Archive for the ‘Wordpress.com’ Category

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Tweet Postz?

February 9, 2011

I read recently where the CTO of the New York Times said you are what you read.

Since I read a lot, why can’t what tweets I read during the course of a day constitute a WordPress blog post?

I would love to be able to grab all of my Tweets from a single day and then post them here on my WordPress blog.

While this sounds like a Paper.li or Tweeted Times type service, its not.

Tweet Postz would create a personalized history of each users Twitter daily activity.

I tweet somewhere between 25 and 250 tweets a day.

Twitter in effect has become what I read.

Being able to record what I read daily only seems natural.

Tweet Post

Tweet Post

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Posted in Tweet Post, Wordpress, Wordpress.com, You Are What You Read | Leave a Comment »

WordPress Listens to Their Customer Audience

October 22, 2009

Several months ago WordPress announced the introduction of their own url shortening service under the WP.me branded domain.

At the time, I congratulated the WordPress staff on their blog while also asking when or if I could ever Tweet WordPress blog posts directly to my Twitter account.

The Official WordPress blog approves or disapproves comments and my suggestion went – for what seemed like an eternity – without being published.

Then within the last week or two, WordPress announced their new Publicize feature which Tweets WordPress blog posts directly to Twitter accounts.

I thought – unbelievable, Are you kidding me WordPress?!

As a consultant I am used to sharing strategies and techniques for growing businesses with my clients, but I provide them because my clients reciprocate by paying my fees.

Sharing ideas freely on the web is a requisite for participating in web culture yet not giving credit where credit is due is what keeps additional ideas from flowing and then multiplying.

This morning I woke up thinking about the above process and how I was going to write about how my suggestion had been perpetually embargoed in an approval que at WordPress while they went ahead and launched their Publicize to Twitter service.

To my surprise, my comment and suggestion were actually published several weeks ago while also being acknowledged by Automattic’s User Engagement head @Wordpress –  Heather.

Wordpress Listens to Their Customer Audience

Wordpress Listens to Their Customer Audience

Congratulations WordPress… you not only listen to your customer audience, you also act on that which you have heard.

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Posted in Consultant, Credit, Customer Audience, Publicize, Tweets, Twitter, User Engagement, Wordpress, Wordpress.com | Leave a Comment »

My First WordPress Blog Tweet to Twitter

October 8, 2009

WordPress.com has announced a new feature called Publicize which let WordPress publishers tweet their blog posts directly to their Twitter account.

The feature is enabled from WordPress Dashboard’s → My Blogs admin page.

Enable WordPress.com Account To Tweet

Enable WordPress.com Account To Tweet

Once enabled, WordPress users are directed through an authorization procedure to confirm that they want to connect their WordPress.com blog and their Twitter account.

Wordpress Twitter Authorization

Wordpress Twitter Authorization

After Twitter allows access to a WordPress blog, the blogger’s account will display a message showing a successful connection has been made.

Successful WordPress.com Connection to Twitter

Successful WordPress.com Connection to Twitter

I assume publishing a WordPress blog post then automatically Tweets the post and it’s WordPress shortened url (Wp.Me) to the previously selected Twitter account.

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Posted in Publicize, Tweets, Twitter, Wordpress Blog, Wordpress.com | Leave a Comment »

Google Webmaster Tools Sitemaps

October 3, 2009

I purchased domain mapping from WordPress.com to move posts from this blog’s original address @ cohn.wordpress.com to my SearchMarketingCommunications.com domain.

After I bought the domain mapping service, my blog went from having a Page Rank of 5 to a Page Rank of 0.

To add insult to injury, my WordPress blog then effectively lost most of its several hundred visitors a day traffic.

To keep up with the carnage, I added Google Webmaster Tools to the site as suggested.

Although I have been able to get some of my pages back into Google’s index, my site’s Page Rank has not returned nor has my traffic.

I recently resubmitted my WordPress sitemap after Google Webmaster tools said it discovered errors.

Google Webmaster Tools Sitemaps

Google Webmaster Tools Sitemaps

I am waiting to see whetherthe WordPress. com sitemaps.xml file I have submitted will be error free or not.

