Search Engine Optimisation

Refer a Friend – Earn Cash Today!

Andy Kinsey — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 17:00:29 +0000

As many of you know SEOAndy is part of Andy Kinsey Designs, which also offers website design and graphic design services. Today I launched a referral scheme for those divisions, within a few hours I’ve had about 15 “affiliates” sign up.

The premise is simple, refer a friend and earn up to £25 per new client.

To get started all affiliates need to do is send me a few details and they can instantly start referring and begin to cash in on clients they refer.

Referrals are free to come via word of mouth, email, facebook, twitter etc – all the referred company / person needs to do is let me know they are being referred and by who in the first contact we have about their project.

Why am I doing this?

This is a great question, an put simply I am looking to expand the business.

I currently juggle everything from initial contact, to the main work load to marketing the business and beyond. I want to be able to employ another person to help out, and also as back up such that if I am ever taken ill again the business doesn’t stop working for any period of time.

In addition to this, many of my clients and friends refer new clients to me. I want to say thank you to those refers for such amazing friendship and loyalty.

Want to know more?

If you would like to know more or would like to join the referral scheme please visit http://andykinsey.co.uk/refer/

Any questions you can email me via that site or leave a comment below.

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Notes:

1) I will be adding seo services to this website and AKD website, plus adding them to the referral scheme in the coming weeks.

2) I will be issuing ad banners in coming weeks.

3) Each month I will be offering a prize to the person / company who refers the most number of clients successfully.

Google Privacy Update – What It Really Means

Andy Kinsey — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 10:06:34 +0000

In this post at the risk of becoming a news type I wanted to clear some crap up about the latest round of privacy updates from Google. Over the past few 24 hours I’ve read countless articles and opinions about how “scary” this is and with lots of news lets claiming a “backlash” against Google which just fuels the whole scary thing…

So in this post I am going to tell you why things have changed and what has changed that you need to know. Remember as you read this 99% of what is in this new document already existed, it was just duplicated across many other privacy policies and is now integrated into 1 (instead of over 70).

First, the changes to Google’s privacy policy will not happen until March 1st. So if you really want to leave Google you can do, no rush – just visit the Data Liberation website to find out how to get it out – its easy.

Second, the changes mean that Google won’t need you to sign in 25 times to get between Google Products etc – Think about facebook which has you ALWAYS signed in … not just on facebook but across the web. Google is just talking about on Google websites like YouTube and Google+ … seamless integration for you and setting across the board. Of course this also means more personalisation of what is on the page you are viewing, but in a world of increasing social influence is this really so scary? Again think of facebook always telling you what your friends have “liked” even though you never asked. At least with Google you have to be searching for something relevant to that…

Third, As i mentioned most of the policies already existed in one or more of over 70 documents. Google has always been fair with data and this won’t change. What will change is we will actually get a single document which will be nicer to read and make more sense – this is something regulators and consumers across the globe have called for since about 2006… I just wish other companies would now follow suit (BING?).

Fourth, the new policy includes further features for the New Dashboard (which has been around for a while) and Ad Preference facility. If you’ve not met them before take a look there is some interesting stuff in there (including data liberation stuff). In addition to this you will be able to share things with a lot more ease, thanks to new buttons appearing across the sites (and the new toolbar on the top of each property).

Fifth, unlike many of our large internet companies, Google is clearly now committed to being open and responsible (even more than previously) when it comes to information about you and me. If you would like to know more about the Google Privacy changes visit the GootToKnow information page.

The Future of SEO – The Game is NOT Over

Andy Kinsey — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 17:01:55 +0000

I recently spoke to a group of SEO’s and Marketer’s about an article I wrote last year predicting the SEO trends of 2012. There were many questions asked about why I thought things would happen and how we can best leverage what we know and predict. Today I wanted to share a few of those questions and answer them in public.

If you have a question about my predictions for SEO in 2012 and beyond leave a comment below this article.

Personalised Search is moving to the main stream, how can we best use this to our advantage as marketers?

One of the things as Marketers of the Digital Age which we have come to realise is that search was always going to become social, ever since the birth of twitter the writing was on the wall. Today we are in a world where Google is showing some Google+ pages next to search results, and certainly profiles within it’s “suggestion” boxes. A world where Facebook and Bing are so tightly integrated it is hard to find a search where they are not personalising using facebook.

