photo credit: pbyrne

If you understand this, truly understand this, about social media, you’ll never be confused about how to benefit wildy from it.

Notice I didn’t just say “get traffic from it”.

The One and Only True Power of Social Media is that it is completely based on getting approval from others.

So to understand how to use that information, answer this question for yourself: in a situation where popularity is driven by approval, who is the most powerful person?

Hint: It’s not the person who Gets the most approval.

Ask me below and I’ll give you another hint. A big one. For free, but I will only deliver it in private. And if you guess correctly or figure it out, I’ll let you know that too.

Within the next seven days, I’ll write in public about the answer. You’ll have to figure out for yourself which writing is the answer though.

You’ve got to get visitors. Every site needs them, unless you’re online to talk to yourself, in which case you ought to just write in a journal.

And perhaps seek the advice of a professional. (I know because I talk to myself out loud and it freaks people out. Professional comedians really can help make that experience even funnier.)

There are tons of ways to get more visitors, as I’m sure you know. But what you may not realize is that there are ways to make every marketing effort you make have ten times the impact of your neighbor, who may be doing the exact same action.

I mean this literally. Guy A may submit an article to a directory and get 5 visitors. Guy B could submit an article on the same topic, of the same length, and get 5000 visitors from it.

I have Seven Tips for how to be Guy or Gal B coming up throughout the day.

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.

People keep asking me how I get so much marketing and related tasks done in so little time. When I fell ill this past year, it took three people to stand in for me, and that was with no one assigned to the task of blogging.

If you

1. make your own infoproducts,
2. write your own blog posts,
3. create your own articles,
4. do extensive online or offline reading for business,
5. do your own research,

or otherwise maintain your own authentic voice in your online personality and image, there’s a special type of training you can get that will cut your time expenditure for those activities in half, or even less. You’re probably heard of this one before and thought it was a gimmick, but I’ll tell you, it’s definitely real.

I had actually mastered this technique as a girl, but after being out of practice for a few years, never quite got back to my original level. However, just a bit of practice gave me the ability to get my research for blog posts and social sharing done in 25% of the time it takes most other people.

Here’s how I (re)discovered these this time saver.

After I fell ill last October, and then gravely ill this past winter, the recovery period was supposed to be about a year. To which I said bah humbug, there has to be a way for me to get to at least half speed. I mean, what am I, a slacker?

I was running out of savings (no health insurance means never getting to say bill me later, LOL), and bills don’t pay themselves.

The most I could work without being threatened with hospitalization again, was four hours every other day. Even with three more people to help me, there was no way I could do what I was doing without being able to train someone to replace me. Two main things, and later a third, saved my butt. This article is about number one.

I can speed read. It’s been my secret weapon, especially as a blogger. Here’s why.

My reading rate, is 708 words per minute on screen, and around 900 -1000 on paper at a fair rate of comprehension, meaning I can get the gist at the same understanding as most people do at their average speed. At my fastest speed, I absorb information the much more quickly, but can’t later recall it as well as I would when reading a little slower.

In other words, at 78% comprehension, I can still read around 500 – 600 words a minute on screen and 650 -750 on paper, depending on the difficulty of the text. (Using typing as an analogy, this would be my speed after correcting for typos.)

That doesn’t sound that impressive, but guess how fast the average reader does?

200 wpm off the screen, 240 per minute off paper, at 60% comprehension.

Speed readers can consume information at four times the average rate at the same rate of understanding, and a little better than twice the rate at 20% better understanding.

I don’t break any world records, but I can read – not skim – and get the gist an average blog post in 45 seconds, when it takes most people 2 or 4 minutes. Doesn’t seem like the time saving is worth it at first.

Until you realize that being able to read four times as fast means I can either get the same amount of reading done in 1/4 the time as my peers. Which means I can get four times as much information in my head in the same amount of time. Again this is information I retain and use, not skim and later forget.

My research will be better or I’ll be done faster. Either way, I’m more productive – though I’m not one of those scan-a-page-at-a-time people. I think that would take the fun out of reading.

Originally, I learned speed reading in the ’80s off a program my father got for our Apple II. It simply flashed words on the screen faster and faster, then in groups, then sentences. You learn to read faster by scanning groups of phrases, instead of pronouncing each word in your mind.

To learn this, first, clock yourself at your current rate. Then you can find a computer program that does this, or make yourself cue cards and practice with a friend. Before too long, you may find yourself able to consume words in groups, and that stage is enough for your speed to be about double most people.

If you’d like to start speed reading, you can start by finding out your current clocked speed of reading along with your comprehension rate for free. I’m not an affiliate of theirs and I’ve never tried their software. It’s a shame there’s no freeware sample. I could probably sell dozens of these every day.

There are tons of sites that claim to have free speed reading courses, but I’ve never had the attention span to brush up my speed from a book, nor have I attempted investing time in a weekend seminar. Even the 25% increase in speed that you can probably teach yourself at home can give you enough of a boost to make the time invested in learning pay off.

CREAM for all you non-hip-hop fans means Cash Rules Everything Around Me.

