Wordpress Blogging

Typepad - Fail on Audio and Design

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 15:43:47 GMT

I've been trying to put an audio player in Typepad. This Typepad recommended player works.

RSS Management

Sat, 04 Jul 2009 20:46:22 GMT

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PollDaddy Traffic Soars, Releases Ratings Widget With Possible Digg Competitor On The Horizon

Sat, 04 Jul 2009 19:37:57 GMT

It's no secret that bloggers love their polls a 'A they're a great way to increase user engagement, and sometimes you can even get some useful data from them.

'Proud to be Indian and gay' - virtual world celebrates

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 14:30:04 GMT

'Proud to be Indian and gay!' said a blogger as he rejoiced an Indian court's decision overturning an age-old law and decriminalising homosexuality.

Keeping It Simple with ShermanLive.com Podcast

Mon, 16 Apr 2007 21:26:04 GMT

Hey there, I launched ShermanLive.com on April 14th, 2007 - whoohoo! ShermanLive...

Typepad Releases Page And Static Home Page Features

Sun, 17 Jun 2007 15:39:09 GMT

On May 16, 2007, Typepad released on its official blog a new feature: Pages...

Sweet street protest

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 10:22:08 GMT

DURING my student days abroad, when recklessness lorded over sound judgment, I did have one healthy penchant: hopping onto the bus and just walking along the streets of Sheffield - " even when the unforgiving English wind threatened to freeze my ears off - " in South Yorkshire.

Suzanne Senses Blog Fatigue - Do You?

Mon, 18 Jun 2007 07:06:30 GMT

Suzanne Falter-Barns of GetKnownNow.com published to her blog, sensing 'blog fatigue' amongst people's lives...

Join me at BlogWorldExpo?

Thu, 26 Jul 2007 15:46:45 GMT

Dave Taylor graciously invited me to be a featured speaker at BlogWorldExpo in Vegas come this November...

Latest Legal Wordpress Site/Blog

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 09:50:22 GMT

Creating a legal blog with Wordpress is a great idea but you can also create a website with a blog using Wordpress.

Beginners Guide to Mastering Web Basics - A New Facebook Group

Wed, 22 Aug 2007 18:47:35 GMT

My new playground? Facebook. Here are some stats that are astounding (Source: Shel Israel) * Over 150,000 registrants daily. That’s 1 million a week since January. * 35 million users today...

Facebook Etiquette Faux Paus?

Tue, 02 Oct 2007 21:25:09 GMT

In my latest podcast episode #10, I present my biggest pet peeve to date in using Facebook...

Blogging, Podcasting, Video Blogging & Social Media at ShermanLive.com

Tue, 08 Jan 2008 04:44:58 GMT

Hi friends, thanks for your ongoing support of this blog and tutorials at WordpressTutorials.com. I really appreciate you...

To Blog or not to Blog

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 09:45:18 GMT

What is it with blogging that has everyone going crazy? What's the point in writing reams of text telling people about ... well anything we want? Do we all crave to be authors ... superstars ... teachers ... prophets? Back when my parents were younger, when a loaf of bread wasn't sliced and you could pay for almost anything with coins, you might ...

Best Method To Post Content To WordPress

Sat, 04 Jul 2009 02:41:14 GMT

We conducted a small poll recently, where we asked WordPress users the method they use to post content to their blogs .

A Lazy Day

Sat, 04 Jul 2009 02:49:01 GMT

It is a really nice change of pace being this unproductive. I had big plans for today - so far, I mean aside from picking up my drycleaning, I have accomplished none of them.

Daily WordPress and Semiologic Pro Developments on Twitter

Sat, 16 May 2009 15:59:09 GMT

Blog -- I've set up a twitter feed on daily WordPress and Semiologic Pro developments. Depending on the interest, I'll give it some love.

Hondurasa new leaders reject appeal for Zelayaa s return

Sat, 04 Jul 2009 04:34:37 GMT

The head of the Organization of American States said Friday he has found no willingness among leaders of Honduras' interim government to return President Jose Manuel Zelaya to power.