How can we best use this knowledge? Well that is a little more tricky. To answer it you need to consider what you do everyday as a searcher and marketer. You search using Google… it knows your IP, so it knows your location… search will be localised to that … you let Google keep your search history, instantly pages you’ve visited will move up the rankings … its personalised. Actually, it is quite hard with any search engine to not get some kind of personalised search results. The answer is, you have to keep doing what you are doing – optimise completely for your local market, keep blogging away and use social media like there is no tomorrow. Talk to people on twitter and facebook and don’t spam them with just links. Use Google+ as a means to say what you are doing but have in-depth posts on there and always always optimise your “about sections” (on all social media) – here is mine for Google Plus.

The Panda Update really hurt some of our websites, how can we best work towards recovery for those websites we are struggling with and will it happen again?

Lets be honest Panda wasn’t nice, it kicked you when you had written potentially thousands of articles and press releases and spread them far & wide. No, really I am kidding. Google Panda kicked you for creating low quality content which you spread across the web, you treated the web like it was your bedroom back when you were a teen, you messed it up and left it for someone to clean up… well now your parent is ignoring it and letting you find how to improve – deal with it.

The solution is to a) focus internally, make the best content possible and put it on your site. b) use only quality websites to promote your own, this means no more writing for craparticles.com but for quality and relevant blogs and article websites for your industry. c) use social media to talk to people and show you are a real company and not just some marketing robot that eats bits for lunch!

Panda the Sequel? mmm not quite but there will be another update quite soon from Google which will do 3 things … 1) lower what a domain name is worth – its already happening but you can expect even less weight to be given to your domain name … why? simply because search engines know there are only so many domains and a lot of “exact match” domains are spam-filled so it doesn’t like them and will stop ranking them just because they have a nice name. 2) Link Farms will be next to worthless … search engines will stop giving any weight to websites dedicated to link building … will this include directories like the yellow pages? who knows – but the value of the yellow pages isn’t in its link power but in the traffic it sends from visitors. 3) social will play an even larger role outside of personalised search. this means if there is a lot of talk about something on twitter, facebook, digg or elsewhere and the same link is always posted (such as say micheal jacksons death and a BBC news article) this link will hold it’s juice for longer than a few days. Essentially a larger proportion of results will be based on social directly.

SEO has become harder this year, is there anything we can do to beat the competitors?

Someone had to ask this, it was inevitable. The answer is simple. SEO did not become harder in 2011 any more than it did in 2010 or 2009 … nor did it die off nor will it for the foreseeable future.

The fact is each year things change, it is how we as SEO professionals deal with this change that counts. We need to evolve our best practice for link building, we need to stop putting thousands or articles up for just one stupid link which is worthless, we need to stop using copywriters (sorry for this) from India and the likes writing crap and worthless content for websites. We need to refocus our energies and understand how best to spend our time, effort and monies to get the best return on investment. If you don’t change, and change now, then you will find this year harder – just as you did last year and the year before. Change in the world of digital media is a constant, everything changes (CRT to LCD, Landline to Mobile) evolution is faster in technology than any other industry, get used to it or get out.

Is the Game Over for SEO, as Social Media platforms take over will be as an industry be left for dead? How can we prevent the death of SEO?

One of my favourite quotes, and I’ve mentioned this before is from Mark Twain.

The News of My Death is Greatly Over Exaggerated

A few years back Jason Calacanis of This Week in Startups announced SEO was Dead. It caught so much attention, as he had intended, that in itself it helped his marketing and SEO. Funny hey? Not really, quite clearly a ploy by a very very clever marketer and entrepreneur.

So just as with Jason’s proclamation, it is with so your own… SEO is not dead and it won’t be in 5 years. The truth is 5 years in search is a long time, 1 year is a long time. Sometimes a day can seem like an eternity as updates are rolled out. No body can see that far in advance (except me? no joke i can’t) but I can give you a guess of what I think will happen further to my seo predictions for 2012.

