Google Wonder Wheel is a handy tool that works as an alternative view of search results. It shows you related keyword phrases to whatever search phrase you searched for. Each of the suggested phrases is clickable, and that’s where the Wonder Wheel gets fun. With a few clicks of the mouse, you can easily find ideas for new keywords for your blog post, video, article or Toastmasters speech that you haven’t written yet (if that’s ever happened to you, that is). Of course, SEO people use it for keyword research too.

Here’s a video to show you how to use Google Wonder Wheel for yourself.

Have you had a cool Wonder Wheel discovery? Share your experiences and leave a comment below.

Technorati Tags: Google, How To, tutorial

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Visit Google and type “Web Design near Washington , DC” into the search box.

Are you there?

If that’s not your business, that’s ok. Enter something you’d expect someone to be looking for near your town and see what you get.

Here’s another example:

So much for the Yellow Pages, eh?

Six months ago, the examples above would have produced almost no local search results. The services were there, but few were making use of them. Now, things are picking up for local search on Google and other hot Internet properties as well.

This blew me away. I know for a fact there is “leadership training near Philadelphia, PA” so why is there nothing listed?

Talk about a missed opportunity.

If you’re behind the curve on this, that’s ok. The trend is still picking up and I’ve spoken to local business owners who are actually still getting business as a direct result of ads in the Yellow Pages.

I wouldn’t wait for long though.

Visit http://www.google.com/local/add and add your business today.

The process is simple. Click Add new business and start filling out the form.

Isn’t it nice when things are easy?

Say “Thank you Google.”

The key here is to fill everything out completely. In the description field, don’t leave it blank. If you saw two listings and one had complete information and the other didn’t, who would you choose? Don’t be the business that doesn’t get the clicks. Google made it way to easy for you to get a local search listing…take the 5 minutes to do it right.

There’s more to building and managing your presence online than a mere listing like this, but for most businesses, this is a big first step that’s easy to do. After you have your local listing, you can take other baby steps to build a credible and authoritative presence online.

For an even longer list of local search directories, check here.

Technorati Tags: Branding, Business, Local Search, Marketing, Social Media, Yellow Pages

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The video below steps you through the process used by any individual business or person to build up a trusted “authority” presence online. At the center of this entire model is content.

Quality content.

It doesn’t matter if you’re creating articles, Squidoo lenses, videos or podcasts, your viewers want to be entertained, enlightened, educated and engaged.

How to do personal branding…in video form.

Technorati Tags: Branding, content, Marketing, Social Media

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This is just an example of what is possible when you start to merge the concepts of Web 1.0 SEO and Web 2.0 user generated content.

In the old days, it was all about managing every last word on your own website to “optimize” your site for the search engines. The problem with this is that SEO is a “cat and mouse game” and Google has a mouse that resembles the Terminator. You can go nuts constantly retuning your site every time Google spins a knob at HQ which causes your #1 ranked page to suddenly become #10.

One solution is to have multiple pages which cover a set of keywords in order to provide more than one search result. This requires multiple domains because most of the search engines filter out results if they all come from the same site. Why not build content on other sites (always, always quality content) and point a single link or banner back at your main site? This has been done in the past under the guise “butterfly marketing” where a business owner registers a dozen domains and points content in towards the “money site.”

Doing it with social media properties takes this concept to the next level. If you select the right Web 2.0 sites for your content, you get indexed and rank very quickly. Most of these sites get money from ad displays so as long as you produce QUALITY content, you’re benefiting them with your creations. Finally, these sites allow people to interlink and comment on your content easily which plugs you into the social community.

Here’s an example to get you started.

First, go to WordTracker to find the keywords you need to make any of this possible. They offer a 7 day, fully-functional free trial so there’s no reason not to try this.

When you log into your WordTracker account, you’ll get the initial view.

Click Keyword Universe.

The next sequence is where I do 90% of my work in Wordtracker.

