June 2006
Our valley trip
Written by Neil Patel on June 30, 2006 | 2 comments
In the last couple of days you may have noticed a lack of posts. Cameron and I took a trip to Silicon Valley to meet up with some random people, clients, and a couple 9rulers...
Monkey in your trunk
Written by Neil Patel on June 30, 2006 | 1 comment
Crowded markets are some of the most difficult markets to enter. They are usually competitive and many times it is difficult to differentiate your product with your competitors' product.
Technorati improves their SEO
Written by Cameron Olthuis on June 30, 2006 |
Last week I wrote a post on how well Technorati has done in regards to their search engine optimization. I also mentioned there was a few key things they could do to improve what they've already done.
CNet missed one
Written by Neil Patel on June 27, 2006 |
CNet has released the Top 10 Google Apps, which is a listing of the top Google applications and their ratings. The list was pretty good overall, but there was one big disappoint...
Google Desktop Gadget Challenge
Written by Cameron Olthuis on June 27, 2006 |
Google has announced a desktop gadget contest. The contest runs for the next month and the winner will receive $5000, plus the chance to show the world their mad skills.
My digg wish list
Written by Neil Patel on June 27, 2006 | 8 comments
Recently digg launched version 3.0 which allows a broader range of topics to now be submitted. The new digg is a great improvement compared to the last version, but with some small tweaks...
What ads work?
Written by Cameron Olthuis on June 26, 2006 |
The Nielsen/Norman group recently did some eye tracking studies that show some interesting results. It shows that users seem to ignore animated ads, or graphic ads that stick out from the rest of the site.
Sleeping Comcast technician gets fired
Written by Neil Patel on June 26, 2006 | 4 comments
Last week I posted about a Comcast technician who fell asleep on someone's couch during a house call. David Dalka, a reader of Pronet Advertising, was talking with Comcast tech support about a problem he...
Leveraging Wikipedia
Written by Neil Patel on June 25, 2006 |
Wikipedia is a collaboratively built encyclopedia that has evolved into a great resource if you are looking for information on just about anything. Because of its popularity and the sheer number of people that use Wikipedia
Enduring the worst for your customers
Written by Neil Patel on June 23, 2006 |
Image is an important factor in marketing. If you want your product to be known as soft and gentle you may want it to be associated with a teddy bear. If you want your product to have a tough and rugged image
Catchup - 6/23/06
Written by Cameron Olthuis on June 23, 2006 |
Last week there was spam site that managed to get over 5 billion pages indexed and ranked on Google within a matter of weeks. Shorty after someone outed the site Google yanked all the pages from their index. Kudos to Google for taking quick action, a big smack upside the head for letting this happen in the first place.
Are your employees evangelists?
Written by Cameron Olthuis on June 22, 2006 |
What does it say about your product when your employees use your competitors' products more than they do your own? Based on a post from Andrew Hitchcock, Phillip Lenssen posted some statistics that show Microsoft employees use Google 3x more than they use MSN.
Buzz can hurt too
Written by Neil Patel on June 22, 2006 | 2 comments
A lot of people use the power of buzz marketing because it can do wonders for their business, but there is also a dark side to buzz marketing where it can hurt your company's reputation.
Maximizing Google click-throughs
Written by Neil Patel on June 21, 2006 |
Millions of people search Google on a daily basis and thousands of companies are advertising on Google's sponsored listings using keyword targeted text ads. You may not always be able to afford the number 1 sponsored listing or rank above the fold in the organic listings.
Search marketing DOES build brands
Written by Cameron Olthuis on June 21, 2006 | 2 comments
Leave it to someone who has little to no experience with any real world search marketing to make a ridiculous statement that "search advertising does NOT build brands." That is what Scott Karp from Publishing 2.0 is saying today.
Web Analytics: Advanced Stats
Written by Neil Patel on June 20, 2006 | 14 comments
The analytics market is a crowded space with many players. There are a lot of robust analytics solutions that can track conversions, goals, revenue, expenses, and even allow you to create flexible dashboards.
Increase your visibility on blog search engines
Written by Cameron Olthuis on June 20, 2006 | 1 comment
Blog search engines such as Technorati, sphere, and Ice Rocket are great ways to bring more people to your site. What I really like about blog search engines is the people who use them tend to be the early adopters and the social media crowd. This should be your initial target audience. They're the ones that will spread your message, of course provided they like what they see.