Sheriff: a Yes, we have a serial killera

Sat, 04 Jul 2009 04:34:53 GMT

The Cherokee County Sheriff's Office released Friday a second sketch of a man believed to have fatally shot four people in less than a week near Gaffney, South Carolina.

WordPress 2.8: Very neat, but needs testing

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 19:18:04 GMT

Blog — From the end-user's standpoint, the difference between WP 2.7 and WP 2.8 goes down to a new widgets screen, which allows to see all sidebars in one go.

More on WordPress 2.8: Very neat, but needs testing

North Korea launches missiles

Sat, 04 Jul 2009 04:35:06 GMT

North Korea fired three short-range missiles toward the Sea of Japan, South Korea's Yonhap news agency reported Saturday.

Former Iran president wants detainees released

Sat, 04 Jul 2009 04:35:21 GMT

Iranians worried about their loved ones detained in the outbreaks of protests that followed the presidential election got the ear of a former president, who wants the detainees released, reported an Iranian reformist party newspaper Thursday.

Send a tweet, win a free iPod!

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 15:12:42 GMT

Blog — Paul Colligan and Alex Mandossian, the widely acknowledged podcasting gurus, kindfuly invited me to this year's Podcast Secrets session.

We'll be discussing how to podcast and videocast using Semiologic Pro, mediacaster, and a coming plugin that will integrate Semiologic Pro with PremiumCast.

Posts about motorcycle event as of July 3, 2009

Sat, 04 Jul 2009 05:03:17 GMT

Street Bikes and Fuel Economy The street bike is often viewed as a recreational toy, The motorcycle however varies greatly proportionately with the engine size Street bike engines The phenomenal fuel savings of motorcycle travel versus car Extreme Sports Nutrition For The Motorcyle Rider - bodybuildingelite.com 07/03/2009 The subject of sports ...

Bryan Eisenberg RSS Interview, part 2: RSS Marketing Best Practices

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 06:53:24 GMT

What works best in RSS marketing? How are RSS subscribers different than e-mail subscribers? RSS publishing best practices if you want to sell?

These and other practical questions are all revealed in the 2nd part of the RSS interview with Bryan Eisenberg. Without doubt, this is one of the best and most practical RSS marketing interviews we've done so far.

In part 1 of the Bryan Eisenberg RSS interview we focused on how the GrokDotCom.com is going beyond traditional RSS Radars by employing intelligent content aggregation tools, instead of relying just on contextual filtering, and what kind of results they are achieving.

In part 2 of the interview we move beyond RSS Radars to their overall RSS marketing strategy.

In this interview find out about ...

1. How RSS subscribers are different from e-mail subscribers and why?

2. How to sell products through content-rich RSS feeds?

3. Do RSS subscribers mind seeing product promotions in your feeds?

4. When to publish your latest RSS content to get the most links from other websites and most readership?

5. What's the right RSS publishing frequency for promotional content?

6. Why branding your RSS feed is important and how to do it?

Click here to listen to the MP3 file [8:33 minutes; 2 MB]

How Can RSS Power Your Internet Marketing and Publishing?
Find out more in the most comprehensive and best guide on RSS for marketers, as acclaimed by leading RSS experts, developers, marketers and publishers.
Click here and get the step-by-step guide to taking full marketing advantage of RSS.

Amazon.com Discussions and Reviews via RSS

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 06:53:24 GMT

I have to apologise to Amazon for missing on two of their RSS content delivery options, which I previously missed.

Sorry guys, and thank you for the heads up.

1. Product Discussions
Most Amazon.com product discussions are now available also as RSS feeds. An excellent way of keeping track of the conversations surrounding your favorite products, and certainly something more websites should implement ... especially those that provide content that people are pashionate about.

The first one that comes to mind is TV.com and their community show reviews.

2. Customer Reviews by Author
Like a product reviewer? Subscribe to their Amazon.com reviews RSS feed.

AdSense user wins trial vs Google

Fri, 06 Mar 2009 21:05:24 GMT

Blog -- There's a fun story in the Huggington Post where Aaron Greenspan describes how he sued Google and won.

