Recently, we launched a new monthly lecture series to present the most important web trends for marketing professionals.

Please join us at our next free WEBINAR: ”Latest Web Trends in 1 Hour” on Wednesday, May 30, 2012 at 10am.  Signup and details here.

At the April 2012 Web Trends Webinar, Miriam Schwab, the Friendly CEO of illuminea, spoke about:

Love the Sociabell graphic!

Google:

• Google Webmaster tools keeping data for 90 days
• Keep a close on your Google account with activity reports
• Need more space in your inbox? Sort emails by size with a Google Spreadsheet script
• How Google Penguin updates affecting sites
• Google Drive finally launching but not with iPhone access
• Google+ gets a new design, as if that’ll make more people join…

Facebook:

Fancy graphs to show user's engagement with the Facebook timeline

• You can now email people’s message box based on their profile URL. Good for stalkers…
• Download IP addresses to see who’s been logged into your account
• Timeline Checklist – a list with useful tools for optimizing your timeline
• Fancy graphs for Facebook engagement since the launch of timelines
• Facebook ads that link to internal Facebook pages perform better, and are cheaper.

Linkedin:

LinkedIn's People You May Know feature

• People You May Know feature
• Targeted updates
• Follower stats
• iPad app which represents a general trend of people moving away from apps and more toward specialized mobile and tablet sites

YouTube:

• Overview of ad options and prices
• Partner program allows you to put ads on your videos and do revenue share with YouTube

We also discussed: Pinterest, WordPress stats – over 72.4 million sites built on WP, Klout, Wajam, Sociabell,  joliprint, and secure.me.

We invite you to join us in-person at illuminea Headquarters in Jerusalem or online via live straming for our next 1-hour Webinar on Wednesday, May 30, 2012 at 10am. Signup and details here.

Watch the April 2012 web trends lecture video
We apologize for the quality of the video. To see the accompanying presentation, go here

April 2012 Slideshow on Slideshare.

About a year ago, WordPress added a feature that made it ridiculously easy to embed content from various sites (like YouTube, Slideshare, Vimeo) into WordPress sites.

How to embed media in WordPress in a second

If you want to embed, for example, a YouTube video in a post, all you do is paste the URL of the video into the editor, unlink it and save/publish. See our ultimate guide to embedding HTML and iframes in WordPress on WPGarage for more info on how this works.

The problem is that it doesn’t seem to work 100% of the time. Luckily, there’s usually a reason for this. So if you’re having trouble embedding media in your WordPress site, see if the following tips help you out.

1. Your WordPress site isn’t set to enable embeds of this kind.

Whenever you set up a WordPress site, you have the option to allow embeds or not. Make sure you’ve chosen this option.

1. Go to Settings > Media.
2. Under Embeds check the option: “When possible, embed the media content from a URL directly onto the page. For example: links to Flickr and YouTube.”
3. Save changes.

2. You aren’t using the right link

It’s possible you aren’t using the right link. For example, maybe you copied the link of a channel instead of an individual video.

Here is an example of a URL that won’t work:

http://www.youtube.com/illuminea#p/u/1/LlSeZIHroNw

Instead, the URL should look something like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlSeZIHroNw

Lets see it work (all I did was un-hyperlink the above link to get the embedded video below):

Man, it’s so easy I could spit!

3. Extra code is messing things up

Maybe extra code is being added to the WordPress editor without you realizing. Try embedding the link into the HTML editor instead of the Visual one. If you see any extra code aside from the link itself, remove it.

4. The YouTube user isn’t allowing embeddings of their media

When someone uploads a video to YouTube, they can choose whether or not others will be able to embed their video around the web. If they chose not to allow it, no matter what you do, you won’t be able to embed it into your site.

Want to know how to change the embedding settings on one of your YouTube videos? Here’s how:

1. Make sure you’re logged into YouTube (with your Google account).
2. Click on the arrow next to your username in the top right-hand corner.
3. Click on My Videos.
4. Click Edit info on the video you want to edit.
5. Scroll down to Embedding and click the arrow next to it in order to see the two options.
6. Choose whether or not external sites will be able to embed your video.
7. Click Save Changes.

Anything else?

These are the problems we’ve found that prevent the awesome WordPress embed function from working. Have you found any other issues that don’t allow you to embed using links in WordPress?

illuminea college is offering an amazing course through which you’ll learn all the basics you need to know in order to get a website up and running using WordPress.

Why WordPress?