For this example, I entered Vitamin C in the Related Keywords box and clicked Proceed…you’ll have to wait for up to 60 seconds after doing this.

Next, scroll down to see a list of keywords that WordTracker thinks are related to what you entered. For this example, I’m just going to click Vitamin C beside the 1. Over on the right, the display will change to show up to 300 phrases which contain Vitamin C.

Click Click here to add all keywords to your basket and then click Click here for Step 3 at the bottom of the window.

In the next window click Competition Search

In the next window, this is where we get to do some very cool stuff that is very annoying to do without WordTracker.

First, at the top the keywords popup starts with 1-100 selected. We’re going to do competition research for just this first 100 keywords to find out how many searches (on average) happen per day for each keyword compared to the number of other pages there are in Google which already match that phrase.

To do that, click the Google checkbox and the click Proceed.

After a short wait, the screen changes and we can see the first 100 keyword research results. If you wanted to do research for keywords 101-200, you’d change the selection in the popup menu, check the Google box and click proceed. It seems a little tedious and I think WordTracker does this on purpose. If they made this process too fast, Google might be forced to find a way to shut them down.

Ok, what did we find? Check out the very first result.

“Amount of vitamin C in energy drinks” the KEI number is based on a formula that compares searches to the number of competing results. Anything higher than 10 is worth your attention. We’ve found a 400 so that’s really good.

This phrase gets about a dozen searches a day and there are 0 other pages that contain this phrase?

Jackpot

I then went to hubpages.com and build a hub page that provides information about the “Amount of vitamin C in energy drinks”

In two hours, I ended up with 4 pages that ranked for this phrase. Two from Digg, and two from hubpages. This is a short term result. Things will shift around a bit over time, but the point here is that I was able to find a keyword with very low competition and got my own content indexed in a very short period of time. This didn’t require any dirty tricks and it will work for any niche.

In the above screen capture, I searched for the phrase in quotes. This forces Google to return results only if they match the phrase exactly. In my lucky find of a keyword phrase that had 0 other so-called literal matches, that makes it look like I’m the only one who’s showing up in Google. That would be true if I expected other people to search for that phrase in quotes as well…and I don’t.

So what are my results when I remove the quotes? Google will try to find anything that seems to talk about the searched phrase which means a lot more results. In fact, I get over 850,000 suggestions from Google when searching for amount of Vitamin C in energy drinks without the quotes.

Will you look at that? I took this screen shot 2 days after creating the rest of the example and I have the top 2 results of 850,000.

Yahoo was kind enough to give me the #1 slot of 3,170,000 “close matches”.”

The new search engine on the block, Bing, gave me the top two out of 1,740,000 results.

I used hubpages in this example and there are plenty of other sites which can be used as well, including your own blog. This isn’t something you do once, but rather it should be a regular process of building content around your niche that is speaking to the things people are actually entering into the search engines.

Building quality content on the Internet is a long-lasting strategy for building a steady flow of traffic to your website. I know a lot more about SEO than what I’m demonstrating here and I used none of that knowledge to make the above example work. In a more competitive space, it would take a little more effort to get results like these, but if you are constantly building new properties and monitoring keyword trends in WordTracker, you will be found and you will receive a steady stream of website traffic, new leads, new sales and mo’ money. It takes effort so either build the habit of doing it yourself, or get someone else to do it for you.

Technorati Tags: bing, Branding, digg, Google, Hubpages, SEO, Social Media, Web 2.0, Yahoo

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No matter what your marketing strategy is for developing your online presence, knowing what people are looking for gives you valuable insight into what you should be talking about. Using free tools, you can find the top, most searched keywords and then write content to match with it.

How to find keywords is easier than you think with the tricks I show you in this video. Just watch and get started right away.

What is a keyword?

I’ve found that a lot of people think there’s some sort of voodoo surrounding the concept of keywords in search engines.

A keyword is simply a match between a search phrase and where it’s found in content indexed by the search engine.

That means a keyword is anything you type into the search engine.