Bryan Eisenberg RSS Interview, part 1: Making RSS Radars Work to Increase Your Sales

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 06:53:24 GMT

Part of the upcoming 2007 edition of the RSS Marketing e-book are also the interviews we are doing with various internet marketing experts and RSS practitioners. In the following days and hopefully not too many weeks, we'll be posting those interviews here.

I'm sure most of you have heard of Bryan Eisenberg before. Bryan is the leading worldwide authority on internet marketing optimization and website persuasion architecture. He was also one of the few marketers that got on the RSS Marketing bandwagon early on.

Recently, Bryan started exploring RSS Radars as a tool to increase the traffic to their optimization portal GrokDotCom.com, increase visitor loyalty, position the website as the key news source for internet optimization ... and naturally facilitate online sales of their books and consulting services. Take a look here.

But while most RSS Radars are based on contextually filtering content from selected third-party RSS feeds, the GrokDotCom.com RSS Radars go far beyond anything else we have seen on the market so far.

Instead of relying only on contextual content filtering to select the most relevant third-party content, they are employing a number of additional filters, such as the amount of linkage the story is receiving, source relevance and credibility, and so on ... and they're calling it a discovery engine.

What are their RSS Radar marketing goals?
How their RSS Radar is different from what you can generally see online?
What concrete results are they achieving?
What you can learn from their RSS marketing?

All of these answers, and more, available in the audio interview.

Click here to listen to the MP3 file [14 minutes; 3 MB]

New Marketing Thinking Required for Second Life?

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 06:53:24 GMT

Mobil Avenue accuses me of 20th century marketing thinking. I'm not quite sure what he has in mind, but it seems that my Second Life posts ticked off some people.

Now, don't get me wrong, I see alot of development potential in virtual worlds, but Second Life as it is simply does not cut it.

I won't go into the details again, but the sheer lack of economy of scales shows that something is wrong when you compare the investments in Second Life and the actual virtual world penetration. Not to mention the difficult user interface.

Second Life is a good beginning, but virtual worlds have a far way to go before they deserve to be treated as seriously as some are treating them today. Yes, Second Life should certainly be treated as a marketing/communications playground, but not as a high importance marketing channel.

If you want to call this 20th century thinking, go ahead. It is. As are economies of scale, profitability, sales conversion, cost per order and other business "relics".

And as you'll notice, 20th century thinking still works, even in 2007. We've all heard stories of the demise of advertising, the death of PR, the death of e-mail, the death of postal direct mail and so on ... but they're all alive, well and kicking still today, and will remain so.

Actually, intrusive direct response TV advertising is still one of the most effective tools to generate sales. And it gives you more bang for the buck than almost any other marketing channel, including online.

Do I like this? No. I'd love to believe that the internet is the alpha and omega of marketing. But it's not. It's the key connector, but not the key driver. That's the way things are, and as markters we need to employ 20th century thinking and use what works best ... and the numbers tell us that.

But this doesn't mean we shouldn't play and test. Quite on the contrary.

OK, this conversation is getting somewhat beyond the original topic, and it's quite possible I'm not even getting what Mobil Avenue is trying to say:)

And please don't get me started on 3D virtual webstores ...

Of course, I might be wrong. And if I am, I'll be the first to change my stripes the next day. It's what marketers do. If a new thing comes up and works better than what you're doing, change. But every change first demand proof. Unless you're just testing ... because when you're testing, the rules of the game change.

Semiologic Pro, v.5.7.1

Mon, 26 Jan 2009 11:55:53 GMT

Release — Semiologic Pro 5.7.1 has been released today.

This was a planned maintenance, which you can safely ignore. Key changes:

The 10-Step RSS Marketing Plan

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 06:53:24 GMT

While RSS has certainly become well-established with most marketers, few are using it to its full advantage.

