Strange Duck - Tech Talk in Plain English

Here’s my first quick post for the How to Market Cheaply and Effectively Using the Internet For Starving Artists and Other Small Businesses. It’s a quickie, and comes from an email I had with Alison Humphrey, who is working at Sarrazin Couture film production as well as at Stratford Shakespeare Festival (a multi-talented artsy gal!)

Here is my big time and money saver for companies in industries with notoriously small marketing budgets: use Wordpress blog software to build your web site.

You will get more bang for your buck.

Here are 2 sites I put up for tv/film production companies using Wordpress. These are using free Wordpress themes to dress up their site a bit.

• Streely Maid Films producers of Diamonds in a Bucket
• PWK productions producers of Puppets Who Kill

Wordpress themes, or templates, are kind of like “skins.” It’s the same Wordpress engine underneath, but the theme can make the site look quite different. It’s kind of like dressing up Barbie.

There are also fancier Wordpress themes called Premium Themes. These make Wordpress sites look more like a magazine site. For these sites below, we used the wonderful Wordpress Wordpress Revolution Magazine theme by Brian Gardner

• Author Paul Quarrington
• Moving Stories Film Festival. Watch for the June 15th big announcement at BookExpo.

You can also do an all out customized original Wordpress with your own design.

Production costs gets more expensive as you go from top to bottom of the above list, but looking at the Canadian TV scene, I think the top ones are fine. There’s little point spending thousands of dollars on a site if no one comes to it - or worse - when they get there, it really wasn’t worth the effort.

So - build your site using Wordpress, then take that extra money and build a Wordpress site for each of your film productions. Audiences are starting to expect this.

By using Wordpress for each film’s site, you can start your site early and build hype and Google authority. You can cross promote the site’s existence during your promotion and publicity, and then invite fans to come to the site, interact and leave comments. You build fans. You can also grab their emails so you can send them news about the show, or other upcoming shows.

With the money you saved building your web site, you can now put more money into other marketing initiatives - like building really cool EPKs or electronic press kits. These will have all the necessary things up on your site ready for press and journalists to download. The easier it is for them to gather their information, the more likely it is that they will write or talk about you.

The more I do this for clients (and myself) the more I think this is smart.

Wordpress is still becoming hotter and hotter. With a monstrously huge fan base that keeps developing for it, it’s become a huge Lego for web sites, allowing you to add really cool functions and plugins - like send to a friend, or forums, or notify me.

I can go on and on - but this is enough to get you thinking. I will write more about Wordpress in other posts

I love lurve Wordpress.

Quick apologies for not writing for a while. I have been really busy - yes the standard excuse - and though I have started about 20 posts all pretty much geared to helping small production companies, authors, theatre companies or businesses on how to market cheaply and effectively using the Internet, I haven’t finished any of them. I just haven’t had the time to complete them accordingly.

Consequently, I find myself saying or writing the same things over and over to clients in emails or telephone calls. Surely, there’s got to be a more effective way to get that information out?

Then poof - the answer came to me. Yes - I will blog it!

So, what I will try to do is keep that perfectionist streak at bay and just write quickly - preferably after I write an email to a client - and just use some fancy copy and paste work, and pop the info from email into a post.

That way it will all be here on the site and I can refer you to the right page and have fancy links or pics ready for you so that you can check things out quickly and see what I am referring to.

Perfect. We’ll see how it goes.

Here are a few things I have been busy with:

• Author Paul Quarrington’s web site
• Moving Stories Film Fest site
• Getting my second degree black belt in tae kwon do
• Directing and editing the cutest series of interviews for the Writer’s Union called Elevator Pitch - a Bookshorts production of course

And now big news. I am moving to Newfoundland!!! Yes - I am running away to fulfill a lifelong dream of being an artist, and have found the most wonderful community of filmmakers, people, and spirit right here in Canada on the Rock. St. John’s is like Paris in the 20s. Well, almost. Kind of. Pretty much.

