Yesterday I wrote about how effort does not equal results. Results are always better. Great results come from testing and tweaking your own routine. You can set up a virtuous cycle: You get more efficient, and have more time to learn more about your job, which helps you be more efficient, and so on. I’ve …

Announcing a new tool: The Gramanator During my MozCon content creation session today, I announced a new tool: The Gramanator. It is mighty. It is the Gramanator: Bow down before it. What it does The Gramanator will take any public Google Reader Shared Feed and: Clean it up, removing stop words. Assemble all of the …

I’ve been building some custom reports for Portent in Google Spreadsheets. They do fun stuff like grab Google Analytics data, insert data from other APIs and such. One thing that nearly drove me batty, though, was figuring out how to automatically add a new row below the last row with data. Turns out, Google App …

I’m addicted to Quora. There, I’ve said it. I know some folks have doubts. I love StackOverflow too. But something about Quora has me on there, all the time, answering questions. I do have an ulterior motive: If I can get on there and help lots of people out, I can build an audience. If …

If you use the KeywordDiscovery API, and Python, my pain is your gain. It took me a few hours to get this to work. You can grab it and go. Here’s the function, written in my usual Python Pigdin. I don’t recommend using it without a passing knowledge of Python, but that’s up to you: …

Note that I am using ad.ly as part of this test. I am not saying ad.ly is bad. They have a great site, a nice toolset and make no promises. I am suggesting (spoiler alert) that sponsored tweets rank in profitability somewhere below hiring alchemists to try to turn lead into gold. Sometimes, I just …

One of the easiest ways to improve your link popularity is to fix old, busted links from other sites. For example: Say I have an online store. One product page is www.mysite.com/bike-tire/tubeless. A nice webmaster decides to link to that page, but uses www.mysite.com/bike/tubless. Because that link is incorrect, anyone going to the ‘tubless’ page …

Quick post tonight: I’ve been using eBay’s keyword research tool for a while now. It may just beat the more established toolsets when it comes to commercial keyword research. Here’s how you use it: First, go to http://labs.ebay.com/raghavgupta/demoto/to?. Type in your query: When you click ‘submit’ you’ll get a report like this: The ‘Popularity’ column …

Update: RFPs Suck now out in paperback 11.30.09: RFPs Suck is now out in paperback, folks. Recent events have only proven to me that Tom’s formula really works. If nothing else, you can read his book to screen for RFPs you should – or shouldn’t – respond to. RFPs are like a colonoscopy: Someone you …

If you’re serious about blogging, then at some point you’ll have to grab an image of your screen. And, in true Give-a-Pig-a-Pancake fashion, once you do that you’ll want to edit it. Then you’ll realize that video would be really cool. And so on. Screen capture: Snapz Pro X I’m probably old-fashioned here, but Snapz …