Starglider Systems Blog
Thought I should have a quick mention of the latest release. It just includes a simple new command-line option: -relative , and uses a new version of the protection system.
If you are not aware already, FPP has a lot of command-line options that you can use to automate reports of folders. Great for the busy sysadmin!
I've just finished another Wordtracker book, this time it was Link Building:How to build links for your site for SEO, Traffic and Response by Ken McGaffin and Mark Nunney.
On a funny note, I was quite pleased with the purchase of the book, as I had tried to purchase it for full price before. Wordtracker's system was broken for hours, so I couldn't order and let it go. Then a few days later, they sent me a US$20 discount, at which point I bought it, with a smile on my face 🙂 .
The book cover many ways to get links. Having read several other somewhat related books, many parts seem similar.
For example, I've seen most of Chapter 1 – Content, on Blogging for Business and Web Content Recipe Book (I recommend both).
There are a couple of details I don't remember seeing covered. Clicking when you link to someone, so that you make sure it gets on the referrer log. There were also a few references to www.majesticseo.com, which I've had a quick look at and seems very cool.
Chapter 2 – Getting to know your online community. A very interesting view on how to classify link prospects, also a reminder that the easiest way to get links (and PR) is finding your 404 errors and converting to 301 redirects.
Chapter 3 – Make your site a linking magnet. All about the best content to get links – pretty much what was covered in Blogging for Business. One interesting reminder is that core articles can often be used for more than a target group.
Chapter 5 – Online Public Relations has some interesting insights about how to write a PR release.
Chapter 6- The definitive link building campaign – covers a lot of various ways to get your link campaign running.
Chapter 7 is a checklist of the various actions mentioned in the rest of the book.
Overall, I found the book interesting, but not great. The coverage on Blogging for Business and the Web Content Recipe book were overall much better.
On a interesting note, Wordtracker now has a Link Builder tool for US$59 a month. From what little I've seen, it doesn't look like a good investment.
You can get Link Assistant for US$99.75. I've used it myself, and it's pretty good. Do keep in mind that they do charge for updates (and it's hard to see when you buy!), but the most expensive plan will only cost US$6.95 a month, while the cheapest is US$3.05. They also have discounts for updates if you use more than one of their tools.
Blogging for Business, by Chris Garret, is the latest book I've read from WordTracker. It proposes to be a How-to for business blogging, and I'd say it covers that pretty well.
Chapter 1 – Why Blog? One interesting part in the beginning is the comparison with various others vehicles for communication –
newsletters:
– Blogs can have a wider audience, and permanence (of course, it's easy to archive your newsletter too).
– They also suggest tying your blog to your E-mail Service Provider to get automatic newsletters. I've been looking into various ones lately, and several can do this.
forums:
Your discussions are already started (articles)
Chapter 2 – Prepare to Blog – covers a number of preparations, such as analyzing the competition, choosing a site extension, subdomain or new domain, and software and hosting options. The Action section has a step by step guide on how to setup your blog with WordPress.
Chapter 4 – What to Write. Since I just read The Web Content Recipe Book, it felt similar in the basic ideas. Interesting additions are the idea of a editorial calendar, and in the Action section, suggestions on how to create a survey form in Google Docs, and the kind of questions you can use to get ideas for content.
Chapter 5 – Attracting Visitors. Various ideas for SEO, PPC, social sites and links.
Chapter 6 – Retaining visitors. Various techniques on how get users to subscribe, and stay. In the action section, how to set up a e-mail newsletter with Aweber, and detailed ideas on how to a serial
After reading the excelent Web Site Recipes, I bought another Wordtracker book, Writing Kick-ass Website Sales Copy. My sales copy is a bit weak, so I thought it could help. It was somewhat helpful, but if it had recipe on the name too, I´d have to say it was a bit bland.
The book is divided in several sections:
1)How to power up your sales messages – various techniques to improve headlines. It has several classics, such as
2)How to make a home page sell
3)How to maximize conversion rates
For me, this was the most useful section of the book. There are many tips on the best way to structure your sales page, your headlines, and the rest. One concept I thought was interesting was that the headline sells the lead, and the lead sells the rest of the copy.
4)Landing Pages
This is a short section. The main concept presented here is that a landing page should be just as the regular sales page, but with less distractions and extranous links to the site than a regular landing page. It also suggest (as I've read everywhere) that it's important to reflect the Ad message on the headline.
If all this seems familiar to you, you might want to skip this book. Otherwise, it was ok, just not particularly iluminating to me.
Having mentioned the content-aware fill for Adobe CS5, I just had to mention the equivalent feature on the free GIMP.
There is a pretty cool video that is similar to the CS5 one:
You can see instructions on how to use it on Windows, as well as another demo here (blog post gone, link removed).
I'm looking into changing my e-mail newsletter from PHPList – which is pretty good for a free tool, but obviously lack features compared to pricy ESPs (e-mail service providers), and deliverability is of course smaller, as the ESPs spend a lot of time tuning theirs.
I'm checking out several ESPs, such as Mailchimp and GetResponse. One pretty cool feature added by GetResponse recently is E-Mail to Speech. It allows your clients to hear your e-mail instead of just reading it.
The quality of the speech is pretty good. I still prefer to read (which is much faster), but I can see busy customers – or customers on the move – opting to use it.
I'm pretty sure they'll post statistics eventually (unless they are awful ), and I'm very interested to see what the exact effect of this will be.
Recently I read an interesting article from GetResponse about Survey Responses.
From the results looks like it's best to have radio boxes based questions, followed by check boxes. Of course, you do limit useful extra information that the user could be bringing on with open questions – after all, they can only choose answers you picked.
Nevertheless, it looks like keeping to mostly limited questions (radio and check boxes), at most 10 questions, with a few optional open questions in the end is the best way to get survey completions.
I've recently received several videos about the new features of Adobe Photoshop CS5. My favorites were these:
I particularly loved the reconstruction of the ruins!
I've recently read The Web Content Recipe book, by Rachelle Money, Ken McGaffin and Mark Nunney. I expected a good book, from the excerpts available on PDF, but found it was even better than that.
The book proposes to improve your ability to create good web content. Web content is important for several reasons, depending on your site, but in any case, fresh web content with well-tuned SEO content is a great way to bring in new readers and potential clients from search engines.
The first section deals with several principles, such as how to apply marketing to your content, how to write and structure an article, how to optimize them for SEO, and others.
The second session has ideas for what kind of content you could add – FAQs, tips and tricks, case studies, reviews and much more. In most cases, they have long, useful discussions on how to best write that kind of article.
The SEO concepts are throughout all the book, which isn't surprising since it's from Wordtracker.
The book was enjoyable as well as instructive, and certainly covers the topics well. I found many useful suggestions on how to improve my writing – including book reviews – and it was after reading it that I decided to add a blog to my site, something I've been postponing for a while. I usually take notes while reading, and in this case they added up to several pages, because there was so much to take from the text.
I can really recommend this one to anyone who have a site, and wants extra clients and search engine referrals (i.e.: everyone with a site).
Welcome to my new blog.
I plan to post articles about features in our products – new, upcoming, or old and overlooked. And also reviews of interesting books, sites and software.