Blog of Life & Business Persuits
About Archived
I just launched my new portfolio website. I still have the blog over at http://jeradhillphotographer.com. I decided to design this portfolio because the blog is just a little to flat. I believe this website will allow people to connect with my work better than the blog.
View JeradHillPhoto: http://jeradhillphoto.com
Let me know your thoughts.
It is often that I hear good things about the services I provide. Though it is great that people think highly of the work I completed for them it is even better if I can get that in writing. Most search engines allow for posting of reviews which believe it or not, help your ranking. I would go as far as saying that these reviews are the online equivalent of Word of Mouth. In this video I share how I have created a few different ways to make it easy for my clients and customers to post reviews about their experiences working with me.
If you would like to post a review for me in regards to how I have helped you through one of my training videos, I would love that! Click the Review Me link in the menu above.
In this video I share a recent website I launched for a client and the results we have experienced in the search engine after 1 1/2 weeks of being live.
Fads come and go so fast now a days. What is cool one minute gets played out and overused and quickly becomes annoying. Being that I am in the web and photography space I see a lot of this. The term Web 2.0 is just annoying and in the photography space the word Couture is starting to get on my nerves. When it comes to naming your company it is important to name your company to last. If you bank on what is “cool” right now, you will only be cool until that word or phrase becomes annoying. A better option is to use those “fad” terms in your products or services rather then in your company name. Take Pepsi or Nike for example, they will use certain words or phrases in their advertising campaigns but would never name a product they expected to last forever after a Cliché. Even the athletes and other personalities they endorse have a short term effect overall on their product base. For the early adapters using Couture in your business name made people think you were a higher class of product than the others. Now it is overused and it is just a matter of time before it is played out. Let me really get to my main point and passion for writing this post.
You are you and nobody else, place or thing is you. Not to say that you need to name your business after your name but be original. Take some time to come up with something completely original. Playing off of other well known names like Couture, Dolce, Bella and the list goes on is not really original. In website design, calling yourself a webmaster, web 2.0 specialist, social marketing expert or any other overused term is not going to provide you much in the long term. Look at the companies or people who are killing it in each space right now, they are being original and doing something different.
Following the fad works for shoes or clothing but they always make it to the back of your closet or the donate pile. Don’t position your business to end up in the back of the closet unless you only care about the short term. My guess is that you want to have a profound effect in your industry and make your place in the biz world. This will only happen if you position yourself and your business to be unique and memorable.
My last thought has more to do with getting found online through search. If your business name is for lack of a better explanation, “so cliché” thus not being at all unique, how are you going to stand out in search and be found easier. Take photography for example. Say there are 100 photographers out there with Couture in their business name. How much easier would you be to find if you had used your own name for example. Stop underestimating the power of your own name especially if your business is extremely personal like photography is. Do you think Jerad Hill is the most market-ably exciting name to use out there? Does not sound as cool as David Jay or countless others I have heard, but it is me and I want people to associate my work and what I bring to the table with my name, especially in a world where so much is hidden behind fronts.
What are your thoughts on naming and using certain words of phrases in your advertising?
We have a huge advantage over the generation that came before us. Social Networking allows us to scale our caring! The social web is empowering us to hear what the customer has to say seconds after it’s said. Another human being cares about what you have to say and that is huge!
Warning: There are 2 swear words in this video.
Gary Vaynerchuk is the founder and host of WineLibraryTV. He used that niche as a platform to launch his career as a consultant for businesses who desire to Crush It in the business world, which is also the title of his new book to be released in October of this year.
I have been using Joomla as a CMS for many of my clients websites as well as my own websites. Through the years I have found better ways of doing things as well as fixes to correct issues that have came up using Joomla. This blog post will be an ongoing process. I will continue to update this blog post as I gather more useful resources for Joomla. Feel free to bookmark this post or add it to your Del.icio.us account so you can access it to check for updates.
SQL Query to reset your Super Admin username and password to admin. Use this if for some reason you can not access your Super Admin account. You must have access to your host account to do this. I recommend backing up your database before applying this query.
