Ask Kalena

Yes, I’m alive, but judging by this blog, you’d hardly know it would you?

Sorry about that. Life has gotten in the way lately, as has setting up a brand new office and losing broadband for 3 days straight.

I do have a series of articles lined up to post here, as well as some post SMX Sydney Conference observations to make and a newsletter to publish.

Thanks for your patience and normal blog broadcasting will resume shortly.

If you were given the task of coming up with an idea for raising money for your favorite charity, using only your influence to fund the idea, what would YOU do?

Here’s what Evan Carmichael decided to do. He took the popular hobby of baseball card collecting and leveraged his connections with 33 leading bloggers to create the Entrepreneur Heroes Trading Card series to raise money for Kiva.

Evan asked 33 top bloggers to name their favorite entrepreneur and provide a reason why they inspired them. The result is a unique collection of trading cards featuring famous entrepreneurs such as:

• Steve_Jobs
• Seth Godin
• Martha Stewart
• Jeff Bezos
• Steve Wozniak
• Richard Branson
• Ev Williams / Biz Stone
• Gary Vaynerchuk
• Walt Disney

Each card has a picture of the entrepreneur on the front, with some facts and a quote from them on the back, together with a quote from the blogger who nominated them. Featured bloggers include people like Danny Sullivan, Guy Kawasaki, Darren Rowse, Tim Ferriss, Chris Brogan and Tom Peters.  Evan and his team have produced a very collectable set of trading cards for exchange at conferences, events or just to add to own your private collection.

Profits from the sale of the cards will go to support entrepreneurs in Africa through micro-lending organization Kiva. To date, over 825 new business owners in Africa have been helped through the efforts of Evan Carmichael and his team.

The Entrepreneur Heroes trading cards officially go on sale tomorrow. But you can pre-order your packs today and save 20% off the regular price – only $3.95 per pack of 5 cards instead of $4.95.  There’s free shipping if you order three packs or more, plus you’ll receive a limited edition gold hologram Steve Jobs or Steve Wozniak card for every three pack pre-order. There’s also a chance to win a baseball signed by Steve Wozniak.

As an Evan Carmichael Elite Author, I’ve been given 12 limited edition, perspex-framed, hologram Steve_Jobs and Steve Wozniak cards (pictured) to give away. In order to win one, please tweet about which Kiva entrepreneur you think deserves support, making sure to include @kiva and @kalena somewhere in your tweet. For example:

“Hey @kalena, I think @kiva entrepreneur Evelyn Paquino deserves support because she is providing a valuable service to her community.”

Every day for 12 days starting 1 April, I’ll choose a winner and post out a limited edition trading card.

Don’t want to risk missing out? Order your trading cards right now.

Well, that wraps up Ask Kalena for 2009.

It’s been quite a watershed year for us and if you’re a regular subscriber, I want to say a heartfelt thank you to every single one of you for sharing the ride.

I’d also like to thank my loyal guest bloggers Andy, Saurav and Peter, as well as my hard-working Virtual Assistant Sarah for their dedication this year.

I hope you all have a safe and memorable Xmas, a kickass New Year’s Eve and remember to find some time to reward yourself for your hard work throughout the year.

As for me, it’s time to unplug from the Internet and shut the laptop down to spend some quality time IRL with family and friends.

Catch you in 2010!

Hi Kalena

I had a big discussion last night with my husband and my son-in-law who has done some work on my husband’s web site.

Jason (my son-in-law) has used WordPress for the site. There are currently about 79 pages on the site. In our conversation I was pretty adamant that I wanted to be able to SEO all the pages. I don’t want to rely on WordPress and it’s blog meta tags to get ranked.

Shouldn’t we be better served by a web building program than a blog program like WordPress? I understand that WordPress has an all singing all dancing SEO plug in but is that really the best option?

I know that you use WordPress for your blog. And it seems the right thing to do. But do you also use it for your main site? Any advice you may give me would be most appreciated.

Thanks so much.

Vicki

Hi Vicki

Actually, sites built with WordPress are perfect for SEO purposes. We are actually thinking of switching our Search Engine College site over to WordPress because of the SEO benefits including deep indexing, cross linking, tagging, filenaming and various SEO plugins that pretty much make other CMS packages obsolete.

You and your son in law should have no trouble optimizing your husband’s WordPress site and hopefully achieving some good ranks and traffic as a result. There are a number of fantastic SEO plugins for WordPress and people are raving about how SEO friendly the WordPress Thesis theme is so you might want to check it out.

You might also want to my review my favorite WordPress plugins. Add to that list the SEO Smart Links plugin and you should be set.

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Like to learn more about SEO? Download my free SEO lesson. No catch!

We’ve all seen the wave effect social media can cause when it comes to spreading breaking news stories such as Michael Jackson’s death and the Samoan tsunami.

But social media is also empowering regular citizens with the ability to break news stories as they take place or spread the word about events they consider to be newsworthy. The phenomenon is birthing a new wave of Citizen Journalism and it’s one of the major reasons news agencies are performing backflips trying to stay relevant.

A perfect example of online citizen journalism occurred in the UK this week, when blogger Jonathan MacDonald witnessed a London rail guard verbally abuse and physically intimidate an elderly passenger whose arm had become stuck in a train door. Midway through the incident, Jonathan had the foresight to whip out his video camera and film the exchange, during which the Transport for London (TFL) employee hurled insults at the passenger, swore loudly at him and threatened to “sling him under a train”.

When Jonathan expressed his distaste to another train guard and suggested that the abusive staffer would lose his job over it, she laughed at him. As a result, he felt compelled to blog the experience and tell as many people as possible as he believed the passenger was being bullied and an injustice had been done.

As well as blogging and tweeting about it, Jonathan posted the video on YouTube, filed an official complaint with TFL about the incident and sent emails to several members of the London press. Social media did the rest.

Outraged viewers of the video joined forces to spread the word, with Twitter users pushing the hashtag #TFL into the trending topics list. Bloggers linked to Jonathan’s post, shared the link on Facebook, MySpace and other social media networks. Within 24 hours the story made headlines on Sky, BBC, LBC, ITN and on the front page of the Evening Standard and the Telegraph. The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson became involved and at the time of this posting, Jonathan’s video has had nearly 145,000 views on YouTube.

As a result of Jonathan’s actions, the TFL employee has been suspended and is now the subject of an internal investigation.

The moral of this story? Never underestimate the power of social media.

From Jonathan’s blog:

“All I did was see something that shouldn’t be tolerated and used the ammunition we have in our hands – video/blogs/network… the main reason this story has flown is due to what happened on camera. We must remember that. It’s not me. I didn’t ‘invent the story’. I just blogged, like I do, and the Twitterverse powered the rest... The conversation may continue for a while and I hope that more citizens become aware of the power they already have to stop hatred, abuse and fear.”

Hats off to you Jonathan.