I received the following letter (excerpted to remove the instructions for closing down an account):

Hi Desi,

Posterous launched in 2008. Our mission was to make it easier to share photos and connect with your social networks. Since joining Twitter about one year ago, we’ve been able to continue that journey, building features to help you discover and share what’s happening in the world – on an even larger scale.

On April 30th, we will turn off posterous.com and our mobile apps in order to focus 100% of our efforts on Twitter. This means that as of April 30, Posterous Spaces will no longer be available either to view or to edit.

…

We’d like to thank the millions of Posterous users who have supported us on our incredible journey. We hope to provide you with as easy a transition as possible, and look forward to seeing you on Twitter. Thank you.

Sachin Agarwal, Founder and CEO

—————-

This isn’t the first and it won’t be the last of the toughening up of the social media landscape.  Unless it has real value, ties into the big players or otherwise fills a very critical core niche, social is fast becoming a big dog’s game only.

Mobile Apps still have the flexibility of being cutting edge and allowing diversity the way social media websites once did. And Posterous is smart to shift focus to apps, where there is room to grow, breathe and even build up a profit, something that standard social sites have always had a hard time managing.

——-

Considering that I have completely forgotten I ever HAD a personal Posterous space, and I have never once thought of them alongside the Twitter brand, this shift needs to include actions to build a bit more brand awareness for their apps.

The web is still an expanding sphere, so if you can find an edge to ride, you’re still on the upward trend.  Good luck to them, and here’s to a bright future.

The post Posterous Spaces Closing Up Shop appeared first on Desi Matlock - Web Adventurer.

About time. Every so often, this has to happen. Every time the system works to clear SPAM out, the spammers go wild looking for the next loophole, the next way to game the system, and then they take advantage of it. The system the has to get tighter, so that your REAL content can rise above the spammy crud and show as the jewel of the web it is.

But, if you’ve ever built links up without a care in the world for whether those were good or bad places to link from, then it’s time to clean that up. (Side note: If your content isn’t great, you can expect worse and worse rankings and no amount of SEO or link-building will help you until you sit down and make your content fantastic first.)

So, here are some ways you can quickly and thoroughly find the bad links you’ve created. Get rid of the ones you feel are truly “paid” or “spammy” – you’ll recognize them because 1. They never bring you viable customers or prospects, and 2. The website it’s on is all about selling links. Everything there is an ad or a paid link and it’s obvious. Just can that crap. You don’t need those links.

If you’re still paying in present time for crappy spammy links, just STOP it already and build links the right way – by generating content that rocks, and getting people to go check it out on social or other distribution tools, RSS feeds or press releases for instance.

Google just keeps getting tougher on SPAM, and Bing isn’t much different.

Here are some toold you can use to start the process of reviewing your link situation:

Open Site Explorer:

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/

In the Google Webmaster Zone:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

Go to Traffic > Links To Your Site, and click on each page, looking for any you’re rather weren’t there.

Also, you can do a search at Google for your website, a very specific kind of search that finds all the links to you that aren’t from your own website. Here’s the search query when it’s MY website:

www.desimatlock.com -site:desimatlock.com

SEO Administrator has a pretty good inbound link checking tool that grabs from many many places.

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The idea here is to please just start treating your actions ONLINE with the same care you do OFF LINE. Where would you want your ads displayed in real life? That’s about where you should advertise online. Who would you want introducing you to a crowd of people? That’s where you want your links.

Stop trying to game the system, and you’ll eventually come out on top. Nothing beats authenticity and true pavement pounding social interaction for link building anyway. Nothing works faster or better than spreading naturally in social circles.

If you need more of an idea how to correct bad links, check this post – Chris may sound a bit melodramatic, but when you’ve been shoved from high placement to the bottom for accidentally employing bad linking tactics, you can get pretty emotional about it. But, he’s got sound advice on cleaning up bad situations.

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It depends entirely on whether the font is fixed width or proportional.

Proportional fonts look like this. Only one space is ever needed because the words group better and thus it is not difficult to discern the end of any sentence that has only one space. ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTU

Contrary to the general layman’s belief, there are still many good uses for fixed width fonts. For instance when setting apart text as “written with a typewriter” in a novel. Or when you’re commenting in software code. Some screenwriters still use fixed width fonts, and those that do will need to use two spaces between sentences.

