AndrewNadeau.com

I just completed my first blog post over on Web2.0Consultants.com. Web2.0Consultants.com is going to be where I will be making all my new blog posts related to marketing online, social media, blogging, and search engine optimization. So if you own a small business and are lacking on online presence then I suggest you go check out my first blog post about How a Small Business Can Effectively Leverage Social Media.

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Andrew Social Media small business, Social Media, Web2.0Consultants.com

It is time for me to organize my life and get serious about my blogging. In the past, I blogged seriously for a couple of weeks and then got sidetracked with some other project and forgot about my blogs. This time it will hopefully be different and I will stick to my blogs. The following are the steps I am going to take to reorganize my life…

#1 - Reorganize my blog portfolio with three clearly defined blogs

I have not had much direction with my blogs. My interests are all over the place and at any given time I have a bunch of projects going. AndrewNadeau.com started as a blog dedicated to my thoughts on investing and the stock market. As that blog got neglected when I was in school I decided to change the blog and talk about Web 2.0 and SEO. Now I want to go a little different direction with AndrewNadeau.com. From now on AndrewNadeau.com will just be about what is going on in my life. For example, projects I am working on, personal goals, thoughts, travels, and anything else I feel like sharing. Basically, I want AndrewNadeau.com to just be a diary of my life. I want to someday be able to look back at AndrewNadeau.com and have a written account of my journey through my 20’s.

Next, I am going to be moving my posts on Web 2.0 strategies, social media, and SEO to a new blog with the domain Web2.0consultants.com. In the future I want to do some Web 2.0 and SEO consulting work, so I want to start to build my personal brand as an expert in this field with this new domain name (actually a subdomain - post on this later).

Finally, my other passion is investments and the stock market. I have setup a blog at TheManiacalInvestor.com for my blog posts and videos on this topic. This blog will include trades that I like, my thoughts on controversial topics, as well as some economic analysis. Hopefully it will be interesting and a good read for those interested in this topic.

#2 - Start Video Blogging and Making YouTube Videos

I just reinstalled my webcam and have been playing around with Camtasia Studio, which is some video editing software. I’m looking forward to creating some video tutorials as well as video blogs where I discuss topics related to my new blog structure. I’m planning on posting these videos to YouTube and then embed them into my blog posts. This should bring in some new readers/listeners from YouTube to my blogs and help build my personal brand.

#3 - Setup a System to Start Making Some Money

Over the last couple of weeks I have been fine tuning my new business model. I have been learning the finer nuances of working with a free FireFox plugin called iMacros, which helps automate repetitive and tedious tasks. I am also planning on purchasing a new netbook in additional to my laptop, so I can multitask and work a little more efficiently. Things are starting to come together from a business point of view, and I will be posting more on my business here in the future.

It feels good to put all this in writing. I find that by putting things in writing makes me accountable for following through and it also helps me think things through completely and to organize my thoughts. I’m looking forward to see how things play out…

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Andrew Blogs blogging, business, life

As you guys know I am all about working efficiently and using automation in my day-to-day tasks. Anything that is slightly repetitive or tedious I like to automate. You should make the iMacros FireFox plugin your best friend when automating tasks within your browser. iMacros is an AWESOME plugin and the best part is that it is free. All you have to do is install the plugin and then simply record your actions within your browser. Then to automate that process the next time you simply play back those tasks.

You are probably thinking that in your day-to-day activities that you don’t have many repetitive tasks, and I thought the same thing when I first discovered iMacros. But after learning different ways to use the iMacros plugin and being a little creative, I have been able to discover several tasks that I can save several hours each day with iMacros. iMacros has a great wiki and by spending a little time learning and experimenting I have been able to learn how to run loops from Microsoft Excel files and also to execute copy and pastes by saving what I copy as a variable and then using the variable later in the iMacro script. When you start to get your feet wet with iMacros you really start to see how powerful this plugin really is.

Your probably thinking that from my enthusiasm for iMacros that I am going to insert an affiliate link at the end of this blog post, but it is completely free and I have nothing to gain. I just think that iMacros should be part of everyone’s arsenal of tools when working online.

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Andrew Working Efficiently automation, iMacros

As many of you know who have used my software products, I am always looking to work quicker and more efficiently. Here is a small, but incredibly useful tip if you are working in Firefox and need to be constantly switching between tabs in Firefox. I am going to show you how you can use your keyboard, rather than your mouse, to switch between tabs in Firefox.

