Guest article by Shannon Suetos from Resource Nation

When implementing any type of marketing campaign it is wise to first take a step back and decide how to develop your campaign. Many companies are have made the executive decision to go forward with social media—they just aren’t so sure what to do.

Decide where your target audience is engaging

Tackling a social media campaign is much like, if not exactly like a traditional marketing campaigning. The first order of action is to decide where your target audience is. You could have the latest and greatest product or services in the world, but if your core audience isn’t hearing the message there is no benefit to your company.

According to a study conducted by Chitika (a full service online advertising network) broke down the users of Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and Digg.com. This study concluded that:

1. 47% of Twitter users are there for news
2. 52% of Myspace users are there for video games or celebrity/entertainment
3. Digg was spread out between news, tech, and video games

Once you have decided on where your target audience is, you can then go to develop strategies for each site that best fits your company.

Social Tone

The tone of your campaign should be less formal, and more conversational. This is not to say you should throw out all social etiquette—but rather a “business casual” approach. People like talking, especially about themselves, but make sure in your campaign you provide information not only about your services, but current events or even industry news.

Staying away from topics such as religion and politics is a good idea as well—especially if you have many clients from diverse backgrounds. Staying neutral will keep your clients happy and keep you out of hot water.

Define Goals and Measuring Results

Going back to traditional marketing tactics, you need to have a clear objective and measurable goals in your social marketing campaign. Knowing how effective your tactics are can also help you determine your social media ROI and help you decide what tactics work and which don’t for your company.

TwitterFriends determines what they call a conversion quotient, which measures how effective your tweets are on Twitter by looking at how many @ replies you receive as well as re-tweets. The goal of Twitter for business owners should be to get as many @ replies (gains you exposure) and re-tweets (helps get your link/links exposed). Once you know how effective your efforts are you will be able to decide on the best social media outlets for your business.

Another great tool to use has been developed by Email Data Source. This tool will allow marketers to measure Twitter’s impact on the traditional brand marketing perspectives of reach, frequency and effectiveness. This tool seems similar to TwitterFriends in the sense it will help you understand what type of people are re-tweeting you, but explains it in a more traditional marketing way. This is a great tool for marketers who aren’t familiar with Twitter yet.

Getting Creative

This is always the fun part of any marketing campaign. There are many types of tactics out there that are useful for brand awareness and fun for the customer as well. Many companies are using quizzes to do this.

Jennifer Stolte, marketing director for Celestial Seasonings (who implemented a Facebook quiz earlier this year) says, “Social media is something that’s really growing. So many people are online, especially on Facebook, so we’re excited to step into the water.”

Another company doing social media right is Dunkin Donuts. Jesse Greco, founder of PRBreakfast Club says, “It’s the small things that they [Dunkin Donuts] truly excel at. They know how to keep consumers engaged and interested on a daily basis and they have a way of making you feel like you’re special, even as just one of their millions of consumers.”

In the end it is up to you how you are going to run your campaign. The main things to remember is research and use measurable means for your tactics. The world of Internet marketing is evolving fast, and it is up to you to keep up.

Shannon Suetos is a writer based in San Diego, California. She writes extensively for an online resource that provides expert advice on purchasing and outsourcing decisions for small business owners and entrepreneurs such as payroll services & small business services at Resource Nation.

Making money from niche blogs in an inexact science. What works in one blogs, fails on another. I’ve launched over 200 websites since 1998 (mostly ecommerce) and about 30 blogs (technical). If your blog has a technical slant, for example, its target audience is technical writers, analysts, architects, or others micro-niche areas, then use some of these search engine techniques will increase your traffic.

