I saw an interesting post in a forum the other day – the original poster was complaining that one of his suppliers hadn’t been able to complete his work, but was blogging every day, was posting on Facebook, tweeting etc, so they couldn’t be too busy, could they?

The reason I found the post interesting, even amusing, was because the person being complained about is one of my clients, and I know how busy she is. So busy that she pays me to do her blogging, tweeting and Facebooking while she gets on with the work in hand. She also hires a VA to deal with her email, and accounts, so she’s not ‘wasting time’ there either.

I think it’s easy to look at someone’s Facebook page or blog and presume that they’re wasting all their time on their own business and perhaps not supplying your service quickly enough, and of course there are extremes, but don’t presume that because you’re seeing activity from someone, they’re wasting time.

For example, I wrote this blog while I was on holiday – I had no internet connection, so I saved it and a few others as there was nothing else workwise I could do with my time. I scheduled it when I got back, so I’m not actually in front of my PC while you read it – I’m probably on a conference call or working on someone’s site.

I schedule a lot of tweets too (@nikkipilkington) – so just because you see me on Twitter doesn’t mean I’m there right at that moment.

Our NikkiPilkington Facebook page is administered by 3 different people, as is my personal account on occasion.

Of course, I keep a check on things and any replies or interactions you see are from me personally, but I don’t spend my life hovering over FB, Twitter and my blog, and neither does my client – something worth thinking about when you see someone Tweet and wonder why they haven’t yet replied to an email you sent yesterday

So you’ve done the optimisation and you’re sure you’ve done the right things to your website to ensure that the search engines know exactly which keyphrases you’re targeting, right?

This little gadget will tell you if you’ve got it right by generating a ‘cloud’ based upon the phrases and words it thinks you are targeting. The larger the text, the more you are targeting that word or phrase.

http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/keyword-cloud/

Here's my front page cloud:

If you've got big bold phrases in your cloud that are nothing to do with your site or the phrases you're targeting, then you really need to rethink your copy! Drop me a line if you have any questions, I may be able to help!

We’ve been adding Google Analytics to clients’ Facebook fan pages over the past couple of days, and they’re loving it!

It’s not difficult to do – all you need is:

• A Google Analytics account
• A Facebook Fanpage
• The FBML application
• Some generated code
• 10 minutes spare

There’s a fantastic guide to it here: How to add Google Analytics to your Fan Page

The basic premise is:

1) Add a new profile in Google Analytics

2) Use the Analytics Tracking code here to generate some code

3) Install the FMBL application on your fan page

4) Add the code generated in step 2 to the FBML page you want to track.

5) Check stats tomorrow!

The guide in the link above is great, and walks you through the process easily.

If, however, you’re having problems and can’t get it installed, then we’re offering a basic no frills installation in return for a donation. You can purchase it below. Why a donation? Because although it takes next to no time, we can’t offer it for free or we’d be inundated and have no time for ‘real’ work. This way, if Leigh spends 6 weeks adding Analytics code to Facebook pages, at least she’ll get paid for it! You can choose the amount you pay, so just pay what you think it’s worth.

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It’s not always easy knowing which keywords and phrases to target when optimising your website – and as I say in my latest blog over on Birds on the Blog, it’s all too easy to fail to see beyond high traffic and high competition phrases.

So why not try asking other people what THEY would use to search for you? This great tool from Seed Keywords allows you to set up a scenario (eg “If you were searching for a website that sells XXXXX, what would you type in to Google?”) and then invite people to contribute, anonymously.

If you can get enough people to contribute, you can get a great overall picture of the type of things that current and potential customers could be typing in to find you – and I bet there’ll be a few surprises!

Set up your ’scenario’ then promote it via:

• Email to current customers
• Your Facebook fan page
• Twitter
• On your blog
• In your email signature
• On LinkedIn
• Everywhere!

In fact, why not post a link to your scenario below and I’ll promise to drop and make some suggestions on each and every one.

A great reminder from Nigel Temple’s Marketing Mentor newsletter today, regarding testing your newsletters and list emails to see if they’ll make it past a spam filter:

Are your email messages being blocked by spam filters?

http://web0.lyris.com/resources/contentchecker/

You can subscribe to Nigel’s newsletter here.

Want to help Google improve on Google Image Search and have fun at the same time? Google Image Labeler is here for little fun for you and loads of new image labels for Google database.This whole activity is to improve the quality of Google’s image search results, while you have fun playing a ’sort of game’ with other online users. No need to login or sign up – you can start playing the game as guest.

After you hit the ’start labelling’ button, you will be given an online partner. Now you and your partner will see same images. You need to provide as many labels for the displayed images. You will receive points when your label matches your partner’s label.

We know from our overflowing inbox that lots of you have questions about Google Adwords.

It seems so easy – sign up, post some ads, get traffic, make money.

But as everyone who has tried it soon finds out, there’s more to it than that!