1) SEO will become less important as more content is gathered by social platforms which will have grown and grown and become the hub for businesses. 2) corporate websites will become selling platforms, which SEO’s must still optimise for both search and mobile / apps. 3) monkies will become tigers 4) SMO will become the “big boy” in the park as the world optimises its social pages. 5) Hubs will form away from facebook and twitter, such as behance, which will be industry based social networks – this is where online business will live (not on their corporate website). 6) Facebook will suffer the fate of MySpace and be dieing a slow death as a competitor takes over the market.

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At this point I want to leave the questions, I will post some more questions in the coming weeks – and update my predictions blog as to say whether it was right or wrong (some items have already been proven!).

If you have any questions please leave a comment below.

Start Up Marketing: The SEO of Guest Blogging

Andy Kinsey — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 11:34:19 +0000

Over the past few years I’ve been lucky enough to guest blog around the web, on a variety of subjects related to design, seo and marketing. Last year I opened the doors to let my child out to play and offered the chance to guest post on SEOAndy. From my experience of writing and being written for I wanted to talk about why and how you should guest post.

This is a topic of great value to start up businesses, as well as existing businesses who are looking to gain drive more traffic to their website.

Before I go rambling on, the first thing to say is that it is not easy to start guest blogging. You can ask many times and be told no, it could be lack of experience on your part , it could be the blog owner doesn’t “do” guest posts or it could be something else. If you struggle pull out you contacts, or social media friends, and ask for a favour … this is generally how most guest authors will start and its usually a great start as you are less likely to be told where to go if you have a few typo’s … been there and have that t-shirt.

Why Guest Blog?

The reason to guest blog is simple. Guest Blogging is a fantastic way to drive traffic to your site, and thereof sales. Guest blogging is an awesome way of building your brand and getting your work in front of people (potential customers) who may have never seen your work before, and if they have making them remember you – the pin-prick advertising effect. Guest blogging is a useful way to earn links back to your website from trusted and “traffic busy” blogs and websites – this will increase traffic to your site and potentially increase your search rankings.

Advice for Guest Blogging

Find Relevant Audiences – Guest blogging takes time and effort, each blog you write should be unique and of it’s own merit. So it would be annoying if you were to get nothing for your efforts, but that is what will happen if you post it to a blog which is not relevant to your industry (or more so niche market), the post would become useless. This idea of content being useless is why a Google Update in 2011 (panda) downgraded search rankings of some article websites which did not add value to a market. So, spend time reading what is on a potential host blog, talk to them about what they are doing and wanting and ensure they have an audience who will be receptive to your blog.

Pitch Perfect – Pitching you idea for a guest blog isn’t going to be easy, it takes practice to get it right and if you send out generic e-mails you will get NO slammed in your face. Be personal and give the blog host options. Try for a far more nicer approach than just wanting a “yes” back from the host, ask them is there anything in specific you should write about or what their rules are on length and images. If you are lucky this will already be on the website, but by asking you show some real interest in their business. If you can in giving them choices give some blog titles and if possible an idea of what you want to cover in such a guest post.

Keep Content Tight – One of the mantra’s of this website is to explain why and show that CONTENT IS KING. In guest posting this is no different, if you blog something of no value, your link within will be worthless, it will be worthless to the blog host and you are likely to get an editorial shrug of “try again”. Remember to write good content of real value, don’t go over the same stuff in 25 blog posts across 25 sites on the same day and expect to get any value from them – you just won’t. Write on unique piece and post it to one trust blog, even once a month and you will see rewards. Keep your content tight, remember to check spellings and dress up well for your date with a guest post.

Make it Social – One of the most annoying things one of my guest bloggers did was not to post on social media about their guest post. Do not bite the hand that feeds you! You are posting for free (usually) so swings and round abouts, if you guest post let people know … you’ve got a link or two and it will help you so get them some traffic too … remember the cycle of life. Oh and if you look a gift horse in the mouth expect a kick up the arse! All I am saying here is be nice, tweet and +1 your post, advertise it and make the most of it. Caring is Sharing

Image Source: andykinsey.co.uk

10 Secrets of Online Selling

Andy Kinsey — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 10:10:13 +0000

Selling online is not easy normally, and even less so in this economic down turn. But with the use of 10 simple seo secrets to online selling you can not just improve your online sales by a few percent but by a huge amount.

