There is one cool joke that the worst nightmare of a web hacker is that he suddenly forgets all his passwords. Password fatigue (or password chaos or identity chaos) is the feeling experienced by many people who are required to remember and manage a lot of passwords.

And how many passwords do you need to keep in your head? I am sure as an Internet marketer, blogger and/or active social media user you must have quite a few passwords to manage.

This post will attempt to make your life easier or at least to encourage you to take it easier…

Creating a Good Password

These are plenty naturally. Most will just generate a random combination of letters and numbers which will be impossible to remember. Others are more fun, they generate passwords based on some criteria you specify.

One of such tools generating memory-friendly passwords is PasswordBird which creates passwords based on your (favorite) second and last names and (your date of birth):

Facts: How Good Is Your Password?

1. This table shows the approximate amount of time required for a computer or a cluster of computers to guess various passwords. The figures shown are approximate and are the maximum time required to guess any password.

2. The following infographic visualizes the “breakability” of some of the popular passwords based on their strength – it might appear a little funny but lot of people are actually using those simple passwords (via):

3. There are also a few tools that help you measure the “strength” of your password: here’s one of them called Password Meter that checks how strong your password is based on the combination of the following criteria:

• Number of characters;
• Number of uppercase letters and lowercase letters;
• Numbers and symbols;
• Repeat characters;
• Consecutive uppercase letters, lowercase letters and numbers;

Password Manager

Many people recommend LastPass, KeePass and Roboform.

As FireFox junkie, I am using a FireFox plugin for that (which probably is not really secure or..?). The plugin is Sxipper and I find it awesome and easy to use.

Sxipper claims to protect your personal data by keeping it secure on your computer and retrieving it for you when you choose to share it online. Besides, Sxipper recognizes OpenID forms and helps you manage your OpenIDs.

Immediately after the installation, the tool will offer you to import all your passwords in it:

After importing (or entering manually) your personal data in Sxipper, go to any page containing a login form and you’ll be able to select the username under which you want to login:

The tool has a plenty more options and features you can read about here including persona management, disposable email address, form auto-filling, etc.

Post img by by azrainman

Related posts:

1. How (and Why) to Maintain Several Online Identities Ok, before you start calling me a spammer or anything...
2. Find Your Most Useful Content with Help of Copy Heat Map What determines the usefulness of some of your content (as...
3. Social Media Marketing – Think Long-Term Web marketers who view social media as a promotional tool...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Twitter can be used in various, almost countless ways. In this post I am sharing a tip on how to create a useful Twitter RT bot that can be used to collect various Tweets around a keyword or a hashtag and retweet them. And before you start throwing stones at me calling me a Twitter spammer, let me give just a few examples of how this bot can be used to create real value:

• Think of a Twitter RT bot that will be used to collect Tweets around some SEO conference. Thus all people who want to follow live updates from many members won’t need to keep track of hashtags and keywords associated with the event – all they need is to follow your bot.
• Or, say, you want to introduce your own cool hashtag and get other people to use it (#FirefoxFriday for example) but you want to filter out all retweets and give people the way to only follow real first-hand Tweets – a Twitter bot is the best option to go!

So, I guess I made it clear why you might find this tutorial handy. Now let’s see how to create one:

Create a Yahoo! Pipe

1. Choose the keywords / hashtags to retweet

Once you decided to create a Twitter bot, I suppose you already have the topic. So what you need to do now is to create a new hashtag to filter the Tweets (or just use the one you want to retweet);

2. Use Yahoo! Pipes to create a feed

The reason I use Yahoo! Pipes to create a feed is that Twitterfeed (I am going to use to auto-tweet) does not allow to use Twitter-based feeds and also Yahoo! Pipes offer some cool options allowing to customize the feed. So:

• Use Twitter search to grab the RSS feed:

• Now, go to Yahoo! Pipes and click “Create a pipe”. Drag the “Fetch feed” item from the left-hand panel and provide your Twitter search RSS link. You should see the feed output at the bottom of your screen.

