I tweet about 3-4 times a day and I like to keep it a nice mix of business-related and plain old silly fun. If you follow me you already know you may learn about Dumpling Butts and corporate mergers in the very same breath. You’ve been warned. I do find it useful and I do enjoy it, and one of my guilty pleasures is having a celebrity-only column on my customized TweetDeck dashboard – because everyone who’s anyone seems to be contributing to the dense tweet smog we have to sift through every day. And who doesn’t want to know what they’re favorite porn stars are doing in real-time. Let’s be honest.

Directors like Jon Favreau are tweeting about the movies they are working on and even sharing exclusive set photos and other production details (In his case from Iron Man 2.) First-time sitcom stars like Joel McHale are single-handedly improving the likelihood that their new shows will score high enough in the Nielsen’s to be picked up for a second season (in his case, NBC’s Community). And R&B/Rap musicians practically paved the way for celebrity contributions to the network. MC Hammer of all people does a great job marketing his new music and reality show via tweets – when he isn’t praising God for something or other. People who think Twittering can’t be linked to tangible revenue and brand recognition are simply wrong. The challenge is making it appropriate and relevant for your own business – but that’s a separate post.

Movie studios and their many executives, sports teams and TV shows, however, are not particularly comfortable or excited about this new level of transparency. Versions of contracts prohibiting stars from giving away too much too soon, or sharing information the higher-ups just don’t want to disclose, are becoming commonplace. The Hollywood Reporter shared some examples earlier this week:

A recent talent contract from Disney includes a new clause forbidding confidentiality breaches via “interactive media such as Facebook, Twitter, or any other interactive social network or personal blog.”

Dreamworks writers, while we’re driving down this road, now have to sign contracts that specifically state they will not leak any plot or script-related information via “a social networking site, blog or other Internet-type site.” If you haven’t been paying attention these new clauses may seem like paranoid overkill – but there have actually been more than a few instances over just the last couple of months that have left a few studios and teams looking very stupid as a result of loose-cannon celebrity twitter posts:

• Paula Abdul used her Twitter account to announce she would not be returning to American Idol. 12,000 13-year-old girls had the news prior to Simon Cowell. Who was probably out trying on tight t-shirts.
• Last week John McCain’s daughter Meghan posted a photo of her funbags on TweetPic that could not have been a delight for the Senator to discuss with his Arizona constituents.
• Fox was understandably horrified when the executive producer of their hit show, Bones, let loose a tweet which declared “First time in ‘Bones’ history we are shut down from production. Damn swine flu!”
• After Donte Stallworth discussed his DUI arrest and subsequent incarceration via Twitter, the NFL banned tweeting at functions and before, during and immediately after games. Full stop.

…and the list goes on. And it will get worse. And I can’t blame Hollywood one iota. Or Ray Liotta. Please share some of your own favorite celebs to follow on Twitter in the comments.

Preach vs. Practice
You learned absolutely nothing from that first paragraph which you didn’t already know. Simply telling someone to consider linkbait, link building or general social media as a means to drive both direct and eventually organic traffic to their site is like lending them your car and forgetting to give them the keys. A big heap of useless nothing. Don’t be that guy. The interwebnets are already flooded with them. And for God’s sake don’t pay them to tell you all those things. Ask for specific examples of their own linkbait work that can actually teach you something practical about applying the strategy to your own business. Don’t let them get away with simply talking about those damned blender videos again.

One of the reasons I am a fan of Montreal SEO maven Gab Goldenberg’s blog is that he provides real-world examples of work he has done for actual clients. As a result he is never even in the running on those days when I get so overwhelmed by my Google Reader backlog that I decide to start culling the RSS feed herd. I thought of possible ways in which I too could provide something particularly helpful today and dug out six of my previous linkbait project URLs. I’m not saying they’re ground-breaking or even especially good - but I did learn a lot from them and maybe you can too.

