20 ways of increasing backlinks

Did you know that increasing backlinks to your website is very important. Backlinks provide evidence of votes of confidence, trust and authority about your website (Brockbank, 2020). So, I am working on increasing backlinks to my website. This checklist that I am using may prove to be helpful for you too!

  1. Guest blog
  2. Participate in a Podcast interview – e.g. you can listen to my recent podcast interview after reading my blog about the knowledge based view of technology transfer
  3. Get others to share your link
    • You will need great content and visual aids
    • Providing lists of resources like this checklist helps
    • Be consistent and post consistently (e.g. once a week)
    • Use trendy keywords and use keyword search tools to help you find keywords
  4. Interview others and tell the interviewee to post the video or audio link on their websites
  5. Post to social media platforms (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Instagram)
  6. Post your website links in your business profiles (e.g. for academics *.edu sites and Linkedin)
  7. Create infographics and post in sites like Pinterest
  8. Post to social bookmarking sites
  9. Post to document sharing sites such as repositories (e.g. Academia, Bepress, Researchgate, SSRN, Orcid)
  10. Comment on others’ blogs. You can find them by looking for  ‘do follow’ comments.
Here’s more you can do!

11. Post press releases.

12. Study web pages of others in your disciplines and use backlink tools to find out where their website is backlinked to

13. Ask people who mention you online to add your web link or reply and include your web link

14. Add your website to your trade associations’ websites (e.g. on your profile pages)

15. Find listicles in your industry. These are articles that list “The Best …” or “The top 10”. Try to get listed in these.

Try these tactics too!

16. Get active in digital public relations by partnering with journalists. Try the Help a Reporter Out (HARO) service.

17. Try Skyscrape which helps you find successful content with a lot of links, create better content and promote those that linked with you.

18, Try to get in on round-up posts. Run a Google search ‘keyword + roundup’. These may be monthly – – e.g. a July roundup.

19. Actively participate in discussion forums and groups with your trade associations and social media groups (e.g. Facebook and Linkedin groups). Establish yourself as an expert.

20. Ask your friends and acquaintances to add your website link to their websites and you reciprocate as a way of increasing backlinks to your site!

Work Cited:

Brockbank, J. (2020, November 25). Semrush Blog. Retrieved from What Are Backlinks?

See these related blog posts:

Promote Academic Research

Academic website SEO rules!

Reimagining China’s Transportation Funding Investments in Africa in the Context of COVID-19

China's investment in Africa's transportation

 

 

I am sharing research on China’s transportation funding in Africa. Africa has underinvested in healthcare. China funds much of Africa’s transportation. COVID-19 further weakened both sectors. This literature review shows healthcare, transportation, education, housing, and economic development are deeply connected. Strong transportation systems support broader development goals and deserve priority.

African nations should strengthen all government functions when partnering with China. Trade deals must include healthcare, education, housing, utilities, and supply chains. The pandemic revealed the need for balanced, inclusive strategies that extend beyond roads and rails. African governments should also rethink domestic transportation spending. U.S. models use transit funds to support health clinics in stations. COVID-19 exposed the need for integrated planning. Governments must align transportation with healthcare, safety, housing, and economic growth. Comprehensive planning can close these gaps and build resilience. This review ends with five policy recommendations.

African nations must rethink transportation partnerships with China. The article urges broader development goals, especially healthcare, education, and sustainability. Clovia Hamilton critiques China’s narrow transportation focus in Africa. COVID-19 revealed fragile healthcare and transport systems. Hamilton calls for integrated development planning. She urges trade deals that include public health, utilities, and digital technologies. U.S. models offer useful examples. Hamilton stresses transactional, policy-driven planning. Transportation must align with socio-economic goals.

The article ends with five recommendations. These include integration, equity, digital tools, transparency, and broader policy engagement. Hamilton advocates holistic, community-centered strategies.

Read more…

Voice Activate Cognitive Personal Assistants

Alexa device

This research is about voice activated cognitive personal assistants. In this article, we address the issue of consumer privacy against the backdrop of the national priority of maintaining global leadership in artificial intelligence. The ongoing research in Artificial Cognitive Assistants is discussed.