< rant > And by hip-hop, I don’t mean most of the often violent, sexist or unimaginative crap that mostly on the air today. If you think that is hip-hop, Happy Belated Birthday and congrats on being one day old. </ rant >

Typically I don’t write about making money online because I think most sites about making money through online marketing or other means miss the point entirely.

That point being that no matter how great your invention is, if it’s not popular, it won’t sell. You’d be better off doing something mediocre and selling it really cheap. Or even something really great, really cheap.

Which brings us to the purpose of this post.

A long time reader of this blog and my newsletter, EJ Cooksey, wrote a post about the latest George Pluss sale on her blog about Making Money Online that I found when I was doing my daily work on my current StumbleUpon experiment. Here’s what she said:

Over 700 folks downloaded the BUM System and they are still coming in. Do you know why and did you take advantage of what they found there?

The explanation is simple: In this new Dime Sale he is sharing THREE proven methods to go from $0 to $100 in a matter of 30 days. And it will only take your time investment, nothing else.

And that clicked something in my head about why a dime sale make so much sense.

So many people are trying to make $10k online per month that they forget to try and make $2K a month first.

You may think, as I did, why should you have a dime sale? If you do 700 in sales a day, if each copy was ten cents, if the price never raised, that’s only $70. (It’s my understanding that the price goes up with each sale, but stay with me for easy math.)

If you could keep that pace up for 30 days, even at ten cents that’s $2100. And 21,000 people on your list that you could sell something else to later.

Even at 100 sales a day, that’s 3000 more people on your list- 3000 leads who have been through your sales process. What if you sold them something for $1?

In the interest of practicing what I preach, I’ll put together a simple traffic plan and put it on sale for ten cents too. Great job EJ!

Okay.

To round up the first two posts, that were published earlier today, I’ve got something that might just make you wet your pants.

I ran across a site that has 139 social bookmarking sites that, where available, has included the page rank of these sites.

For those of you who want to know a bit more about social bookmarking, here’s a site that has a video on the subject and, if that wasn’t enough, the video is under 2 minutes.

For others, who are A-type anal people, here’s the long version from Wikipedia.

Oh yeah, here’s the link to the 139.

Enjoy!

MorganLighter

Good morning. It’s Friday!

What shall we talk about today? How about the ‘tools’ of Socializing, Commenting and Replying. Didn’t sneak that one by you did I? Oh, how clever you all are.

But have you thought of them as tools? Why not? Aren’t they, in fact, tools? Yes, they are and I’ll tell you why.

Socializing. You can’t imagine how important this is.

Not only do you get to read great content, run into interesting people, have access to sites that not only entertain but sites that can teach you everything you need to know about a myriad of subjects, spark ideas that you can implement immediately, sites where you get to express your views and opinions, have the opportunity to help others, get exposure that is world wide which is absolutely free, build a reputation as a guru of this or that and have a good time all the while. It’s better than eating Junior Mints with pop-corn. (Haven’t tried it – you haven’t lived).

Commenting. Are you inundated with comments? Well, maybe you could fix that by commenting yourselves.

When you comment, don’t use a throw-away remark. What do I mean? Well, how fired up are you when you get a comment like this – ‘like ur site, pls vst mine at www.fullofcrap.com’? What kind of comment is that? I’d rather have no comment at all. Wouldn’t you? If you have something important, as you see it, to say or add to the conversation, then, for the love of Mike, say it. If you haven’t anything to add, then for pity’s sake, don’t weigh in just because you like to ‘hear’ yourself talk. People will see right through you and you’ll be ‘branded’ as a flake, a fraud and a fool – and who in their right mind wants that label.

One more thing on commenting. Please, please, please, do not put a ‘commercial’ in the body of your comment. Don’t ‘beg’ by leaving your url in the comment. And lastly, don’t comment on your own posts by using a different name, email, url. All this will come back and bite you in the butt. Remember, cheaters never win.

Replying. Oh, so essential!

For those of you who are new to our site, or drop by now and then, and to you that are avid fans, you know that we are all quite social. Tinu always answers the comments section and I chip in now and then as does Cindy. It’s not only polite, it’s essential that comments receive a response. If you don’t reply then you’re apt to ‘loose’ that person who commented. How would you feel if someone sent you a comment/message, regardless of format, and you simply ignored it. I know how I would feel – and it ain’t a pretty picture.

Don’t think I can’t hear you. I know what you’re saying. Morgan, you’re telling a good story, but where’s the proof, dude? Well, here it is. Read it and weep. Then read this post again and do the same.

Through the excellent work Tinu is doing on Facebook, her publishing of her book ‘FUN Traffic’, which is flying off the shelf, her seminal posts, guest posting on other sites, her interviewing the ‘big shots’ and being interviewed by the same, with my commenting on 25-30 sites most every day and replying in kind and being asked to blog on other sites, with Cindy’s awesome management skills, our site is in a fix. We’ve out grown our server space and need to upgrade. Yes, because we followed the practices, as outlined above, we need to add another gajillion gigabytes. What a problem to have.

So, what are you gonna do?

MorganLighter

Okay, I know what you’re thinking. I’ve finally lost my mind. You might be right. But then again….