• Filter your feed. Now, there might be plenty of retweets of the initial Tweet using your key hashtag – and you don’t want your bot to repeat one and the same update again and again. So you can go ahead and filter out all Tweets containing “RT” ( “Retweet”, “Retweeting”, etc):

Drag the Operator > Filter pipe from the navigation and add the following:

Now, connect all three pipes (feed, filter and output) together and you are done!:

• You can also give credit to the initial update author (RT @username) for the bot’s update to look like this: [the initial message here RT @tweet-author]. This part is a bit more complex.

1.First, drag Operators > Loop Pipe and insert it before the “Pipe output” Pipe;

2. Now, drag String > String Builder Pipe right in the middle of the Loop Pipe and do exactly what is shown on the screenshot:

You should see now that the feed output contains the URL to the initial author profile:

3. Now you should cut the first part of the URL and make it @author. For that grab Operators > Regex Pipe and there in item.title replace http://twitter.com/ with RT @

(!) Don’t forget to connect the last pipe with the other ones – so that in the end our Pipe looks as follows:

And the output looks like this:

Save the Pipe and grab its RSS.

Set up the Auto Tweets

All what follows is quite easy:

1. Create your new Twitter profile to publish the Retweets,

2. Connect it to Twitter Feed and set up the auto-retweets there:

Congratulations! You are done!

Can you think of any really creative uses of this tip? (Please don’t spam Twitter!)

Related posts:

1. Search Cloudlet Adds Twitter Tag Clouds I recently shared on SEJ my latest favorite FireFox...
2. Twitter Translator, Twitter Tickets, What’s More? I usually try to avoid posting here what is...
3. Monetize Your Twitter Account! (Really?) Today in the morning I was pinged by one...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Ok, before you start calling me a spammer or anything like that, I’ll say there may be totally legit reasons why you would want to keep several online identities, for example:

• You may want to separate business life from your personal life (really having your husband/wife and your clients on same Facebook account may be tedious);
• You don’t want your partners and clients to know about your other projects (why would I want the SEO world to know that I own a creepy celebrity blog on blogspot and promote it on Myspace… and no, you don’t want to see that Myspace page!).

You know me as Ann Smarty, that’s my SEO pseudonym, and if you search this name on Google you will see only my professional profiles, professional comments and professional articles. But my SEO business is only part of my Internet life and I don’t want you to know (trust me, you don’t want to know that either:)) what stuff I stumble from my “private” StumbleUpon account and what comments I leave (or used to leave) on fellow Myspace profiles.

OK, I guess now you are intrigued to know that but that’s not the point.

The point is that if you want to live several online lives, that’s totally OK and here are some tools for that (yes, there are tools for that either!)

Create several FireFox profiles:

Imagine you can run several FireFox profiles simultaneously and be logged in to various profiles there at a time (again, this is not (only) for spamming). For example: you have one for stumbling professional sites and one for other fun stuff you don’t want people to know you like it.

I did a detailed post on how to do create several FireFox profiles previously and here’s a quick recap:

1. Exit FireFox;
2. (Windows) Go: “Start” button => “Run” => Type “firefox.exe -ProfileManager” => “OK” button;
3. Click “Create” in a profile manager and choose the name for your new profile, then click “Start FireFox”;
4. Repeat steps 1-3 to create as many profiles as you want;
5. Done! Now each time you want to switch to another profile or change the default profile, repeat steps 1-2 and choose the one you want.

• Install this sweet FireFox extension to quickly switch between profiles.
• Now save different sets of social media profiles on different profiles.

Quick tip: I name my FireFox profile same as my social media moniker I want this profile for.

Use multiprotocol instant messaging application

If you have several IMs installed or even various accounts on each one for various groups of your friends, you can connect them all in one handy utility.

DigsBy is by far my favorite such application because it connects so many IMs and social networks that you can hardly think of any suggested feature for it. Find inside:

• IMs: GTalk, AIM, Yahoo! Messenger, Facebook chat;
• Email notifications: Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL mail;
• Social networks: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace.