What is Linkbait?
Simply put, linkbaiting is the creation of something online which you feel has the potential to go viral. “Going viral” means a piece of content is so engaging, funny, helpful, life-saving, disturbing or a combination of all five that people feverishly pass it around amongst their friends via IM and email. Scores of bloggers link to it because they want to share it with their audience. It becomes bookmarked naturally in tons of social media sites. The benefits are twofold. In the short term the popular webpage gets tons of direct traffic and brand recognition. In the long term the domain encourages many one-way incoming links which is a crucial factor the major search engines take into account when deciding where to rank your site for specific keywords.

Here are some great articles regarding the construction of effective linkbait if you’d like to read more on the basics. I’d rather spend my bloggy time today showing you some real and original examples of linkbait I myself created - and then looking into the reasons they worked, didn’t work or could have been improved upon. I didn’t make these with enormous production budgets or teams of semi-conscious, hungover marketing interns at my disposal - but I did use my imagination with some degree of tangible success. Perhaps this article should be called Linkbait Ideas for Small to Medium-Sized Businesses. Perhaps this article should be skipped altogether.

Linkbait Best Practices
I tried to follow the golden (and vague) rules that I’d been reading about since the term “linkbait” was originally coined. Use media. Make it informative. Make it funny. Put it in a “top 10″ format. Include prominent social media submission buttons. Include an “email this to a friend” form. Make sharing easy. Consider paying off some prominent Diggers (did I say that out loud?). Put it in a subfolder on the client’s domain without any branding and then move it under the main template after it has been live for a few weeks to disguise its true marketing purpose. Sacrifice a chicken and pray. Read up on Chaos Theory.

Original Linkbait Examples
I’m going to link to these 6 examples using the specific keyword phrases they were designed to draw traffic for. This is partially because I’d like that strategy to be abundantly clear and partially because this is my blog and it’s my perogative to keep flogging these pieces even years after they were created should I want to. A good, timeless piece of bait can continue to draw relevant traffic indefinitely.

Valentine’s Day History
A client wanted to drive traffic for terms related to Valentine’s Day because they sold many products specific to the holiday. Product terms (”valentine’s day cards” etc.) were understandably extremely competitive. There were some related terms, however, that were far less contentious yet still had reasonable relevant search volume attached to them. I had a glance at the day’s Wikipedia entry and was fascinated to learn how many truly awful things had transpired on February 14th over the centuries. The dim, filthy lightbulb in my head clicked on and thus “14 Horrible Moments in Valentine’s Day History” was born.

• The Good: The piece definitely went viral, doing well in networks like Digg and Reddit, attracting many natural links from bloggers and was even linked to by some high profile news sites. It continues to attract lots of seasonal traffic and new incoming links to this day.
• The Bad: Not much - this was definitely a success and made the client very happy.
• Lesson Learned: The vague advice I’d been hearing was true - Decent linkbait can indeed drive tons of direct, relevant traffic and have considerable ongoing SEO benefits lasting years.

Custom BBQs
In the middle of Summer 2007 I was asked to create a linkbait piece designed to attract grill and barbecue related keywords to a client’s bbq review section. I wondered if I’d be able to find photos of some custom made rigs having recently seen a homemade beer keg smoker at a friend’s house. Needless to say, I was not disappointed. Yeeee Haaaa! You’ve got a pretty mouth.

• The Good: Although it had a disappointing social media run, it resulted in quite a few links from blogs.
• The Bad: In retrospect the subject matter probably had a very limited audience. Again, failed virally.
• Lesson Learned: If possible focus on a subject related to your client’s goods or services with the broadest potential appeal - men and women, old and young, kids and adults. And never, ever launch a linkbait the day before one of the biggest holidays of the year.

NCAA Buzzer Beaters
This time last year March Madness was upon us and I had a client with a lot of tournament tickets to move. Being more of a hockey/football fan I researched some popular online NCAA discussion topics and quickly decided a list of “buzzer beaters” would be a good idea. I’d yet to use videos for a piece and got myself all excited about it. Everyone from the Director of Marketing to the CEO approved my final piece which took several days for me to write, research, collect and code. Then the NCAA (who were partnered with my clients in some respects) refused to let us use it. “Why on Earth did you even show it to them?” I remember asking them in frustration. I ended up using a revised, non-video version of it on my own semi-related hockey fights site. Cause hockey is a sport too, get it? I really just didn’t want it to go to waste. You can see the original video linkbait preserved for all time on my personal blog.

