Tech Talk: Gadgets, Gizmos and Super Cool Tricks – Top Gadgets and Tech Tips of 2011
Got gadgets?
It’s almost impossible to do anything these days without finding a specially designed gadget or tech gizmo to make it that much easier to do. It makes you wonder how we ever survived, remembered to buy milk or found our cars in a busy parking lot without them.
Let us review the top gadgets, gizmos and super cool tech tricks shared by our experts in 2011!
Top Tech Tips (and Gizmos) of 2011
Protection for Your Touch Screen: Worried about scratching your touch screen? Because Accidents Do Happen, you will want to check out this must-have gadget: “Invisible Shield by Zagg – The ‘Superman’ of protective screen covers, the Invisible Shield by Zagg has screen covers for almost every SmartPhone, tablet, e-Reader and digital camera. If it has a screen, Zagg has you (err…it) covered.”
Handy Parenting Gizmo: Fear traveling with kids no longer thanks to this list for Battling Backseat Boredom! Top pick: “Story Cubes – It’s a tiny box containing 9 picture cubes with the idea that you roll the cubes and make up a story (on your own or as a group) based on the images that are face up. Think of it as a storytelling icebreaker for kids.”
Cord Control Gadget: For getting Control of the Cord Chaos, Professional Organizer Sylvia Daoust recommends, “Cable Drop Cord Clips – These little clips come in packages of 6 and are self-adhesive that secure cords anywhere on your desktop or work area. The best part – when you unplug your laptop, the cord won’t slip off behind the desk!”
Tech Tip for Getting Your Share of the Social Sharing: To make your web site Social Media Friendly, Tracy Matthewman suggests, “in today’s busy world if you want someone to do something, make it SUPER SIMPLE and easy to do with as few clicks as possible.One way to do this for your readers is to add a Facebook Share button and a Tweet button to your pages and posts.”
Tip for Finding Inspiration: Wondering what to write about for your blog? When you are Stuck for Topic Ideas, Tracy Matthewman recommends, “Google Popular Search – It’s pretty cool and “stupidly” simple. Use this method with any number of search terms. Tip: you may get additional ideas just by switching your keyword phrase around. For example, switching “organic gardening” as your seed word to be “gardening organic” and go through the alphabet again.”
SmartPhone Payment Tool: Turn your Android into a Business Productivity tool with this handy app shared by Michelle Mangen: “Square allows any SmartPhone user to accept credit card payments (both swiped and entered).”
Gadgets for Charging Your Gizmos: Get a little help Staying Organized On-the-Go with this handy-dandy tech tool shared by Sylvia Daoust: “Travel Cord Organizer & Charging Case – If you have kids, you have electronics and a mess of cords, chargers, and adapters! Check out Kangaroom’s sensible and neat, all in one travel case to make your expedition easier!”
Tech Tool for Taking Stuff: Want to access your photos, videos and documents from anywhere? This Top 10 Best Android App gets the top pick for its convenience and ease-of-use! “DropBox – Take photos, videos and documents with you anywhere! Anything you save to your Dropbox will automatically save to all your computers AND your Android! Built-in lock codes mean if you lose your phone, your files are safe!”
Home Office Gadgets: Maintain your Home Office Health with this top pick from Ergonomist Diane Stinson: “Gliding Palm Rest – Palm rests are popular choices for mousing, but standard models put pressure on the sensitive carpal tunnel. A Gliding Palm Rest doesn’t add extra pressure and moves with your hand, meaning it takes less effort to mouse preventing overreaching. Recommended brand: Fellows ES 9180701.”
Interactive Marketing Gadget: Need to Add Glitz to Your Pitch? Try this tech tool: “SlideShare – Think PowerPoint meets the Internet! Embed SlideShare presentations on your site, share publicly or privately, add audio or download to your computer for interactive sales presentations.”
Tech Time Tracker: Give your Productivity a Boost with this handy tool for staying on top of your time: “Time Tracker – Wonder exactly where your time goes every day? Handy-dandy apps like Klok or RescueTime let you create a journal of your daily activities to either client billing purposes or just finding those time leaks.”
Tech Talk: Social Media Friendly Sites – How to Make it EASY for People to Share You in Social Media
Ever come across an article that you know your friends on Facebook would love only to find it next to impossible to share via social media? We’re all in a bit of a hurry these days feeling rather busy and rushed. Let’s face it – if it isn’t easy to click a button and share it to Facebook or Twitter, it’s not going to happen.
Take International Naked Gardening Day, as an example. I knew my Facebook peeps would love it so I looked around for the standard one-click share button for Facebook. Nothing. How about Twitter? My followers would love it too. Any “Tweet This” button? Nope. Nothing. Nada.
Arghhhhh.
Frustrating. I mean c’mon if you want me to tell the world about your International Naked Gardening Day post, don’t make me jump through hoops to do it.