My favorite features of the app are:

• For each social network add as many accounts as you want;
• Sort Gtalk (and other) contacts into groups (!);
• Set tracking for any GTalk buddy: e.g. get notified when some person signs in or changes the status message;
• Manage multiple conversations with tabbed conversation windows;
• Set your Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn status right from Digsby.

Use some extra tools to make your parallel lives easier:

• This script makes it easy to switch between multiple Gmail accounts. It is pretty fast and can make my life much easier.
• Use temporal email address to sign up: most sites require an email address to sign up. If you do not care about their updates, just use any temporal address for quicker registration;
• I thought of adding a few tips on IP switching but then thought I’d look like a complete spammer in that case. So I’ll just stop here, hope I managed to do that before you thought I was a jerk and just left this site for good.

Post image by SideLong

Related posts:

1. Everything About Passwords – a Guide to Managing Online Personas There is one cool joke that the worst nightmare of...
2. SEO Consultant’s Email Signature – What’s Your Tactic? I’ve been recently thinking about optimizing my email signature....
3. If You Are Easily Offended… A friend of mine came to me recently saying that...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

I’ve been banned from StumbleUpon – not banned but put under review – the fact is, I can’t use it any more. I’ve been stumbling for a year, found great friends there and now I feel as if huge part of my life has been taken away. Anyway, putting the emotional part aside, this got me thinking: was I really manipulating the service?

The honest and painful answer would be: YES. I did thumb up the content I was related to in some way or other. I did shared it with some of my friends. I did ask others to promote my stuff.

But what is more important is that I drove more value to the community than I got from it. And I can honestly and open-heartedly state that I was a great stumbler! I rated and reviewed content daily – a lot of content. Many people contacted me saying how great my StumbleUpon blog was.

So did I really deserve the ban? In his recent interview Muhammad Saleem said reciprocal voting is a natural part of social media where people having common interests share content and vote for it.

Lisa Barone recently said marketers were to blame for any negative outcome social media manipulating can have. Follow the rules and you will be OK, she said.

So where in their rules do they forbid to review your own content? Or sharing it with those who liked it?

I had about 1000 friends there and I am sure none of them could accuse me of spamming them or sending them some promotional content.

So where is the line between being a power user and manipulating the network?

Image by helmet13

Related posts:

1. If You Are Easily Offended… A friend of mine came to me recently saying that...
2. The Art of Flattering – Social Media Marketing How To Let’s face it, we do flatter daily in real life...
3. Marketing Issues: The Ethics of Saying NO I have to confess: I usually have hard time...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

I have to confess: I usually have hard time saying no when anyone asks for a favor (Shana would call me a pleaser, I guess ). However being rather active at various social media communities and interacting with so many different people, I came to understand that rejecting is something I have to learn to do.

Disclaimer: please don’t get me wrong; I love helping people and never insisted on some special ethics approaching me with items to vote. None of my good friends bothers me at all and I am sincerely happy when I have the opportunity to help any of them. I love my social media friends and I love to help.

The thing is, social media and the Internet in general is not all about friends and every day absolutely random people I even don’t know approach asking to vote / comment / help promote their websites and since I can’t reject, they start bombing me with messages every single day. In the end, I end up voting for posts I don’t even like and spending my time answering these messages.

My idea is that rejection is an integral part of business relationships and so it should be done wisely. So what are some possible ways to handle it?

Lie: make up any random escuse that pops up in my mind (e.g. “I haven’t received your message“, “I have no time”, etc)

Explain: carefully select arguments why I am forced to reject. While it can be hard in the beginning, it should become easier after some training.

Ask for a return favor: well, in this case I won’t reject but at least I will benefit from the situation.

Ignore: don’t answer the request at all? Pretend you never received it or let the person invent an excuse for you?

Any other? Please share your thoughts!

Image source: I wanna say NO

Related posts:

1. If You Are Easily Offended… A friend of mine came to me recently saying that...
2. Social Media Marketing – Think Long-Term Web marketers who view social media as a promotional tool...
3. The Art of Flattering – Social Media Marketing How To Let’s face it, we do flatter daily in real life...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

I usually try to avoid posting here what is already so widely discussed. Really lately we haven’t had a single day without another Twitter post (sometimes also interrupted by Pownce and Plurk ones).

