Winston Meets the Blender
Posted by David WhitehouseI’m sorry to say that my demands were not met – I got a total of 10 extra followers on Twitter (well short of the 100 I asked for), so I’m afraid I had to put Winston in the blender.
I was hoping Winston would be immediately pulsed into a load of fluff – unfortunately it didn’t work out the way I hoped (hardly worth the money I spent on a liquidisor – but I suppose I could do with one anyways). So if your going to blend something in the future, I suggest not using a soft toy…
Don’t try this at home kids.
Follow me on Twitter or the teddy bear gets it
Posted by David WhitehouseI’m not joking – I will blend my 2 year old niece’s teddy bear if I don’t get 100 more followers by the end of the week, Midnight GMT Friday 26th June 2009 (I currently have 65 followers at the time of writing).
So follow me on Twitter – or the teddy bear gets it.
The 5 Most Common Google Analytics Mistakes
Posted by David WhitehouseOk, so you lazy people out there, I know what your like, you just slap your Google Analytics code on the site and think that its done. Well your wrong, and your messing up valuable data right now! Here are the most common mistakes:
1. Failing to Exclude URL Query Parameters
Nobody ever seems to use this, its great though, it gets rid of all the crap out of the content reports. Every time a page loads with a query string (e.g. http://www.david-whitehouse.org/index.php?SirDickonTwitter=boring), Google Analytics treats it as a separate url to index.php. In order to prevent this, you simply put the variable name (e.g. ‘SirDickonTwitter’) in the handy little box (edit profile, edit main website profile information).
2. Failing to Setup Site Search
Again this is a similar problem to the one above. If you don’t state what your variable name is for the site search then url’s like: http://www.david-whitehouse.org/search.php?q=wanker and http://www.david-whitehouse.org/search.php?q=bagels will both be treated as separate content. Instead you just put ‘q’ in the site search query box and then get it to strip the url of parameters.
3. Goal Conversion Setup
I rarely see this one setup right, people often repeat the final step twice, as they don’t realise Google puts the final one in at the end. Most people don’t even bother setting this up, but the ones who do, tend to do it wrongly.
4. Ecommerce Script Setup
When your setting this up, you have to put your ecommerce code after your tracking code, or it won’t work. Most people just paste it in and adapt it, not realising they need the tracking script before hand and an if statement in their footer to prevent the tracking script showing there.
5. IP Exclusion Filters
If you are going to be working on a site, whether you are the developer/designer or the marketing agency, perhaps even the business owner – you need to be adding your ip address to the exclude filter on the profile (make sure you have an unfiltered profile as a backup though).
How to setup Twitter to promote your WordPress blog
Posted by David WhitehouseI’ve been looking into all the difference Twitter related plugins for WordPress, all the different services starting up for Twitter and thinking about how you can promote yourself through Twitter. As a result of this I’ve come up with what I think is the perfect setup for promoting your WordPress blog through Twitter. Basically, here is my setup:
1. I use Tweetmeme (the little icon top right of this post) to try and encourage to re-tweet my blog post.
2. I have TwitterUpdater, so that when I write a post and publish straight away, it announces it on my twitter feed.
3. When I do scheduled posts, TwitterUpdater won’t notify twitter, in order to do this you need to use TweetLater – which can also allow you to follow people who follow you, automatically.
4. I am using Twollow to follow other people, based on keywords.
5. I am also using TweetLater to keep an eye on keywords on Twitter, such as my name, domain name etc.
And that’s how you can maximise the amount of traffic you get from Twitter. If you have any more suggestions, please let me know. (P.S. This is a scheduled post – so it’s also a kind of a test to see if TweetLater and my WordPress plugin can get it right. It might go horrible wrong because my WordPress is an hour behind!)
Do you separate your social (network) life from work?
Posted by David WhitehouseThat title probably sounds a bit weird – let me explain.
I use Facebook for friends and Twitter mainly for professional contacts. I like to keep the two separate, which is why you won’t see a Facebook link on my website.
So am I missing out on untold amounts of targeted traffic? Or am I right in keeping the two separate? Facebook for social networking, Twitter/LinkedIn for professional networking?
Does anyone else do this, or is it just me?
Promoting my new blog
Posted by David WhitehouseI got this blog a few months ago when I first went to meet Dave Naylor (at which I asked him for a job – he said yes). So I bought the domain name and set it up with WordPress and then just left it.
I’ve now got a job working with Dave, and I’m happily fitting in with the Bronco team. There is a really good working atmosphere there and I’m dead please to be finally finding my feet 
So tonight I’ve properly started to setup my blog, I’m trying to hit all the areas – social bookmarking, twitter, email updates, blog feeds, linkedin etc. etc.
One thing that shocked me (well two actually):
1. How do these people have time to use Digg, Stumbleupon, Reddit, Yahoo Buzz, Delicious etc. etc. etc. I just don’t have the time!!! I’m a Google man, I know what I want, I search for it, I get the job done – but perhaps that’s just me. I suppose one disadvantage of this is I tend to be a bit behind on things – perhaps I should check Digg more.
2. Digg have noindex and nofollowed their pages, but Google still indexes them, why is this? Anyone know?
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