I am tired of talking about foursquare and how tired I am about seeing “Mayor updates”  in my Twitter stream. The other day I took a picture and it made me think about it. I call this “I am the Mayor of this branch”.

If you notice there isn’t even a seagull around as they don’t care if this Yellow warbler is the Mayor of this branch. Actually I just needed a good excuse to post this picture.

Sometime the simplest thing can bring a smile.

I was at the airport waiting for my friend Jen who was flying in from Denver. While waiting at baggage claim I saw an elderly couple. They were there waiting for someone also.

What I didn’t know was they were waiting for their daughter and her husband. While I was standing there waiting all of a sudden I hear a lady yell OH MY GOD IS THAT THE BABY. With that I turned my head to see a grandmother seeing her grandchild unexpectedly for the first time.

The smile that was on her face totally made my day if not my week. The grandfather was next and it appeared that the young couple didn’t tell the grandparents they were bringing the baby.

The grandfather yelled at the son in law because he didn’t bring a car seat to get the baby back home. Luckily the stroller they had was also a car seat.

Sometimes life gives you these moments, you need to take the time to appreciate happiness even if it is not your own.

Yes Your Title Tags Suck

Yesterday Google changed the game for webmasters, and I think it was a great change that will improve a lot of websites. Of course there will also be webmasters screaming but such is life on the web.

Yesterday Google let webmasters know what pages get impressions and more important the amount of clicks on those pages. You may be saying what’s the big deal about this. Well lets do a little digging, say you have a page on blue widget that is showing 5000 impressions a day (I know most people would love that) but the end user only clicks on the results 5 times. A very low percentage that I don’t even feel like doing the math for. This tells me that the user either wasn’t looking for your type of widget or your title tags and meta descriptions suck.

Odds are your page title says blue widgets and nothing else. Your meta description tag is probably non existant and search engines are grabbing any content from your page and it looks jumbled and uninviting to the end user. Sorry but odds are this is the cold hard truth.

Now lets see, what do you think is gonna happen to this page that only gets 5 clicks out of 5000 impressions. I would bet that page gets a lower spot in organic search results since users are not finding that page as relevant over and over again.

I admit I only spent a hour looking at one of my sites that rank well and I was amazed at what I was looking at. I found about 25 things that I could change ASAP and make my site much better for the end user. Although the search engine guru’s may tell you meta tags are dead I will be using and have been using them on my sites. It only takes a few seconds to include them so why not include them.

Now this is also good news for people not creating spammy pages. Those spammy pages and sites will naturally disapear as webmasters improve their websites based on info found in the new Google webmasters tool section. I will be interested on reading up on this more. Do yourself a favor and log in to webmaster tools and look at your best site and then your worst site you will see why your worst site is ranking badly.

Come back and let me know what you found.

I am amazed at people when they say they have no time to do something. If something is working then you have to make time to do it.

The other day I was on a forum and people were complaining that they had no time to do things like twitter. This always gets me thinking about how people use or waste their time doing things that don’t pay off at all.

I have a website that gets 56 percent of its traffic using Twitter. (Yes I know that’s too much from one source). Out of this traffic 10 percent sign up for my free weekly newsletter. I market to this crowd over and over and it doesn’t cost me a dime.

My time is valuable and I am sure yours is also. You need to start measuring how your roi is currently working and either do more of what works and less of what doesn’t. The tough thing is being truthful with yourself when doing the measuring.

I hear people tell me they are using Facebook to promote their sites and that’s great but playing farmville half of that time is a waste. That is not considered site promotion no matter which way you spin it. That time wasted could be used in a more productive manner.

Get honest with yourself for a few days and see where you can find time to be more productive. If you are on forums swap out some time you been wasting posting to worthless threads and do something you can track the results for.

Vinny’s Rules For Twitter

The other day I was on a well known social media experts blog and he had a set of rules for using Twitter. I was amazed at some of them to say the least. Instead of leaving a comment on his blog I decided to write a post instead. Why give him the traffic he already has enough anyway.

I am not claiming to be a “Twitter Expert” and these rules should be taken with a grain of salt. They are just some things that I have learned and some rules are not set in stone. It is just some of the rules I try to follow.

1 – Be yourself – Trying to be something or someone that you are not will not help you or your followers. Upload a nice picture of yourself. No one I know does business with an avatar.

2 – Be Helpful – People need help so do your best to help them if you can. It will come back to help you in the long run. Spreading good stuff builds good karma.

3 – Be Engagable – If you are following too many people that you can’t answer a tweet because you didn’t see it then I feel you are missing the whole point of this. Sure you can use list and such to help but if your twitterstream is too crowded you could be missing important tweets from some good people. The so called expert that inspired this post follows the population of Billings Montana which is over 100,000. I read 99% of the tweets of the people I follow, and respond to them.

