them rich. Unfortunately, this “idea” has been in their heads for a long time and little action has been taken towards its achievement. Arguably, this is not only due toprocrastination, but that being an entrepreneur is not for everyone. The success rate in business as an entrepreneur is very low and what most needs to determine is if they truly are prepared for what it takes to be successful.

What does it take to start a successful business? The skills that it takes to successfully run a business will vary depending on the type of business and how involved you are in the actual production or services that are being provided. Although the skills will vary, there are certain traits about successful entrepreneurs that are fairly consistent.

Ability to Delegate: Every entrepreneur is limited by time. There is only so much that can be done by one person and an entrepreneur’s ability to recognize that and delegate tasks will directly determine how successful the business can be. If every small detail has to be done through the owner of the business, then it is unlikely to be successful or grow much larger than a one person operation. The key to delegation is to unload the least valuable tasks so that the owners time can be focused on the tasks that have the greatest ROI and add the most value to the business.

Ability to Coach/Train: Dropping a task on someone’s desk and simply saying “figure it out” is probably not the best strategy for long term success. When tasks are first delegated or expectations are set about performance, there needs to be some level of training so that the employees are clear about how to accomplish the task and that it will meet your expectation. Developing the people around you is key for success because as they improve and become more efficient, the more productive they become which directly benefits your business. Successful entrepreneurs invest time and resources in the training and mentoring of their employees and the people around them.

You Like to Work: One of the biggest misconceptions about being an entrepreneur is the freedom to set your own schedule. While that does exist, for most entrepreneurs that is 12-18 hours a day which does not leave a lot of free time to be scheduled. Those type of hours are not always necessary for success, but are not uncommon. Most entrepreneurs can work through this without blinking an eye because their focus and passion is on making the business successful. If you have a vision of working from 9-5 and the freedom to just take days off whenever you get the whim, then your success as an entrepreneur may be a struggle.

Ability To Sell: No matter how superior your product or service may be, it still has to be sold and sold often. This starts with the owner of the business to get it off the ground. The concept has to be sold to investors, the product has to be sold to customers, the vision has to be sold employees, etc. Every day in the life of an entrepreneur involves some level of sales or at least it should. If no one is actually out selling the product or service with success, then it is unlikely that business can profitably succeed.

Clearly, there are many other traits of successful entrepreneurs, but these are some of the basic traits that you will find. Businesses don’t fail merely due to ideas or bad product, but often from a failure to execute. Successful entrepreneur typically are completing the unpopular tasks and doing whatever is necessary for their business to succeed. Are you prepared to do whatever it takes for your business to succeed? What other traits have you seen that are common for successful entrepreneurs?

Is Buying A Franchise A Good Idea? Part 2

Brian — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 09:35:51 +0000

As a follow up to part 1 of Is Buying A Franchise A Good Idea, we will examine a few more factors to consider during the purchase phase that should improve our chances of making a proper decision and generating revenue and income that you can be happy with.

In addition to national presence, royalties, and advertising fund that were discussed in part 1, here are a few more factors to consider:

4) Size of territory – Depending on the type of business you are considering, this matters greatly. How this is determined varies, but you will need a large enough geographic area for your business to be successful. You do not want the same business as yours on the next block unless the area can support it. And even if it can support it, that is still reduced revenue from your business. Franchise headquarters typically conduct detailed research to determine how large a geographic region has to be for the location to be successful. This is usually slightly in favor of the franchisor so that they can potentially sale more locations. Make sure that the rules for establishing territories for each franchise make sense for the needs of your business or it will be very difficult for your franchise to survive successfully. One of the problems that typically occurs is that neighboring franchisees do not manage their business properly or adhere to the franchise guidelines, therefore creating an unpleasant experience for customers and a different experience from your location which is counterproductive to the franchise model. Make sure that your area is large enough that factors beyond your control are not the reason for your franchise failing.

