I love trying to figure out how people are going to react / respond to certain ideas.So far 1,350+ tweeps have watched the video I made last month to say “Hi, and thanks for following me.” I knew it would work beautifully because the idea was just so simple… I think the results speak for themselves – here’s the video (if you haven’t seen it yet).

Here’s what some of my Tweeps had to say about the video…

Unexpected Effects Of Being A Twitter Rockstar

Another interesting thing happened when I took 15 minutes to create & upload the video to YouTube.  YouTube (owned by Google) is a social video network, you’ve probably already heard of it. Did you know that people can subscribe to your channel? It’s kind of like adding a tweep… except on YouTube!

While my plan was to welcome and engage new followers on Twitter… I ended up with this AWESOME FREE BONUS! I’ve had 30+ new people subscribe to my YouTube channel.

That’s pretty cool, but I’ve also had well over 100+ new friends added to my Facebook / LinkedIn / MySpace / Digg / Pownce & other social networking sites thanks to FriendFeed. If you haven’t done it, go and grab yourself a FriendFeed account and add your other social networking accounts TODAY! Put it on your blog… or maybe right next to your Twitter welcome video?! This is just a suggestion, but after all, social networking sites and social media is there for us to be social, right? It only makes sense to let your twitter friends know where to find you on the other sites.

Why Should You Follow Me?

Twitter is emerging more into the main stream day by day. People online are now wondering who they should follow. Since Twitter is the answer to “What are you doing right now?” I’ve created a little site called Tw33t.me to answer the question “Why should you follow me?”

The idea for Tw33t.me is simple. Much like FriendFeed, Tw33t.me users will be able to add all of their other social networking sites & a Twitter welcome video to their profile page by using their Twitter username and password. The idea is to create a sort of “Online Social Resume.” The site is in Alpha – almost in Beta – and I’ll be updating everyone via Twitter when we “officially” launch.

Pre-Tweet. Auto Tweet. Tweet Later.

I get this question all the time as a result of my Twitter exploits – “How do you auto-reply to new followers?”

Glad you asked. The answer is a handy little site called TweetLater that allows you to pre-post, auto respond, and even auto-follow new tweeps. TweetLater is a little techy, so I decided I’d drop in this short “How To” video so you can set it up to work for your Tweeps! I did this with Gmail because I figure that most readers have a Gmail account. Take a look. Re-watch it if you need to! *If you use Outlook @Wordpresswizard already made a How To video over here 

Tweet Responsibly

Now, I would be delinquent in my duties as a social media evangelist if I didn’t mention being Socially Responsible. It’s great to have thousands of followers and friends on Twitter and other social sites… but we have to remember it’s not just about numbers! These are real people your talking to, they want to be engaged in your conversation… otherwise they wouldn’t have followed you. I know that some people are just going to use the scripts to gain as many followers as they can – so that they can push whatever affiliate program or junk they’re selling on ebay… We can’t stop that. But we can make a difference by using social media for good!

When you see an injustice or something that others should be made aware of… broadcast it! I’m infatuated with “Green Living.” If I see or hear anything that I think would help… you’d better believe it’s going out on my twitter stream! Some folks are going to use my tutorials for spamming purposes. It sucks, I know! I still believe that there’s more genuinely good people out there than there are shysters.

For any of you that have ever read anything like “How to Become a Digg Power User,” etc., you probably already know that in order to get followers or have people Digg / Sphinn / Buzz Up! your topics, they have to be great topics.Guy Kawasaki had written a few weeks back about an AllTop page built to do just that – it’s called GoodTweet. If you’re looking for something to post to your tweeps and you can’t seem to find anything you consider overly exciting, dig through GoodTweet and post it up. This will make your followers think that you have your finger on the pulse of what’s going on. And hence… want to follow you and more importantly retweet ya too!

We will come back and update this post when we find something that will allow the tweeps to use something similar to the GreaseMonkey script from the first article… until then – one at a time and happy tweeting!

Best,

David Brown

On the train ride home today I’ll be posting my “real Big Watah post” along with some insane pics and the whole story.  So, make sure you go to BigWatah.com right now and bookmark it.

Here’s a quote straight from Big Watah himself…

“I’m sure that Barack Obama has had a ‘Big Watah’ night at least once in his life”, Brent (Big Watah) Payne.

The Cams:

Streaming live video by Ustream

Live TV by Ustream

Live Broadcasting by Ustream

If you haven’t yet read the SEO Flattery Experiment post, it’s available here. To summarize, I wanted to test the idea that you could build links by flattering people who you wanted to get links from. I have an interest in photography, subscribe to about 30 photography blogs, and have a photography blog myself… so I thought… Hey… I’ll create a list of my personal favorite photography blogs and then rate them based on some different things and see what happens.

So, I spent about 6 hours analyzing these blogs to determine which ones were the “best of the best” based on 3 pieces of criteria.

There was very little response at first, until I sent emails out to the blog owners. All but two of them responded almost immediately with a courteous “thank you”. One of them linked… which was great! In a conversation I was having with Aaron Wall about SEO and link building, he mentioned that his opinion is that if you can get 10% – 20% of the people, you should consider yourself successful.

I started to see some decent traffic as a result of the post within a day or so. Then, one of the bloggers posted it to a forum and traffic really took off.

They got pissed.

