Looking at his website (http://www.kriesi.at/), he lists his plugins for Wordpress as well as his themes (which are pretty, clean themes).

Unfortunately, his plugin download doesn’t work, so for all of you, I have a copy which is available for download from link below.

Download My Favourite posts plugin

I must state that I did not write this plugin, nor do I take any credit in it’s production.  I just have a copy available and want to spread this great script out as it deserves.

Google is constantly checking your site’s performance and all indications point to this being a ranking factor in future. This was reported a late last year by WebProNews, after an interview with the venerable Matt Cutts from the Google team.

By their own admission Google is all about the ”user experience”, with their prime SEO mantra being; “make websites for users, not for the search engines”. And page load time is one if the most important user experience issues that you’ll encounter when browsing the web.  Google wants to serve it’s users with they what they want.  Do they want slow page websites at the top of their search results?  or do they want a page that loads instantly and gives them the information they’re seeking straight away.    Obviously, the latter.

It’s a well known “statistic” that if a web page does not load in less than 3 seconds a user will ”bounce” from the site, return to the search results and probably pick one of your competitors.  Which begs the question:  how can you speed up a slow site?

Examine your site’s performance

First off, you should analyze all information available about how your pages load using some readily available tools. As a good SEO or webmaster you’ve probably already signed up for Google’s Webmaster Tools.   A recently added feature is the “Site Performance” section, which is found under the “Labs” menu item.

This will give you a general indication of whether Google sees your site as being fast or slow, and provides a few tips on how your pages can be improved for speed.   You can also see over time how your work in improving web site speed is taking effect.

For a more immediate read-out of a webpage’s performance I also use the Yahoo YSlow plugin for Firebug (a Firefox plug-in). YSlow can be run on a live page that you are viewing and gives instant (depending on page load time of course), feedback on what areas you can address to improve load time on your website.   It will also give you an indication of the “emtpy cache” (first time visitor) and “primed cache” (repeat visitor) performance.

For an advanced metric of page load time, Google Analytics can be configured to record a page load time metric and gives a reasonable representation of the issue from the user perspective.   Analytics can be made to track the load time based on internet connection speed in so giving a broad indication of your site’s performance.

Enable GZip Compression

All modern browsers support webpage GZip compression and are able to decompress the data sent from your server.  The less data that is transferred for each page, the less time it takes for a page to load in a browser.  For those site owners who have a restriction on the amount of traffic with their host, GZip compression will reduce the amount of data that you have to serve.

You can use a GZip compression test to check if your pages are currently compressed and if not, this tool will estimate of the size of savings to expect.   If GZip compression is enabled, the actual % of data saved during compression is shown.  This tool can also test CSS and JS files.

Apache and Microsoft IIS web servers both support GZip, and quick and dirty instructions for enabling GZip compression is shown below:

Apache Server

The module that deals with GZip compression on an Apache server is “mod_deflate”. Create an “info.php” file and add the code <?php phpinfo() ?>, upload to your server and browse “/info.php” to get a readout of the Apache modules installed.  If mod_deflate is loaded on your webserver then the following .htaccess declaration will enable GZip for a lot of file types.

<IfModule mod_deflate.c>
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml text/css application/javascript application/x-javascript application/x-httpd-php application/rss+xml application/atom_xml
</IfModule>

If mod_deflate can’t be loaded by your host or server admin (it requires a core recompile for installation) then the following .htaccess declaration will enable GZip compression for php files only. The “gzhandler” is not as efficient at compressing data than “mod_deflate”, so will be marginally slower and the savings will me slightly less but for most sites will suffice.

php_value output_handler ob_gzhandler

If your pages are .htm or .html (as opposed to .php) add the following lines at the top of your .htaccess to get Apache to parse those files as .php so that they will be compressed.

RemoveHandler .html .htm
AddType application/x-httpd-php .php .htm .html

Microsoft IIS

If you’re running a Microsoft IIS server, the following document will explain how compression can be activated: http://g.www.ms.akadns.net/technet/prodtechnol/WindowsServer2003/Library/IIS/25d2170b-09c0-45fd-8da4-898cf9a7d568.mspx?mfr=true

Reduce Image Size

These days websites are very graphicy, with most sites having appealing header images, product images and so forth.  Unfortunately the more graphics on a site, the more data needs to be sent to the user’s browser leading to longer load times.  This is especially an issue for first time visitors who don’t have the images cached.

Most competent web designers keep this in mind and will try to maximize the Jpeg compression versus the image quality to speed up page loading.  But there are some cool tools out there that can further improve things like this.  Even using gif’s and png’s instead of jpegs will make a difference as they tend to use less k’s is size.

One of the most useful image tools that we use is SmushIt (found in the YSlow plugin that is mentioned earlier in this post). SmushIt is able to examine the images on a web page and compress them even further with no noticeable degradation in image quality. Smushing your header and background images is a must, and the data savings are often surprising.

One of the big no-no’s that we often come across is using the browsers image scaling to fit a large image into a small space.  We often find this is the case in product catalogs, when a large product image is used for the shingle thumbnail on the category listing pages.  In this case, use a small thumbnail in the shingle instead of scaling.