In order for me to share this site with my social media networks, I now have to:
#1: Copy and paste the URL - Double click on URL, right mouse click, and click on Copy
#2: Open Facebook in a new tab – Click for tab open, type ‘facebook.com’, hit Enter, enter name/email and click Login
#3: Post it on my wall – Right mouse click, click Paste, click Post button.
That’s a total of 10 clicks and approximately 20+ keyboard strokes (depending on your username and password all to benefit someone else by sharing their post.
Hint: in today’s busy world if you want someone to do something, make it SUPER SIMPLE and easy to do with as few clicks as possible.
One way to do this for your readers is to add a Facebook Share button and a Tweet button to your pages and posts.
If you have WordPress (which I highly recommend you do), then you’ll want to install two pugins: “FaceBook Share (New)” and “TweetMeme Retweet Button”. It shouldn’t take you more than 5 minutes to install and configure both of them.
After the plugins are installed, you have the ability to show the buttons on pages and/or posts, at the top and/or bottom of the page and whether to show the number of times the page/post has been shared or tweeted, along with a few other options.
If you’re not using WordPress, you’ll have to go manually install code for each of these on your site or in your HTML files. You may have to get your web designer to do this for you. For a Facebook Like button go to http://developers.facebook.com/docs/plugins/ and for Twitter go to http://twitter.com/about/resources/tweetbutton. You’ll find instructions for each on those pages.
One last suggestion: Tell your readers or viewers what you want them to do. If you want them to share it on Facebook, then tell them to. If you want them to tweet it, then tell them to. They will. Believe me. I do it all the time and it works.
Now before you go anywhere, share this on Facebook and leave a comment below. Tell me if your site is “Socially Sharable” or not and if not, what are you going to do about it? Like in the next hour?
Want simple, “digestible” online marketing tips delivered to your inbox every Tuesday? Sign up for Sprout at http://TracyMatthewman.com
Tech Talk: Stuck for Topic Ideas? 3 Easy Ways To Find Blog Topics
So many people get stuck trying to figure out “What should I blog about?” or “What should I made videos about?” Sitting down to a blank screen can be daunting when trying to come up with a topic that is both interesting and desirable enough to get clicks.
But it doesn’t have to be.
The key is to look to outside sources to get you going and that is usually enough to create a huge list of ideas that you can draw from anytime you need to create content, whether that be in the form of blog posts, articles or videos.
3 Tried and True Ways to Generate Topic Ideas
#1: Popular Trending Topics – Looking at what is popular now is one way to come up with ideas. Checking the national or local news and creating stories that somehow are related or affect your subject matter.
Look at what others are blogging about and give it your personal twist. Two handy sites for tracking trends are AllTop.com and Google Trends. AllTop.com is a site that compiles the best of the best blogs out there. Google Hot Trends shows what is trendy or popular on a certain day.
#2: Google Popular Search – It’s pretty cool and “stupidly” simple, but it’s easier if I just show you how in 15 minutes you can have a huge list of ideas for what to create content for. Watch the video below for a quick tutorial on using Google popular search:
Use this method with any number of search terms. Tip: you may get additional ideas just by switching your keyword phrase around. For example, switching “organic gardening” as your seed word to be “gardening organic” and go through the alphabet again.
#3: Ask Your Audience – The best way to know what to write about is to ask the people you want to read your stuff. Simply send an email to your list and ask them what their most pressing issues are right now.
Keep it simple by asking them to respond to your email. If you don’t have a list, find a group or popular page on Facebook or a hashtag on Twitter related to your subject and post a question.
One final tip: create an editorial calendar to capture your content ideas and schedule them out each day, week or month depending on your publishing frequency. Using an editorial calendar to plan and schedule your ideas takes the stress out of sitting down and creating the content because you already know what you are going to write about.
Want simple, “digestible” online marketing tips delivered to your inbox every Tuesday? Sign up for Sprout at http://TracyMatthewman.com
Tech Talk: Got Traffic Envy? How to Compare your Page Rank to your Competition
Before you start to implement search engine optimization techniques, you’ll want to check and see where your site stands in comparison to the competition. Your page rank will give you an indication of how difficult or how much work you’ll need to do in order to start ranking well.
One of the factors in search engine ranking from Google is something called “page rank”. Page rank is like a score assigned to your individual pages including your home page. The score range is from 0 to 10. Zero is where most sites start and 10 is usually only seen for sites like Facebook.com. Even Google currently (at the time of writing) has a page rank of 8, which I find odd that Google wouldn’t give itself a rank of 10.
The rank numbers are assigned based on an ever changing algorithm from Google which looks at a variety of factors to do with copy on your site, other sites that link to yours and social interaction. If you have pages that are optimized, with numerous inbound links, regularly update the page(s) and have social interaction (such as comments, “Like’s” and retweets) then the higher your rank will be.