This FREE e-book will help you through the process of setting up and making money from your Google Adwords account – download it now with our compliments

See below for a full chapter list:

• “Are You Prepared To Profit From Instant Web Traffic?”………………………….4
• “10 Minutes To Instant Web Traffic”…………………………………………………..10
• “Keyword Research Basics”……………………………………………………………..23
• “How to Write Ads that Attract Clicks”……………………………………………….33
• “Tracking Ads and Landing Pages”……………………………………………………45
• “Adwords Keyword Strategies”…………………………………………………………55
• Bonus Chapter – Finding Profitable Markets……………………………………….63
• Bonus Chapter – Finding High Paying Adsense Keywords……………………..72
• Bonus Chapter – Finding Profitable Keywords…………………………………….78

So what are you waiting for? It’s here, it’s fab and it’s FREE

For a long time I used Google Analytics to provide webstats for me and for my clients – and it worked. Great stats, pretty graphs, nice figures – everything I needed.The problem I had was that I couldn’t get real time stats – I had to wait until the next day, by which time in some cases it was too late to react to surges in traffic.

I needed something that showed me what my visitors were doing and where they were coming from NOW, not yesterday!

And then I found GetClicky.

As they say about themselves:

Clicky is a web analyzer that works great with any web site, even Ajax and Flash sites. It was originally targeted towards smaller web sites and blogs because it tracks a high level of detail on every visitor, and these types of sites find this information very interesting.

It’s the high level of detail, combined with the fact that I can see what visitors are doing RIGHT NOW that makes GetClicky the perfect stats tool for me.

So what do you get?

The Dashboard:

The dashboard is an overview of the traffic to your site – telling you how mny visitors you’ve had (and showing you trends in a nifty little graph), how many actions those vistors have taken (eg where have they gone in your site), where your visitors have come from, what search phrases they have used and which pages they have visited.As an overview of your traffic, it’s very useful, but it’s in the nitty gritty that getClicky excels, and that’s what’s more exciting to me.

Visitors

The Visitors tab gies you a list of all your recent visitors, and tells you where they came to your site from.You’ll know what time they visited, what their IP address is, how many actions they took on your site, and if the referrer was a search engine, what search phrases they used.

This can be filtered in a number of ways and is very useful information.

Actions

I love the Actions tab as it shows me what each and every visitor has doen on my sites. I can see that one visitor has come to the site from an article that was Stumbled on Stumbleupon, and has not only read that article, but has clicked on the links in it to go to external sites, returned to my site and read some more articles, and even whether they have clicked on an email link to email me. By the time I receive the email I probably already know who they are and what they’ve been looking at and can tailor my reply accordingly – how cool is THAT?

Content

The content tab shows me which pages of my site are being visited, which are the entrance pages, exit pages, which of my files are being downloaded (in my main site, www.nikkipilkington.com, I have PDF versions of my internet marketing articles – this view tells me how many downloads they get every day) and more.

Links

Like most other traffic stats, this tells me where my visitors are coming from. But unlike most other traffic stats, it also shows me which links a visitor is clicking on to LEAVE my site.

This is great – I know whether links in my articles are being visited, recommendations are being followed, links to other sites I own are being clicked – even down to whether someoneclicks on an email link. I can also track visitors that leave to read something I have recommended and then come back! This to me is vital information and one of my favourite GetClicky features.

Searches

The searches tab shows me the latest search phrases I am being fond for on search engines – it’s always interesting to see the searches that bring people to my various sites – intended and unintentional

Spy

This is my favourite GetClicky tab of all.

I can see, in REAL TIME, visitors on my site. I can see which pages they are clicking on, which files they are downloading, external links they are following, and more.

It allows me to react to visitors almost instantly – if I can see that lots of people are on Using Twitter for Business part one on my Business on twitter site, I can quickly amend the page to add a link to other more recent articles I may have written, in order to drive traffic there. If I see that lots of people are clicking on an external link to someone else’s blog, I can make sure I let the blog writer know, and investigate any synergy we may have to exploit the large amounts of traffic.

The spy tab has a multitude of uses – but I wanr you, it’s very addictive

All in all I think GetClicky is as close to perfect as a web stats tool can get.

Pricing?

There is a free service, which doesn’t include the Spy tab, and if you sign up now you’ll get a free 21 day trial of the Premium service, which is what I use. It’s only $60 for the year and you can pay monthly – it’s well worth the investment to have your traffic stats NOW instead of tomorrow.

So, why not given it a go? Sign up now at Get Clicky and let me know how you get on!

Want to get your message out via Twitter? Why not help your followers by pre-populating their Tweet message in the following way:

To create your own pre-populated tweet link just format a link as follows:

http://twitter.com/home?status=Putyourmessagehere

Like this – tell people about 299 Steps to Website Heaven being FREE for one day by clicking this Twitter link

Now, being honest, I never really got on with Second Life – I seemed to find myself flying aimlessly all over the place and not actually getting anywhere, and in the end I felt a bit queasy.

I seem to recall I once attended a ‘virtual’ Ecademy meeting in Second Life too – I’ll say nothing about how queasy that made me feel

However, it caught on and people loved it – people are doing business on there and selling virtual and real things, and all power to ‘em I say!

News comes out today though that Google are launching what might be a serious contender to the Second Life throne – Lively. I’ll be sure to put it on my list of things to try, but I’d love to here from those of you that decide to use it

A New Morning blog says:

Google just launched “Google Lively“ which is a free, browser-based virtual environment with tight integration to social networks like MySpace, Facebook and OpenSocial, as well as Google gadgets like Picassa and YouTube. You can create an avatar and chat with your friends in rooms you design with Google Lively.

 More here