Let me ‘esplain’ how the title might apply to your web site(s).

Being a ‘social animal’, I am fairly active in commenting on MyBlogLog, Bumpzee, PlugIM, Facebook, etc. and therefore I visit a lot of sites, actually tons of them.

To me, it’s interesting to see how bloggers design their home page. One would think that they would make the ‘flagship’ of their site drop-dead gorgeous, mind blowing, unique or real cool, daddy-O. One would think.

Too often, however, this is not the case.

Sometime the sites we visit are nice, but there’s just something that’s not right – kinda out of kilter – you know what I mean. It just needs that little ‘tweak’ to make it awesome. Just a little ‘torque’ is all it needs. Voila!

Then there are those sites that are just a bit ‘over the edge’. They have some uniqueness to them, but it’s just a little jammed up with too much stuff. It’s hard to read and somewhat difficult to navigate around all the unnecessary, in my opinion, junk and therefore a jack hammer should be applied.

Lastly, we all have landed on sites where there is just too much ‘crap’. I mean, ‘In your face C-R-A-P!’ It’s almost like a flash back of an LSD trip, but I’m only supposing what that would be like. There’s just no way you could save it. This site might appeal to a very small percentage of readers, but to get into the ‘big time’, well, let’s just say it needs a total makeover – thus the dynamite.

The moral of this story is this – when designing your site, don’t try to be too cute, or too clever, or too ‘over the top’. You might think that your site is the bee’s knees, but exactly whom would you be appealing too? Not the masses, for sure.

Take time to look at sites that are most popular and see how their sites differ from yours. Swallow your pride and design a site that will attract not repel. After all, what are we all looking to obtain? Page rank, popularity, comments up the kazoo!

You’ll only achieve this with traffic – traffic – traffic! And you won’t get it unless your site is presentable to the majority.

Epilogue – Yes, this is totally my opinion. You may disagree with me. You might think I don’t know what I’m talking about. This may be true. However, I believe that would be most difficult to prove.

So, be honest with yourself and choose the tool that will make you the envy of the blogging world. I wish you all the best.

MorganLigher

Let’s get right to it, shall we?

Static URLs are known to be better than Dynamic URLs because of a number of reasons
1. Static URLs typically Rank better in Search Engines.
2. Search Engines are known to index the content of dynamic pages a lot slower compared to static pages.
3. Static URLs are always more friendlier looking to the End Users.

Example of a dynamic URL:

http://www.widgets.com/product.php?categoryid=1&productid=10

This tool helps you convert dynamic URLs into static looking html URLs.

Example of the above dynamic URL Re-written using this tool:

http://www.widgets.com/product-categoryid-1-productid-10.htm

Note* – You would need to create a file called “.htaccess” and paste the code generated into it. Once you have created the .htacess file simply copy it into your web directory. URL rewriting of this type would work ONLY if you are hosted on a Linux Server.

Dynamic URLs  vs.  Static URLs.

This article explains the various challenges of Dynamic URLs vs. Static URLs.

 And there you have it and here you’ll get it.

MorganLighter

Jeremiah over at Web Strategist, someone I have great professional admiration for, thanked me for my contribution to his group in Facebook, the Web Strategy Group (which you absolutely must join if you’re on Facebook – if you’re not on Facebook, reply with why not. I’m really curious!).

It came as a big surprise, especially since I feel like I haven’t been doing as much as I could… in any way lately. I have a real tendency to be hard on myself for not being able to maintain my former workaholic status.

Being thanked, for something that I didn’t think really mattered gave me a real boost, and totally made my day. And whenever I feel that good, I always ask myself, “how can I make everyone feel as good as I do right now?”

It occured to me that I could follow Jeremiah’s lead.

In my case, I want to take this weekend to acknowledge people who have contributed to my success, to have you meet some of the people I know, go visit their blogs and read about them.

There are all types of wonderful people in my life that can make working online an absolute pleasure that I feel like I just don’t thank enough. I mean, I do recognize them privately… but I don’t say much about them in public. So that’s what I’m going to do this weekend. I have been up all night so I’m pretty beat now. But when I get up, I’m going to make a list of people who have been pivotal in my career, including everyone from clients, colleagues, fellow bloggers, to subscribers… and make blog posts about them.

Never, ever underestimate the power of gratitude.

You never know how much those two little words, thank you, are going to mean to someone.

Yeah, so it’s Mulligatawny Monday. Of course the stew that is today’s bunch of posts will be a little bit of everything. That’s normal around these parts. Here’s what’s not normal that I plan on doing today.

I am in a really sensitive mood and have a lot on my mind. I also have a few series that were not completed, some due to time constraints, others because, well, I just got tired halfway through. So if you wanted to hear more about Trustbait and Traffic or Social Media and Traffic or have missed the posts where you see through to the real Tinu in all her happy/whiny/achy/funny(?)/helpy (I know, not a word. But my poetic license is still valid.) way …

That’s what today will be like. We’re return to our all business face Tinu on the morrow.

Haha! Like I’m Ever ALL Business. I like to have fun, don’t you?