Choose Your SEO Expert Carefully

If you’re going to buy something expensive, don’t you want a little proof that it’s gonna work?  Don’t you also want some reassurance that they know what they’re talking about?  With all the SEO experts popping up, you really need to do double duty in choosing your SEO “expert” carefully.

SEO (or Search Engine Optimization) is the art and science of optimizing elements of your website so that your website will rank higher in search engines like Google.

It seems that many a web designer has realized that offering SEO and Internet marketing advice and services will somehow benefit their clients.  So they find some old articles on the subject, and type out a pretty, well formatted article, and declare that they are experts in the matter.
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Windows 7 Party Success

Thanks to Adam Cochran of TalkingDigital.org fame, and Rick Castellini of HelpMeRick.com fame, Grand Junction, Colorado had an extremely fun and informative Windows 7 party last night at the Grand Junction Realtors Association.

With the release of Windows 7, there’s been a lot of questions across the country about what the improvements are, how to upgrade, and if the benefits are enough to make the switch to Windows 7 right away.

Adam and Rick did an awesome job of answering all these questions and tons more.  They had two systems running Windows 7 on display for everyone to see and play with.

Adam Cochran and Rick Castellini

Microsoft says that networking with Windows 7 will be even easier, so Rick and Adam put it to the test.  They networked the two computers right before our very eyes, and showed off some of the features, like permissions, password protection, and deletion.  Deletion does have one pitfall that’s new for networking – once it’s gone, it’s gone.  There is no recycle bin for network deletions.

I played with Ricks laptop for about 10 minutes and immediately went to the admin consoles, to see what was in store for an advanced user.  In the process, I only had a UAC (User Account Control) popup window once.  Rick and Adam went on to explain that Microsoft has tuned the process, and that there are UAC controls to adjust how often you want to be alerted by UAC popups.  I was impressed by the finer control that users now have on UAC and the initial settings being very permissible.

The interface itself is a bit different,  and I think it would take a bit of getting used to.  The taskbar seems to have a quick launch and open programs buttons on the taskbar, but they don’t have a very good demarcation, and they tend to look all the same at first glance.  They also group things together, and create a sub-panel to choose which one you want.  So if I have two Word documents, it will put it into the same button, and display the two as a sub-menu popup when I hover over the button.  Might be fine for just two, but I often have 5 or more Word documents open at a time.  As I sit here after the fact, I have to wonder how 10 or more documents would look in that preview mode.

Another point they discussed was the release of Microsofts new Security Essentials anti-virus package, which is free, and talked about some of the other anti-virus packages, such as AVG ,  which is also free, but getting bloated, forcing upgrades to new versions, and pushing banners to upgrade to a paid premium package.  One point they made was that AVG is around 80 MB in size now, and the new Security Essentials is substantially smaller, and much faster as well.  I am surprised that they didn’t mention Prevx, which is a paid product, but is faster than AVG, requires no definition files,  is only a 800K download (4MB unpacked size on my HD), and takes only 3 minutes to scan my entire system.  Prevx saved my bacon years ago, so I am a bit biased.

The party was not only informative, but it was highly relaxing as well.  There were ballo0ns and streamers, coffee, drinks, and snacks to make everyone feel welcome and at home.  The final few minutes were filled with various questions about when and how to upgrade, and everyone left the party with a  new sense of things to come.

Great Job Rick & Adam!  You are my new Windows 7 Experts!

Where’s The Dominator Been?

For those of you that keep track of my whereabouts, may be wondering where I’ve been… and I must say that my silence is very indicative of wonderful things in the works!

One of the things that’s The Moxie Maven and I finished, and is ready for the public, is her  Moxie Mafia Social Media Training System.  This site uses the Wordpress blogging framework with a slightly modified Revolution theme.

Included at the Moxie Mafia site are tons of videos, articles about Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and all your social media favorites.  And if you become a member, you get access to monthly lesson plans to get your business aligned with social media, expert interviews,  special reports, and member-only videos.

And if you’ve been paying attention to Moxie Mafia, you’d know that there was an entire blog there that that had The Moxie Mavens Blog Talk Radio show podcasts too… so what happened to it?  We moved it of course!

You can still find the same content as before, but at the new “The Moxie Maven” blog that is still an adorable site, with some very real social media content.

But what else is going on that’s kept me away from this blog?

For one, we’re in the process of finalizing our brand – us being me “The Dominator” and she “The Moxie Maven”

And part of this brand shift means creating a few extra sites, and getting the right content in the right places.  We’re breaking our Wordpress services off into a completely new realm at Blogging Emergency, where we’ll be taking our existing Wordpress offerings, and combine some how-to videos, discussions and articles with it.