29 Ways to Increase Traffic to a Micro Niche Blog

1. Monthly Interview – do a profile every month or a day in the life of your target audience. Rule #1, people like to read about people.
2. Company Profile – same as above but focus on how the company developed, what it’s doing right AND mistakes it made. Rule #2, people like to read how others solved problems.
3. Product review – don’t do a short review. Aim for 1000 words. Look at this review of Camtasia Studio. This will live long in the Google index and generate more backlinks. Short reviews melt like dew in the morning sun.
4. Guest articles – do them and take them. I take guest articles all the time (send me text files, please not Word). Make sure these people have a brain, i.e. that they remember to share the buzz on their site, their twitter, their Facebook page, and maybe on other Social Media networks. I’m still amazed at people who take the effort to submit, write and publish an article but forget to promote it.
5. Be the Hub – make your site the hub for your niche. This means others in the field will flock here to see what’s happening, who’s been hired, rates, buzz, gossip – whatever rocks their boat. And it’s ok to throw in the odd joke to lighten things up. Don’t take yourself too serious.
6. Deep Link – instead of linking to the main page, link to a page within a site. This increases the number of trackbacks. You can also do a Google search for sites that offer back-links and add these to your ping requests.
7. BusinessWeek – has a professional network that that accepts links, i.e. yours!, which get indexed v quickly by Google. You can also connect your account here with LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com/in/ivanwalsh)
8. LinkedIn – you use this, right? If not, sign up and join groups that match your target audience. Get involved. Be active. Ask and answer questions. Check in once a week. Link your RSS/blog to your profile. More back-links for little effort.
9. Connect with Startup blogs – while everyone wants to get on C Brogan, you’ll get further if you connect with people starting out. They appreciate the value and will share the link love. If they don’t, well… PS: here’s the right way to add a comment to chris brogan’s blog.
10. Google Adsense – not very fashionable these days but it still pulls in $750 per month, which pays for the Frappuccino, Cable, and Brazilian waxes. Ok, one of those isn’t true. It’s cable, isn’t it?
11. Calendar – use Google Docs to get it up. Simple way to create high-traffic pages.
12. Add Photos – don’t be shy. Show us your mug! Take photos whenever you go to an event, conference or client. Let others into your world. Remember rule #1.
13. Use Creative Commons – share. Make it easy for others to get your message out there. Why don’t you share?
14. Setup a Newsletter – use Aweber, not Feedburner, if you are serious about making money & getting the news out. The money is in the list. Share useful information. No one cares about your cat’s dysentery.
15. Reach out to Other Bloggers – mention other bloggers, writers etc in your articles. Why? They might pop over and leave a comment or respond in their blog. Don’t write in a vacuum.
16. Add Short Video – use YouTube to increase traffic, cross-links, and to establish yourself as an authority.
17. Offer Incredible PDFs – create PDFs of your best work, upload it to Slideshare and index it in your Sitemap. Why? Google indexes PDFs. Include links back to your site + you’ll see the page rank increase.
18. Create Unique Twitter Lists – create unique and interesting twitter lists. As Twitter has become a wall of noise, people use lists to share, aggregate, and curate information. Make your list as specialized as possible. Then link to the list, not your twitter page. See the difference? Twitter followers will go thru the roof!
19. Twollow – use this to follow others by keyword, e.g. follow those interested in video marketing. AND use it to un-follow deadbeats that don’t follow back.
20. Ejunkie – use this to sell digital goods, information products, online training, or ebooks. 100 times better than Clickbank. $5 per month. How can you go wrong?
21. Optimize Money Pages – log into Google Analytics. Find your top 10 posts. Go into each of these pages and fine-tune them over more. Add 1 product to each page. These are your MONEY pages. Start making money here.
22. Google Analytics – learn how Google Analytics works. ‘I know how it works’. No, you don’t, otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this article! Spend 5 hours here. Do split testing, setup reports, check entrance paths, bounce rates and duplicate headers. All the heavy-weights do this.
23. Posterous – use this to publish your blog posts across all your Blogger, WordPress, Typepad, Flickr, YouTube with one click. Now you can add tags and use Google Analytics as well.
24. Contact Journalists – identify 5 journalists in your industry. Tell them what you write about and why they should read your blog, i.e. to give them material for their articles. See your PageRank shoot up if you connect with one high-profile journalist.
25. Create 2 Sitemaps – add an XML site for Google to read and a HTML one for the humanoids. Check this with Google Webmaster Tools.
26. Title tags – don’t do all the hard work and forget to add the correct title tags to each post. It takes 5 min to get this right but it’s worth the effort. Use SEO in a Box plugin to do this.
27. Google Webmaster Tools – like Google Analytics, spend 30 min in here every week and see how Google in indexing your blog. Look for duplicate headers (i.e. pages with the same title tags) as these lower your PageRank. Also check for crawl errors and others horrors.
28. Leverage Facebook – forget pigville and join groups, fan pages that compliment your business. Add useful comments, not just high fives. Say something that others have overlooked. Add videos, photos and RSS feeds to your pages.
29. Create a Publishing Process – saving the last til best. Develop a workflow for publishing your material. Don’t just write and hit publish. Stand back and see how you can gather information, identify your audience, focus on pain points (i.e. their problems), develop content that will be evergreen, source photos, respond to comments, and get busy promoting. No one knows about your site.

Now, get out there and tell them.

Ok, that’s how I do it. What did I miss?

Photo: invisiblekid

Guest article by Shannon Suetos from Resource Nation

The terms social media and social networking have been tossed around for quite some time now, but businesses are struggling with how to implement these strategies in their budgets.  How much is too much, how much is too little?  There are many factors on how to plan a budget, and the same goes for social media.

A study done by Econsultancy and bigmouthmedia has found that of the, “companies (86%) [they] surveyed plan to spend more money on social media in 2010, and a further 13% are planning to keep the same level of budget.”  With that being said, it seems the biggest struggle for companies is not that they don’t want to spend the money, but they don’t know what to spend it on.

