AnswerHero^™ - The Journey

Archive for the ‘Let The Journey Begin’ Category

If you have a site which has a lot of new content added on a regular basis then adding an RSS feed is a great way to not only get more people to view your content but also a way to generate more inbound links.

I have just created 2 RSS feeds for AnswerHero.co.uk:

• Latest Questions
• Latest Answers

An RSS feed is an XML based file in a specific format that is recognised by the plethora of RSS readers out there.
You can even use services like TwitterFeed to automatically post entries from your RSS feed into Twitter accounts!

Setting up the feed is fairly straightforward and involves writing out a header section and then looping through the required records and writing them to the feed.

RSS Header Section

If you look at the source of one of the feeds above you will see that the header section looks like this:

Everything in this section is hard coded except the LastBuildDate which is basically the current date.

Firstly you need to add this to the very top of the code: Response.Contenttype = "text/xml".
Next output the sections above until you get to the “lastbuilddate”.

I used the following ASP code to format the date using “now”:

response.write ""
response.write left(weekdayname(weekday(now)),3) & ", " & day(now) & " " & left(monthname(month(now)),3) & " " & year(now) & " "
If Hour(now) < 10 then
response.write "0"
end if
response.write hour(now) & ":"'
If Minute(now) < 10 then
response.write "0"
end if
response.write minute(now) & ":"
If Second(now) < 10 then
response.write "0"
end if
response.write second(now) & " GMT"
response.write "" & vbcrlf
response.write "Copyright: (C) eneva.com Ltd." & vbcrlf
response.write ""
response.write ""
response.write "http://answerhero.co.uk/images/logo.png"
response.write " http://www.AnswerHero.co.uk"
response.write "" & vbcrlf


RSS Body Section

You then need to loop through as many records as you would like to go out in the feed, say 50, and write the following for each record:

response.write "" & vbcrlf
response.write "" & DESCRIPTION_FROM_RECORD & "" & vbcrlf
response.write " " & URL & "" & vbcrlf
vbcrlf
response.write " "
response.write left(weekdayname(weekday((mid(rs("DateTime"),7,2) & "/" & mid(rs("DateTime"),5,2) & "/" & left(rs("DateTime"),4)))),3) & ", "
response.write mid(rs("DateTime"),7,2) & " " & left(monthname(mid(rs("DateTime"),5,2)),3) & " " & left(rs("DateTime"),4) & " " & mid(rs("DateTime"),9,2) & ":" & mid(rs("DateTime"),11,2) & ":" & mid(rs("DateTime"),13,2) & " GMT"
response.write "" & vbcrlf
response.write ""
response.write "" & vbcrlf


RSS Footer

Then finish of the XML with the footer:

Allowing Auto Detection of the RSS Feeds

You know when you go to some websites you get the little RSS logo appearing in the browser?
Well you achieve this by placing entries in the head section of your pages.
If you look at the source of the AnswerHero home page you will see the following:

It’s as simple as that!

Once you have created your RSS feed just do a search on Google for “rss feed directory” and you will find plenty of places for you to publicise your shiny new feed.

Finally we have received the design for the AnswerHero.co.uk site!

With over 5000 pages now indexed by Google and the visitor numbers steadily increasing implementing a user friendly design has become ever more important.

Rather than work on all of the functionality we have decided to get the new design live immediately and then work on the features that have not yet been coded separately.

There are a couple of tweeks that we need the designers to make – the most important one being that they removed the h1 tag from the top of the answer pages, which would have a negative effect on search engine rankings. I have simply replaced this but it looks a bit ugly now so I have passed it back to them.

One new feature we have added is the search. On a site such as this, with many thousands of questions and answers, the search is an extremely important feature.

The easy option here would have been to use the Google search “widget” but that would not fit in with the style of the new design so I coded up a simple search script in ASP.

The interesting thing now will be to see what difference the new design makes to both the bounce rate and the time on site. We will keep you posted!

Well there are now 3990 pages in Google and we are getting about 200 visitors a day to the site so it’s looking good.

As you can see from the Google Anlaytics below the bounce rate is very high but that is to be expected as we have not yet implemented the new design which should be ready any day now.

Once we have this we can see how much of a difference it makes to the analytics and, as usual, we’ll post a blog to let you know.

At this point we could decide to put some advertising, such as AdSense, on the site and try to get some income from the visitors we are already getting but as the site is so ugly it could cause problems if someone from Google did a manual review so we will wait until the new design is live before making any decisions on advertising.

Well I am pleased to say we are very much nearly there with the design. Below is the (almost) finished version of what the home page will look like.

