Fortunately, there is a lot of awareness on climate change and increasing efforts to do something about it. Technology plays a big part in reversing the effects human kind has on the climate, and even the small things count, when they can be shared by many of us.

Greener web advocate Online Leaf tries to provide solutions for automating power saving features by covering the browser window in black. The idea is that by hiding resource-consuming animations on the website, a little energy is saved every time the visitor is idle. Of course, if everyone used power-saving features when their computer is idle, it would improve energy savings even more, but this is a good initiative to compensate for those who don’t.

If you use Wordpress, install the Online Leaf plugin for your own site to help the climate.

photo credit: Pink Sherbet Photography

This does pose an interesting challenge, although I’d love to hear some feedback on best practices and (ethical) shortcuts to achieve a better ranking for my own personal “brand name” Calle Hunefalk.

I would love to get your comments below.

The reason? It’s a lot easier to communicate URLs without dashes and periods. My full name is Carl-Johan Hunefalk, but as is the custom in Sweden (where I am from), I’ve had the nickname Calle my whole life.

When I started my career, I used the more formal Carl-Johan in business contexts. When I moved to New York, I ran into my first hurdle with that name – people could not pronounce it, or select half or it (”Carl” or “Johan”) to call me. We all identify ourselves with our name (or names), and for me, it was an important issue not to have my name “halved”. Of course, Americans tend to be as happy about nicknames as Swedes, so Carl-Johan was shortened to “CJ” – or “C” to those who felt even that was too long to pronouce.

I’ve been back in Europe for 8 years since moving back from New York, and have used both variations of my name, perhaps to the slight confusion for people I’ve been in contact with. You will probably see my name online in both variations if you do a search – but now it’s time to simplify.

Calle – [Ka - leh] pronounced like ‘Ca’ in Capacity and ‘Le’ in Leverage.

Carl-Johan Hunefalk = Calle Hunefalk

You can read more details about naming in my upcoming posts on creating a Personal Business Plan.

Why use a Motivational Slogan?

In a sense, the name speaks for itself – a catch phrase to use for motivation as well as marketing. A business plan normally includes a Vision statement as well as a Mission statement – but a slogan? Well, I needed a phrase to use both for my own motivation and for my marketing – a phrase based on a story – so I came up with the Motivational Slogan. I use it anywhere I focus on marketing – from business cards to social media.

Unlike a slogan used by businesses, this is slightly longer, and could be used as a Vision statement if I didn’t have one already.

What does it stand for?

Each word in my Motivational Slogan is carefully selected to match my skills, interests and objectives. Each individual has his or her own interpretation of the meaning of the words, which is why I am describing my selected interpretation here.

Balanced Leadership

Balanced Leadership involves a focus on creating a sustainable business model (for me as a person) with a long term focus on ethics and social responsibility. Balancing Rights and Responsibilities is important to me.

Balanced

Balanced means a strategic focus on a division of efforts so that each gets a strategically selected share, based on business objectives and needs and interests of individuals performing tasks. This includes balancing my own tasks as well as those that work for and with me. Additionally, my goal is to achieve a balance between areas of life, including work and private/family life, health and spiritual needs, and social life.

Balance also signifies a healthy living for myself and my stakeholders (all the people I’m in contact with). Finally, balance also involves techniques for staying focused, based on the belief that you need to relax to focus and be creative (and thus learn and evolve).

Leadership

Leadership includes the focus of leading others in business and in life. To lead, you do not necessarily need to be a manager or have formal authority. This focus includes transformational leadership (as I understand as separate from Change Management), innovation and motivation.

From my skills perspective, Leadership also involves Management of Projects and Outsourcing, including planning and processes.

Global

The Global aspect is a focus on cross-cultural, international (as opposed to multi-national) and localized (culturally and lingually) communication, challenges and opportunities.

Marketing

In my Personal Business Plan, Marketing is exclusively Online Marketing, and activities impacting online marketing. It involves the entire marketing process, including the classical AIDAS model, spanning from advertising and PR, through sales, to customer service and retention. Part of online marketing is also tracking and results measurement.

Technology

As with Marketing, Technology only includes Web Technology in my Personal Business Plan. My technology focus has two subparts – innovative development along with tasks effectiveness and automation. Combined with Leadership, Technology involves IT Management, as relevant to Online Business.