• The Good: It was a good exercise in incorporating video into linkbait and I was able to repurpose it as an NCAA article (with SEO-friendly links) on several blogs and free article directories without alerting any ambulance chasers.
• The Bad: It was nipped in the bud. Also, I found out that the client-side resource who offered to help with my bulletpoints and research completely plagiarized them from another website and had to re-write the entire thing the night before it was supposed to launch.
• Lesson Learned: Let the CEO, Directors and lawyers see your proposed idea before you spend 20 hours putting it all together. Also, with a little re-writing many linkbaits can be repurposed in text form for alternate uses.

I have three more examples to share with you if you’re still awake, but regret I must get back to my company duties for the rest of today. Namely - plotting my next big viral failure success. Stay tuned for part two and I would love it if people shared their own linkbait creations with everyone right here in the comments.

What are some practical examples of link building?
Link building activities can include relevant directory submissions, careful and relevant paid link brokering, press release/article authoring and submission, forum and blog commenting, linkbait strategies, providing link-friendly and free onsite resources and much more.

Why is link building so important to SEM?
Google, Yahoo and MSN consider one-way incoming links to a site to be “votes” for the site. It is also a good idea to ensure that any link to your site contains specific keywords that you are targeting, as search engines are very likely to begin associating link text with the site said link resolves on. The more general links to your site the better your overall chances for well-ranked keywords. The more targeted and relevant incoming links the better you will likely do for the keywords you are using in your hyperlinks.

Topics covered by the speakers will include paid online marketing and I personally will be prattling on about organic search engine optimization best practices. This first seminar is designed as an overview for beginner to medium skill levels, but you’ll be able to ask me any questions you want and we’ll be working live on actual attendee sites in the interests of practical examples - which I insist on.

Space is limited to 25 people and the seminar itself includes a cocktail hour afterwards. The whole shooting match is conveniently located at the offices of Cyan Solutions at 58 Arthur Street. Register or read more details if you like and I hope to meet some of you local folks there.

Although LinkedIn and Plaxo have an imposing headlock on the B2B and B2C business networking space, there are a lot of others jockeying for position whom you likely haven’t even heard of - let alone begun to utilize. Although taking the time to register your own company or that of a client on these “2nd-tier” networks probably won’t result in the flood of direct traffic, leads or new contacts that the major players may have driven - there are still very tangible and numerous benefits to taking the time to build yourself a presence on each. These are listed in no particular order as I recommend them all as part of any comprehensive ORM or SEO effort:

