LinX BoX

This Friday’s Top 3 interesting sites I visited this week:

1. Time and Date
2. OpenMinds.com
3. Advertising.com

This list is published every Friday and values originality. Submit your suggestions for next week as comments.

And don't forget my web templates shop at Bynapse.com - the easy web.

LinX BoX

This Friday’s Top 3 interesting sites I visited this week:

1. Boowa and Kwala
2. Abika.com
3. Telerik.com

This list is published every Friday and values originality. Submit your suggestions for next week as comments.

And don't forget my web templates shop at Bynapse.com - the easy web.

Web 2.0, oil to cyber space

Not too long ago, if you were from Texas and had a little bit of land that only cattle enjoyed thus far and walked into an office on Wall Street asking for money to drill for oil, money were flying to you. A while after that, in the 90’s, oil is still a business but if you’re a geek stepping in that same kind of office with a dot-com idea, money would be coming in fast.
Whenever a new wave of resources or technologies comes up, people are fast to take the new road and fill up the unavoidable cracks of the beginnings. The cycle is so predictable; it’s almost a natural law.
Web 2.0 is one of those waves that revigorates adds opportunity and generates business and it has been around for long enough to mean more than just buzz words. CSS, RSS, Ajax and Web 2.0 do express now real and useful technologies combined with a modern design and architecture based on collaboration and usability to generate a refreshing and manageable user experience. Is it a new version of the internet? No. Is it a new way of thinking? Well if it is, is one that generates business.
Gucci.com is a popular web site that breaks every SEO rule (with JavaScript turned off, all you get is a blank page) and yet it is a reference for Web 2.0 website design.
At Seoul digital forum, Google CEO Eric Schmidt defined web 2.0 as a “marketing term” and being based on Ajax. But Ajax is not search engine friendly. So can you enjoy Ajax and please search engines? Well yes, just make sure the content is html. Web 2.0 may be based on technology (it has actually been made possible by the technology) and yet you hear SEO, SMO and “content is king” all the time.
In the end, users enjoy a simple to decipher html content page just as much as search engines. But are search engines the “goal” of a site? Good ranking can not be the target. Scott Orth completed a case study for one of his clients that used Ajax and CSS and as the user experience improved (which is also at the foundation of web 2.0), he enjoyed a 97% increase in rankings and traffic jumped 53%.
Amit Kumar from Yahoo said that, while technology is awesome, simplicity is also crucial so engines can understand content of page.

To conclude, technology is not a drawback and I’ll use it anytime since search engines will start to understand it sooner than later and then, you know, being first matters over being best. At least under the laws of marketing...

LinX BoX

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PPC Advertisers Hints, Tricks, and Guru Guidance.

Vasilis Pasparas wrote an article on Quik-Find.com about PPC advertising and I felt it does a great job on summarizing the subject for us. I wrote Vasilis and he was kind enough to reply :

Dear Bogdan,
As i have told you over Yahoo Messenger today, i would like your comments on our PPC Article located at http://www.quik-find.com/ppc_tricks.html. Also i allow you to post it on your blog with any comments either form you or your users.

thank you, I really appreciate your comments

Regards Vasilis Pasparas High Speed Data Networks INC Lambi 85300 Kos Greece

Here is the original article:

The following information is presented to all internet marketers, webmasters, and SEO's as a good solid foundation that we hope you can use to get the most out of all of your PPC marketing efforts ... both here at Quik-Find.com, and at any other Pay Per Click search engine that you elect to invest your marketing budget into. In following our stated mission to clean up the PPC industry, we feel it appropriate to take every measure possible to educate and enlighten.

PPC Advertisers are good for the industry. You make more intelligent decisions, attain higher Returns on your Investment, and through your success, make the Pay Per Click model a viable one, both for the PPC operators, and for the advertisers. It is our hope that on this page, and the pages that follow you'll take away at least one thing that will either save you money or make you money. Either way, we both win.

Incidentally, if you're a casual search engine user/consumer, and not a Pay Per Click Search Engine client or marketer ... you should read these articles as well. Knowing the way successful businesses operate and think will most certainly help you in making better, more informed buying decisions.

1. Choose your Weapon
There are now over 500 Pay Per Click Search Engines out there, all seeking your business. It's important that once you have made the decision to use PPC as a marketing strategy, that you fine tune that decision into choosing which of the vast array of PPCs not only deserve your marketing dollar, but which ones are most likely to help you get the best return out of it.