Also, there is explosive growth in the development and application of Voice Activated Personal Assistants (VAPAs) such as Alexa and Siri. This is spurred on by the needs and opportunities arising out of the COVID-19 global pandemic.

We begin by reviewing the growth of voice-activated personal assistants (VAPAs) and their legal issues in key sectors. These sectors include private homes, banks, healthcare, and education. In addition, we then summarize policy guidelines for VAPA development. We classify these guidelines into five major categories, each with specific traits.

Next, we assign a relative importance weight to each trait and category. We recommend creating a rating system based on legal, ethical, functional, and social content guidelines. We also propose forming an agency to manage this system. This agency would inform consumers about the risks of adopting specific VAPAs. Our article presents a framework to evaluate the social, ethical, and legal content of intelligent cognitive assistants (ICAs). Further, we examine the increasing use of ICAs in homes, healthcare, banking, and education. We emphasize the need for stronger consumer protection. Next, we assign weights to policy categories and recommend a rating system. We urge developers to prioritize ethical and legal standards.

Read more ….

HBCU female academic entrepreneurs

Introduction

HBCU female academic entrepreneurs can help increase diversity among women entrepreneurs in high tech. There is a concentrated number of potential women entrepreneurs of diverse races among faculty in the United States’ Historically Black Colleges and Universities (known as HBCUs and are called ‘Black Colleges’ herein). This study describes the potential for developing university technology transfer in these Black Colleges as a strategy for increasing diversity among women entrepreneurs in high growth, high tech fields using female academic entrepreneurs.

Emerging research HBCU Howard University research lab

Emerging research institutions include HBCUs

Currently, Black Colleges lag behind their peer non-Black Colleges in technology transfer because historically they have been under, served and were originally established largely as teaching and blue-collar trade schools. Although Black female STEM faculty comprised less than 2% of the US faculty, they are 22% at HBCUs (Mack, 2011).

This study used a novel theoretical framework to compare technology transfer programs at 24 Black Colleges with doctoral programs and five non-Black Colleges. The correlation analysis confirmed hypotheses about the relationships between tech transfer resource inputs and outputs. The analysis showed that larger technology transfer support and licensing staff correlated with more invention disclosures and startup formations. However, legal support investments showed no correlation with the number of licensing agreements. Additionally, neither legal support investments nor the number of patent applications filed correlated with faculty size per program.

Findings

Faculty size per program positively influences the number of licensing agreements. Both faculty size and total research expenditures also increase total licensing agreements. The data does not support the hypothesis that non-tenured faculty negatively affect licensing agreements or start-up formations. Faculty quality includes measures such as publications, honors, and awards.

Gross licensing income shows no correlation with faculty publication volume or the percentage of faculty receiving honors and awards. Invention disclosures, patent applications, and faculty honors also show no connection to faculty with research grants. However, licensing revenue and publication citations do correlate positively with faculty who hold research grants. Additionally, institutions with more female faculty researchers tend to report more faculty honors, higher licensing income, and more start-ups.

These findings informed the development of a model intellectual property (IP) policy for Black Colleges. These policies aim to strengthen technology transfer and academic entrepreneurship. HBCU female academic entrepreneurs can help diversify high-growth, high-tech fields.

Read more

Appropriation of artisans’ intellectual property: Piracy disguised as giving back?

Creative Industries

Creative industries are industries focused on the creation, exploitation and appropriation of artisans’ intellectual property, including art, fashion design, and related creative services, such as advertisement and sales.  During a trip to Burkina Faso in West Africa, Keri Fosse was taught by an African woman how to wrap African artisan fashion accessory craftsnewborns with fabric in a manner that creates a strong bond and frees the mother’s hands for other tasks.