Social Networking Sites for Business

1. My Cubicle Space: Their stated mission is to provide a search engine platform where any business can promote their product or service in a creative way to the fore front for millions of people. Free to use and includes press release submission, blog and keyword targeting capabilities. HQ: Watertown, MA.
2. Ryze: Members get a free networking-oriented home page and can send messages to other members. They can also join special networks related to their industry, interests or location. The local features are particularly impressive and should be perfect for businesses with physical store locations or service areas. Both free and paid options exist. HQ: San Francisco, CA.
3. Ziggs: A definite fore-runner of the emerging LinkedIn competition, Ziggs allows you to build a profile, network, post jobs and other classifieds and is strongly marketed as an online brand management resource. HQ: Boston, MA.
4. Naymz: Naymz’s solid tagline “Empowering Reputable Professionals” relays their understanding of ORM’s massive importance. If you maintain a decent “rep score”, based in large on how many people you get to vouch for you and therefore refer to the site, they will create a Google ad for you with a budget of $10. HQ: Chicago, IL.
5. FastPitch: Billed as a “professional social network”, Fast Pitch has added an impressive amount of useful features during their short existence including a press release submission option, blogs, event calendars a helpful tour, some early integration with other social networks and the ability to see a list of other online members. HQ: Sarasota, FL
6. Spoke: I like the fact that Spoke features rotating member profiles on their home page. They heavily tout the lead-generation potential of their network as a strength, possibly making it more apt to attract those with B2C lead generation as opposed to networking priorities. HQ: San Mateo, CA
7. Zoom Info: One of the more established sites on this list, Zoom Info has been around since 1999 and according to the home page has over 42 million people and 3 million companies as part of their database. The site is clearly defined for three specific purposes: searching for people, searching for companies and searching for a job. Personal profiles are free to create and company profiles are apparently coming soon. HQ: Waltham, MA.
8. Konnects: No identity crisis here. Konnects is a B2B networking site with a very human-oriented feel. Lots of headshots, rotating newest member list on the homepage and a big focus placed on physical events. Free to sign up and you can request via email a “group” for your organization which I am assuming means an eventual quote on a branded community. HQ: Tacoma, WA.
9. Upperz: The “social network site for professional use” has a long way to go before nipping away at anyone else’s market share, but the latest member blog postings and media gallery featured on the front page are a bit of differentiation. A serious lack of company (I can’t tell for the life of me where they are head quartered) or feature information puts Upperz on my “maybe someday when I have a lot more free time” list.
10. Direct Matches: It sounds and frankly looks a lot like a dating site, but Direct Matches is aimed at business people. Their mission states that they are the first site to “deploy a multi-matchmaking system that helps people locate everything from business contacts to finding friendship and dates online”. I spoke too soon. Perhaps they are over-reaching but the dating angle is certainly unique - and potentially the basis for an equally unique sexual harassment suit. HQ:
11. Xing: The “first Web 2.0 site to go public” definintely looks the part. The clean design, mobile capabilities and numerous mentions in top trade publications make it 2.0 all the way. Purporting to transcend all countries, languages and industries - Xing is definitely a must for professionals who do a lot of business internationally. HQ: Hamburg, GER.

Business Networking Sites for Direct Traffic
How many of today’s most successful web entities started in a dorm room? What is small time today might be huge tomorrow and even if you don’t start immediately having your door beaten down by contacts and customers who find you via Zing - you never know. It’s also important to take into consideration where some of the new or lesser business networking sites may have a strong foothold internationally. Even if a given biz site is only big in Asia it’s still going to provide you with a brand new link. Considering the supplemental benefits we’re discussing today I believe they are worthwhile if well designed and well intentioned - regardless of a site’s current popularity.

Business Sites for Search Engine Optimization
Unless you’ve been exiled to Siberia for the last two years you know that building one-way, incoming links to your website is an enormously important facet of SEO. All of the aforementioned sites allow you various levels of link inclusion. Some limit you to a URL, some automatically link the URL with the company name you input and others allow for the embedding of links in HTML-friendly summary sections allowing you to craft the hyperlink text to your target keyword specifications. A few hours spent creating presences on all of the aforementioned sites is going to be of better SEO value than a week of submissions to crummy “directories”.

Business Sites for Online Reputation Management
On many of the sites I list below you can get your company or personal name into the URL, header tag, title tag or a combination. As these three elements are held in very high regard by search engine algorithms, biz sites can be tremendously helpful for online brand reputation management. If someone Googles the name of your company, for example, and finds your dedicated page on Spoke - that could mean a negative blog post from a critical customer being pushed down to the second page of the search results for a potential one.

Do you use a similar biz site that hasn’t made our list? Am I using terminology or descriptions that can be tightened up (one of the things that perplexes me about this space is how to properly categorize the different sites)? Do you represent one of the sites listed and want to provide a little more info? Please let me know and we’ll keep this post evolving. Get networking/SEOing/Reputation defending and I look forward to your additions and comments.

If you have a Twitter account, even one that is gathering dust, please feel free to add, follow and interact with me. We didn’t have to go to high school together - you can just be a fan of the blog, a creepy ex-girlfriend, a creditor, etc: Pyeman73. My Narcissism is rampant but not fussy.