5) Initial investment – This is a big one because this is usually a fairly large sum of money and your question is simple: What am I paying for? Now if it is a franchise that has been wildly successful and has seen exponential growth, then you are paying for the name as well as the established operations and business plan. You are paying people back for years of hard work to get the business to where it is. Where you need to be careful is large upfront payment for a franchise that is not well established. What if you took that amount of money and started your own company doing the exact same business? You would have a lot more for initial startup and advertising funds. Something to consider.

One of things to be aware of when talking to the franchisor about buying a franchise is that the franchisor is in a different business than you. They are in the business of selling franchises, so they are going to tell you what you need to hear in order buy a franchise. Now don’t get me wrong, ultimately they still have an interest in whatever service or product that is offered, but their success is now determined by their ability to sell franchises and collect royalties. It is far more beneficial for them to sell more franchises because once you buy the franchise it is your responsibility to make it grow. They will be there to support, but your success or failure will have minimal impact to them. They already have your initial investment and if you go out of business, it just opens up another territory to sell. Also in your franchise agreements will minimum monthly royalty amounts regardless of your revenue.

Also, as you are doing your research and calling the other franchisees that they have given you to call to find out more about the business and their experiences, know that these people are props. They are people that are hand selected by the franchisor to say good things about the business. In some way, these people are being paid for their effort to speak highly of the company and encourage others that buying that franchise is a good idea.

This is not to say, that franchising can not be promising. Far from it. I just want you to be very very careful when choosing which franchise to buy, that you are getting what you expect and that you may not be better off taking the money you would invest in your franchise and investing it in your own business. The benefits of a franchise are an established company with brand recognition, streamlined processes, operational blueprint, and headquarter support on top of a worthy product or service. If these items do not exist or meet your expectations, find another franchise. The extra time you take to research and evaluate franchise opportunities initially, will save you time, money, and headaches ten fold in the future.

This is only a short list of factors to consider and there are many others. What other steps would your recommend for due diligence to a person that is considering purchasing a franchise?

Growing Even More Skeptical Of Cloud Computing

Brian — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 15:39:54 +0000

Let me first start by saying that I fully understand the perceived value of cloud computing and the benefits that it offers from a storage and ease of use standpoint…until it goes wrong. That is where the problem lies. As I have stated before, business owners should be cautious about cloud computing, but consumers should as well. Within the last week, over 40,000 users of Gmail lost all of the e-mails in their accounts. Google has been able to recover the history of some of the accounts and says that it will have to go to their offline storage systems in hopes of restoring the rest of the accounts.

The challenge is that you do not have any control over how your data is stored, how viable the company is, or know what your options are in the event the terms of service or pricing structure changes. A good example of this is the recent price hike by Mozy for their backup system for personal computers. They increased the price as well as set limits on the amount of storage that is allowed under different plans. The old plans allowed for unlimited storage. As the need for storage space continues to grow, so should your concern over how secure your data is and how vulnerable you are to changes at the company or changes to their terms.

One solution is to still use cloud computing, but also backup your data on your own system or hard drives. May seem redundant, but just as servers in the cloud can fail, so can personal hard drives and storage systems. And since storage has become so cheap, it is almost a no-brainer because the alternative is to be like most of the Gmail users and get caught with no backup when the system fails. This is something you want to plan for before it happens because after it has happened, may be too late.

From Around The Web – March 1, 2011

Brian — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 09:10:07 +0000

Some interesting posts from around the web….

How To Fund Big Ideas With Lean Pockets @ YSF Entrepreneur – The biggest challenge for any startup is capital to get started and operating capital once the business is started. Erica from YSF Entrepreneur outlines a few ways for entrepreneurs to raise money. She mentions Kickstarter.com which is a site that allows people to raise funds for projects that they are working on that needs funding. I recently had a friend that used this site to raise money to have her book independently printed and it worked. Prior to hearing that story, I was not aware that sites like that existed, so it is valuable to have a list of these sites in the event that I need that type of funding in the future.

