Promote your new “Swiss Army Knife”

Use targeted keywords: Before you start blogging, select keywords and topics that your best customer and reader will find interesting.  Prepare a list of targeted keywords from the topics you have chosen and use those in your titles, content and links.

Regularly ping update services: Every time that you publish a new blog post on the web, your blog sends out a small text file to the internet only containing the title of your blog post, the first few words of the content, the date it was published and where it can be found. Most of the popular blogging systems including WordPress automatically pings popular blog services every time you publish a new blog.  Visit other ping services such as Ping Goat where you can ping different update services at least once a month.

Content is king: Blogging is really not about selling at all.  It is about engaging and educating your readers with interesting and thought-provoking content.  Create a blogging plan that will include your topics, keywords and audience that you would like to focus on.  Always use this plan to keep your content focused.  Interesting and original blog posts will ensure returning visitors.

Comments: Comment and be active on other related blogs in your topic and niche.  Leave comments regularly with your blog URL.  Always make your comments insightful and interesting.  If people reading the comments and find your comment meaningful, chance are good they will follow your link back to your blog.

Forums: Try to participate in forums as the expert in your niche.  Look for forums where you can promote your blog in the signature line of your forum posts.  Include keywords in the link anchor text back to your blog.

Email signature: Include your blog URL in the signature of every email you send out.

Social networking: Setup profiles at popular social network sites such as Facebook and Linkedin where you can promote your blog.

Always remember this when promoting your blog on various social media channels – “Social Media is all about listening before you start selling and providing value before you start marketing”.

Subscription software is slowly becoming the norm.  Most businesses today have dedicated workstations (notebooks and desktops) with individual copies of Microsoft Office purchased and installed on each computer.  These computers are usually connected with a server and a network.  This is not needed anymore with cloud computing.

What you can expect from Cloud Computing

Business applications: Instead of having a copy of Microsoft Oficce on every single business computer, make use of free cloud alternatives such as Google Docs.  This consists of a web based word processor, presentation, spreadsheet and database software system.  These web applications by Google works from any online connected PC and data can be stored on Google’s servers and even downloaded to the computer’s desktop.

Netbooks: With cloud computing, all that is needed to operate a business are netbooks.  These are much cheaper slimmed down notebooks that have minimal or no data storage at all.  These are all that are required to run your office of the future.

Computer server: Why do you need a server for your office?  Why spend thousands and thousands of dollars on hardware and support for your server?  Tap into the cloud and you can get up and going with no hassle.

Email: You don’t need to run Office Outlook on your PC to receive, send and read email.  The cloud alternative is Yahoo email and Gmail.  Just create an account on these email providers and you can get going.

In the long run, cloud computing can save your business time, worry and money.  Use the power of the cloud to run your business.

Social media and SEO now works hand in hand.  Links will always be the currency of SEO that ensures top rankings.  Web 2.0 together with social networking are becoming the relationship side of SEO that seems to be the future of the web.  Social link connections are highly valuable now, especially by Google.

Should I just build social media links?

Not all these links are weighted equally.  Links from websites and profiles with a higher “social authority” are given more weight.  Social authority is developed when a person or business establishes themselves as an “expert” or “influencer” in their market or niche.

What creates a high social authority?

• Quality: Having more important friends and followers.
• Quantity: Having more followers and friends.
• Topic: Social authority will likely be related to relevant subjects.

Links from Twitter are nofollow.  That means none of the precious link juice search engine marketers are after will count but, it still creates social signals that influences rankings.  If the Tweet is made by someone with social authority, then they will create ripples in the search engine results.

Social authority is all about exerting influence.  Experts and celebrities that are social connected will be able to wield their influence in a way that will greatly affect search engine rankings.

Just something to think about.

This is a great feature where you can post a Tweet on Twitter and it will automatically be synchronized to a chatbox of yours on My Chatbox. Tweet Fetcher checks every 30 minutes for new tweets and publishes new tweets automatically to the chatboxes.

How to add a Twitter account to a Chatbox

You can add a Twitter profile username to a new chatbox that you create on the last Chatbox create settings screen. You simply add the Twitter profile username and it will all be setup. If you already have a Chatbox, when you edit the chatbox, you will find a new setting on the Chatbox settings where you can add a Twitter username.

Feeding your Tweets

A couple of weeks ago I have created a feature where you can add an external blog rss feed to a chatbox of yours. By adding a blog RSS feed to a chatbox of yours and also adding your Twitter profile username, you are enabling more ways to make your content travel.

To be honest, I was totally baffled by this error as this was the first time I got the error. This was a really big problem because I wasn’t able to update or add any of the necessary plugins to make the WordPress website work.

Research research research

After searching and doing some research on ways to fix this error I realised that this was quite a common error and there are a lot of people who had this error before. All the fixes that I have found online was for WordPress versions prior to 3.0 and it involves editing the http.php file in the
wp-includes folder found on the root of your WordPress installation.