We’re also going to break-out our seminars and training services into a combined Mox&Dom label.  We seem to do more seminars together, and the name has been really successful, so we decided to not push our seminar services separately, and combine them together, since we were rarely giving speaking engagements independently anyhow.

Neither Blogging Emergency nor Mox&Dom are ready for prime time yet, but I wanted to give everyone a heads-up on why our blogs have been silent for the past few weeks, and to let you know that we’ll be providing you with more avenues to learn what’s important to you.

And as always, if you have a question,  use our contact form, or leave a comment at the end of any post, and we’ll do the best we can to address it.  Likewise, if you’d like to see us writing about something specific, let us know that too, and we can write up special articles, just for you.

Small Bites: Make Things Easy To Consume

I learn more about life from my children than I do any other source.  And a lot of  what my children are teaching me makes perfect sense on how businesses should be run. They are my advisers if you will.

I have 4 advisers- a middle schooler, a kindergartner and twin pre-preschoolers, so I have a wide range of inputs of which to receive.   Sometimes they have so much to teach me, that I become quite overwhelmed, if you know what I mean.

One night in particular, I was serving a steak dinner to my family.  With the little ones, we  cut up the pieces of meat, and (more…)

Single Point of Failure: The Bresnan Experience

For those of you that are Bresnan customers, located in Colorado, Wyoming or Montana, you already know the news - “Bresnans Down!” – and yes, I’m an effected customer as well.

That’s right, in 3 states, Bresnan Communications is down for Internet and VOIP digital telephone.  Three States!!  How the heck did this happen?

With the worlds lessons of redundancy, how is it possible that a single catastrophic event can take out service in three states?

The answer?  No One Knows!  It took 12 hours, but look at the message that they leave us on there homepage:

Thanks for pointing out the obvious Bresnan!!

Several of the local news media tried to contact Bresnan, and they were in the same boat as us – the phone lines were so jammed up, that they couldn’t get through.

Absolutely no communication with customers is bad for business.  I first recognized the problem at about 8PM.  I decided that it was a glitch in the system, and I’d look into it in the morning.

Morning rolls around, and I have partial Internet.  Fortunately I was using a public DNS server so that I could browse without relying too heavily on Bresnan.  That’s all I needed.  It was enough for me to get on Twitter, and see what the heck was going on.  And they were just as clueless as me.

Bresnan made absolutely no attempt to communicate with it’s customers about what’s happened.  They had over 12 hours (and counting) and we’ve heard nothing from them.  I’ve gotten Internet, but mail is flaky and phones are still out (business phones mind you).

And no ETA on when service will be restored.

The lesson to you:  Always keep you customers informed.  Help them.  Love them.  They are your real stockholders.  They are the reason you are in business.  Treat them better than your employees and your family (which should already be super-duper).

Leave them in the dust, and they will leave you.  Treat them well, and they will remember you forever.

I still don’t know what’s really going on, and I have enough redundancy in my plan that I’m not overly effected, just inconvenienced.  But it would be nice to have an update as to when things will be back to normal.

With President Obama visiting our town this weekend, I’m almost bound to throw a conspiracy theory out there that someone cut the hard line in the name of national security….

Remember, I treat you well by keeping you in the loop… now if I could just convince you to remember me forever

CNN Connects With Grand Junction Through Twitter

Screen Capture on Twitter of CNN Breaking News Responding to BonnieRN of Grand Junction

What’s even more impressive is how CNN found us.  Look at the screen capture above.  See the #gjco?  This is a hastag that our local Grand Junction Twitterers set up to identify local traffic, and keep each other in the loop.  Do you see how CNN used the #gjco hashtag as well?  CNN recognized how we used the #gjco hashtag, and joined in on the conversation.

This is the power of #gjco, and hashtags in general.  It’s a way to localize your message to a succinct group of people that want to hear your message, or communicate with you and your friends.

So if you’re in Grand Junction, Colorado, or just passing through, feel free to add #gjco to the end of all your tweets.  We’d love to hear from you.

And remember to keep an eye on CNN for @BonnieRN’s interview.

Grand Junction TweetUp Success – Picnic Style!

Thank you to everyone that attended Grand Junction’s first (and certainly not last) Picnic TweetUp over at Canyon View Park.

There were about 10-12 adults with 6-12 kids ( OK, so there were exactly 6 kids, but it seemed like more the way they ran around having fun!)

