Alphablogs

The other day I got one of these letters again:

This is a scam. If you get a letter like this, do not pay them any money! The only company you need to be in touch with in regard to your domain registration is the company who you’ve paid originally. Confused who this is? Go to WhoIs.

Now what’s Domain Registration of Canada (or “of America”, “of Europe”) up to? They’re basically a scam, skating extremely close to legality. It appears they have some automated system that goes to WhoIs, finds out whose domain registry is about to expire in the next few months, and then pretends that it’s through THEM that you need to renew - when actually what you’re doing is moving away from you host and to Domain Registry of Hell Canada/America/Europe. In the US they’ve been barred from sending these letters (whether they’ve actually stopped is another question).

They’re pretty clever, with their neat little maple leaf that makes it look like it’s coming from The Government. All you need to do is get out your VISA card, pay them an exorbitant amount of money (way more than you’d pay for most other comparable services), send your registration form back in the convenient return envelope, and off you go. That is, off your money goes. Oh, and you have to deal with all the hassle that can come with switching hosts, plus you’ll be stuck with a dishonest host.

When you google “Domain Registry of Canada”, only the first result will give you the company. The rest on the first page are all complaints about the scam. Not a good recommendation. (Btw, when I get an offer or solicitation from someone I don’t know – I always immediately google them to see what they’re up to. With that technique, I can honestly say that I have not once fallen for or passed on a hoax).

If you’ve gotten a letter from these people, feel free to follow Mitch Joel’s advice to call them at 1-866-434-0212 and tell them what you think.

Perhaps you’re like me and you secretly wanted to become a private detective when you were a kid. Then you’ll find interesting what Peter has ferreted out regarding all the names associated with this organization, and Broadbandreports’ detailed explanation of how the Domain Registry of Canada scam works.

(Image by Nebularis)

Luciano over at Litemind, a blog from Brazil, has a group writing project going right now - it’s a list of lists. Bloggers love writing list posts - they’re easy to write and easy to read. Everyone wins.

The first part of the project is over. 67 bloggers have entered their lists. You can see them all here. Now the next job is to figure out which ones are the three best ones.

Are you kidding? Three out of sixty-seven? What a task! I’m not ready for that. So what I’ll do here is start off with my shortlist. (Btw, I didn’t participate as Alphablogs, I participated through my other blog, change therapy, with the list of 13 encouraging questions.)

Each one of them is an article worth reading. Maybe you can help us - which ones would you pick?

100 Things To Write A List Of 100 About by Kotsengkuba

150 Funniest Resume Mistakes, Bloopers and Blunders Ever by Jacob Share

Best 101 Lists by Pearl

100 Resources To Improve Your Career, Relationships And Money by Lawrence Cheok

100 Sites I Seek Inspiration From by Iain Hamp

100 Ways to Personally Conquer Chaos at Work by Judy Martin

40 ways to make your mind your playground by Fier

Top 23 Motivation Tips, Tricks and Tactics from the Blogosphere by Mike Ambrose

21 Punching Tips On Social Media Marketing and Social Media Optimization 35 Guaranteed Ways To Increase Your RSS Subscribers by Fred

17 POWER Tips For StumbleUpon Beginners by Dr. Mani

15 Tips to Prevent Repetitive Strain Injury and Carpal Tunnel Syndrome by CSS

13 encouraging questions by Isabella Mori

8 Habits of Highly Successful Salespeople by Daniel Sitter

7 Tricks You Need to Fight Procrastination by Samir Bharadwaj

Top 7 Paid Review Writing Mistakes You Can Avoid by Prince John

6 Steps to Take Writing Ideas From WordPress Themes by Karen Zara

5 Crash Course Tips in Viral Marketing by John Murch

5 reasons (not) to drink coffee by Lodewijkvdb

5 Things That I Believe To Be Lies by Krizza

5 Ways To Win A Blog Contest by Erz

List of Classes by Priscilla Palmer

List Of Why Blogs Are A Female Gender by Domtan

ten things i didn’t know until last week by Blaiq

The Quitter’s Checklist by Em Dy

The Top Ten Internet Business Ideas by John

Thirteen Reasons Why WordPress is Superior To Blogger by JHS

To Do To Make Tomorrow Better by Bob

(Image courtesy of swiv) 

I just bumped into an interesting SEO blog, Hawaii Online Advertising. There is a post, way back in June, about successful social media.

Since our blog is written for a wide audience, including people who don’t use the internet all that much, let’s have a definition of social media. I like Big Mouth Media’s thoughts:

Social media incorporates the online technology and methods through which people can share content, personal opinions, swap different perspectives and insights into world issues and generally discuss the evolution of media in itself.

Social media website content can come in many shapes and forms:
* Text - text is often used to put across opinions or write blog posts.
* Images - images and photos can display anything from holiday photos to shots by professional photographers.
* Audio - social media lets you create podcasts for users to download.
* Video - video sites mean that you’ll be able to record a video of your child’s birthday for friends all over the world to see.

(For more ideas on this, visit Scoble’s What is Social Media?)

