Sometimes taking advice is a good thing, even if it temporarily impedes forward progress...

It seems everyone has something to say about something. I rarely generalize to this extent but when it comes to advice, humans are inclined to be very generous. No matter how well intended, one’s advice often goes unheeded.

Every parent knows what I’m talking about. In our efforts to have our loved ones avoid our painful mistakes, we sometimes become too earnest in trying to relay our hard earned wisdom to the next generation. Looking at my own forays into fatherhood, I found that my son not taking my advice has made parenting a less than rewarding experience for me. No one teaches you how to be a parent. But life metes out its’ own lessons that can be of great value to the next generation.

I’m pretty free with my advice when I think could help other people. To my disappointment however it usually falls on deaf ears. Is it just the way it is? Does the next generation have to fight a war to know that it is a destructive activity even for the “winners”? I don’t know? But here’s a one solution. A person giving advice to another out of his own experiences has a higher level of reality on its workability than anyone else. We know that few if anyone will go out and use that wisdom, but there’s one person who could and that’s the person himself.

To my horror, I discovered that I seldom take my own advice. I know what is right; I know what to do that results in a more abundant, simpler and happy life. But do I do it? This is my new life project, taking my own advice. What does that mean? Applying what I know in my own life. What a concept!! Life is a process. Sometimes you have to understand something, forget it, and rediscover it anew later in life.

Most of us are quite smart. We know what will benefit us. For example, in my contracting business, when I promoted it expanded, when I stopped promoting my business it contracted. The obvious conclusion is that if you want to expand a business you have to promote it.

You have to let people know who you are and what you do. In these times that includes a web presence. I think most business owners now understand that, but some have not yet taken their own advice. The business owners that know this and have acted on it are moving to the forefront while others drift down the food chain. It’s tough these days. It takes pulling out all the stops and investing in new areas in order to get known. The fact is that more stuff is sold on the web than ever before. And the numbers keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger. You know that. Isn’t it time you take your own advice.

Oddly enough, a lack of transparency makes you all the shadier

When Raffy and I first formed Studio98, one of the policies we adopted early on, was to be transparent in our business dealings with our customers.

One of the areas was pricing. We wanted to be very up front about our pricing with no surprises or hidden fees. This was reflected in the contracts we devised for our website work. And we delivered exactly what we promised. If there was something we didn’t foresee, but we should have, we didn’t then go to the customer, we “ate it” and learned to account for our mistake by writing better contracts. But some companies just don’t get it.

The other day, I was searching for some bubble packs of epoxy. I found a site which sold them and proceeded on with the purchase because of a little colored banner that said “free shipping”. I got to the order page and filled out all of the required fields. This took me to another page to finalize my order. This page had a box labeled “shipping” with a drop down menu. I clicked on it and to my surprise, there was no box labeled “free shipping”.  In fact, the minimum shipping and handling charge for the 2 oz. order was $6.95 – almost half of the purchase price.

This company does not understand transparency and I’ll never order anything from them. Contrast that with other websites where shipping information is available before you have to fill out all the billing and credit information so you can decide before hand.

Transparency is a good thing. It attracts and keeps customers because people trust people who have nothing to hide.

A hash is something that grinds up data... in a consistent way.

Yeah, dumb subject.  Maybe not.  Here’s the beef: I find the concept of hashing so fascinating that I felt compelled to blog about it, because it’s so interesting.  It is also absolutely critical to security and affects every single person who uses the internet.  I’ve always known this word was very important to security, but it has only been recently that I came to understand what it actually is.

Hashing is, at its most basic, the process of taking a string of characters and converting it into another, seemingly random, string.

It comes from the French word hacher, which means to cut up.  This is also where the word hatchet comes from.  It also applies to the culinary definition of hash, where you chop something up and mix it about.

(Speaking of which, hash browns sound really awesome right now… looks like I’m making a run into town after this…)

Back to our topic.

Hashing is a way of securing data.  It’s different from encrypting, where you can reverse it back using a key.  Nope, once something has been hashed, it cannot be reversed.  To boot, no two sets of characters will have the same hash (with a few extraordinarily rare exceptions, which we’re not going to worry about here).

So how in the world does this have a use?  How is it useful to have the ability to change something so it can’t be changed back, by any means?

I’ll give you a hint: Passwords.  Specifically, the process of protecting passwords from hackers.  The hash, in fact, is so vital to this process, the internet would scarcely exist without it.

