BobBuskirk.com
Yes I Make Money Online

Wow what a crazy month it has been! First you may have noticed I have not updated this blog in a over a MONTH! That is way to long without an update! There is a good reason for this, if you head on over to ThinkComputers you will notice the new design. Not only did ThinkComputers get a new design it was moved to the Wordpress platform and we even gave it it’s own hosting! So this past month has been pretty crazy, but things are slowing down a little bit. So thinking back to October my favorite post would have to be Old Media using New Media. That session was my favorite at PodCamp and was very interesting as well as funny.

Popular Posts
So what was everyone checking out this month? Let’s take a look…

1. Motivation: Movies
2. ColorSplash iPhone App
3. Get 1000 Followers on Twitter Easily
4. Old Media using New Media
5. SEO 101 with Jami Broom

Awesome that the PodCamp articles are getting some traffic!

Traffic Sources

1. John Chow
2. Facebook
3. Twitter
4. ThinkComputers
5. Jon Waraas

Nice to see some new traffic sources up there!

Top Commentators
Looks like I forgot to do this again, I really need to make a script that does this!

Stats

RSS Readers 863 (+64)
Twitter Followers 6101 (+135)
Facebook Friends 1377 (+75)

All of the stats keep on going up!

On to November
Well November is already almost over, but I want to get a few more posts in before the month is over! Also stay tuned for a lot of Wordpress-specific posts as I am using it on a daily basis with ThinkComputers!

When I was registering for PodCamp Pittsburgh 4 I noticed that 96.1’s Morning Freak Show hosts Mikey and Big Bob were leading a session called, “We Do a Radio Show … But Not Really”. I listen to the Freak Show in the morning and I also follow both Mikey and Big Bob on Twitter so I was interested in seeing what they had to say. I also figured that the session would be funny and it ended up being the best session of the day. The reason I titled this post “Old Media Using New Media” is because Mikey and Big Bob do a show on traditional radio, which is considered old media.

Twitter
Being a Pittsburgh Blogger I try to follow as many people from Pittsburgh as I can. I started Following Mikey and Big Bob on Twitter a good while ago and always enjoyed their tweets. Being the hosts of Pittsburgh’s most popular morning show they are sort of celebrity’s here in Pittsburgh. So it is cool to see what they are up to by reading their tweets and check out their twitpic’s, except for Big Bob’s poop pic’s! Having Twitter accounts allows them to connect with their audience by other means then just the radio show.

In their session they also talked about using Twitter to run contest for Penguins tickets and other prizes. They said that Twitter allowed them to tell people about the contest when they did not have access to the radio station since they received the Penguin tickets after their radio show was over. Also Twitter allows them to say things that they may not be able to say on the radio.

YouTube & USTREAM
Mikey and Big Bob have used YouTube with huge sucess. If you can make any video you make become viral you can bring a tremendous amout of attention to yourself. This is evident from iJustine’s 300-page iPhone bill, Chocalate Rain, and many others. Probably the most popular video Mikey and Big Bob have made is the In a Snuggie video. It has got over 130,000 views on YouTube! The song has actually been played all over different radio stations too! Because of the popularity of the Snuggie video 96.1 and Mikey and Big Bob did a Snuggie bar crawl on the southside, which was a huge sucess.

Both Mikey and Big Bob have USTREAM.tv accounts where they boradcast their shows and whatever else they may be doing while at work. This let’s people who may not live in the Pittsburgh area watch their shows and it also gives the listeners of the show some insight into what they do. During their session they recalled a funny moment when they were in the office and the Pitt cheerleaders showed up and Mikey was in a wrestling mask for no apparent reason.

Does it Work?
So does traditional media using new media work? I think Mikey and Big Bob are great examples of how well traditional media can use new media to give them more exposure and build their audience. It is great to see that they are doing it right, hopefully more traditional media will follow in their footsteps.

Like I said this was one of the best sessions at PodCamp, thanks to Mikey and Big Bob for taking the time to lead the session!

As most of you know I moved to Shadyside not that long ago. Since moving I’ve been discovering new places and things. One of the places I’ve been spending a lot of time lately is Schenley Plaza in Oakland. Schenley Plaza is located between the Carnegie and Hillman Libraries and directly across from the Cathedral of Learning. If you live in Oakland or the surrounding area’s you probably know where Schenley Plaza is. If you have ever driven down Forbes Ave. you probably have passed it.

Schenley Plaza is sort of like a mini park in the middle of Oakland. There is a large field, many benches, chairs, tables, a large tented area for shade, bathrooms and even places to eat. As I have always said it is good to get out of the house or office at least once a week and my escape lately has been Schenley Plaza. But how can I get work done at Schenley Plaza?? It has WiFi! Free WiFi too! When I heard that Schneley Plaza had free WiFi I knew that I had to check it out.

Going down to the Plaza I grabbed a table and sure enough I was on the internet in seconds. It is nice being able to relax and get out of the office, but still be connected to the internet and be able to work. Schenley Plaza is a great place to do work too, being in between Carnegie Mellon University and The University of Pittsburgh there are always students around and things going on. Also you can spend the entire day there because they have 4 dining kiosks, but you can also walk up to Forbes Ave. and grab food too.