Okay, so now that we all know what we’re talking about, here is my comment to our Hawaiian friend. He had asked who the thought leaders were on the topic of social media. Here’s my reply.

I come to this conversation late but - oh well, here are my .002 cents worth:

Three people who come to mind who I think really know how to have blog conversations are Liz Strauss (check here for a list of thought leaders she follows), Lifecruiser, who has turned her blog into a cruise, and Netchick (check her mid-week socializing game). Now they’re maybe not thought leaders in a more academic sense but they certainly get social media and use it, to many people’s delight.

Now to the sites that were suggested over in Hawaii.

Apophenia seems interesting but I find it difficult to read from a design perspective.

Similar with Augmented Social Cognition: White on black? A white-on-black blog has to really grab me for me to want to read it (unfortunately it didn’t, at least not today). Also, a serious problem on the blogger platform is that there are no categories. How am I supposed to tell whether there’s something of interest for me?

Buzznetworker: Yes, been there before. Like it. Easy to read, easy to navigate, interesting topics. Really liked his latest post on Facebook spam .

Influential Interactive Marketing isn’t bad but doesn’t excite me. What’s it with all these guest posts? Where is the author?

PR 2.0. Like how he gives his readers the choice between two difference backgrounds, and how each post is followed by invitations to link with him in various social networks. That’s what I call walking the social media talk. Posts a bit too long, though.

Unit structures - a place I’d go back to if I wanted to read more on Facebook. But again, I have a bit of a problem with someone who doesn’t walk his social media talk on his blog.

Web Strategy - yes, that’s a good one! His picture is right up there - immediately signals “social” to me. There’s a mix of video and text. One of his Facebook groups is one of his first links. Great mix of academic and non-academic thoughts.

What I’ve learned from this is that for me at least, I want to feel invited and welcome. That’s where the design, length of posts, and ease of navigation come in. I also need to get a sense that a blogger is walking her or his talk. If it’s about social media, show me where you’re sociable. If it’s about conversation, invite people to comment. If it’s about design, show right on your blog what you mean by good design.

Finally, here are two more social media related blogs I read on a regular basis: Profy – check out their post on BookMooch, a web site for book lovers, and Blognation, for example Blognation Japan. Its main guy, Robert Sanzalone, really understands that social media is not just about offline socializing – true social media integrates face-to-face socializing as well.

P.S. I totally forgot Nancy White’s blog - Full Circle Online Interaction. How could I?

Last week we had a get-together with money coach Nancy Zimmermann and musician Craig Addy, to talk a bit about generating blog traffic. Here we are, at Waves on Hastings and Richards in downtown Vancouver.

A number of questions came up, one of them being, “how do you get other blogs to notice you?” Sometimes it seems that you link and link and link to other blogs and they don’t even acknowledge your existence.

Of course it’s like anything else in life. You can’t make people notice you. But you can help them, you can make it easy for them. Here are a few things you can do:

Trackbacks
In theory, there are various ways in which any web site owner can easily see whether someone has linked to his or her web site. But in practice, that doesn’t always work – so don’t assume that because you’ve linked to someone, they will actually find out. A good way to ensure a higher chance that someone will notice you is to use trackback, a way of notifying the owner of the blog you’re linking to.

• Go to the blog post you are linking to and see whether they have trackback enabled. Let’s try this on Nancy’s blog.
• Go to the blog itself, here.
• Then click on the individual post by clicking on an article header, here for example.
• At the end the end of the article you want to link to you find something called “trackback URI”. Right click on it and click on “copy link location”. For Nancy’s article it looks like this: http://nancyzimmerman.com/2007/11/20/econ-101-warren-buffet-on-the-us-dollar/trackback/.
• Now go back to the “create a post area”, where you’re writing the article from which you want to link.
• In Wordpress you will find a location underneath the article body called “Trackbacks”.
• Open it by clicking on the plus sign. Now paste the copied trackback URI into it.

Email
It also doesn’t hurt to send an email to the person you’re linking to. Just so you don’t come across as overeager, you might want to write something like this:

“Hi Blogger XYZ – just a short heads-up that I linked to your blog in this post [include the URL of your post]. I liked you’re article because …. Not sure whether trackback is working, so I thought I’d email you, too”.

You can also use an “email to your friend” plugin for this. (Go here for an explanation of what a plugin is.)

(This post was listed in the Carnival of Struggling Bumbling Newbies)

One of the reasons why people hesitate to start blogging, especially as businesspeople, is that they are nervous about having their privacy disturbed. That is completely understandable. Our lives are already so much more transparent, and while in some way that’s good, in other ways, it feels – and often is – invasive and unsafe.

The beauty of blogging, of course, is that it is a bit more casual, that it invites clients and potential business partners to get to know you a bit better.

How, then, can you let your hair down a bit and at the same time not violate your privacy?

One way is what I call a Blogging Privacy Strategy.

It is quite simple. Sit down and make a list of the non-business activities and topics that you often discuss with your friends and family. Can’t think of any? Just remember the last Thanksgiving Dinner with aunt Maude or when you went to a brunch and movie with the Jeffersons. What did you talk about?

