From the category archives:
WordPress templates
How To Be A Successful Web 2.0 Puppetmaster
One of the key characteristics of Web 2.0 is participation, collaboration and moderation through the use of web applications. Web 2.0 sites derive their power from the human connections and network effects from this characteristic that is made possible, and grow in effectiveness the more people use them.
The idea of “participation, collaboration and moderation” can take many forms. If you look back history, bulletin boards are one form, online forums are another, online multiplayer games, content management systems (e.g. Wikis, Joomla), dating sites and classifieds as well. If not for features that enable multiple users to create their own space within a website via registering accounts or at least leave a message (like a comment in a blog), the communication culture would have been one-way (from the webmaster to the visitors) and remain stuck in 1.0.
Why would a webmaster want to go Web 2.0? We learned that social networkers want to expand their personal network of online friends. On the other hand, the webmaster desires to build up a core group of active participants who unconsciously help to sustain the ‘liveliness’ and therefore the longevity of the website and its agenda or interests while the overall database of users expand. In this manner, a lot of the effort that goes into building the database (or list) becomes very much hands-off for the webmaster. There’s leverage. This is also where moderation comes in.
The role of the webmaster naturally becomes that of the moderator, whose job is to maintain some semblance of order (but not to the point of creating a restrictive environment) and general site maintenance. It gets better when the webmaster can promote participants into moderators themselves, and more and more s/he becomes the “silent puppetmaster” behind the scene without doing much. It may not be easy, but the whole mindset of being a moderator is to gain confidence in just “letting it be” and letting his/her site runs by itself.
Now that the webmaster’s motivation is addressed, s/he must find ways to avoid competition by finding new twists to contribute to the Web 2.0 bandwagon. Much as new sites keep popping up in recent months, somehow no 2 sites are made the same and they certainly enjoy a good amount of traffic anyway. It would be better when you can boil down social networking to the context of a specific niche, like a site to exchange Mexican recipes or talk about Ferrari car accessories or business opportunities in Central Asia. You can better target the type of people you are looking for and it also gives them a sharper sense of purpose to engage with and within your site.
At the end of the day, social networking is all about sharing valuable content and making friends. The successful Web 2.0 webmaster is one who knows how to tap on this human desire to the fullest and consistently encourages such a desire to grow within the culture of the social network he has created by offering further privileges for more prominent members. Really, there’s no better way for them to build up credibility and make their personalities known than to be consistently ‘alive’ and ‘happening’ on the Net. From the SEO standpoint of view, you can also accumulate more backlinks and subsequently more traffic to your social networking site.
About the Author
Nelson Tan is the webmaster behind Internet Mastery Center. Download $347 worth of FREE Internet Marketing gifts at Internet Mastery Center.
{ 0 comments }
Post Regularly Because…
Keeping people interested in your blog, whether it is a business or personal blog, is key to attracting a lot of regular visitors. Many blogs have died because people have just lost interest. The main reason for the lack of interest is simply a lack of posts by the blogger. Regular, frequent posting, which will boost your blog’s ranking in search engines, is essential to the survival of any blog.
You might be asking yourself, what is frequent posting? How many blog entries should I make on a given week? How do I make frequent consistently good posts? What are the reasons for me to post frequently? In this newsletter, we will go over all of the above.
What is frequent posting?
Frequent blog posting is posting enough to keep your readers interested. Obviously, people will not want to come back to a blog that hasn’t been updated in months. They want to see consistent posting so that they know coming back to check the blog next week to see if there are more posts won’t be a waste of time.
How many blog entries should I make each week?
This is one of the tougher questions to answer. It really depends on the purpose of your blog. If it’s a personal blog, a weekly or twice weekly update is an excellent idea. A political/sports/music/religion blog should have 3-4 posts per week. Business blogs should have at least 2 posts, but preferably 4 each week.
The thing to remember is that quality counts. Posting frequently just for the sake of posting frequently tends to result in subpar posts which people won’t care about. It is important to find a balance?”frequent, quality posts that won’t result in burnout on your part. Why create 4 poor quality posts each week when you could post 2 quality posts per week?