4 – Don’t be spammy – Pretty easy one, if you have to ask yourself if the tweet is spammy in any way before you send it it probably is. This includes those sponsored ones. Putting #ad doesn’t make it acceptable it just tells me its spam. You can promote your own services as long as it is helpful to others.

5 – Limit your retweets – Not everyone has the same interest as you. Pretty hard to believe huh. I limit myself to one or two retweets a day. I usually retweet something useful or a cell phone tip since I am hooked on my Droid. Sometimes I retweet something because I know it aggravates Shawn Collins when I do it to all my followers. If you can use the manual method @rt your followers will appreciate it.

6 – Be Respectable – It is OK to tweet out a link about your latest blog post just don’t drop the link 50 times during the course of the day. This will get you on to my never follow list very quickly.

7 – Never Retweet a Guru – Everytime I see this on my twitterstream the first thing that pops in my mind is that the person can’t think on their own, they have nothing knowledgeable to share. They don’t realize the so called gurus only reason for placing the tweet was knowing some people will retweet it. If you need to follow all the so called Gurus odds are I don’t need to follow you.

8 – Don’t Be Perfect – No one I know is perfect and guess what neither are you. Admit when you do something that is stupid or not really with the times. It makes you believable and someone I want to follow. I don’t care if you are attending your 100th Poison concert, we all have bad taste in something we do. I would rather hear about a C.C. Seville solo then hearing about how great you are all the time. If 90% of your tweets start with “I” you are doing it wrong.

9 – Help Your Friends – If someone is doing something good for someone or doing something for charity help them out by tweeting about it or doing a retweet. There are many less fortunate people and animals on this planet. Retweeting about a charity never hurt no one.

10 – Be Entertaining – No one likes boring. Have some fun, it shows people that you are real. Be the life of the party as long as the theme of the party isn’t about how great you are.

11 – Don’t Automate Your Location – Most people don’t care where you are every hour of the day. I know I don’t care if you are on a highway or stuck in traffic somewhere in the swamps of Jersey. I have been there and done that. It wasn’t fun then and it certainly isn’t fun reliving that moment again. Every once in a while is OK just don’t do it all day long.

Well I guess that is enough for now. Would love to hear some of your rules concerning Twitter.

Changing a Domain Name

This past weekend I had to change a domain name for a website I have  been using and building for a while now. As you know I have been working on an NASCAR website for the past 2 years. When I built the website I did step by step instructions on my forum. I figured it would be good to document it step by step so others could learn how I build a site.

What I thought was a good idea at the time turned out to be a mistake in the long run. This was the first website I had built without it being keyword filled in the domain. I tried to be cute with the domain name and it came back to bite me and become a hindrance so I decided to make the change now since the website will always be mine.

When it came time to make the site I was thinking it would be good to have a catchy name. I named the website AwesomeWreckage.com. I came up with this name by combining two of the songs by my favorite band The Dollyrots “Because I’m Awesome” and “Wreckage”. It seemed like a catchy name to me and since there are wrecks in NASCAR I figured I could work with this name.

This was a big mistake as people thought I was glorifying the wrecks in NASCAR by calling them awesome. This is not what my site was about at all. I wanted to build a site where NASCAR fans could get information and talk about the races with other fans, maybe share some pics or some BBQ recipes and such.

Last weekend I had the pleasure of getting press passes to a race. When we picked them up at the track a few people frowned upon the name when we mentioned the domain and a few kind of shied away from us. This to me was a sign that something had to be done. It was almost embarrassing to mention what website I was representing while I was sitting in the press box.

When we got home we applied for some press passes for other tracks and all were denied. When one of the tracks told us it was because of the domain name I knew it was a time for a change. I really knew it before this but being thick headed and didn’t want to admit failure led me to think it was OK to keep the name. Then I thought about it again and came to my senses.

I wanted to have the word Awesome in the URL and something related to the fans also. I spent a few hours in Nameboy searching and then it hit me and Awesomeracefans.com was born.

This name has actually 2 keywords in it “race and fans”. It should have been the name from the start but once again my brain freeze prevailed.

On April 1st we started switching over all the content to the new domain. It went OK except I decided to ditch the forum section for now. It wasn’t working right anyway so the clean install was a better option anyway.

The one thing that was lost that I feel bad about was the cool logos and banners that my friend Auggie made for the old site, he does outstanding work.

The reason I am making this post is to show you that even someone who knows what they are doing can make mistakes too. I will bet that in the long run the new site will double in comparison to what the old site was anyway.

When we went out to Affiliate Summit we also did the tourist things and took some pictures. This was a good test for me as I hadn’t really used my Sony A300 all that much. Most of these pictures were taken outside the Mirage Hotel. This is the waterfall that is really beautiful.