Topics were extremely casual, some were technology/twitter related, but a lot of it was just relaxing conversation, and a time to get to know each other on a more personal level. (more…)

Grand Junction TweetUp For Community Blog and Business Directory Ideas

Event Announcement:

Grand Junction Community Blog and Business Directory Discussion.

Twitter has been so successful at pulling together the Grand Junction community that I’ve decided to use Twitter as a starting point of pulling businesses together to get some feedback on a community online presence that will help promote the Mesa County area.

I currently have the website www.GJZone.com that I’ve been using to promote the Grand Junction area, but would like to give it a clean new look, add some functionality, and make it something that the community as a whole will use and benefit from.

Ideally I’d like to have members of the Chambers of Commerce (more…)

Western Slope Honor Flight Takes Off Aug. 25

World War II was a long time ago, before the time that many of us were born.  But there are still those around us that served during that Great War, and still deserve the love and respect of any hero.

Because the World War II memorial was put into place so late in history, many never got to see the memorial that was built in their honor.  The Honor Flight Network is a non-profit organization that is on a mission… a mission to get as many WWII vets back to Washington DC to see the memorials that were built on their behalf.

The flight will be taking off on August 25, 2009 from Grand Junction Regional Airport with 110 WWII vets from Western Colorado, and 70 guardians will be accompanying them to the memorials.

They will be returning on August 26, 2009 and a public “Hero’s Welcome” is planned at about 5:15pm.  The return flight is open to anyone in the community that would like to welcome home their hero’s

Many have forgotten, or simply never knew, the dangers that our country faced during WWII – but there are those that simply can’t forget, because they sacrificed more than anyone can imagine.

The Honor Flight Network needs two things.  1) Letters to Veterans  and 2) Donations for flights, and medical supplies (like wheelchairs and portable oxygen tanks)

If you would like to give a donation to the Western Slope Honor Flight Network, please send donations to:

The other thing that we need more of are letters to the veterans.  These are thank you letters to our WWII vets for the services that they provided us, and the freedoms that the helped to guarantee around the world.

Letters to our World War II vets can be sent to:

Vet letters are needed before August 15, 2009

If there are questions about donations to Honor Flight Network, or on sending letters to the vets, please contact us directly ( 970-985-4192) and we’ll get you in touch with the right people.

I’m going to conclude this article with my own letter to our vets.  (more…)

The Dominator Visits Womens Moxie Mafia Mastermind Group

I  made a guest appearance at the Moxie Mafia mastermind group yesterday.  Normally the Moxie Maven runs the show, but she took a trip to Denver with our children to visit family and friends on the other side of the Colorado mountains.

Moxie Mafia is the name that this mastermind group calls themselves, and is mostly (or entirely) comprised of women business owners here in the Grand Junction area.

Being a man, I’ve never had the opportunity to talk at a womens only group, so I wasn’t really quite sure of what to expect, or even what to present.  Jennifer (the Moxie Maven) said that I should present some Internet marketing stuff, but wasn’t real clear on anything specific.

So with that, I only came prepared to answer specific questions that the ladies had for me, and that proved to be plenty.

It turns out that there were 5 ladies at this event.  Two were brand new, so with 3 of us being first timers, I knew that they’d have to cut me a little slack!

The questions started about how to build a list.  Perfect – I know quite a bit about list building, so I discussed some of the ways that a list can be built, both for a retail / brick & mortar store, as well as how you’d build an email list for an online store.

We also discussed how a facebook fan page can be used to promote an online business, and did some email forwarding from one email address to another.  This was a very hands-on business meat & potatoes meeting where questions were answered as concretely as possible.

We also discussed the use of auto-responders, like Aweber,  and how to set up a series of follow up messages, and using free (and valuable) reports to get people to subscribe to your newsletter.

One of the most important messages that I tried to portray was the art of  “Selling without selling” – the idea that if you can describe the benefits of your product or service, without even talking about your product, and you will gain their trust, and form a genuine relationship with your fans and visitors.

You will eventually sell to some of them, but it takes time, practice and patience. It is truly an art, just as most aspect of business are.

The Moxie Mafia mastermind group meets weekly at a Grand Junction business, which is currently Main Street Bagels.  If you’d like to join the weekly Moxie Mafia mastermind  event for women business owners, I recommend that you checkout the Moxie Mafia blog or contact Jennifer directly by calling her at 970-985-4192.

