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.
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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
This is #4 on Chris Brogan’s 100 Blog Topics list, and is part of the 100 Topics Challenge.
Alas, this post is a lament.
Way back when, there used to be a website called Askme.com. A friend of mine introduced me to Askme, which filled a niche similar to Yahoo! Answers today. Unlike Answers, people needed to specifically register to answer questions in a particular category, and in doing so indicate how they were expert in the topic. Users of the site rated answers in the standard manner, and experts were ranked both overall and in their categories of expertice.
The Askme community is probably the most vibrant of all of the online communities that I have been involved with over the years. In every category in which I was active, there were users who I truly got to know – both experts and people asking questions. People stuck around for years, and got involved in maintaining their categories.
Unfortunately the company decided that running a free website to showcase their technology was too expensive, so they shut it down in order to focus on selling their software to Fortune 500 companies instead. The hundreds of thousands of committed experts floated away along the internet’s pipes, and so far I have yet to find another site that I truly felt at home participating in to the same extent. From what I’ve heard, I’m not the only one.
This is #3 on Chris Brogan’s 100 Blog Topics list, and is part of the 100 Topics Challenge.
I’ve seen this a lot lately: some little flyspec place a million miles away from anything decides that they need to be bleeding edge. So they build a virtual world that duplicates the whole town and everything in it, and then try to provide municipal services through it.
My chief question is whether they have virtualized garbage collection and property taxes. I’d love to be able to pay my property taxes in Linden Dollars.
I don’t see anything wrong really with the notion that municipalities need to find more ways to connect to residents (as long as they do it right). I think the critical factor is that they need to realize that Social Media provides a different set of features and opportunities to other, older ways of “interfacing”. If their goal is to give their residents a way to contribute to the community then good for them. If they think that throwing up a 3d VR version of City Hall and then hoping that people will vote them in again next time around, then they should understand up front that they are wasting taxpayer’s money.
This is #2 on Chris Brogan’s 100 Blog Topics list, and is part of the 100 Topics Challenge.
The idea behind corporate blogging is to somehow build a more effective connection between a company and its customers. By allowing customers to have a say in how the company functions – giving them “ownership” in a certain sense – there is both opportunity and risk. The risk is more obvious: what if they say bad stuff about us? The opportunity has been well documented by people like Seth Godin and Guy Kawasaki – there is something incredibly attractive about a company that is truly willing to open itself up and “embrace” its customer base.
The truth of the matter is that I don’t have too much first experience with this idea. Yes, I’ve blogged in the past, but it was always more of a personal thing to amuse myself and my friends. Yes, I’ve played around with social media for marketing previous companies that I’ve been part of, but again this was in some way a half-hearted effort; not much more than randomly broadcasting “here I am” to anyone who would listen.
When I started Lichtman Consulting, I wanted to do things better, in a way that I had always somehow felt attracted to, yet never quite did – often because I couldn’t get buyin from my stakeholders (and other times because it is hard and takes real work). My goal was to build the kind of company that I had always admired from the distance. A company that listen to its customers. A company that gave them a say in matters. A company that is committed to Open Source, to community give-back, to making the world a better place. Not just words, but for real.
When I think of embracing my audience, I think of:
I’m not convinced that I’ve totally nailed it yet. I mean I’ve seen other people do it, and do it well. People you’ve heard of too. I know I’m still new at this game, and that there is a lot to learn if I’m going to be any darn good at it.
Have some good ideas on embracing your audience? I’d love to hear from you!