1. If you’re doing it indoors, chances are the zombies will just pass right on by …
2. Zombies don’t attack gays, so if your sex preference happens to be for the same gender, then you are probably cool
3. Alternatively, if you have sex with a Zombie, odds are he or she won’t kill you – as long as the sex is good.
4. Blowing up your spare condoms and popping them will sound like gunshots and scare off your potential zombie attackers
5. If you are holed up in your bedroom for a romantic night in, with food and wine, you’ll be able to survive for longer without having to go outside and confront the zombies
6. If the output of having sex in your household has been any number of children, you can sacrifice them to save yourself
7. If the zombie outbreak is really on a movie screen – then having sex will give you a reason not to watch
8. If you get really desperate you can thrust your partner towards the zombies and make a run for it!

So what’s all this?

Been playing with a little online toy designed to help break writer’s block and help you get creative about your blog content. It’s called the Linkbait Generator and you can find it here http://linkbaitgenerator.com

Have fun playing – it’s not the most sophisticated tool on the planet, but feel free to use it to inspire some creativity – and have a laugh.

Later,

Karen

1. Put your audience first – what will they be looking for on your site? What will turn them on, and keep them there to read all the good stuff and maybe even purchase your products or services … and what will scream out at them to just click right off the site.
2. Use the tools at your disposal. There are many free tools to analyse how people are interacting with your website and most of them are free. Make sure you install Google analytics at the very least, and learn how to use it. This is powerful information that too many people ignore.
3. Keep your sentences short and sweet. People will be scanning the page, so they need to get the sense of what you are saying quickly. Avoid long, complex sentences – attention will be quickly lost. 
4. Review your site content as if you had ADHD. Flick your eyes over the page. Do your main messages stand out? Are your calls to action obvious and compelling? Do you immediately understand what the page is about and what you are expected to do from here?
5. Make things clickable. People expect everything on a web page to be clickable – headings, pictures, anything that5 looks like a button, logos. So don’t disappoint. Make them clickable, link them to relevant places, AND, use alt text so when they mouse over your links, they can see what they are.
6. On that note, avoid using Flash. Sure Flash animations can look great, but they are pretty much invisible to the search bots.
7. Keep your best stuff above the fold. All the user research shows that many people will not scroll down the page. So never put your most important calls to action at the bottom, below the fold. Never.
8. Make sure you use some keywords on the page. Don’t “stuff” unnecessary keywords into the headings and text, but DO make sure there are sufficient relevant words on the page to be recognised by a search engine. You would be surprised by the number of sites that just have something like a product name and product photograph on the page – and no searchable text.
9. Make sure text is text, not an image. Don’t make the mistake of using a graphic designer who puts all the fancy fonts etc into an image – which looks great on the page, but can’t be reviewed by the search engines. You may have to sacrifice a little of the designer-ness, to help your site be found. And after all, there is no point having a fancy looking site if no-one but you ever sees it, right?
10. Get second, third and fourth opinions. Test your site for usability and to see if your messages are getting across. Don’t just ask people who will say that it is great, even if it’s not. Ask your target audience, your customers, for their opinions, and be prepared to make changes if what they say makes sense.

There you go, a great little guide to awesome web content. If you do all of those ten things, you are way ahead of about 60 – 70% of the sites currently out there. Of course there are plenty more things you can do once you get all of this right, but this list is a great place to start.

Karen

bait

Yeah, so it’s the season to head into the wilds for a spot of fishing … the whitebait are running and I am guessing their bigger cousins, the salmon are probably out there feeling frisky too.

So what do you need for a good day out on the water?

First thing is to get your bait sorted.

And that’s a very round about way to getting to my topic for this post – developing “link bait” - otherwise known as “content so awesome that other sites will fall over themselves to link to it and recommend to their friends”.

Developing material that makes people want to link to you is really what the success of the internet and virtually all forms of social media is built on – the very human desire to share cool stuff with our friends. Because what’s the point of coming across something amazing, or ROFL hilarious, or inspiring, or just downright useful – if you can’t then share it with someone else. Half the pleasure lies in being able to talk about those discoveries with your friends – argue about them sometimes, send them on to others to share as well so you can all talk about it and have a laugh or whatever response is most appropriate (or inappropriate in some cases).

We have all seen those YouTube videos that go viral (if you haven’t then you need to be better connected) … and we have all been the recipients (and sometimes the senders on) of those emails that demand to be sent on, in order that you either receive great blessings, or avoid great calamity.

In their own ways, these are the same things as link bait, except somewhere out there in the world of SEO, someone coined a phrase that is less than flattering – but still pretty apt.

So … keep in mind when you are developing content that you really hope will draw people into your site – not only does it have to be really “share worthy” in its own right, not appear to be spam if people choose to pass it on, and ideally be original – you also may need to invest a little time in sharing the love yourself, to make sure it gets the attention you think it deserves.

Don’t be afraid to put it out there – first and foremost, test it in the communities you hang out in and see what they think … if the response is positive, then start spreading the love.

Use your social media networks – Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, delicious, YouTube and anywhere else you hang out, invite people to have a look and cross your fingers that they like it enough to pass it on or link to it from their blogs and websites. The more compelling it is, the most likely this is to happen.

So spend most of your time thinking and making it great, before you invest in spreading the word.

