All about domain names, usernames and email adresses…

Make sure You Get Them All!

I have a few new projects in the works and one of the first things I do is run extensive searches on name availability.  I search for top level domain names (.com, .net, .org) for the project name or with a keyword people would search for related to finding information about the project.

Domainers (people that buy and sell domain names) know this routine very well.  A good domain name is as important to your web presence as having a powerful social media strategy.

For example one of new projects is developing a directory of WordPress experts, developers and designers.  Since Automattic, the company that developed WordPress does not allow you to utilize “WordPress” in your domain name, a popular alternative is WP.  So I registered the domains WPCOOP.com, .net and .org.

Its very easy to search for available domain names with your favorite Registrar.  Most have them have a suggestion tool.  Remeber to try hyphens and numbers if your desired name is not available.  Personally I use domainsbot.com to search for available domain names.  Its a simple tool that searches TLD’s, provides suggested names and allows you to register your new found domain name with your preferred registrar.

Secure Your Personal Domain Name

If you do not own http:// your-personal-name . com, I highly recommend registering it now.  This is imperative if you are an authority, expert or professional service consultant or just a passionate blogger and want to build your online reputation.  After all when people are searching for you on the web, the first thing they will do is Google your name!

Do you have kids?  Secure their name as a domain name now, they will be very happy you did, especially when they become the next social media giant and gain world wide web recognition.

Secure Your User Name

Do you have a nickname or stage name?  One aspect of personal branding, we seem to overlook is securing our user name.  Every social media profile asks for a desired user name, which becomes as synonomous to you as your real name and sometimes people only know you by your nickname or user name.

Twitter is a perfect example for brand recognition built on user names.  Almost every profile you have out there will display your username, bookmarking sites, social networks, and even blog comments, so choose a unique, catchy and easy to remember username.

Need some help deciding on a username?  Check out this great service by namechk.com.  They will run an analysis and availability report on a username across the web.

Think about your industry, your passions and how family, friends and colleagues already know you.  As you know I love to help folks out with anything related to social media, WordPress and Twitter, especially.  My username is @askJayson, which is appropriate for me as I love to answer questions and solve problems.

Secure Your Personal Name and Username Email

Another important personal branding strategy is making sure you own your name and username as an email address.  I was reminded of this when I went to get a new google gmail account for my new project.  GMail also allows to check name availability before your register, so you can find a good one before you have to complete the entire registration process.  I recommend you register your personal name and username email with Google and Yahoo, considering they are continuing to develop social media applications where your username will get a lot of exposure.

Another side note: register your kids names!  All my kids (I only have 3) have a personal email address.  Its my way of ensuring atleast they will email me when its not cool to call your Dad on the phone anymore.

Why do owners fail at promoting their business with Social Media?

Because its too technically oriented, its time consuming, its a fad, its for kids, its for internet marketers, its not a proven marketing strategy, its this and its that….

A colleague and small business consultant of mine asked me to speak to a few very successful and rather conservative business owners about how social media could improve their business.

Here is a Answer

I talked to them about various social media platforms and current applications like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Youtube and how these web applications could be utilized for promotion, marketing, customer service and retention.

Once I reached a point of discussing more of the technical aspects, one of the gentlemen stopped me and said,

“I just don’t get it.”

Was I speaking with too much tech talk or maybe assuming they had a firm understanding of the basics?  Maybe they thought I was just ‘another guy’ preaching about ‘the social media thing’.

Here I am in a t-shirt and bluejeans, (business casual in Boulder) discussing trending topics with guys in double breast suits, the serious CEO types.  So I said,

“What if you could hear a very well known venture capitalist and entrepreneur with extensive experience in the corporate culture, share with you how social media will help you build your business?”

Their answer:  “most definitely” and they finally got it, after watching this video.

Guy Kawasaki – Building Your Business With Social Media

Listening to the quick 20 minute schpeel by John Alanis – I perked up pretty quickly when he mentioned that “Content is Not King”!

What!  I paused the video and tried to think about what he was going to say next.  Was he going to talk about that there is so much recycled content out there that you need to spin a unique personal message to stand out from the crowd?

Well even though I think that is important, John went on to another very important aspect we all need to master to engage our audience.

Listen to John, he knows what he’s talking about and let me know your opinion.

What do you do, to engage your readers?

You hear a lot about driving traffic to your blog.  Making pretty permalinks, seo titles, keyword saturated posts, valuable content, knowing your market and of course a nice site design always helps.  So you do your research, implement all the tips and tricks and you start to get traffic.