Whenever you’re using a fixed width font, and speaking semantically, use double spaces between sentences to improve readability. Old typewriters required it, but unless you are enjoying clacking away on a 1930s typewriter, there is no reason to do so.

When using a proportional font – regardless of your personal preferences, use only a single space. In fact, a basic rule of word processing used to be that there is never a reason for two whitespace characters in a row. For instance a space followed by a tab, a tab followed by a paragraph break, a tab followed by another tab, etc. (I’m not sure it really matters to be that particular, unless you want to make global search and replace changes to the styles applied to many word processing documents at once. )

but the fact remains that most of us don’t need to worry about this, and you can easily read words with proper proportion applied and can tell where sentences end without the extra space. It is just as annoying to have too large a space between sentences as it once used to be to not have enough.

The post One Space or Two Between Sentences? appeared first on Desi Matlock - Web Adventurer.

Rowing in opposite directions.

Hypothetically, let’s say you’re the average business owner working to generate interest online. You’ve been blogging, you have a business website, and you have social media accounts. This is a very common business model online. And it can work really well. But not when you’re rowing backward.

When you set up the social media accounts, your expectations for social media were high! You wanted everyone to friend/follow/fan/like you. So you added links to your social media accounts to all of your sites. Cute sparkly, noticeable links and you encouraged people to follow you.

And maybe that’s where you left it. Or maybe you do a lot of tweeting, posting to Facebook, etc, and you’re engaging people in social relationships. But probably, you are also wondering why this isn’t resulting in more customers.
That’s because you’re routing customers further away from you, not toward you.

The ability to accurately control the process of turning visitors into leads requires understanding how your marketing pipeline is working and getting everything coordinated properly. You possibly integrated your social media accounts alongside your marketing-to-sales pipeline (aka funnel) without thinking about how they might clash.

So here’s what to do so that you don’t undermine the need for truly effective control over the sales cycle. Your social media accounts should be sending traffic to blogs, and those blogs should be directing people to your business website. Not the other way around. Stop working hard to route people to your social media accounts from your company site, Stop trying to route your blog’s visitors to your social media profiles.  All routing, at least in marketing form, should be from Social Media (where you control little of what they can do) to your blogs (where you control more of what they can do) and then to your site (where you control everything they can do).

The proper order of things is important.

So, use social media to engage and interest in blog content or the business site. Use blogs to engage and interest in products and services on your site. If people don’t want to buy from you, they should also be given an option to give you their contact information directly, and then if they don’t choose to do that, they should be able to find ways to connect on social media. But if you intentionally route potential customers to your social media accounts without first trying to make them become something with a more tangible value to your business, you’re minimizing effectiveness. Otherwise, you can end up with thousands of friends/followers/fans and lots of great activity on social, but without a single profitable social media campaign.

Review your social media accounts to ensure they really do work to drive traffic closer to the goal, and that any blogs do the same.  The idea is to make sure every part of your funnel is rowing in the same direction. That’s how to win the race.

And after you’ve made sure the structure is set up to allow forward motion, then make sure every team member communicating on these lines understands the correct priority

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It allows you to not only choose what where when you post, but how easy it is to find and see the responses from others. There are literally millions of ways you could set this up, and it yet manages to have an incredibly simple, easy to manage implementation system.

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For fun, here’s an image taken from a website full of SEO fails – click on it to head over there and laugh at other’s bad website choices:

Desi

The post What Does Too Much SEO Look Like? appeared first on Desi Matlock - Web Adventurer.

http://www.google.com/support/merchants/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=188479

5. Connect AdWords with Analytics at this point if they aren’t already.
Instructions for doing so are here:
http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55507
Again, it saves a lot of hassle to use the same email account at all Google services relating to the same store.
6. Double check your Analytics Goals.
Make sure that your store’s checkout completion is an active goal in Google Analytics. If it isn’t, it should be. However, if you’re not going to set this up, or if you run into problems doing so, then you’ll need to do step 8. Otherwise you can skip step 8.
Instructions for creating goals are here:
http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55515
7. Turn Analytics “goals” into AdWords “conversions”
Under the Reporting and Tools >> Conversions Tabs in AdWords, import your Google Analytics “Goals” into Google AdWords and convert the store checkout process goal into an AdWords “conversion” – sales only should be counting as conversions, is the point here. Note – if you’re given no option to import goals, then your Google Analytics and Google AdWords are not linked properly.
Instructions for doing so are here:
http://adwords.blogspot.com/2009/06/import-your-google-analytics-goals-into.html
8. Conditional – Use AdWords Conversion Tracking