Click here to see the logo as a pencil sketch - this was done by our Uzbekistan designers using a brief from us and they got it right first time (which is rare when using overseas resources) -

Almost finished design of the home page (we are still making refinements)

I was just made aware of an app that you can get for your iPhone called Tweetmic that allows you to record audio on your iPhone and instantly upload it and post a Tweet linking to the audio file.

So this got me thinking – what a fantastic way to record Podcasts. Basically wherever I am I can simply whip out my iPhone and start recording. The quality is surprisingly good and is more than adequate for Podcasting.

So I downloaded the app from the App Store and installed it, followed the instructions and answered a question from Fraser Edwards which he asked me on Twitter.

The question was:

fraseredwards@ChrisYoungUK what made you come back out of ‘retirement’ after taking it easy for a few years?

and here is my TweetMic response: http://tweetmic.com/p/or8×6d677v6.

So all I now need to do is get that audio recording into an audio file on my PC so I can convert it to MP3 and upload to the server as a Podcast.

I had a look around and found a free, open source app called Audacity which looked like it would do the job so I downloaded and installed that.

Using Audacity to Convert my Tweetmic Audio File to MP3

My Sound Card does not allow direct WAV output so I used a double ended mic cable to send the headphone directly to the mic input on the computer.

Next I loaded up Audacity and went to the page with the audio recording on Tweetmic and started playing it.

The next step was to make sure that the recording volume was correct and did not cause any distortion or background noise. Audacity is great for this as it shows you a wave form of the audio as it is being recorded. I found that setting the computer’s volume to 50% and the Audacity Input Volume to 0.5 worked best for me. In future it should now be a case of just making sure the computer volume is set to 50% as Audacity remembers the last settings.

So now I just created a new Audacity project, started the recording and then started the Tweetmic record immediately afterwards. Once complete click on the brown “stop” button and we are ready to export to MP3 for uploading to the server.

If you need to do any editing of the audio then Audacity has a whole host of options but I haven’t used any yet so I can’t tell you about them!

So I just selected the “File > Export” option which presents a screen where you can fill out a ton of information about the audio file. I ignored all that and clicked “OK”.
You can then choose “MP3 Files” as the “Save as type” and choose the directory and give the file a name and Save it.

The first time I did this a dialogue box appeared stating that a .dll file is required:

Just click on the Download button and follow the instructions then try the export again.

You now have an MP3 version of the audio file ready to upload and include in the Podcast XML!

So as well as trying to get users to visit the main AnswerHero.co.uk site we obviously want as many people as possible following this blog.

I have been using Twitter for a few months and whilst I was extremely sceptical at the beginning (as I think everyone is) I can now see the huge potential Twitter has as a very targeted way of getting traffic to a website.

So I have just created a new Twitter profile called AnswerHeroBlog.

Now what I don’t want to do is have to spend a lot of extra time manually posting to this new Twitter account so I am going to use a service called TwitterFeed to automatically post links to any new blog entry that appears on the AnswerHero Blog. More on setting this up later.

There are 2 stages to getting a Twitter Account working: Getting “Relevant” Followers and Posting Tweets (the short posts you make on Twitter) but to be honest they go hand-in-hand:

Getting Relevant Twitter Followers

The key is making sure you attract the correct type of follower. Quite simply you do this in 3 ways:

One Line Bio

Include keywords in the Twitter profile “One Line Bio” that reflect the type of people you are trying to target. This is your “Call To Action” and should convince the reader that they want to follow you.

I am using:

A new Online Marketing Concept – we show you how to use SEO, Social media, Email Marketing, Podcasts, YouTube, etc. to create a new MONEY MAKING website

As you can see the Bio includes the key phrases: “Online Marketing”,”SEO”,”Social Media”,”Email Marketing”,”Podcasts”,”YouTube”,”MONEY MAKING website”.

Use #tags

If you put a # in front of a keyword within a Tweet then people searching for that keyword will see your post. This is very time sensitive. For example I just put a Tweet on the new account which said this:

Welcome! We will be posting real-time updates on our MONEY MAKING website creation journey starting today! #SEO #MAKEMONEY #MARKETING

Within minutes we had 4 new followers who probably did a search on one of these #tags and saw us listed towards the top of the search results. After a few minutes my tweet will have been replaced by more up-to-date tweets which include the same keyword. The tweet may still be found when people search using other words as well as the individual #tag and this goes back to the Long Tail theory. At the end of the day the Twitter search is very similar to the Google Search except it just searches Tweets so the same concepts hold true.

So as you can see this is a very powerful way to target users who are interested in your chosen subject.

Follow Other Relevant People

You should also dedicate a little time each week to finding other people in your industry and follow them. That way when other people look at the list of people that are following that person they will see you in the list and may then choose to follow you too.

From my experience of my first Twitter account we should see a snowball effect – as we post more Tweets, get more followers and follow more people so the number of people following us should start to accelerate.

