Inkahoot - its a HOOT!

You are absolutely right James, this is something on our "To do" list, as it will make the whole system much more effective.

I will alert you when it has been done, though I should say we always do customer work first, and as things are quite busy at the moment it may not be all that soon before we can put this in place.

All the best,

Inka

Hi James,

It seems a bit odd doesn't it - the # sign in Twitter (its called a "Hashtag"), it is used to denote a topic or subject or particular interest. You would use it by prefixing a keyword with the hash - so  you might find that one week there are a lot of people talking about #obama or something.

Where a lot of people use a Hashtag you can see it listed on the right hand of Twitter's home page in the "Trending Topics" section.  This is just a flavour of what is going on at the moment - the Zeitgeist if you like.

So when the Iran protests were going on there was a hashtag for that - right at the top of the trending topics.

You might want to start your own hashtag - something like #yourcompanyname for example.  The trouble is - will anyone pick it up?  Probably not initially, so its up to you to come up with something interesting, and a compelling reason for others to pick it up.

One of the most popular hashtags is the #followfriday, simply a way of whiling away a Friday at work, where people #followfriday someone else (by just mentioning #followfriday followed by their twitter ID), and see if they can get everyone else following the same person too.

Pointless?  Yes.

But in some ways it can be interesting, and occasionally it really does a picture of what is going on in the world - right now.

Hope that helps!

Inka

Could anyone explain to me what the # symbol is about in Twitter?  It seems to be everywhere but I can see very little point in it!

Any ideas?

The new group was accepted by OpenSource Matters this week - see more infomation on this page:

http://www.channelcomputing.co.uk/joomla/joomla-cornwall-group-is-accepted.html

This forum is for anyone that may want to express an interest in being a part of this - either create your own post in this thread, or alternatively please contact Peter Graves via either this site or over on Channel Computing.

Hi Karen,

Well done for setting up your account - that's a good start!  We had some issues with the log in process so that might have made it less straightforward that it should have been.

May I suggest now that you edit your profile and add a "Signature" to the User Status tab - that would mean that your forum posts would contain a link back to your web site. (look at my "signature" at the bottom of this post)

Then also use "Add Listing" in the listings section to create your free web page - all about your business, and make sure you include a link back to your main web site.

That will be a great start - let us know if its difficult at all!

Hi Sam,

This is basically a Scam, those sort of schemes are at attempt at taking a short cut to cheat the process, but they can backfire.  

The only real ways to get links to your site are:

• Write such great content that people want to link to it.
• Ask people to link to it.
• Go to other sites to link to your own site, using article marketing, blog comments, forum posts, directory listings and the rest of the techniques that you can learn about in Inkahoot.
• Create viral campaigns that get lots of people to link to your site.
• HOOT via this site, and get people to start collaborating with you!

In summary - the shortcuts don't work, but these techniques are well proven to make your site rank higher, and attract more traffic.

Good luck,
Pete

Hi All,

Just wanted to highlinght this Stompernet article: 

http://www.stomperblog.com/4-rules-for-making-more-money-with-pagerank/, which talks about the techniques used to focus the ranking of your site on the most important langing pages.  This is important stuff if you want to make your site work well, and very well expressed in this article.

Pete

It has been requested by the members that we provide a place to chat, collaborate, and discuss business and upcoming  events.

This Forum provides that for the mean time, so please make use, ask, and let other Falmouth Business Breakfast members know what is going on.

Should other business networking groups want their own forum please ask and we can put one up, otherwise feel free to exchange news and views from other groups here.

Please note that Business Breakfast and other events will also be listed in the inkahoot events calendar.

As ever please bear with us, knowing that inkahoot is still in Beta mode.  If you have any problems with inkahoot, or would like to see any new features, either post them in this forum or contact the Inkahoot team and ask!

Hi,

We have turned the normal Text editor back on for the site, making it easier for people to edit their posts, and format them as they would like to.