The other reason I have warmed up is my discovery (via a friend’s tweet, no less) of a great application called TWhirl, which makes using Twitter about 3 times as fast and easy as it used to be. It runs quietly in your taskbar, alerts you to new tweets via a subtle pop-up and opens with a click any time you wish to contribute. You can also cross-populate Pownce and Jaiku (two other popular Twitter-esque sites) automatically. If you currently have no clue as to what I’m talking about please be patient and read on. If I’d had Twitter laid out for me like this a year ago I might have taken it to heart straight away.

What Twitter Isn’t

• An instant messenger.
• An RSS feed.
• A blog.

What Twitter Is

• A social media messenger: You are sending a “tweet” to a large group of people all at once in real time, as opposed to just one other person.
• An RSS feed “on steroids“: as I’ve seen it described. A traditional RSS feed keeps you updated whenever the blog of a friend, foe, peer or other person of note is updated without you having to visit 72 blogs via your bookmarks every hour on the hour. It could be said that Twitter updates you on the “thoughts” of those same people in real time.
• A micro-blog: Watch as people update you throughout the day as the mood strikes them as opposed to a traditional blog that might creak into action 3 times a week. The 140 character-limit per tweet keeps the lines from becoming blurred on this point.
• A micro-distribution list: Instead of spending a half hour setting up and sending a mass email linking to your latest baby pictures on Flickr, send a tweet and all your best buddies will see it right away. Twitter automatically shortens URLs so that they don’t take up too much of your 140 character limit. On second thought, just don’t send me the baby pictures, full stop.

Practical Twitter Uses

• Groveling: Ask a question of your professional peers, who are also Twitter addicts, and get thousands of dollars of consulting advice for free and almost instantaneously. Obviously this does not apply to every single industry. I haven’t seen to many ball-scratching construction foremen wearing “I’m Tweeting” t-shirts, for example.
• News: Information spreads like wildfire on Twitter, and if you’re following industry peers or thought leaders - you’re often getting it from the horse’s mouth.
• Whoring: Encouraging acquaintances to vote for or “Digg” your blog posts, articles, press releases, etc. Don’t send out annoying pop-up IMs one at a time to 30 people - send out one tweet. If they want to ignore it, they can. Entirely unoffensive.
• The Liquor: Where are you and your co-workers or friends going for drinks tonight? It’s Thirsty Thursday, after all. This use isn’t quite as important as the first three examples, but most of the social media mavens I know are also pissheads. Hyperlinks respectfully forgone.

Are You Gonna Tweet All Day Little Birdie?

Twitter is the water cooler of 2008. I forget where I saw it, but I’m sure I didn’t coin that phrase. To help you visualize that statement here are a collection of real tweets I have received this week:

• “Is anyone else excited for the new episode of The Office tonight?” - From a friend of mine who wants to have John Krasinski’s baby, or at least some of his DNA on her chin. It was accompanied by a link to a plot summary she had found.
• “New blog post on how to start and spread rumors.” - From an industry peer of mine who likes to send out a tweet to all of his friends whenever he posts a new article on his blog. Many of them would eventually read the article anyway, but Twitter allows you to self promote and get info in front of eyeballs instantaneously.
• “Best Damn Tech Show, Period. films tonight, DM if you are in the Philly area and want to hang out!” - DM stands for “direct message” and this podcaster is using members of his audience following him on Twitter to announce an episode taping. In the process, he is likely going to strengthen his brand, attract some new followers and eventually gain listeners.
• “There’s a giant lake monster attacking the Ottawa suburbs and everyone must evacuate immediately!” - As Twitter officially launched in October 2006 I don’t think anyone’s had the opportunity to utilize it as a distant early warning system… yet. Why is my glass of water rippling? OH JESUS NO…. (flatline).

