I saw this while examining the Wordfence 404 log on a client's site this morning:
Those URLs with ?author=[number] is the hacker trying to learn the usernames of the website's authors. Once the username is know then the hacker can concentrate on figuring out the password.
It's best to block the hacker's IP address because when this approach fails he'll just move on to the next attack. In many cases I'll block the hcker's entire network.
You can no longer ignore mobile. I'm starting to see notifications like this one forsome of my blogs:
This should be an early warning that it is time to begin migrating your website/blog to a responsive theme.
I saw the Apple Watch announcement and was so impressed that I immediately ordered a real watch.
No, it's not a Rolex. I's a Steinhart. German engineered with a Swiss movement, but that's not the point.
I have not worn a wristwatch in years but coincidentally have been thinking about going back to one. And admittedly I was looking for something rugged that did not require batteries.
Why do I not like the Apple Watch (Isn't it interesting that it's not 'iWatch'.)?
Do I think the Apple Watch will ultimately be successful? Yes, but not because of anything it can do today. It will be successful because some entrepreneur will create a to-die-for app that runs on it.
Situated in the Scottish Highlands on an island at the point where three great sea lochs meet lies Eilean Donan, probably the most iconic castle in Scotland.
Almost everything about Eilean Donan is unique and noteworthy, and one of those things is their Facebook page. Thanks to the efforts of David Win, whose title is Castle Keeper', Eilean Donan's Facebook page has over 40,000 fans (Likes) and half of them have been acquired just this year. Not only that, theirs is one of the few Facebook pages I actually look forward to checking.
If you could sum up Eilean Donan's Facebook strategy in one word it would be 'sharing'. Eilean Donan refrains from crass commercial promotions (ie '50% off castle admissions today'). Instead, they share beautiful imagery and anecdotes of castle activity. Almost every day they post a different stunning image of the castle. Creating this endless stream of stunning photos all by themselves would be a lot of work - probably too much work. Instead, many of these images are by local photographers such as DRW Photography, And by doing so, they are helping these photographers achieve some notoriety. And one more thing: These images are so stunning that they get shared all over Facebook, raising Eilean Donan's profile even further.
David's posts often share interesting information about what is going on at the castle at the moment, making you feel like an insider or member of the Eilean Donan family. Recently, David has begun venturing out with his video camera once a week, capturing some of the gorgeous local scenery and giving fans a vocabulary lesson known as 'The Scottish Word of the Week'. Judging by the volume of Likes and comments, these posts are eagerly awaited by Eilean Donan's fans.
And the communication is not one-way. Comment on one of their posts and they will often respond. I still chuckle when I remember the conversation David and I had about midges. (I think one of the biggest mistakes most companies make on their Facebook page is not engaging in conversation with their fans.)
I encourage you to LIke Eilean Donan's Facebook page. Enjoy the content but more importantly, pay attention to how they are leveraging Facebook.
Face it: Those of us using WordPress need to start paying more attention to security. The days of 'set-and-forget' are long gone. WordPress has become the low-hanging fuit for hackers. Automated bots scour the internet looking for vulnerable WordPress websites.
I'm pretty impressed with Sucuri.net - enough so that we recommend them and have clients using their services.
Sucuri will scan your WordPress website periodically to see if any files have been changed, added, or deleted, looking for malware at the same time.
It also monitors login attempts and automatically locks out offending IP addresses after 5 attempts. One of the interesting things Sucuri does is to check these offending IP addresses against its global database.
Sucuri also offers a 'cleaning service' to remove most of the common malware infections.
Sucuri's services are pretty affordable ($99/yr for a single website). Considering the implications of waking of some morning to discover that malware in your website has been infecting your vistors' computer, that's pretty inexpensive
DIsclaimer: LInks to Sucuri.net in this article are affiliate links.
I once had a personal growth coach describe what she does for her clients: "I help people overcome 'timid living'".
Except that I bet her clients never called it 'timid living'. It reminded me of this cartoon by Hugh MacLeod, GapingVoid. We get so wrapped up in our idustries jargon that we fail to describe to our clients how we can help them in a way that really resonates with them.
When we meet someone for the first time - or they visit our website for the first time - we get just a few seconds to cause them to think "You have exactly what I need."
We need to 'get outside our jar' and listen to how our clients describe what we do for them. Then remember those words. Use them on your website and in your conversation instead of what YOU think you do.
A few days ago Vic Gundotra, the executive in charge of Google+, announced that he's leaving Google. That triggered a huge kerfluffle of people pronouncing Google+ to be doomed. Even TechCrunch got in on the act with a an article Google+ is Walking Dead. Balony. Google+ (or something like it) will be with us for a long time for one simple reason:
Google+ (or something like it) is integral to the future of Google's core product, Search.
Remember when Google started? Your website's page rank was based upon the number of links to it from elsewhere on the web. As time went on, Google's page ranking algorithm has evolved quite a bit but it still relies upon the number of links to your website. Unfortunately the landscape that made that a valid metric is changing, and may well be in the road to obsolescence.
