Google Search Phrases to Save Time and Effort

Today one of my favorite design geeks Alex; posted he was scouring the Internet to find some work.  Not unusual for a free lance designer to be spending his morning engaged in such activity…but he needs to use his precious time giving love to his craft of design not looking for work.  Need a good designer check him out here ==>GenerationXAlbums

I suggested he use the follow search phrases to get his lead hunting done more efficiently.

I use site: URL “search term” to search a site without having to browse the whole thing.  I quickly found numerous leads without having to hunt through a job site.

ex: site:http://akroncanton.craigslist.org/ “web design” got me 103 returns from google for web design in Akron/Canton.

site:http://akroncanton.craigslist.org/ “graphic designer” Got me 21 returns.

Save time and maximize your efforts to getting the job, not looking for it.

I included the chart for your reference and good luck!

Google Shortcut	Finds Pages That Have…
minolta camera	the words minolta and camera
ski OR skate	either the word ski or the word skate
“gimme five”	the exact phrase gimme five
cotton -picking	the word cotton but NOT the word picking
Die Hard +2	movie title including the number 2
~bus	looks up the word bus and synonyms
define:exile	definitions of the word exile
bring my * here	the words bring my here separated by one or more words
+	addition; 978+456
-	subtraction; 978-456
*	multiplication; 978*456
/	division; 978/456
% of	percentage; 50% of 100
^	raise to a power; 4^18 (4 to the eighteenth power)
old in new (conversion)	45 celsius in Fahrenheit
site:(search only one website)	site:tusco.display “custom point of purchase”
link:(find linked pages)	link:technologyworkgroup.com
#…#(search within a number range)	minolta camera $200…$300
daterange:(search within specific date range)	egypt daterange:200508-200510
safesearch: (exclude adult content)	safesearch:breast cancer
info: (find info about a page)	info:www.genxalbums.com
related: (related pages)	related:www.genxalbums.com
cache: (view cached page)	cache:google.com
filetype:(restrict search to specific filetype)	web design filetype:ppt
allintitle: (search for keywords in page title)	allintitle:”adidas” running
inurl:(restrict search to page URLs)	inurl:southpark
site:.edu (specific domain search)	site:.edu, site:.gov, site:.org, etc.
site:country code (restrict search to country)	site:.br “honduras”
intext:(search for keyword in body text)	intext:shower
allintext: (return pages with all words specified in body text)	allintext:tropical island
book(search book text)	book Love is the Killer App
phonebook:(find a phone number)	phonebook:Microsoft WA
bphonebook: (find business phone numbers)	bphonebook:Intel OR
rphonebook:(find residential phone numbers)	rphonebook:John Smith Dover OH
movie:(search for showtimes)	movie:The Shining 44622
stocks:(get a stock quote)	stocks:goog
weather:(get local weather)	weather:44622

Hope you can put this to good use.

-Michael

Do Network Engineers Know How to Drive a Train?

Today I enjoyed a two hour session working with the newest national account manger, Rick Gerling, A.K.A., Displayman.  He and his wife Sandy joined us for a two day visit to get acclimatized to working with us at Tusco Display.  I hope to complete a website for Rick before next week and will post the URL.  It has been a nice place to try out some of Jeffery and Bryan Eisenberg’s techniques.  Quick shout out to Bryan, “Hey thanks for the great advise and I love your blog!”

Speaking of Bryan and Jeffery Eisenberg, their book Call to Action is beginning to yield results.  Along with the great information from Angela at shinydoor.com, we are starting to see results of our web marketing and social networking efforts.  I am seeing visitors drilling into our site following some carefully laid out mapping.  They are getting to that contact page, now I need to get them to pull that trigger, make the call, send that email and become clients.

In other news, I am plowing away on Access reporting.  I am embarrassed to say how much I have forgotten, just like my German and Latin classes, fallen out of the back of my head.  I keep finding broken machines in the network and users that need my attention.  I have had a very hard time lately quickly shifting from one hat to another.  I often feel like a segment from “Who’s Line Is It Anyways?” doing “Props”.  I have an office full of equipment and software and many days I go about picking things up, fixing them or moving them from one spot to another so I can do something else all the while asking the question, “Can a network engineer drive a train?”.  The answer for me is “no”.  None the less it doesn’t stop me from trying.

It is later than I like it to be for my bed time and so I am finishing this post and calling it a night.

Hey Mambo!!!

    I have spent most of the last few afternoons building a new site in Mambo.  That is a new CMS(content manages solution) for me as I am accustomed to working with DotNetNuke.  Never the less this has been fairly easy to grasp and use.  Some clunky thing to get used to and some navigation to learn, but over all it has been fun.