If you don’t actively track successful cart completions (sales) as a Goal in Analytics, then you’ll need to implement the conversion tracking code into your store checkout’s final confirmation page.
Here’s the overview on Conversion code installation from AdWords:
AdWords Conversion Installation Help
9. Tweak settings.
Make sure your settings in the new campaign in AdWords are to your liking, activate it and you’ll have active sponsored links in the product listings at Google. You pay per conversion, so set a price point per conversion that is profitable for you. If you have a $10 price point, don’t set your bid for $10. Also, keep an eye on actual cost per conversion, rather than your bid. Use that as the metric you run your bids off. Most of the time, the cost per conversion and the bid are very disparate.
I highly recommend checking back and seeing whether everything is working properly.
———–
If you want guidance at any point along the way, let me know.

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1. What Device are they opening the email with?
Many people now get their email on their phone. If they tried to open one of the emails from us on their phone, didn’t like the way it displays, they might not continue to open other emails from us in the future, set them aside to open later on when they’re at a computer, and then forget.
Check many devices to see how your emails display in the minimal space provided for on iphones, tablets and android devices.

2. What Email Address does the email appear to be coming from?
You actually have TWO pieces of information that you present whenever you send an email – the subject line and the email address.
People more often open email that appears to be from a person, such as JohnQEmployee@company.com, over emails that appear to be from a company-positioned email address, such as Contact@company.com or another impersonal address.
You’re “realer” with a name than a position.

3. What Time of Day is it?
Contrary to a great deal of opinion,  morning is the worst time for someone to find your email in their box. Any time that means that your email won’t be seen until 8-9 the next day also reached abysmal open rates compared with a time where you’re the only email in their box.
Very few people read each and every email regardless of arrival time, as proven by open rate statistics. If you send when everyone has full inboxes, your email is far more likely to be deleted without being read.
Why fight with competing “headlines” in an overful inbox. Consider breaking out your lists by time zone and sending when that person will likely be in the sweet spot time wise. While most emailing system don’t really make it easy to apply that level of control,  it is likely help.
Mid afternoon (after the morning’s “email clean-up/delete fest” is usually the best time for getting your email opened and read and acted on. Noon to two is the sweet spot. Three to four is almost as good.
Note: One client does have a historically amazing morning open rate. Especially on Mondays because he posts a Monday morning article to his blog and everyone on his list knows and expects it to arrive in their email inbox on Monday morning.

4. What day of the week is it?
Tuesdays are well regarded. Not sure why, couldn’t find stats.  Tuesday, Thursday and Friday historically have great open rates by hearsay, but apparently as long as it’s before the end of the workday.
A study that I thought made sense stated that it really doesn’t matter what day of the week as long as it’s not the one everyone else is doing.
Monday followed by Wednesday have worse open rates historically in the data I’ve seen.
Conversion rates are considered best on Sunday, but that depends on industry.  Sunday is supposedly best if you’re in a business that appeals to women, and Friday is supposedly best if you are business to business…
So much of the data about days of the week is hearsay, though, that it’s hard for me to trust it. I’d posit that the day of the week doesn’t matter as much as a time of day, and the perceived amount of ‘free time for reading email’ that the person feels they have.

5. How long is the Subject Line of the email?
From 4-15 characters was opened twice as much as anything over 50 characters long – according to a few different sources. The sweet spot appears to be about 20-30 characters in length from the data I’m looking at.
Try to create subject lines between 4 and 7 words long.

