Posts Tagged ‘Internet Marketing Strategy’

Twitter is exploding at the moment and everyone is climbing on the bandwagon, blogging about its benefits etc, and you could be forgiven for thinking that this was the new easy way to online success.

In the real world, clients want to talk about search engines, search engine optimization or search engine marketing (Google Adwords / Pay-Per-Click).

Why? The current economic downturn is having an impact on businesses and with the majority of people now using Google (mainly) to find information on an all subjects across the board, many organizations are re-evaluating their online marketing and website strategy. It’s an area that clients in every market are asking for advice on.

Many are now concerned by their visibility to prospective customers. Businesses that previously saw a website as an online brochure are waking up to the fact that online they’re completely invisible to those searching online for the products and services that they offer. Not a good place to be at the best of times, but a business killer in a recession. Read the rest of this entry »

Well, they probably don’t get any slower than this do they?

My good friend and business associate Paul Da Costa and I have just started a joint venture with Rev. Keith Lyndon, Certified Exchange Consultant and the man behind the Academy of Creative Real Estate.

His property exchange training manual, 1031 ways to make money in slow real estate markets is now available online for a bargain price!

You can find it here;
1031 ways to make money in slow real estate markets

On Friday 02/06/2009 siteBOSS, TRS Technology’s Internet Marketing Website system, was tested by Microsoft and successfully passed!

siteBOSS PASSES Microsoft Platform Test For Hosted Solutions

That’s quite a mouthful, so what does it mean?

Well, it means a couple things;

1. siteBOSS is built to recognized development standards. This means that the system architecture is correct for a hosted solution, as determined by Microsoft. If you want to find out exactly what that means look at the test guidelines. Go on, I dare you…
2. It means that TRS Technology Group Inc is now a Microsoft Certified Partner.

Of course the system architecture is correct! I’ve been doing this for a long time and with a certain amount of flair. Let me tell you though, it aint easy! Many people think that development is now a fairly simple task, requiring low level skills and the ability to point a mouse and click. Not so my friends. I don’t think it’s gotten any easier, just different.

I also get to brandish a new partner logo, which I’m ok with. I’ve been a Microsoft Certified Professional for years now, so a new designation is cool.

Here is mine and Microsofts, yep, I’m a Microsoft shop and I think Bill Gates is a genius and have nothing but total respect for the man.

I’ve been using YouTube for some time now and have had no problems at all when posting videos, uploading etc. The only real restriction is the 10 minute time limit for video length, which isn’t very long when you’re doing business related training etc (plenty long enough when watching Tiffany dance in her bedroom )

The only possible downsides with YouTube in my humble opinion are;

1. Length restricted to 10 minutes; you have to chop up your videos into shorter segments
2. Private videos; if you want to have private videos they can be viewable by up to 25 people and these people need to be added to your contact list. This is a pain if you want video content to be for private members or list members. I suppose YouTube is really for public consumption though…

Because of these restrictions I started looking at Google video. I was very pleased to see a NEW feature which allows you to upload your video as UNLISTED, so your video will not be included in the search results. This is a handy feature, as you could post a private video and not have it found by the general public. Pretty neat, or so I thought…

I downloaded the Google Video Uploader utility, which lets you upload multiple files with bigger than 100MB. If your video file size is less than 100MB you can use the web based form to upload.

I uploaded one video using the web form and one using the uploader. That was 2 days ago. Since then, I haven’t been able to login using the Google Video Uploader and if I try using the web form I get an error.

It seems that this has been an ongoing problem for a while, you can follow the link at the end of this post to see a recent Google groups discussion about the problem.

I wonder if Google video is still viable as an option? As Google own YouTube, for which they paid around $1.6 billion! Do you think they care much about Google video? If YouTube had these problems over an extended period of time it would be in serious trouble, no doubt…

Here’s the post;
http://groups.google.com/group/google-video-general/browse_thread/thread/3fd7d33a2ab1bd13/ad9c33706b2f1a74

I’ve been looking at a variety of options for allowing a simple email notification from WordPress when a post is made. Although we are still heavily entrenched in email marketing and it doesn’t look like it’s going away anytime soon, email marketing is still a big pain in the butt! It’s a pain to send email and a pain to recieve email, so I’m opting for a lightweight email notification system and hoping that RSS will be a big help in getting my messages out to my clients and subscribers.