You think its great.  People are reading your blog. They are actually interested in what you have to say!

Or are they?  How do you know? Hopefully you have a decent statistical app installed, like clicky web analytics,  sitemeter, google analytics, or my favorite, WordPress.com’s stats plugin.

You’re stats will tell you how many visitors, where they’re coming from, how they got here and most importantly what they’re reading and for how long they decide to stay on your site. But what you really want to do is….

You want to engage your readers!

You put in a lot of hard work getting them here, so keep them here, give them something to do, besides just read!

Make Your Blog Interactive on 12seconds.tv

Video/Audio

If you don’t have audio and video on your blog, you are missing a ton of opportunity.  Watching video on the web will soon surpass television (my prediction).  People love to watch and here what you have to say.  Its entertaining and educational.

Check out the powerful plugin Vipers Video Quicktags, a one click solution to embed all your videos from youtube, vimeo, daily motion and many others.

Video Stats: provided by comScore.com

• 76.8 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.
• The average online video viewer watched 356 minutes of video (approximately 6 hours), up 15 percent versus December.
• 100.9 million viewers watched 6.3 billion videos on YouTube.com (62.6 videos per viewer).
• 54.1 million viewers watched 473 million videos on MySpace.com (8.7 videos per viewer).
• The duration of the average online video was 3.5 minutes, up from 3.2 minutes per video in December.
• The duration of the average online video viewed at Megavideo was 24.9 minutes, higher than any other video property in the top ten.

The 20 Largest Video Websites ranked by a combination of Inbound Links, Google Page Rank, Alexa Rank, and U.S. traffic data from Compete and Quantcast, curtousey of ebizmba.com

Social Bookmarking

We have all seen the nice little icons or share buttons at the bottom of blog posts.  Not a only is is a great way to increase traffic, but for the reader its an awesome organizational tool.  Social Bookmarking allows you to keep all your favorite posts in one area, make comments and of course share your interests with others, thus getting more visitors.

I have evaluated several social bookmarking tools and plugins.  I am currently using the WordPress plugin by addtoany.com.  There are several good ones to choose from  ShareThis by Alex King and Socialable by Joost de Valk, 2 excellent WordPress developers.

The main elements to look for in your social bookmarking tool is an easy admin interface to customize your links, choose which bookmarking sites to display and where to display them on your page.  I like addtoany because it integrates with google analytics, so I can see what posts are bookmarked and to what bookmarking sites.

Ranking & Voting

An easy to implement totally interactive blog feature, allowing your readers to vote for your posts.  Not only is this a great way for you to know what your readers like, but it also allows your readers to tell other readers what content the favor on your blog.

Installing a voting plugin to track your blog’s most favorited and highest ranking posts also gives you the ability to display “Best Post” links on your sidebar, making your best content easily accessible.

The WP-PostRatings plugin by Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan is excellent!  He has written a comprehensible installation and usage guide as well as offering plugin support through his forum.  There is a nice admin interface allowing you to choose various rating images and sizes.  The plugin is totally configurable.

Commenting

Are you generating comments on your site?  Maybe some but not as many as you would like.  Comments tell your audience whether or not your content is worth reading.  They validate you as an author.

Well first thing is to ask for comments at the end of each post.  Something like “hey like this post, please leave me a comment, I will do the same for you”.  Now you would have to be honorable and go read their blog as well and if you do, I guarantee you will get more comments.

Make a few enhancements to your comments structure on your blog. Install the wp-Gravatar plugin. It’s built by Automattic, the guys that run WordPress. This will give your comments a more personal feel allowing your visitors to see a picture of their fellow commentaries as well as include an author box, latest comments widget and Makes Gravatars from users with no blog/url link back to your own site.  WP-Gravatar supports Gravatar, MyBlogLog, OpenAvatar, Wavatar, Identicon, monsterID.

Intense Debate (just installed on my blog) offers blog readers a powerful networking system to establish reputations, link their profiles, make friends and syndicate their comments.

Polls & Surveys

People don’t generally like answering surveys from solicitors calling them at home (at least I don’t) but they love polls and surveys on blogs.  Polls and surveys are excellent mediums to interact with your readers.  You can ask specific questions of your audience to determine many factors about your business as well as learn exactly what your readers want to know.

wp-polls is a popular WordPress plugin, customizable via templates and css , tons of options and now supports multiple answer selection.

