if you use my referral code: mokuhauolibrent

I’ll design a logo for you for fifty bucks.

At Hawai`i Island TV, you’ll get a killer website setup with a complete content management system, one year of hosting and free monthly training classes to help you learn how to use your new site to promote your product, service, business or message.

This is the best package I’ve ever put together.

Embedded Video

Blogged with Flock

Tags: opensocial, google, ning, myspace, orkut

OpenSocial Devloper Site
http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/

An advanced class will be scheduled in either late September or Mid October after Adobe Max.

More free blog WordPress class details:

http://hawaii-big-island.biz/free-blogging-class-hawaii/

All attendees will qualify for a free blog and hosting for one year from Aloha Workshops. There are no sales pitches. We are simply educating small business owners, writers, designers, developers and anyone that will listen about the virtues of blogging about the moku. You don’t need to be good at anything to blog. You just have to have something to share.

All attendees will be invited to network with each other by joining (for free) other bloggers in the Big Island Blog Network.

Read more about the Big Island Blog Network from a Tourism 2.0 expert at Tourism Trends.

Hope to see you there!

Wednesday July 18th 5:30pm – 7:30pm at HTDC, across from Bear’s Coffe on Keawe St.

That’s tonight in Hilo, Hawaii 96720

More details over at Hawaii Big Island Business.

Bring your laptop for hands-on, step by step, instruction. No laptop required though. We’ll pass out materials to take back to your home or office computer.

Need info? Contact Brent 808-896-7656 or brent(at)biaug.com

e komo mai designers, developers, writers, artists, cat lovers, anyone that wants to be read, heard and seen on the web…

Here’s the idea. It’s basically possible now to tell the major search engines exactly how you want to have your site indexed. You can included specific pages of content that might not otherwise make it into the index through traditional methods, ie; site submission. Site submission is dead. It’s been dead for years according the SEO Experts everywhere.

For example:
SEOBook – http://www.seobook.com/archives/002116.shtml

Do website submission programs actually work? – http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum48/534.htm

Daniweb – Web site submission – http://www.daniweb.com/forums/thread72180.html

SEO: What Definitively Does not Work – http://www.gatewayinfotech.com/uk_web_designer.asp?id=59

If you’re one of my clients, you know this. In fact, if you’re a blog client or in our blog network your content is being indexed by Google each and every time you write a post on your site. That’s right, each time you write a post on your blog the Google Sitemap Generator rebuilds your sitemap, compresses it and sends it to Google for inclusion in the index. If you have a Google Alert setup for your site, you’ll notice that your site gets indexed usually within a couple hours.

So what do we do differently? If you’re competing with us, here’s what you need to do. Install the Google Sitemap Generator plugin. Configure it properly, and setup your initial sitemap.xml file. It’s pretty much set it and forget it after initial configuration. Be sure to keep the version up to date for your own clients.

There are of course many sem options in a blog setup. This is just one aspect of solid theme development for search engines and directories. At Big Island Ads we provide over one hundred tweaks to each blog that improve and support specific search engine marketing goals.

Just because there’s seemingly little to grab onto it doesn’t mean “this whole web 2.0 thing” is without merit. In fact, just like web 1.0 business owners are traditionally slow to embrace new technologies, let alone new marketing vehicles. I believe for many of you it’s cause for alarm but I’m not an alarmist so let me frame it this way.

Bill Gates missed out on the initial understanding, thus opportunity of the Internet. Perhaps he just underestimated it. If he would have “gotten it” just a few months sooner, he might have been able to create a Google instead of learn from one. Opportunity is everywhere in the web 2.0 world now. My focus here isn’t to get into the opportunity. Rather, I’ll frame some organizational ideas for those of you that do “get it.” Many of you may have already employed some of this ideas. If you have, leave comments to learn from by registering and clicking on the comments link.

It’s frustrating to have winning ideas in your organization and be completely helpless. I feel for those of you unable to move your teams to embrace the inevitable change you see coming down the tracks. You can be on top of it, technologically, but unless your teams understand their new roles and responsibilities, your destined to watch the early opportunities sail by.

Let’s drill down into an emerging but soon to be popular, situation. Perhaps your struggling to define strategically, what you are missing to create the change you need? Y might be concerned that your teams are communicating effectively. Your current 1.0 or 2.0 projects could already be falling behind and maybe it seems like everything is up in the air for the future? If you’re wondering about any of these issues, chances you’re in need of some change management 2.0-style.

Diesel mechanics are only so helpful on a sailing team. The needs are different. The roles are different and the fastest way around the course is not by taking the same tact (he he). To successfully change, you would need to first identify what you need to do differently. The differences between 1.0 and 2.0 may not be this drastic but the first step is the same, figure out what you need to do differently.