Consider that if I add a link from my website to yours then I'm 'voting' for your website. The more votes then higher up in the search results you appear. The problem is that most of us don't vote that way any more. A small percentage of people have their own personal website. On the other hand, almost every one has a Facebook page, Twitter profile, etc. Today we 'vote' by sharing a link to your stuff on our Facebook page. We call this social sharing.
If Google's primary product - Search - is going to stay relevant then Google must
figure out how to include social sharing as a factor in page ranking.
There are really only three ways that Google can do that:
1. Learn to play nice with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc and avail themselves of the social sharing metrics of those companies.
2. Acquire a new or existing social media company.
3. Make Google+ (or something like it) sufficiently popular to provide Google with the metrics it needs.
That's why I think Google+ is here to stay.
Frankly, I think that Google would be foolish to pull the plug on Google+ right now. Google + Communities are far better than anything that Facebook has to offer. They are active vibrant online communities, each one focused on a specific topic and populated with people who are passionate about that topic.
With Twitter's redesign of your profile page, Twitter has become more like Facebook.
Your Twitter profile page now has a Header Photo, positioned exactly like your Cover Photo on Facebook. I fact just for frun I've made the two identical. The dimensions of the header/cover photo are different however:
Facebook Cover Photo Dimensions: 850 x 315
Twitter Header Photo Dimensions: 1500 x 500
It will be interesting to see if this change helps Twitter capture some additional growth. My sense is that people are looking for a 'simpler facebook' and that could certainly describe Twitter.
Should you be on Twitter? That depends. Where is you audience? Too many people approach social media with the strategy of throwing everything against the wall in the hopes something somewhere will stick. And the result is they spend far too much time posting on every platform, yet their audience is listening to them on just one or two platforms. FInd out where your audience is, and be there.
I have a colleague who owns an SEO company, and he spends his days doing what the SEO specialists do. And to make it more interesting, we each have a client in the same field. My client and his are competitors.
My colleague shared shared that no matter what he did SEO-wise for his client, he was not able to get his client to outrank mine on Google.
My client and I don't spend any time worrying about SEO. Back at the beginning of our relationship I taught him a few basic guidelines about keyword placement, use of images, etc. SInce then he's been diligently blogging about what is important to his clients, and addressing what they want to know (or in many case should want to know).
The dirty little secret is that getting ranked highly in Google is easier than ever before if you are a blogger. Google has become much more sophisticated in its understanding of language. It's using a technique known as Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) so that it can better understand what you are writing about and more easily relate it to the search queries people are making. For example, you may use the word 'Labrador'. In the old days Google might me left to wonder if you were writing about dogs or writing about the Canadian province. Today Google is able to easily tell the difference.
The result of all this is that - after keeping a small handful of guiding principles in mind - you should simply write for your audience.
As I talk to business owners about the benefits of blogging I get asked all the usual questions: what platform should I use? What should I write about? Should I have multiple authors? What about guest blogging? etc. There is one question I never get asked:
What should I do before I start blogging?
You should do to things. This article will cover the second one. The first one is here.
I strongly recommend setting some goals. Some common goals are:
Decide upon a primary plus one or two secondary goals. I even recommend putting them on a sticky note next to your computer screen to remind you of exactly why you are blogging. It will help keep you focused.
As I talk to business owners about the benefits of blogging I get asked all the usual questions: what platform should I use? What should I write about? Should I have multiple authors? What about guest blogging? etc. There is one question I never get asked:
What should I do before I start blogging?
You should do to things. This article will cover the first one:
Think about who will be reading your blog. Actually, think about who you want to be reading your blog.
If you want IT admins to be reading your blog then write for IT admins. If you want CEOs to be reading your blog then write for CEOs even if that's not who your initial readers are.
Your target market may well require that you write for two audiences:
The decision maker often is not an expert on your product or the problems you solve. He/she will rely upon the key influencer who is the expert. You will need both heads nodding yes to make the sale.
The chances are very good that your new readers encounter your blog while searching for a solution to a problem or other related research. What do they want to know? The best blogs are ones that educate their audiences. You are an expert in your field. Share that expertise.
Your has some great wiz-bang features. Your buyers however seem to be interested in only a subset of them. Sound familiar? Usually your reader has a problem they are trying to solve. Focus on their problem. Your objective is to demonstrate that you really do understand their problem and all its implications.
All this information can be gathered easily using buyer personas. A buyer persona is an imaginary figure (who often even has a name, like 'Sarah') who embodies all the important characteristics of your ideal buyer. The best way to develop good buyer personas is to have conversations with your customers. Have conversations that are open-ended and gently-guided. Let them talk. You'll be surprised what you learn.
I am a ham radio operator (callsign WB7OBG). I keep a radio tuned to a local UHF FM repeater most of the time, and most of us who use it know each other to some extent. Think of it as a little community. We even get together in person about once a month.
Everyone in this little community is an equal. We use our radios and the repeater to converse with each other about a variety of topics, most of which are not even related to ham radio. We all have an equal voice (though the repeater's owner is a 'little more equal' than the rest of us, I suppose).
Contrast this with the local AM or FM broadcast radio station that you probably listen to: The only 'voice' or 'message' is that of the broadcaster.
