Ben Tremblay

I want to share with you guys the funniest search keywords I’ve seen in a while. Last week, I was checking my stats on StatCounter during the day and I noticed this particularly funny piece of stat:

Let’s do a quick breakdown of this search. (more…)

I am going to make this short. If you’ve visted the blog recently, you probably noticed some big changes, including a domain change, which means I had to change my feed URL (for the early adopters: yes, again). There is currently a Feedburner redirect for 30 days, but make sure you update your feed reader with the new feed URL if you want to receive updates after that 30 days period: http://feeds2.feedburner.com/bentremblay

Thanks guys! (Oh, please comment on the changes! )

There’s a new trend on twitter right now, mainly popularized by this article from twitip, that consist in “starting over” with your twitter account. It was once very well seen (in fact it still is from my point of view…) to follow back people who were following you, but as the article points out, it’s hard to follow conversations when you follow 10K people. I totally agree with this point (even though it’s still possible with the right tools), but I totally disagree with the way people are “using” this article.

The article mainly says you should follow only the people you find interesting and that there’s nothing wrong with unfollowing people because you don’t care about what they have to say. While I agree, here’s the side effect I find ridiculous. (more…)

Whether you run a blog, website or build websites for your customers, Google is hard to ignore. Of course writing for search engines is not a good idea and we should focus on writing content for people, but we can’t ignore Google. That is if you run a blog, because if you run a more “static” website, SEO is probably and should be a big part of your strategy.

I want to talk about the worst mistake you can make when it comes to SEO and Google traffic: assuming Google is dumb. There are some very common mistakes I see on a all sort of websites, including “professional business” websites and these mistakes are mostly due to thinking Google is dumb and can’t detect basic patterns like keyword stuffing. Thinking you are smarter than Google will probably hurt your website more than help it. (more…)

The world doesn’t want you to be unique. Even though you keep hearing “be yourself” or “be authentic”, the reality is that everything around you is built around the fact that you won’t be unique. The world is built around that concept and also that most people will simply want to follow the latest trends. Blogging and Internet Marketing is no exception. A lot of people sell packages that will make you just like everyone else and a lot of blogs are at the top of the top because they write “top 10 tips” articles just to make you like everyone else. Those same persons and blogs also tell you to come up with a unique idea to make it big. (more…)

The worse way to progress and learn new things is to work on your own. Everybody has something to share that can benefit you in one way or another even if you don’t think it can be profitable to you at first. This mean that just by simply listening to people, you will get new ideas and learn about new things that can definitely be profitable to your business. When listening is not enough, asking is extremely powerful. Most people are willing to help and will help you if you just mind asking for advices. Twitter is an extremely powerful platform for this because you can get in touch with so many interesting people and with just a simple DM you could end up with a skype or gtalk username. (more…)

It’s crazy how easy it is to forget about the word “social” in social networks. You might not really care about twitter or your number of followers and it’s totally fine with me, but for a lot of people it’s actually pretty important. We could spend a lot of time discussing about what is really important on twitter (the number of followers or the strength of your network), but no matter what your strategy or vision is, finding followers is important. You can probably find a thousand posts online on “how to get more followers on twitter”, but to be honest I feel that unless you are already “popular”, here’s the one step process that work best: (more…)

There is a trend right now and it’s called lists. In fact, it’s not really a new trend: top lists have always been popular on the web, but they are now getting overly popular in the Internet Marketing/blogging niche. We have all seen a lot of Top 100 or top 500 bloggers lists emerging lately based on a couple of semi-reliable metrics/personal rating and the natural reaction is: “Am I on the list?”.

While it is extremely flattering to be on such lists or can be very tempting to invest time in analyzing the different metrics to rank higher or simply get on the list, here’s my question: “At the end of the day, does such a list pays the bills?” No it doesn’t, but if you pay the bills with your online business, you will get on those lists without even trying.

I guess what I am trying to say is that there are a lot of things out there to get you focused on the wrong things. Getting on lists or getting more twitter followers is nice, but these won’t help you achieve your goals at the end of the day: they are the result of a successful online business.

What do you think?

I recently tested IntenseDebate on my other blog because I have a crazy post with over 900 comments that needed a decent comment system. I had the choice of course to go with WP 2.7 threaded comments or with a third party plugin, but honestly I didn’t want to spend a day tweaking the CSS and all that to make it work properly. Also, I wanted to introduce “reputation”, so that people could rate comments. On top of that, I had the problem that I couldn’t possibily fit 900 comments on one single page, they had to be splitted on different pages. All of that my friends, is IntenseDebate. (more…)

A common misconception is that if you had more time available, you would achieve so much more. From personal experience (because of school, internships and holidays), I can tell you that more time often mean less things done.

When you have 8 hours in front of you to do what you want, you have plenty of time. Or at least, you think you have. For a lot of people, and this includes me, it’s easy to spend an hour on twitter, an hour on skype, an hour on MSN and an hour on forums when you have a full day in front of you. It is not all wasted time, because during those four hours you might have built connections or your brand a bit more, but let’s admit it: you’re probably procrastinating. (more…)