Pre-Season Thirty Day Challenge 2009

Today is the final day for Thirty Day Challenge 2009 pre-season. It has been a refresher course for some and a pocketful of surprises for others. We have run from the 30DC Forum to YouTube and everywhere in between. You can view all the pre-season links, videos and scripts by visiting this link: http://www.thirtydaychallenge.com/training Here is a re-cap of the pre-season fun:

• 30DC Forum – Create a username, fill out your profile, poke around the forum, social groups, meetups and pictures. Caro does an excellent job of explaining how to get the most of the forum, etiquette and teams.
• Facebook – Open a Facebook profile, find some friends, integrate with Seesmic Desktop, become an Ed Dale fan, friend me and check out the absolutely fabulous 30DC Facebook app (I have had some issues with seeing the bottom of the app page in Firefox…so try it in Internet Explorer)
• Firefox – Install Mozilla Firefox, Google Global, Search Status, SEO for Firefox, Stumbleupon Toolbar, Coolpreviews (I love this new plugin!) and Fasterfox
• Google – Create a Google account (check “Stay signed in” and “Enable web history”), get Google Analytics, create a Google Alerts (huge time saver!), how to use Google Docs, create a Google Group for your team (or join one), making the most of Google Reader, get the Google app for your iPhone/iPod Touch, you can join our team at www.teamedheads.com

Ellis County TEAM Ed Heads

Visit this group

• iTunes – Download and install iTunes, subscribe to the Thirty Day Challenge 2009 podcast
• Jing – Jing is one cool FREE tool for capturing screenshots, screen video and more. This will be very beneficial as you work with your team.
• Kiva – Kiva is a wonderful program to encourage entrepreneurialism in third world countries by extending small business loans to business minded people. Your Kiva gear helps support these efforts.
• LastPass – Encrypted password storage with LastPass will save you time with Social Marker and other sites
• Market Samurai – Install Market Samurai, create a project, a peak at keywords, SEO, targeted content for your niche, increase your traffic and we will be premiering some brand new tools
• Mindset – Karl Moore shares with us how to improve our mind, keep our mind sharp and passionately focused during this years 30DC
• Skype – Install Skype, create your profile, add contacts, send an SMS, send a file, use the chat, proper etiquette and give the Skype conference call feature a test run
• Social Marker – What is social bookmarking? Use URL, title, notes, tags and share. Get a delicious account, try out Social Marker
• Twitter – Create a Twitter account, set up your profile, make a Tweet, install Seesmic Desktop, follow @Ed_Dale, @DanRaine, @GuruBob and @WendyMerritt (that’s me ) and create a search in Seesmic Desktop for the hashtag #30DC
• Ustream – Create a Ustream profile, subscribe to the 30DC channel and get the iPhone/iPod Touch app
• Video Content – How to download the different video file formats available during the 30DC 2009
• YouTube – Create a YouTube account, add some content to your channel, subscribe to Ed Dale’s channel and Wendy Merritt’s channel

What are your expectations for this years Thirty Day Challenge? The team at 30DC is not about teaching you to get rich quick. It’s about making a dollar. One dollar. You are creating the foundation that will help build online marketing structures worth millions…in time. Sure, some people will catch a trend and do it faster than others…but, hey, real life is that you have to learn the skill to earn the dough. Just take it one step at a time.

Do a little every day and stick with it. Find a great and enthusiastic team to help keep your hopes elevated and your skills sharp. Let’s face it! It’s much more fun to cheer and celebrate with a group then taking a sip of coffee by yourself in the quiet while you contemplate your own personal success.

I would love to have you on my team…whether you live in Texas or not! We will Skype our meetings so we can get as many people as possible involved in TEAM Ed Heads!

TEAM Ed Heads Rocks!

TEAM Ed Heads 2008

Ummmmm…there is a story behind this picture…I’ll tell you later

Thirty Day Challenge 2009 Pre-Season Ends is a post from: The Moxie Mom Blog

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I found this great article at www.wordtracker.com. This was just too fabulous to not share it with you. You will most certainly want to add this to your SEO tools arsenal. Let’s check out SEO Blogger a FireFox plugin (add-on).

1. Click here to DOWNLOAD the SEO BLogger for Firefox. I am a Microsoft lover but please tell me you’re not still using Internet Explorer. If so start by using the Mozilla Firefox free download by clicking here.
2. Install the Firefox plugin (you might get a warning from Firefox but just okay it)
3. Firefox will require a restart so the plugin will be fully installed and functional.

Now, let the fun begin!

