Archive for August, 2009

WordPress Blogging Achievement: A Post Published 365 Consecutive Days In A Row

August 31, 2009

When I launched my first website back in 1999 – blogs didn’t exist.

To get my site MarketingPrincples.com launched, I had to use ad agency designers who knew how to write code which in turn published my content on the nascent world wide web.

After my site launched, I realized I needed to make some content changes.

Because blogging platforms didn’t exist and I hadn’t bought the code they had used to develop my site, the designers initially charged me $100 for each change I wanted to make to my site.

Outrageous!

I quickly set out to find my own web developers who could build my own content management system.

While giving a presentation at a local university’s engineering college, some young guys came up and said they would be interested in working with me.

I agreed to give them a shot.

They built me a content management system in .ASP where I could upload and control my own content without any ongoing costs.

Off to the races I went.

Little did I know at that time nor did it occur to me that the idea of a back end content management system would be something other businesses would want.

Nor did I foresee that content management would ultimately become known in general as blogs and blogging.

If I had, I guess I would be on the other side of this post founding and running WordPress.com not my consulting practice.

Anyway in the early days of the internet, the content platform providers all suggested bloggers just sit down and blog every day for a year to generate their own unique set of pages and content.

Well – 10 years later I have done it.

I have blogged here every single day for the last 365 days over a period of exactly one year beginning on September 1, 2008.

I have learned a lot and will write more about what the experience has taught me – tomorrow.

Twitter Local Trending Topics and Google Maps

August 30, 2009

Happn.in is a Twitter tool that shows what people are tweeting about locally in 80 cities around the world.

Local Twitter Trends by Market

Local Twitter Trends by Market

Drilling down into each city produces a list of several hundred to several thousand Twitter account holders who have self identified their locations in their Twitter accounts.

Visitors to Happn.in can click through to each list to scan for potential Twitter accounts to follow or broadcast their message to everyone in a particular market via their Talk to Your City feature.

Talk To Your City

Talk To Your City

Rakshith Krishnappa has also created a local Twitter trends map for Happn.in using their API and Google Maps.

Local Twitter Trends

Local Twitter Trends

Want to find out what Twitter users are saying in any particular market?

Just click on the push pin and the top 10 subjects being Tweeted are displayed inline on Google Maps.

Local Twitter Trends by City

Local Twitter Trends by City

Pretty cool.

Finding A Business With Google Street View

August 29, 2009

The Google Maps team has made several improvements to Google’s Street View product.

By clicking the “Street View” link in the info bubble of any search result the business pin and info bubble also appear.

After viewing a result, you can search from within the info bubble for another business without exiting “Street View” as well as see how far you are from other search results.

Being able to continue to search from within “Street View” reduces the amount of keystrokes required to get information while making Google Maps data more interactive and useful.

New Yahoo Homepage

August 28, 2009

Yahoo has pushed its new home page out with several new improvements.

New Yahoo Homepage

New Yahoo Homepage

I am not sure when they released the latest version of the Yahoo home page, but the Ajax based User Interface brings a new level of information and functionality to Yahoo.com and its related properties.

Hovering over the left rail gives users insight into what else is available from Yahoo’s home page without having to click away.

Yahoo Home Page Ajax

Yahoo Home Page Ajax

Will the new Ajax features create a stickier Yahoo home page and encourage visitors to make Yahoo their homepage increasing like Yahoo hopes?

Check back in a month to see whether these improvements have measurably increased Yahoo’s overall visitor count and session length or not.

Google Show More Results Plus Box

August 27, 2009

Today while searching to see if all of Search Marketing Communications pages had yet been indexed by Google, I noticed results for this blog now include a “show more results from searchmarketingcommunications.com” + box.

Google Show More Results

Google Show More Results

Clicking on the show more results plus box then produces a list of additional pages within the site without having to click through to the site.

In my site’s case, the show more results button produced a list of six pages from within the site.

Google Show All Results

Google Show All Results

Below the six pages listed within the site, Google then offers to “Show all of the results from searchmarketingcommunications.com.

This in turn produces a list of all the pages Google has found within a site.

In this site’s case, Google finds approximately 407 pages of the 550 pages that have been published.

Site:SearchMarketingCommunications.com

Site:SearchMarketingCommunications.com

Hopefully, the Googlebot will eventually update its results with all 550 pages.

Google Maps Spam Innovation?

August 26, 2009

Today I was searching for a local french drain systems specialist to get a quote to install a drainage system in my backyard to handle the inordinate amounts of rain we have been having lately.

It seems like we have been having more than our fair share of 50 and 100 year downpours this summer.

On top of these once in a lifetime downpours we also had a reported 1 1/2 inches of rain fall in less than 30 minutes at the beginning of August when its typically dry as a bone.

Combined the two types of rain have created problems I didn’t have before because I haven’t owned my house for 50 years nor was was it built 100 years ago.