But if you come across 4 new Twitter apps in one-hour time, you just can’t help sharing that.

• Twitter Translator promises to instantly translate whatever you ask into any of 21 languages (Arabic, Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish) once you d-message the service with the short sentence and the corresponding language code.
• Twitter Tickets (UK only) will update you of any tickets for any city you choose to follow.
• Twitter Minific allows you to share short fiction.
• Tweat What You Eat offers you to track what your diet through your phone, IM or the web.

So in a word, we now have Twitter-style diets, Twitter-style online services, and even Twitter-style fiction, custom Twitter backgrounds. What’s more? How many people are actually using these applications? Is it going to blow?

Post image: Eric Twitters too!

Related posts:

1. How to Create a Useful Twitter Retweet Bot Twitter can be used in various, almost countless ways. In...
2. Search Cloudlet Adds Twitter Tag Clouds I recently shared on SEJ my latest favorite FireFox...
3. I am Twitter Bad Ass! What about You? :) We have set up a fun quiz together with Gerald...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Optimize your images for search engines:

• Keywords in alt text, text around the image, image name, page title;
• Preferred image formatting – jpg;
• Separate SE accessible image folder;
• Image freshness. (SEW suggests re-uploading your images to keep them fresh);
• Enabled image search option at Google webmaster tool.
• Reasonable image file size (see the discussion at WW)
• Limited number of images per page;
• Popular and reliable photo sharing hosting (e.g. Flickr is reported to help in Yahoo! image optimization).

Optimize your images for social media:

• (obvious) use really great images to give your readers another reason to spread the word;
• (to get Digg thumbnailed submission) stick to jpg format and make sure the images can be resized to (or already are) 160×120 or 160×160 pixels (Unless you have an image that can be resized that way Digg will not offer the submitter a thumbnail to go with the post).

Optimize your images for people:

• People pay more attention to a clear image where they can see details (choose high quality images).
• (Clean, clear) faces in an image get more eye fixation. (don’t use abstract images too often).
• Keep them relevant: images are not the first thing a visitor sees on a web page but they can compel him to stay (according to the eye-tracking research web text is prior to images; when looking at a printed article people see images first; with web page they see text first – nevertheless images make the visitor stay and remember the page via relevant associations).

Gender specific:

• women are better at recognizing facial emotions than men (research):
• men seem to be more likely than women to first look at faces rather than other parts of a nude body (source);
• women are more interested in images with more than one person (source).

Tools and fun for image optimization:

• SEO Friendly Images WP Plugin – automatically optimize image ALT and TITLE with the help of post “%title” variable;
• Play with Google Images labeling (and help improve the quality of Google image search).

How to find images online.

• Finding Stock Photos – lists 3 great resources for stock photos;
• A Guide to Finding and Using Incredible Flickr Images – describing (1) which Flickr images you are allowed to use; (2) tactics to quickly find best images.

Post image: Feeling lucky punk?

Related posts:

1. Social Media Marketing – Think Long-Term Web marketers who view social media as a promotional tool...
2. The Art of Flattering – Social Media Marketing How To Let’s face it, we do flatter daily in real life...
3. Enhanced Image Search – What Is It Like? I mainly search for images online when I need a...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Like I said previously, social media is not all about friends and mutual help. It might also trigger unreasoned hatred, misinterpretation and misunderstanding. Well, fellow Mozzers might have noticed my highly negative attitude towards SEOMoz thumb down system; so recent discussions over there inspired me to post my opinion on general negative voting across the social media. It’s not that I am against disapproval or criticism in general – no, I am not going to put the necessity of negative voting under question – my main point is that negative voting should make sense.

What does a thumb down mean?

Different social networks treat thumbs down differently. In general, the role of voting down in social media site algorithm can be divided into three major groups (depending on the direct impact on an individual submission): active role, passive role and… well… something in-between.

