I’ve decided to expand this blog to new horizons. Thus far it’s been all about our journey with Nathan and learning how to deal with the world of special needs. I’ve mostly talked about our emotions, equipment, therapies, nutrition, and other aspects of having a disabled child.

This week I’ve decided to talk about my previous passion, the one I had before Nathan was born: Internet Marketing & Search Engine Optimization.

Back in early 2000, I took a break from college and found a job for a semester. It was at an internet marketing firm. I found myself fascinated by it and wanting to know more and more and more. This was a company in the “cutting edge” of the internet world at the time and they were building quite a network of sites. When I started with them they were running about 30 sites – by the time I left 3 years later, we were running and promoting over 4000 different websites. Their focus was on using Google, Yahoo, and other search engines to drive traffic to their websites, which offered a variety of products and services.

I started my own business in 2002, consulting at nights and weekends. It took off and after 1 year I had too much work to be able to afford to keep my job And it all grew from there. I started attending the SEO conferences, met all the gurus, traded secrets, tried out a variety of methods, learned everything from the “white hat” to the “black hat” techniques, in fact I helped create many of the industry standards today. I was always the shy type so I never made a name for myself, but all of the people who did, know me and know of me.

You might be wondering what exactly it is that I do? Search Engine Optimization revolves around methods to gain high rankings in search engines for desired keywords. So if I decided I wanted to sell “pink ribbons”, I would start a website selling pink ribbons, and then “work my magic” so that when people type “pink ribbons” into Google, Bing or Yahoo, my website appears at the top – not the sponsored, paid results, but the “organic” results coming from their algorithms. Of course I am also skilled in managing Pay Per Click campaigns, but my specialty is in the organic results.

This all probably sounds like mumbo-jumbo, especially after I’ve been talking about such different things on this blog for the last 3 years. But there’s a good reason why I decided to include these posts in the blog. It comes down to $$$$.

Taking care of a child with special needs is EXPENSIVE! Therapy costs, medical bills, equipment bills .. I don’t have to say it, all of you know it already. I know a lot of families then decide to try and find alternate sources of income..and of course, the obvious way to do it is online. It requires finding things to do/sell on the internet while we are home caring for our kids. And then the question always arises – how? If I create a website, how do I get people to visit it? Where do I get traffic?

And this, my friends, is my pre-Nathan obsession. It’s what I’ve done for 10 years. I am supremely good at it (excuse my lack of modesty It’s like 2nd nature to me, after working on literally thousands of sites/projects. I can do/talk SEO in my sleep.

So to wrap up this post. I’ve decided to start sharing articles, knowledge, resources about search engine optimization and internet marketing. For those of you that already have websites that you are trying to promote – you may choose to use this information to help you. If you don’t like this new “horizon” of Nathan’s blog – please skip all of these posts!

Also, as I venture into some of the “new” areas of internet marketing, such as social media marketing, I will share what I am learning. Since Nathan’s birth I’ve had little time to stay up to date with new techniques. But now that Nathan is older and in school, and things are much more settled with him, I plan on going back to the “research” stage and expanding my skill set to all of the “new media” techniques that are now out there. Hence my post about Twitter the other day.

My goal for this new category of Nathan’s blog: to help empower and support other families to gain greater financial stability and success. Perhaps this information may help you create/increase revenue streams which you can then use in taking care of your child with special needs.

I hope you guys enjoy this new chapter of Nathan’s blog.

Perhaps some of you noticed an increase in activity on my twitter feed. I decided today was the day when I was finally going to “get” tweeter. So with lots of hope I opened my twitter account and….had no idea what to do.

I found a tutorial who started talking about what to do/what not to do…but still, I just didn’t “get” what I was supposed to say/do with it! Fortunately this tutorial did mention Tweetdeck so I figured I’d start there. While messing around on tweetdeck, the fabulous Katy, Charlie’s mom, came to my rescue! Katy kindly explained to me how to organize columns, what sorts of content to publish, proper tweeter protocol, what the # and other symbols meant, and more.

So here’s a summary of what I learned today, maybe this will help other twitter aspirees (and for a lot of this I’m going to quote Katy, I am just writing this as a record of what I learned and in case others are interested):

* Don’t just talk about yourself or what you’re doing. Imagine that you are at a cocktail party with all sorts of different people, and you are having conversations with all of them. With some you can talk about your kids, with others about business, with others about what’s going on in the world. Try and keep it interesting and varied. Also, if others say something that is interesting, retweet them or reply to them to engage them in conversations.

* Twitter is a great place to share information that you find interesting – news articles, blog posts, cool videos and/or photos, etc. Or if you have a random interesting thought – this is a great place to share it.

* I was a little bit confused about what to talk about. In my life there are several “groups” – family, special needs mommies, spiritual friends, work colleagues. I figured if I talked about Nathan, the work colleagues wouldn’t be interested, and if I talked about work, my special needs mommy friends wouldn’t be interested, etc. But what I understood today is that Twitter is ultimately about people – and everyone has multiple facets to their life – so it’s okay to talk about all of them.

* The key to twitter is TOOLS. Twitter itself is not very user friendly. However, there are many tools that make using twitter easy and fun:

- tweetdeck: Allows you to view many things at once – what the people you are following are tweeting about, direct messages sent to you, when people mention you, and more. It also allows you to create lists and view what people in those lists are saying. I created a list called “CP” and can now keep an eye on what other CP moms are saying.

- twitterfeed: You can set up tweeterfeed so it automatically updates facebook and twitter when you publish a blog post. You can also set up google alerts and set them up on twitterfeed to update your FB and Twitter accounts.

- socialoomph: Allows you to schedule tweets so you can write a whole bunch of them at once, and they are published at a specified time frame. If inspiration hits, you can do a whole bunch at a time about a topic, so you’re not always having to look for instant content.

- alltop.com & popurls.com: If you need inspiration and want to find ideas to tweet about, these two sites are FULL of popular articles and topics to inspire you.

- search.twitter.com: Search twitter conversations by topic. Enter a keyword and find people talking about that topic, and what they are saying. Good way to find people to follow, as well as to engage in conversations.

- twitpic.com: Allows you to upload and publish photos to twitter.

- bit.ly: Since you can only post a limited number of characters on twitter, you can use this service to shorten your URL’s and to track the number of clicks to each URL.

Of course this is only the beginning of my twitterventure so my knowledge is quite limited. It was fun learning about Twitter and finally understanding what everyone is/has been raving about!

THANK YOU KATY FOR ALL OF YOUR HELP TODAY – YOU ROCK!

Update!

Here are a few more tools that people recommended:

* twellow.com – directory where you can find people by subjects
* tweepml.org – you can find lists of people that others created, and automatically follow them all
* hootsuite.com – allows you to manage multiple twitter accounts and organize your twitter strategy
* wefollow.com – directory of top twitterers