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Is There Strength In Numbers? Or Social Slacktivism?

Jeremy Blanton (210 Consulting~ Social Media Advisors) — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 09:01:35 -0700

Let me start by saying I have debated writing this post for at least the past three months. Why? Well the post has nothing to do about benefitting your business online or how to use some sort of new social media tool. In fact, let me just get it out in the first paragraph and say that this post is about me and a situation I am in now where I need your help. If that bothers you, feel free to click off this post now.

As some of you may or may not know, in October of this year my wife and I are going to accomplish something that has been a passion of both of us. Before we even got married almost six years ago we both decided we wanted to make differences in other people's lives through taking short-term missions trips to other countries. On October 22nd we will be loading a plane to head out on our first trip as a couple for one month. If you want to see all the details of our trip, you can visit the site I built specifically for it at http://sendustosouthafrica.com.

Over the past few months Katherine & I have done a lot of fundraising and have been overwhelmed by the generosity of so many friends and family. To this point we have raised slightly over half of the total costs for both of us to go.

When we started raising money for our upcoming trip, I immediately thought it would not be a difficult task at all due to the large number of connections we both have online through the various social media platforms. Between the two of us, I am roughly guessing we have around 23,000+ connections. When you then multiply this by the number of friends & connections our connections have as well, the number would exponentially increase. So raising the money for the trip seemed simple and easy.

Then one day I was introduced to a new word by my friend Matthew Shadbolt called "Slacktivism." The definition of this term from the Urban Dictionary is this: "The act of participating in obviously pointless activities as an expedient alternative to actually expending effort to fix a problem." Even after reading his masterpiece and listening to lengthy discussions in the comments, I still doubted this to be true of social media. I mean, I've heard dozens of stories of how different things have raised tons of money for a cause through social media avenues and how they had tremendous success at the same time. Yet in our case so far, probably 95% of the money raised all came through offline connections we have with friends and family members. To say it has got me down a bit would probably be an epic understatement. We now find ourselves just a mere 3 days before our deposit deadline of September 10th short of our total goal we wanted to raise.

So here's my challenge to everyone: We have three days to raise basically $5,000. Can you help me prove that social media does not suffer from slacktivism by making a monetary donation of any sort? Maybe right now you are strapped tight and don't have the extra to share. I get that & understand completely. As someone who owns his own business and has a family with two young children I truly understand. If you can't give monetarily, will you at least assist me by sharing this post with your friends on the various social networks? The more people who view this post means the more chances we have to reaching our goal by the deadline. I've heard sayings before "There's strength in numbers" and "Many hands make the load light" which I believe are both very applicable right now.

If you are like me, you have probably think a small donation wouldn't do much help, so why even bother. My type of personality can sometimes be that all or nothing type, where if I can't give the $5,000 needed, then there's no point in giving any. But, if 500 people each made a $10 donation, we would have things covered in full. Most everyone I know has the ability to spare that right now. That's the equivalent of a Frappuccino & bagel one morning at Starbucks or a #9 value meal at McDonald's.

So can you help us out? I'm placing the donation form below. If you make a donation, please let me know by either tweeting about it with the hashtag #5KFORSA. If you are not on Twitter, send me a message on Facebook or whatever other means you want. You can also assist us by sharing this post on social networks, or through a re-blog. I appreciate your help and look forward to reaching our goal!

Let me finish by saying this, if this post offended you or upset you, I apologize. I promise that this will be the only time you hear me ask for donations for this trip on this site. As I stated in my opening paragraph, I debated writing here for several months before constructing this post. I felt that as this is my most popular site of all the ones I own, it would be the most likely place to share this post. If you want to follow along as we take this upcoming trip, I hope to update this site while we are gone.

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I am the Co-Founder of 210 Consulting- Social Media Advisors. I have traveled the country as a social media speaker. If you would like more information on any of the topics discussed in this blog, please contact me directly. We specialize in social media training, online consulting, and the creation of your own custom WordPress site.

Feel free to subscribe to my blog to keep up to date with my latest posts of tips & tricks to enhance your experience on ActiveRain. If you would like, you can sign up to receive updates via email directly in your inbox.

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What Is Your Online Shelf Life?

Jeremy Blanton (210 Consulting~ Social Media Advisors) — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 11:10:55 -0800

Social media is beginning to play more of a role in the online marketing of your business if done correctly. Unfortunately though, too many times we get distracted by social media tools that end up becoming our main focus for our business online. Which is why one of the topics I love to speak on the most is the importance of your website, or online home base.

What's Does The Expiration Label Say?

A study done by URL shortening service bit.ly shared that on average, the shelf life for most links shared on either Twitter or Facebook is around 3 hours. That means that most content you would share on social networks will only survive around 3 hours before it loses it's power.

So, before you begin building a strategy of using a Facebook page as the hub for your business, consider the fact that if you aren't constantly updating this page every few hours, you are not getting your message, your product or service out in front of consumers. Sure, you could set up a bunch of scheduled post updates and monitor things all day long, but is that the most effective way to run your business? Personally I'm not a fan of things with such a short expiration date.

Push Versus Pull

While Social Networks have the ability to grow a huge community of followers, the only source of traffic is that social network. So, if you have 2,000 followers on Twitter, your audience is just those 2,000 people unless you get lucky enough for someone to re-tweet you. Facebook, is pretty much the same way, your content getting shared beyond your sphere is dependent on a viewer sharing it for you. So, you must keep pushing the content in hopes your sphere will also push it beyond your page to others.

