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.

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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?

No related posts.

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.

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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…

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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!

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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.

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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!

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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:

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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…

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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:

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Here are the seven tips. For more info about the Tel Aviv Writer’s Cafe, please scroll to the end of this post.

1. Brand yourself as if you were a brand name

If you are trying to market yourself as a freelance writer, or freelance anything, it’s important to start to look at yourself as the product that you, the business owner, is trying to sell. Yeah, that’s a lot of hats to wear, and that doesn’t include the fact that you, the freelancer, are also the accountant, administrator, and coffee-fetcher. Anyways, in order to accomplish this, you need to create “Brand You.”

Why should I brand myself?

The brilliant Gary Vaynerchuk has the answer for you (bonus: guess who’s apparently a MOT (Member of the Tribe)…note how he says Alav Hashalom about Paul Newman passing away!):

Another reason you want to do this is because Google has a long memory, and you need to control what prospective employers and others see about you on the web. You have a chance at doing this if you have a personal site built on your own domain. To see what I’m talking about, read this post from Lifehacker: Geek to Live: Have a say in what Google says about you.

So how do I do this?

At the very least, buy your name domain name now (we recommend using www.name.com – and we have no affiliation with them, they just don’t suck like some other registrars we won’t name). If you’re name is Joe Shmoe, buy www.joeshmoe.com. If that domain name is taken, add your middle initial and buy www.joezshmoe.com. If you don’t have a middle name, pretend you do and choose a middle initial to use from this point forwards in all your professional correspondence so that people will Google your name that way and actually find you. If you think it’s weird to add a fake middle initial, ask Michael J. Fox, if he regrets it. (To see why he didn’t just use “A,” the initial of his real middle name, read about his Early Life in Wikipedia. Hint – it may have to do with the fact that he’s Canadian, eh?)

If you’re not up to it, you don’t have to actually do anything with your shiny new domain name right now. So why are you buying your domain name now if you’re not going to use it? Because it can get snatched up between now and when you do want to use it by someone else, which would suck for you.

If you are up to it, I strongly recommend starting a blog that appears under your name-domain name.

But I don’t have thousands to spend on that kind of thing right now!

That’s alright, I say. Here are instructions on starting a personalized blog on a shoestring. The reason this method is good is because if your blog becomes a real success and needs to grow, you can relatively easily move over to your own self-hosted WordPress blog, like all the pros.

Starting a Personalized Blog on a Shoestring:

1. Sign up for a blog on WordPress.com. Try to choose a  name that represents you, but remember that you will be putting your new name-domain on your blog in a few steps.
2. Choose a WordPress theme that best suits your needs. You can find them under Appearance > Themes in the sidebar of your new blog’s admin section. I recommend choosing a pretty plain theme with a header area that allows you to upload your own personalized image. My sister Deena has done a good job with that on her blog, which runs on WordPress.com and you can see here: http://deenascreations.com.
3. You should go through all the other settings and choose what best suits you. To do this, go to Settings, and go through the sub-pages and modify as you see fit.
4. Map your domain name onto your new blog. First, you need to change your DNS settings for your domain name. DNS tells your domain where it should be point to, i.e. where the site that will be using this domain is sitting. First, log into your account on your domain registrar. Try to find where the DNS info is managed. It may be under Manage Domains or Manage DNS, depending on your registrar. When you do find where you manage the DNS, remove any existing nameservers and add the following:
   • NS1.WORDPRESS.COM
   • NS2.WORDPRESS.COM
   • NS3.WORDPRESS.COM
5. Now, go back to your site and click on Upgrades, and then click on the Domains tab.
   
6. Then, enter your domain name in the Add a Domain field:
   
7. At that point it should ask you to buy 10 credits in order to use your own custom domain on WordPress.com. This costs $10 per year.
8. Once it’s set up, create an About and Contact page (crucial), and start blogging your head off.

Here are some examples of people who have really succeeded in creating a brand around themselves:

Chris Brogan

Seth Godin – yes, I know his domain name isn’t www.sethgodin.com, but he’s Seth Godin for goodness sake! He can get away with it. When you reach his stature, you can too.