WordPress is an open source Content Management System (CMS). Basically this means that regular people like you and me can, relatively very easily, build and tweak websites that are cool, clear, professional and unique.

What is the course exactly?

When: Starts Feb. 15, 2011. 9:30am-1:30pm Tuesdays for 8 weeks.

Where: Our office in Jerusalem

What: Here is the course outline:

1. HTML
2. CSS
3. How do websites and internet work? (And how to get mine to work)
4. Familiarizing yourself with WordPress part 1
5. Familiarizing yourself with WordPress part 2
6. Working with template files
7. Programming 101
8. Social networks, SEO, RSS…

Who’s teaching? Us, the illuminea team, will be teaching the course. We are the ones who work with WordPress every day and are very excited to share our knowledge with others!

Price: The course is 4,300 NIS though you’ll get a 10% discount if you sign up before January 13 and a 15% discount if you’re already an illuminea client. You will receive three months free hosting of your website and a certificate at the end.

Language

We decided that we’ll first offer the course in Hebrew. You can see our landing page for the course here.

Please let us know if you have any questions and/or if you may be interested in attending this or a different course later on in English.

Automattic, the company behind WordPress and WordPress.com has taken a new direction in its activity with the announcement of a new website called FoodPress.com. FoodPress features blog posts aggregated from food blogs sitting on WordPress.com, and that’s what makes it so interesting. It’s a new venture into the world of verticals, sites that concentrate on a certain topic, with posts sucked in from other sources. The potential for these sites is huge and almost limitless: sites could be about fashion, dating, parenthood, startups, web development, etc. etc. But one of the things that makes this source interesting is that it’s not machine-made: posts are chosen by the FoodPress editor Jane Maynard who is scanning tag pages related to food like food, recipes and baking.

This venture is win-win for Automattic and for the bloggers on WordPress.com. Automattic is showing the love to its bloggers, by giving them the opportunity to get more exposure for their posts. This encourages bloggers to open blogs on WordPress.com and stay there, which is good for Automattic since many of those bloggers are or may become paying customers.

Darnell Clayton over at the Blog Herald wonders whether Automattic will open up the site to self-hosted WordPress users. I can’t see that happening since I think the point of this is to support the WordPress.com community. However, maybe there’s an opportunity here for someone to start a site like this for WordPress.org users…

Read part one here in order to learn how to buy a domain name.

Step II: Time to start mapping

You own your dream domain! Don’t leave the domain provider site yet. Here is how to change the Nameservers in name.com.

Click on the cute “Account” man button at the top of the page:

You’ll arrive at a page like this:

Click on the info button of the domain you want to map to. You’ll get a pop up page and on the right it says Nameservers with a list under it.

To the right of Nameservers it says “edit.” Click on that button.

Insert the code from wordpress.com:

NS1.WORDPRESS.COM
NS2.WORDPRESS.COM
NS3.WORDPRESS.COM

And remove the code that was there before.

Click Update and now lets move into the wordpress.com site.

Step III: Make changes in wordpress.

Make sure you’re logged into wordpress.com. Also make sure you’re in the the dashboard of the correct blog!!!

In the dashboard of the blog, along the left run a bunch of buttons. At the bottom is Settings and inside Settings is Domains. Click on that.

You’ll be prompted to add a domain. Write in the one you just purchased:

After you click Add domain to blog, you’ll be prompted to purchase the credits needed to pay for the mapping. Once you finish with that purchase, go back to Settings –> Domains. Click on the new domain which you want to act as your primary domain.

Step IV: Check out your new domain!

Go to the new address of your site, make sure it works, feel very proud and then tell the world!

Good job!

Who is this tutorial for?

This tutorial is helpful to someone who has decided to have a wordpress.com blog but wants to look cooler or more professional by using a custom domain like deenascreations.com instead of the standard wordpress.com domain like deenascreations.wordpress.com. Notice that both of those links go to the same place? Once you map your domain, you’ll be able to tell everyone your more impressive URL without the .wordpress.com part.

This is relatively easy to accomplish (just follow the instructions in this post) and then you will look oh so impressive and no one needs to know that it cost oh so little.

So, how much will it cost?

According to the current prices, around $10US per year will go to wordpress.com for the mapping and another amount will go to your domain provider of choice (the price depends on a few factors but the price of a “regular” domain is around $10US/year). You will need an American/Canadian or international credit card in order to fill these transactions.

Step I: Purchase a domain name

I am assuming you already signed up to wordpress.com and own a domain name there. It will look something like: iamwonderful.wordpress.com.

