These shoes are made for blogging – lacing up your posts in 2013 – Mardi Gras

Is your draft posts list approaching 50% of the total?

Most of the bloggers here at the Cyber Wigwam leave little clutter in their draft list. They have the discipline to publish their WordPress posts on a regular basis.  As with all social media marketing, consistency is second only to Content. If Content is King, then Consistency is the Prince. If you have a robust list of choices in your draft list it might be time to utilize them in a princely fashion. Our best advice at lept Like A Blog is to simply tell the story of your business. We live and breathe our business everyday and it is easy to forget that other people aren’t as versed in it as we are. Telling people about the boring repetitious parts of our business doesn’t seem interesting but that is the easiest way for people to get to Know, Like and Trust us. Publishing your post on a weekly basis is a good discipline and is a reasonable frequency to consistenly update your followers. So just like Mardi Gras where the idea is to clean out all the fat before Lent, it is time to spruce up and clean out the drafts in your WordPress post list.

The Power of 3D printing at home in 2012

Does your dog like treats? If your dog is like our dogs they are food motivated to the end. Why not make homemade dog treats? Better yet, why not make homemade dog treats personalized with your dog’s name? When you have a 3D printer at home, this is very easy to do. Design up a dog bone shape, add some text for your dog’s name and Voila! You have a dog biscuit cutter. If you’re not ready for making your own cutter you can visit the website and order a customized cutter from TPM technologies. Here at the Cyber Wigwam we have a new endeavor, it’s not lept Like A Blog, but lept like a Dog! We have Happy Dogs with their homemade treats. We’re not sure what they like best. Eating a biscuit with their name on it or sneaking a biscuit with their brother’s name on it.

#1 Storytelling – The Art of Social Media Marketing Campaigns among other things.

What do story telling and business marketing have in common? Everything. Here at the Cyber Wigwam we have developed a discipline of weekly blog posts. Many people ask, “what will I blog about?” The answer is simple. Just tell the story of your business. According to Freshly Pressed, WordPress.com’s blog highlighting portal, the number one thing to be featured is “Unique content.” Only you can tell the story of your business so naturally it is inherently unique. The other thing we find here at Council Blogs is that people are interested in how you conduct your business. People like to do business with people they Know, Like, and Trust. People like to be able to read about how you do your business and interact with your customers. What more natural way than to tell the story of your business. Here at Council Blogs we like to use WordPress for our blogs.One great benefit of telling the story of our business is that we have a chance to use the tags that best describe our business. This helps immensely in our findability for new customers. It also helps keep a fresh web presence for our existing customers. So, the next time you have that blogger’s writing cramp, get back to basics and tell the story of your business. If you have any examples of great stories you’d like to share, feel free to comment below.

How often do you watch a YouTube video? Once in a blue moon? It’s here in 2012

You  may say that you watch a video on YouTube once in a blue moon. Chances are you watch one more often. In 2010 the number of users on the internet climbed over 2 billion. With 4 billion views per day on YouTube  that means that there are an average of two videos watched every day per person on the internet. Currently there are about 48 hours of vidoe uploaded to YouTube every minute. Here at the Cyber Wigwam we have some bloggers venturing out into YouTube and have developed their own channel. YouTube classes are available from lept Like A Blog if you are ready to start producing some unique content.

CMS or Static Website? Top reason to consider WordPress for your web presence.

Content Management Systems or CMS are layers of software to help authors concentrate on their content or message instead of the programming details of a traditional website approach. A CMS can give you an advantage in the time spent updating your site. To better appreciate the advantages of a CMS over a static site we need to lift the hood a bit to see what is different about the platforms. You can think of a traditional website as an electronic billboard. The sign painters for your electronic billboard use a language called HyperText Markup Language or HTML. This is the language of all browsers and is the avenue for making your screen come to life on a website. Early websites had to be coded in HTML. Quickly WYSIWYG or What You See Is What You Get editors started to emerge to make the coding of HTML more palatable. The next steps were to develop bigger chunks of code that required less coding and more configuration. These evolved into Content Management Systems where the code allows you to fill in forms that drive the behavior of your website. With the information of the forms in a database the look and feel can be quickly and easily transformed to something else. Styling rules drive what the content will look like. WordPress is a CMS that has caught on with developers making styling setups called themes and functional chunks called plugins. WordPress.org is the clearinghouse for free themes and plugins. WordPress.com is a site where you can set up a free blog. The engine is basically the same in both cases. The top reason for a small business to consider WordPress for their web presence is how easy it is to update the site. Here at the Cyber Wigwam we continually run into people who are having a hard time getting a response from their webmaster. Even the simplest things like phone numbers or addresses or dates take 3 or 4 phone calls to get changed. Small business owners can take the reins with WordPress, updating easily with a respectable looking site that didn’t take a lot of programming. At lept Like A Blog we have classes and tutorials for people to quickly come up to speed.