UPDATE `jos_users` SET `name` = 'admin', `password` = 'af9083d4b82dbc0745b124db3b3cf15d:M0WuLowO4rtRTddG' WHERE `id` =62 LIMIT 1 ;
Resources mentioned in the video:
Mac: Firefox, Transmit, CyberDuck.
PC: Firefox, Filezilla, Putty SSH Client.
I recently upgraded Safari to the latest version and upon attempting to launch the app had it crash. The error that was given pointed blame at a plugin. I looked in the normal Library directory where I figured plugins for Safari would be held with no such luck. After much searching and “Spotlight” was no help, I finally found the culprit. The Stumbi plugin for Stumbleupon was crashing Safari. The folder I found Safari plugins held in is: /Volumes/MacintoshHD/Library/Application Support/SIMBL/Plugins/ In this directory you will find all plugins that are running in Safari. The version I am currently running at the time of this post is Safari 4.0 (5530.17) on Leopard 10.5.7.
I am attending the TWTRCON SF09 today which is my second Twitter Conference this week. I will be blogging some updates and thoughts that come to my mind as the day unfolds. I am not going for a live blog of the conference, just wanting to share things that stick out to me. You can also check our my Twitter Stream: http://twitter.com/jeradhill
For the most part I really enjoyed TWTRCON. The speakers were great to hear from. I love hearing first hand how people are using this space to accomplish new things in their business. That was the core reason for me attending these conferences. I also attend to meet people and make contacts. TWTRCON had the type of people that I was looking to connect with. I understand that they put this conference together in less than 30 days which was not apparent. The conference was very professional and well marketed. Most of the speakers were able to get their messages across to us. The panels were well thought out and the combination of panelists meshed really well.
Flickr #TWTRCON Image Set: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jtography/sets/72157619051926616/
Check back for more through out the day.
*Just ordered an Eye-fi card so I can keep shooting photos with out removing my CF card.
The Hootsuite Owl is in the house!
This guy contrasts selling Twitter to selling off your daughter to sheiks. #OMFG #TWTRCON
Operation Smile is using Twitter to bring the voice of their organization to the twitter masses. 140 Smiles is their campaign. http://140smiles.com Check out the competition they have going on.
Thought: What do you think trending does for website traffic, does trending in the top 10 result in web traffic?
David w/ Tech web – @dberlind – Unconference
Peoplebrowsr and Hootsuite shared their products with us.
Personal Branding Which of course is what I am passionate about!
My thought: Twitter is powerful, I took a pic of Hammer, the third one below. Posted it to Flickr, posted it to Twitter and has been viewed 500 times in the last 15 minutes.
Beth Mansfield – Carl’s Jr., Mike Prasad – Kogi BBQ, Stefanie Nelson – Dell Outlet
Group Question: Has Twitter made you any money? Beth: Yes, Stefanie: Yes, Mike: Hell Yes!
Shel is talking about how in Twitterville you talk about life and then sometimes business happens. People do not get on Twitter because they want to be marketed to, they want to connect with things they care about. We used to move to neighborhoods to organize ourselves around people we share interests with. Now the internet and Twitter allows us to create these neighborhoods all over the world with all sorts of people.
Shel is telling the story about @JamesBuck who was arrested while in Egypt. He started with 90 followers when he was there. The power of retweeting is what eventually got him released. James’ post “arrested” was interesting and took flight because it was about him. Shel is also sharing many other Twitter success stories that happened because of Social Media.
As Twitter grows, negativity is going to grow. As a brand you should have a presence in the space so you can disarm as much of it as possible.
I opted to make a bathroom run. I was at the 140 Twitter Conference last week and heard similar thoughts shared.
Ideas to make Twitter integrate more with our websites and marketing ventures.
Our communications online are going to continue to get more social.
These guys spent most of their time correcting each other. Last panel of the day was a fail.
Thanks for visiting my post on TWTRCON SF09 – Twitter for Business – May 31, 2009.
Visit and share the Flickr set: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jtography/sets/72157619051926616/
How do you stand apart from other businesses in your market?