While some think this may be the absolute best way to run your online presence, I prefer going with a pull process instead of pushing. What I mean, is that I prefer focusing my time and effort on creating content on my actual website that I own. That way, I can drive my Twitter followers, my Facebook Fans, LinkedIn connections, G+ Circles and other social connections to my site. But, in addition to pushing that traffic to a site, I also can pull in traffic, a new sphere of potential clients and more all through the search engines.

Take a look at this chart showing traffic sources driving visitors to my site:

As you can see in comparison to all other sources of site traffic, Google alone is sending over 68% of the traffic to my site. This traffic are visitors who are typing phrases into the search engine looking for answers and finding my site in the results. You can see Facebook, Twitter and YouTube do a good job of driving traffic to my site, but they are not anywhere near the amount of traffic that comes from search engines. This traffic is being pulled in by me writing content they find instead of me pushing something down their social streams.

To make sure it wasn't just my site that had these types of proportions of traffic, I then decided to look at the data for a few of my clients that I work with closely as their social media advisor to see what their traffic source breakdown looked like.

Take a look at the charts below that represents sources of traffic to two of my clients sites:

As you can see, both of these clients had almost the same identical percentage breakdown of traffic sources into their site. While social networks push a good amount of traffic to their site, they cannot compete with the amount that is pulled in from Google and other search engines.

Creating A Lifetime Warranty

When you focus your online marketing efforts on creating good content on your own site and not hours on Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking strategies you can create content that can last a lifetime. When you begin to blog or create pages of content, you need to make sure you are answering the questions that your readers want answered. For example, a post I wrote in June 2011 on Tracking Your Images Through Google has consistently remained one of the top viewed posts on my site.

In fact, this past month it received more traffic than even the home page of my site. Other posts that I wrote on another site back when selling real estate over four years ago still to this day generate leads and make my phone ring. This work is the kinds of work that you only need to do once and you can reap the rewards from it for years to come. The beautiful part is that if I begin to notice a slip in my rankins, I simply write another post on that subject, link back to the well ranking post and it will start to climb back up.

I don't spend buckets of money each month on Google Sponsored Ad Placements, or on other Pay-Per-Click campaigns. I simply find terms applicable to my business and then generate content that helps my site to rank on page one of Google for those terms. While it may take my site a little longer to garner the results I want, the big difference between ranking organically and with PPC is that the minute I stop paying for an ad campaign (PPC), I also lose any source of traffic and leads as my site will disappear off of the first page of SERPS. If you start paying again, you come back up and the minute you stop, you drop again. Personally, I'm not a fan of my site acting like a yo-yo.

If you rank organically for a term and don't do it through shortcuts, you shouldn't ever see a sudden dip in how your site ranks on certain keywords. You may from time to time see things drop maybe one or two places. This is more than likely caused by your site sitting dormant or a change in Google's algorithm that determines how things should be ranked.

When this happens, if you simply go back, write some new content, link to the page that was ranking well and possibly give that well ranking page a slight content refresh, you should be able to climb right back up the search engine ladder. In essence what I have done is created content that can generate leads for a lifetime versus a social network in which you must continuously feed new material to reach that audience.

What Is Your Online Shelf Life?

In closing I want to leave you with this question: What is the shelf life of your online presence? Is it something you are building to last forever, or is it something that spoils faster than a loaf of bread?

Feel free to contact me if your website has been lacking and we can discuss strategies to turn it into a long time source of revenue to your business.

photo by: smplyme84

Originally Posted at: 210 Consulting- Social Media Advisors

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Would You Pay Snooki $6,250 To Advertise For You Online?

Jeremy Blanton (210 Consulting~ Social Media Advisors) — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 12:29:49 -0800

I should probably start by saying I've never seen Jersey Shore, and had to honestly do a Google search the first time I heard her name to find out who she was. I quickly realized why I never watched the show after watching a 2:13 YouTube video of her "best quotes."

That being said, the other day I was flipping through websites and came across one that gives you the opportunity to purchase advertising. You can purchase the normal ad spots on a site for a month, or pay someone to send a Tweet for you. While there I wanted to see who the most expensive ad which as you probably have guessed by now, was Snooki. If I gave her $6,250 she would send out one tweet of anything I wanted.

While I thought of all the cruel and fun things I could do to friends by having someone with over 6 million followers tweet something, I then started thinking more about how this could be for business and if it would be valuable for a business to spend that kind of money.

So, I started to think about my business and would I pay $6,250 to have Snooki send one tweet for me? I tried to break it down into numbers to see if it would make sense. Here's what I came up with:

If I pay per character sent and follow their rules of using only 110 characters to leave room for re-tweets, it would cost around $56/character.
If I pay per user, that would mean I'm paying $1 per 990 users.
If I pay based on Hubspot's 2.8 hour half life, I'm paying $37.21 per minute of life of the tweet.

So I really started pondering if this was the best use of marketing dollars a company could use. Would you open up your bank account and give Snooki $6,250 for tweet about your product or service?

For me, I'll probably stick to simply building my own community the old fashioned way and use that money towards many other things.