Now, while the original Unleash the Marketing & Publishing Power of RSS e-book focused on explaining RSS marketing in a world where RSS was just starting out, the 2007 edition will focus on optimizing your RSS marketing and getting as much as possible from it.

The 10-step plan is one of the tools we will be introducing in the 2007 edition, once it's launched (getting there:).

Going through this plan will help you get as much as possible from RSS, on all levels. It will help you bring your RSS marketing to the same level as your e-mail marketing, and more.

But for now, here's a very quick summary of the steps from the process view point.

1. Develop your RSS marketing strategy
It all starts with a strategy that defines all the other elements of your RSS marketing plan. Developing your RSS marketing strategy consists of planning your RSS usage for each marketing function and integrating it with the rest of your marketing mix, and setting the goals for each of the marketing functions.

2. Start using RSS for business intelligence
Conducting business intelligence using RSS is the first step to improving your marketing overall. You will start by finding the right RSS Reader for you, define your business intelligence needs, find the relevant information sources, and implementing the right RSS business intelligence tools.

3. Plan your overall outbound RSS content strategy
Outbound communications using RSS are the most complex part of RSS marketing, with numerous choices available to you. During this step you will define your outbound communications target audiences, define your goals for each of them, decide on your RSS feed publishing model, define your RSS feed content and define your RSS feed content sources.

4. Define your RSS marketing requirements & select your RSS marketing vendor
Defining your RSS marketing technology requirements and selecting the appropriate vendor to supply you with all the features you need to support your strategy.

5. Plan your RSS content strategy on the content-item level
Once you have prepared your overall RSS content strategy you need to plan your RSS content-item level strategy, which essentially means getting the right content in place within the feed to meet your objectives. This consists of defining your writing style, defining the content item structure and defining your calls-to-action.

6. Promote your RSS feeds internally
Simply publishing RSS feeds on your website is not enough to generate subscribers. In this section you will define your RSS feed subscription process, define the RSS feed promotion locations for your feeds, develop the subscription offer and implement the other neccessary technical items to increase your subscription growth.

7. Promote your RSS feeds externally
After setting everything correctly through your own channels, it is neccesary to promote the RSS feeds using external websites as well. This process includes optimizing your RSS feed for the search engines, submitting the feed to the search engines and performing periodic pinging.

8. Measure and optimize your RSS feeds
Measurement and optimization are the two areas that can have the most profound impact on your RSS success. This consists of defining the required metrics, establishing the technical capacities for measurement, measuring and optimizing your content strategy and measuring and optimizing your subscription generation tactics.

9. Use RSS to syndicate your content to other online media
Use RSS to get your content published on other relevant media. The neccessary steps for syndication are defining your target media, defining your RSS feed content, preparing the right syndication tools and promoting your syndication offerings.

10. Use RSS to enhance your website and brand
Enhancing your website is about adding third-party content to enrich the user experience, while enhancing your brand is about providing your own branded RSS Reader.

What You Can Do With Amazon RSS Now?

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 06:53:24 GMT

If I keep this up, I might actually get the reputation of picking on Amazon.com as a hobby [just take a look at Is Amazon Missing the RSS Advertising Opportunity?, Why is Everyone Missing the RSS Transactional Messaging Opportunity? and Get the Most from RSS Marketing ... Take Your DM Hat Off!].

It's just one of those things. You see a company that could really go above and beyond with RSS and really use it to drive revenues, but they just don't do it.

But at least they're showing some activitiy lately ...
[in addition to removing their list of relatively useless category feeds, which used to be available here]

a) Gold Box
Gold Box is a service that provides you with personalized deals every day. It finally has an RSS feed with your daily deals.

But, unfortunatelly, the RSS feed only provides brief information about the product, instead of also giving you a direct purchase link, some of the latest product reviews and other information that could facilitate the sale. Also, there's no personalization, or so it seems. Why not give me an RSS feed with just the special deals for me, based on my previous purchases?

b) Plog
This is one of the genius Amazon ideas. Each Plog is personalized to the individual user, giving him the latest blog posts from Amazon's authors (just from the authors' whos books you've purchased), and it also comes with a targeted RSS feed, matching the Plog content you see when you're logged-in. You can also subscribe to additional blog content manually.