As usual I will keep you updated on the number of followers in the Results category or you can just take a look at the Twitter account.

After a lot of trial and error we found that it was the Tweet This plugin that was causing the Wordpress to hang. Even trying to disable it in the Admin menu caused it to hang so in the end I simply renamed the directory on the server and we are working again.

I am now on the look out for an alternative Social Bookmarking plugin.

If you have used the XML format defined by Apple then adding a podcast to the iTunes Store should be straightforward.

The only slight problem was that initially I couldn’t find the link to add the podcast as the iTunes Instructions state that the link is on the left of the screen but it’s not any more, it’s on the right under “FOR PODCASTERS”:

Next I posted the XML file location into the box:

The following screen is then presented:

iTunes Review Podcast

A quick click of the Submit button and it’s done!

The final screen states that the Podcast will not appear in the iTunes Store immediately and may get reviewed.

So in a continuation of my previous post on finding a decent HTML design service, I am pleased to say I have something (very early) stages to show – so far the desgners have listened to what we want an come up with a pencil sketch of what their interpretation is of what we want – as you can see (below) it is pretty much on the money for what the term “hero” would conjure up.

We are expecting a proper version next in colour – from which they will start to do the actual technical work. Once we have this then it *may dictate the colour schemes for some of the borders and boxes on the site – I am not sure so we will have to see what they come up with next for other aspects of the site.

One of the areas of affiliate marketing that we were keen to get involved with was the growing popularity of online video.

Now back when I started CompareStorePrices.co.uk there was no such thing as online video but since then it has really exploded and this year is seen by many as the year online video comes of age.

Creating a video for posting on YouTube is a great way to get your message out there and is a fairly straightforward and inexpensive process and I am going to walk you through the steps I took to create and upload the following video:

How to Create a YouTube Compatible Video

If you have a digital camera with video capability then you are all set. For better quality you may want to use a camcorder but for YouTube the quality from a reasonably modern digital camera is sufficient.
There are even cameras and camcorders available now that automatically upload the video directly to your YouTube account but I would not recommend using these as you will want to add some titles to the video before uploading it (more on this later).

So basically go ahead and record the video and transfer it onto your computer. I used a Canon Digital Ixus 75 and recorded the video directly to the memory card. I then popped the memory card into the computer.

Editing the Video with Windows Movie Maker

Windows Vista comes with a video editing package included which is adequate for our needs so this is what I used:

- Start up Windows Movie Maker and select a new project.
- Use “Import Videos” to pull your newly created video into the project.

Now if you want to cut any dodgy bits out of the video, such as the part where you didn’t realise that your wife/girlfriend/husband/boyfriend/dog was on the phone in the background slagging off your best mate, you can slice and dice it to your hearts content using the video preview box on the right hand side. Just play the video up to the point you want to split it and click on the “Split” button. Hey presto your video will be sliced down the middle like a scene from an 80’s horror movie.
You can then discard the leftovers and you will be left with a lovely masterpiece all ready for unleashing on the world.

Next drag the video into the Timeline at the bottom of the screen.

Adding Titles and an Overlay

You’ll want to make the video look all Steven Spielberg now so you can add a title at the beginning and an overlay to advertise the website URL.

Click on the “Titles and Credits” option in the left menu under “Edit” and you will be taken to the titles screen.

Creating and formatting the titles is pretty self explanatory so I’m not going to teach you to suck eggs so let’s assume you have created your “title at the beginning” and added that to the timeline.

Next create an overlay title which shows the website by selecting “title on the selected clip”
Have a play around with the different fonts and transition effects and try adding a few carriage returns before the title so you can see how it changes in the video preview on the right.

Once you are happy click “Add Title” and you will see the title appear in the timeline.
At this point you can drag the title left and right so it appears at the required point in the video. You can also increase the length of time that the title appears by stretching the title box and you can also create a copy of the title by right clicking on it and pasting it elsewhere.
For my example above I place 1 overlay title at the beginning and one at the end.
That way the user will see the title appear twice which should help draw their eye to it.

Creating the Video File

Not much left to do.
Click on “This Computer” under the “Publish” menu option and the video will be generated into a file on your computer.

Uploading the Video to YouTube

If you haven’t already got one then create yourself a YouTube account which should ideally have the same name as the website you are creating. We created a new YouTube account called “AnswerHeroBlog” and used that.

Sign in and click the “Upload” button (top right), select the video file (make sure you select the one you just created and not the original from the camera as I did to start with!) and the video will start uploading.
Whilst the upload is taking place you can fill out the required information. Make sure you mention the website and add as many relevant keywords and tags as you can but don’t make it look spammy.

That’s it – job done – you are now a global super star!