Craft culture

Burkina Faso has a craft culture and is known for its woven cotton and the textile art of Bogolan.  Bogolan is a technique original to and involves the tradition of dyeing threads with bright colors, washing it skillfully, using coated and shiny Bazin, and using indigo from Benin. After this trip, Fosse and her husband developed a shirt which copies the African lady’s, Lalabu’s, technique.

They developed a product called Soothe Shirt; and created a business called Lalabu. Lalabu is also the name of the African woman that the Fosses met. They have been successful. The Fosses have stated that they got the idea from Lalabu, but redesigned it for production. The couple advertises that they “giving back” by giving 2% percent of each purchase to help female African entrepreneurs through microfinancing.

Intellectual property piracy

The Fosses claim that when African women repay their micro-loans, the women reinvest the money into the loan fund. This study argues that such practices do not reflect socially responsible entrepreneurship. Instead, they represent intellectual property piracy. The following sections discuss the relevant legal and theoretical foundations, along with current best practices. However, these practices often lack shared ownership. While Americans may commonly appropriate artisans’ intellectual property within the U.S., their appropriation of cultural crafts from other countries demands closer scrutiny and accountability.

read more

university technology transfer knowledge based view

Introduction

Research and technology commercialization at research-intensive universities has helped
to develop provincial economies. This has resulted in university startups, the growth of other new companies and associated employment. Interestingly, university technology transfer offices (TTOs) oversee the process of technology transfer into the commercial marketplace. Further, these organizational units can be considered in the context of enabling effective knowledge management. This article is about technology transfer knowledge based view.

Method

However, what enables productive TTO performance has not been comprehensively researched. Therefore, we adopted the knowledge-based view as the theoretical construct to support a comprehensive investigation into this area. We employed a systematic literature review (SLR) combined with a robust meta-analysis. The SLR identified an initial total of 10,126 articles in the first step of the review process, with 44 studies included in the quantitative synthesis, and 29 quantitative empirical studies selected for the meta-analysis. The research study identified that the relationship between TTO knowledge management and knowledge deployment as well as startup business performance is where TTOs secure the strongest returns.

technology transfer knowledge based view

university technology transfer from the knowledge based view

With the technology transfer knowledge based view, knowledge management was operationalized by features of TTO research administration and related legal staffing. Knowledge deployment was operationalized as the deployment of resources, including faculty invention disclosures, patent applications and patents owned by universities. Knowledge infrastructure was operationalized as the presence of incubators and medical schools. It was discovered that knowledge deployment is significant relative to startup business formations. The Knowledge Based View (KBV) indicates that knowledge becomes internalized, shared, accumulated, and used in the process of knowledge integration.

Why care?

Once these processes are established, an organization can achieve competitive advantages. Consequently, we can consider that where universities are able to bolster the TTO capability (e.g., in terms of tech transfer and legal staffing levels) and when combined with a dynamic academic environment with inventions and science and technology breakthroughs by teams of researchers, this has the potential to lead to a higher level of tech transfer performance (i.e., in terms of patent licensing and generating startups).

Also, it is important to note instances where small effects are observed (i.e., when the correlation r is significantly less than 0.5). There was practically no relationship between knowledge infrastructure (i.e., the presence of medical schools and incubators) and licensing performance; nor with overall TTO performance; or startup formations.

Implications for TTO managers

This research helps TTO managers and leaders focus their limited financial resources on knowledge deployment rather than physical infrastructure like incubators or medical schools. By doing so, they can improve performance outcomes and reconcile conflicting findings in existing studies. University leaders can also use these insights to allocate scarce resources more effectively. Scientists, engineers, and industry managers aiming to commercialize university research will benefit as well. A deeper understanding of the tech transfer process increases their chances of achieving successful commercialization.

Read more here: Knowledge based view of university technology transfer

Listen to Attorney Lisa Mueller’s podcast interview of Clovia here !

See also university technology transfer from the attention based view

Academic website SEO rules I’ve learned

This article is about academic website SEO rules that I have recently learned. If you work in higher education as a professor or desire to, you need an academic website.

