I haven’t seen a Mac vs. PC commercial on the television in a while so I got my fix on You Tube. Which leads me to the question, how on earth did we survive pre-youtube?
Mac Vs. PC Parodies
Jul 11th, 2010 by admin
What’s New with Bing and Yahoo?
Jul 6th, 2010 by Nick
So, Bing, Microsoft’s answer to Google, has been with us a little over a year (though it seems much, much longer than that.) So it’s unsurprising that the upstart with deep pockets remains number three in terms of search volume, after Google (which has a staggering 84.8% of the volume) and Yahoo! (which has 6.19%). Bing, for its part, has 3.24% of the traffic volume.
Things got a little more interesting last year, when, a month or so after the Bing unveiling, Microsoft and Yahoo! Announced a deal where Bing would power Yahoo’s search functionality. Yahoo! will get to keep 88% of ad revenue revenue from all search ad sales on its site for the first five years.
The agreement also extended to the search marketing side of things. In February or so, we started seeing the advent of Microsoft Adcenter and Yahoo! Sponsored Search sliding together into one.
That agreement is currently going live, so a lot of these things are going to be hashed out in front of our very eyes.
I don’t really care to opine about the Bing powered search over on Yahoo! (although Bing apparently excels at online porn). Hopefully now we’ll see some improvement with Yahoo’s Sponsored Search Offerings, where things had been seeming a little creaky as compared to the other two—especially Google. Time will tell on that, I suppose.
Happy Canada Day!
Jun 30th, 2010 by Nick
One of the best summers I’ve ever had was spent in Ottawa (Hull, actually, which is now a part of Gatineau). Canada Day was just beautiful that year, and my friends and I walked over the bridge to party downtown. It was great fun. Hope your Canada Day this year is as good as that. In the meantime, I’ve been practicing selecting things in Photoshop, so enjoy this balloon which was over, I dunno, Guelph or something. Courtesy of moi and my mad pen tool skilz, you get something like the view I had in 1996. (Wow, I’m old!)
Go over here for things to do for Canada Day in Montreal. [in French]
Arguments for Hiring a GOOD Professional Blogger
Jun 28th, 2010 by admin
Last week, I wrote about the ups and downs of managing your own corporate blog. This week I would like to talk about some very good reasons why you should hire a professional blog writer.
To begin with, a professional blogger understands SEO, keyword placement and web etiquette. This means that a blogging professional who is writing consistently on your blog should be able to attract both search engines and readership. Just as important, they will know the how to properly respond and hopefully retain the traffic that does arrive at your blog site.
Another great argument for hiring a professional blogger is, well he or she is a professional. This means your blogs will be carefully written to represent your company in the best possible light from a marketing perspective and also will focus on interacting with your readers /clients / potential clients in a positive and professionally friendly manner. This may seem an easy task but it can take much skill and finesse.
Blogging is easy, right? After all your competitors have blogs, your industry resources are now in blog format, and even your aunt Hilda writes all about her adventures in gardening. But check up on these blogs after they have been around for a few months. In the beginning many authors post once per day or more. Then it slips to every other day. Soon blog postings are so infrequent that you believe they have been abandoned. A professional blogger does not lose inspiration or get too busy to post regularly. Think about it. You have regular duties, perhaps even an entire company to run. Sometimes it is imperative that you put your blog on the back burner. A professional blogger, however, will post regularly and on time about your business, industry news, or within whatever guidelines you have given.
A good professional blogger cannot only author you blog, they can also read the results of their blogging efforts and adjust their topics, writing style, and/or timing to reflect your readers’ interest and attract a larger following. This may be difficult for a non blogger, not only because you may not understand how to read your analytics but also because it is difficult to remove yourself far enough to see where to improve. As an example let’s say Fred just created a blog for his company Bedpans n’ Stuff. Bedpans are by far Fred’s best selling item. So his instinct may lead him to blog about bedpans every day. Bedpans, however, may not fascinate his customers as much as they do Fred. Even the ones who happen to be in the market for a shiny new bedpan are not really reading Fred’s posts. Fred might throw up his hands in disgust and give up on the whole blogging scene. A professional blogger, on the other hand, should understand that people can only read so much about bedpans and try to attract readership by discussing other topics that people who buy bedpans may also be interested in.
Finally, a professional blogger is inexpensive. In the amount of time that it takes you to research, write and post a blog, what could you be doing instead? Focusing on your core business, following up with sales leads and making money are just a few things that come to my mind. So talk to some professional bloggers for hire today and start attracting the right attention to your blog.
Blogging Bloggers and the Blogs they Blog on
Jun 24th, 2010 by Nick
That sounds a little redundant, and it could be, frankly, but in this instance it’s not. Now that blogging is an industry in and of itself, there are industry bloggers who shape news and views in the blogosphere. They opine on things like how often you should post, what you can do to get more traffic, what to do if you’re having writer’s block and so forth. I follow them for tips and tricks and of course, the holy grail of how to produce content quickly and easily (like turning water into gold for medieval alchemists, there’s not a lot of hope here, but hey, you can dream.)