Also, Amazon is promising that we'll be soon able to track latest releases, changes to our orders and "much more" through our plogs, which will presumably also come be published in our targeted RSS feeds.

Amazon, please keep this up. Make us happy:)

c) The Amazon API
But let's be fair to Amazon. Even though their end-user RSS feed offering is poor, they do provide developers with the ability to create their own RSS feeds from Amazon, by integrating with their API.

Here are some examples:

RSStalker.com - provides a variety of Amazon product tracking options via RSS, such as a 10% price drop feed that lets you know when a product that RSStalker is tracking via Amazon drops 10% in price; RSS feeds from your wishlists; last 25 price changes in a selected Amazon category, and more.

Baebo - provides a persistant search RSS feed for Amazon products, based on your keywords.

More great examples floating around ...

New plugin: Archive Widgets

Wed, 21 Jan 2009 10:30:23 GMT

Software — Archive Widgets has been part of Semiologic Pro for a while now; this is it's first public release.

Any WordPress user can now have as many Archive widgets as he wants.

Quick RSS SEO Tips

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 06:53:24 GMT

WebProNews has a short summary from Amanda Watlington's tips for SEO optimization of your RSS feeds:

1. Subscribe to your own feed and claim it on blog engine Technorati
2. Focus your feed with a keyword theme

3. Use keywords in the title tag; keep it under 100 characters

4. Most feed readers display feeds alphabetically, title accordingly

5. Write description tags as if for a directory; keep them under 500 characters

6. Use full paths on links and unique URLs for each item

7. Provide email updates for the non-techies

8. Offer an HTML version of your feed

9. For branding, add logo and images to your feed

Now, let's add some tips from Stephan Spencer and continue with the numbering:

10. Full text, not summaries
11. 20 or MORE items (not just 10)

12. Multiple feeds (by category, latest comments, comments by post)

13. Keyword-rich item [title]

14. Your brand name in the item [title]

15. Your most important keyword in the site [title] container

16. Compelling site [description]

17. Don't put tracking codes into the URLs (e.g. &source=rss)

18. An RSS feed that contains enclosures (i.e. podcasts) can get into additional RSS directories & engines

And to round this off, a summary of my own tips [part 2 here] for using RSS to drive traffic to your site:

19. Get your RSS content (proactively) syndicated on other relevant websites [just the headlines and summaries of course]
20. Submit your RSS feeds to all the RSS search engines and directories

21. Use RSS to add relevant third-party content [again, just headlines and summaries] to your website to gain additional SE weight for your keywords

22. Use RSS to deliver all of your frequently updated content, not just for your latest blog posts

23. Whenever the content in your feed changes, ping the most important search engines and directories [yes, you don't need a blog for this]

Do you have more tips?

(a) Post them in the comments form below.

(b) E-mail me at info@marketingstudies.net and let's set-up an interview

Buzz Marketing in 1953 Iran

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 06:53:24 GMT

A lot has been written in the past few days about how social media and technology has been at the center of the developments in Iran. But I'd like to go a few decades back.

Something rather startling happened during Obama's trip to the Middle East a few weeks ago.

For the first time a President acknowledge the US role in the 1953 overthrow of the Iranian government. Obama was talking about the prickly relations between the US and Iran:

In the middle of the Cold War, the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically-elected Iranian government.

Never before had a US President admitted what was already well known to everyone in Iran.

But how do you overthrow a government?

As you can probably guess, it was about oil.

The Ultimate Product Launch

After World War II, nationalist leaders began seeking to reduce the power of the Anglo-Indian Oil Company and nationalize the petroleum business. Initially, the British had asked President Truman for help in deposing the Iran's Prime Minister Mosaddegh. Truman refused. Later on, the Brits would approach Eisenhower who agreed to make a joint commitment to depose the elected civil government (with five US oil companies at the ready to grab the resources once control was re-established - and doesn't that sound familiar?).