For all other cases browser image scaling should be avoided, as the web browser is slow at scaling, not to mention the extra time spent downloading the large image. Always  ensure images are scaled to the correct size before use on your pages, and you’ll notice an improvement in load time.

If your website template uses a lot of background images, header images and image buttons  then the number of HTTP requests for a webpage will be quite high. Each request takes time and can slow down a page. To reduce this delay combine these template images into a CSS sprite image. This is basically one “big” image that contains all of your template images and using CSS classes you can pick out the correct part of this image that you need for each of the graphic elements on the page.

CSS and JavaScript Code

There are a few strategies for improving CSS and JavaScript file load time.  At a minimum you should externalize all CSS and JS files so that they can be cached by the users browser.  In addition, if you have more that one CSS or JS include file, combine all the CSS includes into one file, do the same with the JS includes, and this will reduce http requests.  For the hardcore guys out there, try to Minify the CSS/JavaScript which will remove unnecessary white-space and line-breaks. Minify can be also found in the YSlow plugin for Firebug.  And no, I don’t sell Firebug or Yslow (based on how many times I’ve mentioned it) – it’s just a cool plug in.

Reduce the amount of database calls in your application

A lot of websites out there rely on an SQL database to store information that is shown to your users.  If your site runs a product catalog or a CMS systems then the odds are that a database is involved.  Every time a page is requested by a browser, the database is queried for the information that the user will see on the page.  This back and forth takes time and can be a bottleneck.

To speed things up, only run the minimum database queries that are required and only request the actual table fields from the database that you need. Avoid “SELECT * FROM” in your SQL queries.   Optimizing things in this way can get quite quite knarly, so be prepared for a lot of hard work. For large sites that get a lot of traffic this can help in page load time tremendously and is worth the effort.

Wordpress

Wordpress is the most popular blogging software out there, and due to it’s flexibility is increasingly being used as a CMS system. Wordpress uses an SQL database to store all your posts and pages.

Hundreds of “plug-ins” are available for Wordpress to help customize it in countless ways.  Unfortunately the more plugins that you install, the slower Wordpress becomes.  The less plugins that are activated the faster your Wordpress blog will be.  You should also go as far as removing all unactivated wordpress plugins from your “plugin” directory.

A useful addition to Wordpress are “Widgets”, which allow for “real time updated” areas within your template. There are Widgets available to show latest posts, most popular posts, dynamic menus and much more.  The problem is that each one of these widgets will poll the database to get the information required, thus increasing the load time of the page.  Try to reduce the number of widgets that you use and if a widget is showing content that doesn’t change too often, try to hardcode the HTML with what the widget would display.

Summary

There are many more things to look at to speed up a website and those listed above are the areas that I initially tend to look at for my search engine optimisation clients. Depending on the size of a site and the amount of traffic it gets, even the simplest change can have a significant effect.

If there are any other ways you have found to speed up a site, I’d love to know of your experiences.

These are important decisions that need to be made in the planning of the project.    Without planning the whole aspect of starting a web-based business, spending too much on the build with no funds left for marketing will mean you’ll have a great site, but no-one will ever know about it.   Likewise, cutting corners on the build an design and ploughing most of the cash into advertising and other marketing might mean lots of people visiting your site, feel it lacks content or ease of use, and never return.

A good mixture of both will comprimise a good site and enough to launch the site and begin the awareness of it’s existance.

Whether your site is a blog, a shop or a self-perpetuating revenue-maker, funding that effectively is a priority to ensure the long-term success.   The costs of starting a web-based business is minimal if you compare it to a non-web-based business – you have no office or shop to rent, no staff (at first) and no utilities to pay eiether, but a good business and development plan is necessary for every web-based projects’ survival.  The most difficult part of starting a web-based business is the time and effort to build the business and continue growing the site.

Think of it like a snowball:

Imagine, you’re at the very peak of a snowy mountain.   You roll a snowball in your hands and place it on the floor.  It will take effort to begin rolling it down the hill as it weighs almost nothing and will take manual pushing to start building it up with more snow, always pushing it towards the slope.   After you’ve been pushing it a while and it has doubled in size, it becomes easier to then give it a tap and it begins to roll on it’s own for a short distance.  You may need a bit of energy to keep it going , guiding it down,  steering it slightly on track and constantly help it build and gain momentum.   Once that snowball is at an appropriate size, the weight accumulated then means that the snowball has it’s own weight to help momentum and begins rolling non-stop down the mountainside on it’s own accord.   As it rolls, it gets faster and faster – gaining more snow and growing in size as it plummets down the slope.  Before long, you couldn’t actually stopped it getting bigger if you tried.

The hardest part of getting your website going, is at the start…. the big push.   See a rough guideline below for simple purchases needing on any website:

Domain Name

Registering a domain name is necessary for any online business.  Once a business name is established, the domain name is registered at websites such as Dotster.com, Register.com and GoDaddy.com.   The cost of a domain name is dependent on the extension (the .com, .co.uk, .net etc).   For most business owners, a .com extension is beneficial because it is the most commonly known extension among people.   A one-year registration service for a .com domain name is around £7-9.   This service needs to be renewed every year.  Buying it for an extended period will save you money.