2. Know your Prey
How well do you really know your target audience ? Nobody knows your business better than you, and nobody knows the type of person that's likely to purchase your product or service better than you, right ? Wrong. Let's examine some of the strategies that we have seen to work in not only properly identifying your real target audience, but in actually targeting them effectively.

3. Use the Correct Ammo
All keywords are not the same ! If you're a veteran of PPC advertising, you probably have a stock list of keywords that you bid on (Throw that away, right now). If you're new to this game, then welcome to perhaps the most important decision you'll have to make during your PPC marketing effort: selecting the proper keywords for bidding. In this article, we're going to debunk all of the myths and current "industry standards" for generating your keyword list, and hopefully open your eyes to the next generation of thinking in PPC Keyword Selection.

4. Shoot to Kill
So you've taken all of your time ... nights, weekends & days off, and you have found what you consider to be the best search engines to market in, you have the best keyword list known to mankind, and have identified and targeted thousands of potential customers. And they've made it to your website. Job Well Done. Not exactly. Until you're counting your profits, your job is not yet complete. Perfect Marketing doesn't necessarily translate into profit. This is where the real work begins....turning your the visitors you have fought so hard to obtain into paying customers.

LinX BoX

This Friday’s Top 3 interesting sites I visited this week:

1. Bust A Name
2. Funny Junk
3. Threadless

This list is published every Friday and values originality. Submit your suggestions for next week as comments.

And don't forget my web templates shop at Bynapse.com - the easy web.

Building the Comunity Product

iPhone launch clearly showed in the few months that have passed, the power of the community in spreading the word and keeping the topic hot. Even mediocre blog entries, regardless of them being favorable to the product or not, got a lot of visits and social networking sites had days of “iPhone-related only” topics on their front page, and all that from “thunderlizards”, self-appointed evangelists and bloggers that looked for some traffic for their Ad-Sense supported pages.
On the other hand, buzz building does not generate awareness. So what made all these people get involved and build an open community? They found something worthy of building a community around it. It’s tough to impossible to build a community around mundane and mediocre products regardless of the amount of money or marketing minds you throw at it. If the product is worth a community it will get one no matter how hard you try to stop it from forming.
Is a great product enough though? Well, you may have the website that puts Flickr to shame but Google Analytics shows 0 visitors. What you need is a platoon of thunderlizards, right away. You need to be proactive about the community and stir the waters a bit and help form the nucleus and to do that, you need to decide to build Closed or Open communities. Nike owns a community; you may choose football players and have a virtual championship, as long as they’re Nike players. An open community is built on self-appointed evangelists though and if you can’t have such a community forming, it’s time to review the product.
You can build the product for the community and have the community be the product. That is an amazing concept so beautifully built by Treadless. Just check them out; they have built the perfect community product.
Social media is art about context, communication and collaboration so you have to recruit your evangelists right away and have them build the nucleus of a community around you and suggest and encourage people to further spread the word by blogging and commenting. Just asking your customers for help is so flattering that they will help you, much to your surprise.
All right, where to find these evangelists? All great deeds need a champion that inspires and shapes the world. All you need is to be or find and assign that champion, that original hero that gives the community identity and inspiration. What employee wakes up in the morning thinking: “Today I will carry the flag for my company on the virtual world”? Would they be thinking: “I might get fired for my comment yesterday on that blog post”?
The community has to welcome criticism as this is a long term relationship with ups and downs. Luckily, the criticism the community gives the product or the company is always a constructive one. You should fear no criticism as that means people are going away and they usually never return. Freaking out and trying to control the community as soon as something not-so-nice comes up, just kills it. Love letters from the community to the owner of the company are just a myth.
For your product to attract and foster a community on its own it needs flexibility, malleability, extensibility, it needs to be able to grow by having others build on it. It needs and SDK (Software Development Kit) that allows widgets, plug-ins, tuning. The community needs build on and that flatters the community as admits that you did not build the perfect product, but it can get there sure enough. Once someone builds a widget, a plug-in for your product just try to take your product away from that person. A community may as well start building around the plug-in. As long as tweaking is possible, someone will try it and make it great in a way you never thought of.
Participate in the exchange. The community does not run the company but it has a voice and it needs answers from within the company. The involvement of the CEO in the conversation is a bit extreme for a large company though. Participation in the conversation also means you make sure the community is easy to reach and included in your operations. Just search for forums, “user groups” or blogs at Apple, Microsoft, Netscape, Yahoo, Sun or Ford, Harley Davidson, Shell …
For all that happened, Apple deserves a Hight Five on building a community product.