Credit: TW Collins

The good news is many social media outlets are free.  Yes, there are programs you can purchase to help manage your accounts and are necessary for some social networking efforts, but for the most part it’s free to sign up on these sites.

Time

The main cost is how much time you are going to dedicate to your social media campaign.  Someone has to put into action your ideas, and they most likely aren’t going to work for free.  When writing up your budget make sure you take into account the time your employee(s) are going to be dedicating to this new project.

You also need to take into account if you need to hire someone to run your social media efforts.  With the social media industry becoming more popular, there are many people out there claiming to be social media gurus.  There are plenty of quality people in the industry who know what they are doing, but make sure you are getting someone with enough background in social media that makes you comfortable.

Monitoring

Once you have set up who and how much time will be spent on social media, the next step is to decide how you are going to monitor everything.  These analytical tools come in all shapes and sizes and the cost varies from application to application—and in some circumstances are free.

If you are just getting your feet wet, it is a good idea to start small and then grow.  See how effective your efforts are before going full blast.  You need to know where your target audience is engaging.  If your customers are mostly on Twitter and you aren’t there how will they get your message?  Play around with the different social networking sites and figure out which sites are best for your company.

Time will tell

Once you have done some research and dabbled in the different social networking you should be able to get a feel of what tactics work for your company and what don’t.  After you get a better feeling for where your key audience is participating with you, you can then focus your efforts and better know how to manage your time and money.

Shannon Suetos is a writer based in San Diego, California. She writes extensively for an online resource that provides expert advice on purchasing and outsourcing decisions for small business owners and entrepreneurs such as postage meters & postage scales at Resource Nation.

To quote Van Halen, ‘everybody wants some.’ And what you want is traffic. Why write a blog if no-one visits, right? I have 17 technical writers’ blogs in my Google Reader & RSS feeds. Most are fine but… if they used some of the following tactics, they’d get more traffic, comments, money and Nobel prizes. Well, three out of four, anyway.

How To Get More Traffic To Your Technical Writing Blog

Apply five of these tactics and your traffic will double. No kidding, it will!

How To Get More Traffic #1: Add Your Photos

Look at your favorite technical writing blogs. How many faces do you see? Why are they all hiding? I dunno. Stick your mugshot on the page so we can see what you look like! Go on! None of us are Brad Pitt or Paris Hilton (OMG! Paris Hilton rebuilds career as technical writer shock!), so add a pic. Don’t be shy. People like to read about people they know. If they can’t see you…

How To Get More Traffic #2: Video

I’m no spring chicken, so if I can do it, you can. All of these video were taken on a Canon powershot.

Videos let people hear you, see your expression, feel what you’re trying to say in ways that words cannot. Making videos is easier that you think. I use Camtasia 6 for all its sins. (read my frustrated Camtasia 6 review here.)

How To Get More Traffic #3: Social Media Outposts

Use Social Media for maximum impact. With web content publishing tools like Posterous you can get the message out to all these channels with almost no effort. Posterous lets you post once, publish everywhere. Try it.

• Ivan: http://www.ivanwalsh.com
• Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/ivanwalsh
• Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/ivanwalsh
• Business Week http://bx.businessweek.com/profile/ivan-walsh/iwalsh905/
• And also on Disqus, Flickr, LinkedIn, Delicious and Google Reader

How To Get More Traffic #4: Quizzes

We all get tired of checking for split infinitives and looking for typos, so lighten things up. Add quizzes to get people involved… and try to be a little different.

• Did you ever download software illegally?
• What’s your manager’s most annoying habit?
• Would you let your boss friend you on Facebook?
• Do you know any technical writing who can reverse park? (I was going to say Women but then turned on my brain! That was so close!)
• Do you know any men who ask for directions when lost? One for the girls, no doubt.

How To Get More Traffic #5: Comics

May not work for all sites but comics are a nice break from technical documents and other heavy reading. Why do you think they are so popular? Every serious newspaper has them, why not you?

How To Get More Traffic #6: Reviews

If they come to your site, it’s your opinion they are after. So, why don’t you give it?

#1 cardinal sin of most blogs is that they have no opinion!

Don’t be scared! I’m with you! Give your honest opinion (try not to rant or swear) and you’ll see people will respond very quickly.

#2 cardinal sin of most blogs… bland!

If your blog echoes the rest of the crowd, well, why should I come back? Stick your neck out, even a little. Some people were upset that I dissed Camtasia but y’know I’d be lying if I said it worked!

How To Get More Traffic #7: Trends

Pssst! Did you know that… everyone wants to be in the know. Keep your readers up to date. Use graphs, charts and diagrams. See Brain Solis and Information in Beautiful for inspiration.