First you might consider your team’s ability to change, to learn and to adapt. Just as your marketing department has changed as a result of the web, so too are more traditional web roles and with that comes a change in responsibilities. Help from outside resources can provide valuable insight. You web team probably thinks and believes they’re ready for change. Afterall, they are the original agents of change that you hired due partly because of their demonstrated ability to do things differently. Web professionals are typically prepared for change. Therefore, your independent or third-party assessment is critical. We’re almost done but let’s drill down a bit further.

Traditionally the webmaster was responsible for making sure your messaging was usable, read well and looked nice in browsers. A webmaster rarely cared about how the website looked on a cell phone or much less, the back of a seat in a SUV. Webmasters always had to manage links but feeds are a different story. Publishing outwards rather than inwards is a web 2.0 mandate. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is creating mass amounts of change as webmasters are learning to become feedmasters -hopefully. Traditionally, webmasters cared more about broken links than syndication. This must change at your company now, to benefit from any early opportunities in web 2.0.

For example, RSS can substantially help get your message out. If your products can be listed in feeds, you should be going through a fundamental shift in the way you publish information. A traditional webmaster needs to know web 2.0 and the truth is that many of them are not prepared. Perhaps that’s why the World Organization of Webmasters focuses more on the term Web Professional (webprofessional.org) these days and less on the title, “Webmaster.” Understanding the changing role of webmasters is important in understanding the skills you need on your team(s).

Here’s some tough questions to ask your web and marketing teams:

• Do we have a RSS feed?
• What’s the feed address?
• Where do I subscribe?
• How many subscribers do we have?
• Do we have a podcast or is our rss feed iTunes ready?
• Do we have an internal blog?
• Is our site accessible?
• Is it standards based?
• How does it look on a cell phone?

Important!
Call a meeting and ask everyone to bring their cell phone. Have them load your website on their phone. Pass your phones to the right until everyone has seen the website on as many phones as possible. No one to call for a meeting? No problem. Go to phone stores and ask the sales people to show you, your website on all of their newest phones. You may have to figure out how to do this yourself if you’re in a Verizon store (sorry).

More questions to ask…

• Has our site been graphically treated to insure ease of use and adoption of key pages by key visitor segments?
• What is our video strategy? A video is nearly as fast as a blog when it comes to getting your message out in the search engines. You need at least one video up on the major video portals.

More on video…
If your business is already starting to rely on RSS feeds to distribute your information, you’ll need to look specifically at areas you can cut costs and areas where you need to hire additional players. You can outsource video for example much cheaper than setting up a video editing workstation, server and video editor.

>> Consider outsourcing the video but make sure the meta tags in the video are optimized for your target audience including search engines and make sure they’re branded with your company logo if you want to retain some control over it’s usage. Formats are key, consider using Flash (FLVs).

>> Consider hiring a feed master. This is someone that manages your feeds. They should be able to generate valid feeds from information stored in a database. They should be able to merge your feed with other feeds to generate new feeds based on the requirements of your customers. They should also insure that your feed will look and function great in all the major feed readers including the newest web browsers and if relevant, Google Base or other feed directories.

>> Consider hiring a feed marketer. This person listens to your customers to learn how your valuable information (think of your product catalogs, listings or knowledge based products) can become more valuable. This person should be able to promote your feed and work with a feed master to maintain quality and adherence to standards such as RSS (Really Simple Syndication), Atom and XML. A feed marketer should be able to monitor the distribution of your feed(s) and continue placing your feed details in high visibility areas that continually increase subscriptions to your feed(s). A feed marketer will distribute, monitor and analyze your feed in a closed feedback loop. Consider using Feedburner to add features to your feed easily and to cut costs.

Now for your role. With so many new technologies out, how do you help make sure that you’re not throwing money down the tubes? How do you make sure your teams are working on the right projects at the right time? Here’s a few things you can try that others have successfully adopted:

>> Increase or define accountability on a per project basis. A complete web 2.0 project lifecycle includes stages like these:

1. Goals and planning
2. Design
3. Development
4. Testing
5. Release
6. Promotion
7. Monitoring
8. Analysis (metrics)
9. Reporting (return to step 1.)

It is your responsibility as an orchestrator of services to make sure that new project (not “product”) lifecycles do not exceed 90 days. I recommend to clients that no new projects exceed 30 days. Only very strategic projects you have patent interests in, should require more than a month to complete. If your project is longer than this, pare down your goals and rethink your design. Don’t get stuck here, let’s move on.

So let’s presume your project management and development efforts are web 2.0 ready. It is also your responsibility to make sure that your project doesn’t compete with other companies that could compromise your ability to secure the adoption numbers you need. By this I mean, don’t go build a community-based video portal or similar, “alreadey been done too many times” application. Everyone wants to be YouTube, even Google (Update: Google has acquired YouTube). But only a few strategic companies with acquisition motives, care to compete with these already successful sites.