It’s About The Product!
Just because you spent hundreds or thousands on a nice shiney new ecommerce website doesn’t mean that your potential customers are interested in it. Your visitors are there for one thing your product, so sell it … stop faffing with adding new features and cluttering the product pages, nice simple descriptive content with an awesome picture – it will sell.
Get Marketing
This website is dedicated to marketing websites and companies. Think about how your customers find your website and products, generally it will be a search – what search terms do they use and can you leverage this knowledge such as to obtain more visitors for them (and duplicate the success for other search terms).
Market Offline, Even if You Only Sell Online!
Sounds a bit odd but think about it, everyone knows Amazon and Ebay … but why? they do a lot of offline marketing. Other stores such as K&Co (formerly kays) and Very sell online only but are known through offline marketing from bill boards to tv ads. If you can’t afford those don’t worry, get yourself some amazing business cards design and then get those business cards printed professionally. Get yourself some stationary and use it well, if you send something out have a leaflet about your company (it will likely sit on a coffee table for a few weeks constantly reminding people of your brand).
Build Trust in Your Brand
It is hard to be the best, and being the best makes people buy from you, its why brands get to the top of a market like nike when there other perfectly good trainer manufacturers like hi-tec. Building trust is not easy but you can start with an “about us” page, have you contact details on there including a physical page if you are selling products. Join social networks and have conversations, don’t just sell but talk to people. Join ISIS, TrustUK, SafeBuy and also join a review website such as TrustPilot (such reviews will appear on your Google Places page and Shopping Items).
Use Proven Technology
If you are a start-up don’t be tempted to build your own store, this is not the easiest or most affordable route. Use something that is available to the market and can be used off the shelf or with customised themes, if you are wanting more affordable use Open Source script like PrestaShop (its free), going up market consider Shopify (pay monthly) or if you want control on your desktop maybe try Actinic (one off payment).
Don’t Forget Old Customers
Customers become loyal and return only when you talk to them, give them amazing service and don’t forget them. If you haven’t set up a mailing list do so, its your doorway to their inbox. You can send them newsletters with amazing special offers and the latest news about all your amazing products. If you customers don’t get contacted within 3 months of purchase you are as good as forgotten.
Sell Sell Sell
Your website is about selling products so sell. From the first second a visitor arrives it is your job to make them convert into a sale. Use banners use text make your best sellers sell. Don’t ask them to register for the sake of it, don’t ask them for an email to sign up to a newsletter to see your content – people will just hit back at the first barrier and that is a lost sale. Remove barriers and make it easy.
Make it work for sales not for looks
One of the most annoying things across the web is that people make websites that look nice but don’t work. Many times I see ecommerce websites or even just information websites which yes look spectacular but thats it, they don’t convert and don’t make the company any money – indeed the look good in web design galleries but just cost money to run. Make a site that works for you not for your designer. If you can do both, great.
Selecting a Payment Provider
Choose a payment provider which people know and trust, paypal for instance is instantly known and trusted (just one button and everyone knows they can trust it, for example Piano Tuition Hyde’s Gift Voucher section). Once you have one see how it works then add another and see if conversions increase, try SagePay and Google Checkout amongst others. Also if you use an on-site checkout integrated to your site ensure you have a SSL certificate.
Use a Great Hosting Company
A great hosting company means a faster website loading and not slowing down when lots of people visit at the same time. It doesn’t have to cost the world and you certainly dont need to be an expert. Look around get the best you can, if you need help ask your friendly website designer.

5 Best SEO Practices For 2012

Andy Kinsey — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 16:59:32 +0000

With the escalating competition in the web arena, it has become more important than ever to improve
your SEO methodologies and take them to a higher level. The success of your website depends on
how well you portray it before search engines and target visitor. Although there is a need to adopt new
methods for upgrading your SEO practices, you need to ensure that the core strength of SEO, which is
content, should still remain the focus of your methods. Below given are five ways in which you can
take your website to the forefront of search engines ranks in 2012.

Analyze your target audience

One of the basics of search engine optimization is to continuously analyze your target audience base
and be sensitive to its changing requirements. Accordingly, you need to make changes in your web
content so as to make it appropriate to the need of the hour. Also, you need to have a good grip on the
age, gender, skills, income group, education levels and geographical location of your target visitors.
This will also help you provide content and services that are suitable to the readers. What is more, this
analysis has to be a continuous process and not an occasional function.

