Long Island Online Marketing from Bruce Chamoff

Twitter is full of great people tweeting the best advice, both on a personal level and to entrepreneurs who have embraced Twitter to enhance their businesses. Now, the fact that a valuable Twitterer is objective, I have been looking around at those Twitterers that have many followers. I often why and what they are doing right.

I am not talking about the famous people like Barack Obama, Perez Hilton, and Britney Spears. It goes without saying that they will automatically pick up hundreds of thousands of followers just for their fame alone. I am talking about those people who add value to the Twitter community. I realize that value to me may not be value to you, but after talking to most people, I have realized that the general consensus for everyone who contributes to the Twitter community is:

Add quotes that enhance people’s lives

• Include links to informative web pages in addition to just blog posts
• Retweet other Twitterers
• Tweet several times per day
• Follow those who follow you

I know there are other factors that you can find that make people valuable in the community, but these are what I gathered from talking to other Twitterers.

So, I am looking for Twitterers to write about. Can I write about you on this blog?

I want to read your tweets. I want to retweet your tweets. I can do all of that by watching you on the my friend timeline. I will be glad to read your tweets and quote some of them here.

Feel free to DM me on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/BruceChamoff and let me know that I should follow you or just follow me and I will follow you back.

In the Faith chapter, I read the section Faith is A State Of Mind Which May be Induced By Autosuggestion. There is an extra chapter on Autosuggestion, but this chapter sets it up.

What Napolean Hill is talking about is self-suggestion, or auto-suggestion. Very cool. So, he says that your subconscious mind will believe what you tell it as long as you keep repeating the thought to yourself, whether it is true or not. Pretty interesting. So, in other words, you don’t need to lie to yourself, but you can surely bend the truth.

So, if you keep telling yourself that you have $100,000 in the bank, even if you don’t right now, eventually, your desire to have $100,000 in the bank will become true. In other words, you really have to believe it, even if it is not true. Eventually, your subconscious mind will be believe it too and this desire will transmute into its financial equivalent. I love how the human mind works.

I suppose this works the other way and maybe it is the reason that some of us have no money in the bank. We have been telling ourselves all of our lives that there is no way that we will ever become rich. Money goes to money. Since we have no money, we reason that we will never have it. This really does become our reality. So, you can turn it around. Tell yourself, and repeat it, that you will be rich, that you will have $100,000 in the bank, and that you will be a success and eventually, your subconscious mind will make it happen for real.

Hill makes a big deal of this statement “Faith is the eternal elixir which gives life, power, and action to the impulse of thought.” So, in other words, if you have faith in yourself, your thoughts will give you the power to take action and make the money you want to make.

Here is another strong sentence “Faith is the starting point for the accumulation of riches. ” That’s big. So, in other words, you will become rich once you have faith.

Faith is the only antidote for failure. So, if you fail, have faith in yourself and your failure will be transformed in a success.

This is probably the strongest chapter in the book. Let me simplify this chapter for you. Have faith in your ability to become rich and you will!

If you started in the web design industry between the years of 1995 and 1999, please share with me your experiences that related to this blog post.

It is interesting how, as web designers, we not only compete with other, but with the technology. Drupal and Joomla seemed to have changed the way we do business. I remember in 1996 when very few people designing web sites, you were able to earn an average of $10,000 per web site.  Now, you just do not get anywhere near that. If you try, well, you get laughed at both by other web designers and your clients.

I remember when people thought that HTML was a programming language. Now, I am truly laughing. It was never programming. Otherwise, we would have called it HTPL, Hypertext Programming Language. Not bad, until that freaking MS Front Page was bought by Microsoft from a company called Veneer. Once Microsoft started distributing Front Page, I knew that the web design field would be more competitive. Once Macromedia (before Adobe) released Dreamweaver, I knew it was all over for us die-hard coding HTML coders. I knew that I whole group of untalented wannabe web designers would be coming out of the woodworks and so they did!

I have always said that Front Page and Dreamweaver ruined the web design field, not enhanced it. Suddenly, all this sloppy HTML was out there onthe web and it made it harder for web designers to make a living. What we were able to earn an average of $10,000 per web site, became $1,000 per web site, and then $500.00, and once overseas outsouring took over, it was lower than that.

Before web design, I was a desktop publisher. That was a growing field. As soon as that field was crowded, I knew that there was a limited window in which to make money.

