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Blair Williams

Blog World 2009: Provide Value, Engage Your Audience and Make Some Money

Blog World 2009: Provide Value, Engage Your Audience and Make Some Money

by Blair Williams · Oct 20, 2009

So I just got back from BlogWorld Expo / WordCamp Las Vegas 2009 — it was awesome! Since it seems like everyone is talking about this event now — I just want to focus on my own personal experiences and things that I learned. Here are some of the highlights and takeaways from the event:

Day 1 (Thursday):

Internet Marketing For Smart People Panel (Sonia Simone, Brian Clark, Darren Rowse, Chris Brogan) No, I am not sleeping -- this session ROCKED!

The 2 highlights for me on Day 1 were the “Internet Marketing for Smart People” Session and the End of Day Keynote from Chris Brogan.

The “Internet Marketing for Smart People” session was a panel by Sonia Simone (http://www.remarkable-communication.com), Chris Brogan (http://chrisbrogan.com), Brian Clark (http://copyblogger.com), and Darren Rouse (http://problogger.com). This session was packed and rightly so, there was some phenomenal information shared–it even had it's own Twitter hash tag: #3tribe … The gist of the 3 tribe thing a reference to Seth Godin's Tribes book. The panelists showed that there are currently 2 accepted tribes on the Internet now, those who feel its unethical to turn a profit on the Internet and those who fall into the get rich quick scheme mindset. The panelists were pushing the notion that there was a third, emerging tribe that wants to do well by the community, provide value and ethically earn a living. They also announced a new community around this subject (the third tribe community). Since I agreed 100% with the 3rd tribe philosophy — I want to be a member of it for sure.

Chris Brogan's Keynote rocked. He talked about this huge shift in interpersonal communications due to social media and blogs. [Read more…] about Blog World 2009: Provide Value, Engage Your Audience and Make Some Money

Filed Under: Conferences, Social Media Tagged With: BlogWorld, bwe09, Las Vegas, WordCamp

More Twitter Automation Comes to Pretty Link Pro

More Twitter Automation Comes to Pretty Link Pro

by Blair Williams · Oct 14, 2009

multi_twitterIn the 1.4.27 release of Pretty Link Pro there are some major refinements. The first of these refinements is the ability to set up multiple twitter accounts that your blog can post to. You can now automatically post notifications of each of your blog posts to however many Twitter accounts you want to simultaneously. This feature arose from my need to tweet posts out to 3 twitter accounts that I own — before I was auto tweeting to my main account @supercleanse and then re-tweeting to my other two. This was time consuming and kind of defeated the purpose of auto tweeting altogether.

In addition to multiple twitter accounts, we've optimized the page load time for users of the social media button bar, re-tweet badge and of Pretty Link. Many of the SQL queries were slowing down some of the page load times.

Finally, we made many back end changes to the system so that it will be able to accommodate some of the awesome new features we have planned next (some of which were revealed in this month's survey). Enjoy!

UPDATE: Okay, so there was actually a significant bug that was released with version 1.4.27 — if you haven't done it already go out and upgrade to 1.4.28 where it has been fixed! Sorry for any issues.

Filed Under: Pretty Link, Pretty Link Pro, Twitter Tagged With: Automation, Pretty Link Pro, pretty-link, release, twitter

You going to BlogWorld / WordCamp Las Vegas this week?

You going to BlogWorld / WordCamp Las Vegas this week?

by Blair Williams · Oct 11, 2009

Screen shot 2009-10-11 at 1.50.01 PMHey, are you going to BlogWorld this week? It's going to be held in Las Vegas on October 15-17 and apparently it's going to be *really good* …

Let me know if you'll be there so we can meet up.

There are already a few activities that are being organized after the conference that I'm planning on attending.

1. Thursday Night @10pm — There's a photo walk out on the strip that I'm planning on attending. This one's been organized by Victor Cajiao of the Typical Shutterbug Podcast.

2. Saturday Night @7pm — John P. from One Man's Blog & Woopra has organized another photo walk that will be down on Freemont street in old Las Vegas … looking forward to this one a lot. You can read more about it on his blog.