Build relevant links

In 2012 and in all the coming years, make a resolution to build only relevant links to your website.
You might have a thousand links flowing in and out of your site but unless they are relevant to your
web content, they are not of much use to you. Also, you need to focus on quality of the link. Having
hundred links of high page rank web pages gets you a lot more leverage than having thousand low page
rank links.

Make your website mobile-phone friendly

Times have changed and computers are not the sole source of internet access. Smart phones sell
like hot cakes because of the internet access that they provide. Most of the people who own smart
phones browse through their phones and so, if you want more visitors, you need to make your website
mobile friendly. Some of the things that you can incorporate in this regard are not using many images,
providing clear content, easy navigation, installing mobile plugins and using plain HTML/CSS instead
of Flash.

Link chains

If you have not tried it before, it is high time that you try it now. Link chain, as the name indicates, is
a chain of links between your websites and your blogs. So, when a visitor comes to one of your blogs,
he is directed to one of your other blogs and the chain continues. The same applies when search engine
spiders visit you as well. For better results, link the one ends of the chain to relevant websites that
enjoy a higher rank and higher traffic.

Keywords still rule

Keywords should be your focus. Research the latest and most effective keywords and ensure that they
are used with a 1% or 2% density in your web content. Too much of keyword usage is not appreciated
by visitors as well as search engines because the content fails to be satisfactorily informative.

About the Guest Author
Anita is an online SEO and marketing specialist who works for workmonk.com as work manager and
often writes on SEO/SEM and business marketing strategies regularly as guest blogger.

2011 A Year of SEO Articles in Review

Andy Kinsey — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 12:36:22 +0000

2011 has departed and 2012 has begun. Search Optimisation and Digital Marketing is a fickle niche that is hard to predict, though I did my best a few weeks ago with 18 seo predictions for 2012 and it would appear other SEO’s are in agreement.

So to welcome in the new year I want to take a quick look book at my favourite and your favourite posts from 2011.

My Favourites:

Brand Positioning
One of my pet topics in 2011 was Branding and Brand Marketing. Branding is vitally important regardless of your market and audience, without the best brand and identity you may as will whistle into the wind. This post is about moving your brand for maximum effect for your audience.
BBC Homepage – Redesign of the Year
One of the most controversial posts of the year. I love the redesign but few others seem to … at least if you listen to the few people continually commenting on my blog and the BBC website, and not the huge mass of people who haven’t said anything about it and are probably quite happy with it. I think it is more the comments I like from this post rather than the article itself.
Yell.com Websites a Waste of Space!
This is one of my more ranty posts of 2011, though I must say there was a hell of a lot of agreement on twitter and facebook for the sentiment in the article.
and finally, 25 Awesome Business Card Designs
I loved doing the research for this post, the designs in the post are ones which have inspired my designs both online and offline over the past year or so. I hope you enjoy this post as much as I did.

Most Visited Posts of 2011

Mobile SEO in 5 Easy Steps

Andy Kinsey — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 13:34:39 +0000

The pace of innovation over the past decade or so has been amazing. Do you recall 1999? Sure you do, when Google didn’t rule the world and Lycos or Altavista was the search engine of choice? Think of the mobile phone you had, did you even have one? If you did no doubt it was just about able to take a call every few hours without the battery dieing or without signal dropping. Today we live in a world of slim phones, that are (almost) always connected to the network, we can text, speak, take video calls, and (importantly for this post) access the internet.

In the past few years alone the Mobile web has grown so much that for many sites the amount of traffic they receive from mobile is over 10% (for seoandy this is about 15%). This growth looks set to continue as tablet computers (finally) take off and become common place.

With this in mind, you will no doubt understand why SEO for the Mobile Web is important. So lets take a look at 5 steps to getting started with Mobile SEO. There are many many ways to invest in your future on a mobile platform, below are my tips to give you a solid grounding in Mobile SEO – these are the basics, you should build on them.

