Instead of getting the “Ranking received” notice you get a blank dialog box that just hangs there forever.

The URL is not added to the index and it is as if the post was never stumbled.

We have had some success with this bug by asking someone else to stumble the post but that does not always work.

Sometimes just waiting a few days will cause it to correct itself.

It appears to have something to do with the system clock on your machine conflicting with something Stumbleupon is looking for.

It began around the time wordpress.com added the bar at the top of all their blogs.

This is the “quota” that some people refer to when they write that they think they are being punished for submitting too many stumbles to quickly and it behaves exactly that way, appearing to the user that their account has been restricted somehow.

If you have that problem, let us know. Someone else ought to be able to add the initial post to Stumbleupon and after that, you should be able to stumble it yourself.

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Technorati Tags: Bill Austin, Internet Marketing, Social Media, Stumbleupon, stumbleupon.com, Stumbling

The buzz topics from the last hint used to be a different animal from the tags that we all can add (up to five) to our reviews.

Note, for example that the tag for business http://www.stumbleupon.com/tag/business/ is completely different from the buzz page for business http://buzz.stumbleupon.com/business/

Buzz topics show up here:
http://buzz.stumbleupon.com/blogs/ (no longer true)
Tags Show up here:
http://www.stumbleupon.com/tag/ and there are Recently Hot Tags plus Most Popular All Time

http://www.stumbleupon.com/tag/blog/ is a popular one and this item is number four on that list:

Zingers – Sales Training Stories and Sales Training Aids – Zimmerma…

Zingers monthly sales newsletter

4 reviews blog, blogs, sales, training, business, newsletters

Under the tag jobs, three of the top four are people we know.
http://www.stumbleupon.com/tag/jobs/

FRACAT – Free Resume And Career Toolbox Blog & How To Put 9.3 Hour…

sports rated 3 days ago

“Why does my boss’ poor planning mean I have to stay late?!?”

6 reviews jobs, blogs, time-management, work, career

albajason.stumbleupon.com

MegT rated 4 weeks ago

Some great stumbles here

6 reviews jobs, stumblers, bloggers, blogs, career-tools

JibberJobber Blog & Blog Archive & Security? We Don&8217;t Need…

tigerbw rated 4 hours ago

Read about why you shall do something everyday for your own career.

3 reviews jobs, career-planning, career, job-security, careers

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Technorati Tags: arizona, Bill Austin, Buzz, Buzz Words, Internet Marketing, Social Media, Stumbleupon, stumbleupon.com, Stumbling

These are the topics that have a “BUZZ” page.

You want your post to be in at least one of these topics.

The size of the tag on the buzz page listing on Stumbleupon shows the relative popularity of that topic.

· arts

· bizarre

· blogs

· books

· business

· computers

· design

· food

· games

· health

· history

· home

· humor

· internet

· linux

· living

· mac

· movies

· music

· photos

· politics

· science

· shopping

· society

· sports

· technology

· videos

· windows

Visit the Stumbleupon home page to find the top topics.

It appears that since I originally wrote this there has been a change to how Stumbleupon handles buzz and topics.

<a href=”http://buzz.stumbleupon.com/”>http://buzz.stumbleupon.com/</a> now redirects to <a href=”http://www.stumbleupon.com/”>http://www.stumbleupon.com/</a>

They now list the following tags across the top of the main page:

What interests you?

* News
* Photos
* Videos
* Arts
* Business
* Fun
* Health
* Computers
* Lifestyle
* Music
* Science
* Sports
* Technology

The same principles apply.  The topics above are what the majority of the people who go browse and wander around the Stumbleupon site will see are items within those topic areas / categories / tags.

Happy Stumbling.

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Technorati Tags: arizona, Bill Austin, Internet Marketing, Social Media, stumble, stumblers, Stumbleupon, stumbleupon.com, Stumbling, tags

“Claim Your Name” is the name of a social networking experiment being run by Bill Austin for some of the Job Seekers of the Scottsdale Job Network.

We have found that almost all employers use some aspects of social networking, although most of them do not recognize it as such. Recruiters, hiring managers and staffing professionals use online search engines and social networking sites to locate potential candidates (sourcing) and to research job candidates and their backgrounds.

Claim Your Name is actually a social network for job seekers to enable them to take charge of their online identity and make it much easier for recruiters and employers to find them online.

Imagine if you were out of work and were a job seeker and imagine that your name just happened to be

Britney Spears

or

Lindsey Lohan

or

Michael Moore

…

Without a strong social network, you are pretty much out of luck.

