» marketing

I’m at the Online Marketing show at the business design centre in London Islington, doing.SEO Consultations.

I just so happened to attend a Universal search aka Blended search presentation by Neil McCarthy CMSO of Latitude Group.

Neil’s presentation was entertaining, Neil had a good take on what it is that is required to do well in search in 2008, that is, a knowledge and awareness of what it is that is making SERP front pages in 2008 - rich media, social media, news content etc.The message to the unconverted being that search engines today are trying very hard to give users diversity and choice within the search results. Knowledge and awareness of this is an obvious asset in any online marketing strategy.

Maki wrote a good blog post today that for me spoke about marketing and creating things of value that have the efffect of creating converted users; that’s, people who will buy into whatever it is you do or are trying to achieve.

Be it via a comment, a hit of a subscription button, an add to favourites action , a credit card transaction or a link through to what you wrote or advertised, the bottom line is that without any of these sorts of actions, the likelihood is that you are either writing for yourself or selling something that is overpriced and overvalued or just not worth discussing.

This post will never stay the same, just like the internet it will constantly move and shift. It will display different kinds of links to different urls, similar to Google Zetgeist it’ll draw upon what people are looking for, it’ll try and help those who want people to write about those ideas and topics that are important to them.

What do you want to write about?

Charter oak state college perhaps? Hardly the most exciting topic in the world granted, but someone somewhere is out there looking for it, trying to find information about, or sell a service related to that very word.

Most bloggers and site owners want to be heard.

Lets have it right, who really likes sitting in the corner chatting away to themselves? Blogging for most is a conversational medium. For some it isn’t of course, but for most who do get it, they actually want to engage with other like minded humans who have an interest in what they write about.

The same can be said for other site owners. Those who run businesses desire to have conversations with peoples wallets and purses. Informationists and academics want to have conversations with their lessers and their peers, everybody wants to chat it seems.

Blogging for profit?

Ok, not everyone wants to monetise their blog - some people equate money and blogging as some kind of dirty word almost. Some people still like to write for the hell of it and couldn’t really give a rats arse for any kind of monetary payback. Their payback is the reward that comes from getting people involved or simply venting their spleen on a topic near and dear to them.

Promote your blog…if you want to of course

Ever wondered how some people get more readers than others? Here’s a quick and dirty guide to gaining more readers and growing your blog base.

Sometimes it works on word of mouth. Some people have an exceptional ability for writing that others are just knocked sideways by and tell others.

Be it via email or IM or linking or just plain old fashioned conversation. After all, we aren’t all budding Billy Waggle Daggers and most of us (if we are interested even) will struggle to gain a big readership. It’ll be a slow long haul, but provided we write something thats legible and appeals to an audience of sorts, then overtime it will build. People like to be commented on and tend to comment on stories or issues that are of interest to them in some way. Be it making them laugh or cry or just striking a general chord.

There are things you can do to get yourself out there though, and there are lots of tools, techniques and websites that can help.

Lyndon wrote a good post today talking about bait and switch or as he called it “switchbait“. I’m glad he did, cos I was in one of those ’shit, what shall I blab about today’ moods.
The method is as old as the hills. Build a domain, get the visitors, move them on to somewhere else. At least thats a quick and dirty interpretation.

If you’ve ever launched a new website, especially since 2005, then you’ll know that it can take quite some time to be found for your target kw’s and phrases within the search engines.This is a little look at Google and how it treats new domains and how trust and authority are bestowed from parent domains to subdomains and how it can be an effective strategy in kick starting a new campaign, without excessive reliance on PPC campaigns.
I launched a new subdomain on the 1st January 2007. It fitted in with one of my new years resolutions of blog regularly.

I wrote a few posts about various odds and sods as and when they occured to me. I gave them logical titles and didn’t give too much thought to any SEO’d page content and structure strategy. It was a Wordpress subdomain in the form of robwatts.wordpress.com.

I was just over at tech crunch reading some of the broohah about some deal that fell through regarding performancing and payperpost and was kinda surpised at the level of snorting and derision being applied there. There is this guy named Ted, who like most people trying to get things off of the floor in life has managed to obtain $3 million dollars in funding for an idea, which he feels might just fly. So far he has managed to stir up a bit of controversy, with various high profile people like Matt Cutts coming out against the idea in general.

So ok, I can see why a search engine might have an issue with squillions of bloggers being paid to promote and talk about things using keyword rich anchor text to distort the search landscape but thats just tough I guess, they’ll find a way to deal with it, or mightn’t bother even, hardly the end of the world for mfa sites adsense now is it. Besides what with all this talk about mature algos and whatnot, I doubt it’ll make a huge difference anyways, a storm in a teacup even? Perhaps, or maybe some might see it as the thin end of a wedge. The lines get a little blurred when you think ahead and envisage a SERP full of results containing blogs that have been written on the basis of some monetary consideration. In those scenarios, where would the distinction between paid ads and paid ads masquerading as free serps be drawn? Should the search engine be held accountable for its editorial decisions?

In part 1 of how to build a database driven website we looked at creating the database and tables and looked at some simple options for inserting data. In this part we are going to look at connecting to the DB using PHP, creating a simple template as well as discussing a few site architecture issues.

In this part we are going to look at connecting to the DB using PHP, creating
a simple template as well as touching on a few site architecture issues along
the way.