Hosting Service

Hosting services have a wide range of prices, and prices are determined by the platform the business uses. Programming a website in .NET is usually more expensive, whereas a PHP website can be hosted for as low as £5 to £10 a month.  Free hosting services are available, but free services require ads or popups, which is not professional for business purposes.  Be aware that you will get what you pay for.

Database

Database services are for websites that host dynamic content.  The most common databases for Internet websites are mySQL and SQL Server; the former is usually a free or minimally charged service from the host of the website, and the SQL Server costs slightly more and is used with .NET websites.   SQL Server costs can be as low as £10 per month.

Programming and Design

Unless you as a web-business owner have programming and design experience, it’s necessary to hire a professional programmer and designer to do it for you.  Most design agencies have both services in-house.  The programming and design can be accomplished using separate service providers.  The designer can provide a design that the programmer works with to create the web pages.  The cost of a programmer and a designer is dependent on experience and the complexity of the website.  Some professionals may charge as low as £20 per hour.   More advanced sites may need a highly skilled programmer and designer, which can cost £50 to £75 per hour.   Large, complex sites for this reason can take 100’s of man hours at the higher rates, so negotiate costs up-front.

PC Resources

Owning a web-based business means that you need a computer with high-speed online service.  These costs are also dependent on location and type of service.   High-speed Internet access is necessary for the business owner to communicate with clients, conduct research and upload new pages and images.  The cost for Internet connect can run from £30 to £100 per month.   If your site goes down, your business is down so invest in a decent service to ensure that you remain a happy business-owner.

]]> http://www.theonemanmission.com/featured/your-website-start-up-the-costs/feed/ 0 http://www.theonemanmission.com/brand/branding-your-website/ http://www.theonemanmission.com/brand/branding-your-website/#comments Sun, 07 Mar 2010 16:43:16 +0000 Phil http://theonemanmission.com/?p=477 Branding — a hot business buzzword in the ’90s — has come front and center again. Small businesses are rediscovering that branding is a surefire way to make or break a product or service, and the company that produces it. Every business can benefit from branding, right down to the independent contractor working alone. It’s becoming increasingly vital to keep up. Buyers — either business or consumer — have shorter and shorter attention spans. Entrepreneurs must constantly recharge existing brands and devise new ones. Branding and marketing go together. Says branding guru Laura Ries, of the marketing firm Ries & Ries, “If you can build a powerful brand you will have a powerful marketing program. If you can’t, then all the advertising, fancy packaging, sales promotions and PR in the world won’t help you succeed.” Three keys to power-branding:

1. Effective branding combines Web and off-line elements. It is much more than a customer’s reaction to your name or logo. It’s the customer’s total experience with you, your product or service.
2. Think what you sell can’t be branded? Think again. Almost anything can be branded, including you, personally.
3. The Web is the only interactive mass medium, so take advantage of it. Use interactive features whenever possible. The future belongs to the up-and-coming businesses that do the best job of building their brands on the Internet.

Business.com’s “What Works for Business” blog is a great way to keep up with the latest brand-building solutions, trends and strategies for small and medium business.

Action Steps
The best contacts and resources to help you get it done:

Tips & Tactics
Helpful advice for making the most of this Guide

• The best brands tend to tap emotions and appeal to a person’s natural need for involvement.
• Strive for simplicity. Too much information confuses your brand message.
• Be original in identifying your brand identity – the thing that sets you apart. Hint: Not quality or service. Everybody does that!
• Be consistent with your brand’s look, feel and message whenever and wherever they appear.
• Avoid trying to be overly “cool” or in-the-moment. Too hard to sustain. The brand must be relevant, but long term.
• Base your brand on your customers’ needs. Don’t know them? Ask your customers.

Page ranks can be easily described numerically ranging from 1 to 10 where 10 works as the highest page rank in the whole chain. It has been noted that a very less amount of pages are featured with the page rank of 10 but any number above the ranking of 6 is taken to be a favorable one.

There are a wide variety of factors that helps in proper determining of the page ranks. However, the major variable appears to be actually based on the number of websites that link to your site’s page. Larger the number of popular sites visiting your site, better is the chances to get high position on the known search engines. So to say, take for example a case in which excellent ranking websites such as Yahoo.com or CNN.com links to your site. In this situation, your site will automatically get popular and this linking of the excellent ranking websites is much better than links from a large number of low page ranking sites.

Enhancing the page ranks of your site is not only described by the total number of back links you possess and use. Even article marketing with targeted titles, content and keywords, is an important factor that helps in taking the page ranks to higher heights. Equally essential is the site’s content. The actual content of the website requires to be the details that the users can read and use in the best possible manner. Having the right kind of content that suits the keywords is one of the other factors as well that contributes a lot in deciding the overall page ranks. There are various inquisitions in the minds of website owners about whether there are some ways that can actually help in generating good page ranking and that too without involving any expenses or costs. The exact answer to these inhibitions is actually “yes”. There are a few things, however, that needs to be considered wisely in order to generate great page ranks.