Originally Posted at: 210 Consulting- Social Media Advisors

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5 Tips To Dealing with Difficult Clients On The Phone

Jeremy Blanton (210 Consulting~ Social Media Advisors) — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 22:30:09 -0700

Handling Difficult Clients On The Phone

Have you ever had a phone call with someone like the gentlemant to the right? No matter how wrong they may be, the only thing they want is for you to listen to them yell & scream and tell you how horrible you are.

While the days of text messaging & mobile phone apps seem to be at an all time high, some would argue that actual phone skills don't seem that big anymore. There are now mobile apps for just about anything you could possibly imagine. Everything from restaurant reviews, paying bills, and more can be done on the right types of phones. Even though these new apps & ideas are are streamlining the amount of time we may spend talking on a phone there are still times you will need to speak to an upset customer.

Proper phone skills are crucial to any type of business that exists. It is imperative that you handle angry clients properly when on the phone. If a person becomes displeased while on the phone with you, you just lost their business forever. Plus, they will probably then pick up the phone and call all their close friends to complain as well. You have now not only lost the business of that client, but also their entire sphere of connections.

That being said, here are 5 Tips to Handling Difficult Phone Calls with consumers.

Tip #1

When on the phone with an angry person, let them do the talking. Sometimes they just need to blow off steam and get what has been on their chest for the past week out in the open. If you begin cutting them off you will just increase their anger about the situation.

Tip #2

Don't Argue! No matter how wrong the person may be, if you begin challenging what they are saying and arguing with them on the phone, you will never make any progress at solving the problem. Instead you will just intensify the situation until they probably hang up on you never to be heard of again.

Tip #3

Show sincerity and concern. I think the age old saying "People don't care how much you know until the know how much you care" is key to problemsolving. They want you to realize that their problem is a major issue to them and that they don't just want you telling them what you are gonna do.

Tip #4

Don't Patronize! Don't behave towards someone in a way which is kind and friendly but nevertheless shows that you are being condescending. People hate that and can pick up on it almost instantly.

Tip #5

Lead them to the answer. My father tells me constantly that it is not always right to be right. When dealing with difficult people on the phone, if you can lead them to the answer and allow them to discover it on their own, it will make them feel better. You may have to eat a piece of humble pie when they tell you that they figured it out and you didn't, but at least they will end the call feeling good instead of upset and wanting to end the business relationship. Besides remember, it's not about you, it's about them.

I hope these 5 tips help increase your business. If there are other tips you use that work effectively, leave them here!

Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tudor/255272612/

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Is Your WordPress Site Secure?

Jeremy Blanton (210 Consulting~ Social Media Advisors) — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 14:44:28 -0800

I hope everyone enjoyed their holiday to it's fullest extent by spending lot's of time with friends and family, shopping their hearts out, decorating the home and lastly resting enough to sleep off the turkey coma.

For me, my Thanksgiving holiday was spent doing much less fun things. On Thanksgiving eve I logged into one of my sites and noticed it had a few updates that needed to be installed. So, as I normally do, I clicked button to install the updates and everything went downhill from there. Because the sites were not updated in over a month due to me being out of the country with limited to no internet access, the updates did not get installed in a timely manner and it allowed for my sites to get attacked/hacked.

Since the site was on a shared server, the attacks shut down 8 of my sites and took me several days of work to get them back up & running again with the help of Sucuri to clean up the malware. (affiliate) Granted, most of the sites that got attacked were not used for much other than testing things for my clients custom WordPress sites, but some of the ones affected were rather important to my online presence.

In particular, one site I was very upset to see attacked was the new product reviews site I built, New Shiny Object. This site reviews products that you may want to purchase and with it being just a few days from the busiest time of the year for shopping, I wanted this site along with all my other ones back up & running as soon as possible.

Most of my sites had a free backup plugin installed that keeps a copy of the content on the site alone & emails it to you. But, the design customizations, installed plugins, and SEO work does not get backed up in the file it sends. Luckily for me, the most important site was able to be restored quickly & easily because of my recent change in back up services. The new service offers the ability to backup not only the content of the website, but also a full backup of everything to an Amazon S3 cloud server.

A quick download of the file and install back to the server and that site was back online. The other sites on the other hand took countless hours of work on my behalf to restore settings, plugins, themes etc. So, instead of it taking hours like my other sites, New Shiny Object was back up & running in just a few minutes.

Back in July I soft launched the WordPress backup serviceto my clients as well because of the tremendous value I saw in it. I soft launched it to make sure that I knew what I was doing, and also to really test the system and make sure everything worked the way it said it should. Well, after several months testing around 15 clients and after the events of this past weekend, I think it is time to start offering this service to more and more people.

That being said, here is what the new backup service includes:

Daily database backups to an Amazon S3 server with the 14 most recent days saved.
Full site backup (database, files, plugins, theme customizations, the works) saved on Amazon S3 servers every two weeks. (most recent 2 full backups kept minimum)
Full Restoration service of site in case of attack.
Daily email notifications that site has been backed up.
Email notifications if there is an error reported during backup.
Access to Sucuri Malware scanner inside WordPress dashboard to scan your site for malware manually.

Pricing for this is being offered as either month to month or annually. If you have more than one site you would like to have backed up, your second site is less.

Of course, this product will only work on self hosted WordPress sites or the WordPress.org versions. If you have a WordPress.com site, feel free to contact me about get you switched over.