The Moxie Maven also wrote a step by step book on how to create your own mastermind group with social media.  Checkout the social media success book information,  it’s chock full of Social media tips

Grand Junction TweetUp July 21, 2009

Great way to advertise your presence on Twitter!

We had another highly successful Grand Junction TweetUp at Main Street Bagels this morning, and I must say, there was a ton of energy, and a lot of happy faces.

Some of the energy could have been from the coffee and Americanos that folks were drinking, but whatever the reason, we had a high turnout and lot’s of participation.

All in all, there were 13 people in attendance, which included 11 Twitterers and 2 welcomed guests. This was roughly what we had at the last TweetUp, but this time we had some new faces, and a few of the old faces were either on vacation, or had other obligations (like work) to deal with first.

The attendees were (in no particular order):

• @DesertShaman
• @Cllecr
• @HelpMeRick
• @GJChamber
• @GatorGoddess
• @LibraryBecky
• @JunctionByrd
• @Kettlewell
• @NightShiftNurse
• @TalkingDigital
• @Scotti

And Guests were:

• Scott (@cllecr’s husband)
• Inira (@desertshamans daughter)

Twitters gathered around at about a quarter of 8, with most everyone grabbing a coffee or a bagel to munch on while the conversation began.

We didn’t have a pre-destined theme with today’s TweetUp,  but we started with just casual talk about Rick’s upcoming class on TweetDeck, and what he’d be teaching there.

Then we moved on to the uses of social media in the schools.  There were 3 teachers in our TweetUp,  so it was a natural evolution of conversation.  It started with a firewall at the school blocking Twitter, and meandered through the talks of the fine lines of censorship and freedom of expression.  The conversation did get a little bit political, but nothing too dramatic.

I think that the next TweetUp (TweetUp IV I think) should entertain the idea of a “theme” that is broad enough that a lot of extra conversation can flow around it.  Something like “Do you use Twitter for business, pleasure or both?” or “How often do you tweet?”  or “Do you tweet & drive?”…. something loosy goosy, and open for fun conversation.

I think Becky was Tweeting while Talking!

Today’s TweetUp was organized through on online application called TwtVite (Twitter Invite) that really makes the process of organizing a TweetUp a snap.  Anyone can start one, and then Tweet about it.

Just remember, use the #gjco tag at the end of your local Tweets, and the Grand Junction community will see your messages more ofter.

There isn’t another TweetUp scheduled yet, so go ahead and start one.  It’s fast, easy & fun.

Water You Telling Your Friends?

Marketing needs to be creative and fresh to make your business stand out from the crowd.  We all know this, but how many of us are really standing out?

As you browse through some of the pictures in this post of Dr. Greg Haitz of RimRock Chiropractic, I think you’ll get the idea of one Grand Junction business that really gets it.

What is it that attracted me most to RimRock Chiropractic?  They like to have fun. And it shows from all the effort that is put into the almost party like atmosphere.  When’s the last time you’ve gone to the doctor, and they threw a party on your behalf?

I don’t know about you, but this is a “stand out from the crowd” marketing plan if I’ve ever seen one. (more…)

Power Posting and Actionable Blogging

The idea behind most businesses is to grow big and build a reputation so that you can put food on the table and take the kids to Disney Land.

The problem that most businesses have is the growing big part… and the building a reputation part.

There are two primary parts to reputation: Quality and Quantity.

Quality addresses what you say and how you say it.  Do you finesse your words, or do you prefer to say it like it is?  No matter how you say it, you’re setting up the quality of your message.

Quantity addresses where you say it, and who says it for you.  Do you write only on your blog, or do you write articles in magazines, and trade journals?  Do you write once a month, or once a day?

So if you can find a way to have a positive reputation with high quality and sufficient quantity, you’ll be building on your company’s reputation in no time.

Does a good reputation guarantee growth?  No.  But you have a better chance of growing if you do.

So if building a reputation is a matter of quality and quantity, is there a way to combine them? (more…)

Grand Junction Twitter Connection

Many of you already know that I reside here in Grand Junction, Colorado, which is halfway between Denver, Colorado and Salt Lake City, Utah. Grand Junction has less than 100,000 people in the county, and can be classified by most as being a small town.

I’m a big fan of our small town, with all its beauty, and I support Grand Junction in any way I can.

As with many small towns, Grand Junction is a little bit behind the technology curve (though not as much as some), and needs a little boost at times to get things kick started. Because I’ve noticed a bump in Twitter traffic from our community, I decided to put together a blog post that can be used as a booster pack to get more Grand Junction residents and businesses started with Twitter.

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