SEO Prank “How to kill Anthony Shapley”

Posted by David Whitehouse

Apparently this was nothing new, as people had been searching for “Kean Richmond is gay” before I came up with this idea:

Basically I got a load of people to click through to anthonyshapley.co.uk after visiting this page, so that it got into his Analytics:

Anthony Shapley's Analytics

Anthony Shapley's Analytics

Anyone else heard of any other good SEO pranks? I guess Google Suggest is probably a popular one…

htaccess redirects with regular expressions

Posted by David Whitehouse

The Problem

Ok so I hit a bit of a snag tonight, I had ended up with the following predicament.

I had a url: http://www.david-whitehouse.org/blog/ which I wanted to redirect to http://www.david-whitehouse.org/ but when I used the following code:

redirect 301 /blog/ http://www.david-whitehouse.org/

I ended up redirecting pages such as http://www.david-whitehouse.org/blog/blogging-voice-recognition/ to http://www.david-whitehouse.org/blogging-voice-recognition/ – but I wanted to keep it where it was (plus this created a redirect loop, which I could have fixed).

Twitter Friends to the Rescue!

So I asked for help on Twitter – offering a free link for the right answer (at first a site wide, then I chickened out and said “just a post”). Thankfully I found the answer – so they can all settle for a nice link in this post (see below).

Many things were suggested, some would have worked but I felt they were workarounds and I wanted to solve this particular issue in this way. I had tried some regular expressions, others passed me some more and people were passing me mod_rewrite code too. Unfortunately none of it seemed to work, some gave 500 errors, where as others resulted in the page sitting their, not moving – laughing at me, mocking at me, whispering…

Anyways!

The Solution

RedirectMatch 301 ^/blog/$ http://www.david-whitehouse.org/

redirect doesn’t let you use regular expressions – RedirectMatch does (perhaps this is common knowledge, but I couldn’t find it anywhere and it wasn’t in the code anyone gave me). I found the fix here.

Thanks guys

For those that participated in helping me, I would like to thank (in no particular order):
Malcolm Coles
David Elstob
Will Critchlow
David Cumbor
Teifion Jordan
Jaamit Durrani

Blogging with voice recognition

Posted by David Whitehouse

Because of spending years suffering with terrible arm pain caused by a mix of accidents and spending too much time on the computer I have decided to try out some software I bought a few years ago.

I’m blogging this using Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9.5, it seems to be doing pretty well although I have had to make quite a few corrections already. It would be a good idea to get to grips with this piece of software to see if I can blog a lot quicker than I normally do.

Overall I’m pretty pleased I can sit at my desk and talk and it writes for me and I don’t have to risk aggravating my arm pain although my girlfriend will be getting pretty sick of my loud voice.

The Secret of Successful Selling Through Twitter

Posted by David Whitehouse

A lot of people are using Twitter to try and promote themselves/their services/their products – but mostly with not much luck. I remember hearing a guy talk about Twitter at a seminar in February – he just lectured a group of small business owners on how they should use Twitter to promote their business, but he didn’t seem to have the slightest idea of how to do it.

Well here is how I think it should be done…

Stupidly Unnecessary Disclaimer

Before I go on, I want to make a few points clear:
1. My ideas in no way represent those of my employers, so if you think I am stupid and I sound like a baffoon please don’t go whining to Dave, he won’t appreciate it and I’ll be forced to eat chocolate coated rich teas (which really are nasty by the way). However if I’m a genius, please feel free to tell him on twitter (he’ll love that).

2. The legalities of this technique are still a little sketchy, I guess as time goes on we’ll get a better idea of the legalities behind selling on Twitter. With email your recipient has to opt-in before hand – with Twitter it seems a little different as you can set it so your messages aren’t actually being sent to them, its just a mention.

3. This was written at around midnight, so don’t expect it to make any sense…

With those disclaimers said, here I go…

Successful Selling through Twitter

The only way I can explain this is by example, take Timmy. Timmy sells customised shoes (I made this up, sounds like a good idea though) – they cost £199/$299 each, but they have your initials on them and they fit just perfect. Timmy wants to sell more shoes and he’s heard about Twitter so he thinks he will give it a try.

The Prospects List

Firstly Timmy visits a Twitter app which allows him to continuously search for a keyword/keywords (you can do this on Twitter, but I’d recommend Hoot Suite. So he adds a dashboard called “Prospects” using a keyword search of “needs shoes” – he finds a number of people twittering, some people don’t want shoes, they just happen to have that combination of keywords in one of their Tweets. He finds the following tweet (it’s real, I assure you – it took me all of 30 seconds to find):

The Prospect

@wenyiee OMG. Clothes are not doing it for me anymore, i need SHOES SHOES SHOES! 12:50pm, Aug 10 from web

Now I don’t know about you, but I don’t think we could have found a better prospect for a pair of shoes, do you? On to the approach…

The Approach

So Timmy engages in conversation by doing two things:
1. He follows her (this isn’t necessary, but people like getting more followers, so I wouldn’t worry about p****ng them off).
2. He asks a question, like “What kind of shoes do you like?”

The Sales Pitch?

The result is, she may reply saying that she has a particular pair, or style or something in mind. Timmy simply has to respond with a link to the most targeted product to meet her needs.

Alternatively he doesn’t have to send a link, but instead can say something like:

“I have an amazing pair of pink sandals that would look great with your skin tone, would you be interested in seeing them?” (or something – I don’t sell shoes)

If she says yes, send her a link (that way its definitely legal), if not, just leave her be (she might check out your profile and see your homepage link there).

Thats It!

So there you have it – Twitter provides you instant access into the psyche of consumers across the World – up to the second. There probably isn’t a better direct sales platform to actively engage in conversation aswell as meet a need at the right time. Recommendations are powerful stuff too, so I’m sure the conversion ratios are pretty good for affiliates. There are limitations, like geographical location – but I’m sure you should be able to filter this somehow (if you can tell me how I’ll link to you from this post).

Anyways, if you like this article and fancy trying it out, why not follow me on twitter and subscribe to my RSS feed and in return I promise to blog sporadically, but only about highly useful, or entertaining stuff. Agreed?

Google Affiliate Network Begins Integration with AdSense and AdWords?

Posted by David Whitehouse

I just got an email tonight, stating how the lesser known Google Affiliate Network is integrating payments with Google AdSense. What does this mean? Well basically your affiliate revenue will be paid through AdSense, but lets look at the bigger picture, shall we?

Firstly, for those with a large AdWords budget, Google AdWords now offers “CPA” bids – this is based on data and is similar to you doing calculations based on CPC and conversion rates. I believe they have been doing this for a while.

What I can see happening is that AdWords will integrate with Google Affiliate Network (Connect Commerce) allowing advertisers to literally pay per acquisition. Then I believe the offerings will come through to publishers in AdSense, where they will be able to reap greater rewards for monetizing their blog.

So who better to bring affiliates to the mainstream? Ask many small businesses and they probably won’t have heard of affiliate programs, but I bet you within 3 years they all have…