Let’s look at how a security violation would occur without hashing:

1. You submit a password (“golf”) when creating an account, say for email or online banking.
2. This password is sent to their site.
3. They store the password in their database.
4. Every time you visit the site, you enter your password, and this password is checked directly against the one they have in their database.
5. This seems fine, until…..
6. A hacker breaks into their database and steals all the user’s passwords.
7. He now has complete access to all your information.
8. Now you’re some sucker being interviewed for a 60 Minutes special on the horrors of the internet.

Obviously, that situation is not so good.

So someone new to the job decides to enforce the security by encrypting the passwords, making it more difficult to figure out what to do with the passwords once they’ve been procured.  Remember that encrypted data can be reversed back to what it originally was, using a key.

Well, here’s how that would go:

1. You submit your password, a more clever one this time (“Golf2343″, perhaps)
2. This password is sent to their site.
3. They apply an encryption algorithm, and store the encrypted password in their database.
4. Every time you visit the site, you enter your password, and this password is, then, itself encrypted and checked directly against the one they have in their database.
5. A hacker breaks into their database and steals all the user’s encrypted passwords.  He cannot do anything with them as such, because they need to be decrypted.
6. You smugly lean back and smile.
7. Meanwhile, the hacker figures out the key needed to decrypt your passwords.  Now he access to all your information.
8. Now you’re some sucker being interviewed on the evening news.  Maybe even Dr. Phil, if you’re lucky.

So what the heck do you do to actually protect your passwords, making it so the encrypted passwords are literally impossible to decrypt?  Hashing to the rescue!  Here’s our latest iteration of the above events.

1. You submit a password and send it (this time, you get serious, and submit “$gOlf12@3X#^”)
2. They apply a hash function this time and store the hashed password.
3. Now, you enter your password.  The password you enter is itself hashed in the same way, then checked against the hashed password they have.
4. You smile as your movies download and stocks transfer.
5. Rubbing his greedy little mitts together, our hacker breaks in yet again (perhaps you should go with a different bank).  He succeeds.
6. Unfortunately, because it is literally impossible to reverse a hashed string, he sits there with nothing to do but twiddle his thumbs and guess what your password might be.
7. Your password is safe!

A hash function will produce well-scrambled version of your password....

Hashed data is literally impossible to reverse or decode.  Said hacker could have an entire database full of hashed passwords, but he has no way of “decrypting” them.  Not only that, but anything sent to the site is, itself, hashed.  So even if he sends your hashed password, it is, itself, hashed, which is obviously going to be different from the original hashed password they have stored.

(Okay, that’s a lot of hash, and I’m still hungry…)

Maybe this affects you, maybe it doesn’t.  But it certainly helped entertain me and open my eyes to a new dimension of internet security and technology.

That said, do stick to the “cardinal rules” of good password.  A really good password takes hundreds of hours for a hacker to guess, much more than the average hacker has if they’re looking to make a quick buck.  If you already know this, fine, but to reiterate:

1. Make your password 8 characters at the absolute least.  Try to manage 12 or more.
2. Your password should not be a common word, or any word related to your profession or hobbies.
3. And most importantly of all: ensure your password contains at least one lowercase letter, at least one uppercase letter, at least one number, and at least one special character.
   

   ...while an already-hashed password will produce useless dribble, making it useless to a hacker who steals them.

If you’re bad at remembering passwords, write it down.  On paper.  With a pen.  Technology may be accelerating exponentially, but to my knowledge you can’t hack something written in ink.

And that’s all, folks.  Happy computing.

(I think my next password should be “brown.”  That way, whenever I submit a password, I could say that I “hash brown”.  Get it?  Isn’t that clever?  Perhaps there’s a reason I write bi-monthly blogs, instead of books….)

Hard-earned SEO results can sometimes be cut down overnight - maybe it's time for a new strategy!

Can Google’s results be controlled? No.

Is it possible to formulate a workable SEO strategy that will benefit your company or reputation online? Yes.

If your Website ranks well on Google and you are reaping the benefits on a daily basis, it’s easy to get comfortable. Although Google may feel like a natural, sort of organic service — you feed it links, build up profiles, and do all the other homework it takes to get traffic via long-tail terms — there is no guarantee things will stay the same.

Google is a software program that consists of scripts and algorithms, it’s ongoing development is handled by a team of software engineers that constantly update the way it behaves and responds to commands, i.e. search queries. At any point in time (just as was done a few weeks ago) the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) listings can completely change for good; as a result, website owners have found themselves losing up to 50% or more of traffic immediately.

