Multimedia, Websites, Internet Marketing, Social Networking Service for Small Businesses - Monsterbox Productions

I was getting really grouchy earlier today. I spent four hours trying to figure out why my account model wouldn’t save or validate, and kept giving me HashWithIndifferentAccess error. So I’m posting the code here for my future reference. It’d make more sense to post the broken code, but I’d have to rewrite it. The Rails API have some terrible examples.

I use to follow a bunch of hubspot users on twitter because I was interested in amplifying their message to teach people how to market in my generation. I stopped following them because their using twitter as an advertising tool by retweeting self-produced mediocre content and weren’t engaging in meaningful conversation. They we’re (and probably still are) acting like drones, or inanimate objects. When their video came out I had 10 Retweets hit my twitter feed in 15 mins, and than more content was produced after that to indirectly lead you back to that video. I can visibility see the scheming, even though its harmless scheming the noise was too much.

David Meerman Scott described this droning behaviour I’m talking about in his latest article when he talks about company twitter accounts and at the end of the article he points you to learn from hubspot about how to behave on twitter. TheRe is catch to his article because at the bottom he has a disclaimer that points out that his opinion is tainted with a bias to support for hubspot.

The poetic justice is that David Meerman is trying to direct you to learn how to behave on twitter from a company that abuses twitter. The best place to learn how to behaviour on twitter is Gary Vaynerchuk because he’s not out to reach numbers for the sake of stroking his ego, he’s out their because he wants to make a difference.

Hubspot will teach you how to spam, and gauge numbers that will stroke your ego. Gary V will teach you how to listen and and sell your personal brand by being authenticate and transparent.

I’m a team of one, so I don’t have to put tons of project management effort into building Teacher’s Seat, but I do need a way to share my progress with other people. So I’ve done the worst thing imaginable and started another side project, which is my Seinfeld Calendar web-app that will let me create calendar’s online and share my projects progression.

I was pulling out my hair wondering why there was a lack of callbacks for script.aculo.us’s Sortable class. However this article I found saved me some stress by showing me how to manually add in the missing callbacks I needed.

I wasn’t a big fan on Hubspot’s parody video that had the heading “Dude, Cold Calling Is For Losers”. Where’s the real proof that cold calls don’t work in the social marketing world?

Now check out what Gary is doing in his recent video.

Gary V has indirectly proved that old marketing techniques still play a role in the web world. He’s not putting his eggs all in one basket and saying only to use inbound marketing, he’s showing you how to use whatever works to get the job done. He even states in his video that cold calling doesn’t always go as smooth as intended, but to go try and make the effort regardless of the outcome.

The money and traffic isn’t going to roll in while you sit at your phone as demonstrated in Hubspot’s video. You need to go out and touch the people (audience and sponsors) who are going to help you become successful.

Get out their and start tapping shoulders

Just for clarification, Gary isn’t a loser, and I’m not saying that Hubspot is calling him one. I’m just saying Hubspot needs to bring proof to the table before sending the message that you shouldn’t use cold calls. They have their place.

I’ve purchased Seth’s new book Tribes from iTunes and I listened to it for 3 hours straight. If you’re really tired working at a factory (your corporate, bureaucratic ladder climbing, day job) or know somebody who wants out then this is a book I strongly recommend.

Backlinks are your Testimonials

Two things that are believed to get you a high page rank in the google search engine is to have many unique backlinks (websites that link back to your website) and a steady flow of incoming traffic. I want to talk about the ethics of going about building backlinks and gaining traffic. A good way to think about backlinks, is to think about them as your testimonials or your reputation online. If you were to look why websites were backlinking to you, you’d be able to grade the quality of your website.

The Fast Backlinking Strategy

I came across a sale page through my twitter about a strategy for backlinks in 30 minutes that would promise a high page rank in google. I confirmed in the google search engine myself that it ranked on the 3rd page shown in their video demonstration. I’ve seen backlinking strategies like this before, and I want to show you how they work and what your trading using these ‘get backlinks quick’ strategies.

Hold Them to the Light

I want to compare the backlinks from two different websites, the ‘get backlinks quick’ website, My Tattoo Designs Live and a website known to have a good reputation, 37 Signals. You can use Alexa or Google Blog Search to view backlinks by searching their domain in their search field. In my example I’m using Alexa and if you click the images below they’ll take you to the search results page. Browse their backlinks and think about the difference in what kind of websites are linking back to them.