Notice the little blue and white “W” in the lower right of your Firefox window

Go ahead and click on it

Now let’s create a blog post and optimize it

1. Enter a starter keyword into the search box and click on search
2. Notice it pulls up a list of matches including phrases
3. You’re going to be looking for words that get enough traffic to matter but not so much traffic that your competition is too great. I’d say between 80-500 unless you have a high traffic blog with great SEO already.
4. Select any keywords you are going to be optimizing for and click ADD or you could Add them all…but probably not
5. Worry about the most important phrase first.This needs to be in the title of your article and used several times during your article/blog. Notice that the tool tells you how many times you have used this keyword in your article/post.
6. Publish your article and you are almost done
7. Now promote your article using your various social media contacts or email list. Of course it’s better when other people give you a little link love but go ahead and kick start the process by social bookmarking yourself too (remember 1 bookmark for yourself and 5 for other sites keeps your account safe).

SEO Tools A Firefox Plugin

Advantages

• Quick and easy download of SEO Blogger to start using immediately
• Save time by doing keyword research right in your browser window
• Can be used with almost any blogging software
• Lets you keep your concentration on the post you’re writing
• Compare keywords instantly to find out which ones pack the most SEO punch. (For example, is it better to write a post about “fries” or “french fries”?)
• Verify your keywords by seeing how many times you’ve used each chosen keyword in the post

This type of on-page SEO is just a taste of effective SEO. But, hey, you have to start somewhere. Have any other great on-page SEO tips or SEO tools? Do share…

SEO Tools A Firefox Plugin is a post from: The Moxie Mom Blog

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Ever wonder how your site stacks up against your competition? Want to know where you can improve your website? How do you know what SEO you are doing is working? Be real…you know you just want to see if you have stomped your competition yet! LOL

Check your SEO and site stats with Website Grader. This free website is developed by HubSpot and prides themselves in having done marketing reports for 1,000,000 URLs and counting. You will definitely want to check out Website Grader quite frequently.  Okay, how do I get this great free grading service?

1. Visit www.websitegrader.com
2. Enter you Website URL
3. Enter the website for your competitors you want to be measure up against
4. Include an email address in the last box so you can receive the final report
5. Click on GENERATE REPORT
6. Watch the cute little HubSpot icon generate your grade

Check Your SEO with Wesite Grader

Here’s all the valuable information you will receive from using their free website grading service.

Your Website Grade – You can see www.themoxiemomblog.com has a grade of 96.2.
I. On-Page SEO

• Metadata – Page Title, Meta Description, Meta Keywords that tell search engines what your site is all about.
• Heading Summary – Headings and Sub-headings are like chapter titles to a book and help search engines and readers catch what the web page is all about.
• Image Summary – Images are great for your readers but do you have them optimized for search engines?
• Interior Page Analysis – Interior pages can help you to use keywords to their fullest potential.
• Readability Level – KISS – Keep it Simple Stupid! Know your target audience readability level and adjust accordingly.

II. Off-Page SEO

• Domain Info – Registering your domain for at least 3 years will show search engines you are serious about your website.
• Google PageRank – Google uses many factors to calculate how important your website is to the internet world.
• Google Indexed Pages – How many from your website pages does Google have stored?
• Last Google Crawl Date – When was the last time that Google crawled your site. Yes, you want Google crawling your site!
• Traffic Rank – Displays your Alexa rank.
• Inbound Links – Lets you know how many inbound links you have to your website. This is how many other websites have links pointing to some page on your website.
• DMOZ Directory – Are you currently listed in the highly regarded DMOZ directory?
• Yahoo! Directory – Another highly regarded paid directory
• ZoomInfo – Is your site currently listed in this business and search engine directory?

III. Blogosphere

• Blog Analysis – Does your website contain a blog?
• Blog Ranking – How does your blog rank on Technorati?
• Recent Blog Articles – Displays the last three articles from your blog.

IV. Social Mediasphere

• del.icio.us Bookmarks – How many instances of your domain or sub-domain are listed on del.icio.us?
• Digg.com Submission Summary – Lets you know if anyone has dugg an article about your website. Unlike the dachshund going to China in the backyard, you want someone digg-ing you

V. Converting Qualified Visitors to Leads

• RSS Feed – Looks for an RSS Feed on your website.
• Conversion Form – Does your site contain any web forms that helps turn visitors into leads or customers?

VI. Competitive Intelligence

• Keyword Grader – This cool little area compares your keywords against the competitors website keywords you listed on the initial page.
• Competing Websites – A summary of some of the information you have already seen reported.
• Historical Data Available – If you have ran this grader before this will give you the past dates you used their site.

