Blair Williams

Everything is an Experiment

How Tos

Stop Using WHOIS Privacy and 3 Other Strategies For Increasing Your Website’s Credibility

Stop Using WHOIS Privacy and 3 Other Strategies For Increasing Your Website’s Credibility

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Domain NameThis article will show you some simple steps you can take to increase the credibility of your site with a very low amount of effort. Today I came across this fantastic article by Daniel Scocco:

Time to Stop Using Whois Privacy?

His article inspired me to write about this topic and to extend his thinking a bit beyond Private Registrations.

Scocco's argument is that using private registration on your domain names leads to less trust. This is 100% true but here's another big reason not to use Private Registration if you ever plan to install an extended verification SSL certificate on your site you'll have to remove the privacy registration settings (and trust me, that can be a pain in the butt). [Read more…] about Stop Using WHOIS Privacy and 3 Other Strategies For Increasing Your Website's Credibility

New Pretty Link Video Tutorials Added

New Pretty Link Video Tutorials Added

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demoI've had a ton of requests from Pretty Link and Pretty Link Pro users to update and expand my video tutorials for these products. I've finally gotten around to recording the first of these.

Do you need help with:

  • Getting started with Pretty Link on your WordPress Website
  • Setting up Pretty Link Redirects
  • Organizing your links with Pretty Link Groups
  • Advanced Link Options
  • Tracking Hits on your Pretty Links
  • Pretty Link Global Options

[Read more…] about New Pretty Link Video Tutorials Added

Discover Who’s Talking About You Online

Discover Who’s Talking About You Online

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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

Create Short URLs on the fly with the Pretty Link Bookmarklet

Create Short URLs on the fly with the Pretty Link Bookmarklet

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bookmarkletThe Pretty Link Bookmarklet is finally available! My #1 request from users for a while has been to make it easy to create Pretty Links outside of the WordPress admin — and now you can.

If you aren't familiar with what a bookmarklet is, it's basically a button that you can add to your browser's toolbar that will do some action–in this case it's creating Pretty Links. Bookmarklets are great because they are very simple, javascript based buttons that work in practically every browser.

The Pretty Link Bookmarklet is available starting in Pretty Link version 1.4.11. Here's how you'll go about installing it in your browser once you have version 1.4.11 or greater installed in WordPress:

  1. When inside your WordPress admin, click the menu item: “Pretty Link” -> “Tools”
  2. You'll see a link named “Get PrettyLink” under the Bookmarklet section … you'll want to drag that link to your Browser's bookmark bar

That's all you have to do to install it. Now let's look at how you'd use the Pretty Link bookmarklet:

  1. When you're browsing the web and you find a page that you'd like to create a Pretty Link for, just click “Get PrettyLink” in your toolbar while on that page.
  2. Pretty Link will automatically create the link for you and redirect you to a page where you can copy your newly created Pretty Link.

Here are a few screenshots of the bookmarklet in action (in Safari — but the same steps go for FireFox, IE, etc):

I'm currently working on some other ways to easily create Pretty Links soon — so it's only going to get easier to manage your entire link portfolio from Pretty Link!