WORDCAMP

May 30, 2009

Mission Convention Center

I. Tim Ferris, author The 4-Hour Work Week

A. Writing: How I write

The important thing is not being a good writer, but having a voice.

People most often are quite bad at predicting what they would like.

when in doubt, write about things that make you angry but never attack your readers.

Write about the problem and not the person.

He does his best writing from 1 am to 5 am.

Find your best writing or synthesis period.

Put on music – Federico Arebelle

He drinks wine and a cup of yerba mate.

Edit by hand

Ignore SEO for the first draft. When you start off with the objective for optimize for search it’ll be awful.

Write your post and then if you want to go to Google keyword tool then you can search by those and make your choice.

B. Video and Photos

1.Nothing travels faster than text and text gets indexed.

2.Having someone come to my site is more valuable to me than going to YouTube

3. If he offers video then he adds

4. StumbleUpon is the cheapest source of traffic, it works extremely well. It provides a slow trickle of high quality traffic.

5. He doesn’t chase the news, it’s a tireless, not fun job. If you’re not having fun, your readers will know.

6. Finding good photos go to Flickr, go to event search and find most often

C. Comments

1. The livingroom method

2. He sets guidelines at the top of the page.

D. Playgrounds and Labs:

1. Longform: www.fourhourblog.com – Encourages people to once in a while throw something ridiculuous into a content heavy site.

2. Shortform: http://blog.timferris.com

3. Microform: www.twitter.com/tferris

Your blog should not be a source of stress for you.

Think big, but play often. Take sun seriously!

Questions:

-He doesn’t use an RSS reader because unsubscribe often. He has taken 1-3 weeks often and using other social media he can take long periods off.

-There’s some impressive, incredible critiques of 4-hour work week that I don’t recommend, such as being idle. In the book work is defined as something you do less of.

-The blog doesn’t run his life, there are times when he spends a good deal of time on it and he enjoys it.

-What other plugins do you use?

-redirection

-popularity contests

-share this

-nothing too fancy

-he tries to minimize the number of plugins because sometimes they don’t play so well.

-How do you integrate Twitter?

-He does not use a desktop app

-some people might enjoy seismic desktop or tweetdeck

-he minimizes his time on twitter

-generally speaking he will look at his @ replies everyday and otherwise he doesn’t try to follow everyone.

-The sure path to unhappiness is trying to please everyone.

-the complaining doesn’t stop, so just tune it out.

-if you go into Twitter like it’s an all you can eat buffet then you will get nothing.

-Greasemonkey script allows you to view multiple pages at the same time.

-open each link in a new window.

-Go into Twitter with a specific purpose in mind.

-If you’re wasting time, but having fun, it’s not a waste of time, it doesn’t need to be productive. You need to at least be aware of not being productive.

-He doesn’t prioritize non-content over content.

How can I add the Tim Ferris to my lovelife? Turn into the kleenex of lovelife animation.
He did an experiment to outsource his lovelife. He did a performance contest to see the number of dates the different outsource teams could create for him.
Why don’t I try to batch my dates like I batch my email. I had all my dates set for one day. He decided to do 20- 20 minute dates in one small area and jump from cafe to cafe.

He ended up with a longterm girlfriend from it.
Uses Mediatemple on his longform blog.

Straight from Google: What you need to know

Matt Cutts
mattcuts.com/blog

He is head of web spam or anti-web spam team at Google.
90% of blogs don’t even change their template,

Why do you blog?

Fame, access, attention, money, rankings?
Some people are just doing it for fun. And if you’re doing it for fun, I totally support you using WordPress to post cat pictures.
It’s ok to cat blog.
Most people want something from their blog.
Wordress is a great choice.
WordPress solves a ton of self-promotion; it takes care of 80-90% of SEO
There’s a few things you can do to optimize it

My plugins
-Akismet
-cookies for comments
-Enforce
-Feedburner FeedSmith
-WP Super Cache

How does Google crawl?
-We crawl roughly in decreasing order of Page Rank.
-It’s named for Larry Page.
–What’s page rank? It’s really simplicity itself. The number of people who link to you and how important those links are.
So it’s not number, but how important they are.

Don’t have a Back Link Disorder
-don’t get lost in the number of backlinks, keep a larger perspective.

-How does Google rank pages?
You want to be relevant and reputable.
Relevant is what’s on your page and reputable is what people say about you.
You want both relevant and reputable.

How can you be relevant and reputable?
Ex. Google wave – don’t just put up the press release.
Try to write often
Seo tips: keywords
-think about the keywords tha users will type. Include them naturally in your posts.
-ALT attribute are handy (3-4 relevant words)
-don’t forget image search, videos, etc.
-If you are a blogger think of ways that different people would describe something.

PERMALINK SETTINGS
He likes to do a custom structure on his URL.
If your blog has p=123 then you’re missing out a lot. Put a few words in your URL.
Google uses things in the title and URL.

Tweaking Titel, urls, contents
If you’re doing a post then think about SEO and what people would search for.
Make your Categories cool stuff like Linux, search
Keywords in url paths: example.com/my-keywords. USE DASHES.
-dashes are best
-next best is underscores
-no spaces is worst
-someone should ask me: what if I’ve already done my site, should I change things?
-Spend your time on making better content, it’s just something to be aware of.

Don’t Overdo It

Being relevant: summary
-Find something you’re passionate about
-Write often!
-Pay attention to the mechanics, don’t over do it.

Gaining a reputation: how do you get to be more known
-Be interesting.
-Blog called Fake Bill Gates blog
-blog called Fake Carol Bartes
-Update often

Apply Katamari Philosophy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katamari_Damacy
The philosophy is to start small, in a niche that you do well, but then build up and up.
You’re always reaching trying to reach bigger and bigger things.
Then you can imagine “enbiggening” to quote the Simpsons to bigger things.

Gaining reputation
there are so many other ways you can get links
-Eric Goldman – Law professor blawger about legal issues and search
-Do original research or reporting –
-Danny Sullivan – compared spam on Gmail and Yahoo

Give great information
    -Louis Gray – watched his referrers and where people from coming from. Looked
at the bots looking at his site.
Find a creative niche
    -icanhascheezburger, on sentence
    -Penny Archade, xkcd
Write some code
    -write a good project people will use it
Lifehacker – high-quality tutorial and guides, you spend more time reading about productive than actually being productive.
Live blogging.
-Videos rank higher.

Google tools can help:
-webmaster console at google.com/webmasters
-google analytics
-Feedburner: my brand for free
-google website organizer

Straight from Google: What you need to know

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