Now you need to purchase a custom domain. We currently recommend using name.com for this. Generally the way it works is that you own the domain name for a year and then have an option to pay for another year. When signing up to name.com, make sure to use an email address that you check regularly so you will get the notification when it’s time to renew the domain. Either that or you can set it up for automatic renewal.

So now, search for the domain name of your dreams. Enter any name in the space. Remember that:

1. It’s nice though unnecessary that both your .wordpress.com domain and your .com domain have the same name.
2. Don’t write any ending. So, for example, just write “iwishiweredeena” without .com.

Click enter and you’ll get results telling you which domains are available for that name. Here is an example:

Of course most people will agree that a .com domain is preferable over any of the other endings but on the other hand, sometimes it’s just too difficult to find an appropriate domain name with .com. You need to decide which one best fits your goals. (I personally think .co is also a cool option that recently came out but all endings are second to .com.)

Now check off the domain you want and click the checkout button.

Now you get to this page:

It’s a good idea to purchase the Whois Privacy so that not just anyone can have access to the information regarding who owns this domain. I recommend unclicking Google Apps for now. Google Apps is the way to host your email address on Google but that’s a whole other story.

Now create an account with name.com.

Pay for the domain.

Continue to the second and final part of this tutorial.

It’s a month since WordCamp Jerusalem which is basically how long it took us to organize the whole thing. And it’s taken about a month to regroup, between the aftermath and all the holidays.

But all the hard work was worth it since we’ve gotten great feedback on the event which took place on September 5, 2010. Thanks so much guys – you motivate me to think about the next event…

There is lots of stuff for you to check out following the first WordCamp in Jerusalem:

1. Presentations and videos of some of the lectures.
2. Photographs and mentions around the web of WordCamp Jerusalem.

See the video below of my panel where we discussed whether we still need blogs in the era of facebook (short answer: yes!) with Hanan Cohen, Jacob Share and me.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIMYwysGxZ0[/youtube]

The highlight of the day was undoubtedly the fact that Matt Mullenweg, the founder and CEO of WordPress flew from the USA for the conference. Here is his Q&A session which took place at the end of the day:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYgEVTqkHEo\[/youtube]

What I learned organizing WordCamp

Would you like to get a glimpse into the huge amount of preparations that go into an event that has three simultaneous lecture tracks, cool hand-outs and a delicious lunch? Read my articles Behind the Scenes of WordCamp Jerusalem 2010 and WordCamp Jerusalem: Tips for Producing a WordCamp.

See you next year at WordCamp Jerusalem/Tel Aviv/Israel 2011! Be sure to fill out this form in order to receive updates about it as things start to come together. Woohoo!

Yesterday was the second time Sphinncon took place in Israel. Sphinncon is “a version of the Search Marketing Expo (SMX) Conference, but tailored as more of a low impact and more social gathering for search marketers” (taken from the event booklet). Barry Schwartz from Search Engine Roundtable, Search Engine Land, and RustyBrick, was the organizer, and the Jerusalem College of Technology provided the venue.

I really enjoyed the event and here’s why:

• It was in Jerusalem: We Jerusalemites are always schlepping to Tel Aviv for internet and technology related events.
• Good networking: The crowd was awesome. I had a great time schmoozing.
• Impressive panelists: I may not have had to schlep, but some pretty amazing speakers did schlep from around the world to come to this event, like Vanessa Fox, Dixon Jones from Majestic SEO, and Tomer Honen from Google’s Ireland office.
• Good food: Especially the caesar salad and the hot chocolate cake thingy. Yes, I’m shallow. And the fact that I got a free pen really made this event aces in my book.
• Funny people: Sam Michelson from Five Blocks did not disappoint. His title slide said he was going to talk about “Reputation Management for the Mossad.” Turns out he was kidding (though right now they probably could use some rep management). Loved that. Gil Reich from Answers.com was pretty entertaining too (check out his post about the best everything at Sphinncon).

Here’s what I think could be better:

• More useful content from the speakers. I did learn a few new things, but the presentations I heard were nice but kind of fluffy. I got the feeling that the speakers didn’t want to share any really valuable information with the audience.

Check out Barry’s run-down of the event for more details, speaker information, and photos.

Update: I forgot to mention something very important. The last Sphinncon didn’t have any women panelists or speakers, and although I thought the event was great, that bugged me and I wrote about it. For some magical Google reason, if you search for the term Sphinncon Israel, that post is always in the top 10 results. Anyways, this Sphinncon really made up for that with a good number of women panelists. I wouldn’t say it was 50-50, but I think this industry is not 50-50. A quick glance at the crowd certainly seemed to indicate that this is a guy-dominated industry, which is fine, but it was nice to see women represented too. So thanks Barry!