Reasons to have an academic website

 

Clovia Hamilton academic website home page

Every faculty member needs an academic website to promote their research

There are two primary reasons. First, publications is our currency. The goal is to widely disseminate our research. Citations are evidence of this. To get cited, you need to help your journal get your published article found. One way is with an academic website. You can blog about your research findings or interests and link each blog to your research papers.

Second, in the higher education job market, job applications include requests for academic website. You will be asked for the website URL. Some scholars use the website provided by their universities. Some find that they have more control over the content if they create their own website. I use WordPress. There is a free version that includes ads. To eliminate the ads, I use the Business version. It costs about $300 per year.

I find it hard to make time for posting to my blog. You can feed blog content with services such as Feedzy. But, to promote my research, I began by posting the abstract to an article and then stated “read more…” and link that to my full article. However, I found that this quick and dirty strategy does not do your search engine optimization (SEO). You should put much more time into it in order to get your research found. You can do it or hire someone to do it.

Blog post SEO and Readability Rules

I find that the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress is quite helpful. Plugins are simply software packages you can add on to the WordPress website platform. Here are 20 SEO and readability rules I have recently learned and applied to my existing blog posts:

20 rules
  1. Each full blog post should be at least 300 words. Categorize your blog posts and think of key words. Add key word tags. Also, select or add a category.
  2. Shorten paragraphs to less than 150 words
  3. Shorten sentences to 20 words
  4. Enter a key phrase of no more than 4 words. For this blog post, I used the key phrase: academic website seo rules
  5. Put key phrases in the beginning of the blog post title and in your introduction at the beginning of your blog. You can see my key phrase is part of this blog post’s title and in the first sentence of the blog post.
  6. Shorten titles to a viewable limit for your blog page
  7. Put the key phrase in the slug for the blog post’s URL.  The slug is simply the part of your blog’s URL which identifies its particular page on your website. It provides an easy to read format with all words in lowercase separated by a hyphen. Look at the URL for this blog post. It contains a slug: academic-website-seo-rules-ive-learned
  8. If your blog post text is long, your key phrase needs to appear more than once
  9. Add a meta description of 120-155 characters by editing your snippet and include the key phrase in the meta description. This is what will appear in a Google search about your blog post to describe it to a user of the search engine. For this blog post, I wrote: This article is about academic websites seo rules and readability for faculty researchers to use when writing blogs to promote research.
  10. Use the active voice.
  11. Add transition words. Click here for a list of transition-word-list.
  12. Don’t start sentences with the same word or phrase. Use sentence variety.
  13. Use subheadings coded in html if the blog post text is long. Here is an example of the html code for the size h6 subheading: <h6><strong>Blog post SEO and Readability Rules</strong></h6>
  14. Provide outbound links (i.e. link to web pages other than your own). In this article, I provided you with a link to the Yoast SEO web page. You can learn more about the plugin there.
  15. Next, be sure to include internal links (e.g. link the blog post to your full paper). See rule 11 above regarding transition words. I provided an internal link to a pdf that lists transition words that you can use.
  16. Add pictures relevant to your research topic
  17. Enter alt text in the picture’s attributes
  18. Add a caption to describe the picture
  19. Include an image title attribute
  20. Lastly, share your blog post widely in social media channels such as Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest

Finally, you can use this as a checklist for each blog post. You should have one blog post for each of your research journal articles and book chapters. Overall, I enjoy the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress because it provides SEO and readability analyses. It starts with a red frowning face if your blog post needs edits. Next, it moves to orange if it is ok. Ultimately, you will get a green light when everything is in great shape. I am proud of myself. I learned all of this in just few days. Yoast SEO takes a little time. But it’s easy to use!

Also check out Promote Your Academic Research!

GDPR comparative analysis to US data breaches

Introduction

gdpr

The newly implemented European Union General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requires mandatory breach notifications. The GDPR is a revision of a 1995 directive. To our disappointment, the US has no such federal law. Thus, this means companies must satisfy multiple US laws and that makes it more challenging to comply. This is a GDPR comparative analysis to the US data breach notifications. This study is a comparison of the GDPR with the statutes of the 50 US states. It highlights the challenges companies face. It reveals the types of decisions companies must make to be in compliance with these statutes.