Get Started with Mobile SEO

Who Are Your Audience?
SEO is all about knowing your audience, knowing who they are and what they want from your site. Mobile SEO is even more so about this, you have to know them well enough to know what they want to see first and how best to get visitors to perform an action. In essence prioritize your content on a page for your audience, if you are a shop users may want to see an image or the features of a product first and not the price…
Try different layouts using A/B Testing to see which works best for you.
Don’t Forget Your Basic SEO Techniques
As always Basic SEO will give longevity to your optimisation. Getting the basics correct should always be your priority when making changes to your website. If you ignore the basics rankings both mobile and web will lower over time and not increase over time. So, now KISS ME STUPID!
Be The Mobile Bot!
Sounds a bit like soul searching but it’s not. When search engines index your website they will do it using a “bot” one for web, one for images and one for mobile (in Google’s case). If you login to Google Webmaster Tools you will find you can load a certain page using each bot. Therefore you can see what Google will see and optimise for that bot. Have a play and make the bot work for you, not hinder you.
Don’t Forget I Need A KISS!
Keep It Simple Stupid – basically strip any content from a mobile web page that you can. If you have a menu the size of the amazon river forget it, take your main links and have them display. If you’ve great chunks of text split it into pages. In essence keep it simple and don’t put too much on a single mobile web page. This will also be nicer for your visitors because the page will load a little faster.
Set Mobile Specific Goals
Mobile is not “the web” and it is not an “app”. It is important to treat mobile, as it is, as a separate channel. Set targets for your mobile users, it maybe that you want mobile customers to call you (as they are on a phone) or to visit your store (linking to a Google map maybe) … It could also be to buy something, this is a much harder experience to achieve on a mobile so consider instead having a “send this to email” form, so that someone can buy it when they are next on a computer. Other targets are metrics from analytics, pages visited, time on site, top landing pages, are all great targets you can set and achieve.

If you follow these 5 easy steps to Mobile SEO success you will be onto a winner. Don’t forget though that the bed rock of all of these tips is Simple SEO, don’t overcomplicate things – think logically and you will win.

How to get the most from Social Media for Businesses

Andy Kinsey — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 13:23:36 +0000

Anyone can use Facebook. Twitter takes a little more getting used to but after a bit of practice pretty much anyone can use that too.

With these tools in hand, in theory anyone can use them to grow their business. Why then do the vast majority try and fail?

The answer in its plainest possible terms is they are not using content marketing. Content marketing means producing free online content which potential customers find useful.

What can content marketing do for me?

Grow Your Database – People will give you their email address in exchange for some useful info like an ebook. This is a database of potential customers.

Builds Authority – People want to do business with people who know what they are doing. By producing content you can demonstrate your authority.

Builds Trust – If people are exposed to your content they will get to know, like and trust you.

Improve SEO – Having excellent content on your website will naturally attract links from other websites which will move your site up the search engine rankings.

Content marketing and social media, an explosive mix

If you get content marketing right and mix it with a little social media then – booom!
Here’s what you can expect:

Make it easy to share your great content on Twitter, Facebook and Google + and bring new visitors to your website.
Potential customers will follow you, be exposed to your content and share interesting content with their network.
Influencers will follow you and share your content with thousands.
Become the go-to-guy (or girl) and have potential customers coming to you for advice.
Hit the jackpot with some viral content, reach millions and fill your order book for years

Nothing worth doing is easy
I am not saying for one minute that effective content marketing is easy, what I am saying is that this should be the foundation of everything you do to promote your business. Do it right and your social media efforts will soar!

For excellent examples, see: http://www.copyblogger.com , http://www.chrisbrogan.com

Written By: Think Genial is a Manchester based social media agency offering social media services to companies in the North West of England. They provide social media strategy, Facebook and Twitter marketing, online reputation management, business blogging and video marketing.

You can follow Think Genial on twitter @genialjoe and of course follow SEOAndy @andykinsey

I Live in Public, Online – Privacy Beware!

Andy Kinsey — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 16:10:35 +0000

An open letter to online privacy advocates and politicians who want to take charge of the open internet.

Dear Privacy Advocate,

I Live in Public, Online. You can find my life, for the past few years at least, sprawled across the internet – mainly thanks to the advent of Social Media. I’ll list just a few of the accounts later.

