1. DO NOT anger Dan Savage by comparing homosexual sex to beastiality. (SEE Santorum.com. No, this is not Rick Santorum’s official campaign website. It’s Dan Savage’s website and ranks higher in Google than the candidate’s official website.)
2. DO NOT forget to buy your name as a URL. (SEE newtgingrich.com which is really StopRomneysPiousBaloney.com. This is not the website of the presidential candidate.)
3. DO NOT forget to buy the negative URLs that could be connected to you. (SEE newtgingrichlies.com)
4. DO NOT admit you don’t know how to use email. (As did John McCain in the 2008 presidential campaign.)
5. DO NOT run anti-gay ads wearing the same jacket Heath Ledger wore on Brokeback Mountain. (SEE Rick Perry’s anti gay ad and it’s many parodies)
6. DO NOT make off the cuff “facts” that people can check within minutes. (SEE ALL CANDIDATES and most office holders.)
7. DO NOT try to make a high school student with a twitter account apologize for calling the Governor of Kansas a jerk. (SEE #heblowsalot on Twitter and the resulting coverage of the incident.)
8. DO NOT post pictures of your junk on Twitter. (And even if it’s accident, don’t email pictures like this AT ALL.) (See former Rep. Anthony Weiner.)

Well, I thought it was funny…

I’ve been working for months on a series of three webinars on how to use social media  marketing for business. Practiced them with a host of very patient friends, clients, and acquaintances. I finished tweaking the first one (again) this morning. The first class was scheduled for this afternoon. (I was going to start the series last week and had to postpone due to a bad cold. I still have a bit of a cough.)

Then the universe played a very bad cosmic joke. My content was tweaked, proofed, ready. I had even read the webinar service’s manual. I was ready to teach in half an hour. Then, my wireless router went out. No internet. I went upstairs, rebooted the router. It’ll come back on. It always does.

Not this time. My network had disappeared. Poof! Only 20 minutes to showtime and I had nothing. Nada. Bupkis. This was kind of like the bad dream where you’re in front of an audience and you realize you’re totally unprepared.

Well, I wasn’t unprepared. I was completely cut off from my audience due to the failure of a little black box. Now what?

In my panic, I remembered that I did have a live internet connection. I just couldn’t plug into it in the basement where my office is. But I could bring the computer to the modem. Two very rapid trips up the stairs with laptop, keyboard, mouse, notes and headset. Plugged in, and connected. Started to breath normally. All with 5 minutes to spare.

It did make a good opening story for the webinar. But I’d rather lead with something else next time.

Tomorrow (after I buy a new wireless router) I will add to my list of preparations for the next webinar.

Router goes out. Backup: use direct connection upstairs.

Hope I don’t need it again.

The casting director who dreamed up the list of possible “stars” to appear on Dancing With The Stars and included Bristol Palin should get a huge raise. The show this season has become a press agent’s dream. I have never seen so much buzz about the lengths a “star’s” fans will go to to keep her in the competition. Apparently fans are setting up bogus email addresses in order to stuff the ballot box. (Let’s face it fans, the girl is trying but she’s not very good.)

Last night I couldn’t log in to vote on ABC.com. The servers were clearly overloaded. I wanted to vote for Jennifer Grey as I firmly believe that she is the best dancer and should win. Why did I decide to vote? I believe there is a right wing conspiracy to make Bristol Palin the winner of DWTS. And it really annoys me that the country seems to think this is important. It also annoys me that I think it’s important enough to cast my own vote.

If Bristol wins, will this be a victory for the Tea Party or evangelicals, or lobbyists for the spray tan industry? Will Bristol’s victory give them a mandate to demand tax cuts or set the scene for Bristol to tango to the White House in 2032? Or is it more likely that Bristol will be the next Bachelorette or star in a new reality show called Alaska Shore?

Seriously, I’m facinated that we all care. Do we even remember who won the last 2 seasons of DWTS? I think this PR stunt of casting a politician’s kid has become a bizarre reflection of the enormous chasm between the two political parties and their cultural differences.

The winner tonight will prove…….nothing. Only that that casting director should get a big raise. I can’t wait to see who will be in the next cast. It will be a nice distraction from the real problems we face in this country.

Ahhhhh, fall! The squirrels and birds are having a wonderful time taking tiny little bites out of the apples on my apple tree. The spoiling fruit falls to the ground and the dog thinks they’re perfect playthings for the house. I bribe the dog with a cookie to move away from the nasty apple so I can toss it in the trash….

The days are getting cooler and I’ve started cold weather preparations like getting the furnace checked. That’s the same reason I’ve also started fall cleaning my website. WordPress just keeps chugging along, I do the updates, and everything is rosy. But is the site effective and findable to the search engines? Or will it sputter out like my furnace did last winter? I ran the website grader at Hubspot to see how the site is doing. This free service has some very cool stuff you can learn about your site.

Like:

• Your website’s rank in the search engines
• An analysis of your blog – whether your posts are retweeted in Twitter, whether your pages are indexed by Google and most interesting, the readability level of your blog.
• The optimization of your site – metadata and headings, and do your images have ALT text.
• How many inbound links your site has – the better for the search engines to find you
• There was way more, and all came with suggestions on how to improve my site’s ranking.

How did I score? Some good, some not so good. Best of all, I could sign up to get emailed reports on how my site is progressing.This will be an ongoing project.

Next up later this week: More fall cleaning for your WordPress website and blog. Does it rock for your visitors or has it become old and stodgy?

