You Should Always Listen to Me

So, I work in Internet Marketing. Therefore, I know what is right and what is wrong. Always.

ha 🙂 Okay, half the time. I know when you are doing it WRONG or when it PISSES ME OFF. I also have the awful habit of giving unsolicited advice. I’m trying to be better.  However, I was with some other awesome professionals the other day and we were gossiping a little (I love to gossip) and someone was snarking about the fact some other woman was complaining about how something was wrong.  Just complaining. When she probably knew better. I know, not much details here.

So I laughed and said… you know, girlfriend, I pretty much introduced myself to you by telling you that you had some crazy problems on your website. So, don’t hate me too!

She made the point that I handed the advice out along with my services to fix it. I do that a lot. I like to help people. It makes me feel… helpful. It’s also always a good way to chat with people.

Really though? When something is wrong and is not obviously correct… with something regarding search engines or marketing yourself on the Internet it drives. me. crazy. Many times the fixes are so small and simple and I want to tell them so that they can do better on their website! Usually, it is silly small stuff.

• The permalinks in your WordPress setup are not the best. Go here, select this, and save it and you will be happier.
• One of your plugins are not working. Try updating it.
• Your title tags are all the same, make them unique for each page. (Okay, this one was asked advice, see below)

This is how I ended up giving search engine advice to one of my favorite romance authors the other day on her Facebook page. She asked for website advice though. It wasn’t solicited. I probably didn’t have to spend thirty minutes writing up advice. I should have made it into a blog post. However, that good karma will probably come back to me in books. Or, not. It was fun and hopefully it was helpful. She’s made me happy writing awesome books, hopefully I helped her make some changes to bring her more readers.

This latest one made me irritated though. Since I’ve been diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, I’ve been enjoying finding other people who are going through the same things as I am. I’ve usually been following them on Twitter.

This person, while seemingly a nice person, started posting on their blog. I actually like reading new blog posts off of Twitter. 80% of the time, I’m reading on my iPhone so I click on the post to scan through it very quickly.

Have you ever read Twitter an iPhone? The ap I use, you can’t ‘copy’ and paste other people’s tweets. So if they post a link, you can’t copy it and pasted it into your browser. That is also an awful lot of steps to take to find a site. If the domain has a lot of vowels, it might be really hard to remember to spell correctly too. Just sayin’.

Many people use an RSS feed to automatically push their new blog post to their Twitter or Facebook feed. Or, they might just be posting the link in with a quick comment manually. Either way, if someone is telling you that they posted something, giving you the link is usually the best way to read the damn post.

In this case, the person was simply posting the blog address without the ‘http://’ which made the link not active. I should say that for awhile Twitter was making these links active. It wasn’t for him though. So you couldn’t click on it.

New pictures at www.MyBlogPost.com of my [redacted] for the #Crohns and #Colitis Foundation of America. Click [redacted]

This happened four or five times. Finally I sent him a quick tweet that let him know I couldn’t click on his link but next time he may want to put the full address in. Especially as how Twitter would actually shorten the full URL for him so it would keep characters low so he can get in a full 140 tweet.  OR (see, I was giving options here!), he could use a URL shortener.

I give him credit, he responded quickly with a smiley face and said that he wanted to keep characters down but he would think about doing that in the future.

Sadly, he went on for another week to repeat tweeting about new blog posts without the link in place. Finally on Friday I said again, it’s too bad that I can’t click on the link! I’m going to have to stop harassing you, or unfollow. My OCD with non-clickable links is uncontrollable.

I had to make it a little funny but I couldn’t handle this person ‘talking’ to me (via Twitter but still, I was a follower) yet making it incredibly hard for me to see his content!

I also probably couldn’t handle giving advice and him not taking it. Let’s be real here.

He ended up private messaging me saying that he  wanted his URL to become a recognized name, he didn’t want a shortener, and that room was just so precious.

The funny thing? (One of many many!) Was that he had at least 10 more characters to fit in that http:// to make the link live.

I told him the marketing decision he was making was hurting my head and good luck with that. Except when I tried to direct message him back, I realized he wasn’t following me. Fail.  Then, I decided to go to his site and subscribe via RSS and his auto-play video blared out at me because I had my speakers on loud. FAIL. Then, he replied to me via public Twitter and asked me to subscribe to his site and sent me the link, except he put three slashes in, instead of two. FAIL FAIL FAIL.

I unfollowed him. I still feel slightly bad about it because he’s not a sleazy marketer. He’s just a person who doesn’t understand some of the smaller but important details of Internet Marketing. He then followed me from both of his accounts. I was thinking about following him back today but when I checked his profile he sent out another tweet with an unclickable link.

LESSON: If you want people to read your writing, make it easy for them. Period.