Back in 2007 I experienced the unpredictability of Google first hand while working at an internet marketing and PR firm in Pasadena, CA. My official title at the time was “Traffic Manager” (since we worked in the PR field, the title “Traffic Manager” was preferred over “Project Manager” due to traditional usage) and my main duties were managing writers and projects.

As I was new to the industry, my daily routine included learning sessions on various SEO strategies and practices — such as link building and online reputation management.

After a few months of working there I became very curious with how my own name “Jack Napier” ranked and started to monitor the position of some of my social profiles on Google. I proceeded to sign-up to additional services such as Linkedin to help with this and after about 90 days saw good results. Many of the profiles I had created were already within the top 5 listings on the first page!

One year has passed since that initial 90 day period and I’m on Google searching my name again. To my surprise, I only have one listing on the first page: my Linkedin profile. The rest of the page is being dominated by another player I never saw previously: A Puerto Rican porn star who has my same name!

My brain was spinning, how could I have never noticed this before. This guy just showed up out of nowhere… and Bam! now he owns the majority of real estate on that page and my listings are nowhere to be seen. This came as a big shock to me and I decided to fight back. I created more profiles and even distributed online articles. Nothing helped. I eventually lost all real-estate on the first page and couldn’t even find myself on the second page of results.

Over three years had passed and I knew it was time for a different SEO strategy. Either I was 1) going to continue battling for my own first and last name combination — Jack Napier — or 2) build a new strategy that involved my middle name “Michael”. I ended up choosing the latter.

Presently, all of the articles I write (and even the link to my Facebook page) include my middle name. If you search online for either “Jack Michael Napier” or “Jack M Napier” you will see that I, once again dominate the majority of the top 5 listings on the first results page.

Take Away

When building SEO strategies keep in mind the amount of competition on any one keyword, never stop building upon your strategy (just like a good relationship,) and don’t get comfortable — you never know what search engines will throw your way.

Jack M. Napier

Watch out for that cliff!

If you look directly into the sun without proper eye protection, for an extended period of time, you will go blind; The high radiation levels being emitted from the sun will burn your retina and you won’t feel a thing (your retina doesn’t sense pain, only light.)

In order to keep this from happening, the rule of thumb is not to look at the sun at all without protection. Even though you could probably get away with it for a second or two, it’s just not worth the risk.

How does this apply to Social Media? With companies around every corner offering solutions from social media press kits to bulk social friending, it’s easy to get mislead and confused, only to find yourself a few months later a couple grand shy with a suspended Facebook account.

Now, before the aforementioned horror story even has the opportunity to rear it’s head, you need to ask yourself the following question: “How do I protect my social retina from getting burnt?”

It all starts with eye protection. There are two main parts to each pair of glasses:

The Lenses: Knowing what to look for

The first thing you need to determine is exactly what your goal is. Why are you getting into social media and how will it benefit your company in the long run?

A few common goals include, but are not limited to – product promotion, brand influence, and customer loyalty and support.

Now that you have your basic goal in place, it’s time for some research. Since social media is all about connecting with people and spreading the word, you will need to determine which demographic is best to target, and research into what social media platforms will best reach that audience.

Here’s an infographic that will help you identify the best social sites to use.

The Frame: Developing an effective strategy

At this point your have your goal clear and an idea of the sites that will need to be included in your campaign (your already ahead of the crowd, congratulations!).

The next thing you will need to decide is how to connect with your targeted demographic. Are you going to spam them with friend requests, coerce them to “like” your social page through the promotion of your current customer base, or are you planning something completely unique?

I would suggest researching your customer based communities for a little while before you decide on the previous step. Once you have a clear idea of how your customers like to be “reached” you will know how to impact them. You don’t want to come across as too forthright or spammy, connecting with your customers in a social way is all about reaching them on their playing field, not yours.

Looking at the sun

Now that you have some basic strategies to follow when tackling social media, you can start on your campaigns without worrying about damaging your reputation, or worse. No longer do you rely on the sales pitch and strategies of a stranger. You can use your own eyes through knowledge to guide you.

Jack M. Napier

Like a phoenix rising from its ashes, web-based media is rising to fill the role of newspapers and magazines.

Within the last decade, the total number of paper-based newspaper subscriptions has dropped off a cliff; whereas, the average number of daily searches on Google has jumped from 10,000 (official Google history) to over 230 million (Comscore estimate July 2008).

