*****************THIS PROJECT IS NO LONGER ACTIVE ******************* I was brought on to 'Another Harvest Moon' in order to develop the website and build the social media component of the marketing campaign. This is an exciting opportunity for me to combine my interests in the film and web worlds. You can see the current website and trailer here: http://anotherharvestmoon.com/, although one of the first steps in the project is going to be a complete redesign of the site by Sauce Creative Group. Sauce will provide all the design elements and I will be programming the site using WordPress. This is a small indie film with a very small promotional budget but we are trying to create as much buzz as possible in order to help them get distribution. So we were looking for help with organizing and implementing an ambitious social media strategy. Please check out their sites: Official Webite: http://anotherharvestmoon.com Facebook: http://facebook.com/harvestmoonfilm Twitter: http://twitter.com/harvestmoonfilm Youtube: http://youtube.com/harvestmoonfilm
Tagged with: ‘SEO’
Learn social marketing hands-on
July 15, 2009
Optimize Your WordPress Site
May 12, 2009WordPress has become one of the most powerful and most-used blogging and Content Management Systems in the world in part due to its incredible flexibility and ability to be customized. So it is surprising to learn that the default installation is lacking in a few ways. But because of the great flexibility of WordPress, this is easy to fix in just a few minutes. After any WordPress installation, there is a series of steps that I take in order to optimize the site, before I even think about what it will look like. Remove or edit the Placeholder Content There is a placeholder post titled 'Hello World'. DELETE that, or edit it to be your actual first post. There is a placeholder page called 'About'. DELETE it or edit it to say what you want it to say. Delete the user 'admin' If you used a one-click installation or had someone do it for you, you
Should you use subdomains or subdirectories?
April 8, 2009I receieved an interesting question from one of my photographer friends Gustavo Fernandez today. "Why do some folk have their address as blog.domain.com vs domain.com/blog? Is there a benefit?" I started to write back, but in doing a couple quick searches in the name of research, I found enough interesting information that I decided to write a post explaining it all. Subdomains vs Subdirectories photo credit: Tim DorrFirst, let's define what we are talking about: "blog.domain.com" is a subdomain while "domain.com/blog" is a subdirectory or a folder within a domain. A subdirectory is used as a folder within one domain to organize smaller pieces of content, like a category of several pages. For most people they will only ever need subdirectories. A subdomain creates more separation than just a folder, basically creating a stand alone site that could easily be it's own domain. However, you may want to piggyback on the main domain name.
The Spectrum and Spiral of Social Media
March 13, 2009photo credit: Robbie-73 Danny Brown has been a recent find of mine in the social media and PR world and a great addition to my reading. He is a PR consultant who writes some great articles with a very personal approach. Continuum or Spectrum? He recently had an interview with Tom Cunniff. The idea was The Continuum of Social Media. Being a physics geek, I had to check out anything with the word Continuum. The basic idea was that there is relationship between the size of the company (and the size of that company's needed audience) to the percentage of their media being social media vs. traditional paid advertising. Small companies or individuals could benefit from 99% social media and 1% (in some cases, like mine, 0%) paid media. Meanwhile large corporations selling to huge markets would be more like 99% paid advertising to 1% social media. In between there
Using the Website Grader service from Hubspot
February 1, 2009In a post last week, PIFPhoto.com talked about Google's Keyword tool, one of the great free tools made available by Google for free to help analyze, enhance and promote your website. I left a comment mentioning a site called grader.com, which offers a number of great free tools to analyze your site's visibility to the search engines. It even offers suggestions for how to improve your site specifically. Lindsay at PIF, asked if I would be interested in writing a guest blogger article going into further detail on using the Website Grader. I was happy to take her up on the offer but the PIF site has undergone a redesign and now the post is no longer available. So I have recreated it below: There are three sections to the site: the 'Website Grader', the 'Twitter Grader' and the 'Press-Release Grader'. I have only used the website and Twitter sections, but
PIF Guest Post
January 29, 2009After finding and commenting on this post from pifphoto.com, I was contacted by Lindsay from PIF (Pay it Forward) and asked to do a follow up as a guest blogger. I had mentioned a site that I have been using called website.grader.com which does a great job of analyzing your site and grading it's SEO performance on factors like keywords, incoming links, whether or not you are listed in some of the major search and listing sites. It works as a great starting point for assessing your site's visibility. You can read my post at PIF. I also wrote a couple follow up ideas, just to get out some of my other thoughts on SEO - An Introduction to SEO & Why SEO is not Enough.
An Introduction to SEO
January 26, 2009The term SEO very simply stands for Search Engine Optimization. Yet most people seem to think it is some magic formula that will drive customers to their site. While the term SEO is still thrown around and still relevant, it is usually misunderstood and I often hear a lot of really outdated and sometimes downright wrong ideas about what SEO is - especially from potential clients. I can't tell you the number of times someone has asked me how much I charge to add keywords to their site and make them rank #1 on Google. I can tell you that my answer every time has been that it is not as easy as just adding keywords and anyone promising a number one ranking on Google is trying to scam you. Rather than get into the scam aspects here, I will just point out this article on 'Black Hat' vs 'White Hat'
Why SEO is Not Enough
January 26, 2009The biggest problem with all this craziness over SEO is that it gets confused with the real goal, which is simply to increase traffic to your site. If you could get meaningful traffic to your site without search engines, would SEO even matter? To take it to another level - think of this: increased traffic eventually leads to a better page ranking, so one of the ways to improve your sites SEO is to get traffic there. But isn't that why we want SEO? So where do we start? The Real Goal Let's start with our actual goal, which is not to rank #1 on Google, but to get more meaningful traffic to our site. Using SEO to rank higher in searches is merely one way of doing that. There are countless others. For example when I go to Geico.com, it is because I saw a TV commerical with a talking lizard,