Use Ctrl + Page Down to go to the next tab in Firefox. Use Ctrl + Page Up to go to the previous tab in Firefox.

Also, another neat trick is that if you know the position of the tab in Firefox that you want to switch to you can use Ctrl + Tab Number. For example Ctrl + 3, which will bring you to the third tab in your Firefox window.

Yes, it is that easy and hopefully this tip will allow you to work a little faster and more efficiently. After all, ever second you save when you are working can be used to relax.

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Andrew Working Efficiently

Would you rather ask someone to follow you or communicate with you on Twitter? Twitter is designed so people can “follow” you, but the word follow implies a passive, impersonal connection. However, there is a way to use Twitter to promote communication, active engagement, and conversation that is relatively easy to implement.

Instead of just linking to your Twitter profile and asking people to come follow you, I suggest that you use a more direct approach. Use a link that looks like this:

http://twitter.com/home?status=@andrewnadeau

But of course replace “andrewnadeau” with your own Twitter ID. This link is going to link directly to that person’s “What are you doing?” box, and already have @andrewnadeau filled in. It will look like this…

You will want to say something like “Send me a message on Twitter” rather than just “Follow me on Twitter” when using this type of link. This makes your message much more personal and encourages your visitor to take the initiative to make contact with you. It will then be up to you to make a personalized response to their initial contact. Once you have exchanged messages you now have a more personal connection with this person and they are more likely to engage in your Twitter posts later on. This is a much better result then just having someone passively follow you and never really build a personal relationship.

So lets give this a try…

Send me a message on Twitter!

I promise to send you a message back on Twitter.

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Andrew Personal Branding, Social Networking, Twitter

Here are what the current Google rankings for “Andrew Nadeau” look like:

Tasks Completed Since Previous Post on April 10, 2009

1.) Changed the name of my Twitter account to @AndrewNadeau
2.) Linked to my Twitter profile and LinkedIn profile from my personal blog
3.) Added “Andrew Nadeau” to the Title tag of my personal blog’s homepage

Notable Changes in Top 10 results Since April 10, 2009

1.) My Twitter profile page is now ranking #6
2.) There is a LinkedIn profile ranking #8. Unfortunately this is not my LinkedIn profile. It is the profile of another Andrew Nadeau.
3.) Some ManufacturedDirections.com website is now ranking #9. I am not associated with this website.
4.) An eduspaces.net profile is now ranking #10. I am not associated with this website.

Goals to Accomplish

1.) Bump ManufacturedDirections.com and eduspaces.net profiles out of the top 10 results
2.) Get my LinkedIn profile ranking in the top 10 instead of another Andrew Nadeau’s profile
3.) Create other public profiles geared towards my personal brand to rank for my name

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Andrew Case Study, Personal Branding, SEO Case Study

WordPress Blogs on their own are extremely search engine friendly. Within minutes of publishing a post you can get a listing in Google. Because of this WordPress is extremely valuable in generating traffic and building your business. If you are just a casual blogger that does not know too much about search engine optimization (SEO) there is one extremely important and beneficial way to optimize your blog posts for the search engines.

#1 Way to SEO Your WordPress Blog

By default WordPress does not optimize your URLs for the search engines. Look at the URL of one of your blog posts. It might look like http://www.andrewnadeau.com/?p=329. The problem with this URL is the ?p=329 part. Google gives extra weight to pages that have the main keywords in the URL, so as a blogger you are missing out on huge brownie points from Google by not optimizing your URLs. For example, the URL for this blog post is http://andrewnadeau.com/1-way-to-seo-a-wordpress-blog. Google will give extra weight, and therefore rank my page higher in their results, for anyone searching “SEO a WordPress Blog” or a combination of those keywords.

How to SEO Your WordPress Blog’s URLs

In your WordPress Admin Panel click on “Settings”, “Permalinks”, and then click the “Custom Structure” radio button. In the “Custom Structure” you will want to type /%postname%/ and you are done. It is really that easy to do. WordPress will now automatically convert your blog post URLs to URLs that are optimized for the search engines.

