Lichtman Consulting

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While I’m on the topic of helpful websites, here’s another simple but useful one: Wefollow.

Its a user-edit Twitter directory, that Nathan pointed out to me a few days ago.

I picked up a few followers just by signing up.

I find it remarkable how many followers some of the top users of Twitter have accumulated. Yes, some of them are leveraging off of some form of celebrity status (real-world or online). Its quite amazing how large the reach of some dedicated tweeters is though. It takes a lot of hard work to scale up a following like that, regardless of where it is.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, I suggest taking a look at Grader.com, a tool provided by web marketing gurus HubSpot.

Their website grading tool provides a host of useful information that can help you fine-tune your site.

I’ve been playing around with their tools for the past few months, and they’ve been extraordinarily useful in terms of tweaking things to make them more search engine friendly. Also useful is their Twitter profile grader.

Editor’s Note: The author of this blog entry, Nathan Bomshteyn, is an SEO and internet marketing expert, who works for Lichtman Consulting. Please welcome his first article with a round of applause!

If you use WordPress then you might of heard about their sister project BuddyPress. BuddyPress is the open source social platform that promises to be the WordPress of social platforms. To be scalable and the same time light, to have a variety of features and be user friendly… Just as WordPress made it possible for anyone to have a nice professional looking blog without even touching the code, now you could have your own social network too with very minimal interaction with code.

Now that the version 1.0 is officially out I decided to test. So I downloaded the file only to find out that its not a program by itself but a plug-in for WordPress.

I installed WordPress on my Linux machine on localhost. When tried installing BuddyPress I was notified by the program that I have to run WordPress-mu (multi user version) to be able to install BuddyPress. I tried installing the mu version, but guess what, WordPress-mu can’t be installed on localhost.

At that point I just decided to buy a domain name and get a proper hosting for it. I installed WordPress-mu, activated the BuddyPress plugin that I inserted into plugin folder. Hooray! Looks like its working, I found few nice web 2.0 themes installed them, it looked really nice, until my friend who uses Internet Explorer tried to signup and for some “unknown reason” got a 404 error, page doesn’t exist. I have got a new challenge why does it show this error when I know that the page is there…

One day later the problem is solved: you can’t use a regular WordPress theme for the main blog, what you need is two themes one specially designed for BuddyPress “home” and the second one for the  BuddyPress “member” page. So I put them in the appropriate folders and I have finally got it working.

Or did I?

Wait! What about the forums capability? Why don’t I see it?

Oh! In order to have forums you have to install BBpress which is a stand alone application but has the built-in options for WordPress integration.

So I download the latest stable version, install it, integrate the user info with WordPress, but for some “strange” reason even with the key master account I can’t start a new forum…

I almost gave up for now on forum capability, when I by mere coincidence found a folder in the BuddyPress installation that had the BBpress integration files; there I saw a readme document with detailed instruction of how to integrate them. I found what I did wrong – the latest stable release is too old, what I need is the latest Alpha release. So I uninstalled the stable release and installed the unstable one. Got through the installation by following every line in the readme. And guess what – its finally working.

Moral of the story: I am part of generation that doesn’t like reading the manuals and readme files, but sometimes reading them could save you a lot of time.

Some resources:

WordPress MU – http://mu.wordpress.org
BuddyPress – http://buddypress.org
BBpress – http://bbpress.org
Working Example: http://postnonstop.com

A better subtitle for this blog could be: “Throw a bunch of spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks”

I keep an eye on the Google Analytics reports for this site. The past couple of months, there were an unusually large number of hits from people searching for info on Twitter. I just tried a couple of searches on Google.com and Google.ca this morning, and for “twitter purpose” (and a variety of other combinations), we’re showing up near the top of the first page. In the past, we’ve also had searches for people looking for info on Askme.com, DandyId and other specific topics that I’ve written about here.

I think the general principal, one that has relevance for SEO (search engine optimization), is that it’s just about impossible to determine in advance what the zeitgeist of the moment is going to be. As a result, place content on your site that covers a wide range of related topics, and there’s a good chance that something that you write will be relevant to somebody, somewhere, at some point in time.

This is otherwise known as the spaghetti principal – when you don’t know what precisely will work, try a bunch of different things, and record your results. This isn’t a new idea by any means. Bloggers, internet marketers and SEOs use this tactic all the time, in a variety of different ways.