The first and foremost thing that needs to be kept in mind while looking for better page ranking at no cost is that of creating internal back links. It is necessary to make links to your website whenever applicable. Take for instance a condition where you mention the online payment system on the introductory page. In such a case, it is not only good to add the service provided of online payments, it is always a better option to hyperlink the specific payments page so that the customer can easily get to the payments system and enjoy the facilities. By doing this, not only your website is creating another back link for the spiders, it is making it easier for the visitors to get to the specific payments page right there and that too without wasting their precious time.

The second aspect that needs proper consideration is that of avoiding the usage of dead-end back links. In case you have worked day and night on creating around 7 relevant pages. Your page rankings have the ability to be a rank of 7. But if by chance some of those pages are basically not providing any relevant results, they you really need to consider and figure out the main problem. Whenever the search engine spiders crawl on a site, they wish to move from one web page to the other. You may be featured with a really fantastic and informative page but in case it is not equipped with other page pinks, the spiders will take that particular excellent page to be a dead-link one thereby reducing the chances of enjoying high page ranks. It is necessary to ensure that each web page is added with an external door apart from the back button. You can easily add an index link or maybe a site navigator on each page in order to add that extra convenience for your site visitors.

The data means that around 20% of those with a mobile use it to access websites and that all small businesses must have a site that is compatible with mobile technology.

There are now 6.2m smartphone users in the UK after 600,000 people bought one of the latest technology phones since last summer.

It’s a fact:

10 million people (in the UK) are accessing the internet on mobiles

“The era of the handset as a truly multi-media device on a mass-market level lies somewhere on the horizon,” said Edward Kershaw, head of mobile media at Nielsen.

So I set out to find just how this was accomplished.   I personally have a potentially large commercial website due for launch in a month or two, and have always wanted to find out just how I was going to make it friendly to mobile users – especially when you learn that there are more people in the world who own a mobile device than who own a credit card.  Big numbers.  Also, take a look at the Japanese at the moment (who are normally two steps ahead of the Western world when it comes to technology) – only a small percentage now have home PC’s, as mobile devices are the norm for all their internet / communication needs.

Let’s get stuck in:

You may think that since you write valid code and separate structure from presentation at all times, your site already works great on mobile devices. You may also think bad things don’t happen to good people. In both cases, you’d be wrong.

The fact of the matter is that the state of HTML rendering in the wireless world is all over the map right now. Some browsers, like Pocket Internet Explorer, are actually pretty good at parsing through standard web pages. Others can scarcely handle layout rules at all. And still worse are the mobile browsers that load all CSS and javascript files, attempt to use them, and screw up the experience even more in the process.

What’s really needed until HTML/CSS/JS support is improved in mobile devices is a little server-side filtering. By pulling out everything a mobile device can possibly choke on before it even gets to the mobile device, we can create a mobile version of our site which is not only viewable on more devices but is much quicker to download as well.

And you know what? The mobile version of your site is probably going to be much easier on screenreaders too.

Four easy steps

Outlined below are the four steps to get this done in a matter of minutes, provided you are in an Apache environment and can run PHP.   If you’re not, these steps can easily be adaptable to other technologies.

Step 1: Set up a domain mirror

If your site lives at

www.theonemanmission.com

you’re going to want to set up a subdomain at:

mobile.theonemanmission.com

How you accomplish this is usually pretty straightforward but differs depending on your host. You want to set up your subdomain as a “mirror” of your main site, meaning the subdomain is really just pointing to your existing site.

Step 2: Create a global_prepend file

The next thing we’re going to do is a create a PHP file which will be automatically prepended to every page of our site. Call this file something like "global_prepend.php"

and throw it at the root of your server:

<br />
<?php<br />
function callback($buffer) {<br />
if ($_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'] == ‘mobile.owendevelopment.com’) {<br />
$buffer = str_replace(‘http://www.myawesomeblog.com’, ‘http://mobile.myawesomeblog.com’, $buffer);<br />
$buffer = preg_replace(‘/[\n\r\t]+/’, ”, $buffer);<br />
$buffer = preg_replace(‘/\s{2,}/’, ‘ ‘, $buffer);<br />
$buffer = preg_replace(‘/(<a[^>]*>)(<img[^>]+alt=”)([^"]*)(“[^>]*>)(<\/a>)/i’, ‘$1$3$5<br />’, $buffer);<br />
$buffer = preg_replace(‘/(<link[^>]+rel=”[^"]*stylesheet”[^>]*>|<img[^>]*>|style=”[^"]*”)|<script[^>]*>.*?<\/script>|<style[^>]*>.*?<\/style>|<!–.*?–>/i’, ”, $buffer);<br />
$buffer = preg_replace(‘/<\/head>/i’, ‘<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex, nofollow”></head>’, $buffer);<br />
}<br />
return $buffer;<br />
}<br />
ob_start(“callback”);<br />
?>

This code uses a PHP function called

ob_start()

to read in your entire HTML source, run some rules on it, and then send the output to users’ web browsers… all in real time.   The first

"if"

statement simply checks to see if the user is coming from our special “mobile” URL, and if so, runs seven replace statements on the code.   Here’s what each line does:

1. Changes all URLs to “mobile”-ized URLs.Strips all linefeeds, carriage returns, and tabs.Trims multiple spaces down to one (HTML doesn’t recognize more than one space in a row).Changes any anchored images with alt text to plain text anchors.Strips all stylesheets, images, inline styles, scripts, and comments (including RDF).Tells search engine robots not to index or crawl the mobile version of the site so as to not create duplicate listings.