The Motivational Slogan

It is important to clearly define your slogan, for a couple of reasons. One, it sets you apart from your competitors – only you have the unique definition of the Motivational Slogan you have written. Also, it limits your playing field (as long as you stay within your own defined boundaries) to focus on areas that match your skills, interests and objectives.

Defining your Motivational Slogan shouldn’t be taken too lightly – a really good one can really keep you motivated – but don’t spend more time on planning than you do on actions that follow your plan.

The Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) Affiliate Marketing Council launched its guidelines for best practice in affiliate marketing at the end of November, 2008. Recently, they revised the best practice guidelines, to now include the voucher sector as well.

These are the IAB’s affiliate marketing code of best practice:

1. Affiliates must not use a mechanism whereby users are encouraged to click to interact with content where it is unclear or confusing what the outcome will be. For example:
   • Using “click to reveal code” and opening the site when no valid code is present or an offer/deal/sale is presented instead, without this being made clear before the click.
   • Using “click to copy code” and opening the site when no valid code is available
   • Opening the merchant’s site without making it clear that this will occur
2. Voucher code affiliates must clearly detail the nature of the voucher or offer/deal/sale before a user clicks to interact with it (by revealing, copying, visiting the merchant site etc)
3. A valid code is defined as a code that has been legitimately issued by a merchant for your use online. This code will have an activation date and, where provided, a deactivation date. When a code has expired it must either be removed or the fact that it has expired must be clearly stated in writing, not simply by listing the expiry date.
4. Sites displaying voucher codes must contain clear categorization and separation between deals/offers/sales and voucher codes.
5. Any affiliate judged by one of the participating networks to be contravening the code will be referred to the IAB’s Affiliate Marketing Council and all members will agree on a course of action. The discretion of the council will be used when determining what is judged as misleading or confusing and is not confined to the examples above.

It is a positive trend to see guidelines for affiliate marketing, an industry that has been lacking that for some years.
Image courtesy of tanakawho

Part of the next evolution of the web – Web 3.0 to some – is claimed to be the Semantic Web, which enables websites to provide information about what information and functionality they have, and to communicate with other websites. It is a way to make information “understandable” by computers, so that they can perform tasks that humans would normally do.

Understandable data is great, and having a computer (your own or an online service) do your tedious tasks for you is brilliant, since it frees up your time to focus on other things. And time is one of the most valuable commodities we have, isn’t it?

But what about the troves of information that you have to wade through to sometimes find things on the web or on a website? Even though there is (or will be) information about the information on Web 3.0 websites, it will certainly take a long time before a significant part of the web is semantic. And even on semantic websites, how will it make your life easier?

At the end of the day, clever systems readable by computers don’t necessarily make them better for humans.

Socialize the web

Social Media is a term used frequently with buzzwords like Web 2.0. Assuming that Social Media 2.0 is part of the Web 3.0 evolution, the Semantic Web should ping your friends and their social application whenever you do anything online.

Great socialization – or is it?

I admit that I have reconnected with old friends and made plenty of new connections through social media, but just because the communication and information gets better and ’smarter’, will it make social media better for us? Sure, we’ll be constantly connected, perhaps using the same applications across devices. That’s really smart, but nothing revolutionary as far as the web goes. I can do that already, with some tweaking (or enough money).

Website Conversations

What the next generation of Social Media (the 2.0 one, or Web 3.0) really could do, is improve the way we interact with each website, application or interface. Make it an intelligent interface, who simply learns from your actions, asks you what you need, lets you tell it the details and finds it or solves it for you.

If Amazon will start talking to me when I visit, and give me the alternatives as I speak, I am likely to spend even more than I do already in their web shop (I buy several books a month).

If I can tell Google that I am looking for the absolute cheapest price on a DLNA enabled Digital Media Adapter that will work with my Linux network at home – and Google asks “in stock only?” or “available for shipping to Copenhagen?”, then we’re starting to have a conversation. With the Semantic Web, Google may find it for me, but the big deal for me is whether I could call Google via the mobile web and find and order the product with normal human-like conversation.

I do a lot of research for work, and read countless sources of information each week. The Semantic Web should help a few percent in finding information, but then the challenge to marketers becomes “who provides more/better semantics?”. If the next evolution of the web is simply about better information about information, will the competition be about providing the best information about information. Phew!

If, instead, interaction with conversational, learning websites that actually perform the task you ask for, that would be a leap up in Internet evolution!

Well, here is a courtesy from Seth that I have been using once in a while, to bloggers that write posts that are very useful to me. I leave a small ‘tip’ by clicking on an ad next to their post – it has to be something relevant to me, but if I see one, I will click it.