Get Started:

Monthly : $15.00 USD - monthlyAnnual : $120.00 USD - yearlyTwo Sites : $25.00 USD - monthlyTwo Sites Annually : $180.00 USD - yearly photo by: Don Hankins

Originally Posted at: 210 Consulting- Social Media Advisors

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Returned & Recharged For 2013

Jeremy Blanton (210 Consulting~ Social Media Advisors) — Fri, 14 Dec 2012 08:25:47 -0800

Wow, the past month has flown by. My trip away was beyond amazing & life changing. Not only did I get to make an impact on lives of others during the past month, but I also got to see some of the most beautiful places I've ever been in the world. The photo to the right was one I took while in Cape Town, South Africa.

While I was gone I decided I would start my Thanksgiving early and start reflecting back on this past year and some of the things I'm thankful for from the past year. Since I had over 50 hours of time spent on airplanes over the past month, there was plenty of time for reflecting and planning for the future of the business too.

First, I looked at my goals coming into 2012 and what goals I accomplished. A big goal I had for 2012 was to increase my opportunities to travel the country as a social media speaker. In previous years, I was asked to attend maybe 5-8 conferences in a year to present. However in 2012, those numbers increased dramatically. This year I traveled to over 20 cities all around the country to share as a social media speaker. I would say this goal was definitely accomplished.

Another goal of 2012 was to help more people realize the value of WordPress for their website solution. During 2012 I was able to share with thousands how awesome WordPress can be through webinars, conferences, and company meetings. In addition, I also helped over 30 clients get their own custom WordPress site designed. Overall, the goals set for 2012 were pretty well met, or even exceeded.

What to expect in 2013?

Seeing how there are only a few weeks left in 2013, I figured while I had all that time on the plane without much else to do, it would be the perfect time to start planning ahead for the coming year and setting goals. Here's a few of them so far:

Just like in 2012, one of my top goals is to secure more opportunities to present at conferences as a social media speaker. I've already began signing agreements for conferences in 2013. If you have an event coming up or a company you would like me to come speak to, feel free to contact me to discuss presentation topics, rates, times, etc. I want 2013 to be my busiest year yet of travel.

My next big goal for 2013 is to help even more people in getting started with WordPress. To accomplish this there are several things I'm implementing. First is the public launch of a new WordPress starter package I'm offering. I soft launched this product at the beginning of October at a conference and the responses were great. This low cost option is perfect for someone getting started with wordpress. It features a basic blog setup with design and all the plugins you would need to get your site running for a one time setup fee. You will hear more on this over the next few weeks. Of course, I will still be offering the custom WordPress site option for those who want something more involved than just a basic setup.

The third goal for 2013 is to help people protect their WordPress sites from being attacked. While I was gone on my missions trip, some of my sites were attacked and hacked. I've spent the past three days over Thanksgiving getting them all restored and back running. Just like the starter WordPress sites, I soft launched a WordPress backup service using Backupbuddy that I provide to clients on a monthly basis this past year. In 2013 I plan on offering the service to everyone to help keep their sites secure and safe. One of the worst feelings in the world is having your site go down and no backup in place.

Unlike the free backups I install when building a site, this one backs up everything on the site, not just the content. That includes the plugins installed, design customizations, SEO work, etc. In addition, it saves the backup of your site to an Amazon S3 storage cloud server so everything is safe from an attack on a shared server. In my instance, I had 8 domains on the shared server and all 8 were taken down by the attack. Currently I have around a dozen clients using this service and hope to increase that number dramatically in 2013 to keep everyone protected.

The next big thing I want to get back to doing more of is webinars in 2013. When I started the company back 3 years ago, it was one of the main things we offered. We offered at least 2-3 webinars each and every month. I pay good money each month for software and don't always use it to it's fullest potential. So, be on the lookout for more webinars in 2013. Some will be free, some might cost money to attend. I also hope to do more webinars in 2013 with special guests. If you have a topic or want to do a guest webinar in 2013 with me, feel free to contact me to discuss your topic and schedule. As they become available, I will post them to my upcoming classes page.

The final goal for 2013 is to write more. During the past year I became lax on blogging on my various sites. In 2012 I created a product review site that has set dormant for months now. I hope to begin contributing more there as well as adding several guest writers there as well. I also help to take one of my personal blogs that have set dormant and turn it into a place to start sharing more of my images I've been taking. Don't worry, I also plan on adding many more tips, ideas, and helpful hints here to increase your business online.

Over the last year I've found myself really enjoying photography and want to share some of those images with others. I have not yet decided on which site I'm going to convert into more of a photo blog, but when I do, I'll let you know. One thing for sure, I hope that in 2013 I'll get back into the habit of sharing more quality content with my readers.

So that's it, that is the game plan moving into the new year. I've got a bunch on my plate, but I wouldn't have it any other way. I look forward to what the new year holds and the things that are to come!

Originally Posted at: 210 Consulting- Social Media Advisors

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Blogging With WordPress Webinar Sept 14th 1PM Est

Jeremy Blanton (210 Consulting~ Social Media Advisors) — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 10:06:07 -0700

Almost every day I receive email from clients who want to better results from their online marketing. Normally the conversations begin with some sort of statement to me like: "I wanna get started on Facebook" to which I always respond: How's your blog doing?