Businesses are increasing their social network activity in 2009 and even more will in 2010 says an article on Mashable.Com. Conferences are popping up all over the map teaching best practices and offering solutions, but what solution and social network would work best for your company? The other big question is how to be active on social networks with out killing your daily productivity or resort to hiring someone to do it for you?
Stop pouring advertising dollars into mediums that have lost their audience!
I do not consider myself a social networking consultant because anybody can be that today. What I do consider myself is someone who has found a way to make it work for himself and his business. If you or your business is looking to find the best way to attack the social networking monster, I would love share with you how it has worked for me and how I do it.
The traditional marketing techniques of years past are almost dead. The phone book is no longer the best option. Having a great website is no longer the best option. In Commercial Real Estate the term I always heard was “Location, Location, Location!” The same is true with the web, you need to be located where most traffic takes place. Does that make sense? If the masses are spending their time in social networks, your business needs to be there.
You are probably wondering why you would need to connect with people on social networks. Nobody wants to know when I am going to the store or what I ate for dinner? Social Networks are much more then that. Social Networks give you a voice that can be heard by those who are looking to connect with others who have interests similar to them. Users subscribe to updates from companies that provide products and services they like each day. How much more effective would it be to allow the customer to chose what advertisement streams they want to hear about? Let’s look at some examples of where people are spending their time.
In the graph below Yellowpages.Com, Facebook.com and Twitter.Com are compared. Look at the traffic differences. Where do you want your business to be displayed and shared with views?
Facebook has over 100 Million unique visitors per day. Twitter is growing by leaps and bounds with over 25 Million unique visitors per day. If your phone book, local newspaper, radio station or direct mail marketing company can offer you that large of a market at the low introductory price of FREE, please let me know. Below I will go into more detail as to why Social Network Marketing is the new way to meet customers.
Who am I to give advice on Social Network Marketing? Grader.Com lists me as the Top User in my community, Modesto, CA on Twitter.com
Do a Google search for my name. Many of the results that will come up are social network profiles that I have in place. These profiles point back to my business website and drive traffic to my website. Take a look at the image below which displays the traffic by source that my website receives. A large portion of my traffic is due to my social network activity.
The image below displays more details in regards to where the market is going. Facebook and Twitter are on the rise while Yellowpages is falling. If you add up all of the traffic my website receives, the sum of the traffic referred by the social networks is greater than the traffic Google provides me. Feel free to run the same Compare.Com report I did, click here.
Now lets switch out Yellowpages.Com for Google and compare the traffic growth between the two major social networks and Google. You will notice that Google, although far in #1 is not experiencing growth as rapidly as the other social networks. What does that tell you about where people are going? Twitter.Com is currently experiencing 1100% growth. Feel free to run the same Compare.Com report I did, click here.
The numbers are overwhelmingly exciting to me as a business owner. People are flocking to a space where I can access and gain the attention of potential customers for free. You should be asking yourself why you have not jumped on this boat.
Feel free to contact me, I would love to help you figure out how to market your business using the up and coming social web. Another resource I offer is my blog. As new and exciting solutions for arise I discuss them on my blog. From the menu above, mouse over blog and choose a category.
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Some suggestions on how to get yourself or your business on to the front page of the search engines.
If you have not done so before, try Googling my name, Jerad Hill. All you see is me. If you Google Jerad Hill Studios, all you see is me and websites that I have profiles on. If you search for Website Design in Modesto, you will find me in a few different places.
Now that you have done those searches you are probably wondering how much time it took me to get listed on all of those website and set up those profiles. I want to tell you that it is easy to find these websites, easy to set up a profile and from there the search engines will crawl them and find you.
There is an amazing new website out there that allows you to search your username on all of the popular social networks, blog sites, photo sharing, video sharing and many other websites. Why would you want to do this? So you can make sure that your name or business name is on all of those websites. You are probably wondering why you need to be on all of those websites. The answer is that you really don’t. I am on almost all of them and I honestly only log into the majority of them if I need to change something like the URL to my website or an image. Otherwise I just use a select few of them.