No one would ever find you online.

This online program called “Claim Your Name” lets you take charge of your name online and tell your story to recruiters, hiring managers and the rest of the world.

If you need help  to take charge of your online reputation, whether for a job search or for your company or personal online reputation management, you can call Bill Austin at 1-480-998-0246 for short consulting assignments or major reputation management engagements.

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Technorati Tags: Arizona SEO, Bill Austin, Business, Internet Marketing, Online Reputation Management, Reputation Management

The Amazon Associates Program will no longer be paying for traffic and sales that result from paid keyword bidding on various pay per click search engines. The original announcement is below.

I say it is about time.  Some people were making a lot of money using the Amazon affiliate program and a keyword bidding strategy and others were paying out a lot of money and not making a lot of associate sales.   The people who were making piles of money, however, are those who were selling classes, e-books and seminars on how to get rich using a keyword bidding strategy and the Amazon Associates program, clickbank, Commission Junction ( CJ.com ) and other affiliate programs.

Dear Amazon Associate:

We’re writing to let you know about a change to the Amazon Associates Program. After careful review of how we are investing our advertising resources, we have made the decision to no longer pay referral fees to Associates who send users to www.amazon.com, www.amazon.ca, or www.endless.com through keyword bidding and other paid search on Google, Yahoo, MSN, and other search engines, and their extended search networks. If you’re not sure if this change affects you, please visit this page for FAQs.

As of May 1, 2009, Associates will not be paid referral fees for paid search traffic. Also, in connection with this change, as of May 1, 2009, Amazon will no longer make data feeds available to Associates for the purpose of sending users to the Amazon websites in the US or Canada via paid search.

This change applies only to the Associates programs in North America. If you are conducting paid search activities in connection with one of Amazon’s Associates Programs outside of the US and Canada, please refer to the applicable country’s Associates Program Operating Agreement for relevant terms and conditions.

We appreciate your continued support and participation in this advertising Program. If you have questions or concerns, please write to us by using the Contact Us form available on Associates Central.

Sincerely,

The Amazon Associates Program

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Technorati Tags: Affiliate Marketing, affiliate programs, Amazon, Internet Marketing

by Bill Austin

Please Stumble this article. Thank you.

Top 3 Social Media Strategies for twitter.com from @wbaustin

Bill Austin was recently interviewed by Travis Campbell of MarketingProfessor.com on the topic of “Top 3 Social Media Tips & Strategies.”  The video interview is featured below.

To summarize, the top three tips are:

1. Get Involved
2. Engage
3. Personalize

Some quotes from this social media and twitter tips video:

“If you want to engage with people in order to grow your business or grow your social relationships and grow your social capital, you have to engage with them.

“Put your picture up there, fill out your bio.”

“It’s called social media for a reason.  And that’s because it’s supposed to be social.  So if you’re just on there to count numbers or connect with everybody in sight and you don’t really know them, you’re not going to get much value out of it.”

“You already know the people who are going to make your business successful and make you successful.” … “they know your next customer.”

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Technorati Tags: Bill Austin, social capital, Social Media, Social Media Expert, social relationships, Strategy, twitter, Twitter Strategy

Is that what you really want?

Many of our clients get solicited by companies who claim to be able to rank them better in the search engines than they are currently ranked.  We are sure that you get those same solicitations. As you wade through those piles of spam solicitations, here is the most important thing to keep in mind.

Ranking well for something is not the same thing as ranking well for something that will sell your products or services.

If you want to improve your search engine rankings, the first thing to find out is what the search terms for your products, services and industry are that people actually search for in volume.

Keyword research tools are readily available to determine what terms are being used within your industry and surrounding your product or service.  Do the work to develop a comprehensive list of keywords and key phrases for your industry, product and service, rank them in order by relative number of searches and use that list for all other marketing that you do, both online and offline as well as for your public relations campaigns.

As your marketing campaigns proceed make a second list of the terms that are leading to sales of your products and services.  Use that list to hone your marketing campaigns to acheive the better results for the search terms that make you the most money.

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Technorati Tags: Internet, Internet Marketing, Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, SEO

From nowhere to top 10 on Google for Car Czar in 30 minutes.

Be careful what you write to me about. I was just sitting here minding my own business and somebody sent me a note on Twitter saying “Hey Car Czar – Look at this.” I thought that was somewhat peculiar and not knowing that I had been named Car Czar, and indeed, not even knowing what that was, I took a look at the link above and it was the same article I wrote about earlier having to do with a Manhattan Project for U.S. Automakers to get them out of their rut and to rapidly get them on the road to more energy efficient cars.