I decided to go into back end web development which I thought would have less competition. Boy was I wrong. Everyone, including those people overseas,  learned the tough languages, which turned out not to be not-so-tough after a while. Between PHP frameworks, You Tube, and other development aids, it just lowered our standards and our prices.

So, where do we go from here if we want to make it in the web design / development field? How do you specialize? Can you specialize doing one thing or maximize your profits doing more than one. Do you help other web designers with SEO or back end development and work under the hood?

Let me hear what you think.

Speaking to my web design clients, I found that Google Analytics is difficult to read for most of them. It is not the case once you go through the pains of the initial screens. When I first started using Google Analytics, I was overwhelmed. I did not know where to start first and there was no tutorial. I simply just jumped right in head first and started playing with it.

Approximate 3 months into my Google Analytics usage, I started coming up with my own reports and proceeded to offer them to my clients for about $150.00 a piece. Here are three of the seven Google Analytics reports that I created.

Your Most Popular Products and Services by Landing Page

A strategy that will determine your most popular products and services just by analyzing your most popular landing pages. This report will include a count of your page views for 5 to 10 top web pages on your web site with their bounce rate and average time on each page. With this report, you will know exactly what your most popular web pages are and how to optimize them to make you the most money you can make from your web site, just by generating leads from those web pages. I will help you rebuild those web pages to increase their rankings on Google and Yahoo, helping you maximize the money making potential of your web site.

What Web Sites Are Bringing You Traffic?

If you trade links with other web sites, this report is for you. Instead of being concerned about who is linking to you, we really should be concerned about which web sites are bringing you traffic. Any web site can link to you. That’s easy. However, it is those web sites that actually get people to your web site that count. You would be surprised to know that it is not just search engines. This report will give you the scoop about those web sites that are getting their own traffic and then funneling it to you. You can always contact similar web sites and trade links with them giving you more traffic potential to your web site. We will give you the number of visits your web site is getting from those referring web sites.

Also, don’t forget the famous SEO claim that irrelevant sites who link to you will actually LOWER your chances of retaining good search engine rankings. So, using this report, you can find the web sites that are not relevant and contact them to have your inbound link removed.

Your Best Search Engine and Keywords

Which search engine is bringing you the most traffic and what keywords are people typing into them to find you? This report will help you see your best keywords, what keywords you need improvement on, and what search engines you need to attract more.

I use this report to measure the effectiveness of my meta tags and menu hyperlinks.  I look at this report and then compare them to the keywords in my meta tags. If I find that a certain keyword has a high number of hits, I keep it. If there is a keyword which someone found me and it has a low number of hits, I move it further up in my meta tags. I also check this report against my HTML <title> tags.

Now, if there is a specific keyword phrase where I want to improve my search engine rankings and I see my competition coming up, but my web sites are not coming up for them, I now know that I have to add that keyword phrase somewhere into my SEO strategy, whether it is a <title> tag, meta tag, <IMG> alt attribute, or a hyperlink.

I hope this blog post helps you see the potential of Google Analytics as an SEO planning strategy. In my next blog post, I will describe the other 4 reports that I offer to my clients.

I realized this after I re-read the very first chapter of Think And Grow Rich, which is titled Thoughts Are Things. I believe that Napolean Hill opened the book with this chapter because the name of the book is Think And Grow Rich. The first thing you need to do is think. So, I suppose he felt it was necessary to make this the first chapter.

After finishing the book 2 weeks ago and re-reading this very first chapter, it dawned on me that no matter how bad the economy is, it really is irrelevant. Accordingly, your reality comes from your mind. You make it up. So, with that said, change the economy and make it better. After I started thinking this way, I am now seeing more business.

Let’s put this another way. Imagine that you really are being affected by today’s economy. Maybe you lost your job. Maybe the business is not coming in the way it used to. You cannot simply walk into a job interview with the attitude that there are no jobs. Look on Craigs List. Look on Monster. There are jobs out there. If you change your attitude to be more positive, you will soon start to see that there are more jobs than you thought.

In the chapter Thoughts Are Things, Napolean Hill has a section called “The Impossible Ford V-8 Motor”.  This section is another motivator for the naysayers out there. This section basically tells the story that Henry Ford, originally penniless and uneducated, told his team of engineers to build an 8-cylinder engine. His engineers claimed that this was totally impossible. Yada Yada Yada, a year later, he had his 8-cylinder engine. He only thought that he would have it and he did.