I like polldaddy.com, also developed and supported by our friends at automattic, which virtually guarantees seamless integration with WordPress.  You can create and edit your polls from with your admin dashboard.

[polldaddy poll=1491439]

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Contests & Give Aways

Everyone loves something for free and an opportunity to compete for an attractive gift.  Many folks in my community will enter a contest because they know it will bring them recognition and at least give them some clout to to rant about on twitter.

Hosting contests enables you not only to engage an individual reader but also to introduce them to others and align them with another community on your blog.

Depending on your industry there may be an affiliate or company that would love to sponsor your contest and even provide some “swag” for your contestants.  Ask a fellow colleague or blogger.  I would easily give away an hour of my social media consultant time for an advertisement on your contest page.

The easiest way to setup a contest is to simply write a blog post describing the contest, rules and regulations and ask your readers to post their answer in the comments section.  Easy as pie.  Hmm …

My Favorite {cautionary discretion advised}

Actually ASK your readers!  Talk to them. A novel idea, huh?  You would be amazed how many people do what you ask them.  Some just need to be pointed in the right direction, others need a firm leader.  Some folks may do it on their own, but there is a reason that all successful businesses teach their sales force the one most important rule of closing a deal, “Ask for the sale!”

Ask your readers to join you, right here, right now.

Therefore, please SUBSCRIBE to my blog, if you haven’t already. Thanks.

Ask your readers (in your post) to engage with you and start a conversation.

hey meet me on twitter, I will be there every day from 10 am til noon and then again from 3pm til 4pm .. or .. thanks for checking out my post, if you think we could be friends, facebook me! .. or .. I am always looking to network with like minded professionals, connect with me at linkedIN.

Ok, that about wraps it up. I love to hear your feedback. Please feel welcome to share any other techniques you are using to make your blog more interactive and how you engage your readers. If you enjoyed this post, please share.

You can even retweet it on twitter. Just Click Here, thanks so much.

Readers of TechCrunch are complaining that the company writes too much about twitter.

The TechCrunch article entitled ‘Lance Armstrong: Natural Born Twitterer caught my eye.  Not that I am an Armstrong groupie by any means, but I am an avid cyclist with a great amount of respect for any Tour de France competitor especially for a guy that has won the world’s most infamous cycling race, 7 times, but also because I’m an avid technologist and twitter junkie.

This article is clearly about Lance and how he uses technology to build his corporate brand, in this case twitter.  The article is written well with a decent Q & A format.  I enjoyed the content and liked the way Lance answered the questions.  I totally related to Lance’s reply “I’ve been around too long to BS people”

I finished reading the article and moved onto reading the comments.  I love blog post comments. I find people ’s opinions and thoughts very interesting.  Sometimes I walk away with more satisfaction from reading the comments than the article itself.

I was a bit surprised with what others had to say.

Here are some excerpts from the articles comments:

…enough of twitter, for god’s sake…

…I double that! But more importantly, who gives a shit about this useless article?? Are you gonna write an article about everyone famous on Twitter?…

….It’s my belief that there’s a massive PR campaign to hype up twitter, so it can be acquired by one of the big players ie Google…

…You have always posted about Twitter. But now this is getting insane!! We love Twitter too, but give us a break!!…

…TechCrunch needs to really move away from Twitter related posts and get back to the normal way they update this blog…

…twitter, twitter , twitter …. it seems you get BIG MONEY , i was reading you for more than a year , go write for your boss … i will not read it…

Not every comment had a “get over twitter” tone.  There are quite a few praising the article and the choice from TechCrunch to deliver information about the latest and hottest tech trends.  One reader wrote:

Getting the real story behind the use of twitter is good journalism. A personal brand like Armstrong, how he uses twitter, personal philosophies, and why he does it – very well written.

The conversation brought up a few things to ponder:

What is proper commenting etiquette?

Should of these concerns been addressed with TC directly, submitted to the company and not the ‘Guest Author’?

Will TechCrunch respond with another article written about Twitter?  That would be sort of ironic in this situation.

It will be interesting to see if TechCrunch loses a few readers because they write too much about twitter, but what blog following social media tech trends isn’t writing about twitter? I agree with some the  comments, hearing about twitter 24/7 does become a bit annoying after awhile and there are other companies doing some really cool stuff in the social media realm.  Check out intensedebate.com or lijit.com for example.

I have come away with a few lessons, or should I say ‘reminders’ from this.