How To Get More Traffic #8: Lists

It doesn’t have to stop at 10. Here are a few list of get started:

• 21 Left Handed Technical Writers
• 7 Reasons Why Adobe FrameMaker Sucks But You Still Need to Buy It
• 12 Honest Ways to Get a Pay Rise
• 5 Ways To Give An Honest Appraisal
• 28 Ways to Proofred a Technical Documant
• 1 Good Reason to Join the STC
• 18 Mistakes Technical Writers Make Before Breakfast
• 9 Ways to Evaluate a Help Authoring Tool

How To Get More Traffic #9: How-to guides

Ok, the technical stuff comes last. If you’re going to offer technical advice (and you should!) identify the problem, explain how to fix it, and then ask for questions or comments.

#3 cardinal sin of blogging is… blogger doesn’t interact with readers. Ask for comments. If you have a Facebook page, give them the link and connect there. Use Twitter? Create lists for technical writers and add them. Like these lists I created for technical writers and creativity.

• Adobe FrameMaker list http://twitter.com/ihearttechdocs/adobeframemaker
• Creativity list http://twitter.com/ihearttechdocs/creativity
• Technical writing software http://twitter.com/ihearttechdocs/technicalwritingsoftware

Share, share, share!

What ya think! Fire away below.

What do you want people to do after they’ve watched your video? Most beginners forget to ‘close the sale’. Their efforts go into making the video, getting it up on YouTube, but forget its original purpose. It’s easy to do when you’re in a hurry or engrossed in the technology. But you want people to do something, right? Otherwise, the point of the exercise is lost.

Video Blogging – Creating a Call to Action

Here’s how to create a Call to Action with your videos. Use your video blogs to encourage viewers to take some action. One of the mistakes new video bloggers make is that they overlook this step and assume that viewers will take the next step. They won’t!

Remind your viewers to take the next step.

1. Encourage them to sign up to your newsletter
2. Subscribe to your YouTube channel or
3. Leave comments

Also, remind them who you are: ‘’Hi, I’m Ivan Walsh from IvanWalsh.com, visit my website”.

Keep it short, less than three minutes and ALWAYS encourage the viewer to add a comment. That’s the easiest thing for them to do. Don’t make it difficult for them to interact – just remind them.

What did you think of this video, by the way?

What’s the most common mistake people make when shooting their first video? Christopher Ming Ryan points out that most video-makers don’t get in close enough to the person talking. This lessens the impact of the message. Zoom in. Frame the face. Here’s some tips from Ivan.

#1 Mistake When Making Your First YouTube Video

I took this video in Beijing. Twice. In the second take, I’m closer to you and the impact is better. The first take was scrapped. Pointless.

But I still made mistakes:

• The sun is in my eyes, which is why I’m squinting
• The noise was louder that you’d think, making it harder to concentrate
• The camera was not stabilized, i.e. free-hand. Try to use a tripod if possible.

How to Make a Near Perfect YouTube Video

Ok, it’s not on YT, but you get the point. Seth Godin is the guy talking.

Try and beat this!

‘curiosity’ from Nic Askew on Vimeo.

What Other Mistakes Did You See?

This video is far from perfect. I know that. What else did I do wrong?

Fire away below!

I’ve started to use video to sell (and upsell!) my digital downloads and information products. Like most beginners, I’m making mistakes at every step. But I’ve learnt a few tricks this week,  mostly thanks for Christopher Ming Ryan. Here’s what I learnt.

Video Blogging: Mistakes to Avoid

There are three steps involved in making videos:

1. Planning
2. Recording and
3. Editing

Most of us are good at one, but not so hot at the others. For me, it’s editing. No patience. Want to start the next. But I need to slow down. Here’s why:

• Great videos will significantly increase sales on your site, sales pages, squeeze pages – call them what you will but
• Lousy videos will drive potential customers away, screaming, ‘did you see how bad that was – my god!’

Christopher makes these suggestions:

• Start to like editing. It’s part of the process.
• Play with Camtasia or Premiere. Really take it apart and see what it can do.
• Don’t think of yourself as an Editor;  you’re a Director. See the difference?
• Study the best. Watch Rachel here.
• Invest in high-quality transitions. Watch the TV transitions on Rachel’s vids. Cool or what?
• #1 Mistake to avoid: the most interesting thing in the video is the face. Focus on it.

Watch Seth here. Compelling isn’t it?

‘curiosity’ from Nic Askew on Vimeo.

and watch Rachel. Look at how the transitions work.

Ok, that’s me.

What tips do you have for making better videos?

Jing Pro lets you make a high-definition video recording of what you see on your PC, which you can then email, Twitter, send to Facebook, Flickr, or YouTube. It’s brilliant. But, there’s a catch. There a free versions (which does most everything) and a premium version.

So, if the free version is so good, should you upgrade?

There are some limitation and restrictions on Jing Pro.

Jing  Pro Limitations

Here’s a few to start with.

Tip: Complete list of features is here.

