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So you have a website… Now what?

Building traffic by doing the ings that matter.

Networking

• Social Media (Facebook, Twitter, etc)
• Set up a Facebook page for your company
• Set up a Twitter account for your company
• Use Them!
• Forums
• Determine your expertise
• Help people
• Have fun and get your name out there!
• YouTube
• Show your personality
• Show your business
• Have fun and get your name out there!
• Make sure to carefully choose your keywords!
• Google Places
• If you have a physical location, you must get yourself listed on Google Places
• In Person
• Always carry business cards
• Talk to people about what you do
• Everybody knows somebody who needs your website

Writing

• Write SEO-friendly copy
• If your business has a local focus, use local keywords.
• Use keywords in your title and permalink
• Use an SEO plugin like Yoast or All-In-One
• Don’t get hits under false pretenses.  Google learns how good your content is by how watching how many people stay on your site
• Post timely content. When there are new developments in your industry, be the first to write about them
• Write regularly
• Use the post scheduling functionality in WordPress
• Google loves fresh new content
• Focus on “Long Tail” SEO
• Find “niche” search terms in your industry, and write content to rank for them.  Combined with posting timely content, this can have a huge impact on your ranking
• Get and use Google Analytics
• Find out which posts are getting you traffic, find out what search terms people are using to find your site, and use that information to write effective content.

Spending

• Everyone can benefit from copywriting, whether you do it yourself or hire someone.
• In addition to copywriting, you may opt for web advertising, traditional advertising, or both.
• Who is your target market?
• If your target market is wide, you may have more benefits with traditional advertising
• If your target market is narrow, you may have more benefits with web advertising
• Most successful ad campaigns use methods in addition to copywriting for organic SEO

Planning your Spend

• Hiring a Copywriter ($300-$900/month)
• Pros
• You don’t have to write
• Get regular original content from an SEO professional
• Most cost-effective way to build traffic, long-term
• Authoritative
• Cons
• Nobody knows your business like you do
• Takes time to build traffic
• More expensive than DIY
• Online Ads ($500-$10,000/month)
• Pros
• Pay-per-click, only pay for traffic you get
• Get traffic quickly
• Compete for short-tail SEO terms
• Cons
• Can be very expensive to execute effectively
• Low level of authority
• Traditional Ads ($500-$30,000/month)
• Pros
• Wide audience
• Low cost-per-impression
• Gives your brand the appearance of size
• Cons
• Added cost of design
• Very little ability to target advertising
• High monthly cost

Resources

Networking

• Facebook (facebook.com)
• Twitter (twitter.com)
• City-Data (city-data.com/forum)
• Quora (quora.com/forum)
• YouTube (youtube.com)
• Google Places (google.com/places)
• Meetup (meetup.com)

Writing

• Copyblogger (copyblogger.com)
• SEOmoz (seomoz.org)
• Plugin: WordPress SEO by Yoast (wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-seo)
• Plugin: All in One SEO Pack (wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack)
• Google Analytics (analytics.google.com)

Spending

If you’d like to know more about hiring a copywriter, contact us.  We have an excellent copywriter on staff.

• How to know if you need to hire a copywriter (copyblogger.com/professional-copywriter)
• Google AdWords (adwords.google.com)
• Facebook Advertising (facebook.com/advertising)

In my work, at least once a week I’m either copying a live site onto my development server or moving a site back to the live server. I’ve figured out a few tricks along the way.

Notice: This post assumes that you have a basic comfort level with the command line, it assumes you have a linux web host, and it assumes you’re not going to sue me or hold me responsible if you break something. If that’s not the case, please stop reading now!
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The jQuery Validation plugin is one of the most commonly used and useful jQuery plugins. One of the nicest things about it is how easily you can extend it.

I recently had a client ask me to build a form which wouldn’t allow users to sign up with free email addresses– in particular, no Gmail, Yahoo!, or Hotmail accounts. After playing with it for a little bit, I came up with the following jQuery Validation method to check for, and block, Gmail, Yahoo!, and Hotmail (you can easily add other free email providers):

$.validator.addMethod('nofreeemail', function (value) {
    return /^([\w-\.]+@(?!gmail.com)(?!yahoo.com)(?!hotmail.com)([\w-]+\.)+[\w-]{2,4})?$/.test(value);
}, 'Free email addresses are not allowed.');

Once you’ve added the method, you can easily call it:

$("#signup_form").validate({
		rules: {
			'user[first_name]': "required",
			'user[last_name]': "required",
			'user[title]': "required",
			'user[phone]': "required",
			'user[email]': {
				required: true,
				email: true,
				nofreeemail: true
			}
		}
});

So– to wrap up, the final code is:

<script type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8">
$(document).ready(function() {
	$.validator.addMethod('nofreeemail', function (value) {
	    return /^([\w-\.]+@(?!gmail.com)(?!yahoo.com)(?!hotmail.com)([\w-]+\.)+[\w-]{2,4})?$/.test(value);
	}, 'Free email addresses are not allowed.');

	$("#signup_form").validate({
		rules: {
			'user[first_name]': "required",
			'user[last_name]': "required",
			'user[title]': "required",
			'user[phone]': "required",
			'user[email]': {
				required: true,
				email: true,
				nofreeemail: true
			}
		}
	});
});
</script>

UPDATED 12/2: Code updated for efficiency and code download link added.

Ran into a problem today– there’s no easy way to add and subtract dates in PHP and be left with standard units (year, month, day, etc), so I whipped up a quick script to do it– the biggest problem is months, here, since PHP deals with second-based timestamps, and months don’t possess a standard number of seconds. Without further ado, here’s the code– I hope it’s helpful to your projects:
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I’m working on a custom eCommerce site for a customer right now, and ran into an issue– they wanted to have, on every product page, a forward and back button to get to the previous and next items. The problem with this is that they may have arrived on the product page in a couple of different ways, through search or browsing, with different criteria set.

I came up with this easy routine which goes through the result set, whether it’s search result or category view, then creates an array where the key is the current product ID, and the values are the IDs of the product before and the product afterward. So if I’m on product 157, $ordering[157]['next'] will give me the ID of the next product. Just pop it in a session, and you’re good to go.

Simple and straightforward– feel free to reuse all you like!
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Becky got me a 3g iPod shuffle back when they first came out, and it’s been great.  It’s TINY, super light, battery lasts all day… etc etc etc.  It also has no buttons, so you use a little block in the headphone cable by your right cheek to control it.  Apple tells you you can use this to skip tracks forward, skip tracks backward, pause, play, change the volume, and change playlists.  But there are a couple of hidden features, too!

Skip forward within a song: Click the button once, then hold it.  This will fastforward within the song or podcast.

Skip backwards within a song: Click the button twice, then hold it (you have to do this quickly).   This will rewind within the song or podcast.

Skip through songs while hearing the name of every song.  Hold the button until it starts reading the name of the song to you, then double-click the button.  It will speak the name of the new songs as you get to them.

Skip through playlists: Once you hold the button long enough that it starts reading back your playlists, release the button and you can use the volume up and down buttons to quickly scroll through your playlists.

Anybody know any other neat tricks?  Let me know in the comments!

Update: I guess the fast forward/rewind tricks ARE in the online manual… but I could have sworn they’re not in the little booklet. I’ll have to check tonight.