There’s no cookie-cutter method for managing and communicating with your clients. Some folks will only want to hear from you once a month when you deliver their 30-day ranking report. Others will want to be involved in each and every step of their search engine marketing campaign. Flexibility is important - if you try and put the square peg of a client who likes to stay informed into the round hole of one who likes you to work autonomously - you’re going to have one less client on your roster pretty darn quickly. The best strategy is to risk over communicating, if that is at all possible, because you’re far more likely to run into trouble for not being transparent enough than for providing too much information.

Communication, however, can be a double-edged sword. Beware of billing clients for frivilous work or contact. If you initiate a half-hour phone conversation about your son’s little league team, that can be a great way to forge a relationship and earn their confidence. If you then charge them for that friendly chat - not at all cool. Likewise, if you burn through 2 hours of their monthly budget preparing a report they didn’t ask for, which they don’t see value in, you’re going to have an issue again. Pick your battles and don’t waste your non-billable time, or their money, unless everyone is on the same page and feeling verbose.

Here are a few simple ways in which you can open the lines between your team and your clients without the risk of either side not making the best use of their valuable time:

1. Go to the Phones: Some people like to work predominantly via email while others prefer conducting their business over the phone. There are advantages and disadvantages to both, but one is not better than the other and it is foolish to try and impose your personal preference onto your clients. That having been said, it’s hard to go wrong by picking up the phone and making an unscheduled call. Even is you get your client’s voicemail they’ll still appreciate you reaching out and checking in on them.

2. Traditional Greetings: Have you had your client for a full year? Did they recently achieve a critical keyword ranking victory or sales goal thanks to your SEO efforts? Did they get married, have a baby or move to a new city? Gift baskets, greeting cards and other simple gestures are easy to organize and worth far more in terms of goodwill than any money you’ve spent. There are many web 2.0 services which make sending gifts and keeping track of important dates a piece of birthday cake.

3. Welcome Them to Your World: Most SEOs have their heads buried in industry blogs for a good hour of every work day. If you don’t, your skill set is in danger of dying on the vine. When you see a search marketing-related post that applies to a specific client’s products, services or predicament - forward it to them with a short, analytical note. Not only are you finding a quick excuse to say hello, you’re letting them know that you’re “on the case” and researching ways to help them.

All the advice I can give, and the daily communication reminders I give myself, can be boiled down into one crucial word: proactivity. Find reasons to reach out to your clients - on even just a weekly basis - and you’ll quickly find that managing them, their campaigns and their expectations will be infinitely more efficient and enjoyable for you both.

I was recently introduced to a new tool out of Russia called SEODigger via the always bleeding-edge, Brendan Picha. The tool builds a reverse index of keywords that you may have no idea your site is currently ranking for. Combining Google, Overture’s old volume tool and Wordtracker - the results are clean, practical and easily exportable into .CSV. Not to mention you don’t even have to register, let alone pay, to use it. I would recommend joining the community however as membership has is privileges in the form of more queries allowed per hour. A query history page is also provided which allows you to log back in a week later and re-run previously generated projects with just a click of the mouse.

In addition to the comprehensive list of word that you’re showing up for in Google, the outputted reports contain additional useful information like the actual SERP position and separated volume results from WordTracker and Overture. It is also possible to filter the search between an individual page and an entire domain up to a ranking depth of the top 20 results for a given keyword or phrase. How are all SEODigger’s gold nuggets helpful to an individual SEO or Search Marketing agency? The answer to that question is not entirely clear to me yet, however I have been making a list of potential client-facing applications, and checking it twice. ‘Tis the season, afterall.

• In the same query you can identify keywords you didn’t know you were ranking for that actually have significant volume. Finding these less and less common ’sweet spots’ has never been easier.
• Keyword research has a tendency to drop off after the first few months of an SEO effort, and Digger is a simple and easily shared way to breathe new life into your list of MVKs. And if your client never knows that you weren’t specifically targeting the high volume keyword you’ve suddenly discovered their site ranks well for - it won’t hurt them.
• A lot of this info is easily discernible from analyzing server logs, But if you’re ranked #19 as opposed to #1 for a high volume, relevant keyword you won’t be getting a fraction of the potential traffic. Your already existing and considerable traction for that valuable term may never become apparent. With the data you get from SEODigger, you can quickly identify these easily attainable SERP wins and get onsite or offsite targeted optimization into the project plan and underway in a fraction of the time you may have noticed the opportunity otherwise.

