Month: September 2012

SEO on the Cheap

We get lots of questions from folks interested in ​improving their position in Google searches but who aren’t quite ready to jump into a paid solution like we offer.

​If you’re looking for “cheap SEO” (we didn’t coin this term), you’re in luck and have quite a few options. Here are a few free resources that you should definitely consider:

​1. Create an account for your site or blog with Google Analytics. If you have a Google Account (GMail), you’re halfway there. Google Analytics isn’t perfect, but it’s more than most folks new to SEO or site optimization will ever need.

2. Sign up for Google Webmasters Central. It has a little bit of a learning curve but the payoff is certainly worth the thirty minutes you’ll spend. From learning about sitemaps to addressing problems that the GoogleBot might have indexing certain pages or parts of your sites, Webmasters Central is a goldmine of a reference site.

3. If you happen to have your site or blog on WordPress as a self-install (you pay a host like MediaTemple or BlueHost and install WordPress on a server yourself… not wordpress.com), then check out the Yoast SEO WordPress plugin. Yoast does a great job of walking you through easy steps to make your WordPress site more “Google Friendly” and will help you optimize options like your sitemaps and XML. Again… nothing free is perfect, but it’s a good start.

4. SEOMoz has a great page on what to expect when expecting Do-It-Yourself keyword management. Keyword research is insanely important. We stress this so much with our clients and we’re always amazed when people overlook this critical component of website and brand success. This is part of a larger book and not completely up-to-date, but will help you get a start when you’re ready to start dabbling with AdSense.

As always, get in touch with us when you’re ready to take your site or business to the next level. As strange as it sounds, we love helping people discover the power of search and what it can mean to their business, especially when combined with a healthy social media plan. But start playing with these tools and see what you can do for yourself.​

First Fall 5K

For some reason last year, I didn’t run in many fall 5Ks and as I was running and training this summer, I realized I missed the scene and the energy that encompass a Saturday morning run for a good cause. 

Asheville is the perfect place to get re-engaged in the running scene (although I would suggest hiding in the middle of the pack and not pushing your way to the front of the start line) because you have people who are passionate about running and people who are passionate about helping! 

It’s intoxicating to be a part of this kind of community and to understand the world is bigger than you and your own issues. 

So as I sit here drinking my post race coffee, I am happy that I was able to support Autism Society of NC and Harrelson Agency. 

Oh, but I am definitely checking out the course map next time so as not to be surprised by quarter mile hills that lurk around mile 2!

Contact

We encourage our clients to embed a contact form into their websites because :

  1. it transfers communication about bookings and/or business to their website rather than their inbox with their dentist appointments and child’s soccer schedule. 
  2. the form collects valuable data that can be used for other purposes ​

Plus, when you realize how many people really want to contact you, it makes you feel good inside! 

My Music Since 2005

It’s funny, odd and a little comforting to scroll back through back in my last.fm profile and see what music I’ve been listening to since I signed up for the service in August of 2005 (when I was 26 and a lot more wiser):

samharrelson’s Music Profile – Users at Last.fm

In 2005, the social web was still completely new and the idea of sharing what you were listening to with others was just revolutionary.

Still is.

In 2005, I was living in Columbia and teaching at Hammond School and had no idea what lie ahead.

What a long, strange trip it’s been.

By the way, I went a few years without having the last.fm audio scribbler hooked up, so there is so much data missing. I’ve listened to way more than 12,000 songs over the last seven years (about 4-5 a day if that’s to be believed). I’ve probably covered closer to three times that amount at least. But still… fun data.

Yay interwebs.

Solving Multiple Email, GMail and iOS Problem

I’m noting this here for my own needs as I’ll certainly have to follow this breadcrumb trail again.

If you are looking or have consolidate a bunch of email addresses into one Google Apps account, there’s nothing more sweeter than having that account work just as well on iOS as it does in your browser app (or Apple Mail if you will):

Handling Multiple Email Addresses with Gmail and iOS: “When I started adopting Getting Things Done and Inbox Zero, I decided to consolidate my numerous email accounts. For a few, this meant wrapping them up or forwarding them along, never to think of the account again. For others, like my personal and work email, as well as various customer service and sales email accounts that I monitor, it meant that I needed to find a way to receive everything in one inbox, while sending my replies back from the proper account.”

See also:

Solved: Gmail, iPad, iPhone, and multiple from addresses – Modern Nerd: “After much Googling, dribbling, and head bangering, I’ve managed to get around this in a way that works great on the iPad and iPhone. I thought I’d combine the various hints and tips I’ve discovered to put them in one place, then add some screenshots to make it more useful to others who’ve been driven nuts by the same issue.”

