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Yup, finally lost my mind.  It’s snapped about 5 minutes ago.  I hope it stays like this, cause then I’ll have a legitimate excuse for whatever.

“Ground control to Major Morgan, ground control to Major Morgan, take your protein pills and put your helmet on - Ground control to Major Morgan”.

At this site anyone, even me, can post a question about any subject, or answer an existing question.  Registration and use are completely free.

If you need an answer, ask your question, register to its RSS feed of answers, and just wait until your news aggregator pops out an answer.  Questions and answers can be rated, so that the most interesting questions and the most useful answers come first.  If you have knowledge to share, pay this site a visit from time to time, you might even earn some money.

Money!  I can make some money? Oh, I’m all better now.

Easy to install and to customize, Askeet, may be the solution you are looking for if you need a FAQ section on your site or for a mini knowledge base for your community.

Ask you, ask me, Askeet!

MorganLighter

Popularity: 4% [?]

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There’s a possibility that I’ve made a bad mistake, as my fellow Arrested Development fans would say. I look at Facebook and I see opportunity, as a business person, for every business. I see a way to strengthen relationships with people you do business with.

I see the ability to say yes, I do have time for you, even if my competitors don’t. I see social presence marketing and I’m in the minority. Most people use Facebook to waste time. And that’s great! If I’m going to waste time Anywhere online, it will most likely be on Facebook. It’s perfect for that.

And it’s also the reason that I suddenly have time to waste time in the first place. In my business, you spend about 10 - 25% of your time actually creating products, doing consulting or conducting training. If you want to make any real money though, whether you have an advertising budget or not, you spend 75% or more of your time marketing, until you get to the level where you can hire or outsource most of the leg work.

It’s the secret to making a decent living online for people like me. I outsource my mass marketing efforts like submitting articles, except where I’m on the staff of a publication. But you kind of have to do things like networking yourself.

Facebook helps with both marketing and networking under one roof.

On it, I have almost 250 direct connections. About 10 of them are real-life friends. Another 100 are people I happen to know from the business who are more influential than me that I’m connected to purely to learn from and follow. I want to be the first to know if they are test marketing a product, or have some new secret weapon I can order.

Then there are people who are either colleagues that I make a special point of looking out for, and clients who are special to me beyond the fact that we do business together.

I could easily have several thousand connections on Facebook. I’d just have to ask my opt-in list to do me a favor. And a certain percentage of them would. But it’s not the quantity of friends you have on Facebook. It’s the quality of the connections.

This is why I’m telling you about my numbers. Pay attention to this and you’ll understand what most people who realize Facebook can be used for the social side of business don’t.

Let’s say that half the people I’m connected to log in daily, as half of Facebook audience is reported to do.

Let’s say of those people, I only have strong connections to 100 - of the people who have my news broadcast to them, these are the ones who make a special effort to act on the news they will be updated with when they log into Facebook.

All of those people will get an update about me on a page they visit daily - again we’re only talking about the less than 50% who may decide to do something about my update that day.

(Who, by the way, could opt out of my messages if they wanted to, Of course, they don’t because that’s one of the reasons why they’re connected me in the first place.)

You see, if each one of those people

• shares my link manually,
• has an application installed that does it for them automatically,
• comments on my link, or
• does one of several other things that take them ten seconds or no time at all to consciously support me,

they’ve then also spread my message to the people they are connected with, on average if that’s 100 people, then my message was sent, in a personal way, to 10,000 people, probably that same day. That doesn’t count people who happen upon information that connects the two of us on their profile each day.

Now, here’s the crazy part.

I don’t even have to be logged in to Facebook for this to happen. I doubled the reach of my blog on a newsletter day, and I wasn’t even logged into Facebook to do it.

I didn’t write an email, buy an ad, or even do anything extra that I wouldn’t normally be doing already. And I widened my potential reach by about 10,000 people. Not bad.

Yes, you’re going to have to log in a few times a week for at least 15 minutes to touch base with people if you want to use it to network in a wider circle. But for that kind of free, targeted, opt-in exposure, isn’t it worth it?