How do I create quality postings on a consistent basis?
It’s all about following a consistent pattern of writing. Maybe you’re not a natural writer and this is difficult. That’s why we’ll give you an outline to help you.
1. Pick a topic that is interesting to you and to your readers. Maybe if your blog is a personal blog, you could write about the latest happenings in Hollywood. 2. Carefully think about what you’ll write about the topic. It makes it easy to make quality blog postings if you know exactly what you’ll write. Plot out everything about the post before even beginning to write it. 3. Before writing your content, pick out some keywords that are relevant to your blog. If you naturally use keywords throughout your post, you will please search engine spiders which will get your blog ranked higher on search engines. Your visitors won’t mind the use of keywords if they are used in a tasteful way. 4. Begin writing your post. Don’t limit yourself to a particular amount of words. Just do what’s natural. And if any blog post is hard for you, just take a timeout and relax. You should be able to finish the post a bit later on, after you’ve had some time to think things through, you should be able to finish the post with no problems.
Why is frequent posting important?
Blogs are meant to be outlets for individuals or businesses. They are used to get an opinion out on something and to engage readers. Readers need to have something that makes them want to keep coming back to a blog. That something is usually quality, frequent posts.
Gaining and maintaining visitors isn’t the only reason to post often in your blog. Catching the eye of a search engine?”and achieving a high ranking?”is another valid reason for posting frequently. Most likely, each posting in your blog features some keywords or keyword phrases scattered throughout it. Logic says that the more natural keywords you have on a blog, the better. Thus, the more posts you make on your blog, the more keywords you have on there. And the more keywords you have, the more likely a search engine bot is to crawl your site. The more your site is crawled by bots, the more likely it is that you will have a high ranking on a search engine.
Frequent blog posting can be easy as long as the person who is posting takes the time to plot out what they’ll write about. So take a few minutes to think about your post and then just do it!
About the Author
Len Hutton is a information publisher specialising in helping people start their own home based business. Get a no cost video showing you step by step how to set up a niche ebook empire at www.nicheresidualincomes.com Keep your eye on residual income business opportunity regularly to learn and earn. http://residualincomebusinessopportunity.blogspot.com/
{ 0 comments }
How Can Interactivity Increase Conversions & Make You Money?
In the last article (See Resources for details) we discussed several ways to enhance your users experience and how having a site that is user friendly is so conducive to having pages that are also easy to crawl and index. This time we’ll discuss the central elements of the ideal Web 2.0 ready site and they are collaboration and interactivity. I want you to really focus on these two key concepts in particular because they really are an essential must have in the Web. 2.0 era
The phenomenal popularity of sites such as these has had more and more organizations that are doing business online reexamining the status quo. Consumers now simply expect more than just a one-way conversation or a static mandate. Think about it, why should anyone follow what your have to say if you are not willing to listen to what they have to say to you in return. Consumers prefer to interact; they want to know what other customers have to say about your product or service. That means you have to facilitate a place for your customers to express their point of view, start a conversation, comment on a particular topic or simply ask a question. With that in mind, you need to start thinking about your online presence as an outlet or podium that regularly encourages and endorses an entrenched sense of community among its users.
But how can interactivity increase conversions and make you money? If you read the last article you already know about the importance of having good content. Search engines love content. They want the foremost authority on any given subject. In other words, they want a site that knows the most and is the most reputable on a topic. Now we need to look instead at what we don’t know. We need to gain a better understanding of what our customer’s wants and needs are. That is where interaction and collaboration come in.
Tools like web analytics (e.g. Google Analytics) which help you see what’s happening on your site by determining which aspects of the website work towards the business objectives; for example, what pages they looked at, visit durations, where they left from and who referred them, only tell you half the story. Web analytics tools are great for answering questions like when, where and how. But what they don’t tell you is the who and the why. Only by feeding and growing the interactivity of your online presence can you gain a better understanding of your customer’s wants and needs. Moreover, giving your customers a voice will you help you better tailor your product to suit them.