1 It doesn’t let you edit proxy settings within the JING application. So, if you are behind a firewall or need to reconfigure on the road, it may get tricky.

2. You can’t use it as a standalone app without connecting to Screencast.com.

3. You need to be online as it’s web-based. Fine at work but not much good when you don’t have web access or if the web goes down.

4. When it does go down, you need to re-enter your username and password again. This became such a pain for me that I stopped using it and went back to SnagIt.

5. There is still a 5 minute limitation. So, if you’ve video is more than this, you’re out of luck.

Jing  Pro Advantages

The Pro version is fine if you don’t want to upgrade to Camtasia Studio but want an easy-to-use video-capturing software, for sharing videos on YouTube/Facebook.

Jing is very good at what it does and for $15 per year is not so expensive.

For light-weight users, the Free version should be fine. You can take nice screenshots, small videos and upload to Screencast.com which also offers 2 GB of storage space.

On the downside, the Free version support only SWF format while Jing Pro supports SWF ands MPEG-4 video, which is required for YouTube HD.

Should you buy the Pro version?

No.

Of all the limitations the 5 minute restriction is the biggest barrier. Actually, this is the main reason I have not signed up. If this was raised to 15 minutes, then yes, I’d signup. But 5 minutes is too short!

Simon makes this point on the blog: “In the above “94 Comments” 5 min is mentioned over 50 times … I think that you should listen to the user group and as I stated before: “drop the time limit on the Pro version and you will make conversions of people from free version to Pro version, and at the end of the day some $$$”

Matt adds “great job with the Jing project. The idea for allowing users to cut down videos to 5 minutes is a good alternative. The problem you may face is losing the beauty of simplicity that Jing offers and still leaves the 5 minute constraint.”

But the bottom line is that the 5 minute time limitation is a show-stopper.

Leonardos Bardelotto says that “5 min is bad, but they want to sell the Camtasia for bigger time and much more money.”

I agree.

This is the real limitation on this product. I‘ve flagged it on their site. Most others seem to agree and have encouraged them to make it free to get more market share.

There are so many free apps out there that charging for this – and the overheads that go with it – don’t seem to justify this decision.

But, it’s they’re product.

What do you think? Have you tried it yet?

PS: here is a quick list of the key features

• Screenshots directly to Snagit where you can edit the image.
• Publish it Screencast.com where you can store, file, organize and track the videos.
• Edit Jing created screencasts in Camtasia Studio. You can also combine multiple videos into a single video, or string several together with a table of contents.
• Create different Jing folders on Screencast.com, by topic/project/client.
• Adjust the video’s size to fit your blog or website.
• Centralize conversations and comments with the new commenting feature.
• Annotate captured images with arrows, callouts, text and highlights to add emphasis
• Narrate Jing-recorded screencast videos for even greater clarity before sharing
• Generate HTML code to so you can embed it on your blog or website
• Customize the sharing buttons so those they use most are only a click away.
• Screencasts are delivered in HD-quality video for the Web
• Jing logos and links are removed from the start and end of newly-recorded videos.
• Publish directly to YouTube, Vimeo, Viddler and MSN Video, Flickr
• Jing Pro produces MPEG-4 AVC video files for Flash delivery with H.264+AAC compression.

Charlene Li and her colleagues at Forrester Research report that companies often approach Social Computing as a list of technologies to be deployed as needed — ie a random assortment of blogs, communities etc— to achieve a marketing goal. Ms Li argues that “a more coherent approach is to start with your target audience and determine what kind of relationship you want to build with them, based on what they are ready for.”

You can use the tool here to get started. www.forrester.com/Groundswell

Features of this profile:

• For an explanation of these groups (Creators, Critics, etc.), see a presentation (8 slides)

• Bars indicate the percentage of the selected demographic that are in each Social Technographics group.

• The white marks indicate the same percentages for the whole population of the country selected.

• The index indicates how the demographic compares to the population — a score of 100 means the demographic is the same as the population average.

• The message “No data available” appears when you request a profile for which our survey samples are not large enough to provide a reliable answer. This occurs for age groups in Japan, Metro China, and South Korea. To see profiles in these countries, set the Age to “Not specified”.

Some really terrific material over here including free case studies, PDF downloads and extracts from the book.

If you’ve read it, please let me know what you think.

Regards,

Ivan

and you can Twitter me @ivanwalsh

Note: Any use of data and charts generated from this site must include the following citation: Data from Forrester Research Technographics® surveys, 2008. For further details on the Social Technographics profile, see groundswell.forrester.com.

Charlene Li and her colleagues at Forrester Research report that companies often approach Social Computing as a list of technologies to be deployed as needed — ie a random assortment of blogs, communities etc— to achieve a marketing goal. Ms Li argues that “a more coherent approach is to start with your target audience and determine what kind of relationship you want to build with them, based on what they are ready for.”