And so the C.I.A. selected Kermit Roosevelt for the job (one of Teddy's ~~grand~~sons). Roosevelt landed in Iran and began his one-man campaign to overthrow a democratically elected government. Quotes below are from Amy Goodman's interview with Steven Kinzer, author of All the Shah's Men (book cover, above).

Confuse the Issue

To successfully start a viral marketing campaign, you have to create a sense of disruption. You have to create ideas worth spreading. You have to influence the influencers and create fertile ground for your marketing messages to take root:

The first thing [Kermit Roosevelt] did was, he started bribing members of parliament and leaders of small political parties that were a part of [Prime Minister] Mossadegh's political coalition. Pretty soon the public started to see the Mossadegh 's coalition splitting apart and people denouncing him on the floor of parliament.

Media Buys to Amplify

As the viral campaign starts to take happen, you can use traditional media channels and placements to amplify the message. The C.I.A. put journalists on the payroll.

Within a couple of weeks, he had 80% of the newspapers in Tehran on his payroll and they were grinding out every kind of lie attacking Mossadegh .

Paid Reviews

Once you've started seeding things with a viral message and amplified it with traditional tactics, you need to get some paid reviews. You need experts to talk about your product or service. Or demonize the competition.

The next thing Roosevelt did was start bribing religious leaders. Soon, at Friday prayers, the Mullahs were denouncing Mossadegh as an atheist enemy of Islam.

Customer Support

Also be sure that your staff is at the ready to provide support for any customer questions or complaints with your product delivery.

Roosevelt also bribed members of police units and low-ranking military officers to be ready with their units on the crucial day.

Use Social Media to Spread the Word

As things roll on, you can use social media to bring your ideas and messages to a larger crowd.

[H]e hired the leaders of a bunch of street gangs in Tehran, and he used them to help create the impression that the rule of law had totally disintegrated in Iran. ... He hired a second mob to attack the first mob, to give people the impression that there was no police presence and order had completely disintegrated.

Ask for the Sale

And once everybody is beating down your door (or beating down each other), you have to go for the brass ring and ask for the sale:

The first coup that Roosevelt organized was scheduled to take place on August 15th of 1953. ... The C.I.A. had a general already designated to take over the next day as prime minister of Iran. But what happened? Mossadegh got wind of this plan. So now, the coup had failed and the Shah, who had been waiting out the results at his resort near the Caspian, immediately fled the country.

Go Back and Ask Again

Sometimes you don't get the sale on the first try. What's that old adage that you have ask multiple times from multiple channels?

On his own, [Roosevelt] activated his mobs on the 19th of August, just four days later, in a second coup attempt. They rampaged through the streets by the tens of thousands. Many of them, I think, never even really understood they were being paid by the C.I.A. By midnight, on August the 19th of 1953, his house was in flames, and he had fled over the back guard wall to surrender himself a couple of days later. And the general, who was a C.I.A.--who the C.I.A. had selected as the designated savior of Iran was installed as prime minister.

And the shah who was cooling his heels in Rome also returned to the country. He'd later toast Roosevelt and say, "I owe my throne to God, my people, my army, and you."

Find a New Niche and Repeat

Once you've conquered one niche (or country), time for a new target market.

Roosevelt came back home to raucous reception. And of course they wanted an encore.

Roosevelt was called into his boss's office, and told, you know, you did such a great job overthrowing that government in Iran, we have decided we don't like the government down in Guatemala. Kermit Roosevelt demurred but someone else was found, and in less than a year after the democratic government of Iran was overthrown by the C.I.A., the C.I.A. did the same thing in Guatemala.

I'm always entranced by the ideas of marketing and 'management perception' in the world around us whether they are exercised by entrepreneurs, bloggers, corporations or countries.

Ad Manager Widget

Fri, 16 Jan 2009 20:06:40 GMT

Resources - Today I added a page on how and where to use the [ad manager widget->ad widgets@resources] plugin.