And then I started getting emails. I mentioned in my post on this site, the name of the designer who created 3 of those blogs that were posted. I did this giving them “props” because I really like their work. Well, someone got into a conversation or sent emails or something telling all of the photography blog owners that the post was part of an SEO experiment.

One emailed me saying that he was going to post about it, but now that he knows I was blowing smoke up his ass that he wasn’t going to now.

Another spoke of me as unethical and how dare I do such a horrible thing.

The other, someone who I have actually hired in the past made a comment that they “don’t know how they feel about it”.

Here’s the deal in the end. That post on the ConklinImages blog gets more traffic than any other post now. And in addition, the post is coming up when people search for things like “greatest photography blogs” and other’s that you can see on the original post.

I ask you this my pissed off photography bloggers (whom I still admire)…

Is it a bad thing when someone googles “10 greatest photographers” that your photography site comes up as one of them on my site? I don’t think so.

Getting Hacked

I have never worried about security on my photography blog site in the past because it was just a hobby thing and only had like 50 unique visitors a day… it was really just a personal thing.

So, when I set the thing up forever ago, I 777′d my main blog directory so that wordpress could access my htaccess file. I know!!! Half of you are SCREAMING at me right now. For those of you who don’t understand, this leaves your site WIDE OPEN to hacks.

I had posted screen shots of each of the photography blogs that I rated. I looked at my site the other day and all of the screenshots posted that were of blogs designed by infinet design were completely changed to other images.

Now, they have since been changed back and I have locked up my site a bit better. I don’t know who did it, but I have my assumptions and I say “props to you” for having so much time on your hands.

When I was investigating my log files to see when things were changed… sure enough, my htaccess file was changed on a day that I did not touch it.

Now, I believe that the most comical part of the “hacking” part of this story is the post I wrote a few months ago about securing your site.

peace.

Oh… congrats to Aaron Wall… your comment from the original post was correct.

Please comment in original post.

>>Click Here To Read The March 5 @ 10:30AM update or scroll down.

To see the results of this experiment click here.

In this experiment we will find out if SEO expert’s theories of building links with flattery really works and exactly how effective it is.

I have been doing link building with sites for years without the use of link baiting. Now, I have studied and studied theories of brilliant people like Aaron Wall of SEO Book, Jim Boykin from WeBuildPages.com and others. I had an awesome opportunity to chat with Aaron today about some things… Thanks, Aaron!

So anyway… I have a photography blog where I post some personal pictures of my family as well as some photo work that I do from time to time. It is only a hobby site and I have no intention of making money with it. Therefore… let’s do some experimenting!

As of today if you do a search for back links to that site, you’ll notice that there are an embarrassing 36… keep in mind I have done NOTHING for this site at all yet. Most of the links are from blog comments I made and a site that I submitted some images to.

I was reading a nice article tonight from Nick Wilson called “The Art of Link Baiting“. I noticed it on Jim Westergren’s link baiting page. In the article, Nick states that if you link out to blogs in your niche, that links will come back… “he promises”.

I’m sure that Nick is correct in his assumption – and he probably is writing from experience… but we’re going to see if it works on a site with almost ZERO traffic, my photography site.

I created an article called “The 10 Best Photography Blogs On The Planet” and did an in depth analysis of 10 photography blogs that I actually subscribe to. I gave them ratings for “design”, which was my own opinion, “search-ability” (I used SEODigger.com to find how many meaningful top 20 rankings they had) and “links” where I used yahoo to find the total number of links coming in from outside domains. They got points for each category and I rated them accordingly.

These blogs all have a small to large following in the photography circle, and if I was really trying to get ranking for my site, they are definitely the places that I would go to try to get links.

Oh… for future comparison… I spent about 6 hours putting the post together on ConklinImages.com. So we’ll see how many links I can get “per hour” that are from relevant sources with this method.

The next step I will take if I don’t get links automatically by the evening of Wednesday, March 5, 2008 is to have a bunch of my employees click on the links in the blog post to try and get the attention of the blog owners. I will then send emails to the blog owners. As a last resort, I will create a press release about the top 10 list and submit it with hopes that they will them link.

So… stay tuned… we’ll see what happens. Do you think ConklinImages.com will get links from my bait? What could I have done better or different? Submit a comment telling me what to do next.

SEO Flattery Experiment UPDATE 1 – 3/5/2008 @ 10:28 EST

So it’s 10am and Google has indexed the post where my top 10 photography blogs appear. I figured I’d wait to measure results until after it was indexed to ensure that any of these photographers who receive daily google updates about their names appearing in SERPs would have seen them by now. Of course, it’s only 7am for you west coaster’s, so there may not have been updates sent to everyone just yet.

One interesting observation that Ashley made in the comments for the post was that people who are not “tech savvy” may not have any idea who is linking to their blogs. Many of these photographers seem to use a company by the name of Infinet Design, a photography site and blog design company. I have no idea if they have the same type of tracking that other bloggers use to track incoming links, or if they’re using analytics software.

So, I’m debating on doing one of two things. I’m either going to email each of the photographers that made the list and congratulate them on winning the “award”, comment on their blogs congratulating them (this would show that I was on their site and they would probably have to approve the comment), or have some people click away at the links to get their attention with increased referral traffic from my domain name. Wow! That’s so spammy 8 )…

What are your opinions? What would you do next if you were trying to get these links for ConklinImages.com?

To see the results of this experiment click here.