It’s all about participation! If you want to be successful on the internet, you’ve got participate and engage with online communities whether that be through your blog, their blog, twitter, facebook or any other social media. It’s not a matter of just throwing up a website and letting it sit.

One of the best ways to engage online is using the comments feature on a blog. It’s an ego boost for the blogger, that people are actually reading his/her posts and shows him/her that their posts are strong enough to stir up a conversation or debate. For years I reguarly read blogs, found articles really interesting, interesting enough to go back to the same article a few times but never commented!

Why didn’t I comment? I was a chicken shit, I was afraid I’d say something wrong and would be ridiculed. I was right and wrong. Sure there are some blogs that if you make a stupid comment, you’ll be flamed by either the blogger themselves or one of their followers but you have to remember this is usually due to the online persona they portray. These blogs are usually the “I’m always right and so superior because I know more than you” type of blogs but there are the “I’m a nice guy and I’m just here to help people learn” type of blogs which will happily engage with you even if you come out with Paris Hilton style comments.

Either way you’ve got to take the risk! The amount of knowledge and readers I would have lost out on if I hadn’t started engaging with other bloggers through their comments would have been massive. It’s a bit like being in the pub at the weekend. You might see a gorgeous girl at the bar but unless you go up to her and chat, you might not find out how gorgeous and interesting that girl really is. Sure you may get knocked back but its still better than the “What if” scenario.

The last things that comments are really helpful for is building backlinks and authority. We all should know what backlinks are so I’m going to focus on authority. This week Brian Clark from Copyblogger.com released an excellent free report on authority. In it he goes to show how we percieve authority as individuals but also how Google percieves authority. It is an excellent read and delves into the psychology behind our interaction in the real world and on the internet. I’ve listed 3 points he makes that I believe apply to comments as well :

Your content actually demonstrates your expertise, compared with a website or bio page that claims expertise.

• By providing inciteful comments on blogs it demonstrates your expertise

… people respond to and follow important people more than others. And Google ranks important pages and sites higher than others.

• This I like to think off more in terms of fraternisation. In the real world people with similar interests consort with people with the same interests, i.e. jocks hang around with jocks, geeks with geeks. It is the same on the internet, if you have an interest in affiliate marketing you will read a lot of affiliate marketing blogs, by commenting on multiple niche blogs other readers might percieve you as a like minded individual with important incites, important enough to follow your own blog.

What other people say about you is more important than what you say about yourself.

• You’ll find when commenting, people will often reply to your comments agreeing with you or affirming your statement again adding to your authority or percieved authority.

Recently two of my fellow bloggers Sean from Smemon.com and Enda from ILiveOnTheWeb.com have tried to prove the benefits of commenting by building a case study through their new online venture TopCommentator.com. The site is specifically designed as a central hub used to comment on other blogs and look at the benefits of promoting interaction with the readers of your blog. They’ll be showing their readers detailed stats on how our their website is growing and the value they’ve added to this site through commenting on other blogs. I for one will definitely be interested in seeing their stats in the future.

So for now please remember, commenting is good. And please leave a comment on this blog and any other blog you frequent!

Popularity: 15% [?]

Lately I’ve been really interested in the psychology behind peoples searches and how they interact online. i.e. people that search for “buy blue widgets” are more likely to buy that people searching for “blue widget styles”. This area has a huge influence on what and how you should structure your content and manage your email marketing.

One of the best guys to listen to in this area is Frank Kern. Frank is a surfer dude but also a people person and you can tell he just “gets it” when it comes to influencing peoples emotions online. Hell, if you search for him online, you’ll get nothing but references about how people feel he’s their friend and what an all around nice guy he is.

If you do a little more digging you’ll find that Frank was once busted by the FTC for running an alleged pyramid scheme. Now in saying that, it doesnt make him a bad guy, think Frank Abagnale from Catch Me If You Can or any good grifter. They all have talents for reading or convincing people, they just mightnt have always used them for ethical purposes. He openly admits this and actually when you think about it he must have been succesful at marketing it as at the time he was making half a million a year.

The video above is what Frank released as a promo for his Mass Control program. The information he gives away is amazing. He discusses modalities, the persona we need to portray when selling online, developing story lines to interact and engage with potential customers. Now I’m not telling you to buy Franks products, just watch the video and if you think the info is good enough, make up your own mind.

Popularity: 9% [?]

You can thank Krishna De from Krishnade.com for this one! This is a great firefox plugin. You can picture the scene your writing your blog post about the latest and greatest internet event and your trying to decide what keywords to use in the article to get the most potential traffic. Well Wordtracker SEO Blogger is the answer. It is a firefox plugin that you can call up when your in your wordpress dashboard and throw in your keyword and it wil give you an approximation on the number of searches for it and related keywords.

The plugin can be downloaded from Wordtracker.com’s site or by clicking this link. If you are interested in social media, branding, online pr, I definitely recommend checking out Krishna’s site, she’s like the Martha Stewart of online media in Ireland with bizgrowthnews, podcast sisters and her own range of books.

Popularity: 92% [?]

One thing I hate about building sites targeting multiple locations is checking the serps manually in each region. The thought of manually altering the address bar from google.com to .co.uk or .com.au just irratates me.  It is such a mundane task that it should be automated and now thanks to Dave Davis and the fabulous team at Redfly Marketing it has been.

Redfly Marketing have developed a firefox plugin called Google Global. Google Global now allows you to view organic and paid Google search results as they appear in almost any location on Earth.

Some of the Features of Google Global:

• View paid and organic search results as they appear in different cities.
• View paid and organic search results as they appear in different regions.
• Open all results from countries, cities and regions in multiple tabs for easy comparison.
• View paid and organic search results from a specific IP address.
• View paid and organic search results from any US ZIP code.
• View paid and organic search results from different language results pages.
• Custom advanced saved searches.

How to use Google Global

The easiest way to use Google Global is to simply do a search for something on Google. When you see you search results page, simply right click anywhere on the search results page, select “Search Google Global” and select what geographic location you would like to see the results from. It is as simple as that.

Get Google Global

To get Google Global, just click this link

Popularity: 6% [?]

Heatmaps are used for testing and research purposes. They can be applied to many different fields and web design and usability testing are just two of them. There are different types, some track the focus of your eyes on a webpage or there are others that will track clicks on a page.  Damien Mulley has a great example of heat maps generated based on the movement of eyes around a webpage and they can give you some very valuable information. In Damien’s example below you can see that users mainly focus on the top three results in Google:

Today I want to show you how you can setup heatmaps for free on your website to track clicks on your webpage.  You can see from the image below, it will show clicks on the page which can give you valuable info that you mightn’t already be tracking like, is the search function being used on the site?, are people viewing your twitter profile. etc.?

The tool I use is called ClickHeat and it is opensource. To set it up just download it from the site, upload it to your server and follow the installation process (which is very simple). Finally add the javascript to your template to enable tracking.

Popularity: 5% [?]