Some keywords get used a lot. Type ‘golf’ into Google and you’ll see there millions of pages that contain that word. Now type your own name into Google.

How many results did you get?

How close was something directly relating to you at the top of the list of results?

See? Even your own name can be a keyword if someone is looking for it…

Which leads me to a truth many ‘SEO specialists’ don’t want you to know.

While everything and anything can be a keyword, it’s doesn’t really matter if no one is looking for it.

If you’re company name is “Bob’s Super Mega-Blaster Design Firm” you should have no problem getting the #1 search listing in Google for that keyword, but how many people are looking for “Bob’s Super Mega-Blaster Design Firm”?

Given an obscure enough search phrase, ANYONE can have the #1 spot in Google.

The moral of the story is: if you want to be found online, use keywords that other people are looking for.

Technorati Tags: Branding, How To, keyword, SEO

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What does your to do list look like?

Many people carry around to do lists that contain broad goals and vision statements.  These items are not specifically actionable and lead to a to do list that feels more like a lead weight than a simple map for the day’s activities.

While tracking such goals are an essential element to success, they don’t really belong on a to do list.

We live in busy times and a productivity tool that isn’t helping you get things done is like a boat anchor tied around your neck.

So what should you to do list look like?

According to Getting Things Done author David Allen, an effective to do list should only contain items for which you can take action.  For example if you need to get the oil changed in your car but you first need to find the coupon you saved, “find oil change coupon” should be on your to do list.

This follows for anything you want to get done that represents a multi-step process.

Following this model I keep a simple spiral notebook to help me track my larger projects.  At the top of a clean page I write my goal.  On the next line I write the very next thing that could be done to take a step towards that goal.  Just knowing what that is takes a big load off my mind.

If I can think of more sequential items I’ll add those to the page is well.  The trick is to think in terms of the sequence you need to follow to reach the goal.  Sometimes it helps to imagine yourself already having achieved the goal and been thinking of the tasks in reverse order.

What ever works for you, just do it.

When I’m planning my next day, I will transfer some of those next step items to my to do list for the day.  This leaves me with that to do list which contains things that I can actually do.  Typically I will transfer no more than six things to my to do list.  Whatever doesn’t get done goes to the list for the next day.

This way I get to experience the brief endorphin rush associated with checking items off my to do list without the dread of carrying around a list with hundreds of items that I could never possibly complete in a single day.

Sound off.  What does your to do list look like? 

Is it just a big old mess? 

Do you try to keep everything in your head? 

Do you follow David Allen’s Getting Things Done model or have you found something else that works?

Technorati Tags: Getting things done, GTD, productivity, success

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Are you suffering from the effects of continuous partial attention?

While reading an article from 4 Hour Workweek author Tim Ferris, I was struck by how pervasive multitasking has become in our culture and how much damage it is most likely doing to our personal productivity if not our sanity.

Given my background in computer programming I already know that while multitasking is a cool thing for computers it also makes them less efficient. 

Every program that you have running on your PC gets a slice of the available CPU resources.  Even if the program isn’t doing anything, the operating system must do something called a context switch to move over to the program just to find out that has nothing to do.  With only a word processor open, twitter, and a couple of web pages open, this probably has little impact on your computer’s response.  If you’re processing with a video editor or if you’re trying to play game you may start to notice the effects of your computer not paying enough attention to the window on which you happen to be focused.

Even with a computer multitasking has an impact on performance.

What about you?

There are instances where multitasking is both productive and useful.  If you’re a cook at Denny’s, multitasking gives you the ability to make sure that different things that go on a plate are cooked it the same time.

For people known as knowledge workers (a term coined by Peter Drucker), even passive multitasking is the punch line to a very cruel and counterintuitive joke. Trying to write a report for your project while thinking about the groceries you want to pick has an impact on your ability to mentally process efficiently and effectively.

Every time I meet someone who tells me that they’re good multitasking I just roll my eyes. 