Remember when you entered your email address? Within minutes HubSpot will send you an email with a link to you free report to share or put the badge on your website. They will re-grade your site occasionally so keep checking back for an updated grade.

This is an excellent, easy and simple way to check yourself on your website SEO skills. Test it out and see how you rank? Did you make the grade?

Tip: Don’t just check your website or blog but also check some of your social networking sites too! You might be amazed to see how you are doing against your rivals.

Check Your SEO with Website Grader is a post from: The Moxie Mom Blog

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Using Twitter’s website interface is very cumbersome and doesn’t really lend itself to quickly and exhaustively unfollowing and reciprocating. Buzzom does require you to enter your Twitter username and password so it can access the Twitter API for you and to verify you. This site makes these two tasks and others a breeze. Imagine my elation when Google found for me Buzzom.

Here are a couple of the things you can currently do while on Buzzom:

• Flush - This is the default after you enter your username. Got too many people chattering in your stream? Unfollow quickly and easily those who aren’t following you.
• Grow – When you click on the grow button Buzzom will intuitively recommend new people with similar interests for you to follow (this is the part I hope spammers don’t exploit).
• Reciprocate – After you click on this button you will see a list of who’s following you…but you’re not following them…yet. Just by clicking the check boxes and a button you can follow your followers until your hearts content.
• Lock - When you “lock” a Twitter user you will prevent this user from showing up in this list again. Let’s say you have a certain business you follow but they aren’t following you; there is no need for them to keep showing up in your “flush” list. Just “lock” them and they will not appear in  your flush list where you might accidently unfollow them.
• Tweet - On the right side of the screen you can send out an instant Tweet from here. Buzzom has it pre-filled so you can give them a shout out to your followers if you value their service.

Stats - Notice in the upper right of the screen you have a few stats.

• Followers – How many people are currently following you (I wish they had called it something else other than “follow”…who wants to be a “follower”…I digress).
• Following - How many people you are currently following.
• Stars - This is the number of people you are following but they are not following you back.
• Fans – You might enjoy seeing the number of people who are following you but you are not following them back.
• Friends – A perfect world. This tells you the number of people you are following and who are following you back.

This is one powerful tool and just what I was looking for today. Give it a whirl and let me know what you loved or hated about it.

Easily Manage Your Twitter Flock is a post from: The Moxie Mom Blog

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What Would Google Do? (Hardcover)
By Jeff Jarvis

Buy new: $26.99
$17.81
2 used and new from $17.25

First tagged “twitter” by Marc van der Chijs “Internet entrepreneur”
Customer tags: internet(2), new media(2), google, social media, twitter, social networks, blog, 8w8 – global space tribes, internet word of mouth, causewired

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500 Digital Hints, Tips, & Techniques for Every Internet User: All-in-One Guide to Those Inside Secrets for Blogging, Vlogging, Photologging, MySpace, … eBay, Google, and More! (500 (RotoVision)) (Paperback)
By Dan Oliver

The subtitle says it all, and the book delivers it all!

* Great new addition to a best-selling series–huge audience! * Jargon-free beginner’s guide to using the Internet like a 16-year-old It’s everyone’s little secret. You sit at the computer all day, tapping away, maybe surfing the Net. But do you actually know how to post a video on YouTube? Can you make a call on Skype? And how about MySpace–got a page? Or do you leave that to your teenagers? Now it’s time to let go of your secret fears and anxieties. Don’t be afraid. It will be easy, with 500 Digital Hints, Tips, and Techniques for Every Internet User. This new addition to the best-selling 500 series is packed with practical, hand-holding, easy-to-use directions for getting the most out of the Internet. Accessible step-by-step tutorials, quick fixes, and bullet-point tips make this book the anti-technical manual. Let it put the power of the Internet in your hands!

Buy new: $15.56
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Customer Rating:

First tagged “twitter” by Jinger Jarrett “Internet Marketer and Writer”
Customer tags: google, ebay, blogger, social networking, make money writing, skype, firefox, meebo, facebook, myspace, social marketing, flickr

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I am going to show you how to install the application made available by www.sociable.es…yes, that means the website is in Spanish (which added to the difficulty of this installation). I am going to assume you have upgraded your self-hosted blog to WordPress 2.7 and you have a Facebook account.

Give it a try…look on the sidebar to the right until you see the Connect with Facebook button…see how easy it is to expand your community.