Step 3: Create global_append file

Next, we need to create a tiny PHP file which will automatically get added to the end of every file on our site. This is the code that actually outputs the page to the browser. So the flow is like so: Suck code into buffer, siphon fat away, spit contents of buffer into browser.

The code for the global_append file is below. Call it something like

"global_append.php"

and throw it at the root of your server:

<br />
<?php<br />
ob_end_flush();<br />
?>

Step 4: Enable prepends and appends using .htaccess

If you don’t already have an

.htaccess

file at the root of your server, open up a new text file and add these lines to it:

php_value auto_prepend_file /localfilepath/global_prepend.php
php_value auto_append_file /localfilepath/global_append.php

Then save it to the root of your server with the filename ".htaccess"

If you already have an .htaccess file, just add the above lines to it.

* Important Note: If you copy these two lines from your web browser, you might need to delete the carriage return and make your own. Sometimes a browser’s carriage return will cause your .htaccess file to fail (you’ll know immediately if it has failed because your site won’t come up).

Assuming your subdomain is live, you should now be able to hit your site in a web browser using the special mobile URL and see a nice, compact, imageless, styleless, scriptless version of your site. Voila!

Many thanks to the Genius of  http://www.mikeindustries.com for this useful info.

]]> http://www.theonemanmission.com/featured/make-your-website-mobile-friendly/feed/ 2 http://www.theonemanmission.com/marketing/7-hot-secrets-to-viral-video-success/ http://www.theonemanmission.com/marketing/7-hot-secrets-to-viral-video-success/#comments Mon, 30 Nov 2009 14:18:50 +0000 Phil http://theonemanmission.com/?p=475 Viral videos are the Holy Grail of Internet Marketing.  Every individual, marketing firm, and corporation is striving to create a piece of video content that goes viral.  Most of it is just shooting in the dark. There’s no real way of specially filming content, or choosing what is likely to go viral.  This can bee seen as a negative point, but it also means that anyone who has that special short video clip can propel anything they are advertising or selling on the back of it.  And believe me, some do very, very well.

I’ve heard some respected people in the industry quote stats like “only 2% of YouTube videos ever go viral.”  Granted, it’s a bit absurd to try and quantify what percentage of videos go viral when the very definition of something having “gone viral” is open to wide interpretation and debate.  How many views make a video viral… is it 100,000? A million? How fast do those views have to come to count as viral? You can see how difficult it gets to quantify. But I think we can all agree that very few videos go viral as hoped.

I think it might help to examine some viral video successes and attempt to break them down, check out what makes them different, and define what it was that made them work.

1. The Accident  - AKA: Oops, You’re Famous

Summary: Probably the most common type of viral video is the accidental viral video. These are shot by non professionals, usually just a single user, and are uploaded without the faintest hope or inkling of mega popularity. These are often uploaded for friends and family, but unexpectedly take on a life of their own.

Examples: Chocolate Rain, or the JK Wedding Dance.

Chance of Success: Virtually nonexistent. Since viewers are the ones who cause Accident Viral Videos to exist, they are impossible to predict.  Creators of these Accident videos are often quite surprised to see their little creation hit a million views or to get invites to a national talk show. By definition, you can’t plan for this to happen.

2. The Imitation - AKA: Anything You Can Do I Can Do Worse

Summary: What happens when Big Business takes notice of an Accident viral video (or any other viral video success for that matter)? They try to recreate it, naturally. You can also call this “The Hollywood”, since major film studios have been riding film trends with countless rip-offs for years—after coming out of the Disaster Movie era a few years back, we are now firmly entrenched in the Snarky Animation era (thank you Shrek) and the Torture Horror era (thank you Saw). It works like this: See something successful, then recreate it as closely as possible, removing only the most obvious copy-cat elements. Like making photocopies of photocopies… the enjoyment and interest in the video wanes exponentially with each passing generation of rip-offs.

Examples: Dr. Pepper hiring the Chocolate Rain guy to sing about Cherry Chocolate Rain, or the JK Divorce Dance video.

Chances of Success: Moderate. Ripoff, Spoof, and Copycat videos are never as popular as their inspiration. They benefit initially by piggy-backing off the fame and popularity of the original, but that soon wanes. A huge section of the video-watching population sees them for what they are… rip-offs… copies of an original that is much more… well, original.

3. The Embarrassment - AKA: Kill Me Now

Summary: Something embarrassing happens to someone, and said embarrassment is caught on film. Uh oh.  This is one of the most popular kinds of videos… it’s the “you’ll never believe what this idiot just did” phenomenon.  It’s very difficult for major brands to have success with this kind of viral video, as most brands aren’t interested in embarrassing themselves.  Yet you have the recent Jim Brewer Goes Off On Film Crew video that, to me, has to be fake and manufactured.  And in that example, it’s the hired actor “embarrassing” himself, not the brand.

Examples: Star Wars Kid, Boom Goes the Dynamite, Miss South Carolina

Chances of Success: Higher than normal if real, far less likely if staged.