How often are you just Three Feet From Gold?

Hill talks a lot about temporary defeat. The question is, who actually says you are defeated just because you did not succeed. Is it safe to tell yourself that you have been defeated? In the section called “Three Feet From Gold”, Hill talks about a miner who is the uncle of R.U. Darby(I have no idea who this man is, but anyway…) was drilling for gold during the Gold Rush and gave up looking for gold just 3 feet before he would have found it. He left with nothing, but the junk man who bought the drilling equipment from him made millions because he hired an engineer to help him find it and it was just 3 feet from where Darby’s uncle stopped drilling. What luck! Was he kicking himself in the butt? I think so.

I have been three feet from gold thousands of times! How about you?

I have been 3 feet from gold so many times, it makes me sick. This section of Thoughts Are Things really opened my eyes to help me realize this.  The concept that I got from this was that if you would keep going and stop succumbing to temporary defeat, then you would be successful. Plain and simple! In my situation, the “gold” was going full time with my business. I was afraid of not having enough money to do anything if I was self-employed, but I never really gave myself the chance to find out. What if the business did not come in, would I be able to support my family? After reading this section, I am giving myself the chance to find out if I will be successful working for myself.

I really am trying to ignore the economy, no matter how bad it is.

As I said, it seems that I am getting more business now more than ever. I am pretty confident after reading Think and Grow Rich that I can do just as well. My answer to the question about whether or not you will do well financially in this economy is pretty simple…just ignore it and move on. Make it business as usual. If you don’t get some clients because they don’t have money, then move on to the next client. If you are looking for a job and you find that one company is not hiring because they are instead laying off, then move onto the next company that you want to work for. Just remember this…businesses still need employees to help them get the work done. So, suffice it to say that there HAS to be jobs out there. Stop blaming the economy and change your attitude, your thinking. Once you do, you will see that there is potential to make money out there.

Wish me luck, because I am going for the gold!

Content management systems are taking over the web design industry. Drupal and Joomla are the two most popular. If you have considered using one of these, here is my comparison of them.

Making comparisons between Joomla and Drupal are very common these days as they are currently considered the top two open source content management systems (CMS) out there.

Most people claim that Joomla is too difficult and Drupal is easier, but it really depends on how used to one you become over the other. I found Drupal easier when I first started using it than Joomla, but I find that Joomla has better looking templates.

Both CMS systems allow you to edit the live pages as soon as you are logged in as an admin, but Drupal has much better user management which you can assign custom user roles to any content type. Joomla’s user management is not that great as you are limited to only 6 user types, while Drupal allows you to create as many as you need. I created a web site for an online podcast conference at www.Podcamp.Info and created user roles for speakers and another for attendees. Speaker roles can create sessions. Also, what I like about Drupal’s user management is the Auto Assign Role module which allows people to register for more than one role at the signup form or to automatically assign a role. I have not seen that from Joomla.

Joomla has good plug-ins and components to manage users, but out of the box, Drupal gets my vote for the better CMS when it comes to user management.

What are your comments?

In the chapter called Desire, chapter II, Napolean Hill talks about a man named Edwin C. Barnes in a section called The Man Who Burned Bridges. This section is a very interesting short 5 paragraph section of the chapter. It actually motivates me and I read it often.

Edwin C Barnes was actually working for Thomas Edison and all of his co-workers saw him as just another employee of Mr. Edison, but Mr. Barnes saw himself as a partner of Edison. So, in other words, he saw himself differently, in his mind, subsciously.

Barnes did not say “I will keep my eyes open for another opportunity in case I fail to get what I want from Edison organization”, but I have said this so many times. I have always said to myself that I would look for another job in case my business is not successful. So, what do you think happened? I got a new job and prevented myself from letting my business go full time. I kicked myself for that each and every time. Now, this makes perfect sense to me. I know it is not 100% realistic to think like this and if my business is not successful, I could actually make a decision to look for a job, which a lot of my supposedly self-employed friends are now doing especially in this economy. However, consider the alternative. If you want to be successful with your business and make 6 or maybe 7 figures, give yourself no way to retreat, or at least you can think like this.