Of course, I'm sure some fun stuff will come together for Friday night as well … but no matter what, feel free to contact me so we can hang out. 🙂

Filed Under: Conferences, Marketing, Social Media Tagged With: BlogWorld, MeetUp, one man's blog, Photo Walk, Typical Shutterbug Podcast, woopra, WordCamp

Deserve Victory on Your Website!

Deserve Victory on Your Website!

by Blair Williams · Sep 28, 2009

Winston-Churchill-Says-We-Deserve-Victory-PostersDoes your blog, website or Internet Business really deserve to succeed? Well it depends on what you do with it–now doesn't it?

Several years ago, a former boss of mine had a poster of Winston Churchill hanging on his door. It depicted Mr. Churchill pointing to you saying “Deserve Victory!” — underneath it, there was a large piece of paper that someone had taped that interpreted the meaning of the poster — it read:

“Our Business Deserves Victory”

Was that really true? Did our company deserve victory?
[Read more…] about Deserve Victory on Your Website!

Filed Under: Business, Internet Business, Marketing Tagged With: Internet Business, Market, Success, Victory

Discover Who’s Talking About You Online

Discover Who’s Talking About You Online

by Blair Williams · Sep 23, 2009

Listening to tin can telephoneIn the history of mankind it has never been easier to figure out who's talking behind your back. Anything published on the Internet is available to the whole world — so you should be able to see it right? Well, many people still don't realize just how easily you can find out who's talking about you — in real time. This kind of tacit knowledge is vital for successful businesses in the fast paced world of the Internet.

I've been using several great tools to find out what people are saying about me for a while now. Its really cool when I can respond to potential customers who are having troubles — without them even contacting me first! I've been able to do this many times and it inevitably leads to a great relationship with these people. Its funny how confused they are when I contact them — they generally have no idea how I could possibly have seen their blog post or tweet.

You can find out when people are happy with you and when they are not — but either way it gives you the opportunity to build great relationships.

Here are 3 tools that I use on a consistent basis:
[Read more…] about Discover Who's Talking About You Online

Filed Under: How Tos, Marketing Tagged With: Collecta, Google, Real-Time, Search, twitter

Pretty Link Adds Robot Filtering and a Bunch of Other Goodies

Pretty Link Adds Robot Filtering and a Bunch of Other Goodies

by Blair Williams · Sep 21, 2009

johnny5Over the years, I've learned it can be hard to tell the difference between a Robot and Human … er … well that is, on the Internet. Pretty Link and Pretty Link Pro can now help you unmask those pesky robots clicking your links. There have also been several other features and bug fixes added in the last week that I'd like to update you on and give you a little bit of info about:

Robot Hit Filtering

This one has been a long time coming. You can now go into “Pretty Link” -> “Options” under “Reporting” and select Filter Robots. Robot Filtering will only work for new links — any robot hits that were recorded in a version of Pretty Link before version 1.4.21 won't be able to be filtered. With that said, if you're really wanting your old hits to have the ability to be filtered just comment on this post — if there's a demand, I'll post some code that you can run on your server to do this effectively. Another thing to know about the robot filtering is that it will eliminate the lion's share of bots (like 99% of them) — but there may be a few that slip through the cracks — I'm working on some future enhancements that will close the gap on this — but for now, if you still see 1 or 2 bots in your hit list don't be alarmed.
[Read more…] about Pretty Link Adds Robot Filtering and a Bunch of Other Goodies

Filed Under: Pretty Link Tagged With: features, pretty-link, Public Link Creation, Robot

Social Network Buttons for Posts Added to Pretty Link Pro

by Blair Williams · Sep 6, 2009

I just added (in version 1.4.18) a simple but extremely useful feature to Pretty Link Pro — the social network buttons bar. This feature will put a configurable row of social networking buttons on your posts and/or pages that use your Pretty Links!

To enable this feature, just go to your “Pro Options” menu item, click “Page and Post Options”, make sure Automatic Pretty Link creation is enabled on pages and/or posts, and then click the checkbox to enable the social networks button bar… Now you can configure which buttons to display and where to display them (above or below your page/post content).

I'm personally excited to start using this feature on all of my sites — you can actually see it on this post. While this feature is cool and very useful, it is only the beginning — you can expect to start seeing even more exciting enhancements to this feature very soon.

Filed Under: Pretty Link Pro Tagged With: Digg, facebook, Pretty Link Pro, social networks, twitter

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