The first thing I had to do was add SMTP email capability to WordPress. It seems that the standard email function is a slack old send function expecting an open relay (tsk tsk). So I had to put in the SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) plugin to enable me to send via SMTP with a username and password.

I used WP-Mail-SMTP. It was simple to install, i.e. point and click and simple to configure. There is even a test button so you can check it works on the config form. Nice. Thank you!

Then, after looking at a couple different post notification plugins I ended up selecting http://subscribe2.wordpress.com/. This is a bigger plugin, with a few config pages. Install was a snap. I still have to configure the messages, under settings>subscribe2 but the good news is you can easily create any message you want for your subscibers, optins and reminders.

You simple add a new page (easy in Worpress 2.5) to put the subscribe / unsubscribe form on and away you go.

I also noticed that Feedburner (now owned by Google) were offering email updates as a service, plus a ton of tracking options in the feedburner PRO version, which I believe is free. It would probably be the easiest option to go for if you didn’t have your own web design, development and hosting company!
http://www.feedburner.com

I found this script in the root of my WordPress blog the other day. It’s a script that generates links to a web server in Germany. The links point to advertizing pages etc. It’s a nasty pain in the ass and you should delete it and block the server ip etc. I have no idea how it got there yet, but I’ve been trying a lot of different plugins lately so who knows…

Details:
Filename:ph.php
Location: blog root
Server: http://km20725.keymachine.de
IP: 62.141.48.94

If I find anything more out about this I’ll post it here. You can see the full details of the domain
here http://whois.domaintools.com/keymachine.de

I just recieved a spoof email from some douchebag in Canada. It’s a very sophisticated request for me to login to my Google adwords account. The email starts with the subject line;

Your AdWords Google Account is stoped.

Thats the first indication, a spelling mistake in the subject. Those PhDs at G are smarter than that. The email then says;

Dear Advertiser,
———————————-
We were unable to process your payment.
Your ads will be suspended soon unless we can process your payment.
To prevent your ads from being suspended, please update your payment information.
————————
Please sign in
to your account at http://adwords.google.com/select/login,
and update your payment information.
————————————————-
We look forward to providing you with the most effective advertising available.
Thank you for advertising with Google AdWords.
———————————–
The Google AdWords Team

The interesting thing is the email address is actually on the Google domain, which is another more sophisticated technique, so I followed the link, which is included above but may not be working for very long. Below is a screen capture of the landing page;

It’s pretty darn sophisticated isn’t it. I wonder how many people have gone there and logged in, thus giving the perp their adwords account login. Pretty serious stuff eh? I always forward the email to spoof@google.com, and I usually get an email back from them within a few days…

Well I know I keep banging on about Google but you’ve got to hand it them, they keep on rolling on and pushing more and more advertising and marketing services.

Recently launched is Google TV Ads, which allows you to place televison network ads from the comfort of your office chair no less!

Now you have to realise that if your going to put an ad on a TV network it should be pretty good quality (I don’t mean hd!!), I mean a good script and well shot and produced etc. Come to think of it, going by some of the low budget local ads I’ve seen on the local tv channels, maybe it doesn’t matter?

It’s interesting how the video space has opened up, what with live tv broadcasting on USTREAM etc and now the ability to run tv ads from Googles interface. Plus, with G you can apparently track usage and measure results…

Here’s a nifty little tutorial from Google for your viewing pleasure;

Audio campaigns and print media campaigns are also available. You can check them out here http://www.google.com/adwords/tvads/index.html and on their blog here http://google-tmads.blogspot.com/

I got an email from Marlon Sanders the other day. I went to his sales page and he was broadcasting live on the internet using USTREAM.tv. He was so excited he could hardly contain himself.

I didn’t buy his trainign program, but I did go create an account on ustream.tv to see how easy it was to setup and what you could do with it. I have to say, I’m blown away! Desktop video, dvd camcorders and all of the technology to create an uploadable video have been with us for a while now and are pretty stable. But to be able to stream live on the internet at the click of a button, literally. That’s bloody awesome!

Check out my quick tutorial, then go get your account and have some fun. Try not to get arrested though!

Just created another screen video using Camtasia 5. This is the latest version and its really cool. You can put in a picture in picture (I know you don’t want to see my ugly mug!), which might be useful in some situations. However, the filesize increases dramatically with PIP.

See what you think…