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Blair Williams

Everything is an Experiment

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Introducing PrettyBar

Introducing PrettyBar

by Blair Williams · May 4, 2009

pretty_bar_exampleOkay, I know … Digg recently had a full revolt on their hands when they released the DiggBar … but trust me, there are plenty of uses for a Digg-Like bar on redirect links for those of us running WordPress based websites. Before you start make sure that you learn ‘how to create a website‘.?In the most recent release of PrettyLink I created a new feature that I think is AWESOME — the “PrettyBar” … This is an optional bar that you can place at the top of the page you redirect your users to. This bar can have your look & feel, links to your site and encourages users to tweet/retweet your link to others! Here are just a few of the uses I came up with for the PrettyBar (off the top of my head):

  1. Viral Twitter Campaigns — Use Pretty Links in your Twitter posts instead of bit.ly or tinyurl.com and use the Pretty Bar. Not only will you be able to accurately track these links in Pretty Link but you'll have a built in way for your link to be re-tweeted.
  2. Website Promotion — If you send out a lot of links, just think of the impact of giving the end viewer of the link a way to get back to your website! You're effectively posting ads out on the internet that have a built in way for users to get back to your site. Even if only a small percentage click the link to your blog, it is better than nothing :).
  3. SEO Link Building — Imagine the possibilities of every URL you post to Twitter, Facebook, or wherever having an automatic link back to you! I mean you can link to news stories, youtube videos, whatever — and get some links back to you.
  4. Sandbox User Comments — okay I haven't gotten this feature fully completed yet 🙂 … but soon, you'll be able to replace all links in your user comments with Pretty Links with (or without) the PrettyBar. This will keep users tethered to your site for a while in a non-threatening way.

Here are some links I've already created with it:

https://blairwilliams.com/x0z

https://blairwilliams.com/j8u

I'm really excited about this feature for my own marketing efforts… Please leave a comment and let me know what you think of this feature!

Filed Under: Plugins, Pretty Link, Software Tagged With: Digg, diggbar, pretty-link, prettybar, SEO, twitter, viral, website, Wordpress

Launch Your Website Today!

Launch Your Website Today!

by Blair Williams · Apr 30, 2009

building_wwwOne of the biggest mistakes that online businesses make is not to put a marketing website up until after they have they have their product, service, graphics or brand launched and utterly perfected. Well, those things are important but shouldn't stop you from building your website today. It's extremely important to get your website up and running sooner rather than later — even before your product launches. Because if you have no marketing efforts in place then you have no customers and if you have no customers then you have no money — and that is a sad place to be.

If You Build it They Will Come … uh

What a load of crap! I recently had a client show me growth projections for their product after it was to launch — it showed exponential growth on day 1 and they had no marketing site up! These guys obviously didn't hit their sales projections by a long shot but once they started actively marketing they were alright. This just illustrates that there's a big misconception out there among people who haven't ever tried to promote a website that once you put a website on the Internet it is like flipping a switch and your site is immediately flooded with visitors lining up to buy your product — this is simply not true. If you think about it — there are billions of websites on the Internet, most of them clamoring for attention — why is anyone going to care about your little website when it launches?

The reality is that it takes time to build an effective website with a high volume of traffic — sometimes months, sometimes years. You have to give yourself time for the right Audience to find your site and for a community to come together on it. You have to have time to submit articles, get involved on other related sites, build reciprocal linking relationships, test landing pages, etc. You may have the greatest product, service or message in the world but if you don't get any attention then your business will fail — and despite what any so called Marketing expert tells you, it takes a rock solid plan, a lot of hard work and some money to drive traffic to your site.

I attended a seminar a few months ago where a prominent blogger talked about the success he's seen on his site. He started blogging in 2005 and before his blog hit its stride it only had about 30 visitors a day for 2 and a half years! He loved what he was talking about on his blog though and eventually it began building momentum. His blog currently sees hundreds of thousands of visitors a month and he makes his living from the community he's established. Now that is an extreme example but it shows that you need to be patient, continue to improve your site daily and find ways to promote your site on the Internet.

Don't Build a Website … Build a Community

Really, when you think about it — building a website doesn't matter nearly as much as building a community of people around you that love what your doing — or at least have strong opinions about what you're doing. This is why you want to launch a site that enables you to start the discussion with your audience.

Don't worry so much about what people will say on your site … If you launch your site using WordPress or any other CMS worth its salt you should be able to moderate any comments coming in. Trust me, I've launched sites dealing with very sensitive topics and it always amazes me how being sincere and helpful on your site can lead to some great comments when you're targeting the right audience. It has been my experience that visitors to your site won't comment on a post unless they are interested in it or are angered by it (you may have to moderate some of those) — so you won't typically get as many negative comments as you think you will starting off.

Once you have a people who are interested in your message coming to your site and interacting with each other you'll naturally see links and pingbacks coming back to your site from people talking about your site on Twitter, Digg, Forums or other websites. This kind of organic promotion is critical to your long term success — if your message is good enough for people to care about what you're doing then they will promote you, how cool is that!

Build the Community First — A Case Study

A buddy of mine is consulting with a startup who has done it right. This startup will be selling a physical product that will help keep kids safe — so they have a message that people actually care about. They are still in product development right now but rolled out their marketing site several months ago. They now have hundreds of people who have commented on their blog, thousands of people on their email list, an active affiliate program with over 2,000 affiliates and are even generating revenue on their site by accepting pre-orders for their product. The crazy thing about this company is that they just used a template for the graphics on their site (and their blog is just the WordPress default theme), haven't even established the final graphics for their logo — yet they've been generating revenue for months now — and their product won't even launch until August!

If you're waiting for your graphics to be perfect, your product to be complete, a “killer” flash piece for the front page or anything else — don't. Get your website online today and start building your community now. No website is perfect on day 1 — its virtually impossible to get the message right and make it as effective as it can be instantly. What matters when launching a website is that you are committed to making daily, incremental changes based on the data coming in from your community (analytics, comments, surveys, etc) and you'll have a killer website that actually turns a profit!

Filed Under: Marketing Tagged With: audience, blog, build, CMS, Comments, community, content, Marketing, reach, SEO, startup, website, Wordpress

Don’t Use TinyURL – Create and Track Links from your WordPress Website

by Blair Williams · Mar 29, 2009

A few weeks ago I started getting frustrated because I had to go into my apache config file every time I wanted to add a redirect link. I stopped using BudURL and TinyURL some time ago because my users have started to realize that they're being tracked whenever they see a link from one of these services. I've talked with several other Affiliate marketers and they've been saying the same thing, “don't put a tinyurl on your site.” Affiliates are always concerned with masking their URLs and with tracking so these link shrinking services seemed perfect for them… well, now users have caught on.

Last week, I started working on my own replacement for TinyURL, a WordPress plugin named “Pretty Link.” The thing that's great about this plugin is that I can now generate ultra small urls that redirect wherever I want and hang off of my domain name! I'm also able to track clicks on these URLs and in future releases of this plugin more stats than just clicks in future upgrades.

I just released this plugin tonight and can be downloaded from the WordPress plugin directory here:

https://blairwilliams.com/download

Filed Under: Plugins, Software Tagged With: blog, link, pretty-link, projects, redirect, shortcut, shrink, Software, tinyurl, url, website, Wordpress

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