Your Friendly IT Department
Two great posts at Think Smarter about interfacing with your company’s IT department. The comments are just about as good as the posts.
Smart People Running Blockbuster
I remember when Netflix first came out, and I thought it would be the death of Blockbuster. More selection, more convenience, and no overhead associated with running a brick and mortar store. Of course Blockbuster responded by launching the same basic service that Netflix was offering, and the competition had begun.
But then Blockbuster did something that Netflix could not counter. They started allowing you to return your movies in the store. They put them in the mail for you and also allowed you to pick out another movie from the store to rent for free!
Not only is this a great service, but it gets you into their store where they always ask, “Would you like to purchase Coke, candy, or popcorn tonight?”
AHA!!! Blockbuster took what would appear to be a competitive disadvantage–having to operate a brick and mortar store–and turned it into a competitive advantage–an opportunity to sell food and beverages at an extreme markup along with pre-viewed movies, posters, video games, etc.
Blockbuster had the rules changed on them overnight, but they turned the new rules into an advantage. Some creative thinking on their part has put Netflix on the brink of going out of business.
Your Problem May Already Be Solved
On one of my blogs, not a “blog” blog, which talks about blogs, but a regular blog that talks about something entirely different, I made a post a few days ago that mentioned Google Reader. In it, I talked about one of the great features of Google Reader is that it has the “trends” option that lets you know how often a feed is updated, how many of the items in the feed you actually read, etc.
Just today, I found out that a techy friend of mine who didn’t know about these features in Google Reader. He was complaining about having so many subscriptions that he couldn’t find good information anymore. He was frustrated that he couldn’t easily sift through all of the feeds to get just the good stuff. He was amazed when I showed him how Google Reader could help him do that.
The purpose of this post isn’t to sing the praises of Google Reader. I’ve already done that twice on two different blogs, albeit from two different angles. This post is instead about the fact that even the most well informed and clever people can miss things, even things that solve their problems. Often, the solution to your problem is right in front of you if you’re willing to dig a little bit deeper or ask the right question of the right person.
Now What? Make a Squidoo Lens, and Hurry!!!
You’ve got your site up and running and are pretty happy with it, but the marketing job is just beginning. Here’s another tip that can get you a lot of mileage in making is making a “lens” at Squidoo.com. A lens is an easily configurable site that Squidoo hosts for you for free. There are several reasons to do this in a hurry.
1) The name of your lens will be www.squidoo.com/nameyoupick. It is important to get a name that is related to your field. Once someone else grabs that name it is gone forever
2) Google LOVES Squidoo. This means every link you make from a Squidoo lens to your site is a quality, high ranking link. It will do wonders for your reputation with Google
3) You control the content of you Squidoo lens, so all the information in the lens can lead people to your site. For example, if you sell romance novels, you can talk about how your site is the absolute best place to buy romance novels online and include just enough information on your lens to encourage people to visit your site to learn more.
4) It is free! The price is right. Squidoo is one of the easiest, most effective things you can do to market your site.
5) You can have as many Squidoo lenses as you like, so you can use “longtail words” or details about your field to build even more lenses. Using the romance novels example, it would be feasible to create a lens based on the names of the most popular romance novelists, give information about each of them in their own lens, and provide a link from each lens back to your site.
Get your lenses yesterday! Come back every now and then to add content and keep them fresh. Squidoo can help you drive traffic and increase awareness about your business.
Now What? Add Your Domain Name to Your Signatures!
Having a functional and attractive web site is just the beginning. You still have to find a way to get people to use it. One of the easiest ways to let folks know about your site is to leave a calling card for it everywhere you go on the web.
You probably already have your domain as part of your signature for your email account, but the title of this article mentions siganures–plural. There is an even better way to get the news out about your website than using your email sig–use your domain name in your sig on forums related to your field where you post.
You don’t post on forums? Big mistake! Posting on forums is an incredible way to market yourself online for a couple of reasons. First of all, forums allow you to communicate with potential clients who are qualified. You know they are interested in your market because they are on the forum in the first place.
Additionally, each post you make with a link to your site in the signature is another chance for someone to find your little area of the web. These links also help build your Google Page Rank, which is based on the number of links to your site and the strenth of those links.
Posting helpful and relevant posts on forums where people are looking for the services you provide is a great way to find new clients and get your name established. Thirty to forty five minutes of reading and writing in forums every day can do wonders for your online rep.