Then:

James’ Ubiquitous Blog – Journal – Making multiple ‘From’ email addresses on iOS my bitch without adding extra accounts: “This all came about because of work. I got a call from a client that we regularly work with asking if it’s possible to consolidate his some 20 email accounts into one of his Google Apps accounts (this also works with regular Gmail accounts too) while still being able to reply and send from the individual addresses. As it turns out this can be quite tricky but I managed to find an article that outlined the steps perfectly, or so I thought to begin with.”

Sounds geeky, but it’s a great 5 min solution to an otherwise incredibly annoying workflow issue for those of us with too many email accounts.

The Next Step

You can’t argue with this type of closure…

Closure « Steve Blank: “Fast forward 15 years. Retired for a year, I ran across an article that said, ‘$35 Million Dollar Supercomputer For Sale for Scrap.’  It was the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center Cray Y-MP that had beaten me at Ardent.  It was for sale on Ebay.

I bought the Cray.

It took two semi-trailers to deliver it.”

Great story (read the links as well).

Twitter as the Poisoned Coral Reef

So sad… Twitter was once that coral reef service we could all bet on:

LoopInsight: IFTTT to End Twitter Triggers: In an e-mail sent to users, IFTTT’s CEO Linden Tibbets said that the service will be removing all Twitter “Triggers” on September 27, 2012 – a direct result of recently-published changes to how Twitter is allowing third-party developers to work with their service.

As goes selfishness, so goes the web.

MarsEdit and Squarespace 6

Disappointed, but hopefully the Squarespace team will listen to Daniel…

Red Sweater Blog – State Of The Squarespace: “It came as a surprise when Squarespace 6 was released earlier this year, that support for 3rd party editors such as MarsEdit was dropped from the service.”

We use Squarespace (6) for the HarrelsonAgency site and I’m hopeful they’ll follow through on his first suggestion.

Here’s To the Worst Dog Ever

Schaefer and Sam in Connecticut | Flickr – Photo Sharing!

To say he was a good dog is a far stretch. However, he was the best friend a young guy growing into a man could have. Ever since that first cold winter in Connecticut for grad school, I’ve had my troublesome buddy to keep me honest.

I’m heading into this winter without him physically here for the first time.

He and Mary Hudson were born on the same date (seven years apart), so that bond is beyond special.

Here’s to the only dog that ate bathroom drywall, laptop computers, entire steaks defrosting on the countertop, entire pizzas (that he would close the box on to cover his tracks), numerous shoes and gloves (including both the shoes and gloves pictured above), a Sam’s Club sized bottle of Advil and many incalculable objects made out of aluminum and/or other metals that would later require surgery and/or dialysis.

He was a terrible dog. But he was the best dog in the world. I needed him more than he needed me, and he left this universe a better place having known him.

Go crazy up in doggie heaven, Schaef.

I miss you.

Paperless 1.2

Paperless is one of those books that I thought would be enjoyable for reaffirming what I already know but has turned into a constant reference guide for how I get things done and process info.

Paperless, Version 1.2 — MacSparky: “It always made me a little crazy with my prior books that I couldn’t update them. I was in Barnes and Noble just the other day looking at a copy of iPad at Work on the shelf. By and large, the book held up pretty well. However, there are a few areas in it that I would desperately like to update. Of course that’s not possible given that most of the copies are sitting on people shelves and I don’t have control over the digital copies either. The ability to update a book was one of my big motivations to self-publish.

I’m particularly interested in the ability to update books on the iBooks Author platform and am in the middle of some pretty exciting things with it myself at the moment.

More on that soon 🙂

Discovery Marketing

At Harrelson Agency, we know that discovery marketing is revolutionizing how consumers search and interact. When I am looking for a place to stop as I am traveling, I know what I want. I know the foods that I like and the foods I don’t like, so I am going to wait and stop where I like, which leads me to search for a specific restaurant.

And I’m going to search with my directions app.

That changes the marketing world even if that’s not how you discover. Even if that’s not how your employees discover.

It’s how consumers discover.

​

Discovering Client-Based Marketing

There is nothing better than having your client ask, “Could we….” and your being able to answer yes! You can see the hesitation because they have had experiences where other marketing or technology agencies have said, “No.”

Discovering that your story can be told well and that there are more possibilities than you thought is important because it leads to new learning and new challenges. There is something powerful about discovering for yourself.

As I discover what my clients see, I see them discovering new possibilities and avenues for themselves. I see their identities and audiences expanding to more than they thought, but the best part of all this discovery is that it’s the way marketing works now.

​

Show, Don’t Tell

I try to explain to student writers that there is something powerful about talking around your point. It’s a strategy called showing and not telling. By using an interaction, a conversation or an observation you can show your audience what you mean.

It may seem unrelated, but as I have talked to clients, I have realized that too often marketing strategies are straightforward explanations rather than real life experiences. When you include these experiences that have shaped your story and your journey to where you are, you draw your audience in because they can connect with you.