Suze Orman

Gary Vaynerchuk

Here are some resources on creating a personal brand:

By Dan Schawbel – who has succeeded in branding himself as a personal branding expert

Gain a Competitive Edge by Establishing a Personal Brand

10 Ways Personal Branding Can Save You From Getting Fired

By Brian Solis

Facebook is the Hub for Your Personal Brand

Oh, and more Gary Vaynerchuk just cuz he’s so awesome, inspiring and in your face (and did I mention he’s an MOT? What naches.)

2. Don’t forget about social media

Since blogs run on RSS feeds, it means you can promote your blog content elsewhere. This is good because it increases the likelihood that people will come across your content, which is the most important thing here. You can set up your facebook and twitter profiles to automatically pull in your blog content, and post it for all your network friends to see.

In order to do any of this automatic republishing, you need to know where your feed is. On WordPress.com, it’s at http://myblog.wordpress.com/feed, where myblog is your WordPress.com blog name, or at http://myblog.com/feed, if you’ve mapped your own domain on to your WordPress.com blog.

To learn how to automatically post your blog posts on facebook, read Publish your Blog’s Feed to Facebook.

To automatically post to twitter, first create a user account on twitter. Then, go to EasyTweets, sign up, and add your twitter account to your profile. Then, click on the RSS icon at the right-hand side of your dashboard:

Enter the feed URL (see above for info on how to find it), entry frequency that EasyTweets will check for new posts (every hour is fine), any text to add before each tweet (I don’t recommend adding any text because then it looks automated), and whether you want to post the current new item in your feed, or only start updating from new items. Press Add RSS Feed, and you’re done.

One thing that came up during our session, and often comes up, is people’s confusion as to what usefulness twitter provides. Here are some links that may help you better understand why all these people get to excited about twitter:

7 Habits of Highly Effective Twitterers: Kris Colvin

How to Attract and Influence People on Twitter — The Ultimate Twitter Resource – this is like a how-to book for twitter

Twitter Enlightenment for Business Owners

50 Ideas on Using Twitter for Business

The Big Juicy Twitter Guide

3. Get people to stay in touch with you via RSS feeds and email subscriptions

If someone comes to your site, you want to get them to subscribe in some way to stay in touch before they leave. If you do, you can start to create a long-term connection where they consistently receive content you create, and trust grows between you. If you don’t, chances are they’ll leave, forget that you exist, and never come back.

So, make sure to prominently display the options for subscribing. Here’s a screenshot from Natan Sharansky’s new site for an example on how to do this – note how the subscription info appears very close to the top of every page:

4. Focus – so that people know what they’re getting

People subscribe to certain content because they are interested in the general topic being covered. Imagine if you were an avid car fan, and you bought Cars magazine only to find a spread about the latest hairstyles (or whatever they write about in fashion magazines). And imagine if you were an avid fashion fan and you opened the latest edition of Elle only to find a spread about axel grease (or whatever they write about in car magazines). You’d be pretty disappointed because you are paying to read those magazines because of their focus.

Same with your blog: people subscribe to it because you are writing about something they are interested in, whether it be politics, celebrities, iPhones, or cats. So stick to that 99% of the time, and your readers will stick with you.

5. Optimize for search engines

Yes, even you can optimize your blog for search engines. SEO may be perceived as a magical talent only bestowed upon special fairy beings, but there are some basic things you can do to help your blog rank better in the search engines. Here is a quick rundown:

1. Make a quick list of keywords you think people are using to find people like you. You can use all sorts of fancy keyword tools if you want, but you can also just use your brain since you know your industry. Take this list, and write it down on a piece of paper. Make a note of which terms are the most targeted, and which are less focused. You have more of a chance of ranking high for “Jerusalem car fans” than for “car fans.” You see what I mean? So while you’d probably like to rank high for car fans, it’s best to aim for Jerusalem car fans. But even so, don’t lose sight of the big vision of ranking for “car fans” because you may get there.
2. Once you’ve got your keywords, make sure to use them whenever possible in your blog titles, and in your first paragraph. However, when in doubt, make sure you are ultimately writing for humans. What I mean is, don’t stuff your title and paragraph with keywords that don’t make sense, because while you may make Google happy, you won’t make people happy, and that’s not good.
3. Tag your posts with tags related to your keywords, but also to other stuff you mention so that you may rank for those words as well.
4. Pay attention to meta keywords and particularly to your meta description, because that’s what appears under the title of your post in the Google search results.
5. Link internally. When you mention an event, term or phrase that you’ve mentioned before, link to that other post, or category if it exists on your blog.