I had to do a bit more research and discovered that there was a proposal in Congress that a Car Czar be named to oversee the Big 3 Auto Makers Bailout. I thought it had overtones of Jimmy Carter and the Inflation Czar and the Energy Czar and several other failed policies so I wrote a bit about it in Car Czar and let it go. Within a few minutes people were reading the post and within 30 minutes it had hit the front page of Google for the search term Car Czar. It might not still be there but it was there for a while.  I see it at the top of the Google news search right now as well.

Car Czar #1 on Google News

#7 on Google

Car Czar

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Technorati Tags: Arizona SEO, Car Czar, Google, Google News, search, SEO

Thank you for asking.

The Future is at Stake.

My name is Bill Austin and this is my response to the most frequently asked question I hear.  I am quite well connected on various social media and social networking sites and more people connect to me every day.  New LinkedIn and Twitter connections often ask me “How Can I Help?”

As more and more people from twitter.com ask how they can help, I find it very difficult to fit a response into 140 characters.  This post has been created to make the response easier to manage within that character limit.

When I first started networking I would respond to each person with a non specific answer indicating that I was fine and would let them know if I needed any help. Later I began to reply with a specific answer that let people know precisely what I need and what I am passionate about.  Over the years, about one out of 10 people actually did any of the things that I list in the response.  To that 10 percent, I say “a fond and hearty Thank You.”  To the other 9 people I say, “Please read on and see how easy it is to help save the future.”

Thank you for connecting.

My primary goals these days involve survival through the current slump and positioning for explosive growth as the mental state of the nation begins to recover.  My passion in work is helping people grow their business.  My passion in life is helping grow the next generation of brilliant people who will continue to move the world forward.  Our company does a lot of volunteer work in the areas of Education, Health, Human Services, Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) and when my core team is too busy with lower order needs, we can’t help as much in those areas.

I am mostly working right now on building awareness of what my team can do to help people grow their businesses.  Once the business gets back to where it was before our real estate and mortgage clients vanished, I can get back to doing more of the charitable and philanthropic work that makes our communities better.

What we need primarily is more people having knowledge about what we do and more links to various articles on our website that communicate that information.

Here are some of our articles about Internet Marketing.  If you find any of these interesting, we would appreciate a blog post or link to those you find compelling and of value to your contacts and clients.

Does your Website Need Professional Help

Internet Marketing and all of its most important elements can be completely summed up in ten letters.

Small Business Internet Marketing Services

EBay Affiliate Success

Business Blogging

Bill Austin
(480) 998-0246

Some of the organizations we support and participate in include:

Community Information & Referral
Write to Congress and ask them to support national funding of 211 call centers.
Find your local 211 call center and offer to help.

The Maricopa County Fair Association

Scottsdale Job Network

American Legion Post 911

Metropolitan Youth Symphony

Starshine Academy

Arizona Technology Council

Arizona Foreclosure Prevention Task Force

The American Diabetes Association’s Rip’s BAD Ride

Arizona-American Indian Science and Engineering Fair

Central Arizona Regional Science and Engineering Fair (CARSEF)

Junior Science and Humanities Symposium

Arizona Science Olympiad

Arizona Technology Council Workforce Development Committee

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Technorati Tags: help, LinkedIn, twitter, volunteering, volunteers

Google Page Rank as shown on the Google Toolbar does not update very frequently.  Lately it has been updating 3 or 4 times per year and that may become less as time goes by.  Google claims that actual PR or PageRank, a trademarked concept of Google Corporation, is updated on a continues basis but that the Google Toolbar numbers are updated infrequently based on taking a snapshot of the data and pushing it out onto the server that tells the toolbar what the value of PR for a particular page is.

Google Toolbar PageRank is shown as a little green bar on the toolbar.  The value shown on that bar is shown as an integer and can range from 0 up to 10.  In reality, the PR scale is based on continuous numbers based on a logarythmic scale.  Actual PageRank values are numbers such as 3.831 which might be shown as PR 4/10 or PR 3/10 on the toolbar scale.

When you look at a Google Toolbar PageRank value, keep in mind that you are looking at archelogical data, similar to an anthorpologist examining the skull of a 100,000 year old ancestor of ours.  Only Google has the current real data and we can only infer what those numbers might be today based on trends and a knowledge of historical changes.

Ths number shown on the Google Toolbar PR scale is minimally useful and has little relationship to today’s reality.

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