If you are blogging about the 2009 thirty day challenge & plan to update your blog regularly as you go through this years challenge just leave a comment below and I will add you to the list of 30dc bloggers

Tom

Well it’s actually day three.

Amazing content as usual. If you did not know anything about niches, niche research, where to go what to do… you do now. If you think you know all there is to know about niche research you will still learn  from these lessons.

The resource pdf’s were excellent sources and will be something to keep near by beyond the thrity day challenge. Happy to see Shopping.com was included, it has given me more than one good niche.

Getting the niche right & the seo is the sink or swim. I have often lept before learning or completely researching a niche, sub-niche. Don’t make that mistake. This part is crucial.

This part in the side bar of day two is extremely critical. At least it has been for me. It was the first thing I stuffed up in earlier challenges.

Handy Tip – Your ‘theme keyword’ describes the overall theme of the website you will create, and the ‘category keywords’ describe the different categories of information contained in your website. The ‘theme’ and ‘category’ keywords should be semantically related and should meet the page and traffic competition criteria. (SEOT>80, SEOC<30,000). This is an important distinction to understand. Credit to the Thirty Day Challenge

Semantic Keyword Research is something to look at.

Today is all about search engine optimization & the SEO Matrix.

Off to the lessons.

Tom

They can look like statics sites, sales pages, squeeze pages cpa landing pages. You name it. There is a theme or plugin for almost everything.

This theme called wiggle emulates a google design with it’s blog psot and ads. An interesting design.

You can see it here 1800Tom

Thought I would post this award winning time saver.

Integrates with social apps.

Picnik is an online photo editor that works on all platforms PC Mac Linux & integrates with your facebook, flickr, photo bucket accounts etc.

It has an amazing amount of functionality and is blazing fast. I use this all the time for blog post, product shots and such.

You can edit images from a complete url, your computer, your photo sharing sites, any online image. Very easy to apply drop shadows turn into Polaroid style, postage stamp, crop, resize, fix… you get the picture.

With the FireFox plugin you can right click and get a menu to get straight to it or do screen captures.

I’m not affiliated. This just saves lots of time compared to opening your photo editor to get the job done. Plus its free

Here are the links

Picnik – edit photos the easy way, online in your browser – The editor
Picnik: Tools – The FF plugin

Cheers,
Tom

Are you guilty of ignoring your about me page? Leaving it as something to get to later?

I am. One site of mine simply has “we will get to this” written on the page lol. If you look at your stats you may see that this often ignored page ranks high in pages visited. I poked around some of my stats and the “about” page was usually in the top ten, often top 5 of pages visited after a visitor lands on the site.

At the least you should use this page to tell visitors about you or your organization. Better yet check out these tips from Smashing Magazine.  About Me Page Design

Same thing with profiles on social sites, forums etc. They are often ignored but you may be suprised how many people have a look at these.

Tom

Go here Free Twitter Icons

Enjoy,

Tom

Here is an example blog post…

Here is how to put a tweet this link on your website.

Tweet This

To do this just right click on the Tweet This link above and choose copy link location, paste into notepad & change the url, twitter name & text to fit your needs. Then use the link to link to your text like “Tweet This” “Click To Tweet” “Tweet This Page” etc. Remember to keep the message & url under the 140 character limit.

There are some plugins or apps that automate this for you but  that’s how to do it manually.

Here are links to some wordpress plugins

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tweetmeme/

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tweet-this/

Tom

Here is a pretty cool online tool for generating a pretty good hand written signature image.

You can use the online wizard or upload a scanned file. Several fonts available & you can adjust size, tilt & color

http://www.mylivesignature.com/

why not share?

This morning woke up to 123 new followers all basically in the IM niche and a lot from the 30dc

Get 19,530 new twitter followers in 30 days?

tweetergetter

Followed a tweet to this site that shows you a way of getting 1000’s of new followers on twitter, I just started using it myself.

Guess we will see what it does.

19,000+ in 30 days seems a bit far fetched but I guess they would be in the general topic of who you have following you now.

Check it out here
http://tweetergetter.com/TomDean