No worries. I will be back-and-forthing a lot between St. John’s and Toronto (feeling guilty about the carbon footprint all ready) and we’ll always have the Internet! I love the Internet.

Have any questions you need answered? Email me irene @ strangeduck.com

I need to learn to use Skype with video. Anyone know a good tutorial?

This is a great deal from An Hosting, one of the more reliable hosting companies out there.

Thinking it’s time for a site or blog? No more excuses - now is the time to jump in because $4.95 USD is a great price for hosting, and this package is hot. It even has One-Click Installs Of WordPress - the best blogging software out there.

Here’s what you get for $4.95 US a month with their AN Hosting “One Size Fits All” Plan

• 999GB of disk space (up from 250GB)
• 9,999GB of bandwidth (up from 2,500GB)
• Host 999 domains on one account (up from 20 domains)
• Free domain for life!
• Free site move!
• 30 day money-back guarantee
• Free website builder
• 24/7 phone/e-mail support
• Free scripts library
• Only $4.95/mo with no setup fee!

To put this in perspective, let me explain what it means.

Most of the web sites I have built for clients come in under 5 mb, unless they have hefty media sections with a lot of press ready art.

7 years ago, 100 MB was considered a lot of hosting space.

999 GB of storage space is 4 times more than the average computer holds…so that’s a huge amount. I can’t think of how you can use that up unless you actually host 999 blogs on the site.

9,999 GB is a also a huge amount for bandwidth. Bandwidth means how much data is allowed to be downloaded from your web site. It’s a way of measuring your site’s traffic. Some hosting companies put caps on the bandwidth, meaning if your site is super popular, and lots of people are going to your site, hence downloading images, text etc from your site, and you hit the limit, you may have to pay a surcharge.

With shared hosting, this number can be deceptive, but the short answer is the more bandwidth the better. You’d have to be very popular to hit this amount of traffic, so I wouldn’t worry about it. The long answer is that your hosting company may still put a cap on you…but that’s for another post.

Host 999 domains on one account? Wow! Are you a filmmaker with lots of films to promote? Then this package is a great way for you to set up a site or blog for each one of your films. Or how about a blog for everyone in your family. It’s easy to do with one click installs. If you want your own blogging empire, this would be the way to do it.

You only get one domain name free for life with this package, so you will still have to pay for the other domain names every year. But domains start at about $6 USD, so you’ll save at least that much. Some companies are still charging (or rather, ripping people off) $34.95 a year for those people not in the know. Now you know not to pay that much.

You don’t want the web site builder. They build awful sites. Better to put up a Wordpress blog and use that as your web site. If you want it to look less “bloggy,” switch the home page to a static page, and title your blog section as News. I did that here on my writer/director’s site.

All the rest is standard. No one dare charges set-up fees anymore, so that’s nothing special. 24 hour support is another standard practice, though if they actually provide that is another question.

I just sent an email to these guys and it was responded to in under 5 minutes, so that is impressive.

All in all, a very good deal. Sign up before Nov 22, 07, when the price goes back up to 6.95 USD a month.

Tags: web hosting, one-click installs, specials, sale, AN hosting

Non-techies listen up - now you too can have a Wordpress blog set up and running at your own domain.

The how-to instructions on how to do a manual install of Wordpress can be rather intimidating. This is because you need to set up a database on your web hosting server to run Wordpress, and in order to do so, you need to get into the “tech guts” of your server. Spooky.

That’s why One-click installs are great - all you have to do is follow the instructions set up by your web hosting company, which usually amount to clicking a few check boxes. The trickiest part in the operation will be naming the database, but that’s basically all you have to do: name it. The rest is done for you.

Another thing that is great about One-Click Installs is that they make handling updates to the Wordpress software easy. The kind Wordpress developers keep making their software better and safer, and so it is a good idea to keep updating to the latest version of Wordpress. With one-click installs, the web hosts will upload the latest software for you, and when you are ready to install it, it’s just another click away.