When you are getting started, be sure to check the page rank of your competition for a particular keyword. If the competition has a page rank of 3, you’ll have to put a relatively smaller amount of work forth to get on page 1 than you would for a competitor who has a page rank of 5 or 6.
For example, if you were trying to get on page 1 of Google for the keyword “weight loss”, you’d be competing with sites like Wikipedia who have a page rank of 6 for that keyword. But if you were to target the keyword phrase “weight loss supplements for women over 40″, you’d be competing with pages that have a page rank between 0 and 4. So ranking for that keyword phrase would still take effort, but much less than targeting “weight loss”
Want to learn more about page rank and how to compare your site to your competition? Watch the video below:
Tech Talk: Web Optimization 101 – Simple Ways to Build Your Traffic by Optimizing your Web Links
Links are a key element to an SEO optimization strategy. How you link to other pages and how they link back to you are very important, including how you link between your own internal pages.
Link Structure
The way you formulate your links from page to page will determine what weight google gives them in terms of the keywords they represent. For example, if you have a page that is about your dog walking services and on it somewhere you also mention your dog grooming service.
You will want to use the keyword phrase “dog grooming” as the link text which links to the dog grooming page. Vice versa to that you will also want to have a link on your dog grooming page that include link text “dog walking” which then links to your dog walking page.
This is important for search engines to know that one particular page is about a certain subject or related to a certain keyword. When Google sees a link that says “dog grooming” it looks for a page (where the link goes) which is about dog grooming and as long as it find a page about dog grooming, that page with gain a heavier rank for the keyword phrase “dog grooming”.
If you use a sentence that says “For dog grooming services click here” and the “click here” is the link, you are not using link SEO to gain the most rank with the search engines. Always, whenever possible, use keyword phrases to link to your destination pages, meaning the link itself should be the keyword you are targeting.
Internal Linking
It is strongly recommended that you link your pages internally. Often times, internal linking is done by default through your menu or navigation. You will also want to link within the body of your pages to other pages and vice versa. Follow the keyword logic explained in the Link Structure section above.
External Linking
When you are creating articles or forum signature posts and leaving links that drive traffic back to your site, you always want to use keyword optimized links. Use your keyword or keyword phrase as the actual link text. Using external links will give the search engine a better idea of what is on the targeted landing page and will help those pages rank higher in the search results.
The following video shows you exactly how to optimize your links for better search engine results:
Want simple, “digestible” online marketing tips delivered to your inbox every Tuesday? Sign up for Sprout at http://TracyMatthewman.com
Tech Talk: YouTube Video Optimization – How to Get More Views on your YouTube Videos
Video is cutting edge.
It’s cheap. It’s easy. It’s powerful.
Don’t miss out on this vital marketing tool.
First things first: boring bombs. You won’t watch a boring video, and neither will your audience. It won’t matter how much marketing and strategizing you do: no one will watch a video that bores them.
Making your Video Interesting: Learn the 3 “E”s of Video Marketing
Entertaining: If you have fun making it, your audience will have fun viewing it. Add a blooper. Use creative editing. Make your intro and outro appealing.
Education: Reward people for the time they spend watching your video by teaching them something or sharing solutions they can use. If your product can help solve a problem your audience has, you’ve got their attention. Show them how to use your product, how it can work for them, creative ways to work together, or complementary products that work well with yours.
Engaging: Your audience wants to be involved directly. Give them options to start a conversation, share their opinion, take part in something, meet people, interact in a demo, attend events, or take part in a contest.
How to Keep the Views Coming: Tips on Building Video Traffic
Once you’ve got your “E”s down pat, your videos are ready for more views:
- A catchy title will get more attention, but never substitute wit for keywords. That works in print media, but without keywords demonstrating exactly what you have, your audience cannot find you online.
- Add a description that includes your web address, keywords, and a teaser letting them know what to expect without giving it all away.
- Don’t forget tags: use very specific, targeted keywords. These should also be in the title and description.
- Tell your audience what to do! Embed or overlay a call to action throughout or at the end of the video, as appropriate. A call to action should be clear, simple, and specific. Be clear about telling them to call you or visit your website or enter a contest, etc.
- Invite your audience over. Ask them to subscribe to your channel, either in the description of the video itself, preferably both. This will ensure that the next time you upload a video, they will be notified automatically.
- Participate: use video responses to appropriate videos getting loads of views.
- Create playlists. When someone views your video, YouTube will indicate that it is part of a playlist. The list can work for a multipart video series, or a group of videos that is topically related.
- Surf YouTube for hot views, and then use a similar title, description, and tags. This handy trick gets YouTube to recommend your video as “related video” when the already-popular video is watched.
- These tips will get you started, and it won’t be long until you are on YouTube and other video channels. Begin a video marketing plan and stick with it. It’s a great way for people to connect to you or your brand.
Shy? Don’t have a camera? Even you can make a video! Full-length online tutorials from Tracy Matthewman show you how: Video Marketing Made Simple Without a Camera and If You’re Shy.