There was an issue with the Listings Directory which (only in Internet Explorer of course) was breaking the display for visitors when they went to add a new listing or entry.

We have taken the editor out of the directory meaning that the company description will be - erm - limited until this is fixed, however the Editor now works for normal Forum users and when you post normal articles for the site.

Best,
Inka

1. Looking for a couple of the best keywords on a known topic to help bring traffic to a single article or blog post.
2. Search for keywords around an existing business, to drive more traffic to an existing site.
3. Researching for Keywords around an entire market place, in order to identify a new business niche and determine whether there are areas within it that have potential to exploit on-line.

Each of these tends in our experience to be an order of magnitude greater thatn the last in terms of effort and time involved.

Option 1 can be done in a few minutes, and frankly the Free Google Keyword tool is absolutley fine for it.  (Search for Google Keyword Tool and it will come up pretty q****ly).

Option 2 being fairly narrowly defined around an existing business is not too much work, but by the time you have explored the various avenues and identified the best keywords, then broken them down into groups that will indicate the content of a site, this usually takes us 4-5 hours work.  If you only do this once or twice its probably most cost effective to hire a good SEO company (like us I hope) to do this, as a Wordtracker.com subscription would probably not be justified.  Once you have a keyword report like this it normally contains enough phrases to get you writing and posting for a while. 

I guess we should blog about this process soon, but contact us if you want this service to help understand what content to develop for your site.  However as you say Simon we shouldn't actually share our account details except perhaps with close friends!  You can use the Google tool for this, but without real data about the competion and effectiveness of each keyword, it makes the data rather hard to get the best out of.

Option 3 is a very large task, and can take days or weeks of work before you really identify a new niche or market, sufficiently that you can persuade yourself that its worth building a new site or business around it.  If you are planning on doing this then I would definitely recommend taking out your own Wordtracker subscription, and learning properly how to use it, because the cost of hiring us to do this might be too great for a small business.

I should add also that it doesn't matter how many keywords you have sitting in a list it does you no good at all, unless you have used them to create valuable and in demand content on your web site.  I know ane or two people with long list of Keywords that are still sitting in a spreadsheet, when if they were using them to write articles on their web sites they would be attracting vast amounts of extra traffic.  So remember - content is king they say, you have to write the pages!

I hope that makes a bit of sense, and although not directly offering a low cost solution to people wanting free or cheap keyword reseach, at least helps people understnad what it is, what you can get for free, and what may be worth paying for.

Best,
Pete
http://www.channelcomputing.co.uk

Hi Simon,

We'll open this up to any Keyword  research and SEO people in the community.....

Inka

Hi Simon,

When you post to a forum you can click on the "Subscribe" link below your post to be notified when other people post to the same forum.

Have a go and let us know how you get on.
We are considering implementing something similar for the main part of the site - will let everyone know when it is ready!

Regards,
Inka

Hi Simon,

We have added a section in this Forum where you can post your hoots. If you look at the forum section "put your hoots here" you can post about anything you have posted or added.  I'll get the ball rolling now by starting with an article from this site that we recently dugg called "Using Twitter" - see the Forum for more information, and then get HOOTING!

Best,
Inka

There are some advantages in having a Facebook Business page - partly because of some additional functionality that it gives you within Facebook for promoting your business, and partly because they tend to be public, while normal "personal" Facebook pages are only accessible to logged in users.

By having the Business Page it can be viewed by all visitors on the web, so once somone sees your Facebook profile listed on inkahoot they can click straight through to it, whetherthey have an existing Facebook account or not.

Another advantage is that because the business page is not password protected, search engines can get to it and index its content, giving you another way to get found on the web.

Good luck, and do let us know how you get on if you set up a Business Page on Facebook.

Hi Simon,

The "HOOT" function is coming soon - it will allow you to HOOT out to everyone that there is a new blog post or article to look at link to, digg, stumble, etc. 

I'll post here again once the HOOT is up and running, and I'll message all registered users also at that time.

Well done for getting stuck in - keep it coming!