5 Commonly Overlooked Tax Deductions @ YBP Guide – It’s that time of the year to find every tax savings possible. I can’t verify that this is accurate, but the possibility that mileage to and from volunteer events is tax-deductible is worth having the conversation with your tax accountant. If this is true, this could be a huge incentive for people to increase their amount of volunteer work which is badly needed in most communities.

Off Topic Article Marketing Traffic @ Lisa Angelettie Blog – Lisa discusses how to handle traffic to your site that is from keywords that are not specifically related to the topic of your blog. This post should be internalized by those who spend a lot of timing hoping for traffic from SEO because if you spend much time in Google Analytics you would know that the search terms that bring people to your site are all over the board. Definitely a wider range of topics and keywords than you would have guessed so as Lisa mentions..just embrace it and build upon it if you have the expertise.

The Importance Of Being Tenacious @ Get Motivated – Good read about staying tenacious summed up by it’s opening quote – “Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan ‘press on’ has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.” – Calvin Coolidge

11 Signs You Are Not Ready To Run Your Own Company @ Conversation Marketing – “You might want to take care of little details like a product/service, some happy customers, maybe a profit, before you start looking for Warren Buffet. Don’t cite Facebook and tell me you’re going to be like them. The road to hell is littered with copies of that business strategy.” – Absolutely Love That Statement!

False Myths Of Being An Entrepreneur

Brian — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 07:08:53 +0000

Being an entrepreneur requires taking a risk to determine if your product or service is viable enough to sustain itself as a standalone business. It is estimated that over 600,000 new businesses are started every year and that number will probably increase due to the high unemployment rates and low barrier of entry of starting an internet business. With all of those entrepreneurs taking the risk to go into business, there are some false myths about entrepreneurship that should be dispelled that can save a lot of time and frustration. These myths are often repeated and most often from people who have not tried to start and operate a business venture, but are merely repeating something that they have heard as well. By listening to these myths, entrepreneurs may have unrealistic expectations of beliefs about access to capital that simply do not exist.

The five myths of entrepreneurship that if understood will save a lot of time are:

Flexible Work Schedule - When you break down the actual number of hours that are required to operate a business, especially at startup, nothing could be further from the truth than the flexible work hour myth. The dream that is usually sold is that without a boss, a business owner can come and go as they please and work when they feel like they need to, but not required to be in the office by 8 or 9. What studies have shown is that business owners on average work about 12 hours per day which is 50% more than an employee of a company. There are times when a business owner can be flexible and adjust their schedule to deal with life demands, but it is an absolute fallacy that there does not need to be any structure or that work becomes an exercise of working 40 hours whenever it fits your schedule. Talk with any existing business owner and you will quickly find that this myth is false.

Build It And They Will Come - If your are under the belief that your product or service is so different and unique that as soon as you get it ready and open your doors for business that customers will come busting through the door, then you are setting yourself up for failure. No matter how unique your product or service is, it requires marketing and sales to promote it. Although your offering may be above average, the benefits and features must be communicated to your potential customer base. Additionally, if you believe that your customers will come because you do not have any competition, then you have not thoroughly done your research. EVERY business has competition. Waiting for customers to come without properly marketing your services is a recipe for disaster and is another false myth that is not true.

It’s Easy To Get A Bank Loan - Bank loans for small businesses are possible, but they are far from easy and often limited based on your business type. The problem with this myth is that it leads people to believe that banks are quickly loaning money based on ideas and concepts, when in reality banks are looking for collateral and assets. The bank needs some assets of value that it recoup part of their investment if the businesses does not succeed. If you are a work at home or a service business without a physical location, then a bank loan will be difficult because they are not any hard assets for the business in which the bank can justify the loan. In many cases, the loans that an entrepreneur is able to get from a bank is an unsecured loan or unsecured line of credit which requires a personal guarantee for the funds that are loaned. This means that as an entrepreneur, you would still be responsible for the loan even if the business does not succeed. This is in contradiction to the typical guidance that you can get a bank loan and if the business fails you just walk away. That can happen, but banks understand that too and to limit their risk in the loan, they are requiring more personal guarantees. Banks want to limit risk as much as they can, so easy loans without hard assets are a myth today and will become even more elusive in the future.