Sitemaps Resubmitted

Sitemaps Resubmitted

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Posted in Domain Mapping, Google Webmaster Tools Sitemaps, Wordpress.com | Leave a Comment »

WordPress Blogging Achievement: A Post Published 365 Consecutive Days In A Row

August 31, 2009

When I launched my first website back in 1999 – blogs didn’t exist.

To get my site MarketingPrincples.com launched, I had to use ad agency designers who knew how to write code which in turn published my content on the nascent world wide web.

After my site launched, I realized I needed to make some content changes.

Because blogging platforms didn’t exist and I hadn’t bought the code they had used to develop my site, the designers initially charged me $100 for each change I wanted to make to my site.

Outrageous!

I quickly set out to find my own web developers who could build my own content management system.

While giving a presentation at a local university’s engineering college, some young guys came up and said they would be interested in working with me.

I agreed to give them a shot.

They built me a content management system in .ASP where I could upload and control my own content without any ongoing costs.

Off to the races I went.

Little did I know at that time nor did it occur to me that the idea of a back end content management system would be something other businesses would want.

Nor did I foresee that content management would ultimately become known in general as blogs and blogging.

If I had, I guess I would be on the other side of this post founding and running WordPress.com not my consulting practice.

Anyway in the early days of the internet, the content platform providers all suggested bloggers just sit down and blog every day for a year to generate their own unique set of pages and content.

Well – 10 years later I have done it.

I have blogged here every single day for the last 365 days over a period of exactly one year beginning on September 1, 2008.

I have learned a lot and will write more about what the experience has taught me – tomorrow.

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Posted in Blog, Blogging, Blogging Achievement, Wordpress, Wordpress.com | Leave a Comment »

Google Webmaster Tools Crawl Stats

August 25, 2009

Switching from a WordPress subdomain to my own domain has proved to be much more expensive than the $10 annual domain mapping fee I pay WordPress.

I went from having hundreds of visitors daily to less than one hundred visitors a day.

Being in the business of traffic generation primarily through Google Adwords pay per click, the drop in “orgnanic” traffic proved to be quite frustrating.

I installed Google Webmaster Tools on this blog and verified the site as directed.

Several months passed and nothing changed.

I then decided to submit a reconsideration request which in turn got my domain mapping WordPress redirect resolved.

Yet, SearchMarketingCommunications.com continued to languish in Google’s search results barely registering 200 of my nearly 600 pages.

Yesterday,  I spent some time in my Google Webmaster Tools account and today I noticed my “Crawl Stats” jumped significantly from their average page crawl rate.

Google Webmaster Tools Crawl Stats

Google Webmaster Tools Crawl Stats

I am hoping this new average page crawl high will soon lead to a greater presence of my web site’s pages within Google’s search engine results pages.

Time will tell and so will my Google Webmaster Tools dashboard.

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Posted in Crawl Stats, Domain Mapping, Google Webmaster Tools, Wordpress.com | Leave a Comment »

Add Latest YouTube News Videos to Your Website

August 24, 2009

Google Web Elements makes it possible to add YouTube News to any website.

Latest News Videos

Latest News Videos

I have been able to grab a single Associated Press video from YouTube and post it within my blog.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

more about “Add Latest YouTube News Videos to You…“, posted with vodpod

However I haven’t yet been able to post a news roll like those featured on the Google Web Elements site.

Google Web Elements

Google Web Elements

I have tried both the post video feature from within WordPress in addition to atempting to post video via the VodPod service.

Any ideas why I can’t embed the news roll from YouTube within a WordPress blog?

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Posted in Associated Press, Google Web Elements, Latest Video News, Vodpod, Wordpress.com, YouTube | Leave a Comment »

How To Create and Search Your Own Twitter Followers List

July 22, 2009

Yesterday I wrote a post about how to create and search a list of Twitter updates in both WordPress and Google.

Today, I am going to tackle a similar problem: Searching Twitter Followers and Following lists.

Until Twitter makes searching Twitter account followers and following lists part of Twitter search, finding someone who follows you or who is following you isn’t very easy to do.

Creating a searchable list isn’t too dificult it just requires some time.

Go to your Twitter account and click on your followers link and select list view.

This will produce a list of 20 followers per page.

Twitter Followers List

Twitter Followers List

Copy the list of followers from each page.

Depending on how many followers you have will determine how many pages you will have to scroll through and scrape to create your own searchable list.

I have 873 followers at the moment so I had to visit 43 pages to create my list.

Paste the list of followers into a Word document or Excel if you extracted tables and save.

You can now sort either the Word or Excel documents alphabetically to create your first archived list of Followers in a searchable hierarchy.

To archive your Twitter followers list in the cloud, import it into a Google indexed WordPress blog and wallah! – you will have a instant browser searchable WordPress file with a list of all your followers.

After the Googlebot visits your site, your list of followers will also be archived in Google’s search engine results pages.

I have posted my current list of Twitter followers over on TimothyCohn.com

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Posted in Google, Twitter, Twitter Followers, Twitter Search, Wordpress.com | 1 Comment »

Making Twitter Updates Searchable

July 21, 2009

I have posted over 16,000 words 140 characters at a time to Twitter since I began Tweeting in May of 2008.

Recently I became concerned about the Twitter cloud’s ability to archive my Tweets for a prolonged period of time.

I don’t have the same concern about WordPress’ ability to archive my blog posts so I thought I would mash the two together to create a searchable archive of my Twitter updates both here in my WordPress blog and ultimately in Google’s search engine results pages via the Googlebot crawl.

To create a searchable archive of your Twitter updates, Go to your Twitter Updates link @Twitter.com to scroll, scrape and copy all of your Twitter Updates into a Word document or Text editor.

Then create a new blog post in your WordPress blog and paste all of your Tweets into a post with or without each Tweets hashtag (#).

Once you have published your Tweet post in WordPress, visit your blog and search for any of your Tweets by date or keyword in your WordPress search box.

Your Twitter updates are now archived within WordPress.

Provided your blog is already in the Google index, your Twitter updates will then soon be locatable within Google search engine results pages too.

I have posted an example of searchable Twitter Updates on my personal blog @TimothyCohn.com.

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Posted in Google, Googlebot, Twitter Cloud, Twitter Updates Searchable, Wordpress Blog, Wordpress.com | 2 Comments »

Google Webmaster Tools Reviews Actually Work

July 18, 2009

Several days ago I wrote about my frustration with WordPress.

I had moved my original WordPress domain to a new url  – SearchMarketingCommunications.com via their domain mapping service January 29th of this year.

To my dismay, I witnessed all of my Google search referrals vanish along with my WordPress domain from the Google search results.

To add insult to injury, my new domain went nearly six months without being re-indexed by Google even after authenticating and validating the new domain with Google Webmaster tools.

I contacted WordPress again and they said it wasn’t their fault the domain wasn’t in Google’s index.

Their response may have been intellectually sound, but it didn’t help me much.

I did however decide to take their advice and use Google Webmaster Tools message center to contact Google and ask for a review of my site.

To my surprise, in my Google Webnaster tools inbox I received the following message:

Google Webmaster Tools Reconsideration Request

Google Webmaster Tools Reconsideration Request

A Google site search for Search Marketing Communications also yielded 17 pages.

Google Index Search Marketing Communications

Google Index Search Marketing Communications

This is 17 more pages from my new site than were found in Google’s index yesterday.

Although I have several hundred pages in SearchMarketingCommunications.com – 17 pages in the Google index is better than none.

Googlebot crawl stats show its crawling two pages per average visit.

Googlebot Crawl Stats

Googlebot Crawl Stats

I expect to see the average number of pages crawled increase with each Googlebot return visit to my site.

Another way to verify whether or not a blog is receiving optimum distribution is to check whether or not its in Google’s Blog Search.

Based on the following Google blog search results, it appears a successful Google Webmaster tools reconsideration request into Google’s index also yields placement in Google blog search.

Google Blog Search Marketing Communications

Google Blog Search Marketing Communications

I am cautiously optimistic this entire site will soon be available in Google’s index.

If and when this occurs, I will be sure to report on the outcome here @SearchMarketingCommunications.com

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Posted in Google Blog Search, Google Webmaster Tools, Google Webmaster Tools Reviews, Googlebot Crawlstats, Search Marketing Communications, Wordpress.com | Leave a Comment »

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