That is to say to the author: ‘Thank you for taking the effort to provide such useful content for me – here’s a few cents from your advertiser’. Once in a while, I actually take action on the landing page, but my conversion rate is probably below half a percent.

Instead of saying “I’m too smart/busy” to click on ads, consider helping the person who took the effort and helped you with the information you received. Don’t overdo it – but just do it once in a while.

Have you considered tipping your fellow bloggers?

Not that blogging is the cause of this illness, but theoretically stress could be a contributing factor. I had not gotten far with the renewed effort on this blog, but I am still determined to get it rolling again.

Despite my illness, I am working hard to deliver SEO projects and Reputation Management work, and when I have recovered enough to continue with this blog, I will post about some interesting findings there.

Thank you all who are so supportive – I appreciate it more than I can tell you!

Four SEO Focus Areas

1. Make sure your site is optimized for search engines
   • Use a checklist to ensure that your website is technically optimized for search engines. Without a search engine friendly website, you’ll not get the same results, regardless of your other SEO. I have a 100+ point checklist for my clients, you can compile your own by looking at resources like Google Ranking Factors.
   • If you use a Wordpress blog, check out this post on SEO for Wordpress for some handy tips.
   • At the very least, the main sections of your website should be optimized with relevant titles, meta tags and not be based on Javascript or Flash. If you do use excessive Javascript or Flash, provide alternative pages for search engines to index.
   • DO NOT TAKE SHORCUTS. Cheating will jump up and bite you, in the end. There is no substitute for doing it the right way.
2. Keyword Research and Content Evaluation
   • The second step involves identifying keywords and content on your website. A nice tool like SEODigger will help get you started, to identify which key phrases you rank in the top 20 for. Just search on your own website URL, and you’ll get a list of key phrases.
   • It’s important to get creative with the words you optimize your website for. WordTracker lets you identify which keywords have the most searches with the least competion. This is good for both your SEO efforts and SEM advertising.
   • Start adding content and keep adding content. The debate on whether ‘Content is King’ or not has been going on for years between various online professionals, but I think it’s safe to say that the more optimized content you have on your website, the more likely you are to attract visitors via search engines.
   • Stay relevant. Write useful content for your niche target audience. Keyword stuffing (cramming keywords into texts without relevant context) is a bad practice, and it will not get you results in the long run.
3. Competitive SEO Analysis
   • In SEO, you have two types of competitors; the ones from your industry (in real life) and the ones that compete for the keywords that are relevant to you.
   • Use SEODigger to identify which (and how many) keywords your competitors rank in the toip 20 for.
   • Use tools like SEO Spyglass to figure out who your competitors are and which pages link to them.
   • Build a list of keyword phrases in your industry – keep track of the keywords in Excel or another useful tool.
   • Build a list of backlinks (links from external pages) to your competitors.
4. Link Building
   • Search engines place different value on links to a website (link popularity), but there is not doubt that the number of incoming links to a page effects SEO.
   • Use the list of backlinks from the Competitive SEO Analysis and identify the Google PageRank and Alexa Rank for each link (using tools that do this in a batch format).
   • Sort links based on ranking. Remove the links that have PageRank below 4 and Alexa Rank below a million.
   • Start from the top of the list, and research the pages. Look into whether the website is owned by a competitor (doing a Whois) or if perhaps the competitor could have paid for a link. Remove any such links from the list.
   • Add a description to each of the remaining links on your worksheet, of the website and how you can add a link to it. For example, you can update Wikipedia yourself, but unless you add relevant content, it will be removed again. For DMOZ, you have to adhere to the rules before you submit your site to a moderator.
   • For a detailed link building process, have a look at Linking Matters – although it’s a bit old, and you shouldn’t spam website owners with linking requests, there are a lot of good details on link building (without direct SEO focus, but it helps SEO as well).

Finally, always remember to keep track of your business objectives. Add, optimize, monitor and revise. Keep it up and you will see the results – optimize your content based on which keywords are generating the revenue for you.

photo courtesy of allshots_imaging

I have just added two new affiliate networks in Denmark to complete that list. If you have any updates to affiliate networks in Sweden or the UK, please write a comment here.

Even though this Online Marketing blog is being updated infrequently, I will certainly update it at the end of some of the projects I am working on. At the moment, I am working to infuse knowledge and create processes for SEO with one of my clients. I will write some of my learnings from that project, once it’s finished.