Web 2.0 doesn’t mean you need to create anything new. To survive, you need to adopt a new way of doing things. Adopt new strategies and use specific techniques to create change internally. As your teams adopt these strategies, the techniques will start to show in your existing efforts. Your marketing metrics will respond accordingly. Try to measure your results in a more social context online by engaging potential cusomters, turning visitors into subscribers and subscribers into buyers.

A few more tips…

• Socially aware or conscience applications help build community and are necessary.
• Take responsibility for learning 2.0 technologies and what they means to your organization.
• Study transparency and ethics issues.
• Study persuasion architectures.
• Remove communication barriers between you and your customers

Get all of these issues out in front of your teams and your roles and responsibilities upgrade will start happening right in front of your eyes.

You’ve got some a-ha moments in front of you and you deserve all of them for reading this far!

aloha

So what’s the action item?

Make sure you have loaded your feed(s) in Google Reader or have added your feed into your Google Personalized Homepage.

Google Webmaster Tools – How Google Crawls My Site

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/topic.py?topic=8843

In fact, I’m writing this because I believe this to be the most valuable information I could give this month. Specifically, find content you copied and pasted between sites without very much modification. This stuff has got to go!

Also, this is a good time to review your websites in a fresh light. This year will mark the collapse of many so-called, expert seo tips and tricks. Google, along with Microsoft and Yahoo have been working very hard to improve the quality of their indexes. If you haven’t been working hard to improve the quality of the content on your sites, you will be fighting an uphill battle all year.

Here’s some tools and articles to help. The tools have not been tested by me extensively.

Duplicate Content Filter: What it is and how it works
http://webconfs.com/duplicate-content-filter-article-1.php

Virante Duplicate Content Checker –
http://www.virante.com/seo-tools/duplicate-content.php

Copyscape – Helps you find your content on other sites. Built to help find copyright infringements, this tool is great at identifying your own duplicate content.
http://copyscape.com

So in the last couple of days he’s been busting or rebusting some myths. Reading his latest postings could change your perspective on at least one topic (virtual hosting vs. dedicated ip) and possibly two.

Recommended reading: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog

I recommend leaving this post and reading something else.

Ok, it’s safe. It looks like it’s working.

This requires a blended approach. Do what you know works tactically while strategically trying new approaches using very disciplined methodologies. For example, continue submitting your website URL to website directories. In fact, creating inbound links should consistently remain a top ten goal. Remember, Google considers you imp[ortant if you have lots of relevant inbound links.

However, today you need to act strategically in this area as well. Distributing RSS (Really Simple Syndication) news feeds is the 2.0 version of submitting website URLs to website directories. Feed directories act much the same way as web directories wth a couple of major differences. For starters, feed directories promote your feed in a social context. Feed directories have systems that enable visitors to subscribe to your feed in addition to visiting your website. Many feed directories have ratings where other users can rate or review your feed. Spammy feeds get low ratings and helpful feeds get high ratings. Secondly, RSS feed directories provide a way for people to get your data in their terms. Meaning instead of just pointing to your site, these RSS feed directories provide multiple methods for interacting with your information. More on this in later posts -I think you’re getting the idea strategically.

Tactically, here’s what I do to make it happen. I keep a sheet with my client’s messaging handy. It includes things like rss feed, title, description, keywords and tags, email address, usernames and passwords and a url to a small standard image I can use for getting my clients info into various directories and social networks. This sheet, probably has a name, I just don’t know what to call it. It’s literally a cheat sheet and it makes my cut and paste life simpler.

By keeping my cheat sheet handy, I can sign my client up for an affiliate program or submit their information to a new search engine or in this case, a new feed directory. This cheat sheet enforces consistency, keeps the messaging accurate and helps speed up the process. I’ve developed written programs that explain this so much of this work can be handed off as appropriate. Sometimes it’s just faster to do the work yourself.

Like I’ve mentioned before, you can’t just think up solutions. You must go through the processes to understand the full potential and pitfalls of the solution. If you’re the CEO and you haven’t done any production work to promote your website, you probably still don’t get it. Enough said about that -that’s why you hire me, right?

To make the blended approach work, you must also manage your visibility in various feed directories that you’ve submitted. You can’t just set it and forget it. Visit the directories (aka feed distribution points) You’ll also need to listen or read what others are saying (or not saying) about your feed.

Listening to all the new channels you create (places where you get your RSS feed listed) can be difficult. Keeping track of all your RSS Feed Distribution points in a single sheet is essential if you’re going to go back and read reviews or understand your analytics. This can be most important when through traditional log file analysis, you find a spike in visits from one of these new sources. You can then go a tweak the listing or profile and if the results remain consistently above average, you can create a custom landing page that directs visitors to buy your product or service.

Building your brand across mediums that work for you is the shangri-la of a blended marketing approach. When you get all these channels running and dispensing the same message, you’re ready for a pay raise.

That’s Web 2.0 marketing, blended, not stirred.