Synergy

January 29th, 2008

Synergy is an application to allow you to use one keyboard and mouse between multiple machines. You can now connect your OS X laptop and your PC desktop for instance. The best part about synergy is that its persistent. Once you plug into the network, it starts up. So instead of plugging in a usb keyboard and mouse every time I sit down at my desk, I can just sit my laptop down and go.

The performance is pretty good. There is not really any noticeable lag or anything like that. The clipboard is shared which is pretty cool. It makes the user experience between my two opposing machines much crisper. More specifically it allows me to dump off all the tasks that are not productive to the pc, so I don’t have to see them.

The install looks a lot harder than it really is. This is the main thing that synergy could improve upon though.

http://synergy2.sourceforge.net/

Posted in Sysadmin | 1 Comment »

How to dominate any search term in three easy steps

January 20th, 2008

The techniques that follow are ones that I routinely employ when I am looking to establish my presence in a niche. These skills should be applicable to any niche, though if you are looking for the post profit, you should do the first step many times until you find a stagnant niche you will be able to easily dominate and bring in lots of profits.

Know your Competition
Your competition is a gold mine for data about how the search engine is treating the term your competing for. Look into how much content is on their page, how long they have been around, how many links they have, who links to them, how fast they are gaining links, if they are still growing, etc. It is important to look at growth and freshness of the sites that are winning in the niche. If the sites are growing fast, your site must grow faster. If the sites are barely growing, and have no new inbound linking - congratulations, your job just got easier.

Look at where they are getting their links. Many times you will be able to exchange links, or get free links from the same places they are getting their links. This will also give you a good idea to how much work they have done to get where they are. This will allow you to estimate what it will take to dominate that keyword. Hopefully it is worth the effort.

Optimize your Page
To optimize your pages you need to properly use h1 tags, titles, and content to create a coherent message about your page. Beyond that, there really isn’t much to standard SEO techniques. Once you have optimized your pages so a spider can easily determine what the topics of the page are, then you can really optimize your pages for success.

The real optimization of your site should be concerned with marketing. How are you going to make people talk about your site? Giving away something free is a great way to get links to your site and build volume faster than your competitors. Creating a way for users to contribute content is another way. Image hosts are quite popular. What if you created a free image host that linked back to your niche site with each post, and you marketed this image host in relevant forums. That is one way to optimize your site for success.

Get Creative
Putting an image host on your site is obviously not the only way to build a user base, and get incoming links at the same time. There are many other methods that can be deployed on your site to do this. Remember, the key is that you want to be able to get content and incoming links *faster* than your competition.

Be social. Your site does not have to be a social networking site, but you can integrate with a social network in a creative way to bring users who are savvy enough to potentially help you build some links. If you put social aspects on your site it is a great way to build content though.

Make your site fun! Did I just use an exclamation point? Well anyways.. A site that is fun will attract users, and more importantly get talked about. You would be surprised at how many great one way links you can get just by having something fun about your site.

Winning in the search engine game is about applying a strategy over time. Even if you make it so your strategy involves setting something up, and momentum building from user interaction. There must be some sort of movement with your site, or it will go stale.

Posted in Sites, SEO, Business | No Comments »

DoFollow Comments

January 18th, 2008

I believe it was Shakespeare who said “to follow, or not to follow. That is the question.” Well I have answered. To Follow! Since nofollow was developed to help get rid of comment spam, and it obviously does a worse job at it than spam filters, I decided to open my blog back up with links that the seo spiders will follow. A little incentive to post relevant comments… If people abuse this and clearly are only posting for links then my policy might change. But if you have something to add, then by all means add it. Viva la Community!

More about dofollow and nofollow
http://www.nonofollow.net/11-reasons-against-nofollow/

More about dofollow wp plugin
http://kimmo.suominen.com/sw/dofollow/

Posted in SEO | 2 Comments »

Project Management 101 - Planning

January 16th, 2008

There is a lot more to getting a project completed from start to finish than meets the eye. Even with developing a small site, you will probably have to involve multiple people with interdependent jobs. Starting out by hiring a designer, writer, and programmer from the very beginning may or may not work. The possibility of something going wrong and blowing your entire budget - as if you computed a budget - is enough of a reason to properly plan a project. I am going to show you a minimalist approach to project management that while not taking up too much of your time, should help maintain your sanity.

