I’m thinking about…. thought leaders.  Not the people who declare themselves to be, but those on the cusp who are putting new ideas out there and seeing how they fly.

I have a client who is doing great things and thinking in a different way.  He sells modular buildings.  And he holds the vision of how this could be a breakthrough concept for school design.

Reconfigurable as class sizes change.  As learning styles evolve.  As town and school budgets fluctuate.   As more is learned every day about innovative ways to teach children.

They can look permanent — customized to fit in with rest of architecture.  But they can also MOVE as the needs of the school change.

Plus they’re GREEN — saving resources while providing a healthier environment for children.

Cool, right?  And an application of modular buildings that has barely been explored.

He is a thought leader, ready to lead his industry  in a new direction.  The trouble is, he’s not sure.  “I don’t know enough,” he worries.

Here’s the secret.

When you’re pushing boundaries, you will never feel that you know enough.  How could you?  The territory is all new.  And most likely changing.

As long as you continue to innovate and imagine, that slightly unsure feeling in your stomach will persist.  Along with the excitement of learning new things and seeing in new ways.  And sharing that.

Get over it

(And I say that in the most loving way possible).  No one will ever declare you an expert.  You have to be willing to be out in front… to lead.

A true thought leader rarely believes they are one.

Photo by Jule_Berlin

Whether you’re about to write your very first blog post or there’s a hundred under your belt, you want to make sure to take the proper steps to SEO your blog so that the people out there can actually find you and benefit from all the fabulous things you have to say.

We’ll get more in depth later, but today we’re going to talk about the first basic step you need to take (if you haven’t already) to get search engines to show your blog the love it deserves.

Permalinks

Permalinks are the URLs that point to the individual posts or pages on your blog. When you first install WordPress, the default structure for this URL is going to look something like this:

http://www.yourdomain.com/?p=123

Boring right? Besides basing a post’s rank on the keywords found within the content, title, etc., search engines also look to the URL for a clue as to where and how high up your post should appear when someone searches using that keyword. A permalink set up like this tells the search engines NOTHING about what your post is about.

Luckily WordPress offers an easy way to fix this.

Changing the Default Permalink Settings

From your Dashboard, click on Settings > Permalinks. You will come to a page that looks like this:

If you haven’t already made this change, your setting is most likely to be at the Default. Click the bubble next to Custom Structure and then type the following into the field on its right:

/%postname%

Scroll down the page and click Save Changes.

(Note: Occasionally, some websites are set up with strict permission settings on their files. If you get a failure notice to update your .htaccess file, contact your webmaster to change the file permission to 777. They can always change it back after you’ve completed this step.)

Editing a Post’s Permalink

Now you’re ready to edit the permalinks on your individual posts. To test it out, add a new post. Making sure your post window is set to the Visual tab, type in your post’s title. Immediately you will see the post’s permalink appear directly underneath the title bar, and that it is now pulling all the words from your title instead of the original letters and numbers gobbledygook. The next thing we’re going to do is tweak that custom URL. Click the Edit button directly to the right of the permalink.

The three rules of thumb of a good permalink are keep it relatively short, include a target keyword and remove unnecessary words.

For example, say you have a post that you title “The Benefits of Hiring a Good Financial Planner” By default your new permalink is going to look like this:

http://www.yourdomain.com/the-benefits-of-hiring-a-good-financial-planner

While this looks better than http://www.yourdomain.com/?p=123, it’s too long and search engines disregard articles like the, of, a, etc. You also want to choose the fewest words that best describe this post. So keeping that in mind and assuming that “financial planner” is my most important keyword, I’m going to delete the default permalink and type in this:

/financial-planner-benefits

I’ve removed the the’s and the a’s, inserted the target keyword right at the front and have kept it short. Beautiful!

Now go try it out yourself, and stay tuned for more on optimizing your blog.

Google Analytics is a powerful tool for your website (and free!) – allowing you to track in-depth how your site is doing – how many visits it’s getting, where those visits are coming from, what pages they’re landing on, etc.