Findings

Notably, this GDPR comparative analysis reveals that the requirements of various laws, statutes, or regulations vary by state, country, and audience. Companies must decide if they will base compliance on the most stringent requirements which can be financially prohibitive. Alternatively, they could meet the minimum requirements which could be managerially prohibitive. A comparison of the GDPR and the statutes related to data breach notifications reveals the types of decisions companies must make. Because the definitions of personal information and data breach vary, a company in one case would be considered to have had a breach. However, in another jurisdiction the company would not. Companies might decide on the behalf of the consumer to notify all their customers.

Further, the time required to notify the consumer or some authority agency varies. A company would likely notify the entities requiring the earliest notification and continue notifications as time permits. Since penalties vary, companies might notify according to those with the costliest penalties first. The contents of data breach notifications are not always specified or consistent. Thus, companies should develop a standard notification provisions for all required entities if the information is available.

Challenges

Briefly, comparative analysis highlights the challenges companies face in trying to comply with multiple regulations. The greatest challenge exists for small businesses. Just knowing the regulations is likely a challenge for an average small business. The GDPR may remain consistent, but the statutes of the 50 US states continue to be amended. In addition, there are the statutes of other countries. More than 100 countries have enacted data protection legislation. Several other countries are in the process of passing such laws with data protection laws (Banisar, 2011).

Further, Banisar notes that data protection laws have been enacted in countries such as Thailand, Mexico, Georgia and Malaysia. The most recent US personal information security breach statutes include new laws in Arizona, South Dakota, and Alabama (Bellamy, 2018). Thus, companies should put into place protections. They need personnel that would help prevent a data breach as per any of these governments’ definitions. Further, this needs to be in addition to a plan to comply with the existing laws. The countries that companies do business in require legal compliance.

Read more…

Technology transfer job scheduling for universities

Introduction
job scheduling weekly and daily assignments

job scheduling weekly and daily assignments the old fashioned way

This study describes the development of a novel job scheduling tool for university technology transfer using simulated annealing in R-programming. Technology commercialization managers often face training inventors on intellectual property (IP) laws and IP policies. They also evaluate invention disclosures for patentability and marketability. In addition, they draft and implement invention marketing plans. Further, they work closely with patent counsel on patent prosecution. Expediency is important. The amount of time taken to evaluate invention disclosures and file patent applications often conflicts with inventors’ desire to publish findings. Yet, very few technology transfer managers use project management job scheduling tools to minimize processing time.

Importance of Job scheduling

Job scheduling is crucial because it has the potential for improving staff accountability and trust between the TTO staff and faculty. However, TTO staff that value their academic freedom and autonomy may resist the use of job scheduling tools. A description of experimentation follows and the test results is provided. The discussion provides the primary implication for technology managers.  The job scheduling tool schedules technology transfer tasks quite easily and speedily with this proposed job scheduling tool. I scheduled a hypothetical set of TTO staff job tasks that did not include faculty inventor tasks. These are study limitations. Thus, future research should include further experimentation in actual university technology transfer offices using the job tasks in real time.

Findings

In short, I found fascinating discoveries through experimentation. Simulation annealing is an advanced optimization tool. University technology transfer job scheduling is ideal for this. The meta-heuristic simulated annealing program converges to an optimal solution that satisfied the constraints. As it happens, the use of simulated annealing for job scheduling statistically guarantees finding an optimal solution (Ingber, 1993).  In conclusion, the job scheduling tool experimentation illustrates the use of advanced optimization to schedule TTO staff job tasks in a very quick and simple manner.

Read More..