6. Promote offsite

Aside from trying to get traffic via the web, make sure to promote your blog in other places as well, like in your email signature and on your business cards. And tell people about it whenever relevant, without being annoying.

7. Track your success

Like anything in life, if you are trying to achieve something in life, you need to track if you are getting there. As the saying goes “if you can measure it, you can manage it.” So track your site stats and feed stats. Don’t worry about seeing huge leaps in growth, but you do want to make sure there is a steady incline at the very least. You don’t want to plateau or start to shrink – that’s bad news, and if you see that you need to work to reverse it, generally by creating more content, and commenting on more blogs.

8. Bonus – accessing the awesomeness that is called humanity

“But you said 7 tips,” you say.

That’s right, I say, but I added a bonus. The bonus is about all the people you get to connect with via your blog and online activity, particularly when those people are…extraordinary (in every sense of the word).

Recently I got the following comment on this blog, and it makes it all worth it. Note the author’s name:

Author : moshe rabeynu
Comment:
I am a former male exotic dancer and am interested in establishing a “Chippendales” type establishment in Israel. What type of assistance and tax benefits does the Israeli government provide to new businesses of olim chadashim? Are there many such entertainment facilities in Israel?  I would like some idea as to how stiff the competition would be.  Do Israeli women, as a rule, like to look at males dancing in skimpy G-strings?  Are they generous tippers?  Would they put a shekel to the shmeckel?  If I hire other olim chadashim as dancers, would they have to pay any taxes on their tips?   Can I employ dancers who have not had a briss ?  I might want to hire one or two to add variety to the show lineup. Is a liquor license hard to obtain in Israel.  Do I have to bribe any officials to receive one?  To whom is it customary to pay proteksia money to start a business and keep it going and approximately how much to they ask for?  Thank you for your help.

If there were commenting Olympics, this one would bag a super-gold.

That’s all!

That’s it – 7 tips + 1 on how to market yourself using blogs and social media. Thanks to those who came to my session – it was great meeting you!

And now, a bit about the Tel Aviv Writer’s Cafe:

It was started 3 years ago by Stephanie Freid, a freelance writer and journalist, as a way of grouping Tel Aviv area writers together for networking and topical discussions on everything from how and where to look for jobs to tips on approaching editors to discussing what makes good journalism to deciding on filing taxes in Israel and abroad. Attendees come from a variety of writing backgrounds including technical, journalism, marketing, book writing & blogging.
Writer Forum guests have included NBC New bureau chief/author Martin Fletcher who spoke about his experiences covering world conflict and his acclaimed first book “Breaking News”, successful book author Matt Beynon Rees on taking a journalism career to the realm of fiction novel writing, NY Times writer Dina Kraft on covering conflict in Israel and why it seems to hit a nerve among so many, Pajamas Media editor Alison Kaplan Sommer on how to slot into the new era of blog writing, Israel Project Executive Director Marcus Sheff on keeping the foreign media informed and celeb blogger Lisa Goldman on how her blog propelled her into the limelight.

For more info, please contact Stephanie at [stefanella.stef at gmail.com].

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More and more professionals are starting their own blogs. There is a growing realization that blogging can help advance a person professionally, or market a business. It helps establish them as thought leaders, create relationships with people they wouldn’t normally connect to, and increase search engine rankings for their corporate sites.

But it’s hard to know where to start. Here are some tips that can help you start off on the right foot, so that you can grow as a blogger and head in the direction of becoming a “really professional blogger” (RPB):