You can use the tool here to get started. www.forrester.com/Groundswell

Features of this profile:

• For an explanation of these groups (Creators, Critics, etc.), see a presentation (8 slides)

• Bars indicate the percentage of the selected demographic that are in each Social Technographics group.

• The white marks indicate the same percentages for the whole population of the country selected.

• The index indicates how the demographic compares to the population — a score of 100 means the demographic is the same as the population average.

• The message “No data available” appears when you request a profile for which our survey samples are not large enough to provide a reliable answer. This occurs for age groups in Japan, Metro China, and South Korea. To see profiles in these countries, set the Age to “Not specified”.

Some really terrific material over here including free case studies, PDF downloads and extracts from the book.

If you’ve read it, please let me know what you think.

Regards,

Ivan

and you can Twitter me @ivanwalsh

Note: Any use of data and charts generated from this site must include the following citation: Data from Forrester Research Technographics® surveys, 2008. For further details on the Social Technographics profile, see groundswell.forrester.com.

We reviewed PerfectIt last month and were impressed with its ability to edit and test our documents.

Daniel Heuman, the founder of Intelligent Editing Ltd has prepared this tutorial that goes into more detail and show some of the ways you can get more out of this editing product. Here’s Daniel.

[ad]

PerfectIt does not require any kind of configuration. Once you install it, you can use it straight away to find mistakes in any MS Word document.

This article is for users who want to get even more out of PerfectIt by fine-tuning it to search for particular errors or to enforce a style guide.

Fine-tuning PerfectIt

You can set your rules for how PerfectIt checks:

• Hyphenation
• Common typos
• Numbers in sentences
• Spelling variations
• Keywords left in the body of text
• Use of capital letters
• Punctuation of bullets and lists
• Capitals in bullets and lists

There are two ways to build your rules into PerfectIt, you can add them organically when PerfectIt runs or you can use the configuration screen.

Common Errors in English Usage

Organic fine-tuning

The easiest way to add rules for checking is to teach PerfectIt your preferences as you use it. When PerfectIt finds an error, just click the “Customise Test” menu to either exclude that from future searches or build a rule for checking it.

For example, if PerfectIt states that an abbreviation appears in two forms: “NASA” and “N.A.S.A.”, you can use the menus to specify that “NASA” is always preferred. After that, PerfectIt will prompt for any instance of “N.A.S.A.” with any document you test.

You can specify an even wider set of rules by using the configuration screen. To load the configuration screen, select “Advanced…” from the “Customise Test” menu. This will provide options for setting your own checking rules. For example, to specify that semi-colons are the preferred punctuation for short bullet points, choose “Settings for Lists, Numbers and Compounds”, then choose “Punctuate Short Items”, then select “A Semi-Colon” from the drop down menu. Save your changes and PerfectIt will notify you if it finds any bullet points with other types of punctuation.

The advantage of customised versions of PerfectIt

It is possible to share configurations between computers – just copy the files ‘CustomExclusionLists’ and ‘CustomFindLists’ from one computer to another. However, for organisations, the best way to ensure that rules are standardised across computers is to have Intelligent Editing prepare a customised version for you. Intelligent Editing will scan your library for inconsistencies and review those with you. Then we’ll build a version of PerfectIt that is custom-designed for your organisation. We’ll include all of your preferences and supply you with a version that is built for the specifics of your style guide.

Conclusion

Style guides are important documents that all too often go ignored. With PerfectIt, you can quickly and easily check that reports, articles, contracts and proposals are all aligned with your style guide. You can build in the checking that is most important to you and ensure that documents are reviewed completely for the mistakes that matter most. To try PerfectIt for free, download it now.

About the Author

Daniel Heuman, Founder, Intelligent Editing Ltd.

Intelligent Editing Ltd specializes in software solutions that deliver faster, more accurate editing for professionals. http://intelligentediting.com

I’ve been reading this book most of the weekend. It’s a terrific exploration of social media and how social media technologies are effecting corporations and companies from a business perspective. I thought you might want look at these links as these are the footnotes to the book and provide some very interesting material. Worth a look if you’re trying to get a handle on how twitter, facebook and the rest will impact your profit margin.

This morning I’ve been putting the finishing touches on some Process Design Template. The final step is the packaging, including the product shots and other marketing materials. Something I thought I’d share with you is how I take screenshots and especially tricks I use to add some nice effects.
The first image is the standard screenshot.

In the next I used Techsmith’s Snagit to modify the image so that it has this nice effect.

And then I flip it around in the other direction.

Let me know how you take screenshots and what tricks you’ve found to be most effective.

Regards,
Ivan
Twitter @ivanwalsh

I’ve been working on SEO (search engine optimization) code this weekend, mostly for my Word Tips site and also with a client.

I do some freelance WordPress work here in China where corporate blogging is now taking off.

