Wingnut SEO

I was looking over my analytics today and noticed that a large portion of my traffic is coming from places that don’t use English as their primary language.

I don’t know how accurate this information is but it got me thinking… if they are finding me though stumble or digg or elsewhere what happens if they don’t speak English very well/at all?

So I did what anyone who values ALL of their traffic SHOULD do and went out and found an “auto-translation” plugin. If you don’t see it, scroll down a little it’s underneath MyBlogLog Reader list in the sidebar (while your there take a second and join my community.)

I speak a little Spanish so from what I can tell it looks like it works fairly well.

It’s pretty cool. I found it over at carlosquiles.com that was directly linked from the WordPress plugin page.

If anyone of you out there speak a different language - I’d love to have some feedback on how well it actually translates - thanks in advance for any input.

I really appreciate all of the support. Thanks for stopping by to everyone and a very special thank you to my international readers.

I’m not nearly one of the “cool kids.” I’ll be the first to admit that. However I am starting to see some actual traffic to my site and people submitting my stuff to all those fun social networks that I love so much (to the point of dreaming about them, but I won’t bore you with that.)

Now don’t get me wrong this is awesome - I couldn’t be more happy/excited/giddy about it - and anyone who does it you are the coolest people I could ever imagine. That said, however, it has changed the entire dynamic of my blog - how I’ll write in the future and how I will promote my own work.

Why does this change? Before, I could time my submits, submit only where I wanted, or have time to ask someone bigger than myself to submit and bring in way more traffic than the post should. I could also write up pretty much anything, not submit it anywhere, and know no one saw it.

So thank you to everyone who is stopping by and thinking my work is good enough to submit to your favorite social media pages. I really appreciate it, you guys are great.

I recently found this nifty widget that you now see up in the right corner called “Wijit” or “Lijit Search.” So far, I’m impressed.

It syncs up with all of your social networking profiles and allows people to search for anything and get results from not only your site, but from all the sites in your network of friends.

How cool is that? It lets you search for whatever you want and it gives back results you can trust because you are searching from a blog you trust… it’s basically like asking your favorite blogger what they would recommend… about anything.

I’m letting you all know about it because I want more people to get it… Think how awesome it would be if every blog that you read had this? This is taking social media to the next level because it brings all of the social sites together and allows you to search your friends network for great posts on any topic you want.

I’m rollin’ like a pimp slappin’ blog posts turnin’ tricks, submittin’ all my business to Sphinn and Mixx. Got a million clickers on my adSense every day and when I drop a thumbs down the bitches go away.

They call me big G cuz I’m the Google Masta’ if you leave a bad comment I’ll just write back and blast ya. My SEO’s just betta then you stupid perps - don’t believe me? Take a look at the SERPs.

Aaaand now that I got that out of my system… A lot of people who use social media to promote their websites use it only for shameless self promotion. It is so much more than this and that is one of the hardest things for social media noobs to learn.

When I started using forums back in the day to promote my website that’s all I did… promote my website. I was quickly seen as a marketing guy and the community shunned me.

It wasn’t until later, when I found a forum on a topic I was actually interested in and knew about. I asked questions, answered questions and just got involved in all of the fun discussions and actually MADE FRIENDS some of whom I still talk to and keep in touch with to this day.

That’s the real gold of all of this Social Media, making friends, networking, chatting it up and rubbing elbows with all the big names in your niche, the people you look up to - use social media to surround yourself with the best in the business and learn from them.

Social media shouldn’t be about shameless self promotion - it should be about bettering yourself.

What makes a comedian funny?  It’s all about their timing and delivery.  The same can be said about a good blogger.  You have to have both, not one or the other.

You can be ahead of the curve and break a huge story and still have something that no one reads because the writing was poor, the tone wrong, or you posted it in the wrong place.  You can also do all of those three perfectly but if everyone got tired of your topic a week ago, game over.

What makes a blogger exceptional is when they can hit both of these qualities flawlessly.  It’s something that new bloggers frequently fail to understand.  Being fairly new to the blogging world this has been one of my biggest pitfalls.

Delivery, that’s the easy part.  Learn to write.  If you don’t know how to write take some classes, buy a For Dummies book, practice.  Find your voice and go with it.

Timing, that’s the hard part.  How do you know when the time is right?  How do you know if the proverbial iron is hot and it’s time to strike?  You don’t… really.  You just have to make a good guess.

That’s not to say it’s random.  If you have a blog we know you can at least read.  So use what you have.  Look around the interwebs for a while and see what everyone is talking about… see what they are tired of talking about.  You can get a pretty good estimate of what people will flock to just by reading what they are already flocking to.

That’s the big secret.  Know your audience, know what they vote for, know what they talk about, know what they like, think, dream about.  Once you know these things you can follow the ebb and flow of what is hot and what is not - and will be able to predict, fairly accurately, what people will read.