WordPress for social media and SEO

I was on a panel about social media with Vanessa Fox, Debra Askanase and Roi Carthy. I spoke about how to set up WordPress to be the hub of your social media and SEO activity. Here are the main points. The presentation is embedded further on:

• Your internet presence must be based on a hub which is your blog, or website combined with a blog. WordPress is a great platform for creating that blog or website/blog.
• WordPress is great for SEO. Yes, there was recently a kind of “WordPress SEO showdown” between Michael Gray and Robert Rolfe about whether WordPress really is good for SEO. Rolfe says it’s not because the permalinks (URLs) that you can set up are limited and not perfect from an SEO point of view. Gray says that WP is not perfect, but its benefits outweigh the disadvantages.
  Sidenote: before I got up to speak Barry told the audience he wanted them to see something. Then he searched for the term Sphinncon Israel in Google and our blog post about Sphinncon Israel two years ago appears on the first page.
• Social media should be used in conjunction with SEO, and vice versa. If you use the tactics of one without the other, you are missing out on a lot of untapped internet goodness like more keyword opportunities, diverse traffic streams, link building, long tail keywords, etc.
• Some good tools for integrating social media are Chat Catcher that aggregates all the conversation taking place about a post and publishing that conversation as comments on your blog; facebook fan box and facebook connect; flickr galleries, YouTube galleries; LinkedIn TypePad application called BlogLink for displaying an RSS feed on your LinkedIn profile – this app is better than the WordPress one because the WP one is limited to one WP rss feed while the TypePad app allows you to pull in any RSS feed.
• Track your feed subscriber stats with Feedburner. Make sure that auto-detect for feeds will find your feedburner feed URL, not the built-in WordPress feed URL. Can use a plugin, htaccess, or hard-code the header.php file.
• Don’t forget about email. Use RSS-to-email service to make your life easier. Feedburner is free but you can’t brand your mailings or add people to the list; MailChimp allows you to brand your mailings and add people to your mailing list, gives you more control.
• Track how you’re doing socially with the following tools: bit.ly for tracking how many people clicked on tiny URLs you posted on twitter etc.; tweetmeme; Topsy (check out the Topsy page for Sphinncon); PostRank
• Hootsuite allows you to fire and forget the sharing of your blog RSS feed with your various twitter profiles, facebook profile, facebook fan page, and LinkedIn.
• Don’t leave the growing mobile user demographic out in the cold: easily make a mobile version of your WordPress site with the WPtouch plugin.
• WordPress is itself a social network thanks to BuddyPress which allows you to create a social network on the WP platform. The most recent version of BuddyPress can be used on a single installation of WordPress, as opposed to only being compatible with WPMU (multi-user WordPress).
• WordPress and SEO – WordPress makes it easy to implement a lot of the SEO basics, like rel=canonical meta tags, redirect all pages to with or without www, add an XML sitemap. The All in One SEO Pack plugin helps you manage page and post title structure site-wide, control meta-descriptions, no-follow areas of the site like categories, and more. Yoast’s Meta Robots Tag overlaps a bit with All in One SEO, but it offers additional features too.
• Google recently started to display breadcrumbs in search results. Add breadcrumbs to your site with a plugin or by modifing your functions.php file.
• Check for broken links in your site, and correct them on the spot, with the Broken Link Checker WordPress plugin.
• Easily add internal links with SEO Smart Links plugin that allows you to enter a word, and then tell the system that whenever that word appears on the site, it should link to a specific page. There are quite a lot more plugins that I mention, but why not view them yourself in the presentation embedded below.
• Optimize your site for speed – the speed with which a page loads is apparently considered for its ranking. Therefore, you need to speed up your pages. Check out the presentation for some ways how.
• You also need to secure your WordPress site against hackers. Some ideas for that are in the presentation too.

Ironically, even though I mention all the plugins above, if you really want to promote your site online, it shouldn’t be running too many plugins since that can seriously slow the site down. Many of the plugins I mentioned can be run briefly to accomplish something, and then deactivated once you don’t need them to do their deed anymore.