All Of Your Websites Are Belong to Us!
Remembering my attempt to use my first web page to get chicks reminded me of a funny story that came out of that little venture. I used to chat with a girl, we’ll call her “Amy” (since that was her name), on a bulletin board called ISCA run by the Iowa Student Computing Association. This was early 90s…BBS’s were the chat rooms of the time, and ISCA’s was like the Facebook or MySpace of BBS’s–we’re talking a userbase of college students well into the triple digits!!! Lynx was the only real web browser at the time, and chatting on the web was a long way off.
Anyway, once I saw Mosaic, built a page, and had it out there I was super excited about it. I was telling Amy all about it (the web) and giving her directions on using it at the workstation she was using while we were chatting. For some reason I had to stop chatting once she got everything working and told her that I’d talk to her later.
The next time we chatted she was AMAZED! She’d surfed the links from my page to other pages, and links to others and so on and so forth. By the way, remember when you first used the web and you’d really surf? I mean, you’d sit down with the intention of aimlessly surfing, not to get one little nugget of information and visit the same 15 sites over and over for updates. The funny thing is that Amy thought I was responsible for the WHOLE THING. She thought I’d posted the entire internet as it existed at the time.
I wasn’t really interested in her in that way, but looking back I missed an opportunity to reach the exact goal I’d set out to accomplish in the first place–getting chicks! She was so impressed, and had I been interested, I’d gotten my foot in the door.
I didn’t know it at the time, but this phenomenon is pretty common in the online world. Espcially with the viral nature of the web today, success comes at times and places where you least expect it. Be prepared to strike while the iron is hot!
The First (and Best) Marketing Lesson I Learned
I built my first “website” back in 1995. It wasn’t really a site, just a page. Does anyone else remember those days–when people would ask about your “page” instead of your “site”? I worked pretty hard to get this page where I wanted it. I learned html by reading some links I found on this really cool site called Yahoo! I did all the html in a vi editor, ftp’d the default.html file up to my student account at school, viewed it with Mosaic, edited, uploaded, viewed, edited, uploaded ad infinum.
I was so proud of the finished product. It was hideous–a black background with a mugshot-like photo of me that I’d scanned at the computer lab. The font color was flourescent puke green, and I’d even gone to the trouble of using those tricky <ul> and <li> tags with links to my favorite sites. Actually, I think I made an effort to use just about every tag I learned.
What, you may ask, would prompt a perfectly lazy college student to take time off from drinking beer and watching Animaniacs to do such a thing? The answer is obvious–chicks. All I needed to do was get my handsome mug up on a black background with flashy green letters and the ladies would come flocking, right?
Not exactly. This was my first and probably most valuable lesson in internet marketing–KNOW THE MARKET. See, chicks weren’t using the internet back then. Sure, some were, but for the most part girls didn’t know or care about the web back then. Hell, most guys didn’t know or care about it either, and the ones that did were nerds like me. If I wanted to get people to come to my site I was going to have to either populate it with either porn or Dungeons and Dragons info. Campus policies stopped me from the former (thankfully), and ignorance of elves and fairies stopped me from the latter.
So I was stuck with a super cool web site that no one wanted to visit.
Something to think about whether you have a site now or are thinking of launching one–WHO will be coming to this website, and WHY would they want to come here? If you can’t recognize the who and the why, your site will come up short in fullfilling the needs of they user and they will go elsewhere.
Google Earth–Maybe the Coolest Google Tool Yet
For me, this in anything BUT a productivity tool. Every time I start it up I lose hours. If you have an addictive personality, stay away. If you think you can keep it under control, read on… Continue Reading >>
Flickr Photo Sharing Online
Want an easy and fun way to share photos with your friends? Need
Flickr is an image hosting service owned by Yahoo!. Like all of their tools, it is FREE, and allows you to upload 100Mb per month. It is super easy to upload your photos and share them with friends and family. Just like Picasa on your home computer, Flickr uses tags to organize photos. Instead of
Google Reader
If you aren’t sure what RSS is, there’s a quick primer available on this site. If you already know about RSS and are itching to try it out, I think Google Reader is the best one out there.
Not only is it a nice reader, but it also ties in with your Google account along with GMail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, etc., so it integrates nicely. If you are a fan of Gmail, you will love Google Reader’s interface. It allows you to arrange your feeds by subject and shows new updates from your feeds in bold, indicating they are “unread”. Continue Reading >>
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