   I really am excited about the new site and our existing company site over at tuscodisplay.com.  I have started to track changes and updates to that site.  Since the 20th of February we ave started to see some climbs upward in the search engines.  I have also started lookingat not only the “hits” but also the depth of sessions.  I have added links into the pages as using the sessions of client visits to script their steps to conversions.  Jeffery and Bryan Eisenberg suggest that you create a wire map and storyboards to conceptualize the path through your site.  I also had a few folks outside the company “shop” the site, boy that was a surprise!  I am quickly uncovering a number of flaws in some of my own thinking that I have need to correct about designing and building websites.

    Another bit of news on the LinkedIn/Social Networking scene-My boss told me at lunch today that a former client contacted him via LinkedIn and they have set up a meeting at an upcoming trade show to discuss possible business deals in the near future.  Now I am going to count this as a conversion although it didn’t come in via the website, but I have kind of taken the lead on our digital marketing.  I consider this a great bit of news that our efforts to maximize our presence on the web via these tools has been positive.  Some of the same principles of building websites also apply to writing copy for your LinkedIn profile.  Think small act big, 5 to 10 good keywords to sum up your experience, if you are looking to get some push for you company customer concentric job experiance.  There are folks using the searches on LinkedIn to find clients, employees, and even a job.  I can only image that the search engine on LinkedIn is tuned in a similar fashion as Google for quick results.

  Well enough for today, tommorow  will certainly hold plenty of new and exciting things to learn and do.

Mending Fences and Broken Website

Well I am grateful for someone making me learn HTML.  That is a story worth repeating:  When I first started at Tusco Display I was a support person.  You know, that person you call when your PC stop behaving in the way you expect or desire.  I had spent several weeks getting familiar with the infrastructure of the network, learning my job duties, and pretty much trying to figure out how I fit into a company that manufactured Point of Purchase displays.

My boss one day brought me a book on HTML and told me to look at it and learn it.  I felt like Daniel in the Karate Kid when I asked ,”Why?” and he said, “You will see”.  Likewise he did the same thing in return with a book on SQL server, Unix, and Visual Basic.  I learned a bit and it has become useful in the last six years.  But I digress.

Continuing on my quest for better marketing my employers website, I set to effectively breaking the finely crafted CMS they host it in.  I like DotNetNuke and have been using Mambo recently.  I am comfortable with theses tools.  I am not really sure what control set our site is host in, but it was pretty easy to mess it up.  Needless to say by the time Craig Ferguson finished his monologue I got it back to 99.9% fixed.

Beings I am a guy who helps build websites I am not really happy with ours and of course nothing would make me happier than to convert it to DNN, but that will be a ways off I suppose.

So with the fences mended for now, it is back to writing customer focused material and adding links that tie calls to action together.  It is a little backwards doing it this way, but I feel I can with the tools fr0m Bryan and Jeffery Eisenberg it is very achievable

Today to better understand who we do business with I sent out an email to all of the folks here at Tusco Display and asked three questions.

1. Who is our most important customer?
2. Why would you say they are most important?
3. Describe them in 50 words or less.

I guarantee you will be suprised at the answers.

I also sent the following questions to the Owner and President of Tusco Display:

Are we engaged in accidental marketing?

Could you gentlemen offer me brutally honest answers to the following list?

1. What came first-the idea for our product or service or the understanding that there was a market need that needed filling?

2. Who are our customers?

3. What do they really need?

4. What benefits (not features) of our product or service satisfy the real needs of our customers?

5. What about our products or services is unique, and how can we answer the question, “Why should I buy from these guys?”

6. What other options does a customer have instead of buying from us (including nothing at all)? Are those options better or worse?

7. How does a customer make a decision to buy our products or services?

8. What does a customer have to know before they will buy from us?

9. How does a customer perceive not only our product, but our company compared to our competitor?

10. What is the process a customer goes through before buying our products and services?

11. What is the value of our product or service to the client?(This is not the price.)

12. What would a customer say to a colleague if asked for a recommendation of our products and services?

Once again my thanks to Bryan Eisenberg for his permission to cite from the book “Call to Action”, as he and his brother will help anyone drive visitors to converts.

Stay tuned as we keep climbing up the hill to successful web marketing.

The Faster I Run The Behinder I Get

    I had really hoped to get all of the events of the last week in some form of order so there was some fluidity to my story.  Alas as it always is for a one person IT operation I am running out of caffeinated hours in my day to fulfill all of my digital duties.

    So here is last week in a nutshell.  I have had a HUGE amount of success apply the three platforms of social networking.  LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter have become staples in my application arsenal.  I also have started this blog which is going to be followed by colleagues, family, friends, and I suspect a few enemies as well.  I have made new friends like Angela at ShinyDoor, got connected with an old friend on Facebook, reacquainted myself with a former client turned mentor on LinkedIn, and got a good business direction and help from what I consider a giant in the industry of web business via Twitter.