1. Really professional bloggers have self-hosted blogs. A self-hosted blog is a blog that is hosted on a person’s own hosting account, as opposed to a blog that is hosted for free on WordPress.com or Google’s Blogger. To self-host your own blog, you need to install one of the blogging platforms on your hosting. This means an investment of about $10 a year for a domain name, and about $8 a month for hosting. So when I say investing, we’re not talking thousands. But it shows that they’re taking their blogging seriously. This also means that they are not at the mercy of WordPress.com and Google’s Terms of Service, and they also avoid the risk of being blocked in certain countries that block entire social networks like WordPress.com.
2. Really professional bloggers have their own domain name. This means that the domain name of their blog is not something like miriam.blogspot.com, but is www.miriam.com, or www.company.com/blog. If the idea of hosting your own blog makes you nervous, but you do want to have your own domain name, sign up for a blog at www.wordpress.com, and then upgrade to their paid service that allows you to have your own domain name. This will also make it easier for you to move to your own self-hosted blog with that domain name in the future. (We just did that for a client and the move went really smoothly. All their URLs were preserved.) But just note that people will still know that you are using the WordPress.com hosted blogging service because their favicon appears next to your URL in browsers. That just means you can’t personalize your favicon, but it’s not the end of the world.
3. Really professional bloggers use WordPress as their blogging platform of choice. Some may argue with me, but many if not most of the leading bloggers (except Seth, maybe) use WordPress for their blogs. Bloggers love WordPress because: 1. It has a large user community; 2. It is really flexible and many cool and wonderful things can be done with WordPress; 3. It is pretty optimized for search engines out of the box, and can be optimized even more by WordPress designers and developers. If you don’t want to invest right now in your blog, and you’re just getting your feet wet, it’s a good idea to get started with a free blog at WordPress.com. This gives you a few advantages: 1. You can easily migrate (move) your blog over to a self-hosted WordPress blog when you feel ready; 2. You will be used to the WordPress user interface and features, since the admin is basically the same for the hosted and self-hosted versions of WordPress; 3. You look much savvier than a blogspot blogger. (Ok, that’s very subjective, but at least I’ll think you’re cooler!)
4. Really professional bloggers have customized blog designs. This is a serious investment in your blogging career, but in a world of millions of blogs, it’s important to find a way to differentiate yourself and show people you are serious about what you are doing. But you don’t have to worry about that right now – WordPress makes it easy to change your blog’s appearance at any time. It’s like putting a different dress on your content: the content all stays the same, but it’s now wearing its fall wardrobe.

So if you’ve been bitten by the blogging bug, and want to get started on the right foot, I think the above tips can help you start a blogging career that lets your blog grow with you, and vice versa.

Happy blogging!

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Yes, we’ve revamped our website, and it’s about time! If you’re reading this in a feed reader, come on over and check it out.

Our old site was divided into two parts: one part was a static site built on old-fashioned HTML, and the second part was the blog, sitting separately on WordPress.

There were a few problems with that setup:

1. Updating the static site was not fun, especially if we needed to update elements that were repeated across the site, like the navigation bar, or the footer.
2. The blog should have been tied into the site for better search engine results.
3. The blog was sitting on a really old version of WordPress.

It was the old story of the shoemaker going barefoot – how can I recommend to clients to integrate their blogs with their websites for better web exposure, and not do so myself?

WordCamp Israel was the final push – if I’m going to be on the business panel at a WordPress conference, my business had better be oozing WordPress.

Having a new site has actually inspired me to pick up the pace on my blogging. It’s kind of like getting a new toy (i.e. laptop, PDA) which encourages you to become more productive.

I hope you like the site, and feedback is welcome. I know there are some quirks that need to be worked out, plus a lot of content is still missing, but we’ll get there!

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It’s now official – Lorelle Van Fossen (yes, THE Lorelle) is going to be the keynote speaker at the upcoming WordCamp Israel blogging conference!

When: Oct. 25, 9am to 4pm
Where: Michlelet Afeka – Bney Efraim, Tel Aviv Tel: 1-800-37-37-10
Cost: Free! But you must register to reserve your place.

Among the topics to be covered at the conference is blogging and business (I’m on that panel ), how to create an effective web presence with WordPress, and practical tips on installing WordPress and using Plugins.

The conference now has an official web site, but if Hebrew ain’t your cup o’ tea, you can get most of the information on the English blog (written by…me!). You can also download banners in English and Hebrew to put on your blogs and sites, like the image at the top of this post, over here.

The Israel Internet Association (ISOC-IL) and Michlelet Afeka are the main sponsors behind the event, and have contributed the venue and Lorelle’s plane ticket.

What’s amazing about this event is that it’s been organized by some run-of-the-mill bloggers who thought it would be a good idea. Most of all, Tal Galili, a Masters student in Tel Aviv’s Mathematics Dept., has invested a huge amount of time organizing this whole thing, and WordCamp Israel exists basically because of him.

I’m really excited! I think that some of the lectures will be better than others, but most of all this is a great opportunity to meet the people behind the Israeli blogging and Internet scene, which is full of dynamic, innovative and creative individuals and companies.

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