Here’s the fix that I have found. Find this code on-line no 223 in http.php in the wp-includes folder.

'timeout' => apply_filters( 'http_request_timeout', 5);

Replace that code with:

'timeout' => apply_filters( 'http_request_timeout', 30);

This will not work if you are running a WordPress version 3 or higher as the above code is not in the http.php file anymore but in the class-http.php file also found in the wp-includes folder.

By replacing the code above resolved the nasty HTTP error I was getting. Hope it works for you!

But experience has shown us that we are managing tightly interconnected, delayed, complex systems where one action has multiple, often counterintuitive, results.  Delays and perverse effects are common.

Our brains just don’t capture these system features well. Sustainability Institute

You can see this in action right here on this blog at the top where I display my most recent tweet with a link back to my Twitter Profile.

Display your most recent tweet

php
$username = "TwitterUsername"; // Your twitter username.
$prefix = ""; // Prefix – some text you want displayed before your latest tweet.
$suffix = ""; // Suffix – some text you want display after your latest tweet.
$feed = "http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=from:" . $username . "&rpp=1";
function parse_feed($feed) {
$stepOne = explode("", $feed);
$stepTwo = explode("", $stepOne[1]);
$tweet = $stepTwo[0];
$tweet = str_replace("&lt;", "<", $tweet);
$tweet = str_replace("&gt;", ">", $tweet);
return $tweet;
}
$twitterFeed = file_get_contents($feed);
echo stripslashes($prefix) . parse_feed($twitterFeed) . stripslashes($suffix);
?>

NB: Remove TwitterUsername with your own username.

Use the code below that you can insert into the file plugins.php on the root of your theme folder to increase or decrease the excerpt length.

// Changing excerpt length
function new_excerpt_length($length) {
return 100;
}
add_filter('excerpt_length', 'new_excerpt_length');
// Changing excerpt more
function new_excerpt_more($more) {
return '…';
}
add_filter('excerpt_more', 'new_excerpt_more');

NB: Add the above code before the closing ?> tag in functions.php.

When you are logged in to My Chatbox, find a new menu on the “My Account” menu on the right hand side titled “Create a link”.  You can also create a new social bookmark from the “Links Directory” by clicking on the button “Create a link”.

New Social Bookmark

On the page that you create a new link, select a category and enter your bookmark address in the URL textbox.  Once you have selected a category and added the address of the bookmark, click on “Fetch Page Details”. My Chatbox will browse the address (URL) you have added and try to fetch the link title, description and any rich media elements it finds to use as the image Thumbnail for the link. All of the link details can be edited such as the title, description and the thumbnail.

You can also social bookmark YouTube videos where a Thumbnail of the Video will be displayed and when clicked, a new window will open in My Chatbox where you can view the video.

Social Bookmark Votes

All My Chatbox members can vote on the bookmarks by clicking on the thumbs up or thumbs down image below the link thumbnail.  Members can also comment on any of the public bookmarks on My Chatbox.  All the links on the Links Directory can be filtered to display the most popular links, newly created links, highest rated, etc by selecting a filter from the drop down “Order by”.

Share Social Bookmarks

On the links directory, members can click on the share button where they can share the link to their profile or to a dedicated Chatbox they have created on My Chatbox.  Social bookmarks can also be created directly from a Chatbox by clicking “Create Chatbox Link” on a Chatbox.  View an example of this on the General Chatbox.

The social bookmark links section of My Chatbox is another great way how you can share valuable content that you find on the Web with your My Chatbox followers.

Create a new file and call it twittercounter.php and paste the below code into that file.  Make sure the file is located in the root of your theme file.

<?php
$tw = get_option("twitterfollowerscount");

if ($tw['lastcheck'] < ( mktime() – 3600 ) )
{
$xml=file_get_contents('http://twitter.com/users/show.xml?screen_name=antonrsa');
>if (preg_match('/followers_count>(.*)</',$xml,$match)!=0) {
$tw['count'] = $match[1];
}
$tw['lastcheck'] = mktime();

update_option("twitterfollowerscount",$tw);
}
echo $tw['count'];
?>

Make sure to replace antonrsa with your twitter name.

Then Simply place this code anywhere you want to display your Twitter counter:

<?php include("twittercounter.php"); ?>

Blog post Re Tweets

If you would like to display your blog post re tweets without a plugin, use the code below on your blog post pages.  Usually you can paste it in the file single.php located in the root of your theme files.

<?php
$link = get_permalink($post->ID);
$key = 'Backtype Key';
$url = "http://api.backtype.com/tweetcount.xml?q=$link&amp;key=$key";
$request = new WP_Http;
$result = $request->request( $url );
echo "<span class=\"result\">".$result['body']."</span> tweets";
?>

Replace the $key = ‘Backtype Key’ with your own key on Backtype.