Promote your Academic Research

Introduction

In this video, I give you some ideas about how promote your academic research. The motivation for this presentation is I attended the Academy of Management conference in Chicago. I attended a faculty development workshop and paper development workshop for hosted by the Social Issues and Management Division. And some international scholars shared that their universities give credit to scholars for the impact of promoting their research, do social media marketing. Now, that was pretty neat!! When measuring performance with respect to scholarly impact, leaders don’t just go by your citations. When scholars are citing your work, they go by total impact of your marketing and promotion effort in getting the word out about your research. So, I thought that was pretty cool!! And I started researching ideas for promoting my own research. And I just want to share some of that with you.

 

About Dr. Clovia Hamilton – got started in AI

So, here’s a little bit about my background. Research promotion has a lot to do with search engine optimization. I am by no means an expert SEO. But I have been in this space a very long time- – since way back in the 1980s. I was a research assistant for the US Army Corps of Engineers in Champaign IL. I worked on the development of expert system knowledge management tools. The idea was, we would capture the information that our experts knew about the construction army barracks and other military facilities before they retired. This would help more junior engineers learned from the experienced engineers.

This is why social media marketing and search optimization interests me. And since 2005, I’ve been very active in social media marketing. I’m a patent attorney. And I went on to work for the US Patent and Trademark Office and learn how to you know what to do about reviewing patents for patentability. Then I went on to the US EPA’s National vehicle and emissions lab in Ann Arbor Michigan.

Had fun joining the Academy way back in 1999 in research administration as a technology commercialization specialist. And I started publishing law articles back then. I was not a faculty member. I was on an administrative side. Did a short stint as an assistant professor at East Carolina University and then started consulting. Unfortunately, I abandoned my research but used social media marketing when I was consulting to attract clients. So, I’m a fan of search engine optimization.

Importance of social media marketing

I also want to share a quick story about that experience, because my colleagues at Georgia Tech were naysayers about social media marketing. They didn’t want to have anything to do with being active online, to promote our work in our activities. For the work that I was doing at Georgia Tech, I was in a government contracting space. And but I’ll share a quick story with you. We had an event in Albany, Georgia, at the Civic Center, we call this speed partnering, where we hit small businesses.

We’re trying to partner them with government agencies for government contracts. I was real active in social media. And through Twitter, and networking on Twitter, I was able to get Fox News, interested in the event and they sent camera crew down. And we got a lot of news press and coverage and interviews and all kinds of wonderful things, all because of dialogue on Twitter. So, I’m a huge fan, because it’s just really fast and quick, you’re not picking up the phone, trying to figure out who to talk to and play some phone call or send out emails and not get a response. Social Media Marketing is the way to go.

Getting cited

When I re-entered the Academy as an Assistant Professor at Winthrop University, I didn’t have very many citations. I only had 25 cites. Now, Google recognizes 70 and I have found about 100. When you get cited by other authors, that’s evidence of making an impact and joining scholarly conversations. So, I’m kind of proud of my little numbers and I want to share some of the ideas that I’ve come across and some of the things that seem to be working.

 

Brand Identity

The first step is, I would say you need a brand identity to promote your academic research. The very first step is “know thyself”. Start by answering: Can you define research agenda? What do you stand for? How about the purpose of your research? Why are you conducting research? My research is focused on how to improve technology commercialization operations. This is related to inventions and marketing and promoting and licensing inventions, which is my background and patenting. Also research how to increase diversity and technology commercialization by addressing some social issues and Technology Management. And some of the social issues

The next step is that you need to start curating content that’s related to your brand identity. This is content that you would share with people in your network online. So, I get a lot of news feeds that come to my email address, my personal email address. And I’m signed up with a lot of listservs to trade organizations. I read these for an hour each morning. If I come across some interesting articles, I’ll share them with friends in Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. That’s the name of the game!  Share!!

Don’t just use how promote your research. You’re also being a part of the conversation about what’s going on in your research area. For example, I get from the American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE). They’ve been covering Chinese intellectual property piracy quite a bit which is an area that I’m interested in.  I collect these. I can use them in my research papers and share with others that are interested.

The third step is, of course, you want to write research papers. But you want to write your papers with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in mind. Be very careful about keywords that you select. Use tools like Google Trends.

Learn much more by watching the video!