Of course, it doesn’t happen this way most of the time. But 86 of my 250+ FB friends are set up to broadcast some of my messages to their profiles automatically, and I do the same for all of them. Another 100 of them get other messages of mine broadcast into their news. And of those 186 friends, most of them have around 200 connections. I wouldn’t care if they had ten if they were willing to be my part-time evangelists.
This is just one of hundreds of tiny little edges I have over my competition on Facebook, just by having a profile, and setting it up to work for me even when I’m not logged in. My message is spreading faster than theirs is. And I’m a click away from some of their clients because they don’t see what I see when I look at Facebook for businesses of all sizes.

At it’s very worst, Facebook can be used as an additional social communication tool.

Even if I hated Facebook I’d use it. I despise talking on the phone — but I cherish the people I can reach with it. Some of my clients can only reach me by Skype. It’s had it’s problems lately, but if a client in Australia wants me to reach them on Skype instead of their cell phone or landline, I’ll use it.

People who are dismissing Facebook and other social media tools as time wasters have dismissed their clientele right into my lap, on more than one occasion.

Literally.

People have said to me, “I was going to ask such and such but they aren’t on Twitter/Facebook/StumbleUpon/blogs/IM” so many times, it’s not even funny anymore.

And my business, which was at a dead stop when I was ill for several months, a business I would have lost had this been 2003, is not just saved, but starting to flourish, largely due to the proper use of social media tools and sites.

And it is for this reason that the competitor inside me nags “Shut up about Facebook already! You stand to lose the upper hand by sharing this information, even if it IS at a price.” When I told my audience about RSS, all my competitors got feeds. When I told my audience about blogging, most of them started blogging too. So even if I profit in the short term, in the long run, I’m leveling the playing field for people who aren’t even in business yet.

Mind boggling if you think about it.

So I sometimes think I should really shut up about this already.

But the side of me that really, really gets what the emergence of social media is about won’t let me….

Popularity: 6% [?]

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I didn’t think so - so see ya!

Just kidding. Sorta. Kinda. Maybe. Who knows. ??

If you’ve heard about this site and haven’t shared it, I don’t know if we should be angry with you or just chalk it up to your not wanting to let the cat out of the bag.

Well, tough. I’m letting the cat loose, so there.

Yes, I had thoughts of hanging on to this for a while, but that wouldn’t be friendly or nice, and as you know by now, I’m a nice guy.

So what is it, you ask.

Well, featured on this site, which places blogs on nearly 100 top-tier news and media sites, are: Reuters, USA Today, Gannett, McGraw-Hill Architectural Record, FoxNews and Internet Broadcasting, just to drop a few names. Not that I’d drop names.

Excited yet? I can hear you say “Gimmie, gimmie, gimmie!”

Okay, don’t wet your pants.

What it is, is BlogBurst!

Once you log on to their site, click on Blogger Info, Publisher Info, Check out their editorial team, the FAQ’s, etc. I think you’ll find it’s a fairly straight forward site and will treat those that play by the rules, quite well.

A million new viewers a month, a million new viewers a month, a million new viewers a month.

Just had to say that a few times.

Makes my head spin. Here’s the front door.

MorganLighter

Popularity: 13% [?]

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Have you heard about the “Bitty Browser”?

Well, check this out!

Bitty Browser helps you keep track of your favorite Web stuff by enabling navigable windows directly within your favorite sites - it’s like Picture-in-Picture for the Web.

For example - Try opening Bitty in: Google, Netvibes, Pageflakes, Windows Live, Protopage, Typepad, WordPress, webwag, 30 Boxes, Widgetbox, AOL’s AIMPages. (In a couple of sites you have to log in - but it’s no big deal). Or add Bitty to any other site or blog via a simple HTML copy/paste.

It’s also a platform to Widgetize and Syndicate activity - how cool is that?!?

For all you Web developers, bloggers, advertisers, publishers, Bitty Browser is a smart way to widgetize and syndicate interactivity.

You’ll reach a wider audience by making your content or service available out through windows on other Web sites all the while maintaining closer relationships by enabling your content or service within personal start pages. And if that isn’t enough, you’ll provide your visitors with extended content and services without driving them away from your site.

Check it out for yourself.