Bloggers limbering up for Memorial Day

The bloggers are busy this week leading up to Memorial Day weekend. Memorial Day began as a tradition after the American Civil War. Generally, the canon is symbolic of the conflict. How does a canon get from installation to installation? At the time of the Civil War the canons were pulled by horses, 6 to be exact. A battery was made of 6 canons and the accompanying caisson and repair wagons each requiring 6 horses. The two wheeled unit between the horses and the canon is called a limber. The limber also had a box that carried the ammunition. That ends up being a lot of horses. The photo is a little scratchy but you can get a sense for all the horse flesh required to move a canon battery. It doesn’t take quite as much horsepower to get the blog posts rolling with our motivated bloggers at Council Blogs.The bloggers all have their posts connected to Facebook from their wordpress sites. Feel free to comment on the blog posts here. Enjoy your holiday weekend.

May Day, the 8 hour work day at Council Blogs

May Day symbolizes the American drive to establish a 8 hour work day. At Council Blogs we have a special take on the 8 hour work day and our marketing plan. It is ironic that the origin of the 8 hour work day is the U.S. where we have such a work-a-holic culture.

Enquirer.com put it elegantly: American workers take an average of 13 days off a year. The Italians meanwhile take 42 days, the French, 37 days. Even the highly productive Japanese take 25 days a year.

The rule in our blogging club is to set aside one hour a week to work on marketing. WIth all that work-aholism you would think it would be easy to find an hour. That’s why we have an organized get together. Mike calls it “an appointment with the maketing department, myself.” If you would like to join the bloggers you can email the Chief here.

Blogging for out of the Box SEO in 2012

Ever wonder what that funny little orange symbol is? Many people recognize it as RSS, a few people even know it stands for Real SImple Syndication, even fewer people realize what that means. The good news is we really don’t have to understand it to take advantage of it. RSS is at the root of our blogging platforms. It is the technology that allows bloggers to be both the reporter and the publisher. RSS allows a means for us to publish to the world and then have a simple method for people to subscribe to our “feed.” Here at the Cyber WIgwam few people care about that but we are excited that the nature of RSS has an impact on our SEO or Search Engine Optimization. The bloggers at Council Blogs know that effectively choosing tags for their posts can have an organic impact on their Findability. Why? Currently, the search engines like to parse the RSS feeds because it is easy to find where the new information is coming from. Rather than send web-crawlers out to find new aspects of a site, it is easier to monitor the RSS feeds to see what is new. If our blog posts are appropriately tagged the search result impact is astounding. In SEO tests conducted at the Cyber Wigwam we have posted in the morning at 10:00 and received Google Alerts for those posts with the target tags by 2:00 that same afternoon. Our bloggers have found that we can focus on telling the story of our business and let the tags and RSS handle the SEO.

DST 2012: Don’t lose another hour getting your Social Media Marketing going.

WOW! What happened to the winter? Here in Rockford, Beloit, and Northern Illinois and Southern Wisconsin we have had a mild winter. Now it’s time for Daylight Saving Time (DST). Unfortunately, in spring we lose an hour but don’t let discourage you from getting your Social Media Marketing campaign going.  You can leap into your Social Media campaign with lots of resources at lept Like a Blog. You can leap ahead and get a jump on your marketing just like getting a jump on sunlight this spring.

February 29, 1900: Microsoft changing history?

These partying men from 1876 might have wondered in their drunken stuper that somebody in the future will get the leap year calculation wrong. Well, of course they were having such a gay time they were hoping for more leap years. Maybe one of them passed that thought onto their heirs at Microsoft. I have a personal connection to the 1900 leap year (or should I say lack thereof). My great aunt was born on February 29, 1896. She was famous in our family as she didn’t have a chance to celebrate her birthday until she was 8 years old. There was not a leap day in 1900. Since Julius Caesar started leap days every four years to keep the calendar synched with nature we found he was a little off. 1500 years later the Gregorian calendar aimed to fix the crude adjustment by adding some more rules. Anyway, the outcome is that 1900, or any century year for that matter that, is not evenly divisible by 400 is not a leap year. Microsoft didn’t investigate it well enough and the calculation inherent in Excel is wrong. They mistakenly show 1900 as a leap year so changing history unbeknowingly. Apparently, they feel it is too much effort to correct it so future generations can debate about the reality or the virtual reality of Microsoft. Luckily, at the moment, WIkipedia sets the record straight with a well defined definition of the calculation. Will the 21st Century Shakespeare say, “Beware the Ides of Microsoft?” More on that the next post.