Looks great on “paper”, but…

You want to make sure that the incoming traffic you’re seeing is as accurate as possible. One way to ensure that is to remove yourself from the equation with a Filter. Analytics is extremely smart, but it doesn’t know that this is YOUR site unless you tell it so. Every time one of you or your co-workers or contractors visit the site, Analytics is going to record that as a visit.

You may login to Analytics one day and say “Holy cow! Look at all those visits! We must be on the right track”.  But if you haven’t created a Filter, your results are going to be skewed. It’s a simple concept and right now you might be thinking “Duuuhh” – but it’s a common occurrence for business owners to forget this important step.

First Step – Finding Your IP Address

The first thing to do is  find out what your IP address is. An IP address is the unique number that identifies your internet network. The simplest way to do that is to go to an IP lookup site like http://www.whatismyip.com. Just go to this site and your IP address will appear right at the top. It will look something like this:

Make sure that you instruct all your employees, co-workers, independent contractors to do the same to add to the Filter. Make that sure that everyone provides you with an IP address from anywhere they visit the site, including their home IP.

 Creating the Filter

Login to Analytics and click on your website’s name to access the Profile. At the bottom right you will click the link that says Filter Manager.

From this page, you will click + Add Filter

Enter the Filter name. This can be anything you decide to identify each individual person’s IP address. For example, if your name is Rob and you want to filter out your work computer, you would name it something like Rob – Office.

Make sure the Predefined Filter bubble is selected

Next there are 3 pull-down menus to choose from. You are going to select Exclude > Traffic from the IP Addresses > that are equal to.

Next type in the IP address for “Rob-Office”. Make sure that you keep it in the same format with the periods in the same place.

In the next window, highlight your website profile and click Add.

Click Save Changes at the bottom.

That’s it! You will repeat this process for each IP address that you want to exclude from your Analytics reports. If you’re a one-woman or one-man band, then you’re done!

Photo courtesy of Christian Beirle Gonzalez

/clients-page-here?fb_xd_fragment=

My first reaction was “What the #$&% is that??”

Where fb_xd_fragment Comes From

In a nutshell, what has happened is that you have placed the XFBML version of the Facebook Like button on your site, allowing your visitors to Like and Share your pages galore. This is a wonderful thing. However, in doing so, this handy little button creates a “phantom” page every time someone clicks Like, resulting in Google Analytics recording it as a separate page visited.

So for example you have a page called www.yourdomain.com/buy-my-widgets

If you have placed the Facebook button on this page, Analytics will show it twice like this:

www.yourdomain.com/buy-my-widgets  Pageviews: 500,000  – This is the REAL number of pageviews for this page

(if you actually did get 500K pageviews in a month, I’m thoroughly impressed by the way)

www.yourdomain.com/buy-my-widgets?fb_xd_fragment=  Pageviews: 100,000 – this is how many times visitors clicked the Facebook Like button while visiting this page.

I See It! What Next?

If you’ve come across this in your own Analytics reports, you’re not alone. The infamous Facebook Like button bug has been discussed and forumed and posted and shared across the Internet for a while now.

Most of these discussions involve confusing coding gobbledygook to fix the problem, but today we’re just going to talk about how to remove this parameter from your Google Analytics reports. If these FB Like pages are being indexed by Google or other search engines, that is very bad for SEO.  Contact your web developer or designer immediately so that they may find the coding solution best suited for your site.

So, on to removing this little Facebook nugget from your Analytics. There are two ways to do this.

The Permanent Solution

One is to permanently exclude it so that you never have to see it again:

1. Login to Analytics and then click on the Account name of the website you’re working with.

2. Click on the Edit link which is located all the way to the right of the screen underneath Actions.

3. Click Edit on the first section called Main Website Profile Information. You will see a field called Exclude URL Query Parameters. Enter fb_xd_fragment into this field.

4. Click Save Changes at the bottom.

Simple right?

The Temporary Solution

You may decide that you want to have the option of seeing how many times the Facebook Like button was clicked, but then be able to remove it quickly for other reporting purposes. In that case, you will bypass the permanent exclude mentioned above and filter the fb_xd_fragment pages out manually each time you check your reports.