Here’s the presentation:

After a long break I’ll be giving a course on social media marketing for businesses on Sept. 23 and 30. The course had filled up already, but we’ve moved the venue to a bigger room so we have 5 spaces left for anyone interested. The course will take place in the Sandisk offices in the Kfar Saba Hi-Tech park. Each session will be four hours, and we will get hands-on at every stage with tools and techniques for optimizing your social media activity.

For more information about costs, venue, topics, etc., please contact us at (02) 5660297 or via email at info@illuminea.com.

Agenda

Sept. 23: What exactly is social media, and how do I use it effectively?

Part 1: What is social media marketing? (1 hour)

• What makes something social? What is Web 2.0? We’ll look at the most important elements of social media today: RSS, Video, Widgets, Tagging, and more to get everyone on the same page.
• The importance of social media in your marketing activity
• Case studies: companies and organizations that have successfully and unsuccessfully used social media

Part 2: Planning effective strategies for social media activity (3 hours)

• Elements of an effective social media strategy
• Setting goals
• Important considerations before starting
• Research your space
• Implementation
• Monitoring & engaging – how, what
• DO NOT neglect the other “boring” stuff: SEO, email, advertising, etc.

Sept. 30: Practical techniques for implementing your social media strategy

Part 1: Overview of important social networks – what they are, how to best use them for marketing (3 hours)

• How to use twitter for marketing: setting up profiles that work for business, building up community, promoting your profile, what and how to write, monitoring, measuring, the best tools, etc.
• Using facebook for business: profiles, Pages, applications, events, etc.: critical differences between each of them, how to choose the right ones for your purposes, setting up a facebook presence that works for marketing and promotion.
• YouTube and other video sites: why video is the next generation of web marketing, what to keep in mind when working with video, ideal length and content, how to promote your video to achieve your marketing goals
• Blogs – “old fashioned” but crucial: blogs are the hubs of an effective social media presence. What to keep in mind, how to set it up, how to integrate it with your other social media activity, ideal frequency for updates, what to write, how to write, how to promote.

Part 2: Personal branding (1 hour)

• What is personal branding?
• Why everyone should work on their online personal brand today
• How to create a successful personal brand with social media

Summing up: Where to go from here (0.5 hours)

• Key points to keep in mind when branching out into social media
• Putting it all together
• Working with (skeptical) upper management

About the speaker – me, Miriam Schwab

Miriam is the Friendly CEO of illuminea, and has been speaking and teaching about social media and blogging for business for over two years.

illuminea is a marketing firm dedicated to helping businesses and organizations use the social web effectively as an integrated part of their marketing mix. illuminea has extensive expertise in designing, developing and strategizing business blogs, and using these blogs as the hub for launching successful social media marketing activities. Part of illuminea’s day-to-day activities involve keeping up with the latest developments in the social web so that we are always able to offer our clients the best solutions for their needs.

Among illuminea’s clients are some of Israel’s leading companies and personalities, including Comverse, Commtouch, Natan Sharansky, and more. Click here to view testimonials from illuminea’s clients.

Here is a list of the conferences and events that Miriam has spoken at:

Wordcamp 2007 – moderator http://english.wordcamp-israel.info/ and the schedule

WordCamp 2008

Elephant

Techshoret 2007

Affilicon 2008

Affilicon 2009

Marchshoret, Nov. 2, 2008. Presentation is here

Partnership 2000, Nov. 12, 2008

Pradler Institute

SSVN, hosted by IBM on July 8, 2009. Read reviews. Presentation.

ISOC Israel:How to create a personal brand by using online tools- MP3 of lecture; presentation; article on The Com (Hebrew).

MEET Alumni Conference, August 4-5, 2009 Istanbul Turkey: “Blogging Secrets: Tips for marketing your business online.”

For more information about costs, venue, topics, etc., please contact us at (02) 5660297 or via email at info@illuminea.com. Hope to see you there!

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… Rank: wait… Traffic: wait… Price: wait… C: wait…

This past Wednesday, July 8 I was privileged to be the “keynote speaker” (I find that term kind of amusing, thus the quotation marks) at IBM for the latest SSVN (The Startups & Societal Ventures Network) event.

The challenge of talking to a large group about social media is trying to make sure that the information is not too overwhelming for the newbies, but at the same time is not too boring for the seasoned users. The feedback from the audience was pretty enthusiastic, so I hope I managed to reach that happy medium.

The talk covers recent landmark events on twitter, such as Dell reaching $3m in sales via twitter, the success of the Iran Election protesters who used twitter to bring their cause to the world, and some other events. We looked at strategies, tips and tools for creating an effective online presence.

Without further ado, here’s the presentation: