Michaela Cernescu’s Blog

Jolly Judicious Jetsetters.

It started as a buzzzz… I didn’t pay a lot of attention as I was working on 2-3 projects at a time… and wanted to get rid of my information overload… sweet dreams…And the buzz culminates with a personal invitation from Joan Adams: Giant Squid, Squid Angel, 100 lens club, a person I like, and respect, we are squidoo friends. 
Can I ignore my friends?  Never!

I start reading, I find out that Joan is a Greeter – she has her own team called “Jolly Judicious Jetsetters” and I am invited to join.

Meticulous as she is, Joan creates a lens about her team, she explains the purpose, the mechanism of participation, even the name of her team:
http://www.squidoo.com/jolly-judicious-jetsetters

Then I educate myself with other info coming from the fabulous Squidoo team.

 At this point I was in. It wasn’t just another challenge, it was:

• the spirit of Squidoo 
• the dedication of hard working people 
• the excellent team habits and manners
• the joy of shooting for the stars
• that type of creative togetherness which brings the best from each of us 
• and Joan with her optimism, dedication to a cause, and her impeccable credentials.

Now I am a member of “Jolly Judicious Jetsetters” and I invite you to join and discover our team, time sensitive you can do it until first May, click on this picture, and trust me, it will be a joy:

Joan's JJJ Team

Just live a message on the Squidoo lens and you are in!

Thanks for reading
Michaela

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They’re Changing the World Through the Power of Social Media and Twitter!

The concept of Twestivals was born on September 2008, when a group of Twitters from London UK decided to organize an event where the local Twitter community could get together, and socialize offline. The event was organized using Twitter as a communication tool, and financial support of the local Twittersphere. 

It turns out to be an exiting experience to meet the faces behind the avatars, tiny pictures, or not picture at all. They get some entertainment, a few drinks, and the most important a food drive and fundraising effort for a local homeless charity.

Since Sep. 08, the globalization of  Twitter made possible similar events to be organized and other local Twitter communities got together and took action for a variety of great causes.

Twestivals was born and they had a spectacular impact to bring awareness to global crisis. 

This is one more proof that Twitter can be a powerful communications tool.

It can

• Connect, mobilize and inform people around the world instantly,
• It has the ability to create targeted communities from those people who find and follow each other,
• It is extending your virtual community into the real world, and doing  it  can help a lot of good causes.

Starting Thursday, February 12^th, fans of Twitter.com are coming together for Twestivalsf – in San Francisco branch of an event happening simultaneously across the  world, so far 175 cities are coming together to benefit charity: water.

The mandatory $20 donation (i.e. the cost of a ticket) goes to Charity: Water, which lends a hand to some of the 1.1 billion people in the world who don’t have access to clean drinking water. Organizers for the event are all volunteers, find out more on the twestivalsf  link.

Be Part of a Revolutionary Event.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Just a short note to tell you want was remarkable on Internet Marketing on last week.

1) The eBay finally decided to get read of other types of payments and accept only PayPal. Make a lot of sense, they a talking about it from some time but now they implement this idea. Forcing customers to pay only with PayPal which is part of eBay will:

• Create more secure payments
• More stability
• Build trust between sellers and buyers
• Make transaction easy to follow

This is a “change”,  I am totally agree with.

 2) Opt-in Forms are back on Squidoo, I already update my lenses, you can see an example at  http://www.squidoo.com/BeginnersAffiliateProfit or http://www.squidoo.com/SquidIncomeGoal

3) I create my own group on Squidoo, and call it: AffiliateMarketing09

 4) It is a flood with new Twitter Applications:

http://www.tweepler.com  http://twitter-splitter.com and so on.

At this point the power of tweeter is incredible, there are people with thousands of followers and there is no restriction on what you advertise. When affiliate marketing URLs are more and more restricted on: some blogs, forums, ezines, on Squidoo and Twitter we can use affiliate link as much as we want. But don’t abuse it, use Twitter ethically and spamlessly and you will increase your web traffic.

Until next time all the best

Michaela

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It is about the right time for Dec. Newsletter that I pledge to get it out around 15th of each month. This is special because is the last newsletter of the year and we are close to special Holidays and the challenges of a new year.

My mini talking points are:
1. Website design – Find out if your Website is meeting its usability requirements!
2. The faster growing Web 2.0 Application – Twitter
3. Holidays and 2009 expectations

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1. Website design – Find out if your Website is meeting its usability requirements!

Website Design is a subject dear to my heart. I have started creating Websites from the scratch long time ago, and I have been a stanch believer on the concept of combining a good looking Site with a useful content. I don’t believe in ugly Websites, even when the content is good. Make sense as I am a fun of Seth Godine’s school of the 3 Rs:

useful  –  unique  -  up-to-date

We always create our Sites with a purpose in mind. We never create a Site for just one time visit, using websites we want to create lists of potential customers, a community of friendly people that coming back again and again to visit out site, and this is the most powerful way to transform potential customers in customers. 

The first impression: unique, pleasant, a warm feeling is what makes me look closer and discover the content. The first 5 seconds of exposure are very important to determine a visitor to stay longer or go away. If the visitor starts browsing your site, the other characteristics are important: easy navigation, clarity, quality content.

The truth of the matter is, after so many years of Website design, we have now good guidelines for website usability, accessibility, and we have a lot of tools to measure those characteristics. The bad news is not everybody follow the guidelines.

The general wisdom is that a Website must have:

• Easy Navigation, and map side for large WS
• Functionality, Clarity, and Consistency
• User Control, everything a user wants to do, must be available: search, cancel, sign-in, read more, contact us, about us. Don’t leave the impression that you have something to hide, put your picture, address, email, your Twitter count, Alexa count. This is the way you will build trust
• Content of high relevance presented in simple language, avoid jargon, well structure info: clear links, paragraphs, bullets. This is very important that a lot of people first scan and second read or go away
• Content is the king, but don’t hype, be as honest as you can, at this point in history people are sick and tired of hype and sophisticated enough to discover what is hype and what is not
• On-line help and instructions available for sign-in, for download
• An efficient System of User Feedback
• An efficient System of Error Prevention with visible error messages and concise instructions for correction

We have a lot of sources, but for more details, I redirect you to the best source available that also contain learning sites, checklist and guidelines:
http://web.mit.edu/is/usability/usability-guidelines.html

I give you same tools to measure your site usability and accessibility:
http://fivesecondtest.com/   this is a site which will run a quick usability poll for you

http://www.feng-gui.com/  this site shows you the heat map of any image you put in your site, it effectively analyze attention and attraction in visuals (this is important for “5 seconds first impression” I talk about)

To lean more about Usability and Accessibility you can go in forums:
http://www.cre8asiteforums.com/forums

Hang on in forums is always a time well spend, you can learn from others, find best advice, and best people interested in your niche, new ideas, and is fun as well.

If you enjoy this post, let me know, drop a line or two. I’ll come back to this subject, because I believe in the power of “well done” Websites.

2. The faster growing Web 2.0 Application – Twitter

Not all Web 2.0 Applications are equal, and Twitter is really the fastest growing Application.
It is build around a simple question: What are you doing now? And you can respond only in 140 characters or less. Initially I was skeptical but after I tried I discovered why people get into it:

• It  is very simple and easy to communicate, a lot of people is using it as a mini blog
• A perfect way of picking up useful information
• Easy way to find new customers, business partners, pears, friends 
• Excellent opportunity to advertise yourself, your work, services, blogs
• A powerful networking tool, put questions, give answers
• It is addicted and fun 
• You can build a following crowd in a short period of time, anyway quicker then an opt-in list in a website

All I said is valuable but the best profit of Tweeting is build a team of followers, create a community that like you, communicate with you, pay attention to you, get closer to you daily. In time you can brand your business, doing this you make people know you, remember you and finally trust you. 

I don’t advise you to put in front of your follower offers all day long, this will be considered same sort of spam and the people will go away, but if you build correctly the relationship, and brand correctly your business, when you will advertise something this community will pay attention to you, because the felling of knowing you was created, and you will have customers.

In summary: The numbers of so many applications that have been created and are related with Twitter are definitely the proof and the recognition of the value of Twitter. I list just a couple of them:
http://twitter.grader.com
http://tweetdeck.com
http://twittAd.com
http://tweetMyBlog.com
http://TwitWall.com
http://search.twitter.com
http://TwitPWR.com
http://TwitPic.com
The latest I found is: http://itweet.net  it built-in auto-refresh, search and hashtags, full follow, block, notifications features, view user bio, location, URL inline with tweets, and watch conversations with “in reply to” links, awesome!

Play with all of them and you will find something you like it for sure.

3. Holidays and 2009 expectations 

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Hello!  I just want to share my observations about traffic with you.

I have a couple of websites, blogs, squidoo lenses, hubs and so on, and like everybody else I try hard to drive traffic to them.

Because the Internet trends, patterns, Web 2.0 applications, engine algorithms are changing so rapidly, we cannot relay on 2-year ago info.

I need to know what is working NOW, and what I have to change from my old patterns.

For websites.

I have started a habit to find out info about my traffic . I spend 10-15 min per day looking to the statistics on my cPanel. 
When I was looking for a host for me, I chose HostGator as they had Fantastico utility. It was an excellent choice. In addition to Fantastico, they have a big variety of other utilities, tutorials, statistics tools and an excellent live support.

You will be surprised how much you can learn just looking at the statistics.

Example:
If somebody asks me what page on my main website attracts the largest number of visitors, I couldn’t guess, as it is:

• The most simplistic page possible
• The page contains only 2 pictures and 4 links
• I created the page as a practice for a script I bought one  and a half year ago
• It has never been updated since creation and
• I almost forgot about it.

This is it:
http://www.mc-ebay-resources.com/MyVideos.html

It is true that the 2 links are for sites which are collections of videos I created with the script:

• One is collecting all the videos created for eBay
• The other is collecting all the videos created for Studio Art Glass

It is also true that:

• My Squidoo lens for Art Glass S. Fellerman is ranked #552 in Alexa (last time I checked) as squidoo is ranked #552
• My eBay auction site is not ranked at all in Alexa and Google (this is the other mystery of Google search engine algorithms) 

But MyVideo.html page produces the most traffic possible and NOW I know WHY!

It is because it has 2 links to pages that are collections of videos which are dynamically allocated, each time a new Video is added or deleted. But don’t forget my page ( MyVideo.html)  hasn’t changed in one year and a half, and continues to inherit the visibility, the traffic from the video collection sites.

Isn’t this intriguing and useful to know? This is actually the proof that the backlinks to pages with high volume of traffic can benefit you for your own ranking.

And I found this looking at my statistics in cPanel.

For lenses, hubs, twitter etc.
For Web 2.0 applications are easier to determine if you have good traffic or not, as you can see the participation of other people.

Example – you can see that one twitter has 2,000 followers and the other has just 200, or a lens is ranked well and has a lot of comments whereas others are not, and so on. 

For Web 2.0 applications you also have a lot of widgets which are dynamically allocated, and now you can use some widgets in websites as well.

Note: I think I am an affiliate for the script creating a site that collects all the existing videos created for a specific key. I never used that affiliation; I will look it over, and let you know.

As always, you are welcome to leave your comments here on the blog.

Until next time, all the best
Michaela

Popularity: 1% [?]