During lunch we got talking about different SEO tricks, amongst which was the ‘no-follow’ attribute.

This was new to my colleagues, so I gathered some material from Wikipedia and sent it to them. FWIW here’s how it works.

[ad]

nofollow is an HTML attribute value used to instruct some
search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link
target’s ranking in the search engine’s index. It is intended to
reduce the effectiveness of certain types of search engine spam,
thereby improving the quality of search engine results and
preventing spam-indexing from occurring.

Concept and specification

The concept for the specification of the attribute value
nofollow was designed by Matt Cutts (Google) and
Jason Shellen from Blogger.com in 2005. The specification for
nofollow is copyrighted 2005-2007 by the authors
and subject to a royalty free patent policy, e.g. per the W3C
Patent Policy 20040205

What nofollow is not for

The nofollow attribute value is not meant for
blocking access to content, or for preventing content to be
indexed by search engines. The proper methods for blocking
search engine spiders to access content on a website or for
preventing them to include the content of a page in their index
are the robots.txt for blocking access and on-page Meta Elements
that are designed to specify on an individual page level what a
search engine spider should or should not do with the content of
the crawled page.

Google Take Action

In 2005 Google announced that hyperlinks with rel="nofollow"
attribute would not influence the link target’s PageRank. In
addition, the Yahoo and Windows Live search engines also respect
this attribute.

How the attribute is being interpreted differs between the
search engines. While some take it literally and do not follow
the link to the page being linked to, others still “follow” the
link to find new web pages for indexing.

In the latter case rel="nofollow" actually tells
a search engine “Don’t score this link” rather than “Don’t
follow this link.” This differs from the meaning of
nofollow as used within a robots meta tag, which
does tell a search engine: “Do not follow any of the
hyperlinks in the body of this document.”.

Interpretation by the individual
search engines

While all engines that support the attribute exclude links
that use the attribute from their ranking calculation, the
details about the exact interpretation of the attribute vary
from search engine to search engine.

• Google states that their engine takes “nofollow” literally and does not “follow” the link at all. However, experiments conducted by SEOs show conflicting results. These studies reveal that Google does follow the link, but does not index the linked-to page, unless it was in Google’s
  index already for other reasons.
• Yahoo “follows it”, but excludes it from their ranking calculation.
• MSN respects “nofollow” as regards not counting the link in their ranking, but it is not proven whether or not MSN follows the link.
• Ask.com ignores the attribute altogether.

Other websites like

Slashdot, with high user participation, use improvised nofollow implementations like adding rel="nofollow" only for potentially misbehaving users.

Potential spammers posing as users can be determined through various heuristics like age of registered account and other factors. Slashdot also uses the poster’s karma as a determinant in attaching a nofollow tag to user submitted links.

Websites that don’t use the rel="nofollow" tag include Digg, Furl, and My Web 2.0.

Paid links

Search engines have attempted to repurpose the nofollow attribute for something different.

Google began suggesting the use of nofollow also as a machine-readable
disclosure for paid links, so that these links do not get credit in search engines’ results.

The growth of the link buying economy, where companies’ entire business models are based on paid links that affect search engine rankings, caused the debate about the use of nofollow in combination with paid links to move into the center of attention of the search engines, who started to take active steps against link buyers and sellers.

Control internal PageRank flow

Search engine optimization professionals started using the nofollow attribute to control the flow of PageRank within a website. This practice is known as PageRank sculpting. This is an entirely different use than it was
intended originally.

Nofollow was designed to control the flow of PageRank from one website to another.

However, some SEOs have suggested that a nofollow used for an internal link should work just like nofollow used for external links.

Several SEOs have suggested that pages such as “About Us”, ”Terms of Service”, “Contact Us”, and “Privacy Policy” pages are not important enough to earn PageRank, and so should have  nofollow on internal links pointing to them.

If you have any thoughts on this, please let me know.

Jing Pro lets you take a screenshot or create a HD quality  screen recording of what you see on your PC.

You can then share it by pasting a link to the content in your email, post it on forums, tweet it on Twitter, publish to Facebook, Flickr, or YouTube.

This review looks at the new features in the professional version and how it compares against the free product. We liked everything except for 1 thing – and it wasn’t the price.
[ad#ad1]
Price

$15 per year

Pro v Free

There are 2 versions of Jing – Free and Pro. Today, we’re looking at the new Pro version which costs $15 per year.

What can you do with Jing Pro?

Tony Dunckel at Techsmith describes the differences between the Free and professional version, “you can provide a quick “in person” intro to your videos, send “video postcards” to your kids away at school, or even show off your latest big purchase to your friends by recording with your webcam.”

He then provides some interesting tips on how to use Jing.

Easy Region Selection

Hold down the Ctrl or Shift while selecting the area to record and the selector will maintain standard aspect ratios of 4:3 or 16:9 for widescreen.