1. Listen to your readers, after all you are writing for them.
2. Write about Hot topics but be aware of your frequency.
3. If something catches fire, you quickly need to make a decision, let it burn OR put it out.

I guess we will see what TechCrunch decides to do.

Do you ever get a really great idea?

You know one of those huge lightning strike kind of ideas that you’re convinced will change the world.

So what do you do next?  You research.  You try to find out if anyone else has thought about it.

You google everything you can imagine related to the idea.  Most of the time you find out it’s already been done or somebody is already developing it.

But sometimes, just sometimes, every once in awhile, you have an idea that no one has thought about or at least if they have, they’re not in action about it as far as you can determine.

So you run to the phone, you send an email, you get on twitter, you wall to wall on facebook….Why?  To ask your mastermind group of course.

You think you’ve got one, the big fish, the viral application, the idea that will finally bring your name into digital format and make the world a better place.

You’re so excited you even sound out of breath to the folks reading your updated status,

hey I’ve got the most amazing idea, you won’t believe it, you gotta DM me ASAP

In the next few minutes you get everyone on skype.  Your most trusted colleagues with libraries of knowledge and expertise.  You give them the executive summary, cut to the chase, deliver your revolutionary concept.  You make a great presentation…..then there’s silence.

Then, the first questions come.  Then more questions, then obstacles, issues, roadblocks.  Your mastermind group raises every concern you have not yet even considered about your new idea.

Every question from marketing to technology and development to distribution.  You digest the feedback and further the discussion. You listen and take all of your friends criticism to heart and eventually come to the final question;

You’re one-of-a-kind concept very well may be worth writing up and beginning the process of a new venture.  OR it may not.  You may have discovered there are so many pitfalls, that its not even worth the risk.

Whatever your decision, you learned a valuable lesson. The power of your network .

You utilized your beta testers to prove whether your idea has merit or not, and in doing so, validated the indispensable asset of your mastermind group.

Starting a mastermind group may seem to be a daunting task, when in actuality it can be very simple.  You probably already know half a dozen or so folks that give you great feedback everyday.  Look at your friends, your co-workers, even your clients.

Many of the people you currently associate with on a daily basis have beneficial knowledge and experience.   Its just a matter of organizing a set date and time to chat.

Make it informal and make it fun.  Have a rotating schedule based on the number in your group where each person can have an equal opportunity.  Utilize web conferencing technology for convenience and a comfortable environment for in depth discussions.

No one minds giving advice and consulting with a friend, when they can sit home in their pj’s with a cup of coffee on Sunday afternoon.

Most of us really enjoy it!

Some important questions your potential customer will ask themselves when evaluating your product or service, especially in the making money online Internet marketing industry.

1. Who is this person?
2. Do I relate to them?
3. Can I trust who they are?

Yes they are many ways to make money online today from affiliate programs, selling your own products, e-commerce, business opportunities, MLM’s, the list goes on, but there is one crucial element that remains the same no matter which avenue you pursue, the human element.

Building a successful internet business requires building relationships with your customers. I’m not just talking about answering their questions and sending them inspiring messages or delivering quality content, that’s a given.  I am referring to being transparent and allowing your character to be revealed.

Allow people to know the real you. Let people know how you feel about the world, what’s important in your personal life and the mistakes and rewards you have made along the way.  You want to create a connection with like minded individuals, people that believe in you because they share a similar outlook on life, because they lived through a similar experience.  This is important, not only because establishing this type of relationship will ensure a long term customer but because you then are attracting the right type of customer.

If your audience can not relate to you they are not going to buy from you anyway, so you might as well just be the real you versus trying to present yourself as someone you’re not.  A customer that can relate to you on a very personal level will always listen to you and become a loyal word-of-mouth sales force.

Transparency is not always about showing a screen shot of your clickbank account. It’s about sharing your failures as much as your successes.  Share what you don’t know, as much as what you do know, if not more.  Engage and participate with your audience in an authentic genuine manner, just as you would if they were sitting in your living room.

These are some specific techniques and strategies in order for you to become an authority in your particular niche.  Its not difficult to create a network of thousands who believe in you.  You will not be seen as just another Internet marketer trying to make a buck.  You will be known as a friend, a colleague, a regular person wanting to help others unconditionally.  And you will make a lot more money too.

Go ahead and “Reveal the Wizard from Behind the Curtain”

What are your thoughts about transparency in marketing?  Leave me a comment and let others know.