What’s the difference?

37Signals have Relevant Backlinks from Real People

If you browse 37Signals backlinks you’ll get many websites, such as independent web developers and business websites talking about 37Signals. The backlinks have relevant information about 37Signals that should help search engines choose relevant keywords to help as find conveniently 37Signals.

My Tattoo Designs Live have Misleading Backlinks from Download Websites

If you browse the ‘get backlinks quicks’ tattoo websites you’ll get the majority of the backlinks from computer software download websites for a gimmicky screen savers or rss reader program. These download pages have filled in their description with target keywords that tattoo website wants to have a high page rank in. I don’t think myself that these software downloads are relevant to cool tattoo designs, but search engines don’t determine relevant content based in the context their being used, so these software download pages will help this website get a higher page.

Final Thoughts

The ‘get backlinks quick’ strategy is based on gaming the system by taking advantage of search engines not having the human ability to determine what context the content is being used in. This causes websites with relevant content that you want to find based on a specific keywords to suffer. The backlinks you build reflect on your reputation. What kind of message are you sending to your audience if your banklinks are filled with download websites?

The Analogy

You and another competitor are training for competitive race. You take steroids(download websites) and your competitor hits the gym(build great content). On the day of the race you technically come in first(higher page rank) and get the cash prize(monetize the traffic). A press conference is held and its been discovered and is now publicly known you took steroids(backlinks on Alexa). What do you the medias’ reaction will be? Are you still the winner?

Hopefully everyone enjoyed their Halloween. I was David Bowie from The Labyrinth and yes I can some-what juggle the crystal ball. I actually never got to show anyone my costume because I got stranded after losing my debit card and my money on the way to the bar, so I walked back home. The better part of the story is when I bought the tights from a girl’s store with my twin sister. My sister asked if they had longer tights, and the sales girl replied “they’ll fit you”, and my sister said, “no their for my brother”.

When I was in school I constantly handed assignments in late, I didn’t understand the answer my teachers gave, and I didn’t have the will power to sit through instructional (hand-holding) lessons. It wasn’t that I was stupid, I think it was because my teachers’ format and delivery of information didn’t fit my brain’s filing system. The cost of me to translate what format I needed, translate it back, and than deliver it was expensive! It hurt my marks, my time and overall progress of goals. I built Teacher’s Seat to lower the cost of control to format and delivery of information.

Its been two years since I first built Teacher’s Seat for my own personal use to organize my learning process, and I’m coming back to warm the up the seat as I work on version 2.

I want to teach others, but I need an organized way of delivering that information and I can’t settle for the mediocre tools that are available today.

I’ve learned a lot in the last couple of years, and I’m glad that I didn’t have the technical knowledge to deliver this platform commercially before. I think there was too much noise to build what others wanted as opposed to what I really needed.

I can’t sell my soul to work for a factory until I have built this. I spend late night hours and my spare time building Teacher Seat, but its not because I have a passion for building web-apps, its the end result of assisting others to take control of their learning by claiming their teacher’s seat.

I’m blogging about to it let the everyone know that I’ve got something better than a band-aid to cure their frustration.

I want to hear from learners and teachers, send your comments in any form. Your frustration needs to be heard!

I saw Gary V tweet about a website that didn’t exist, and I guess his goal was to see what sucker would buy this domain and I am that sucker. He deleted the tweet but I was sure to grab a screenshot. I’m going to blog about websites that I think are really worth checking out. Its basically a bookmark blog, but I’m hoping I’ll figure out to do something more with it. It was fun in any case.

I enjoy taking ideas to action and seeing how quickly I can make them fly. It took me two hours to setup and design everything.

I’m watching a video about inbound marketing by David Meerman Scott on hubspot’s blog and Scott is talking about focusing on creating personas so your target audience can identify and think about how to apply your product or service to their needs. As a result I’m thinking about a chapter from Getting Real called Personify your Product and thinking about Basecamp’s pricing packages.

But how Emma’s pricing packages makes a lot of sense.

Maybe what I’m really thinking is I wantThe Prisoner to be on television again.

What I try to communicate to my clients, friends and family is the benefit of taking action and socializing online. Its strange how people who socially interacted online 10 years ago were labelled as the anti-social, and today its the exact opposite. I want to just give an excerpt of how easy it to start socializing online, and what kind of interactions to expect.