I invite readers to help me add to this collection of reverse-index uses, and correct me if a better tool to this end currently exists. In the meantime, many kudos to Aramis and the entire SEOQuake team behind this useful new SEO tool, and I hope you find it as helpful as I have. Get digging!

I am a big Facebook user and Wordpress devotee, so I have been pleased to see the two behemoths playing so nice together recently. It keeps one from having to undertake the time-consuming process of updating certain aspects of their web presence from scratch in multiple locations. Although I love keeping in touch with friends via FB, I also spend a lot of time maintaining my personal blog and in terms of updates, photos and other snippets of content there is a lot of potentially redundant overlap between the two. Here are a few of the tools I use to cross-pollinate the two worlds in the best interests of protecting my fragile sanity.

• Import Facebook “note” comments into Wordpress: If you syndicate your blog into your Facebook profile via RSS, as a great many of us do, your FB friends are able to leave comments on each and every “note” (as the posts are called once they are imported). Having two sets of comments for the exact same post is a little silly on the best of days. This WP plugin pulls comments out of FB notes and adds them to your real blog, to sit seamlessly beside those that have been left on the original post, on a post-by-post basis.
• Integrate your Wordpress hosted blog into Facebook: I don’t actually use this plugin myself, as I do not host my blog with Wordpress, but for those that do it’s definitely an impressive mash. It’s more of a two-way street than many of the apps, with benefits to populating both platforms. Publish posts, bookmark, check stats and more.
• Insert Facebook photos into Wordpress posts: This is the first of two very useful photo-related plugins. Additions to your ‘write’ dashboard after activation allow you to browse your Facebook gallery remotely and add thumbnails or larger sized photos directly to whatever post you happen to be writing. Hopefully the author will update it soon because judging from the comments it isn’t working with the most recent versions of WP. Somebody please pick up this ball and run with it - it’s almost, almost an awesome plugin.
• Migrate entire Facebook gallery into Wordpress: This is an exceptional plugin, written by Aaron Harp, that allows you to incorporate your entire Facebook gallery - lock, stock and barrel - into a static Wordpress page of your choice. You can also update exported galleries as you make additions to the parent FB gallery whenever you want - with the touch of one button off the ‘manage’ tab. I am surprised that this plugin hasn’t caught on at a larger scale, and I encourage Aaron to keep developing similar items as he’s obviously darn good at it.

If you know of a worthwhile WP / FB application that I haven’t listed here, please let me know and perhaps I’ll write a Valentine for it too. Or better yet, write your own. To date there aren’t very many of them and you could earn yourself some considerable notoriety should you so desire. How about a WP plugin that displays your FB “status” in your sidebar? Or a way to improve on and customize the FB sidebar badges they provide with information from specific apps you have installed (Flixster, Bookshelf, etc.)? The possibilities aren’t endless, but they’re out there. Get mashin’!

Are you a “nights and weekend” SEO looking to get into the exciting world of online marketing full time? Would you like to join an accomplished and experienced search marketing firm who can benefit from your existing skill set whilst improving it dramatically?

… and the usual nonsense you’ve read a million times, elsewhere. But seriously folks, if you are an experienced search marketing pro looking for a team, or hoping to supplement the income you make off your own related efforts, please say hello. Likewise, if you’ve yet to dabble in SEO but want to learn and are already in possession of above-average writing skills, say hello.

SEO in late 2007 is more about creativity and quality content generation and less about knowing where to stick the right keyword into a piece of HTML. If you’re hungry, literate and have a wild imagination - I’m willing to take on the less experienced in addition to the Gurus. I’ll need a few of both. We pay well, have many high-profile clients, are perfectly sane (which always helps) and we get results. One more time for the cheap seats - say hello and let’s just do the thing.