Technorati not just techno babble
Written by Cameron Olthuis on June 19, 2006 |
If you search for just about any popular keyword on Google you will notice one site that continually comes up very high in the results, usually on the first page. This site is Technorati, a blog search engine, and when it comes to SEO they are absolutely killing it.
Marketing 2.0: Warner Brothers entices MySpacers
Written by Neil Patel on June 19, 2006 |
Superman is a popular character. He has had his own TV show, movies and commercials. He has a large audience that follows him wherever he goes. On June 28 his new movie, Superman Returns, is coming out and Warner Brothers have been promoting it like crazy.
Catchup - 6/16/06
Written by Cameron Olthuis on June 16, 2006 |
comScore Media Metrix released May's monthly analysis of consumer activity of top online properties. The social networking phenomenon continued its stratospheric ascent, as MySpace.com reached new heights with 50 million visitors in May and YouTube.com nearly doubled its traffic from April, reaching 12.6 million visitors. It's amazing how fast these sites continue to grow, now they just need to figure out how to monetize the traffic.
Pretty marketing
Written by Neil Patel on June 16, 2006 |
For years companies have been using sex appeal to sell their products. Depending on your target market, sex appeal may work wonders for you. GoDaddy has used sex appeal
Marketing with fear
Written by Neil Patel on June 16, 2006 |
Fear is an interesting thing, it can affect the way you think and react. When y2k was coming around, people had a fear of computers going wrong so everyone started stacking up on basic supplies such as dried food and water.
Optimize for people, not search engines
Written by Cameron Olthuis on June 15, 2006 |
Don't you hate it when you click through to a search engine result only to find a site that has been overly optimized, without visitors in mind. We've all experienced it, you know, the sites that are so ugly you can hardly stand to look at them. The ones where the content is stuffed with so many keywords that it is clear that it was only written with the search engines in mind.
Netscape's digg clone, Better then most
Written by Neil Patel on June 15, 2006 |
Netscape Beta launched last night, it has a similar concept to digg, but seems to be more oriented towards the masses. When I first saw it, I was impressed on how well they optimized it for search engines.
TechCrunch advertisers can get penalized by Google
Written by Cameron Olthuis on June 15, 2006 | 2 comments
Each one of the four premium ad spots on TechCrunch currently sell for $10,000 per month. That may seem like a lot of money at first but when you consider you the fact you're reaching 3 million eye balls from a very targeted audience every month it's not so bad. But before you pony up the 10 grand for one of these spots you better take a moment to consider the potential consequences.
How to: Robots.txt
Written by Cameron Olthuis on June 14, 2006 |
There has been some noise around the seo industry today about Google not obeying the NoIndex meta tag. Google is indexing pages that use this tag when they shouldn't be. I have actually seen this first hand myself when our company received an email earlier this week asking for opinions on the seo of a website. We noticed this site was trying to keep pages from being indexed in the search engines by using this meta tag. However, when we searched through Google we noticed these pages were still being indexed.
eBay wiki wiki wiki
Written by Neil Patel on June 14, 2006 |
The eBay Wiki launched today, it is a community driven wiki that eBay has created in collaboration with JotSpot. JotSpot was the first company to create a wiki platform, similar to the platform used by Wikipedia.
9rules has welcomed Pronet
Written by Neil Patel on June 14, 2006 | 7 comments
I am so excited; I am now an official 9rules member. I am honored to be selected in the 4th round with Cameron and all of the other great bloggers that made it. If you are not too sure what 9rules is about
Yahoo answers to no one
Written by Neil Patel on June 13, 2006 | 2 comments
Yahoo has recently launched Yahoo Answers which has been getting a lot of buzz around the blogosphere. The concept of Yahoo Answers is very similar to Google Answers.
Viral marketing for links
Written by Cameron Olthuis on June 13, 2006 | 3 comments
Link building was once the most tedious, labor intensive processes of search engine optimization. It's funny because inbound links also happen to be one of the more important aspects to your search engine rankings. Fortunately, it's not so tedious anymore. Thanks to the social web, link building through buzz marketing is now possible.
Don't wait until the last minute
Written by Cameron Olthuis on June 12, 2006 |
Sometimes clients will wait until the last minute to hire an SEO or bring them into a project. Nothing is more frustrating as an SEO, the amount of stuff the needs to be redone can sometimes be very over-whelming.
The web slinger and the Internet
Written by Neil Patel on June 12, 2006 |
Usually when a new movie is coming out, studios start promoting it everywhere. They put up billboards, TV commercials, online banner ads and anything else they can think of that can create buzz.