My reason for this open letter is to explain why I believe living in public is not something to fear, but rather to be embraced. I do not fear people knowing I may or may not have health issues, I do not fear that due to tracking I can see highly personalised news feed and search results, I do not fear living in public.

One of the people I admire is Jeff Jarvis (@jeffjarvis), he lives his life on the internet and is like me an avid promoter of doing just that. He agrees with me, living life in public is nothing to be scared of. Indeed when he found out he had prostate cancer his reflex was to talk about it online, it meant he could find out lots of great information and through the world audience learn about what could happen, how to deal with things and most of all he received support. You can read his first post about prostate cancer here, do take not of all the comments and support he received. The reason for admiration is both what he does in life, but also his publicness (yes it is a word, not it probably isn’t in a dictionary). In his book public parts, Jeff share a hell of a lot of information and detail about his life and living in public and why it is nothing to fear. This letter was in part spawned by the book and in part by needing to air why I am happy to be so open and honest online, the book turned this from a thought-train to a letter (thank you Jeff ).

Jeff’s story is not uncommon. There are many cases where individuals or groups have placed their private parts on the internet, in a blog, in a video or maybe just on social networks. The reason is simple: humans crave interaction. Interaction with one another, as friends and also as we see on twitter and facebook with those we befriend, even though we may not know them like we know our family or those we’ve known for a long time. There is a theory which says you can only ever really have 150 relationships properly at one time, but I believe this is an old theory which in todays modern world is wrong. For instance on facebook I’ve nearly 1300 friends, facebook.com/search.andy, I know a hell of a lot of them in real life (more than 150!) but I also know a lot of those friends online, they help support my website design and graphic design business, they help when I feel down, they celebrate whenever possible and they interact with me and my posts (just as I do them). Taking this example further, if humans did not crave to be listened to and interacted with Twitter would not be the huge success it is today. Facebook connects friends and family, simple. Twitter connects a user with the world, they take an interest in your doings by following you and as you do with them also – you share your thoughts, wants, dreams and more! @andykinsey (me) has almost 2500 followers at this time, I follow over 2700 of interest, I make lists (organised for once) of specific people and types of people I may want to hear from, there are local lists, news lists, technology lists and more. If i just want to see the world at large I just view the timeline, hundreds of messages a minute passing by as users interact with each other. It’s funny how they probably don’t notice they are talking to the world, and those privacy junkies who want lock themselves off and close their feeds to public consumption. This is their prerogative, each to their own, but I want to live my life in public – I have no fear of being in public.

But why do I want to live in public?

I want to live in public, not because like everyone else I crave interaction, but rather because I have nothing to hide and everything to gain. Sure privacy is great and deserves protecting, I don’t talk about my family or anything I think may attach to others and harm them, I keep that private. It is our right to live in public or in private, they are not exclusive you can do both, as I’ve just attested too. The internet allows the public to speak, be heard, act, connect, collaborate and live in a more open society. And it is this final part I believe in living in public.

An Open Society is not about everyone knowing what your DNA structure maybe, it’s not about what you say alone, it is about the collective public connecting and collaborating to make the world a better place. Remember a few months ago in Egypt? A revolution for democracy made possible by the internet and social networks. When an injustice is done in the world, someone is imprisoned for the wrong reasons etc, the internet can be a tool for the masses of good public to be heard and listened to. Open Society does not end here though. It applies to everything! One of my favourite examples is with Pharmaceutical Companies, imagine if they shared all the pre-trial data with each other, imagine if they found a drug which failed tests and this data was shared, nothing commercially sensitive here but if they shared it and collaborated medicines would be better and they would improve faster. It is like lots of universities now foster the idea of collaboration, working with other universities and charities to find out new things and make things better. This is why I am living life in public, in the hope that with an Open Society the world will be a better place. I believe in privacy as much as living life in public, they as i’ve said are not exclusive they can work together.

So my privacy advocate friends, don’t you think it’s time for a rethink of your position to support an Open and Collaborative Society.

If you agree with me I would appreciate you leaving a comment and more so sharing this post in which ever way you see fit, just as I would if you disagree I am open to discussing my views too.

- Andy

> @andykinsey
> facebook.com/search.andy & facebook.com/AK.Designs
> +Andy Kinsey
> Also find me on flickr, linked in and many many other networks.