4. The Special Effects - AKA: Is That Real?

Summary: A popular trend in viral video is the subtle use of special effects to make an unbelievable event slightly more believable. Because the quality of video on YouTube is generally lower than what you get at your local movie theater (and because the screen size is so much smaller), special effects are slightly harder to gauge for the average viewer. With just the right touch of CGI, you can make something fantastic appear real.

Examples: Kobe Jumping Over A Car, Microsoft’s MegaWOOSH, NFL.com’s Fantasy Football Series

Chances of Success: High, particularly if you can score a celebrity like Kobe to star in your video (keep in mind… “high probability” on this scale is still a long-shot). All that’s required is enough believability to cause a portion of the audience to wonder if it’s real. Once you have a few of them believing it, they’ll start the viral process for you, sending out links to the video to all their friends. Even something so obviously fake as the Microsoft Slide video still convinced enough people to go viral—even prompting Microsoft to eventually admit it was faked.

5. The WTF - AKA: What Did I Just Watch?!

Summary: Sometimes a video goes viral simply because viewers aren’t sure what they’re looking at. Sometimes unexplained imagery captivates an audience in a way that standard videos cannot.

Examples: Cadbury’s Gorilla, Sony Bravia Bouncing Balls

Chances of Success: Low. Hitting on a “what the heck is that?” video is an extremely inexact science. If you’d have told me two years ago that Cadbury’s was about to release a viral video of a gorilla playing drums along to Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight” and that it would get millions of views, I’d have told you that you were insane. Predicting what people will like is hard enough when you’re staying comfortably in the box. Stray outside that box into the strange and bizarre, and your odds go down even further.  The payoff, though, can be huge.

6. The Shill - AKA: Obviously Corporate Advertising

Summary: You might think I’m about to bash or slam these videos.  But I’m not.  If a company can find a way to highlight a product or service in a manner that is still entertaining to viewers, you have what we call a “win/win” scenario.  What might initially look like a television commercial can—with the right dash of humor and personality—become a web sensation.  Users want to be entertained, first and foremost.  If it happens to be an advertisement, so be it… as long as it makes us laugh (or smile, or cry, or whatever).

Examples: Will It Blend, Awareness Test

Chances of Success: Among the highest on this list. People have inherent trust in certain brands, and at the end of the day, most of the viewing public just wants to be entertained. If you can do that while being completely transparent in your attempts to advertise, then you can save time and money on the front end and have maximum impact on the back end.

Look at Subservient Chicken (no, not a video, but a good example nonetheless). Most of the folks I knew who were forwarding that around in 2001 or whenever it was were not the least bit concerned that it was a clear and obvious Burger King commercial. All they cared about was that you could control what the chicken does! In the end, Burger King’s stock went up a few notches in the eyes of the users because they provided something fun and entertaining.

7. The Blair Witch - AKA: Those  Faking Fakers

Summary: Not to be confused with The Special Effects (though they are similar), The Blair Witch viral video is one where everything is staged.  Big companies are so desperate for their own slice of viral video history that they’re often willing to try faking it.  Hire some actors, give them a script, and then pay them to pretend they aren’t actors.  It’s a lot harder to do right than you might think.  Forget for a second that the average YouTube viewer is already trained to cry “fake” at the first sign of something out of the ordinary. It’s actually incredibly hard to artificially manufacture authenticity.

Examples: LonelyGirl15, the Disneyland “Spontaneous” Wedding Proposal from earlier this summer (that is so obviously and totally fake).

Chances of Success: Pretty slim. Lonely Girl kind of killed it for the rest of us. The YouTube series turned us all into cynical skeptics.

So, which variety of viral video should businesses shoot for? Well, most businesses aren’t out to embarrass themselves, so we can scratch that one.  The Accident videos are, by definition, not something you can intentionally create, so that’s out too.  The Imitation is a short term solution, destined to have a ceiling for success, but I still have clients that choose that option.

The Special Effects videos almost always require a bit of budget, particularly if you’re going to use a recognizable figure.  To fake an amazing feat, even if you eschew CGI, there are tons of hidden costs in planning, setup, and execution.

The WTF is probably the riskiest venture, because you spend money on producing an ad that has no assurance of even being understood, let alone enjoyed.   I’m sure there was more than one raised eyebrow in the room when Sony was pitched on the Bouncing Ball concept. Most of my clients are not interested in being video concept trailblazers, at least not in this economy.

And the Blair Witch is nearly as risky as the WTF. First, it’s tough to find actors who are good enough to pull off the fake but are also not recognizable enough for people to instantly remember them from some White Castle commercial. But it’s also risky because of the possibility of getting caught in the fakery. Once viewers know something is fake, you may still get views… but your branding efforts are completely undone.

If you’re just dipping your toe in the water of viral videos for the first time, or if you are a small business… the best approach is to simply find a creative, lighthearted way to highlight who you are and what you do.

Mission post with thanks from the geniuses at www.reelseo.com

Read the top tips, then follow the explanations below for an understanding into the reasoning behind them.  Information like this isn’t everywhere on the web:

Redesign your Web site once or twice a year.

Add 5 pages of content to your site every week.