To me your blog is your home base, one of the quickest and easiest ways to share information to your audience at a place that you own and can completely control. Also, Google and other search engines love the constant stream of new content which will help with your search engine rankings as well. Blogs also give you the ability to share your content quickly & easily with all of the social networks. Finally, the statistics show that businesses who blog receive 55% more online traffic than those who do not which is just another reason why you should be blogging today.

Join me Friday September 14th at 1PM Eastern for "Blogging With WordPress."

During this one hour webinar I will share with you how to get started with blogging as well as discuss with you some of the many great features that a self hosted WordPress site has.

photo by: Mykl Roventine: Out & About

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Are You Here To Comment On My Blog Or Sell Me Something?

Jeremy Blanton (210 Consulting~ Social Media Advisors) — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 06:17:41 -0700

The other day a buddy of mine sent me a message on Facebook of someone who had commented on his new WordPress Blog that he is building. He found it strange that he had received a comment as the site isn't finished yet, and the content in the comment seemed a little odd. Over the past few months we have discussed me designing a Custom WordPress Site for him in the near future.

The random comment was made by a "Bruce" whose site domain entered had nothing to do with WordPress sites, Agentpress themes, SEO, or anything close. His site domain was a religious one. So when my friend asked me about it, I said, do you have the IP address? I had a hunch.

To look into things a little more, I asked him to send me the comment because it just seemed rather strange & awkward that someone would not only come & comment on a blog that isn't even built yet, but to also that the comment would randomly suggest someone to redesign his site.

Here's a screen capture of the comment:

The first thing I did was a simple IP lookup to find what I had expected. The IP address of the commenter on his post who suggested a company to do site work for him was in the same location as the company suggested. Now, I don't know for certain that the commenter & suggested company are the same, but my gut feeling is that they are since the site that was commented on was 2,300 miles away and the company mentioned to hire does have connections to my friend through various social networks.

Now maybe I'm the only one that finds this kind of tactics really below par, sneaky, and shameful. If you feel that someone should hire you because they could really benefit from your services, then simply email the site owner and tell them. I've done this before with many people. Some I've helped by giving them solutions to fix something wrong on their site, others have gone on to hire me to do work on their site instead. But, to impersonate someone else and push your services in the comment on someone's site is just wrong.

A common courtesy when commenting on someone else's site is to not try & push your services, or link to something off the current domain you are visiting. When you have a WordPress site, you gather all the information needed to check where someone is commenting from. This is just another reason why having your own Custom WordPress Site can be a great addition to your online marketing strategy.

Let's all try exhibiting a little common comment courtesy and stick to adding comments of value, not selling our products or services dishonestly.

photo by: photosteve101

Originally Posted at: 210 Consulting- Social Media Advisors

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How To Use ScribeFire to Enhance Your ActiveRain Blog Posts

Brad Andersohn (Zillow - Natl Outreach Mgr & Dir of Zillow Academy) — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 16:26:58 -0800

How To Use ScribeFire to Enhance Your ActiveRain Blog Posts

Scribefire.com is a great 3rd party add-on to the Mozilla Firefox Browser. Lately, the emails and calls have been coming in about how to setup AR Blogs, get API's, and how to use Scribefire with ActiveRain Blog posts. First off, the reason I mention Scribefire is that it is one of the few third party apps I have found that works well and doesn't conflict with the AR Network HTML format.

Really Important

Some members on AR use MS Word, Publisher, Front Page and other sources which often times (but not always) has hidden HTML codes, tables, and formatting that is incompatible with ActiveRain. You've seen them, you know the ones, these are the posts that show funky looking codes, push the sidebar half way down the page, and make Blogs look like "you know what" when they load on your computer screen.

Why Use Scribefire?

Though the AR Blog Post editor may seem somewhat simplified and to some, a bit archaic, it still does a great job for creating great text content, adding images, photos and links, and producing search engine friendly creations. However there are many who want to customize and create larger fonts, add color to their fonts, use a different style of font etc. This is where Scribefire does a great job and works well with AR.

THE MAIN REASON FOR POSTING THIS

Where most of our members get hung up is when downloading Scribefire as their Firefox add-on. Somewhere in the process, Scribefire asks for your Blog URL, API, and other information that IS NOT NECESSARY to begin using the Scribefire tools on ActiveRain. The requested and "perceived as required" information is ONLY for use on Blogging Platforms where you plan to use ScribeFire as the total replacement tool for creating your Blog posts. IE: Wordpress, Blogger, Self-Hosted Blogs etc. NOT ON ACTIVERAIN.

Here's the Scoop on How It Works

Go to Scribefire.com, download it and add to your Firefox Browser. BYPASS all the additional questions and other stuff they want you to enter. (unless you are using scribefire on another blogging platform) To begin using the Scribefire tools and options, just press the "hotkeys" FUNCTION + F8 while in the edit mode of a Blog post, and the Scribefire Window (shown below) will open up in the lower section of your computer screen. Now you will have two areas to work in, your AR Blog post, and the Scribefire editing window.

Create your text, change your font color, select a larger sized font, use a variety of different style fonts, have a field day, and when you're done, just highlight the section you've created in the Scribefire window, copy it (CTRL+C) and then paste it into your AR Blog post body (CTRL+V) You can do this using the ActiveRain WYSIWYG tab. Save your post in "draft" mode to be sure everything looks just as you want it, then make the necessary changes you want before making your post public.