Myself included, people rarely are able to see the lack of results achieved by the attempt a multitasking. 

Continuous partial attention is the effect that our modern information culture is having on our brains.  Trying to write an article while answering instant messages are receiving calls and text messages on your iPhone is a recipe for a mediocre article.

The effects of continuous partial attention are certainly present in the realm of social media where we’re glancing at Twitter, answering instant messages and scanning Facebook updates.

It’s very easy to bleed out when you’re being stabbed by 1,000 knives.

What’s the solution? I’ve found that a simple oven timer help me boost productivity by working for a focused 50 minutes, followed by a 10 minute break (also timed) throughout the day. At home, my Blackberry is on silent when I’m working (silent, not vibrate) and I no longer have my email open in a window when I’m working. Small steps, but effective for me.

What’s your solution? Have you taken steps to control the multitasking beast in your life?

Technorati Tags: Marketing, multitasking, Social Media, time management

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With social media being distributed as it is, being able to share your blog content through multiple services is an imperative. Sharing, or syndicating, your blog through Friendfeed, Facebook, Yahoo Pipes and others requires you to provide your RSS feed address.

Do you know what your RSS feed address is?

It turns out that WordPress made finding your RSS feed very easy and it works the same way if you’re using wordpress.com to host your blog or if you are hosting your own blog with the free software from wordpress.org.

To help you find your RSS feed address, I put together this little video to show you how. Just hit play and leave a comment below to say hi.

Technorati Tags: blogging, Facebook, Friendfeed, RSS, wordpress, Yahoo Pipes

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I’ve been asked how to find the RSS feed for Blogger a few times now. It’s a handy thing to know because with the RSS feed address, you can link Facebook notes and Blogger content which allows you to connect your content to a larger audience. Finding the RSS feed address in Blogger is a little frustrating. I clicked around settings for a while to find it myself. It’s not exactly something that everyone needs or wants to know, but when you do it would be really nice if it was obvious and immediately available. The ATOM URL used to be listed there. Finally I poked around in the help files and discovered how to construct the URL in Blogger to get the RSS feed for my blog.

To find out how to get the RSS code for Blogger yourself, just watch the video below and you’ll see how to do it for your own blog.

According to Google / Blogger, here are the special addresses they’ve provided for blog users.

Full site feed:

• Atom 1.0: http://blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default
• RSS 2.0: http://blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss

Comments-only feed:

• Atom 1.0: http://blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default
• RSS 2.0: http://blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default?alt=rss

Label-specific site feed:

• Atom 1.0: http://blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default/-/labelname
• RSS 2.0: http://blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default?alt=rss/-/labelname

Individual post comment feed:

• Atom 1.0: http://blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/postId/comments/default
• RSS 2.0: http://blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/postId/comments/default?alt=rss

RSS feeds from Blogger seem to provide clean code. This is a good thing too because I don’t know of any clean RSS widget for Blogger.

Technorati Tags: Blogger, Facebook, Feed, How To, RSS

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Connecting Twitter with Facebook is one of the best mashups available for Social Media. You get the easy a quick action of Twitter combined with the sticky content that leads to more interactions and connections you get with Facebook.

Following the instructions in this video (darn easy), you activate a Facebook application which accesses Twitter and automatically changes your Facebook status every time you update your Twitter status.

It’s just that easy.

While there are some great tools out there like ping.fm, which will also update your status in a bunch of different places at once, those tools have one drawback: Twitter, Facebook and really any social media site work best when you’re interacting. If you’re using ping.fm, you’re billboarding and little more. It doesn’t matter how profound you think you are, your social media participation is 1 dimensional. I still use ping.fm for exactly the benefit of updating a bajillion places at once, but because Twitter and Facebook are such major social media destinations for me, I make sure that I’m using them regularly in accordance with all of the principals of the social media funnel.

Linking Twitter to Facebook then gives me extra punch for my activities because I regularly interact with people in both places.

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