A business association with Thomas Edison is all Barnes wanted. According to the book, he burned his bridges and left himself no way to retreat. This one statement actually has changed my way of thinking about business. Make it happen. Forget about any alternative and give yourself no way to retreat. About the “burn your bridges” statement, well I do not 100% agree with that, but I see Napolean Hill’s point here.

Napolean Hill first had this book published in 1960 and 50 years later, it is still selling really well. Can a book like this really help you change your thinking and help you become rich or is it another self-help book? I am not sure. That probably depends on your experience with self-help books, but the content of this book makes sense to me.

In a nutshell, the bottom line of the 13 steps in this book is based around the thinking pattern that you can transmute your desires into your financial equivalent. So, if you believe that you will have $225,000 in the next 6 months, you can, provided that you follow all the steps in the book. What I gathered from this book is that if you don’t believe that, you have already failed, because you have already set your mind to say “I will never make $225,000 in 6 months”.

The Famous 6 Step Process That You Must Follow

The chapter on Desire, Chapter II, sets up the entire book with a 6 step process that you must follow each and every day. What you need to do is plan how much money you want to make, when you will make it, and what you do in return for the money. That’s 50% right there. According to Napolean Hill, it is not sufficient to say “I want to make a lot of money”. You must actually put a hard number on it. How much do you want to make? $100,000 or $250,000 and when do you want to make it? 2010, 2012, or how about 6 months from now?

The other 3 steps basically entail you saying out loud the answers to the 3 above steps and writing them down. The step where you say them aloud should be done twice a day: once when you wake up and once before you go to bed. If you think that sounds stupid, it is not. You actually feel stupid when you say it aloud for the first time and sometimes you want to do it when you are alone. So, how can you do something like this twice a day when you have a family and are around co-workers? I actually say these goals aloud in my car about 3 to 5 times per average. It no longer sounds stupid. I have also imagined myself saying it aloud.

Shout it out right now: How much money will you make, when, and what will you do in return? Are you alone? Go ahead. Say it aloud! Why do you need to do this? Well…

Well, it appears that we have spent so many years pounding our subconscious mind with negative thoughts like “I will fail at that”, “how will I make that money when I am working full time?”, “I can never make THAT much money”. I have said all of these things. It’s easy to think negative thoughts, but as you think these negative thoughts, you feed your subconcious mind with all of these doubts and they become your reality. Hey, I am no psychologist, but this is my interpretation of Hill’s comments from the book.

CSS Frameworks are now making their way into the hearts of web designers. I know how we all disapprove of using tables for multi-column web page layouts. Some web designers still use tables because CSS flops in some browsers. Most web designers still do not know the difference between fluid CSS and fixed CSS.

I recently discovered CSS frameworks and found that they do make CSS easier to use. Actually, the CSS layout is already done for you. You simply add the classes to DIVs, like you would your own. I checked out Blueprint CSS framework. It works on a grid system.

Has anyone tried this or a similar CSS framework yet?

Blueprint is cool, because they offer a grid section of 24 columns. You simply add classes called span-#, where # is the number of the column. Yousimply specify what column you want that DIV to be in and it moves it to that column. Each column in the grid is 30 pixels wide with 10 pixel margins. You can always override that if you need to.

Now, how good is this system? I applied it to a few client web sites and it worked really well. The cool thing is that it took 45 minutes to redo the entire CSS using Blueprint.

I know about 960GS, but have not used it. Has anyone had luck with it?

We were following the application development API for Myspace. The Myspace Developer Platform (MDP) seems intuitive enough and allows Myspace members to easily add those applications to their Myspace pages.

The MDP has a nice splash page as well and features Myspace applications every single day. With almost 25 categories in which to place your application, you really can develop an entire suite of Myspace applications for comedians, musicians, and more. The page I am looking at now features a Family Tree, Family Guy application, Texas Hold Em, and a Travel application called Where have I Been?

I have not gotten too much into the MDV as of yet, but when I do, I will surely develop an application or two and let you know how the process is. So far, from a quick glance, I like Myspace’s Rest API section that allows web developers to access their own web page from Rest (Representational State Transfer) connections and uses two flavors Low Rest and High Rest. It uses HTML GET, POST, PUTs, and GETs, which allow you to access elements of your web site over XML or JSON.

Using Google’s new open social API os what the Myspace Developer Platform is created on. So, Myspace developers will need to join iGoogle first and learn the basics of Open Social.

Using MDV, you can write applications for your Myspace friends, groups, and more. Give it a try.