Active role: a thumb down contributes to ‘burying‘ the submission (= no one will see it; an active role of general community news sorting)
Example: Digg

Passive role: a thumb down only shows a member’s attitude (no automatic impact on the post; though this might be added to a submitter’s record)
Example: SEOMoz

Intermediate role: a thumb down tells the system that the submission (and the like) is not relevant to you personally (and to like-minded people) (= don’t show things like this to me and my friends; but this is not necessarily a generally bad post)
Example: StumbleUpon

*Note: StumbleUpon algorithm has been up for debate recently; I have no official evidence to support this (like they say “The thumb down will also lessen the likelihood of your friends stumbling this content“), my assumptions are based on my personal experience and investigation.

What is the process of thumbing down?

Now what is the process of negative voting?

1/ Anonymous thumbs down (it can be either commented, or just left as it is) = the community doesn’t know who thumbed down the post (e.g. SEOMoz)

Advantages: people are free to show their negative attitude;

Drawbacks: beside being rather pointless (most often it does not mean/show/tell anything to a member), this kind of negative voting seems potentially dangerous to the overall community atmosphere and behavior: (1) it encourages ‘biased promotion/discrimination’ based solely on personal attitude (= I don’t like this person, so I will thumb him down no matter what he/she says); (2) it can limit members in their freedom of expressing their own independent opinion (e.g. members feel uneasy to voice their (opposite to the community’s) opinion at the fear to be thumbed down ‘scot-free‘); (3) it may be unfair (as often it is ruled by emotion, that’s only a one-click action!).

2/ Non anonymous (with no compulsory comment/explanation) – example: Mixx

Advantages: unlike the previous one it seems to be more thoughtful as a (cough) “thumber” knows that people will see who has voted them down;

Drawbacks: people may be afraid of showing their honest negative attitude to the submission as this is a good way to make enemies with the submitter (who most often watches his post progress).

3/ Non anonymous (with a comment required)

Advantages: an approach requiring much thought and effort; so negative votes are most often well reasoned;

Drawbacks: people do expose themselves to potential revenge (like above) plus in this case negative voting seems to take too much effort (anyway, why should a negate vote be so much harder to cast than a positive one?)

The solution?

The above analysis got me to thinking about a perfect system (ok, nothing is perfect under the sun – at least the best possible combination of the negative voting role and process). So what might that be?

1/ Anonymous (with no need to comment) but also invisible to anyone except a thumber himself = StumbleUpon. Really this model seems one of the best existing – it provides both freedom of the members and healthy sleep of the submission owner. Besides, non-active role of the negative voting allows for this invisibility. After all, thumbs down don’t mean “Your post is bad” – it just means “This article is not too interesting to me but I have nothing against you personally and I do assume that you are a talented blogger“. Besides, in cases of utmost disagreement, you can always show it by commenting your thumb down.

2/ Anonymous (with the required anonymous comment). I don’t know if that model exists, but it seems quite reasonable. It requires some effort and thought (removes “emotional” factor) and at the same time gives some freedom (you are no more afraid of massive revenge).

Any thoughts?

And what are your thoughts and experiences with negative voting across social media you participate?

Post images: under the same sun, dripping cloud, UAE

Related posts:

1. Online Negative Reputation Case Studies – That’s Never Been Easier While Tom over at SEOmoz posted a must-read piece...
2. Sharing versus Manipulating: Where’s the Line? I’ve been banned from StumbleUpon – not banned but...
3. If You Are Easily Offended… A friend of mine came to me recently saying that...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

The benefits of niche blogging are well-known: that’s a proven way to attract loyal audience who will be visiting your site and interact with you; applying niche blogging basics also allows you to generate organic search traffic by focusing on niche related keywords and highly relevant inlinks.