DISCLAIMER.. I mean Warning.. NO... A QUICK TIP!

One thing to be careful of is that you don't go CRAZY with Font Colors and sizes. Sometimes the colored fonts and multiple sized text can make your Blog Post hard to read and unpleasing to the eye. Yellow font colors are difficult to read, Big Fonts can take away from the message in the little fonts, and multi-colored Blog post (for some) can and will cause nausea. (IMO)

SUMMARY and PURPOSE

The Scribefire add-on tools will allow you to enhance your AR Blog posts to your liking, give you a bit more versatility, and keep the AR network and your Blog clean of those Hidden and incompatible HTML codes. Many of these outside third party apps can and will make Blogs on AR look like "you know what" and frustrate AR members beyond your wildest imagination. I'm not kidding, you should see and hear some of the emails and calls I get. lol~ NOT!! :-)

Scribefire

For my next trick, we'll look at how to insert iFrames and tables into your Blog post without completely blowing out your Blog. This is one of the more common errors I see on ActiveRain by members that not only affects your AR Blog, but does even worse things to your Localism and Outside Blogs.

Tutorials | Training | Mobile | Tools | Websites

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Come Join Me In Tampa On August 6th, 2012

Jeremy Blanton (210 Consulting~ Social Media Advisors) — Mon, 23 Jul 2012 19:00:21 -0700

I am truly blessed to travel the country as a social media speaker and participate in some amazing conferences. One of the benefits is getting to make friends with awesome people from around the country. Some of my favorite people in the world will be joining me in Tampa, Florida on August 6th for a wonderful evening event that I would love for you to join.

During the event we will be discussing ways to make your business profit from using online marketing. There will be presentations like Mastering Facebook in 20 Minutes a Day, Becoming a Twitterqueen, Apps that make you more productive and more. I will closing the event with a presentation that will help to bring all of the different strategies, concepts, tools, and apps together and have it make sense. The title of my presentation is "Building a Successful Mousetrap."

During this session we will discuss the importance of a good website that you own instead and how you can use the power of all the social networks to drive traffic to your site and convert it into transactions.

Check out the below who some of the awesome speakers are for this event:

Mike Mueller is a former Mortgage Banker, Mortgage Broker turned “Tech Geek” who specializes in Social Media. He is a nationally recognized builder of engaging Custom Facebook Business Pages and WordPress blogs.

Mike writes AreWeConnected.com, a blog dealing with social media and technology. He publishes articles in the San Francisco Examiner and the BusinessWeek Exchange. AreWeConnected is listed in Alltop and ranked by AdAge. He has been interviewed and quoted in articles for BankRate, Scripps, the San Jose Mercury News and others, (including the front page of The Wall Street Journal for writing mortgage related Haikus).

Cyndee Haydon is a straight talking full time Realtor® with Charles Rutenberg Realty, Inc, in Clearwater Florida specializing in the "bluest backyards". She uses technology especially video to leverage the ability to connect with their ideal clients. They have successfully grown their real estate business 356% over the last 4 years. http://www.sandbarstosunsets.com/

Craig Grant, “The Real Estate Tech Guru”, is one of the TOP Technology and Marketing Instructors around delivering over 100 speaking engagements to over 5000 REALTORS each year. As his motto, “Advanced Real Estate Technology Instruction at a Pre-K Level” states his job is to make the confusing world of technology EASY and FUN for everyone! Craig was the 2011 Chairman of Education & Technology for Florida REALTORS®, Member of their GRI Task Force, member of REEA & a Top Technology & Marketing Consultant for REALTORS®. http://www.reti.ws/Craig_Grant/

Lesley Lambert offers 21 years experience in real estate, public speaking and training. Lesley has a degree in communications and was the recipient of an international award for coordinating media in real estate. In the course of her career Lesley has presented at international real estate conferences and state REALTOR associations, hosted a real estate television program, written articles for trade magazines and created marketing and PR plans for many individuals, companies and non-profits. http://www.lesleylambert.com/

Lynn Van Meter, is the CEO, Owner of Fiddlehead Marketing Advertising Public Relations, located in Spring Hill, Florida. She holds a Master’s in Business Administration, and a BA in Public Relations. In addition to developing marketing & advertising campaigns for businesses, her niche and passion is face-to-face marketing, spreading the news about businesses by shaking hands and engaging in conversation. www.fiddlehead-mktg.com

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Even With Over 900 Million Users, Facebook Is Still A Rental Space

Jeremy Blanton (210 Consulting~ Social Media Advisors) — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 08:06:28 -0700

Not too long ago Facebook released it's latest stats saying it now has over 900 million members. While this is a very impressive milestone, there is one thing I hear from people that makes me want to simply bang my head against my desk is a statement similar to the following one:

Websites and SEO are dead! They are now being replaced by Facebook.

Say what? Last time I checked, my site here is still alive and thriving and the number one marketing tool for generating income. I've got a fantastic Facebook page with a wonderful Facebook app that was built by my friend Mike Mueller. I update these regularly and they do help my business. But, I do not focus my energy on driving traffic to this Facebook page. Instead I try using Facebook and any other social networks that I am on to drive those readers to my WordPress site.