Reading Bowkett’s blog and I watched Gary’s video

I’ve watched Gary’s video before via 37signals links, and I was reading Gilles Bowkett blog and Bowkett had blogged about a recent Gary video I hadn’t seen.

I write notes while watching videos, here’s what he talked about:

• do what is in your DNA
• Remember C(ommunity)
• community 2hrs – 3hrs of days
• leave comments on websites (no spamming) just a link back through your name
• respond to every single comment and email
• community work you do is huge
• content king, but marketing is queen, and the queen is the household
• best shit in the world, but nobody knows you? you suck
• bring eyeballs to you
• every email is going to give you a sticky situation
• what makes us tick, is hugging, kissing and grouping
• if your not popping up content every single day, you will be out hustled
• people think they’re going to have a blog and shits going to happen
• if you want to build a business, you have work your face off (hustle)
• go out in the community, put out great content, find money
• brand is everything, everything is behind brand
• google your keywords, and look at the adsense, and see how they’re getting there, and start investing time hustling the keywords from theme
• quickest way to make good equity is to make swag
• swag is brand
• everyone in this space think corporates are douchebags and they don’t get it, your all wrong, they all get it, they don’t all wrong billon dollar companies because they clown company usa, they have patience, they just know its not there, they know its coming, they just want to wait, they’re just got money in there pocket and there waiting to buy it from you
• build content, if you do it right, your never going to want sell this shit
• everything earth will be an affiliate program
• get eyeballs, most traffic people can
• become a value person, on the community
• you want to induce conversation at everyturn
• your job is to suck people in
• get people passionate about what your doing

Call to Challenge

Gary says in his video he constantly searches his name on Twitter so I threw out a challenge, and called his name.

Unbelievably Fast Response

To my amazing belief he responds in less than 5 minutes.

I start following him on twitter.

3 Minutes Later, He’s going to be online on Fox News

Than he posts a link he’s going to be on a live stream with Fox News. I can’t stand watching Fox News and I’ll change the channel when their news segments is on, but not this time, because I’m still on a Gary rush.

Now I’m watching Fox (First Time)

Unbelievable how he delivers his opinion. I would have recorded the stream but I was low on hard-drive space at the time.

Gary tells Fox that people are watching Fox News because of his twitter link to watch him, and Fox is skeptical about his power to yield a new audience just because of his presence. He tells people on twitter to email Fox News to shut their email down to prove his point. I contribute an email, surely enough 15 minutes later Fox News says on their show their having email problems.

Other Followers

Than gigigirls88 is now following me on twitter, because their also watching Gary on Fox. I’m looking up InternshipRatings, a cool idea executed beautifully by Lauren and Stephanie, who are the twitter alias gigigirls88.

I’m building a social network for women entrepreneurs so I’m definitely interested in what their doing. But what a crazy detour just from reading a blog post. Everything I’m doing online is driven by people around (in real time) interacting.

Help Create the Domino Effect

I dare you to…

I’m publishing lessons on HTML and CSS for Beginners- on Learnhub again. I thought I’d share how I setup a web-site from scratch. The only thing I didn’t show was that I add all my web-sites to a git repository. I’m interesting hearing how others people web-sites conventions or commenting on mine

I was sent a few days ago to proof an advertisement that was getting published on a phone book cover. I think the advertising company put the ad together but I was flabbergasted by the amount of design mistakes.

I threw together a new ad in less than 10 minutes and sent it off for replacement.

I’m surprised again and again how these companies make money with half-assed products.

I found something just as worthy as getting the iPhone.

I’m back to using a cellphone and if it was anything but Koodo I’d still be cellphone-less. Koodo Mobile has no System Access Fee and no 911 fee. Per-second billing, call forwarding, call waiting, and conference calling included. My phone was $70 but I don’t pay anything. I put it on my ‘koodo tab’ and every month they take 10% of your payment towards your tab. If you ever want to leave Koodo you just pay the remaining balance on your tab. The reception is Tbaytel.

Where to get it?

Future Shop and Wall-Mart are the only two places in Thunder Bay where you grab them. I first went to Future Shop but they ran out of phones quickly and only had a pink Motorola, so I trotted over to Wall-Mart and got it there. Now if only someone opened a store to sell and services these things…