Unfortunately, there is a tendency by business owners to use social media like AM/FM broadcast instead of 2-way radio. They bast out their marketing message on their blogs, Facebook, Twitter, etc. They never listen for feedback or dialog. They may even have outsourced their entire social media activity to a third party.
Which is a shame. Using social media solely as a broadcast medium reduces it to the level of junk mail. When's the last time you paid attention to a piece of junk mail? This is not to say that you should never mention your latest product or service - it means that it shsouldn't be the majority of your content. You'll never build community and create conversation by talking exclusively about your product.
Further evidence that my gut-feel campaign against using 'sliders' (also called image rotations or slideshows) is on the right track.
This is from an excellent website called WhichTestWon.com that performs A/B testing of verious website functions and features. The version on the left used six static images on the home page. The version on the right used a slideshow. The version on the left had a 187% higher click-through rate and increased sales by 75%.
Slideshows are OK if they are used as an 'accent' feature, but if you try to use them to present facets of your sales or marketing message you are probably doing yourself more harm than good. Website viewers are not going to wait around to view the whole thing in hopes that one of the slides resonates with them.
Designers love sliders. but you should engineer your website for revenue.
When creating a mobile-optimized website, It is important to create the shortest path possible (the leat number of taps) to the content mobile visitors want. Google Analytics allows us to do that, though it is a little laborious.
Do you have multiple blogs and would like them to all feed into the same RSS feed?
That's the position I recently found myself in. I recently decided to narrow the focus of my Business Blogging Pros blog to be only topics related to blogging, and create a new website (http://www.klaroty.com) for the website design side of the business. I didn't want my readers to have to subscribe to two RSS feeds however.
The answer is Yahoo Pipes. It is a free service provided by Yahoo that allows you to process RSS feeds in many ways, one of which is to combine several feeds into one, It's got a terrific interface that's easy to understand.
You are not still logging in with the username 'Admin' are you?
One of the most common WordPress attacks is directed at user accounts with the username of 'admin'. Once upon a time the WordPress installation script automatically created an admin user named 'admin'. Today, while the script prompts you for a username it defaults to 'Admin'.
Here is a screenshot from a WordPress blog I manage. You can see all the attempts by hackers to login as admin:
Using the WordPress username 'Admin' effectively cuts the hacker's job in half.
If you have been using 'Admin' as a username then here's what you must do right now:
There, You're a lot safer now.
One of the most common requests I get when creating a client's blog is an event calendar. If you are speaking or appearing at events a calendar is a great way to keep your audience up to date. A calendar full of events sends the message that you are active and actually doing things.
We've tested and used a lot of calendar plugins for WordPress and in my opinion this one is the best:
It utilizes custom post types for events, which is (in my opinion) the right way to do it. It supports all the event-related fields you commonly could need as well as the ability to display a Google map.
How do you combine RSS feeds from two sources? Yahoo Pipes.
As some of you know, I'm rebranding the company from Business Blogging Pros to Klaroty Strategic Marketing. I've started a new blog named Engineered For Revenue on the Klaroty site. It will cover our website design activity, strategic marketing, and general social media issues. In the future the Business Blogging Pros blog will be focused specifically on the topic of blogging.
I would really like for the subscribers to this blog to continue to receive all the content even though the source of some of it has moved. Yahoo Pipes to the rescue.
Yahoo Pipes has been around for a long time. It has a simple drag-and-drop interface that allows you to construct some very sophisticated RSS processes. You can even filter out duplicate content and search RSS feeds for certain keywords.
It was a simple matter to create a pipe that takes all my desired feeds as inputs and output them together as a single RSS feed. Then I simply went to Feedburner and changed the feed source from blog.businessblogginpros.com to the Yahoo pipe.
In a recent rant, I talked about why I think Facebook is doomed. The reason is that Facebook lacks any facility for topic-specific communities.
Let's say for example that your hobby is wine making. There is no place in Facebook you can go and exclusively discuss winemaking with your fellow winemakers.
Google must have been listening because they just launched a new feature of Google+ called 'Communities'. One of my hobbies is breadmaking and I've already joined The Art of Bread.
I can't emphasize enough the significance of this for businesses. If you sell an accessory for banjo players, you should go where banjo players hang out. Find the online communities of, by, and for banjo players and spend your time there. Get known. Get trusted.
Facebook has entirely missed the boat. Those kinds of communities don't exist. If Google gets Google+ Communities right - and that's a big 'if' - it could be the thing that finally makes Google+ viable.
Sprinkler World is the lodest prinkler and irrigation company in the Phoenix area. We were honored that they chose us to build their new website.
We started with a stock, off-the-shelf WordPress theme and modified it to fit their business image and the way they work. To Sprinkler World Managemnet, the most attractive aspect of their new website is not how it looks. It's the fact that they are now in control and can easily make changes and additions themselves.
We built Revelation Welless' first website a few years ago. Recently the founder, Alisa Keeton, came to us and asked us to explore the potential of a new website.
This website is a great example of what custom wordpress development can do.
Thought-leader in leveraging social media for small businesses growth, gourmet chef, Typepad Guru.
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