Catchup - 6/12/06
Written by Cameron Olthuis on June 12, 2006 |
Yahoo has launched a customized version of Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2, which has Yahoo search built into the browser. It's good to see that Yahoo still has some fight left in them, I was beginning to think they'd thrown in towel for the search war. With the loyal following that Firefox has built I'm not sure yet whether this is a good move or not. What do you think?
Don't forget the fun
Written by Neil Patel on June 12, 2006 |
Before I started this blog in January I read 10 Tips to Better Blogging, which I try to follow to some extent. Since then, I have learned a lot about blogging and one important thing that is not on that list.
Should your business have a blog?
Written by Cameron Olthuis on June 9, 2006 | 1 comment
There's a lot of good reasons your business should have a blog if it doesn't already have one. In fact, I'm going to go as far as to say that you cannot afford not to have one. Big business or small, it doesn't matter, they are simply to powerful of a communication tool that you can't ignore them.
VW terrorist ad
Written by Neil Patel on June 9, 2006 | 4 comments
There a lot of things that people hate in the world. Some people hate specific things, while others may hate certain types of people. People are passionate about what they hate, using hate and passion in your marketing campaign can help promote your product or service.
Catchup - 6/9/06
Written by Cameron Olthuis on June 9, 2006 |
New stats from Hitwise has put Google at 60% of the total search queries performed in the US. They put Yahoo at 22% and MSN at 12%. Google's share continues to climb while Yahoo and MSN are heading down the slope.
Just Google It
Written by Neil Patel on June 9, 2006 |
Some of the most popular phrases that are searched on the Internet are celebrity names. If you are a celebrity the freaky part about it is you don't know why people are searching for you.
Riya: Photo search can be simpler
Written by Neil Patel on June 7, 2006 | 2 comments
Riya is one of those sites that impressed me with their idea and at the same time has been devastating me with their execution. They make photo organizing simple and photo searching seamless.
Are you tracking your company buzz?
Written by Cameron Olthuis on June 7, 2006 |
Word spreads like wildfire within the social media scene. In just a matter of minutes your company's reputation can be damaged. If criticism or nasty rumors about your company gets out in the blogosphere and you're not paying attention, forget about it. Your brand will suffer a devastating blow.
Web Analytics: Basic Stats
Written by Neil Patel on June 6, 2006 | 5 comments
There are a lot of statistic solutions out there and they can be used for a lot of different type of websites. Statistics solutions used to be basic, but nowadays these solutions have grown to become robust products.
Don't forget your bookmarks
Written by Neil Patel on June 5, 2006 | 2 comments
Blogging is becoming more popular and more mainstream. As a result, there is a ton of opportunity to enter the fray and leverage it for one reason or another. New social mediums are emerging in response to the increasing popularity of blogging and the key to blowing up your blog (company, personal etc.) is to figure out how to use these social mediums effectively.
Catchup - 6/2/06
Written by Cameron Olthuis on June 2, 2006 | 2 comments
By leveraging the AdSense API, sites can now allow members to create AdSense accounts and earn cash for content contributions. Members will even be able to track earning through the sites. Giant step forward for the social web.
Hardcore gay runs around Yahoo
Written by Neil Patel on June 2, 2006 |
There are a lot of trademark infringements that happen on the web and a lot of people get away with them. This hardcore gay claims that Yahoo used his "hoo" without asking. People deal with infringements in many different ways, watch this hardcore gay go into Yahoo and tear the place up.
Usability: Yahoo, they can do better
Written by Neil Patel on June 2, 2006 | 3 comments
Yahoo Video is getting a lot of hype right now. Everyone is talking about how great it is and all of the good features, but no one is really talking about how they messed up. They are Yahoo, a big search giant, so you would think they know what they are doing.
FeedBurner's count goes crazy
Written by Cameron Olthuis on June 1, 2006 | 9 comments
Today I noticed what looks to be yet another glitch from FeedBurner. There was a serious overnight jump in the number of RSS subscribers on some popular blogs, and I do mean a serious jump. At least that's what we're seeing on the feed count chicklets, can't say for sure if the back end stats are matching this.
Usability and SEO
Written by Neil Patel on June 1, 2006 |
A good rule to keep in mind these days is that nothing stands alone. When it comes to website optimization, a lot of people conduct effective SEO campaigns but don't bother to put time and effort into the usability side of their website.