One of the frustrating aspects of being an entrepreneur is all of the “advice” that you will receive from people who have never done anything entrepreneurial.They will be quick to tell you how easy it is to do something or how you can just waltz into a bank to get money and from experience most experienced entrepreneurs know these he said/she said myths are not true. Fortunately the internet has a wealth of information and a couple of hours of research can dispel many of these myths or find the right people that can answer the questions. Take the time to do good research before you put a business plan in place that is based on a number of myths and false truths. You will be glad you did in the long run.

What are some of the myths that you have heard as an entrepreneur that you have found not to be true or totally accurate?

Four Ideas For Small Business Lead Generation

Brian — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 12:25:07 +0000

Lead generation is essential for any business that expects to be around for a while and prosper. I want to offer a couple of ideas for lead generation for small business that are relatively low cost, but can be very effective in generating new business. These methods focus on underutilized methods to reach new customers and engage existing customers and if implemented properly will yield positive results rather quickly. The four methods that I would recommend are:

Coupons – Coupon sites are all the rage with the exponential growth of Groupon.com and other group buying sites over the last year. These group buying sites that can have massive amounts of traffic, but also squeeze the margins on your sales and require deep discounts, which is why it is important to realize there are other alternatives to distribute your coupons and generate leads. The best place to setup and distribute your coupons are through your Google Places account, formerly Google Local Business Center. After you have completed their setup process and verified you business, there is a tab for coupons. This tab allows you to setup multiple coupons for your business that will appear on Google Maps alongside your business. Even if the discount that you are offering is not that great, there should always be an active coupon in your account due to the extra exposure it generates on on Google Maps. It sets you apart from all of your competition that has not taken the time to setup a coupon for their business.

Coupons can also be distributed through Google using Google Coupon Feeds, but this process is only for merchants with large numbers of coupons. If only have a couple of coupons and a couple of locations, Google Places is much more efficient.

Craigslist – Generating leads from Craigslist is a topic that I covered here and here, but it is worth mentioning again because it is such an easy and effective method that is still underutilized. It really is as simple as adding a reoccurring event to your calendar every two days to update your Craigslist listing. It does not need to be unique every time although mixing it up from time to time will help. A quick review of the posts mentioned above will provide much more detail about using Craigslist effectively, but this is a simple reminder to say get something posted.

Facebook Fan Page – A few months ago, I would have likely said that Facebook was not an effective method for lead generation for small businesses due to the amount of time necessary to maintain a page. With the additions and social hooks that have been added by Facebook over the past few months that allow for greater integration into other websites and greater sharing within Facebook, I would now recommend Facebook as a lead generation tool for small businesses.

The key to using a Facebook fan page effectively is growing your number of fans and creating activities that causes them to engage on your page which will spread to their friends as basically referrals. For instance, post a sign in your business for your customers to join your Facebook fan page or offer some incentive or discount to your customers that join and then post offers on the page that they may “like” which their friends will see. You may also offer an incentive in which anyone that “likes” your post will have a special discount coupon mailed to their inbox. As your list continues to grow and creative methods of interaction are utilized, your Facebook Fan Page can become an effective lead generation.

Local Business Referrals – It is also important to remember that lead generation should still occur offline as well as online. I recently read this story about a car wash with 12 locations that is able to generate over $40 million per year in revenue by placing coupons on the counters of other local businesses without even the need to reciprocate placement for those businesses. They simply would regularly distribute their coupons to each business as a “gift” to their customers and this led to an amazing amount of sales for each location. That’s it. Simple, but very effective.