It wasn’t always this way. In the year 1690, Benjamin Harris printed the first published newspaper in the USA, “Publik Ocurrences”. Up until 1996 newspapers were successful and on a steady incline, but, between 1996 and 2010 the number of subscribers dropped sharply and the amount of workers employed by newpaper publishers nearly cut in half.

What Changed?

Since the inception of the “WordWideWeb” in 1990 by it’s creators, Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau, blogs and other online news portals have supplied a steady stream of free content to the general public. People quickly discovered that it wasn’t necessary to buy news off the stand any longer when Google and other reliable sources were just a click away.

Furthermore, within the last 5-10 years, microblogging sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and Myspace have sprung up offering instant access to news throughout the world within minutes of incidents.

The roles have changed, no longer is “news” reserved to the standard media channels; anyone can take a part in it from anywhere.

Fighting Back

Publishing giants such as News Corporation are fighting back to stay alive. Not only are they trying trying to monopolize content from news aggregators such as Google, they are also applying new strategies of adoption for devices like the iPad. In my opinion, both actions are futile in the long run – news is best when it is both free and open.

Conclusion

“Traditional” practices and theories need to be re-evaluated anew. Just like Rupert Murdoch is finding his kingdom collapsing, so will outdated web-design and marketing practices.

Jack M. Napier

For many people SEO is often a product that doesn’t live up to the marketing hype you hear about it.  More than one business has shelled out thousands of dollars to an SEO firm only to discover that while their title tags were optimized, their website traffic remained unchanged.  Many Search Engine Optimization companies add a level of mystery to SEO and to be honest, many have to in order to protect their own working process for true organic search results.  The question remains is there a modern day Einstein cracking the elusive algorithms of search engines everywhere or are all online marketing companies just winging it?

Is there really a “Dr. Good” to heal your sad website ills?  One major ailment in the SEO industry is that there are just too many people trying to give you bogus miracle cures for your lacking traffic.  The sadder story behind it is that many “black hat” SEO companies can do more harm than good when it comes to getting your website in the top search results.  The exaggerated marketing of numerous search engine optimization companies, SEO software and tools, and especially the newly emerged social media marketers, are a sure sign that things may not be on the level.  But what else should you look for when you are processing SEO applications?

The simple answer is…Results! Don’t go with any single company without seeing their past client results-both good and not so good-not everyone can get to #1 every time, right?  Not just where the websites landed in rankings, but what happened with traffic and conversions too.  Being number one for a search term no one uses does nothing for your return on investment.  Any internet marketing company who doesn’t use analytics to monitor their client campaigns and monitor the effects of their optimization plans probably shouldn’t be the company you go with.  Google analytics will quickly tell show if a website’s traffic has increased by 50% or by 500% and it will identify the origin of that increase too.

Along with those results should be references from past clients who can verify that your search engine marketing firm doesn’t misdiagnose your website’s weakness.  Bear in mind that SEO requires a huge time investment and the price you pay for services should reflect that.  Also remember that with SEO, there are no guarantees.  Just as you won’t find many doctors who will promise that their treatment will definitely work; if anyone guarantees you top results, get it in writing and hold them to it-at no additional charge of course or even get your money back!

There are many reputable search engine optimization firms out there too.  Your due diligence will be greatly rewarded and simply ask for answers.  If your search engine optimization company isn’t willing to sit down and explain what they will be doing and how or why it will help your website, then they probably don’t actually know themselves.

If you live in the world of search engine optimization and online marketing you probably know the importance of a blog and can’t imagine why someone would choose not to have a blog about their business or industry.  The concept of a blog may be less obvious and much different however for a website owner.

There is a very common misconception about blogging.  It is that blogging is for personal rants and complaining about your neighbor or the underwear you recently purchased that isn’t as soft as advertised.  It is this preconceived notion of a blog that causes many business owners to steer away from the blogosphere in dread that they will have to divulge some personal revelations about themselves or their undergarments.

So many times, clients will ask, “Why do I need a blog?”, “Well, what would I write about?”, and “Would a blog really ‘go well’ with my business?” And the confusion generally lies in that earlier misconception; that blogs are strictly for personal venting, personal sharing and personal ranting.  This is only true of the personal blog.  Which many people maintain.  A business blog however, the kind of blog you would have online for your business, has a different goal and that is to inform about your industry, products or services.   This does not mean that a business blog can’t get personal, but generally, business is business and your blog should be useful to visitors and should only get personal to the level of making your blog posts conversational and relatable.  Your personality should shine; your personal life should not.