There are also many events that go on there throughout the year. I few weeks ago I was able to catch Jessica Lea Mayfield perform and she was great. If you’ve never heard of her she has done some great songs that are actually on the Starbucks playlist. Check out their Music Schedule to see who will be playing there next.

Schenley Plaza is run by the Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy, they have a blog that is updated quite often so check that out.

While at PodCamp Pittsburgh 4 this past weekend I was able to attend Jami Broom’s session on SEO for Wordpress. Jami is an Internet Marketing Strategist at ClicksToMySite.com. I already know a lot about SEO, but I figured I would sit in on the session to not only learn more, but share what I learned here on my blog.

Permalinks and Robots.txt
What SEO is all about is making it easier for search engines to find your content. Not only that, but for you to rank higher in the search results. One of the easiest ways to do some easy SEO with Wordpress is to change your permalink structure. On a normal install Wordpress will by default have your permalink structure like thisL http://www.bobbuskirk.com/?p=123. That is not a good permalink structure for search engines. To change this go ahead into your Wordpress admin panel and go to Settings -> Permalinks and you are given the option to change the permalink structure. Right now I am using the custom option on this blog with this as my structure /%postname%/ which seems to be the standard for many blogs. Jami also pointed out that if your site does not have a robots.txt file you should create one. The robots.txt file basically tells search engines what part of the site they can index. A basic robots.txt file should look like this:

User-agent: *
Disallow:

Keywords
Keywords are extremely important on any website or blog. They allow search engines to know what your website is about and provide better navigation for your users. I know from experience that keywords can really help with your search engine traffic. About 2 years ago on ThinkComputers the title of every page was just ThinkComputers.org, obviously that is horrible for SEO. Now if you go to any review on the site and look at the title it is the product being reviewed. This way when someone searches that product in Google we come up in the search results. We have seen our traffic from search engines go from 20% to 60% in just a short time and of course a large increase in traffic because of this. So when you title your posts make sure that reflects what you are talking about in them. To make sure your keywords are effective make sure you have something like Google Analytics installed to track keywords.

Plugins
Now that you know a little bit about SEO let’s make it a little easier for you. If you are running Wordpress there are many plugins that will improve your SEO automatically. Probably the most popular one out there would have to be the All-in-One SEO Pack. I use this plugin and it works great! Some of the other plugins that Jami mentioned were Google XML Sitemap, which will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. SEO Friendly Images which automatically updates all images with proper ALT and TITLE attributes. Redirection manages 301 redirections, keeps track of 404 errors, and generally tidys up any loose ends your site may have. There are a ton of other SEO plugins out there as well. Another helpful plugin that Jami talked about was Google Analyticator, which adds the necessary JavaScript code to enable Google Analytics logging on any WordPress blog. They way if you don’t know much about editing your blog template this is the easy way to get Google Analytics running on your blog.

Content is King
Even though SEO is very important you need to remember that your content is very important. People are not going to return to your site if you barely have any content on it. Also the more content you have on your site the more posts there are for the search engines to index. So essentially the more you write the more you are getting your site out there and noticed by search engines.

Thanks to Jami for leading the session on SEO!

If you come to this blog often you know that I don’t change things up that much. Well finally I made a few changes, some of the stuff I’ve been meaning to do for a while actually, and I just never got around to it. It is always good to change up your blog from time to time, that way people notice if you actually make a change. The changes that I made are very small actually, mostly tweaks and other things like that.

First off let’s start with the contact page. For some reason the contact form was not sending out e-mail. So if you sent me a message from the contact form in the past month or so I most likely did not get it. I’m really not sure what the reason for it not working was, but I updated the plugin and the contact form works great again!

Moving over to the side bar I finally added a Subscribe to my RSS Feed link under feed. I just had the FeedBurner feed counter and my Twitter Counter there. Now you can use the link to subscribe to the RSS feed as well as subscribe via e-mail all from the sidebar. I hope this will increase RSS subscriptions, I’m not sure if many people really notice the RSS subscription box at the top of the blog. I was using SayTweet.com for a while to display my current Twitter status, but I decided to just use the regular Twitter widget. The one I’m using is actually the Myspace widget, I like it better than the website widget. Finally I added the PGH Bloggers chicklet under all of that to show some love to the PGH Bloggers website.

Probably the most noticeable change has to be the Header Image. I changed the style and font on it a little bit, but if you check back in an hour the header image will be different. This is because I am using the WP Header Image Rotator plugin that will automatically rotate my header image every hour. So I actually have 5 different header images right now. They all have different sayings on them. The current plugin that I’m using only allows for 5 images, I might just buy the pro version of it for $2 so I can use more than 5 images. If you are for some reason seeing 2 different images in the header press crtl+f5 to refresh the page. Here is a peek at one of the images I’m using as a header.

Check back to see the other images as they are in rotation. Let me know what you think of the updates in the comments!