This ‘easy region selection’ lets you choose any dimension you want while locked to the set aspect ratio. Or you can snap to a standard present dimension such as 320×240 or 640×480, etc.

Share to Different Screencast.com Folders

You can setup new folders on Screencast.com and create new buttons for each different folder (Jing allows up to 8 unique buttons). This helps organize your work and maintain projects in different folders.

Output to Snagit & Camtasia Studio

Use Jing Pro to take the screenshot and then send the image/video to Snagit or Camtasia Studio where you can edit it.

Aspect Ratio

You can stop wasting time resizing images. Instead Jing screen captures can be configured to automatically fit into your blog, website. Nice time-saving tool.

New folders in Screencast.com

After you have taken the video, you can save it on Screencast.com. This is what generates the URL that you then share with your colleagues

It now lets you organize things a bit better with online folders.

MPEG-4/H.264 format

Jing Pro uses MPEG-4/H.264 format, which should improve the quality of your videos on sites YouTube, Vimeo and Viddler.

Publish to YouTube

You can now automatically send your videos to YouTube.

No more Jing logos

Jing logos are no longer displayed at the start and end of videos.

Webcam

Add an introduction or show the object you’re discussing by switching between webcam and screen recording. The webcam feature is now available in Jing Pro 2.1

Othere Key features

• Screenshots directly to Snagit where you can edit the image.

• Publish it Screencast.com where you can store, file, organize and track the videos.

• Edit Jing created screencasts in Camtasia Studio. You can also combine multiple videos into a single video, or string several together with a table of contents.

• Create different Jing folders on Screencast.com, by topic/project/client.

• Adjust the video’s size to fit your blog or website.

• Centralize conversations and comments with the new commenting feature.

• Annotate captured images with arrows, callouts, text and highlights to add emphasis

• Narrate Jing-recorded screencast videos for even greater clarity before sharing

• Generate HTML code to so you can embed it on your blog or website

• Customize the sharing buttons so those they use most are only a click away.

• Screencasts are delivered in HD-quality video for the Web

• Jing logos and links are removed from the start and end of newly-recorded videos.

• Publish directly to YouTube, Vimeo, Viddler and MSN Video, Flickr

• Jing Pro produces MPEG-4 AVC video files for Flash delivery with H.264+AAC compression.

System Requirements

Windows – XP or Vista; Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0; 3.0GHz Pentium 4 processor; 1GB RAM

Mac – Mac OS X 10.4.11, or 10.5.5+; QuickTime 7.5.5+; 2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor; 2GB RAM

Jing Pro comes with a free Screencast.com account that provides 2 GB of storage and 2 GB of bandwidth transfer monthly.

Limitations

There are some limitation and restrictions on Jing Pro.

Here’s a few to start with.

• It doesn’t let you edit proxy settings within the JING application. So, if you are behind a firewall or need to reconfigure on the road, it may get tricky.

• You can’t use it as a standalone app without connecting to Screencast.com.

• You need to be online as it’s web-based. Fine at work but not much good when you don’t have web access or if the web goes down.

• When it does go down, you need to re-enter your username and password again. This became such a pain for me that I stopped using it and went back to SnagIt.

• There is still a 5 minute limitation. So, if you’ve video is more than this, you’re out of luck.

The Pro version is fine if you don’t want to upgrade to Camtasia Studio but want an easy-to-use video-capturing software, for sharing videos on YouTube/Facebook.

Jing is very good at what it does and for $15 per year is not so expensive.

For light-weight users, the Free version should be fine. You can take nice screenshots, small videos and upload to Screencast.com which also offers 2 GB of storage space.

On the downside, the Free version support only SWF format while Jing Pro supports SWF ands MPEG-4 video, which is required for YouTube HD.

If you really want a powerful video-editing app, maybe look at Camtasia instead. This is the industry standard in video capturing and worth the money.

If this is all new to you, sign up for the free version and play around. If you still like it – and use it after a few months – then consider upgrading.

The bottom line – Should I buy the Pro version?

No.

Of all the limitations the 5 minute restriction is the biggest barrier. Actually, this is the main reason I have not signed up. If this was raised to 15 minutes, then yes, I’d signup. But 5 minutes is too short!

Simon makes this point on the blog:

“In the above “94 Comments” 5 min is mentioned over 50 times … I think that you should listen to the user group and as I stated before: “drop the time limit on the Pro version and you will make conversions of people from free version to Pro version, and at the end of the day some $$$”

Matt adds “great job with the Jing project. The idea for allowing users to cut down videos to 5 minutes is a good alternative. The problem you may face is losing the beauty of simplicity that Jing offers and still leaves the 5 minute constraint.”

Tony Dunckel and his team have done a terrific job on this application. Most all products from Techsmith are exceptional – Jing Pro is no different.

Don’t take my word for it.

[ad]