If for instance you are looking at launching a new promotional campaign you can use the feedback on your site from your prospects so as to test the idea before you launch. You can even find out how people currently perceive your small business. This type of research is invaluable in helping you improve and make the right decisions concerning your online business. As they say: “If you don’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”
Having an interactive site does not have to cost you and arm and a leg either, there are plenty of low-cost solutions out there, one of which I will be telling you about in the upcoming weeks. However, the key here is you have to facilitate the means to carry that conversation. You need to open that dialogue to get insight into what’s really working or isn’t working on your site
In the upcoming weeks we’ll talk more about these new Web 2.0 trends and also show you the easiest way to launch your own ready-built web 2.0 site. As always please feel free to share your thoughts, comments, feedback and keep checking back for more updates.
Resources:
Is Your Site Search Engine and Users Friendly?
How to Analyze, Optimize, Publicize, Monetize and Troubleshotize the Ideal Web 2.0 Site in a Nutshell.
{ 0 comments }
Is Your Site Search Engine and Users Friendly?
In the last article of this series (see Resources for links), I explained the importance of having regularly updated content on your site. In that same vain, we looked at how that content must be clear, authoritative and more importantly, relevant to your niche. Additionally, I talk about how crucial making your content available through RSS is become with the advance and development of the decentralized information movement. In this article, I’ll discuss two more fundamental characteristic of the ideal Web 2.0 site, and that is that your site must be search engine and user friendly.
As I’m sure you may have already heard, at the center of all this there’s a lot of technology: JavaScript, HTML and XHTML, a bit of dynamic HTML, Ajax, and even some XML (Extensible Markup Language). Don’t worry if you don’t understand all of this (or any of this for that matter) you don’t have to. What I’m about to teach you through this series of articles does not require any knowledge in programming. Anyone can do this and I don’t care if you are selling garbage bags, bartending, teaching disco dancing or working retail. These are all very easy and inexpensive techniques anyone can use to launch their very own Web 2.0 ready site and it can be done in a matter of just minutes.
Building a site with SEO in mind goes Hand-in-Hand with having a site that is user friendly too, in fact you can’t work towards the one without the other. Search engines love feeding web users lots of relevant content, so the more authoritative and relevant your content is, the more likely it will eventually be served. Consequently the better the users experience the better your Ranking. In other words, make pages for users, not for search engines. Hence, you need to figure out your niche and be carefully defined within that niche. In addition you must updated your content regularly and that content must be authoritative.
Now that we understand the significance of having the right content lets talk about the sites structure. First, you must take common-sense steps to ensure that your site helps users find their content easily. For example, is your content organized in an easy-to-read hierarchical layout? Are you using HTML links on every page, and does each page provide internal links in the text to help the search engine crawler find its way around? Does your site offer a site map and do you include a link to the site map somewhere on each page? And last but certainly not least. Do your pages contain relevant information that clearly and accurately describe your content and is that text clear, crisp and legible?
Remember, optimizing your site structure has to be an integral part of the design process and must enhance the overall user experience. Furthermore, pages that are simple to navigate and don’t require much thinking on the end users part, will also be pages that are easy to crawl and index. In reality, SEO is pretty simple, avoid using overzealous SEO practices and think about what’s best for the user. The ideal search engines and user friendly site is all about providing the user with content–rich relevant information and getting them to that information as soon and as easily as possible.
And there you have it. Two more fundamental ingredients of the ideal Web 2.0 ready site; is your site search engine and users friendly? In the upcoming weeks we will be continuing this discussion, as promised, and show you how you can launch your very own ready-built Web 2.0 site. If there’s anything you wish to add on the subject of search engine and users friendly websites please feel free to share your thoughts and comments and keep checking back for more updates.
Resources:
How Can Interactivity Increase Conversions & Make You Money?
How to Analyze, Optimize, Publicize, Monetize and Troubleshotize the Ideal Web 2.0 Site in a Nutshell.
{ 0 comments }