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Andrew Blogs, SEO

About two weeks ago I listened to a presentation by Dan Schawbel at Bentley University on the topic of Search Engine Optimization and Personal Branding. If you are interested in viewing Dan’s presentation I have embedded the video at the end of this post. During this presentation Dan talked about creating a personal brand by controlling the search engine results for your name. Much of my background is in SEO having worked on SEO projects as a consultant as well as optimizing my own websites, but I never really gave much thought to actually building a personal brand and optimizing for my own name. When I googled my name, Andrew Nadeau, I was surprised to find that my Google results were in complete disarray. This gave me the idea to document the journey I am about to embark on of optimizing and aligning the search engine results for my name, Andrew Nadeau.

Current Rankings

Here is what the top 10 Google results look like for my name, Andrew Nadeau.

It is interesting to note that these results are out of 216,000 results. Now 216,000 results is a decent number of results, but should be easily manageable to optimize. If you have a popular name or the name of someone famous this is going to be a more difficult task, and might not be achievable. For example, Michael Jordan has 29,500,000 results. If you have a popular or famous name my advice would be to use a nickname, your middle name, a middle initial, or some other way to distinguish yourself from your generic name.

Analysis of Current Rankings

#1: I am currently ranking #1 for AndrewNadeau.com which is my personal blog. This is good.
#2: This result is a White Pages Search for my name and adds no value to my personal brand. I am going to have to work on pushing this result off the first page of Google.
#3: This is my Facebook page, but it is currently redirecting to the homepage of Facebook. I am going to have to figure out how to get this ranking to link directly to my Facebook profile.
#4: This is another Facebook result that is listed as a sub-result for someone on Facebook by the name of Eric Andrew Nadeau. I am going to try to push this result out of the top 10 results on Google.
#5: This is my profile at ArticlesBase.com. A while back I wrote some articles and published them on this website, but the articles do not relate to my personal brand. I will have to think about how to handle this ranking and will write about it in subsequent posts.
#6: This is my profile on a Ning community site that I contributed some ideas. Again, this isn’t relevant to my personal brand, so I will have to address this ranking.
#7: This is a sub-result for my Ning profile, which is for my Ning page. I will have to try to push this ranking off the first page.
#8: This is a result for the directory of all the Andrew Nadeau’s on LinkedIn. I am going to have to push this result off the first page of Google results and replace it with a direct link to my LinkedIn profile.
#9: A direct link to my LinkedIn profile, but as a sub-result. I will have to make this a main result and get it ranked higher in Google.
#10: My profile at CrunchBase.com for a start-up I founded called SyllabusCentral. This ranking is good, but I will have to fine tune my CrunchBase profile to my personal brand.

My Goal

My Goal is to completely control the top 10 results of Google for my name, so that each Google result is a page to adds value to my personal brand as a leader in social media, web 2.0 and search engine optimization.

What’s Next?

In my next post on this case study I will talk about some of the things I am working on to align my Google results and also give tips, so that other people can follow in my footsteps to build their own personal brand through their Google results. I want to make it clear that this is not going to be a quick process. It will take time for everything I do to take affect as it takes time for Google to find links and update their rankings. I think this should be a very interesting case study and I look forward to getting some results.

Dan Schawbel’s Presentation at Bentley University on SEO and Personal Branding

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Andrew Case Study, Personal Branding, SEO Case Study

There are hundreds of established Web 2.0 companies and thousands of more start-ups. It can be very difficult navigating through the social media landscape and identifying services that will help you or your business build a presence online. Overdrive Interactive, a social media consulting business located in Boston, MA, has done a very good job of mapping and categorizing a large variety of social media websites that will help you make sense of it all.

Click the image to enlarge

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Andrew Social Media, Web 2.0

If you have ever worked on a project from different computers then you know it can be a pain to have to remember to save your files to a USB drive and then remember to bring it with you.  Oh, and nevermind the trouble you go through if you lose your USB drive.  There is now a service called Dropbox that allows you to easily backup, sync, and share your files from PC-to-PC. I will let the video below explain how it works and then I will give you an example of how I have used Dropbox to make my life easier.

Pretty cool, huh? A very useful feature of Dropbox is that it allows you to share a folder with another user and your folder and files will automatically update in their Dropbox folder. This is extremely useful if you are working on a collaborative project with someone else. It makes file sharing very easy and efficient, so you don’t have to send files back and forth through email. Dropbox even saves previous revisions online. If you need a quick and easy file sharing and backup method then I highly suggest you check out Dropbox.

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Andrew Services