    So now I find myself working on extranet for our external clients including out national account managers at Tusco Display, intranet is an ongoing improvement cycle, and building up our web presence @ www.tuscodisplay.com.  This doesn’t include the day to day duties I perform here at work and at our home based business Technology Workgroup.  Needless to say I forgot to mention integration of a new time and attendance system to our ERP software.

    The biggest purpose of this blogging experience was to illustrate and document my evolution of our company web site www.tuscodisplay.com.  I was fortunate enough to get in touch with Bryan Eisenberg via Twitter.  For those of you who are not familiar with Bryan and his brother Jeffery  they have author several book and white papers about successfully selling and converting visitors into clients.  I have heard words like “the bible” or “gold standard” of web marketing to describe their teaching and methodology.

   So now I feel up to speed and further behind as I write this post, as my wife’s words come to mind as I left this morning, “Don’t forget our 8:00 PM with the Trustees of Dover First Moravian Church“.  This is another project Technology Workgroup is taking on as we are members of that church and this is our gift of service we are offering.  So here is my blogging challenge, I will be writing about what I learn in “Call to Action” by Bryan and Jeffery Eisenberg, and inviting all of my readers to follow the changes on both of these site as in some way we will be working to make visitors into converts.

Rockin’ Robin? Tweet! Tweet!

    This past Monday morning after all of the usual A.M. network administrator duties at Tusco Display are complete I find a few moments to open up LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.  I work on maintenance of each platform.  I am very aware after the weekend just how much time this can take and even seeing some of the “tweets” on Twitter the strange addiction that can be formed.  So to better maximize my learning and using I install Tweetdeck, it is the IM equivalent for Twitter.  So now I start looking for people to follow and am surprised at how many folks out there, I mean the people I want to ask questions of when reading their books or watching their tutorials on-line are on Twitter.  Now I can follow what they say, it is like an instant on work space. A recent tweet said, “Who needs coworkers when you have Twitter?”  I being a one man IT operation now find myself getting a wealth of information.  But here is the caveat I now find myself being able to give back.  Too many people in the web are takers and there are not enough givers.  Twitter is very entertaining, but it is by far the one new application that has given me the most cause to consider the community of people the “netizens” as it is, and what my role is to that community.

    So I have found several people to follow and quite amazingly people are following me.  I am reaching people with my questions, answers, and even humor.  I feel less apt to struggle over a Google search now, there are many good netizens out there, my neighbors in cyberspace who would willing let me borrow a cup of sugar, or better yet help me bake the cookies.  And I am happy to share those cookies.  I recently read an article about how information technology will lift us out of this recession.  It is hard to ignore the fact that technology unites me with a guy from Switzerland and his video of all of his snow on the mountain and it spurs me to shovel the piddly four inches of snow from my neighbors driveway.  How I get answers to a software programming question that helps me at Tusco Display complete a program that allows us to be more productive.

    Complete waste of time?  For some perhaps, but for me it has been a new way to interact with a world of interesting people.  It has become an improved method for seek and giving aid, humor,empathy, and even a bit a grief.  Once again it is all about using our powers for good not evil.

Digging Holes in Cyberspace

So I’m only at Friday of last week, but as you can see this whole thing has begun to gain momentum.  After a full day of work, LinkedIn, Facebook, and tweetting on Twitter I join my wife and girls for a bit of dinner.  My oldest daughter is amused and somewhat concerned about her mom and dad’s new “hobby”.  She was shoulder surfing with her mother earlier in the day and was quite taken aback by what an old school chum had written on my wall.  She told her mom that she would have posted a comment and her mother reminded her why I had not “friended” her.

So we all finish dinner and my wife and I decide that we will retire to the bedroom with our respective notebook pc’s at about 8:30.  So we settle in and start digging up facts about social networking, SEO techniques, and LinkedIn tools.  I got off on a number of threads to get a better grip on why we weren’t getting conversions on our site.  We both traded links over IM that might help us better help our existing clients.  And we all have been there it is now 4:30AM Saturday!  Must put down this machine.  The black box yields many clues but few answers.  I do feel as if I am on a treasure hunt as each white paper and blog post point me in another fascinating direction.  I keep amassing more answers and questions all at the same time.  I am finding where I have moved off the path of successful conversion rates, but I am too tired to take anymore notes and it is all beginning to look the same.

Eating With the Snow Shovel-Part Two

A few days later (last Thursday) both Mike the owner of Tusco Display and I attend a social networking event held at Kent State Tuscarawas, in New Philadelphia, OH.  Angela Siefer from ShinyDoor.com is going to teach us how to use Facebook, LinkedIn and briefly talk about Twitter.  Oh boy, more time wasting application thanks to Web 2.0!  My daughter gets up 30 minutes early to use Facebook and spends countless hours every night frittering away valuable time to do chores and I have a LinkedIn account that probably doesn’t even work anymore.  Twitter, yeah just what I need another method to instantly tell the world “Look at me!” 