The website is called http://friendscall.me
At Friendscall.me you type in your username and it goes out and searches all of the popular social webs to see if you have an account and if your username is available. You can then click on the link and register an account. With each account you can place your name or business name, an image, a URL link to your website, and a brief description about you or your business. The search engines crawl this information and display it. If you are having a hard time getting your website on the front page of Google but your Twitter account made it to the front page, who cares. Let them click on your Twitter account and then click on the link to your website. Friendscall.Me will show you a ton of websites you can register on and I suggest you put an account on as many of them as you can. This will take up some of your time, if you are fast you could get accounts set up on all of these websites in one day. If you really don’t have the time, then get your assistant to do it.
Updating all of these profiles at once. Like any good person you will worry about having an empty profile on many of these accounts. How on earth are you going to post content to all of these websites? It would be impossible to pull off if you have to log into each one, one by one. There has to be a better way. In fact there is…
HelloTxt.Com – http://hellotxt.com – Hellotxt allows you to update multiple social web accounts all at once. This is how I maintain a personality on all of these social webs and still manage to get work done and have a life with out my wife wanting to kill me. The first step is to create a Hellotxt account, the second step is to enter the login and passwords for all of your social web accounts, the final step is to enter your message and hit send. Hellotxt works from your computer and your wireless phone. You can share anything from specials you have going on to what it is you plan to do with your weekend. Really it does not matter to much so long as you have a presence on these websites and you don’t have to do it very often. It will not take over your life. I promise that.
As a professional in your industry you get all sorts of information sent to you that is interesting. This content you may even put into newsletters that you send off to your clients from time to time. This content is also something you can forward onto these social network accoutns. If you come across a cool article on your industry or something that interests you that you want to share with others, post it. You are creating a voice for yourself on that topic and you are informing others with information they will find relevant. Because these social websites are “share” friendly websites, people may even share that information with their contacts which will link back to you and create a new follower of your information, maybe even a potential customer. You can use these sites to create conversation starters that often result in people contacting you directly for more information.
Even if you do not want to participate on these websites, simply set up an account. Protect your username, you never know when/if you will want to use it. If the website gets out of control popular, your name or business name may be taken by then. Saving your username is just as important as buying your domain name to protect your brand these days. Whether you use it or not, it is going to help your search engine placement because the search engines see the links and the words associated with that account.
As you can probably tell by now, sometimes I go off on tangents. What started as a article to help you get ranked higher in the search engines has also became an article on the importance of protecting your brand. I’m just trying to help.
What have you done using the social web to help your search engine ranking? Share your thoughts with us below.
I know exactly what you are thinking, you are rolling your eyes at the idea of a Twitter bot. You may even remember how annoying they were when used incorrectly on Myspace. I want to share my experiences with Tweetadder and explain to you why it is a must have tool for anyone who takes their persona on Twitter serious.
Tweetadder is a tool that allows you to perform all of the normal functions of Twitter from one app but also allows you to target followers based on search terms and follow them with the click of a mouse.
Warning: People will use this to create accounts and mass follow people with the sole purpose of advertising to them. People already do this as it is, this app will make it easier for them to do so but it’s happening anyway.
Tweetadder is perfect for those of us who promote ourselves and our businesses online and wish to target people with specific interests to follow. It simply makes it easy to do that so you do not have to use the Twitter website and manually follow people. Tweetadder saves you a ton of time.
Twitter has limits set up in place to prevent spammers from creating huge accounts and spamming a lot of people. Those limits are easy to hit manually so I don’t see this tool making Twitter a spam filled place such as Myspace has became.
I am going to walk you through the many features of Tweetadder and explain why they will save you time and better your Twitter experience.
First things first… Tweetadder is not free. There are many levels of licensing for you to choose from to fit your needs. Currently the prices range from $7.95 for a one week one account license to $499 for a 100 account, outright unlimited usage license. To try it out, I purchased the one account week long license. As of the first day using it I followed 200 new people who have the word iPhone in their about section and 160 of those people have followed me back. Is that not worth $7.95 alone? Other services that place your Twitter account in ads on their partners websites will cost much more then that and perform no where near as well.