Then of course, if you get a good result, the hardest thing is coming up with a sequel that matches its success, or even better, outstrips it! Of course, if your first effort is already out there working for you, your second can piggyback on that groundwork to some extent … if you have a hit YouTube video, chances are that any other videos you post to your channel will also get some attention.

But don’t rest on your laurels – make sure you keep the standards high, and reward the people who were interested enough to come and have a look.

Before you know it, you and your creations could be an “overnight success” – we’ve all seen it happen, so we know it’s possible.

Good luck and happy fishing!

Karen

And we all know that sometimes images can be a lot more powerful than words.

Except, you can’t interact with them (unless of course your images are moving, and it’s an embedded YouTube vid or a Ustream live feed).

And right now, interactivity is where it’s at. Thanks largely to what most people are calling social media or Social Media. I like to call it interactive media – and it’s something I’ve been participating in online for maybe 10 years now, primarily through message boards and forums.

Not a huge number of different ones, a small, select group … I have started a few, currently moderate one, have been a very active participant in three or four.

One of them is an online Success Team (once again, a la Barbara Sher) that originated from her message boards … we started out with 7 or 8 members, had a few fluctuations over the years, now down to just four of us and these days we probably all blog more and post more on Facebook than we do on the message board itself.

The thing that has held that little group of women together – since none of us have met in person, are the words we share, the words about our lives, our families, our jobs and businesses, our sorrows and our joys. And in more recent years, technology has allowed us to share some images too … which is great since two of our members are artists and it is always a treat to see their work.

My membership of the SARK (Susan Ariel Rainbow Kennedy) message boards, firstly Camp Sark, and then the Marvellous Message Board (MMB for short) took me to the US to stay with women I had only ever met online – a hugely brave thing for me to do at the time, and a wonderful adventure I will always remember.

Then there’s the Tavern – where I am one of the “buxom wench hostesses”. This inspiring group of women is spread between New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, the UK, Europe, the US and Canada. Over the years I have laughed, cried, lived and loved with them. They are some of the most supportive, intelligent, creative and downright hilarious women I have ever come across and my life is richer for having them all in it. Some of these women I have met in person, some I have had in my house, some I have travelled to meet in Melbourne for our “wenchfest”.

Once again, we mostly share in words, but we also upload pictures of our lives, the places we live, people we love, food we make … all that jazz.

Then of course there are the raw boards, the most important one to me being a spin off from the Tavern (yeah kinda like a sitcom). Started by my friend Lucie Walker in Canada, this board has also been a powerful source of information and inspiration for my raw food journey, and her blog is a font of tremendous wisdom.

I guess this truly is a stream of consciousness ramble tonight, but my point is that our words are very powerful for building bonds between you and the very real people who are out there reading what you have to say.

Never forget that.

Don’t be afraid to open up and share, and be open to the fact that the internet has become an incredibly powerful way of building relationships from one side of the world to the other, and of helping bring about change on an international level.

Oh and, back to those flashy websites that are all about the look. So often they have no soul – they just look pretty, but we get bored with them really fast, because they are not a place where people feel comfortable about hanging out. Bit like a fancy show home where you are afraid to sit on the white leather couches. It looks really cool, but you wouldn’t want to live there.

To me, the trick of creating websites that really work is making your site feel like a place people feel comfortable – and want to come back to. Because you have interesting stuff to say – and because you are happy to listen and have made it possible for your customers/readers/members to get onboard and share.

If you have a moment please share in the comments some of the online places you feel relaxed hanging out in.

Thanks again for reading.

Karen

For a long time I have been thinking about starting a blog that provides a chance to share some of the things I have learned along the way about marketing and communications.

For many years (I started in PR early in 1987) I struggled with the label PR consultant – and even after being their parent for 17 and 19 years, my sons still don’t really understand what a PR person actually does.

That’s because when a PR person is really doing their job well, they are invisible. Ironic really – biggest marketing problem you could ever have – no visibility. But, the fact that the industry survives and thrives is largely due to referrals between those businesspeople in the know. And these days, a lot more profile due to the fact that bloggers are now being exposed to the PR practitioners skills.

So one of the interesting things about transferring my skills to the world of SEO and online content is that to an extent, SEO is really the same. If you are doing it well, it is seamless and invisible to the casual viewer.

Ultimately, great SEO helps website owners create awesome content that naturally draws lots and lots of viewers, keeps them in the site for a while, encourages them to come back, and inspires them to recommend your site to other people.

That’s what works.

So what do you do as a business owner if you don’t have that kind of website?

My suggestion is to spend some time with yourself (and your business partner/s, senior staff, stakeholders) really thinking about what it is that inspires you about your business. What keeps you in the game, what do you have to offer your clients or customers on a daily basis?

Once you have worked that out – and you might record it in pictures (of happy, excited customers perhaps), words, video or audio … then it’s time to really get creative about how to instil that inspirational content into your website.

If you are excited about what you have to offer, then other people will pick up on that if you communicate it well.

Thing is, communicating something exciting is hard to do with words alone.  The more ways you can convey that excitement via your website, the better.

• Think tangible.
• Think interactive.
• Think compelling images that are worth more than thousands of words.
• Then find the right web maestros to help you make that happen.

Get it done, then keep feeding it with your personal source of excitement and inspiration. Don’t just put it out there and forget about it. Treat your website like your children – it needs your care and attention every day.

Whew!

So that’s it.

My first post in Stream of Consciousness SEO … and it was!

Look forward to streaming some more with you very soon.

Karen