     Modern technology is pretty well wasted on me, I like shiny new things, but working with ASP.Net and DotNetNuke and hardware all day, it all gets a little trite.  Bottom line though is adapt or die, that is the credo in business.  So Mike the Tusco Display Owner and Michael the Network Administrator go to the meeting.  Network Administrator already thinking, “How many of these people can I make into clients for Technology Workgroup?”  Right away I am engaged with Angela, she is excited about her topic and hits the ground running.  She very easily invites all of us there without accounts on LinkedIn to go and set one up and if your neighbor has one help those who don’t.  We begin to examine the profile and the various tools that can most certainly give us a greater chance of being found as businesses.  I am intrigued as I begin to do the math, I have five friends, and they each have five friends… 

    We move over to Facebook and Angela once again has everyone smoothly navigating the functions and features.  She skillfully points out the “do’s and don’ts”, the best practices and even the faux pas of social networking.  Then she talks about Twitter, briefly and with the caveat that we should get comfortable with Face Book and LinkedIn before moving on.  I feel like that guy that gets told he isn’t tough enough to drink the hard stuff.  I’ll just see about that, I can’t wait to get home and sign up!  I’ll show her! She is certainly smart and well educated but I am a well seasoned, trial by fire, burned to a crisp veteran of technology.  I remember using punch cards for Pete sake not some fancy little USB drive.  I go home and sign up for a Twitter account @mmmock along with the wife and start looking for interesting people to follow.  I have 3 before I go to bed…sadly one of those is the wife.  But she and I now are engaged in this need for “street cred” and begin to build our professional and personal networks on Facebook and LinkedIn.  We are becoming better connected to the business world and I am on track to become a social networking evangelist!  I will help others get onboard and learn to use their powers for good not evil.  It is late I really have to put down the notebook and get at least four hours of sleep.

    Mike and I compare notes all day Friday as we build our networks and discuss how we ALL at Tusco Display get set up and start using this new cyber tool for building business, creating better relationship with existing accounts and our own team.  Brainstorms like F5 tornadoes blow through the office, I am looking for the duct tape to wrap my head with so when it explodes the EMT’s will have all the pieces in one spot to transport along with my body!  Can’t wait to get home and compare notes this social network stuff is a powerful drug…what was it Angela said, “Don’t dive in?  Right straight to the deep end of the pool.

Eating With the Snow Shovel-Part One

     This last week has been such a flood of new information and ideas. The number of “light bulb” flashing “aha” moments is astounding. It began a week ago with a Monday meeting. As the network administrator at Tusco Display I was asked to join both the owner and the president of the company to sit in on a meeting with a company that specializes in marketing businesses on the internet. I am not terribly possessive about our website. It was built by a third party and they are certainly good at what they do. Our previous site was built in Flash and it was a nice piece of work as well. The challenge with the site isn’t how pretty it is, or how many keywords we have, it is all both getting people to do something other than look.

    We met at length and had quite a discussion about how the web works. How spiders and bots see us and some of the “Black Box” stuff can get us ranked better. We bantered about capturing data and analyzing statistics. The rep did a great job of telling me that we had a good site, but there was an uncompleted quality to all of it. He also mentioned a book, “Call to Action” by Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg. He swore it was the bible for selling on the web. “Oh great another book on how to get rich from selling on the internet” I think to myself. I let it go by me and nod my head really wanting to get to the bottom line. Eventually it comes in the form of tell us who we can compare you to and well send a proposal. I leave the meeting not really excited as I felt that there was so much more we could do and just haven’t got to it. Face it I am a one man band here. I write the songs, tune, play, and put away the instruments, book the gigs, and write the press releases! The owner tells me he was sending me a call to action. (What I heard in my vernacular was he was forwarding a web based request to me.) What he said was he was going to buy me the Eisenberg’s “Call to Action” book. I looked at him and flat out say, “If I had a dime for every book someone said I should read I wouldn’t need to work anymore.” He nodded politely and softly said, “Well perhaps your wife would like to read it so she can help her customers.” My wife is co-owner of Technology Workgroup, a small team that develops sites in DotNetNuke. I function as the technical support and co-owner and she is sales and design.

    So I hang my head and realize he wants to better equip me. The owner is a “teach guys/gals to fish” person. He believes in education and desires that all of his associates at Tusco Display learn and become the best in their industry. He hired me part time to be a technical support guy, then paid for me to become an MCSE and eventually allowed me to take the reins of the company’s information technology. I realize only after my remarks walking to my desk what had just transpired. Later that evening I sent him an apology and recognized his desire to “smarten me up.” So the book is ordered, but life goes on.