Dictionary.com defines an individual’s “platform” as

So, yes, you do need one if you want to give people a reason to pay attention to you as you sell your book or your services. What makes you different from the other people who write and talk about in your field? Why should anybody care?

Try this exercise is creating your USP:

I don’t consider myself a techie. I know just enough about back-end SEO to be incredibly dangerous. So how does a non-tech website owner help their website make nice with Google and the other search engines?

1. Have a blog on your website and update it regularly. I’m amazed how many web people think it’s okay to just have your website linked to your blog on WordPress.com. You’re just driving traffic to WordPress.com, who’s doing quite well, thank you very much.

2. Import your blog to your social media profiles in Facebook and LinkedIn. If people like your posts, they’ll check out the rest of your site.

3. Use a Twitter plugin like Wordtwit to notify Twitter when you’ve updated your blog and provides a link to your post.

4. If you have a brick and mortar store, get a free listing in Google Local Business Center and Bing Local Listing Center.

5. Use keyword descriptions in your blog posts and in your listings that people are likely to use if they’re looking for your services. I get a lot of traffic from people searching for “book marketing” “self published books” and “sell your book on the internet.”

6. When you start doing these things, be consistent. I had a client a while ago who was concerned he wasn’t getting any traffic to his blog. Trouble is, he hadn’t updated it in a month. Search engines love new content. When you don’t update your blog, the search engines lose interest in your site and favor the ones that are putting new stuff out there. (Kind of like us – always attracted to what’s new and shiny.)

1. WordPress. The open source blog software enables you to build a great website without knowing any code.  And it enables me and millions of others to blab endlessly about great observations, information and sometimes just….stuff.

2. The thousands of how-to sites that tells you everything you need to know about marketing online, how to fix your plumbing, buy a car, cook your Thanksgiving dinner, and darn near anything else you want to know.

3. Google Analytics/Feedburner/free keyword tool Google may take over the world someday, but at least they’re giving us some useful tools in the meantime.

4. YouTube – another Google-bot, I’m grateful to YouTube for giving me a way to take a silly break in the middle of a stressful day. And for giving creative types with fevered imaginations a place to post their work. Anybody up on what Chad Vader, Darth Vader’s younger brother is up to these days?

5. Amazon.com – and other online shopping sites that I intend to use for my holiday shopping again, enabling me to skip getting up at 3 am on Black Friday to wait in line outside of Best Buy.

6. The online community – Who would have thought 20 years ago that you’d have “friends” all over the world that you’ve never met, but share hobbies, obsessions, and marketing tips with? Heck, I know more about my Facebook friends than I do about my next door neighbors.

Happy Thanksgiving!

I google my name and my company’s name every now and then just to see where I’m popping up on the net. One day, I was surprised to see my name mentioned in the archives of a newspaper in Salt Lake City.

I live in the Denver metro area and have no ties to Salt Lake. But, surprise, surprise, the now-defunct Rocky Mountain News and the Deseret News were both Scripps-Howard papers – and the Deseret picked up a Rocky story quoting me in 1996 about the worst bridesmaids dresses ever and how my friend Debbie and I recycled our dresses as “Bridesmaids from Hell” the Halloween after our (now) ex-friend’s wedding. (She couldn’t understand why we hated the dresses. Maybe it was because we all looked HORRIBLE in them!)

In the spirit of full disclosure, here’s the guilty photo:

I’m the ghoul on the left.

Aside from this being one of the best costumes we ever came up with for bar-hopping on Halloween, this is also a great example of how stuff you might have posted say, on Facebook or on a forum might pop back into your life when you least expect it. (Maybe you should rethink that hooker costume for this upcoming Halloween….)

Generally, I’m a big believer in the Mom Rule of what content is suitable for posting online.  I don’t post anything I wouldn’t have wanted my Mom to read. (Mom thought this story and picture in the newspaper was pretty funny, by the way.) But maybe it’s a really good thing I’ve never applied for a job in the bridal industry.

And, oh, yes, the bride no longer speaks to us. The dresses eventually went to Goodwill where someone else probably snagged them for Halloween costumes. But I’m happy to say this picture will live on in cyberspace. Happy Halloween!

Small is the new big.

For once, I feel I am in the middle of the new “latest thing.” (I am not an early adaptor. I’m still excited about getting an iPod shuffle last Christmas.)

I’ve wondered for a while whether it was such a great idea to be on so many social media sites that I never visit most of them. What’s the point of having all of these “friends” that I’ve collected and never made an effort to get to know? Do they even know who I am? Or care? I doubt it.

On the other hand, I’ve enjoyed several online conversations with people I actually know on Facebook and LinkedIn. I’m now in the habit of logging in to one or the other during my work day to see what conversations are going on, adding my 2 cents when I want to, starting my own threads. It’s become an added conversation in the day. (And when you work in an office with only 3 other people, your conversations can be someone limited.)

20th century marketing emphasized getting your message out to masses of people. This was a one-way conversation. New marketing via social networks emphasizes a two-way conversation where people actually communicate. One of the common concerns business people and authors voice is where do you find the time to communicate with all of these people on these networks?

Answer: don’t try to have so many conversations.

Wow, is that simple or what?

If you only pick one or two places to hang out, you’ll actually have the time to get to know some of these online “friends” and maybe they’ll become friends without the quote marks. They, in turn, will get to know you and what you do. If they like what you do, they will recommend you to others. You will get calls, and hopefully, business.

That’s not so hard, is it?