To save the time and hassle of cracking open one of the five yellow pages directories I receive annually, I thought I would see what information Google’s search results would provide.

To get straight to their local search results more quickly, I searched Google for “Oklahoma French Drain Systems”.

Google Maps Spam Innovation

Google Maps Spam Innovation

As expected, Google quickly delivered a set of three local business listings I could look over and then consider clicking or calling.

Nothing new there.

Since the top two listings shared the same great relevant domain – FrenchDrainSystems.com – I excitedly clicked through thinking I would soon be viewing the website of a great French Drain Systems company who could then help me solve my drainage problem.

Nope.

Clicking through to both of the top two results landed me on the same parked page.

FrenchDrainSystems.com

FrenchDrainSystems.com

Having seen a variety of spoofs occur on Google Maps particularly within the user content sections of business listings, I assumed this was the case here too.

Nope.

Looks like a local company – although not one in the French Drain Systems business – owns FrenchDrainSystems.com.

Apparently, they claimed their listing with either a previous website and then elected to display the parked page or the claimed their listing while using a parked page.

Either way, whether this was an innocent attempt at claiming some local search real estate with a parked domain or not, I don’t think the search results are what Google Maps had intended for its users to find.

Google Webmaster Tools Crawl Stats

August 25, 2009

Switching from a WordPress subdomain to my own domain has proved to be much more expensive than the $10 annual domain mapping fee I pay WordPress.

I went from having hundreds of visitors daily to less than one hundred visitors a day.

Being in the business of traffic generation primarily through Google Adwords pay per click, the drop in “orgnanic” traffic proved to be quite frustrating.

I installed Google Webmaster Tools on this blog and verified the site as directed.

Several months passed and nothing changed.

I then decided to submit a reconsideration request which in turn got my domain mapping WordPress redirect resolved.

Yet, SearchMarketingCommunications.com continued to languish in Google’s search results barely registering 200 of my nearly 600 pages.

Yesterday,  I spent some time in my Google Webmaster Tools account and today I noticed my “Crawl Stats” jumped significantly from their average page crawl rate.

Google Webmaster Tools Crawl Stats

Google Webmaster Tools Crawl Stats

I am hoping this new average page crawl high will soon lead to a greater presence of my web site’s pages within Google’s search engine results pages.

Time will tell and so will my Google Webmaster Tools dashboard.

Add Latest YouTube News Videos to Your Website

August 24, 2009

Google Web Elements makes it possible to add YouTube News to any website.

Latest News Videos

Latest News Videos

I have been able to grab a single Associated Press video from YouTube and post it within my blog.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

more about “Add Latest YouTube News Videos to You…“, posted with vodpod

However I haven’t yet been able to post a news roll like those featured on the Google Web Elements site.

Google Web Elements

Google Web Elements

I have tried both the post video feature from within WordPress in addition to atempting to post video via the VodPod service.

Any ideas why I can’t embed the news roll from YouTube within a WordPress blog?

Google Adwords Questions: Where Do You Advertise and Sell?

August 23, 2009

I was setting up a new Google Adwords account today and found the following questions near the end of the account creation process.

Where do you most often advertise your products or services?

Where do you most often sell your products or services?

Where Do You Advertise and Sell Your Products?

Where Do You Advertise and Sell Your Products?

I guess Google Adwords is still adding new advertisers to its reported 1+ million Adwords account holders around the world.

It would be interesting to learn what percentage of their new accounts report advertising  adn selling their products exclusively offline.

Surely most small businesses are now aware they are being browsed online before their  phone ever rings or their door swings open.

The Listening Campaign: Getting Your Voice Heard Above The Crowd

August 22, 2009

I recently had lunch with an old friend who shared with me his experiences conducting a listening campaign.

As you can imagine, as a market researcher, analyst, business developer and student of all things related to human behavior I was all ears so to speak.

Although his listening campaign wasn’t conducted within a business context, the lessons he learned and shared with me were both instructive and valuable.

The premise of the listening campaign is that the deepest yet most fundamental of people’s needs are surfaced when they are given a chance to share their experiences and opinions about a subject in a free and slightly unstructured manner.

Unlike traditional structured question and answer market research formats the “interviewed” are engaged in conversations about the topics they care most deeply about.

This process elicits a unique and often times different storyline about a particular subject from the audience’s perspective which by definition is inconceivable from the author’s perspective.

In a business context, the author is the person or enterprise who asks directional market research related questions.

Allowing the audience to provide their interpretation of a topic regardless of what it may be often brings a new dimension of understanding and meaning to the subject at hand.

Integrating domain specific knowledge into future conversations about a subject establishes higher levels of audience trust.

A listening campaign can be both an instructive process and an invaluable tool for any business trying to have their company’s voice heard above the crowd’s.