Support my efforts: As an early adopter of the Tweetadder software I signed up as an affiliate so when you purchase Tweetadder, please follow my link to do so. http://www.tweetadder.com/idevaffiliate/idevaffiliate.php?id=118 What is great is that you can be an affiliate also and earn income from the people you refer to Tweetadder. After you create an account and have your license of Tweetadder, simply revisit the link I just provided you and create an affiliate account.
When you first launch Tweetadder you will register your license and enter the Twitter account(s) you wish to manage. You can always add more accounts later or upgrade your license to allow for more account usage in the future. Once logged in you will see the following screen.
Who To Follow: In this section you will tell Tweetadder who you want to find and follow. There are different search fields that will search different aspects of Twitter to return the results you desire. You can follow users with in a zip code and radius, follow the followers of another user or search for terms people have tweeted or have entered into their about section of their profile. As you can see, you have a lot of options. This will allow you to find the people who have interests in which you can service in a hurry. Long gone are the days of searching Twitter manually and adding people one by one. Have fun finding people to follow.
Add Followers: This tab allows you to add the followers you just searched for, add followers that you have not yet followed back and set parameters to assure that the use of Tweetadder does not flag your account. I will note as a warning to you: Do not get greedy. You will be tempted to try and follow 2000 people in the first day of having your new Twitter account. I do not recommend this. Nothing looks more fishy to me than someone who follows a ton of people and has nobody following them back. I never follow those people back because chances are they are fake or will just advertise to me. I recommend you check the box that keeps your follower to following ratio at 1.5:1.
Unfollow: Use the Unfollow tab to remove people whom you are following that are not following you in return. If you have chosen to follow to many people you may want to use this option to remove the people that chose not to follow you. If you got to carried away with the last tab then you may hit a Twitter limit which means your followers to following ratio is to far apart. I like the option that allows you to unfollow people who were followed using Tweetadder. This will make sure that none of the higher end people or companies you follow because you respect and desire to hear what they have to say get removed.
Messages: Now we are getting into the tools that can potentially be used to spam. I suggest that you think of sending direct messages in the same context that you think of sending text messages from your cell phone to your close friends. Only send them when you need to and always make sure they are relevant. Sending unwarranted direct messages to users at random is a big No No in my book. However if you are administering a Twitter account for an event or conference you can use this tool to send out updates. Direct messages do have a higher chance of reaching the person you send it to because most people have their direct messages go to their email or via. SMS to their cell phone. The messages section will allow you to set custom messages to be broadcasted out to your followers. You can set the time and date that those messages will be dispatched, which makes Tweetadder a really useful tool. You can load messages from a file or enter them directly into Tweetadder.
Tweets: Tweetadder can be used to send out tweets at any time or date you set. This could be a great tool for events, conferences, speakers, sports teams and more. Use it as a tool to thank attendees of your event or to set up custom #followfriday tweets you don’t want to forget to send out. You can also use it to custom reply to messages that were tweeted back to you in response to the message Tweetadder sent out, how cool is that!
Automation: Each tab described above has features with daily limits that can be used to assure that your Twitter account does not get flagged as a spammer. Continuing on with my example, my search for people with the word iPhone in their profile returned many more twitter profiles then I would feel comfortable adding in one day. Using the automation tab I can set Tweetadder to follow the maximum amount of users I had set in the Add Followers tab, remove users who did not follow me back, send out twitter messages and tweets as specified on their respective tabs. This allows you to focus on conversing with those new followers and cultivate those new relationships.
Let Tweetadder worry about following new people and unfollowing the old. You can now focus on your followers and creating more value for them. Though there will be many who will abuse this software I suggest that you use it to grow your business or friend base so that you have a larger contact base to share your passions, products or services with.
I hope that my article on the new software Tweetadder helped you decide to download it and give it a try. Remember, it’s only $7.95 to try it out on one account for a week. The amount of targeted followers that you could get in that one week is well worth the $7.95. If you are serious about your Twitter persona then I am not sure why you are still reading this article. Go give it a try now. Click the banner below.