Why? Well, it is pretty simple. Facebook, Twitter, and any other social networks that you use are not owned by you. Even if you purchased shares in Facebook, you still don't own the space you use there and run the risk of being shut down or deleted at any moment if you do something wrong, or get accidentally caught in a glitch of the system. It's like renting a home. You may want to paint the walls in the house green, but if the landlord says no, you can't do it.

Better yet, what if Facebook changes something you don't like. Where do you send your complaint? Does your complaint get addressed in a timely manner? I don't know about you, but I've never once got someone on the phone or by email from Facebook to actually speak to me directly. I was told once that in order to get a personal account representative at Facebook you need to be advertising on their platform and spending around $10,000 per month. I'm not sure about you, but I don't have quite that type of money available.

The fact of the matter is that they are going to do whatever they want and you don't have much say. I laugh whenever they make a change to design or features. Almost instantly a new page on Facebook is created complaining about the change that picks up a few million fans hoping that if they band together they can get things changed. Unfortunately, that doesn't happen, but at least misery has company.

Shift Your Home Base

Instead of focusing all your energy on building a large following on Facebook or another social network, you need to direct all that energy and time to building traffic on your website. It's the only thing out there that you in control of. If you have a custom WordPress siteand you want to add a feature to the design, you can. If you don't want a feature available anymore, you simply log in and delete it. It is your home base that you can claim ownership over and not have to worry about losing at any moment as long as you continue to pay for your domain registration and hosting plan.

This is where most of your time should be spent. Not on sites that could disappear at any moment.

Re-Focus Your Strategy

Here's where I see a lot of mistakes. We spend our time trying to drive our traffic to like us or follow us on a particular network. It might work well right now, but if you put all your efforts into driving your readers all to a Facebook page that is shut down all of a sudden, they are lost the minute the page dies. Instead, if your readers are in the habit of coming to your website and your page gets shut down, the loss is very minimal.

Maybe you are thinking that I am just being negative by all this talk of pages being shut down, so let's shift gears a moment. Unless you have a custom app on Facebook, how does someone view your products, make a purchase or even simply contact you about making a purchase? It's virtually impossible to do so. If a consumer wants to make a purchase, they would at some point need to be pushed to a website to do so.

Your website is where your products or services can be featured. It's where I can learn more about your business. It's also the one component of your online marketing that has lasting power. Blog posts I wrote four year ago still bring me business today. Facebook and Twitter status rarely live past 24 hours.

So, before you begin focusing more time and effort into building a large group on a social network, or platform that isn't your main website, realize that you are using a platform that is here today and could be gone tomorrow.

photo by: Thos003

Originally Posted at: 210 Consulting- Social Media Advisors

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What Inspires Your Blog Content?

Jeremy Blanton (210 Consulting~ Social Media Advisors) — Tue, 22 May 2012 11:04:11 -0700

Coming up with ideas for blog content on a regular basis can be rather difficult for many people. It’s one of the biggest objections I hear whenever I speak on blogging. How do you think up new stuff to write about that isn’t just a repeat of something you have already done?

During this month long challenge of 21 blog posts in 21 business days, I’ve found myself at times even pondering what to write on next. But, what I have come to the conclusion is that by using one of the four options below to inspire content for your blog, you should almost always have a wealth of content available. These are the four areas I turn to when I am trying to think of something to write about:

1. Content written by others. No, I don’t mean go copy & paste something you liked that was written by someone else. That’s called plagiarism. What I mean is go out & read content written by others in your industry. You will come across posts that you like that you can then write in your own words or make it applicable to your area.

Another thing I do with these posts written by others on a rather regular basis is use it as a underlying theme to a post. I may write what I liked or didn’t like about the other person’s post. Or I may write a blog post why I agree or disagree with a concept/idea that they shared. This is a great source of content for your blog, and can also help you learn things from time to time.

2. New Products. No matter what type of business or blog you run, there is always something new coming to that industry. Either some new piece of technology comes about or you find something that you really enjoy implementing into your business. When you find these things, they can make some really great topics for blog posts. People love learning about new things and how they might be able to use it to make their job easier. I’ve written numerous posts about things I use when building a custom WordPress site for a client and have received many comments thanking me for providing help to others.

3. Past Experiences. Getting content ideas from here can be a blessing or a curse depending on what you pick to write about. In the past I have shared funny stories of working with clients, but some that share stories can end up getting into hot water by sharing things that they probably shouldn’t have. You have to always remember to use a good level of discretion when writing content for your website as it will live on the internet forever.

But, on the other hand sharing things you have experienced and had to do in the past to reach a level of success or accomplishment can make great content for your blog.

4. Your Inbox. This last area is probably my biggest secret weapon for new blog content. Every day I receive anywhere from 10-20 emails from clients of past, current, and potential regarding all types of topics. What I realized a few years ago was that if I was receiving the same question on a regular basis from those I’m connected to, how many other thousands of people were asking the same question and looking for an answer. The video tutorials alone that I have created to answer questions related to WordPress have generated well over 3,000 views.

These are the ways I come up with content for my blog. What about you? What is your inspiration for your blog topics?

photo by: jmoneyyyyyyy

Originally Posted at: 210 Consulting- Social Media Advisors- What Inspires Your Blog Content?

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Structuring Videos on YouTube For SEO

Jeremy Blanton (210 Consulting~ Social Media Advisors) — Fri, 11 May 2012 05:20:31 -0700

As we are well aware by now, YouTube is the world's second largest search engine with over 4 billion videos now watched each day. This means that it is an awesome way to gain exposure for your business online.