Change the titles on your least successful pages twice a year.

Stop using keywords in your URLs.

Stop using keywords in your titles.

Find 3 SEO forums that accept site review requests and write 20 reviews in each forum before you ever ask a question.

Create your own SEO book by collecting your favorite SEO forum and blog posts, newsletter articles, and tech tips in a .PDF file that you review once a month.

Create a new SEO book once each year, replacing the one you just created in the previous step.

Optimize your best peforming page for the exact mirror of your targeted keyword expression (turn an ABCD page into a DCBA page).

Find 5 low-traffic blogs or forums that are consistently active and support them through comments, links, and referrals WITHOUT being self-promotional.

Write 10 blocks of ad copy (no more than 25 words each) every week. Place them on the Web where they won’t offend anyone.

Write 1 full-page announcement about your Web site each week.  Post it some place where it won’t offend anyone.

Get a text editor like Notepad (the fewer frills the better) and use it to code one of your Web pages from scratch.

Learn how to write Who, What, Where, When, and Why in 4 paragraphs or less.

Create a 1-page listing of 20 UNKNOWN Web sites you wish you had created. Post that page on your site.

Create a forum signature that does not promote your Web site.  Put it into every forum profile you have created.

Design a 5-10 page Web site about a community project or charitable activity. Promote that site to number 1. Now repeat the process without changing or building more links for your first site.

Find a niche directory you have never heard of before that you feel is honestly listing unique, useful Web sites. Promote that niche directory through links and comments on your own sites until you see improvement in its Compete, Quantcast, and Alexa metrics.

Find a friend or relative who has no clue about Web sites and persuade him or her to create a Web site. You must restrain yourself and ONLY give advice on how to build and promote the site.

Define a metric that uses from three to five factors OTHER THAN Google PageRank, Alexa Rankings, Compete Rankings, Quantcast Rankings, and backlink counts. Use this metric to track five to ten sites you don’t control for six months.

20 Hard Core SEO Tips – The Explanations

Change is the only constant you can count on in search engine optimization.  Although we often say that the fundamental principles of search engine optimization don’t change, pretty much everything else does.  If you want to be really, really good at this, you cannot be inflexible.  You cannot afford the luxury of becoming emotionally bonded to any particular idea.

Redesign your Web site once or twice a year. Why? Because you’ll find things you broke the last time around and you’ll be able to fix them.  Because you’ll finally be able to tweak the optimization for pages you have known could do better but for which you never found the time to do anything.  Because you’ll have an opportunity to improve your visitor experience and make your presentation more competitive (but avoid the “Web X.0 pitfall” — don’t marry your site to any particular concept).

Add 5 pages of content to your site every week. Why? Because it gives you opportunities to expand your search visibility. Because it gives you opportunities for more free links that actually help. Because it gives you opportunities to try out new ideas.  Because it increases the value of your Web site.

Change the titles on your least successful pages twice a year. Why? Because obviously those titles weren’t helping your least successful pages.

Stop using keywords in your URLs. Why? Because if you don’t know how to optimize a page without slamming keywords into the URLs, you don’t know how to optimize a Web page.

Stop using keywords in your titles. Why? Because if you don’t know how to optimize a Web page without stuffing your title, then you don’t know how to optimize a Web page. Titles and URLs are options, not requirements, in search engine optimization. Learn to understand and fully appreciate the difference between being able to do something and needing to do something.

Find 3 SEO forums that accept site review requests and write 20 reviews in each forum before you ever ask a question. Why? Because looking at someone else’s mistakes and brilliant ideas with an unemotional, critical, helpful point of view will only help improve your own self-analysis.  Keep your ideas and opinions to yourself.  Just share your feedback on how other people’s sites look.  You’ll learn more faster by helping with your honest, gut-level reactions than by helping forum idiots attack people whose ideas they don’t agree with.  You’ll also look more professional, too.

Create your own SEO book by collecting your favorite SEO forum and blog posts, newsletter articles, and tech tips in a .PDF file that you review once a month. Why?  So you have all your favorite advice in one easy-to-read-and-search compendium.  Don’t sell it.  Just use it.

Create a new SEO book once each year, replacing the one you just created in the previous step. Why? Because after a year of using all the advice you put in the previous one you’ll have a far better idea of just how much crap and bullshit you’re getting from SEO blogs and forums.  But that also means your next SEO book will be ten times better than the last.

Optimize your best peforming page for the exact mirror of your targeted keyword expression (turn an ABCD page into a DCBA page). Why?  You can’t do better than to nail the number 1 position for a query, so why not aim for a second query?  If you can optimize a page forwards and backwards, you should be able to handle just about anything.

Find 5 low-traffic blogs or forums that are consistently active and support them through comments, links, and referrals WITHOUT being self-promotional. Why?  It teaches you just how hard it is to build a good community, and maybe you’ll appreciate what “good community” really means before you act like an ass in an SEO forum or blog and flame someone else for disagreeing with you.  But there is another reason.  Keep reading to see if you can find it in the explanations given below.