Here are my favorite bloggers who blog about blogging:
Problogger. This blog is pretty much the epicenter for this blog community. It’s run by Darren Rowse, an Australian, who has now spawned a blogging empire. Plus, he’s a totally nice guy and the site never ceases producing meaningful, helpful content and really encouraging folks to get in the game of blogging. He has a paid membership community (Problogger.com) that is a very helpful place to get feedback and so forth.
David Risley. David Risley is a really, sort of in-your-face guy. But he’s really cool and responsive to his readers. His big thing is how to monetize your blog, so if you’re struggling with that, his site is definitely worth a go. He has a couple of free e-books on the subject, so it’s worth a look.
Performancing is definitely worth a look as well. Their pieces always seem to hit me at the right time and to be quite relevant.
Nick’s Traffic Tricks (not me). This site treats search engine optimization, specifically, I suppose, but it’s basic enough that it’s quite useful to the everyday blogger. He typically posts videos (which is a traffic trick!).
What about you? Where do you go for bloggy inspiration?
If you feel like reading this in proper Canadian French, go here.
Hire a Blogger or Write for Yourself?
Jun 22nd, 2010 by admin
As part of our host of services, iMark customizes and sets up Blogs for our clients. We also provide blog writing services and intro to blogging and social media learning sessions. Naturally we inform all of our blog customization clients of the latter two mentioned offerings.
I have had a few clients scoff at the idea of having a professional blogger writing content on an ongoing basis for their corporate blog and that is okay. If you have the time, talent, and inclination, I encourage you to go for it yourself! In fact, we will coach and help our clients to make the most out of their blog, should they need our assistance; not only in the form of one-on-one learning sessions, as mentioned above, but also on an as needed basis (usually for free, as long as the client doesn’t get carried away!) and through the occasional tips on our blog and in our newsletters. In fact, here are some very useful blogging tips that we posted to our blog not too long ago, if you happen to be looking for a few successful blogging hints.
While some people and corporations are ready, willing and able to maintain a successful blog, it might not make sense for others. If you happen to fall in the category of OTHERS, then it of course makes more sense to hire an inexpensive yet reliable blogger than to go without a blog altogether. Or, as yet another alternative, hire a blogger to co author your blog. This way if you get swamped at work or temporarily lose inspiration, you will not lie awake at night worrying about the unkempt state of your blog …or maybe that is only me, but you know what I am saying!
In my next post, I will write some very good arguments in favour of making the leap to hire a blogger rather than attempting to maintain a blog on your own.
image courtesy of innovation creators
Video: Stop Motion Mario
Jun 18th, 2010 by bryandean
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAue4hnH8-A]
A group of Japanese students with an abundance of free time have made this really awesome stop motion video of Super Mario traversing around their school. These kids actually made what I only daydreamed about staring at the walls at school when I was their age.
[ Youtube via boingboing ]
Web tools I can't live without.
Jun 17th, 2010 by Nick
You know, Lifehacker and other blogs like it always feature different websites or web-based tools that help people do a given task or set of tasks. Sometimes I wonder if the editors ever really get anything done with all their trying different ways of doing things. But it is important, when you’re trying to be an effective person, to have a certain arsenal of tools at your disposal.
I’ll tell you about my list of tools. Mind you, this list changes over time, but probably not so quickly as the Lifehacker editors. But here goes:
- Google Apps. My life would be greatly diminished without Gmail and Google Maps, for instance. But lately I have become strangely dependent on Google Documents, where I keep lots of my important, daily-access kinds of files. It really solves the problem of using 3 or 4 computers on a regular basis, and version control is not a problem. Google Calendar is wonderful as well. The Gmail contacts sync beautifully with my Blackberry (yes I am a BB person until I get my Android this summer.) Google Tasks are cool as well, but I’m keeping them in my back pocket for the time being.
- Office Drop. This is a cool little service where you mail in your paper documents and they scan them in and host them online. It works great in conjunction with Google Docs, if there’s something you need regular access to.
- Picnik. This is the awesomest photo-editing software: all online. You can put a drop shadow in, straighten a photo, put a cute little border on it and boom, you’re done. And I guess I have good taste because guess what? Google just acquired them. Whatever. If Google ever goes evil, I’ll be in deep trouble.
- Diigo. This is a bookmarking app. I had used delicious for quite some time, however, but it wasn’t quite getting at what I needed. Diigo has a bunch of tools to help me organize my online research, and it gives you quite a bit more meta-data than Delicious did.
That’s about it, really. Like I said, I am overly dependent on the Google products, but you know, they work. Let me know in the comments which sites/tools you can’t live without, and I’ll see if I can remember some more too.