However, what most do not realize is that there are some basic principles to creating your videos that if followed will make them more popular to the search engines and increase your overall views exponentially.

At first I thought this was a theory until I recently did a video of my daughter and a new toy that she received for Christmas called a My Baby Alive. This is one of the more strange toys she has ever received as it pees & poops. I wanted to see if search engine optimization mattered or not, so I tested my theory on this video by doing a little keyword research and then implementing it into my video before uploading to YouTube.

Here's a quick tutorial on what I did:

So, if you apply some basic SEO principles to your video, I really feel you can begin to increase the number of views your videos receive. Have you ever tried applying these principles when uploading a video to YouTube?

Originally Posted at: 210 Consulting- Social Media Advisors

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The Art of Uni-Tasking

Jeremy Blanton (210 Consulting~ Social Media Advisors) — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 08:59:15 -0700

This past week I was in Atlanta, GA for a real estate tech conference where I got the honor of hearing my friend Matthew Shadbolt deliver a very powerful presentation on how social media is ruining us. He shared about the addictions people are forming to the instant gratification and recognition they receive on social networks like Twitter & Facebook. The mentions, likes & comments we receive release a level of oxytocin that makes us feel better. Once a person starts to receive some, it becomes even more addicting.

It gets to the point where people spend hours at a time bouncing from one social network to another trying to find another dose. Not only is the addiction a bad thing, but it has also caused more and more people to do more multitasking each and every day. No longer are we just focusing on our duties for our job, but we also splitting our time that should be spent working on a task on Facebook updates, Twitter statuses, and all other types of social networks.

While I used to believe that by multitasking I was accomplishing more. I also used to brag at how well I could do it and how I could do so many things at once. But what Matthew shared in his presentation changed my whole thinking. No longer am I going to try & multitask. Instead, I've implemented a new work into my daily routine called uni-tasking.

To me, uni-tasking means I will no longer keep my inbox, Facebook, Twitter, iMovie and several other networks/programs open at the same time and bounce from one to another. Instead, I am going to only do one at a time and shut the other networks off.

On Monday I tested this theory to see how it would work. I shut everything off but my inbox. I took the next three hours and spent just the time on email. What I noticed is that I was able to respond to everything I need and seemed to be much more focused on it while doing so. I also found I didn't miss the likes, mentions and praises that the social networks provide. I was then able to move on to another task without having to wonder if everything was finished or not. I found myself more productive than I've been in weeks and had everything done to then spend time with family.

So in closing, this uni-tasking might just be the best thing I implement into my business in a long time. If you don't believe me, give it a try and see if you receive the same results. My guess is you will be amazed at what you can accomplish by trying to just do one thing at a time.

photo by: ryantron.

Originally Posted at: 210 Consulting- Social Media Advisors

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Are You Over Optimizing Your Website?

Jeremy Blanton (210 Consulting~ Social Media Advisors) — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 14:37:17 -0700

While search engine optimization plays such a crucial role in how well your business does online, one of the ever increasing issues I see from various SEO companies is the over optimization on customers websites. While there is great importance in having the SEO information done properly on your website, it is even more important that things do not go overboard. Going overboard can result in a website being either penalized greatly or possibly even banned from search results.

Also, search engine optimization is not a quick fix for any website. If your results come that quick, more than likely you are doing something in a way you shouldn't, and that will catch up to you in just a matter of time. So, be careful in who you hire to do your SEO work. Don't trust those that promise the world for just some dollars. Get involved and be a part of making your website effective. Ask specific questions as to what they are going to do to make your rank better. Don't let them just decide on some random keywords, but ask what type of traffic those keywords get each month.

Whenever I do SEO work for a client, I provide them with a spreadsheet showing them the monthly search of many of the keywords related to their business. Not only is this helpful for the initial setup, but this list is also very handy when you are trying to find topics to blog about or just know what keyword phrase to use in the post. I once had a client that by changing one word in the keyword phrase increased the popularity of searches from 180/month to 8,800/month.

Google Doesn't Like Over Optimization

When I hear someone say a site is over optimized, I immediately think either someone doesn't know what they are doing, or they are trying to use some less than honorable black/grey SEO tricks to push a site up the search engines. While this might do what they are looking for and push that website to page 1 of Google quickly, the site will inevitably be found by Google and penalized. If you remember back a few months ago, I shared about the JC Penney debacle and how when they were caught by Google, the penalties took them from #1 in the results to not even being found on the first 5+ pages.

Whenever I build a custom WordPress Site for a client, I make sure to try and follow all of these guidelines as close as possible to keep my clients from danger. Does it make the process of reaching page one results take longer? Yes, but I'd rather it take more time of them writing good quality blog posts and sharing valuable content that lasts for years than get instant results that end up being banned in just a few months. Post that I wrote over four years ago on an old blog of mine still bring business to me today.

My main site 210 Consulting ranks well in the search engines for several keywords and I've never once paid for SEO work. Instead, I've simply taken the time to write blog posts that are search engine friendly, and done the work on my own of building good quality backlinks through guest blogging, commenting on other sites, and other good SEO tactics.

If you would like more information on how to write blogs for search engines feel free to contact me and we can schedule a coaching session to get your site started in the direction of page one of the search engines to stay.

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