Another big turn-off for business bloggers is the idea of having to maintain their own blog.  Coming up with content is no easy challenge for some.  There are natural born talkers out there, that have no trouble making the transition to the world of blogging and blog marketing, but for another very large group of business owners, the idea of writing and maintaining a good blog needs to be balanced by a promise that business will follow their authoring efforts.  For the later, studies have been conducted and have shown that online guests stay 60% longer on websites that host their own blog.  This extended stay means you are getting more face time with a potential client or customer and maybe a returning visitor for your great source of information.

Beyond being a vessel of information for your online visitors and returning customers, search engines love a quality blog.  The more relevant content you link back to your site and the better you get at integrating your keywords into your blog posts, the more relevant and better score you are going to get from the search engines.  Not to mention that most blog posts will start to arrive in the search results beside your website, allowing you to control even more of the top organic search result positions.  The reasons you should have a blog are many and maintaining a blog is far from rocket science making blog marketing a great investment for any business.

The buzz on the street these days is buying organic and why not right? The health and environmental benefits of organic foods are too many to mention.  While these attributes work well for your daily produce picks, they often get neglected when it comes to business.  Now, you may be wondering, how can I possibly incorporate organic into my business and the answer lies in your marketing and more specifically in your internet marketing.

The great thing about buying an organic apple is that it has been certified organic by the USDA.  This means there is a certification process in place that is largely based on the production process for the food or materials.  Unfortunately for internet marketing, when it comes to getting organic search engine results, there isn’t a governing body monitoring your efforts or the final product; unless of course you consider Google a governing body?  So, how can you be sure that your SEO company is delivering real organic search results or if your results are artificially organic?

Organic search engine marketing goes back to the age old terms of white hat SEO and black hat SEO.  As a business operator looking to market online in a campaign of the highest quality, you want to avoid black hat SEO.  It is the black hat practices that deliver the artificial organic search results.  These are indeed fly by night results that yes, you are at the top for a few days after your SEO company has worked their black magic, but the results weren’t the real deal and not only do you quickly fall off the top search result positions, but you are likely to get Google-slapped and sent to the back of the line as well.

To stay true to being organic in your search engine marketing you need to remember that all things organic take extra time and extra work, but the results have better longevity and stronger presence.  Although every online marketing company may know the words ‘Content is King’, only truly good, quality content reigns for the long term.  That quality content then attracts natural links, avoiding the whole unnatural link farming approach to getting search results.  Organic search results are about creating a valuable resource on the web.  This resource is your website and it grows, adapts and changes to continually be a better source of information for visitors.

Rafferty Pendery

When it comes to building your brand through marketing, it can be tough to stand out. To distinguish yourself from similar businesses and products while working under the looming notion that “it’s” already been done. The use of humor is a timeless approach for marketers to deliver a strong branded message that is memorable and effective.

Adding humor to advertising is an art and done right, you can have a viral video or ad campaign that skips across the World Wide Web in a matter of moments. Adding humor into your marketing campaign can be trickier than you think for many reasons. You don’t just want them to laugh at your ad; you want them to remember your message too.

Memory plays a big role in the effectiveness of a video marketing campaign and funny videos have a way of sticking with you. Humor triggers an emotional reaction to your brand’s message. This is what makes it so memorable for the viewer. It is this same emotion that inspires them to share your humorous advertisement with their friends and family.

True humor is often hard to hit squarely on the head and all too often attempts at being funny do more harm than good. There is a difference between invoking a smile and producing a laugh out loud response. So what makes funny, funny? One key ingredient is the element of surprise. The tough part is making that surprise relevant to your brand.

Humorous marketing can be used even for those industries that aren’t naturally funny. For example, most people don’t consider learning a foreign language fun or funny. For many high school students, learning Spanish is everything but funny. However, the commercials from Berlitz, less commonly known language instruction software, have added funny to their marketing vocabulary and are coming up with some very memorable campaigns.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsCR9Y4Ymvo[/youtube]

In an industry where Rosetta Stone has become synonymous with learning a foreign language, Berlitz is using humor to catch up to the competition. While the videos produced by Berlitz are knee-slappers, each delivers the message of just how important it is to know a foreign language-even if that language is English. Not to mention how that language can help you out of some pretty serious situations.

Trying out humor can be a scary experience. There is nothing worse than going for funny and falling short. Some humor is thought-provoking and this is a positive effect to have on viewers. The opposite end of the scale is that some humor can be offensive and you definitely don’t want to take your marketing campaign there.

Remember it’s either funny or it’s not and if there is any doubt, better safe than sorry and try again.

Rafferty Pendery