6. What Subject Lines are you using?
Make sure your subject lines:

• Have relevance – Your email subject line and the content should both clearly be about your company and about the person getting it. The words you, your, and yourself are considered clinchers.
  The mantra here would be  “It is literally all about the reader“.
• Have value  – The email subject line and the text of the email itself make good by being interesting to the reader, being unique from everything else you’ve written him, and from everything else in his inbox, and by offering something he sees as useful to him.
  “What’s in it for my reader?” is the mantra here.
• Are Honest – Make sure that somehow the subject line matches the content in some way. Make sure that you don’t try to trick him into opening an email. You can fool someone only a few times before they stop listening or opening emails. Including a number of facts appears to boost open rates. “10 tips” etc.
  “Would this have made me feel tricked if I were my reader?” is this one’s mantra.
• Seems Scarce or Urgent – Make it seem pressingly important or time sensitive. Make it seem as though there is a crucial reason to open this without making it also seem that you’re falsely panicked. Time sensitive offers (with at least a three day build) or exclusivity to this particularly high breed of readers can increase open rates.
  Scarcity, exclusivity, urgency or providing a reason to rush make a huge difference. “A few seats still available if you qualify – today only” will probably make him look.
  The mantra here is applicable to many many kinds of marketing and is “How can I make my offer have more apparent urgency than my competition?” In the case of email open rates, your competition is the remainder of the inbox (and the ads in the sidebars of the mailbox…
• Engages him – Yeah, you’ve heard this before. What does that buzz word “engage” mean? It means it makes your reader actively participate somehow. This can be because he’s curious, and there is a mystery to unravel, or because understanding the purpose of the email makes him have to perform an action, or because you’ve made them laugh, or otherwise makes them feel like a “part” of what you’re doing.
  Some people engage their readers by puzzling them, making them a bit confused and then unraveling the confusion before the end of the email… I’m not sure whether this is a good practice to always engage in. Used “wisely and not too well” this is gold.
  You can also engage your reader by asking a compelling question that makes him think, and teach him something or impart knowledge during the process of selling him. That way, he always comes out of your sales pitches a little wiser, and he’ll remember that.
  The mantra here is “How can I get my readers to enjoy actively participating?” but another mantra here is “What’s my reader’s ‘take away’ knowledge?”

——————
I’ve tried to provide a simpler version of all the combined knowledge on the web right now relating to email open rates.

CAVEAT: If you send emails “too often” to the same person, by their own estimation, your open rates will suffer no matter how you apply the above good practices, and even if you keep yourself off the undeliverable/blacklists.

This “too often” consideration varies by industry and by “loyalty” rates. If your email list is of a driven, passionate variety about the services or products you provide, then you can email them far more often than if your service or product doesn’t generate a great deal of fervor. Know your public and test on a small number of people what happens when you send more often.
There is really no reason not to split-test everything. With email it’s incredibly easy to split test, and I recommend you go absolutely hog wild split-testing everything you can.

Open rates are not deliverable rates or conversion rates. The above is not about the other two. Just open rates.

The post Email Open Rates — Quick Study appeared first on Desi Matlock - Web Adventurer.

My question is, where did you hear this? From someone who writes sloppy code, perhaps?

It is easier to write invalid code – that’s all it has going for it. The average WYSIWYG editor makes such websites at a mile a minute.  (What You See Is What You Get – Programs like Dreamweaver, which are used to build websites visually but do not require that you look at the code to do so.)  Even if they are invalid in code, these sites look pretty and that is all that usually matters to people.  Standards seem pesky to deal with when you can build a site which gives every appearance (visually) of being fine, despite the messy code.
Here’s a great article about standards compliance and why to do it from Ian Lurie, who I met at a search conference once. I like the guy and he’s spot-on about this. When I’ve made a site’s code valid for a client, it has actually never failed me in my efforts to improve its ranking. Read the article and then come back here.

(Whistles while she waits…)

OK, done? Now, check your own site against the standards here:

CSS Validity check
HTML and XHTML validity check

If they’re incorrectly coded, get it fixed.
Seriously. Why build  if you’re not  going to finish building it to code?  Think about how SEOs talk about the importance of architecture. This is part of what we are talking about.

When you’re talking to a search engine, you’re essentially talking to a machine, and speaking their language fluently makes you that much more likely to actually communicate to that machine.
And while you’re at it…
Log into your Google Webmaster Tools and check your “site performance” (page load speed improvement recommendations) in the Google labs section.  If you have recommendations, implement them.  Or at least all that make sense for your site.
Why code validly?
Because it makes your communication clearer to the machines on the web. It avoids glitchy browser problems. In my experience,  most  sites will perform near-flawlessly beginning from the day they standardize–in nearly any browser for nearly any kind of visitor.
Really, you have no right to complain about needing to improve visitor experience if you haven’t yet smoothed out the display issues caused by invalid code.

Implementing web standards makes your pages load better and can cut down on server load. It makes it easier to make site-wide changes. It makes the time you spend doing on-site SEO that much more powerful. Because cleaning up your code is a lot like cleaning up your desk and finding bonus Post-its you forgot you had. You might find opportunities to promote better that you didn’t know were there through all the mess. At least I have always experienced that to be the truth. Pretty much every time.

And good code…is just good tech. A job done right is worth doing.

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