Maybe the list looks like this:

• Hockey
• Stephen Harper
• Aunt Maude’s arthritis
• Your son Matt’s homework
• News and events in Aunt Maude’s hometown, Winnipeg

Now the question is – what aspects of these topics would you feel totally comfortable talking about? Which ones would be 100% off limits?

Let’s take Stephen Harper, our sometimes not-so-beloved prime minister. If you are now a staunch supporter of the Conservative party, maybe you feel quite private about that summer a few decades ago when you thought it would be cool to be a wild-eyed radical and had a shouting match with young Steve. And perhaps on the other hand, Stephen Harper’s economic strategies are something you’ll happily discuss with anyone who’ll stand still long enough.

Now you take another piece of paper and divide it into two columns: Absolutely yes, and Absolutely no.

Your wild-eyed past goes into the “Absolutely no” column and “Harper’s economics” goes into the “Absolutely yes” column.

And so you go down the list. Chances are you’ll have more than one “Absolutely yes” or “Absolutely no” per topic. Chances are also that as you do this, you’ll come up with more topics.

Within less than an hour, there you have it: Your Blogging Privacy Strategy.

Bonus? You’ll also have a nice big list of topics to write about.

(Photo courtesy of leep)

On October 30, 2007, I finally made it over to the annual SOHO small business show here in Vancouver. I had known about it for quite a while – a business mentor, Dean Barbour, had always talked about it very enthusiastically – but I had never initiated contact yet.

SOHO’s fact sheet states that

SOHO Business Group is a national marketing company focussed on connection Canadian business with valuable tools, benefits, savings, resources and special events. The SOHO – SME Business Conference and Expo is a national circuit of one-day events that focus on delivering a unique event experience to support success and growth of small and medium size businesses in Canada.

Part of this “unique event experience” were speeches by Peter Legge, well-known author and President and CEO of Canada Wide Media Ltd. (publishers of business magazines such as BC Business) and expert advice talks by people such as Martin Bryne of Yahoo! Canada.

A component that I personally found interesting was an “Ask the Expert” center. I think that’s a great idea; however, I must say that the one person I talked to saw this clearly more as a chance for a sales pitch than an opportunity for a potential customer (me) to ask questions; so it would be good to tweak that a little bit.

As you can imagine, this is a topic of particular interest to me. Marketing via blogs is pull marketing: Working with your clients’ and potential clients’ existing interests. What are their problems? What are their goals? What attracts them naturally? What turns them off right away? Where is the love?

What really excites me as a client or potential business partner is when, through normal person-to-person conversation (vs. let-me-sell-you-something conversation), synergies arise. That was the case with a number of exhibitors at SOHO, particularly Daniel Wang, a commercial insurance specialist at the co-operators (we discovered we had both lived in Germany), the people from the Gay and Lesbian Business Association (we might do some work together), Katie Morrison from The Business Exchange (an interesting concept, especially for people interested in franchises), and Victoria Ronco from Boiling Point Communications, who gave me a list Canadian business bloggers (you might find some of them discussed here in the future).

Have you been to any local trade shows lately? Or even participated? How did that work for you?

Are you writing your blog to reach a wide audience, or is your blog for a few select clients and friends?

Or in other words, are you looking for popularity and wide-reach, or in-depth one-on-one with your specific target group?

Both these approaches are valid in the blogosphere. Don’t assume that to be successful your blog has to reach a wide mass market. Isn’t blogging all about being outside of the mainstream media? Well, yes and no. More and more blogging is coming to the foreground as a viable medium in its own right, and, as dad always said, “With those rights come responsibilities.” Your responsibility is to your own audience, whether it is 24 close readers, or 2,000 mildly interested people, or 100,000 bots.

Have you seen that kind of devil-may-care stance that many bloggers affect or express becoming a little more mannered, as the audience widens? It becomes, in fact, the blog-style of choice. There is a blogger voice, a social attitude that many would-be bloggers might feel they have to emulate. Don’t. It isn’t necessary. If all the popular kids in high school do this or that, it doesn’t invalidate your particular voice or approach in any way. Once we get out of high school we realize this. There is no need to perpetuate the tyranny of social hierarchy and its many discontents through the blog world too.

Your blog is your own. Do what you like with it. If you are reaching out to a few select readers, in depth, speak directly to them. But if you are reaching out to the “masses” then by all means uses the blogger-voice, the wise-cracking bon mot, the shock factor, the now so-last-night Paris Hilton name-dropping, whatever it takes, right?

If you aren’t up for all that, just remember that reaching your client group through your blog can help them keep in touch with what you are up to, and it may not be really important for you to water down that message by adding references or keyword groupings that will up your google juice.

Now there some truly wonderful popular blogs out there too, and there are really good solid ways of building popularity and widening presence.

How do you want to interact - person to persons, or broadcaster to public? It’s all within your reach. Understanding media is all about understanding audience. If we want humans reading our blogs, we have to demonstrate some humanity to speak to humans. Then we can layer on the purpose of your blog, the intended people you wish to reach, the message you wish to give and the communication and community you want to build .