Here are a few reputable companies that offer one-click installs. Sign up with either one and you could be blogging in about 10 minutes.

Hostgator

We are happy to say we have started using Hostgator as a web site hosting company and are delighted with the servers and with service. With packages starting at $7.95 USD per month, Hostgator is a sweet deal. It is also the host of choice for many pro Internet Marketers who use the Reseller Package to host all their web sites. It boasts Cpanel and WHM control panels.

• Click here to check out the Hostgator web site or to sign up for an account.

Dreamhost

Is probably the most popular one-click install company, probably because of their very popular affiliate program. There are as many Dreamhost evangelists as there are detractors, but the one thing you can be sure of is that Dreamhost’s newsletter will make you laugh, as it boasts the wittiest corporate writing out there.

A big plus - the company is very honest about what’s going on with their service and have a blog and wiki set up so that you can stay up-to-date with what is going on with your server’s status.

Dreamhost’s Crazy Domain Insane! package costs $7.95 a month if you sign up and pay for 2 years up front. This will get you 150 GB of web host space, which increases weekly by 1 GB. Yes, this incentive is quite unique, but it seems to be working.

Your allowed bandwidth or transfer amount increases weekly too, starting at 1.5 TB and increasing weekly by 16 GB.

With Dreamhost, you can host as many domain names as you like on this package and have unlimited MySql databases running - enough to set up a blogging empire. You also get 1 year of free domain name registration.

I am currently hosting this site and a few other blogs with Dreamhost and I have had very little problems with them and found their support service quite speedy.

• This way to review the Dreamhost package in more detail.

Midphase

Is growing quite a strong fan base. Their packages tend to be a bit more costly, but advocates swear the service is worth it.

Midphase’s basic package is $7.95 and will get you 200 Gigabytes of space, a domain name for life, and 3oo GB of bandwidth. You have to bump up to the $11.95 pro-phase package to get unlimited domains.

• More about Midphase

AN Hosting

An Hosting is offering a lot of great deals recently. Their usual package is 250GB of disk space, 2,500GB of bandwidth, 20 fully hosted domains and a free domain for life, all for $6.95 a month. But if you wait for sale time, you can get some pretty good deals - like this $4.95 a month special that is available until Nov, 22, 2007.

• More about AN Hosting

As usual, do your research to choose the right company for you. A quick Google search of any company name above and you will find tons of fan mail, heated debates, as well as a few horror stories. But I think you will be safe with any of the companies above unless you plan on getting millions of hits a day, which in that case you should be able to afford a dedicated server (one that you do not share with anyone else.) And that is a good problem to have

This post is part of my “Blogging with Wordpress Made Super Easy - Well, Almost” series. More coming soon.

Tags: wordpress, blogging made easy, one-click installs, web hosting, blogging for beginners

I sure did learn the hard way in my recent Google fiasco, the case where I mysteriously disappeared from Google’s pages.

My site Bitter Tonic was out of the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) for a total of 9 long, painful days. Then one day, just as easily as I had disappeared, I reappeared. And in pretty much the same positions, if not better.

In the meantime, I had done a whack of research on what could have caused my ousting and how I could fix it. The most interesting result being that a lot of the information that is out there is mostly speculation - and not fact. And because Google is very secretive about it’s algorhithms and the way it ranks pages, the speculation will no doubt continue.

I got pretty spooked when I read a bunch of horror stories of businesses being locked out of Google. Some were led astray by Search Engine Optimization companies promising them high rankings, only to be booted out for cheating (called black hat SEO). Others didn’t know why they were on the outs. Some of these companies were losing thousands of dollars in business a month. Some of them had been trying to get back in, begging on their knees unsuccessfully for months.

Which should make everyone’s number one rule - don’t go cheating on Google.

Hell hath no fury like this scorned search engine. And since Google is the preeminent and undisputed leader in its field, you should definitely play nice.