The Mountains behind the Rio were amazing, this was taken through the glass from our 18th floor room at the Mirage.

Here is a closer view of these amazing clouds, snow and mountains.

You can see the view we had from the room, you can’t tell where the sky ends and the mountains begin. It is a shame that crane ruins a great picture. Have a feeling that will be photo shopped out in the future.

Here is a view of the Las Vegas Strip with clouds in the background and the newly opened City Center.

This picture was taken from the monorail platform behind the Bellagio. The monorail is new and goes from the Bellagio to City Center, great place to get some pictures of the Las Vegas Mountains.

This is the sign above Harrah’s Casino. I love the details of it.

The waterfall again outside the Mirage but this time it has the Dolphin statues.

This was the first shot I took at City Center. I like the reflective nature of this shot.

Here is a shot of the Bellagio with some very dark clouds over it.

I hope you enjoyed these pictures, I made them small for the web. The originals are quite larger and were shot in RAW files. Can’t wait to print some of these and put them up in the office.

There has certainly been a buzz about Foursquare and I don’t know why. I see Foursquare as annoying and will never use it anymore. (I have an account and I yes I know how it works.) As you probably know I use Twitter a lot and when I get an update of someones location from Foursquare I will usually stop following that person.

I have a guy that I was following on Twitter that checked into Foursquare every morning from a Starbucks. The first thing that popped into my head is the guy should make coffee at home and send the $5 he would save everyday to a charity or something. Odds are if I had known he likes to waste money like that I don’t want to be following him anyway. While he thinks it’s cool to be at a Starbucks everyday I am totally thinking otherwise.

I have another buddy that checks in almost every half hour from the same locations everyday, once again I don’t care where you are or where you are going. Since this guy is up in Canada and I have no plans on going there it is nothing but annoying when I got these updates. It makes me wonder if this guy really thinks we care where he is.

Someone else I was following on Twitter used Foursquare to give updates whenever they stopped to eat. Everyday his morning update was from Dunkin Donuts. His lunch was from another fast food place and dinner was from KFC. When I see this person all he talks about is how his diets never work and he doesn’t know why. He may be the mayor of his local Mcdonalds but to me he something else.

I don’t get why anyone would let anybody know their location using the gps on their cellphone. You have no idea how they are going to use this information or if they are going to sell it. What if Foursquare was sold tomorrow to an advertising company? Now someone you had no relationship with knows your popular locations and what time you are usually there. To me this is the scariest part of Foursquare.

What happens if a crime is commited in or near your location, you could end up being dragged into something you know nothing about. I know that is far fetched but it could happen, all because you had the need to tell strangers where you are.

Last week I was reading about how big brands were giving money towards Foursquare. Little do they know there are many people like me that find Foursquare as annoying. Whenever I see the companies that are using this I stop buying their products forever. Never again will I buy a product from a certain soda company that gave Foursquare 10k a few weeks back. Guess they are doing me a favor since I drank alot of soda over the years.

I am all for Social media but this service is totally spammy to me. There is no circumstance where I would keep following a person that likes to post their location updates to Twitter. If you want to use Foursquare be my guest but please turn off your updates on Twitter.

If you are running any sort of online business you constantly have to keep learning to keep going and making money. One way to learn while you are working or on the go is by listening to a podcast.

I am not talking about a certain podcast from your industry which you should be listening to anyway, I am talking about one that is outside your industry that you can learn new ideas to spark up your business. I often listen to podcast that are based around a hobby or something that I want to learn about.

A few weeks ago we were at Affiliate Summit meeting new people and I started talking to someone about SEO and when I asked them certain questions it became apparent that they had no clue.

I told them if they wanted to learn about SEO they could find a few podcast and listen while they worked on their sites. Of course since they were just getting started in affiliate marketing I also steered them to www.geekcast.fm where I am on a few podcast and there are other good podcast on the subject also.

I listen to almost every podcast on Geekcast since they are mostly about making money online. You can get them delivered automatically using Itunes which is a huge time saver. You can listen in the car (since most radio stations suck now anyways) or you can listen using an Ipod while taking in your morning run.

If you make time to learn your business should improve. If you can’t find a podcast in your business then start your own, you can be the expert in your field and business will come to you. You will be considered a leader in your field and business will come to you in ways you never expected.

Today I downloaded the new app on my Droid that allows me to post right from my smartphone. This post is a test to see how it turns out.

I am not sure how I will be using this but it can come in handy for times I don’t have a laptop with me. So far I can tell that between this app and notepad I will be using this to post.

Update:

I have made two post to this site using the Wordpress for Android app and I am loving it. I have made a post directly from the app and also made a post using notepad and copy and paste directly into the app which I can see becoming the normal way I will post.