MorganLighter

Popularity: 4% [?]

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That’s right. Screw em.

I don’t want to be on the front page of Digg like many of my friends do, and it ain’t sour grapes. I’m not even saying there’s necessarily anything wrong with Digg.

(Even though, yes, there is, that just isn’t what this article is about. On the other hand, Digg’s flaws created a cottage industry for Digg-like niche sites. Maybe I should thank them for the targeted, converting traffic I get?)

Hoardes of untargeted traffic to your site doesn’t help you. Even the bragging rights are temporary. The whole world is not your audience.

When I was first told this back in the late 90s, I thought that the big gurus were trying to trick me. They wanted the whole world of traffic all to themselves. Target my prospects? Why not just get my message to as many people as possible and let them get sorted out later?

No wonder it took me another five years to make a full time income from the Net.

You know how you have mail that comes to your house, and then you have junk mail?

That’s how an untargeted prospect feels about you.

You know how you have comments that come to your blog, and then you have spam?

That’s how an untargeted visitor feels about your blog.

You know how you get email you want, and then you get random messages telling you that you’ve won a free iPhone?

That’s how a person who shouldn’t be on your mailing list feels about you.

Who wants to fight someone to come to your site, wrestle them to the ground and threaten them into making a purchase? Not me.

Target people on the fence, or even better, those looking for your product. It’s one thing to have to help people realize that you are a solution to their obviously related problem. It’s quite another to try and sell a videotape to someone who only has a DVD player.

And what if you can’t find your audience? You either need someone to help you see what you’re missing, or you probably shouldn’t be selling what you’re selling because there is no profitable market.

I’ll end with easy math.

What do you think will make you more money? 100,000 untargeted visitors that convert to sales at 1% or 10,000 targeted visitors that convert at 10%?

The answer is neither. They both bring you 1000 sales. The second one is just easier to do.

Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury, I rest my case.

Popularity: 4% [?]

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In case you haven’t noticed, I’m having a productivity day here at the site. Normally, I’d be talk about search today. But it’s Danny Sullivan’s birthday, so my gift to him is observing a day of lazine celebration, hereby redirecting any search related inquries to the upcoming search news page at Sphinn, or to other expert search engine resource sites related to him.

My first productivity tip on speed reading, can either cut your research/reading time, or help you get four times as much done in the same amount of time if you get as good as I am at it, which isn’t hard.

If you spend 3 hours a day reading, whether it’s email, books, reference materials, feeds or blogs, imagine getting the same amount of work done in 45 minutes. Or think about how neat it would be to be able to process four times as much information in those three hours what it takes most people 12 hours to read.

My second tip can help you get up to twice as much typing done. It’s easy. Get voice recognition software and/or increase your typing speed.

Average uncorrected speed is 50 words per minute. I started out around there and my current uncorrected speed is 79 words per minute, as checked this morning. (You don’t have to be as accurate when there’s spell check!)

But that’s when I can type - sometimes I have problems with my hands swelling, and I can’t type at all.

When I first started having this problem with my hands (supposedly related to some nerve damage I have in my spine, but I think they’re just saying that because they don’t know), a friend of mine told me about Dragon Naturally Speaking. When I tried it just a couple of years ago, I’ll be blunt and say it sucked.

But in recent years, it’s actually gotten much better. We speak about twice as fast as a fairly good typist, at 130 words per minute. Once you have Dragon trained, it can often produce that fast.

The downside is training it for techie speak, though it works surprisingly well out of the box. Even with manual editing, it can cut down your production type a bit more than increasing your typing speed. To start out on this tip, test your typing speed.

I have one more time saver for you, but it will have to be this evening. By the time you read this, I’ll finally be asleep.

If I’m not, don’t tell my friend Warren or I’ll owe him money.

My next tip is going to be about how to combine these first two tips with one that multiplies the effect of certain marketing acitivities. In this way, you can get a work week’s worth of marketing done in two days.

In the meantime, why don’t you tell me some of your web related productivity tips? No fair linking to stuff you didn’t write! I want YOUR tips, because the very last post is going to be a collection of other people’s tips or sites. I need five and I only have two I really like.

Popularity: 8% [?]

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