If that wasn’t bad enough, some think there are things that you could be doing that Google frowns upon and you don’t even know it.

I knew I hadn’t cheated the search engines on purpose. But what if I had been caught for duplicate pages? I read a post that the way Wordpress archives its pages may be considered duplication by Google. That scared me, mostly becuase I didn’t even know what it meant.

Perhaps I was linking to “bad neighbourhoods?” Or the nighbourhood used to be clean but unbeknownst to me, got bought by a scammer, and has since deteriorated in Google’s eyes. Did I have too many internal links? Too many affiliate links? What was too many?

Your number two rule should be - be super squeaky clean.

As I said earlier, I think the reason I fell out was just one of Google’s admitted glitches. But in the meantime here is what I did to ensure relisting:

• I got the Wordpress Duplicate Content Cure plugin from Badi Jones
• I got the Google Sitemap Creator for Wordpress plugin by Arne Brachhold, and submitted it to Google. Whatever Google wants, it gets
• I removed lots of affiliate links. Noone was clicking on them anyway.
• I removed most of the cross-posted links, though I don’t think it mattered.
• I asked to be re-instated into Google, and clicked that damn check box that says you admit to committing a crime
• I kept researching, reading and posting to forums
• I was patient. Well, more like dejected, but patient sounds better.

I also was really happy to find a wonderful and giving SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and web community out there. I found no shortage of great sites, forums and communities offering up great tips and advice. So make sure to read on to my next blog entry where I list the places to go for SEO help.

Which brings me to my last point - write and create honest to goodness really good content. That’s what we humans like, and that’s what Google likes too.

Hmmm. I don’t think I ever said “honest to goodness” in my life - but it seems to fit in well here.

It’s true. The reason Google became and remains a popular search engine is because it manages to filter out the scammy and spammy sites, so that its results feature quality web sites and content with each query.

So, write for humans, and Google will follow.

Tags: google, search engine optimization, advice, SERP, page ranking, demotion

Last Wednesday morning I went to check my stats at my comedy blog, www.bittertonic.com, as I do numerous times throughout the day due to my stat-tracking addiction, and was pretty amazed to see that they were very low. I didn’t think too much about it as I continued my morning coffee and email reading.

But when I went to check in the afternoon, I realized something was definitely wrong. My numbers were about a quarter of what they should be.

Uh oh.

About a week prior I had started getting at least 200 page views a day, the majority coming from Google. Not tremendous, but OK, since I hadn’t done that much marketing work on them. The blog was built so that I could put up my original comedy stuff on it, but first I had to learn about blogging, how to do it and what to use, etc. and so original comedy creation had taken a back seat. I was going to do the big marketing and community building stuff when I put up more of my own content.

I had chosen Wordpress for blogging months before and that turned out to be the right choice. It is great open-source blogging software program with a super community who keep churning out unbelievable plugins that can really make the program powerful. It has also become one of the 5 most popular blog platforms, so that when you sign up for extra services or widgets with other companies, like Feedburner, or addthis.com, they always have a Wordpress version, so you never feel left out.

Some of the best plugins are Search Engine Optimization plugins, and I had added Aaron Schaefer’s Optimal Title, which move your blog’s name to the end of your Page Title, so that the important words come first, and Head Meta Description by Kaf Oseo, which creates a unique meta description tag for each page, and so I was pretty pleased with the number of visitors coming from Google. Most of them were coming to see a ridiculously funny unicorn video called Charlie Goes To Candy Mountain.

But not any more. Whereas for months that post was in the top 8 in Google’s search result for numerous permutations of the video name, sometimes hitting number 2 right under YouTube’s number 1 slot - for which I was ridiculously proud - starting Wednesday it was gone. Nowhere near.

In fact, all my posts were gone. Nothing was showing up in Google except my home page, which used to sit at number 1 for Bitter Tonic, but now was demoted to number 4. And when I searched my name, my Bitter Tonic profile came up dead last.

I was dumped from Google. Demoted. Banned.

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