Write 10 blocks of ad copy (no more than 25 words each) every week. Place them on the Web where they won’t offend anyone. Why? Because you can never write too many advertisements. Your audience is always changing. Your venues are always changing. And GOOD ad copy (not the cheap, shlocky crap you see most of the time) makes GREAT meta description tags.  BTW — you should write that ad copy for sites other than your own until you learn to stop using cheap, shlocky crap expressions like “Proudly announces”, “pleased to admit”, “best prices”, etc. Be informative. Be compelling. Be classy.

Write 1 full-page announcement about your Web site each week. Post it some place where it won’t offend anyone. Why? Because you should spend some time promoting your site while you learn how to become a better search optimizer. Besides, practice makes perfect.

Get a text editor like Wordpad (the fewer frills the better) and use it to code one of your Web pages from scratch. Why? Because when you’ve seen just how stupid your templated CSS code really is, you’ll begin to understand why ugly works better than pretty.

Learn how to write Who, What, Where, When, and Why in 4 paragraphs or less. Why? Because you should never write a press release that starts out with, “John Shlock Smith the Shmuck proudly announces….”

Create a 1-page listing of 20 UNKNOWN Web sites you wish you had created. Post that page on your site. Why? Because it’s an opportunity for you to create an honest, sincere resource that no one else on the Web has the ability to create. Because people are actually more interested in your opinion of OTHER people’s Web sites than your opinion of your own Web sites.   Because if you haven’t found 20 sites you wish you had created that no one else has talked about in your regular Web communities, you need to spend less time with your buds and more time with the rest of the Web.

Create a forum signature that does not promote your Web site. Put it into every forum profile you have created. Why? Because it makes you look confident, professional, and less like a shlocky self-promotional shmuck who doesn’t know what forums are for.  More importantly, it will teach you to write compelling content (think of those 25-word advertisements I mentioned above).

Design a 5-10 page Web site about a community project or charitable activity. Promote that site to number 1. Now repeat the process without changing or building more links for your first site. Why? Because you’ll never compete with anyone harder to beat than yourself.

Find a niche directory you have never heard of before that you feel is honestly listing unique, useful Web sites. Promote that niche directory through links and comments on your own sites until you see improvement in its Compete, Quantcast, and Alexa metrics. Why?  Because you need to know what it takes to become an influencer without cheating through social media Web site spam.

Find a friend or relative who has no clue about Web sites and persuade him or her to create a Web site. You must restrain yourself and ONLY give advice on how to build and promote the site. Why?  Because I’ve had to suffer through the frustration of not being able to take the computer away from someone who wants to do it their own way. Misery loves company.  Besides, it teaches us to be humble and appreciate the people who at least listen half the time.

Define a metric that uses from three to five factors OTHER THAN Google PageRank, Alexa Rankings, Compete Rankings, Quantcast Rankings, and backlink counts.  Use this metric to track five to ten sites you don’t control for six months. Why?  Because you need a competitive advantage that you cannot possibly get from using someone’s backlink checking tool.  Because you need to understand and appreciate that there is more to the Web than links. Because you need to be one step ahead of the other guy, who may very well have his own metrics in place before you even get started.

20 Hard Core SEO Tips – What They Mean:

Let the idiots spend their days arguing in the SEO blogs and forums. They don’t need your help to look stupid.

You can learn from other people by watching them, helping them, promoting their sites, and putting the community ahead of yourself.  They won’t always appreciate what you do.  But you can knock a self-promotional shmuck out of the search results any day of the week if you know more about search engine optimization than he does.

You have to keep moving forward. When you stop learning about search engine optimization the idea of getting back into the game becomes overwhelming. Worse, if you become dependent upon any one tip or technique, you hobble yourself in ways you cannot possibly imagine.

Thanks to Michael Martinez for posting this on www.seo-theory.com

The amount of leverage that this gives to even a small home business entrepreneur to brainstorm and act upon big ideas, simply can’t be over-estimated.  The ability to put those ideas into the homes of literally millions worldwide is what it truly amounts to.  That’s the sort of power that was previously only available to large corporations.  But not any more.

Already successful but traditional entrepreneurs can look forward to their ideas creating even bigger pay days by utilising the internet.  Now they can have a voice and sell their products in places that were simply out of reach previously.  No other business medium has had the impact or afforded such opportunity before.

But thats only the beginning.  Slick entrepreneurs know that they can test their ideas whilst cutting their advertising and promotional costs down to virtually zero.  Saying that, they can still reach a bigger target market than ever before.  That market is still growing and is still very sustainable.

In real-life terms, that means that no matter what an entrepreneur is selling - digital or physical products – if its a good idea, it can literally make a fortune in a very short period of time.

Plus there’s so many ways to promote and advertise and a lot of them are free, certainly nearly all are very inexpensive.  So a clever entrepreneur can promote a new idea using free advertising methods and then re-invest the profits to promote a good idea further and generate even more sales and bigger pay days.

If you’re thinking of entering the world of entrepreneur business then just one good idea could truly change your life overnight.  Really, thats not cloud cuckoo-land.  Naturally you need to hit upon the right idea but even small ideas can lead to bigger things, and sometimes, even the daftest idea can be what makes it big.   So for entrepreneurs full of big ideas the world wide web truly is their oyster and there’s a very big pearl in the middle of it.   I advise you all to think hard and reach out for it.