Maybe show, don’t tell isn’t just for writing.

​

Evernote Amoeba Takes in Skitch

I’ve been a long time user of Skitch (since the early beta days… ’07 or ’08?) and a user of Evernote for just about that long.

Both have become integral parts of what I do as a teacher and with my work at Harrelson Agency.

It’s very cool and promising to see something as core to my workflow as Skitch get its proper due in the rapidly expanding Evernote ecosystem.

Evernote is Bringing Sketching App Skitch into its Core Service: “Evernote is moving to integrate its annotation and sketching product Skitch into its core note-taking product,which it says will strengthen the service by bringing syncing, searching and sharing features to it.”

I wonder when they’ll do the same with Penultimate?

Into the Wild

As a teacher, there’s something humbling about being with about 150 middle schoolers at an overnight trip with two days full of (real) rock climbing and (real) canoeing and sleeping in cabins.

You’re stripped away of the front of your classroom and your remote control and your ability to write on the board and ring a bell and have assigned seats… all conventions that keep you in power and give you comfort of knowing the plan.

Instead, you’re thrown into a canoe with a couple of students and have to figure out how best to get unstuck from a rock or not hit a pylon with a roaring current and rapids. The stakes aren’t about arbitrary A’s and B’s but real physical impact and safety.

Learning takes on a whole new level when you realize that your guidance to/from students and your teamwork with a group of 12 or 13 year olds can literally change your life in a second for good or bad as you are suspended from a rope 50 feet above a cliff.

I sometimes wonder if Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Pythagorus, Epicurus, Lucretius, Pyrrho etc had it right with their model of education in small groups with no classroom walls or school buildings compared to our four walled system of “instruction.”

Not to live, but to live well…

Why Apple Really Ditched Google Maps in iOS 6

Google Earth is the single most important property for Google’s position as market and thought leader of search and discovery. That’s always been the case since they purchased Keyhole Tech in 2005.

Apple knows this as well and that’s why they are going on their own in iOS 6 with a mapping technology that’s in house.

Mapping (discovery) is the new search:

How Google and Apple’s digital mapping is mapping us | Technology | The Guardian: “There is a sense, in fact, in which mapping is the essence of what Google does. The company likes to talk about services such as Maps and Earth as if they were providing them for fun – a neat, free extra as a reward for using their primary offering, the search box. But a search engine, in some sense, is an attempt to map the world of information – and when you can combine that conceptual world with the geographical one, the commercial opportunities suddenly explode. Search results for restaurants or doctors or taxi firms mean far more, and present far juicier opportunities for advertisers, when they are geographically relevant. And then there’s the most important point – the really exciting or troubling one, depending on your perspective. In a world of GPS-enabled smartphones, you’re not just consulting Google or Apple data stores when you consult a map: you’re adding to them.”

Mapping/Discovery will be the verb akin to “searching” of the next five years.

We’ll have “Discovery Optimizers” just as we have search engine optimization and “But are we appearing at the top of people’s discoveries?” questions as we have “Are we on the front page of Google?” now.

Discovery motors will quietly, but quickly, replace search engines.

It’s about time (and place).

Connecting with Students

The post is for principals, but applies just as well to teachers:

6 Ways Principals Can Connect With Students: Be open to showing kids how much you care about them. Be their advocate. Care about them. Say kind and authentic things about them. Embody to them how you would like them to treat all of those in their lives.

Needless to say, I don’t agree with the whole “Don’t let them see you smile until December” garbage.

American Democracy and Athenian Democracy

From a 2007 paper by Josiah Ober at Stanford titled “What the Ancient Greeks Can Tell Us About Democracy” (PDF)…

She explains the Assembly’s annual decision of whether to hold an ostracism, and the occasional (only 15 recorded instances) of actual ostracisms, as a repeated ritual through which the mass of ordinary Athenian citizens reminded Athenian elites of the power of the people to intervene in inter-elite conflicts if and when those conflicts threatened the stability of the polis. Forsdyke argues that the Athenian revolution itself, and thus the origin of democracy, is best understood as a mass intervention in what was formerly a exclusively elite field of political competition – and that the signal success of Athenian democracy was in the regime stabilization that emerged with the credible threat of mass intervention.

Recalls and impeachments don’t do the job of intervening (like ostracisms) in what has become a very exclusive process of government in the USA.

Social Media’s Importance For Business

Forbes:​

The perception of social media marketing has shifted quickly—no longer viewed as a trendy or passing fad, having a flexible and well-managed presence in each of the “big three” (Facebook, Twitter, and Google+) has become a must for any business seeking to secure a place in both the traditional and digital marketplace.

We’ve quickly entered a brave new world where social media matters infinitely more than most businesses guessed it would a few years ago.​

Don’t get caught left behind.​