Devour The Web

Shortly after Microsoft bought aQuantive it quarantined the ad company’s agency unit, Avenue A/Razorfish, in its own division with its own CEO. There were two ways to interpret that move: A) Microsoft wanted to keep the unit — and its substantial profits — while diminishing the appearance of conflict of interest, or B) Microsoft wanted to sell it and was reducing the barriers to such a sale.

A report from AdAge appears to lend credence to the latter theory. According to the story, Microsoft has been in talks with agency network WPP about a possible transaction that would unload Avenue A/Razorfish onto the agency holding company. Rather than a direct sale, unnamed sources tell AdAge the companies are entertaining a swap — AA/Razorfish for 24/7 Real Media’s Open AdStream technology. Such an arrangement would conceal the fact that both companies overpaid for their holdings, the thinking goes.

The partnership might make some additional sense since the companies have a very cozy relationship (Sir Martin Sorrell has spoken at numerous Microsoft events.)

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Drama.

Drama jolts a reader into paying attention.

Novels use it. Movies use it. TV uses it.

There’s no reason why your content shouldn’t use it.

And one of the best ways to create drama is to disagree with your headline. (Yes, I said disagree).

So let’s look at an example:

Headline: The Logical Case For Increasing Your Prices

First Paragraph: Let’s do something really stupid: Let’s avoid increasing your prices. Let’s decrease them instead. By a whole 50%

That’s drama. And it’s dramatic because it takes the opposite stance from the headline.

The reason your reader is hooked into the article is because you wrote a powerful headline. Now once you’ve got attention, you can take the reader down the thread of ‘decreasing prices.’

Show him how stupid it is to decrease prices. Make the case. Then yank him back to ‘raising prices’ once again.

And instantly, you’re pulling the reader back and forth, just like they do in the movies. The drama is deliberate. Planned. And the jolts are designed to wake the reader up.

Because when you think about it, most people believe content creation is about mere words. But it’s not.

I can’t help it. The Onion cracks me up and sometimes I just have to share. Since I know all of you are working feverishly on your next great post, you probably haven’t had time to keep up with the news.

Here’s the latest weather news:

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Bigger Results From Smaller Search Engines
 by: Robin Dary

Advertising on Google and Yahoo, if done properly, can be very successful. However, most small websites or businesses can’t afford to advertise there effectively. If you have a limited advertising budget it won’t help you to be up on Google or Yahoo for 3 days out of the month. What to do then?

Try starting small and working your way up. Enhance.com has a PPC (pay-per-click) service that utilizes the smaller and some tier-2 search engines, exactseek.com has an offer available right now for a PPC campaign that is $36 for one year for one search term on 50 smaller search engines, and redzee.com is a tier-2 search engine that is offering keywords as low as .10 per word.

Start advertising on these smaller and less expensive sites and you might just be pleasantly surprised by the results.

webmaster@ParkerComputerGuy.com.

If you own your own website, there are a variety of things you can do to generate extra income for yourself. To enjoy the most success for your efforts, you must take into consideration your existing website content, as well as your particular target audience. You will also want to know the approximate number of visitors you regularly receive to your website.

Once you have this information, you can decide which idea (or ideas) will apply best to you:

1. Include Google Adsense on your web pages. Google delivers text and image ads that are targeted to your site and its content. When people click on an ad, you will receive a portion of the amount paid to Google by the advertiser. On average, you can expect to receive anywhere between 2 cents to a dollar per click, depending on the keyword.

2. Make money selling other people’s products and services through affiliate programs. Each program you register for should provide you with an affiliate link to track your referrals. Depending on the program, you will normally be paid on a per sale basis or for each sign-up you generate.

Choosing Effective Keywords
 by: Matthew Rankin

Arguably, keyword selection is the single most important stage in the entire optimization process. If you do not choose the correct keyword phrases you will not maximize your ROI on this campaign. I mention ROI and use it as a reminder that keyword selection is not necessarily about looking for the most searched phrases. A profitable optimization is one which produces the greatest return on investment for the time and money that are available to put towards it.

Bigger Is Not Always Better

If you are a web designer in Seattle who has just started your own business, you could make “web design” the targeted keyword phrase for your site as it certainly has the highest number of searches with 707,962 in September 2004 according to the “Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool”. If you have thousands of dollars and many months to dedicated just to attaining those rankings it could be done however, would that be the best use of your time? Alternatively you could target “seattle web site design” with 5,070 searches in September. A Google link check shows the number of links for the top three competitors for the Seattle search had 132, 21, and 47 respectively whereas for “web design” the top three had 18,700, 5,420, and 1,310 incoming links each.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a very complex process. It is a long-term process that will usually never produce results that you can see in days or weeks. By now you probably heard about the importance of getting other websites to link to yours so that you can get a higher ranking in search engines. You listed your websites in some directories and also received a few other links to your website.

But stop right here. How is being linked to your homepage? Are people just using a plain http://www.yourdomain.com for the link? Or is the link embedded in your business name? If so you are eventually loosing valuable points in your search engine ranking. To receive full ‘points’ from a search engine for a link to your website, the link should be embedded in specific keywords.

Keywords? What keywords? How are people searching for things related to your website? Almost nobody searches for your business by business name when doing a search in search engines. People are search for something specific and the search engine will eventually show a link to your page if it relates the search term to your website. If it does not associate a keyword with your website it will not display the link to your site and you are missing out on visitors.

[Insert Killer Title Here]

Here’s a great opportunity for honing your post title writing skills and gaining some traffic at the same time. Possibly even a professional logo design from a top design firm.

Problogger is running a contest this week centered on a simple concept: post titles. Actually the task is deceptively difficult, as we all know. Just look at my piss poor title above!

If you’re up for the challenge, enter by following instructions at Problogger.

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GoDaddy made a calculated decision to nationally "brand" their name using the Super Bowl commercial. They also decided to make their commercial "news" by making it a racy play off of last year’s Janet Jackson fiasco using the Senate Hearings theme. This made the commercial more then just a commercial. It made it News. I read about the commercial in Time magazine 2 weeks before the Super Bowl even aired it. Using this clever trick GoDaddy was able to make the most of their airtime by receiving press before and after the commercial. This extra press only further "branded" their name with consumers.

Paying a large amount for one 30 second commercial can be a large gamble for any company, especially one trying to mark their image on the minds of consumers. But to make the commercial newsworthy practically guarantees your money’s worth and continues to create talk 6 months later. The next key to its lasting "brand" power will be weather it is compared next year to the new crop of commercials.

Business and personal bloggers might seem to be on two ends of a spectrum. On the one side: logic, strategy and profits. On the other: empathy, passion and heart. Never the twain shall meet, right?

There’s one point where they do come together, though. Whatever moves you to build an audience for your content, you need to inspire one key response.

More than admiration, money or attention, you need to earn your audience’s trust.

Prove you’re a human

It’s a weird, Bladerunner world when we have to prove we’re human, isn’t it? But the Internet is a giant tangle of mistrust, aggravated by the use of viruses, bots, spiders, and other not-human things that creep around the web making trouble.

Small businesses and sole proprietors used to spend a lot of time and money trying to look big. Big meant trustworthy. A big company, after all, had more to lose than some little guy who had just hung up a shingle. Big companies were stable and we expected them to behave themselves.

No longer. In the era of Enron, WorldCom and Halliburton, you’d have to be out of your mind to trust big for big’s sake.