Facebook Connect WordPress Plugin

WordPress plugin that allows direct integration of WordPress blogs with Facebook using Facebook Connect:

• Build a community

• Login using your Facebook account

• Send comments to Facebook profile feed

• Invite your friends to the blog community

• See last visitors

Download the latest version hear (V.0.9.6)

1. Download the plugin

2. unzip the plugin file

3. upload the entire plugin file to your /wp-content/plugins directory

4. login to your self-hosted WordPress account

5. In the left-hand menu click on Plugins/INSTALLED and scroll down to

6. Click on ACTIVATE…wait for activation notice

A. Click on GO TO FACEBOOK DEVELOPER APP – this will open up a facebook developer page

B. On the upper right click on SET UP NEW APPLICATION

C. Choose and enter an Application name (this is what your users will see when they try to connect to your site, i.e. The Moxie Mom Blog)

D. Enter your Callback URL (your domains root url: i.e. http://www.themoxiemomblog.com)

E. Scroll to the bottom and click SUBMIT

F. Now you have created your application – copy the API key and paste into your Facebook Connector Options

G. Copy your API Secret and paste into your Facebook Connector Options

8. I checked comment auto-approval, send user comments and connect via SSL

9. Click UPDATE OPTIONS…wait for saved notification

10. Scroll down the same page and click on CREATE TEMPLATE…wait for notification

11. Scroll down to Template ID and click on ACTIVATE TEMPLATE

12. In the left-hand menu click on Settings/FACEBOOK CONNECTOR

VOILA! You’re done…with this step

1. In the left-hand menu click on Appearance/WIDGETS

2. Click on FacebookConnect ADD

3. move this to wherever you would like in your sidebar

4. Edit the settings to suit your taste (Title, Welcome Msg, Footer Msg, Invite Msg, Visitor Ttl, Login Msg, Member Msg, Max Users and the type of login button) Click DONE and then SAVE CHANGES

Surprise! But…there is one more tweak if you are up for it

• Scroll down until you see

<p><input name=”url” type=”text” class=”comment-input” value=”<?php echo $comment_author_url; ?>”/>&nbsp;&nbsp;Website</p>

• Click on Appearance/EDITOR

• Click on COMMENTS (comments.php)

or wherever you would like to insert this facebook plugin button

• on the next line hit enter a couple of times to give you some space to work with

• paste in

Or use our<br>

<fb:login-button></fb:login-button><br>

<br>

Now you have a nice widget in your sidebar that displays your recent visitors and a facebook button in your comments box for easy login

P.S. Important: If you dont see the Facebook Connect login button and the user photos (on IExplorer), you need to modify your “header.php” theme file:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd”>
<html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml” xmlns:fb=”http://www.facebook.com/2008/fbml”>

It has made it easier for your community to leave you comments too. Go ahead ang give it a whirl…

Facebook Connect is Now Available as a WordPress Plugin is a post from: The Moxie Mom Blog

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Twitter is one of those really unique sites that allows you to become a leader just by letting people know what you’re doing in the world. Sound cool? It is…but a word to the wise…don’t abuse your power. Just like “The Force” Twitter needs to be respected. So before I give you my favorite Twitter apps, I’m going to give you few ways NOT to use Twitter:

1) Don’t SPAM people. Very simply, we all know what it is…but sometimes it’s easy to let a little slip in. The best way to lose followers is to drive them crazy with Spam.

2) Don’t over do it. When Twitter asks, “What are you doing?” we don’t need update every half-hour. Be relevant, resourceful and current and you’ll make a lot of friends.

3) Don’t insult, abuse, belittle or be a meanie.

Twitter Tools

Twitterrific

World leaders in icon design, we offer thousands of free icons, custom design services, software, royalty-free stock icons and much more.

Twitteroo

Twitteroo lets you send Twitter tweets from your PC!

TwitterPost

A simple, feature-packed, stand-alone interface for Twitter.com.

twitterfeed.com

Here’s how to get your blog (or any other RSS or Atom feed) twittering.

twhirl

twhirl is a desktop client for the Twitter microblogging platform, powered by Adobe AIR.

Tweet Scan

Real-time Twitter Search.

twittervision

Captures the Twitter zeitgeist on a map in real time.

TwitThis

TwitThis is an easy way for people to send Twitter messages about your blog post or website.

TinyURL.com

Making long URLs usable! More than 71 million
of them. Over 1.9 billion hits/month.

Summize Conversational Search

Search Twitter conversations in realtime – discover what people are doing right now.

A Little Birdie Told Me…About Twitter is a post from: The Moxie Mom Blog

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