There are many other methods for generating leads like Google Adwords and traditional advertising, but I wanted to highlight a few methods that have much lower costs and are very easy to maintain. Once these methods are put in place, they are very easy to maintain which makes it much more cost effective. Set a plan to have each of these methods in action within a week and I am confident you will be pleasantly surprised with the results.

10 Essential WordPress Plugins

Brian — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 13:51:37 +0000

WordPress is a terribly easy platform to use, but it requires installing some additional plugins to activate the functionality that you need to make your site run smoothly. Adding plugins is only an option if you are using the self-hosted installation of WordPress from WordPress.org and not the hosted option at WordPress.com.

Here is a list of 10 plugins that I believe are necessary for your site. This is only a small list as there are thousands of plugins available that can perform almost any task that you can think of. All of them do not work perfectly and mainly this is due to them being open source and anyone can create a plugin, but they do not always work correctly. Especially if you are on a version of WordPress that is higher than the plugin was created for. Fortunately, most of the developers are very good about upgrading their plugins to work with the latest version of the software.

The ten essential WordPress Plugins are:

Akismet

Akismet comes installed with your WordPress installation and only requires an API key for activation. Akismet prevents your blog from being overwhelmed with spam as it checks the commenters information against their database to determine if it is spam or not. You still have to go in and manually approve/disapprove spam though. If you do not have Akismet active, you will quickly find out how much spam your blog will receive very quickly. This plugin is a must have.

Tweet This
This plugin adds the “tweet this” widget to each of your post so that your visitors can share your story with their twitter followers if they are so inclined. This plugin works well and what I like most is that you can set which URL shortening service that you want to use. TinyURL is used as the default, but the plugin supports several other options.

All in One SEO Pack
All-in-One SEO pack is the most widely use SEO plugin for WordPress blogs. It adds fields to your admin panel where you can easily add custom title, description, and keyword tags to each of your posts. It also has an option where you can have the plugin use your tags and categories as your meta tags. This is definitely a must-have to get your site optimized for the search engines.

Brian’s Threaded Comments
Have you ever seen a comment on a blog that you wanted to respond to, but there would be twenty other responses between your response and it would not be clear that you are responding to that commenter? This plugin solves that problem so that you can respond to someone else’s comments and the comment will be listed right below the previous comment. This is a great plugin for making your comments section more conversational.

Comment Relish
Comment Relish sends a short e-mail to users who comment on your blog for the first time to say thank you. You can customize your message to say whatever you like so that it matches your writing style and fits your readers. The downside is that if you have a lot of comments, it can cause your site and server to run more slowly. For smaller sites, it should not be a problem.

FeedBurner FeedSmith

Feedburner is a RSS platform that lets you customize how your feed will appear, monetize your feed, and track readership statistics for your feed. Every blog should have a feed and since Feedburner(owned by Google) is the best RSS platform, this plugin should be used.

Google Analytics for WordPress

Instead of simply adding Google Analytics through your theme editor, this plugin makes it simple to add the code, but also gives the functionality to allow you to track extra search engines, click outs, and downloads. It makes some of the stats understandable for people that may not be very knowledge about Google analytics.

Google XML Sitemaps
Generates an XML sitemap for your blog used by search engines Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask. What’s an XML sitemap, you ask? Basically it’s a file that tells the search engines which pages on your site are most important and which they should crawl on a regular basis.

Subscribe To Comments

Allows commentators to receive e-mail notifications of new comments on an article (checkbox option in the comments form) on which they have posted a comment.This is a great way to get people back to your site and continue the conversation.

WP Contact Form III
Adds in a simple contact page on your blog with a form for name, email, website, subject, and message. This one isn’t as fancy as the other contact plugins out there but it’s simple and easy to use and most importantly works properly. You also have the option of adding multiple forms to your site using this plugin.

This is just a short list of plugins that I have found very useful. I use many more and may detail them as well at some point. By visiting the WordPress Plugins directory, you should b able to find any plugin that you need. If not, discuss it in the forums and most likely there is someone out that will develop it pretty soon.