1. From the Dashboard, click Content > Top Content

2. Scroll down to the bottom of the list of viewed pages to the field called Filter Page.

3. From the pull-down menu select “excluding” and then type in fb_xd_fragment and click Go

This will remove any of the “phantom” FB Like pages from appearing in your Top Content results so that you can get a clearer picture of your real pages’ performance. This filter will remove itself when you leave the page.

Questions about this post or another question about Analytics? Post it here in comments and I’ll be happy to answer.

Have you had a chance to try out Google +? It’s the newest social media channel, less than one month old.  It’s only for personal use right now — no companies allowed. I’m finding it to be refreshingly different from Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn — a bit more space, more ease and lots of customization available.  It feels like not as much shouting somehow.

And it’s catching on fast. After 24 days, Google has over 20 million users — Facebook and Twitter took two years to get there.

Graph from Leon Haland

Even with 20 million users, how much value you will from get from it depends on how many of your friends/associates/customers have signed up for it. (If you need an invite, send me an email.)

What’s So Special?

It’s all in the circles. You can set up circles for different categories of friends. I’ve got circles for Friends, Clients, Family, Entrepreneurs, and Arty Friends, to start. Someone can be in more than one circle, because life tends to overlap, doesn’t it? Then you can send out messages and have conversations targeted to what that person is interested in.

And it feels so far as though it is not as much about broadcasting out, as Twitter and Facebook do, but fosters more conversation, similar to a blog.  Of course, they’re just getting started.

When Can Your Company Join?

When Google + first opened, companies rushed to be at the front of the line and began making Profile pages. But Google wasn’t ready for them, and in fact deleted the company profiles.

Google is now promising Q3 for brands, which could mean soon… or not.

How Will This Affect YOU?

Of course we won’t know until we see it and try it.

And, as with any social media channel, how effective it is will vary based on your company, your social media goals and your customers/clients.

But the potential looks great. And just as soon as it comes live for businesses, we will look at the best use for YOUR business and get it going.

(And please come visit and connect. Warning — Not much there yet.  I’m still playing with it myself.)

For more on Google Plus and its features, here is the official word from Google.)

Photo courtesy of ©Ken Douglas

I woke up this morning filled with an epiphany.  It is JULY, people!

Yeah, I know — obvious.  But think about it.  JULY.   We are halfway through the year with our businesses.

Remember all those bright shiny January New Year’s hopes and plans?  Now’s the time to take a look again.

Right on target?  Go reward yourself with a favorite beverage (mine is iced coffee), sipped outside in the gorgeous July sunshine.  No really, you deserve it — go ahead.

Some progress?   Let’s bask in that a moment.   Ahhhhhh

Not quite so much progress — here’s your chance to hit that Restart button.  (And I’m right there with you on this one.)

Personally, I never seem to be where I want to be in July.  Over-exuberance and optimism in January planning … perhaps.  Fear and doubts around actually Doing the Thing I want to do — definitely.  Perfectionism requiring that I work just ONE aspect completely to death and then feel it’s not good enough to actually share — you got me.

If your plan is going fine, keep on rolling.  We are all clapping for you.

Stalled?

Let’s pick ONE THING.  What will you be most happy to see movement on.  (Or conversely, what will you be yelling at yourself about in December because it didn’t happen?)

• Is that one thing doable?
• Do you know what the very next step to take is?
• Could it maybe even already be good enough as it is and just needs to be floated out there so that you can see what else it might need?

I think I’ll go work on a certain blog……

Photo Courtesy of ©Nicholaus Haskins

In January — of 2009 that is — I declared that my most important goal was to finally start the $%&$*% blog.  The one I had been planning and talking about for years.  A lover of all things Blog, it was way past time for me to jump in and join the fun.

Flash forward to today.  16 months have gone by.  Still no blog.

So I am telling myself what I so easily tell my clients:

1. Just start.
2. Use your own voice.
3. Write to one person.
4. Have fun with it.

Because it’s all about starting and discovery and learning.   Perfectionism, second guessing and self-consciousness don’t really have a place here at all.

Welcome to Post #1 of my new blog, Six Million Ways to Shine. I’m so very glad you’re here.