But is it also as good for actually making money (ROI)? As an example, if you offer services related to your blog topic, that’s not always wise to limit your audience exclusively to this sphere. Blogging about SEO and by this advertising your SEO services (like me), you are most likely to be interested in all webmasters (as that’s who your potential clients are); likewise operating a small jewelry related website, you are most likely to be targeting audience interested in a broader topic like fashion and modern trends; furthermore with many verticals (like travel for example) you want all people to know about your site (as any of us travels from time to time). Being popular outside your niche is another great marketing opportunity that should not be overlooked.

So how to both blog inside and outside your niche (and not to fall between two stools)?

1. Play with your own blog content. Some techniques I am experimenting with (or planning to) throughout this blog are:

• write both entertaining and industry related articles (e.g. my color branding series). This will appeal both to your niche and non-niche friends. I for one try to offer some fun or actionable advice in each of my posts;
• introduce ‘blog columns‘ (e.g. Wasabi (i.e. Social) Wednesdays at SEOMoz). This will encourage your non-niche readers to come back regularly;
• use generally understandable and universal stylistic techniques (e.g. humour is one of the proven methods to expand your readership).

2. Guest post at blogs belonging to a ‘neighbouring’ niche (e.g. tell web designers how to create both appealing and SEO friendly website).

3. Take part in non-niche group writing projects and blog network (I am not a professional web designer but I like to explore the topic and take part in graphic design related writing projects; I have also had some positive experience participating in Don’s home based business project). You can check this site to get updated of the writing projects around the Internet.

4. Participate in social media. A while ago I posted on niche social networking (that makes you an industry influencer). Soon after that I realized non-niche (general) social networking is as well essential, though for SEO industry it might be also risky (once you go popular as an SEO in social media, you will instantly be labelled as ’spammer’ there). Anyway taking part in general social media sites helped me meet new people outside SEO (and that resulted in very promising business connections).

These were my methods of blogging and branding beyond SEO sphere. Most of them are at experimenting phase, so I need your experience and thoughts. How do you manage to balance between niche and general blogging?

• Post images: Urban Pyramid, Equilibrista, Beyond the Boundary and now into Explore too…

Related posts:

1. Color Branding: Geographic and Niche Targeting A while ago I posted an article on color branding...
2. 4 Reasons Why I Started Blogging I am often asked why I actually don’t build links...
3. 6 Benefits of Guest Blogging + 9 Tips for Better Guest Blogging This is the second post in the series of guest...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

A friend of mine came to me recently saying that she was “blatantly approached with an insulting proposition” </quote> by another member of the social media network where she participated. She looked really worried and angry. I recommended her to block the guy and forget about that.

Another friend of mine keeps complaining that he is often “spammed”</quote> by his social media friends who ask him to vote for their stories. I said that social media is all about sharing information, so that’s quite natural.

If you participate in social media:

• you are most likely to be thumbed down;
• you are most likely to get negative reviews;
• you are most likely to receive insulting messages from random people;
• you are most likely to be often misundestood;
• you are most likely to spend time answering meaningless (as you might think) PMs;
• you are most likely to get requests for a favor…

Why is it so, you ask?

• Social media network is a community of people from different countries and cultures – what seems OK in one country is unacceptable in another country. Very often this can result in a cultural shock;
• Social media network is a community of people who speak different languages - hence people may mean to say one thing and sound as if they mean something else;
• Social media network is a community of people of different ages. Generation gap may cause misunderstanding.
• Social media network is a community of people with different motivation. Some people are there to meet friends, others to find love, and some – to network with business partners;
• lastly, social media network is a community of different people - let’s face it, people can be wicked and bitter.
  

What if you are easily offended but still want to participate in social media?

My advice is to join Myspace and start adding friends (Digg is also quite OK for this by the way). You will be spammed, insulted and pissed off to the extent that your activity at any other social media will seem enjoyable after that experience. Just try it and you won’t be as easily offended as you thought before. Good luck!

Image: the rules

Related posts:

1. Sharing versus Manipulating: Where’s the Line? I’ve been banned from StumbleUpon – not banned but...
2. The Art of Flattering – Social Media Marketing How To Let’s face it, we do flatter daily in real life...
3. Social Media Marketing – Think Long-Term Web marketers who view social media as a promotional tool...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.