Your project management process might be slightly different than mine. The important part is that you have a process and you know how your process works. No matter how small the project, you should go through the same process. A smaller project will most likely go through the steps much faster. Even for a project that is a couple hours long, you should go through the steps. You might not need to write them down though.

Project Definition

This is where you answer what the project is, why it came about, how you will solve it, and when you will do it. There are several important parts to define here.

Overview - This is where you define what project you want to implement, and the business reasons behind the project.

Scope - What is in scope of the project? And more importantly, what is out of scope of the project? Knowing what is out of scope, and being able to quickly communicate that to developers, designers, and other people working on the project can save a lot of time and effort in the long run.

Assumptions and Risk - Since you cannot possibly know about everything that will happen during the project, what things did you leave to assume? Why do you think it is safe to assume these items? What are the risks associated with the project? How will you manage these risks?

Approach - How will you go about the project?

Cost, Duration, and Effort estimates - This is a big part of the process if you are working for someone or with a partner/investor. This is where you estimate how much money will need to come from the company’s funds. Also, you will need to answer how much employee time will be needed, and how long the project is expected to be completed by. Be careful here, if you are too aggressive on these projections, it will make you look like an ineffective manager. If you set the budgets too high, then you are potentially setting the project up for waste. Treat every dollar as if it were your own - even if it is not.

Project Workplan

The project workplan is where you define everything that needs to happen in the project and when it needs to happen so other processes do not get disrupted. It defines deliverables and goes into a bit of detail about what constitutes a completed deliverable. You should be able to map out the entire project to this level. If you cannot safely do so then you may consider breaking the project up into multiple phases.

Project Management Procedures

This document is going to be basically the same for all projects in your company. In fact, it is common to only have one copy that just gets improved upon over time. How to change scope, how team communication will occur, how bugs will be managed and dealt with, how quality will be addressed are all things that can be in the project management procedures.

Conclusion

It is best to use actual documents for each of these items. You may be able to simply think about all these items in your head if you are doing a small project on your own. At the very minimum though, you should have at least considered each item in these documents. If you do not want to make formal documents, at least keeping note of these items should greatly contribute to your success in managing projects.

Posted in Business | 1 Comment »

5 Steps to PPC Success

January 12th, 2008

I have had many discussions with people about making money with PPC. I have outlined 5 critical, but simple to implement steps to achieving success in PPC. This is not a guide to using PPC or a complete guide from start to finish. It is what people who are unsuccessful at PPC typically neglect to do.

1. Learn as much as you can about PPC

The PPC model may be pretty simple in a nutshell, but it is a business where money is made on a margin. Any additional knowledge you bring to the table will help increase your return. Take the Google Adwords course online. It is free, and provides a surprising amount of knowledge about how the system works. http://www.google.com/adwords/learningcenter/

2. Do keyword research

Learn about your niche and how people search for items in your niche. Building a decent keyword list is very important for success in PPC. Just as important though is a negative keyword filter. Words you might be interested in filtering out are words that would imply the searcher is not interested in buying a product but instead is interested in getting information or getting the product for free. Of course you might be able to make a profit for these words if you make sure you bid less on them and your results prove that it is successful. I typically find that the competition is nearly as stiff on the words that are worth less as they are for the words that imply the customer is ready to buy.

3. Track your results

Collecting data from PPC is a very good side benefit of spending money on advertising. This data is very important in decision making and learning about your market. Set up tracking codes and hopefully an analytics program for conversion tracking. This information will support your decision making process about wether to stick with a campaign or pull the plug.

4. Use split testing

You do not have to use a complicated tracking and testing system in order to do testing properly. All you have to do is run two different ads or landing pages, and test which one does better. Use the better one, and then try another change. This is much like the process you go through at the optometrist to determine your correct prescription. What you want to make sure of though is that you make decisions on enough data. A good way of determining what enough data is for your niche is by testing and then doubling the time of the test. If that does not change the outcome significantly then you probably have found a decent test time period. Constantly test, do not ever accept the campaign as perfect.

5. Replicate Success

Figure out what makes you money, and keep doing it. Figure out what costs you money and stop doing it. This is actually universal advice and can be applied to all lines of business and life.

Posted in SEO, SEM | No Comments »

Synergy

How to dominate any search term in three easy steps

DoFollow Comments

Project Management 101 - Planning

5 Steps to PPC Success

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