Archive for January, 2008
Thursday, January 31st, 2008
More and more companies are adding blogs to their sites with only one thought in mind - more conversions. This is what they think - Blogs bring traffic - traffic brings conversions - A BLOG WILL GET US MORE SALES!!!
Then they see that they are getting thousands of hits to their blog while only getting a couple more sales so they stop blogging and think of it as a failed project.
This is a very bad way of thinking about your corporate blog. Of course your blog can be used as a sales tool, but that’s not all a blog is. When you effectively use social media along with your blogging it not only will get you a lot of traffic and spread the word about who you are/what you do - you also can get other people to start talking about your company on their blogs and linking back to you.
From an SEO perspective - links are all I care about. When you get to the front page of Digg or whatever social site you use you’re more likely to be mentioned somewhere else. This happens because a large percentage of social media junkies are running blogs of their own (sometimes several) and they will link to great content - always.
The more links you get the higher your page rank is going to be and you can spread that link juice your blog post is getting to your other pages - the ones that are high converting but rank poorly in the search engines for the keywords you want.
From a user perspective - You get your name out, people who didn’t know you existed now do. Sometimes more importantly than getting the word out - a corporate blog can put a personal face on your business. Blogs open the lines of communication with your users. Would you rather buy from someone you could have an open dialog with - or - someone who turns his back to you?
Don’t miss the point - Corporate blogs are more than just about conversions.
Tuesday, January 29th, 2008
Earlier today I was gathering together several Windows utilities that I always install on any server I maintain or work on regularly. These are some sweet little programs that make my life a whole lot easier so I thought it might be nice to share them with you over the next couple days.
The first of these incredibly useful utilities is called Visual Directory Explorer — VisDir for short. I have a handful of servers that seem to run out of hard drive space every few days. I am not the only one using these servers so it can be difficult to track down where this data is on the drive in order to clean some of it out. I remember one time when the files were hidden so well that I was positive that the drive was bad and it was misreporting how much space was left. I remember thinking to myself, “Wouldn’t it be awesome if I had a utility that would give me a picture of where all the data is on a drive so I wouldn’t have to dig through a million directories searching for who-knows-what?” That is when I found VisDir. VisDir searches drives or folders on a drive and creates a pie chart of each sub-folder and file representing how much space these items are taking up on the drive. You can then click on a slice (a sub-folder) and view the contents of that folder as a new pie. In my earlier example, I saw that Documents and Settings was taking up a vast amount of space. From there I dug into a particular profile and then all the way down to the temporary files created by Internet Explorer. VisDir was a lifesaver! I use the program all the time now.
The Visual Directory Explorer is a free application created by Scott Baker and can be downloaded from http://www.sb-software.com/visdir/.
Monday, January 28th, 2008
2007 was a very good year for Indigio. We acquired many new clients, saw very few clients leave, entered into some great partnerships and finished the year with solid revenue growth. In addition, we continued to invest in the appropriate infrastructure to support future company growth. While most of our employees work from our corporate office in Denver Colorado, we have infrastructure that allows us to scale and have employees anywhere in the world.
A good portion of the 2007 revenue growth can be attributed to the acquisition of CurrentWisdom. CurrentWisdom’s online search practice represented a piece of the Interactive Agency puzzle that we needed to fill. In 2007 we not only integrated the search practice seamlessly into Indigio, we far exceeded the search revenue projections that were identified at the time of the acquisition. Search has become such an important part of the Indigio offering because it allows us to optimize our client’s online opportunities by optimizing their traffic. This feeds right into what we have done very well for many years. That is optimizing online user experience and customer conversion which maximizes our customers’ return on investment.
Indigio has been actively planning to do additional company acquisitions. We have spent the last several months doing research on the Interactive Agency space. We leveraged the services of BBC Research and Consulting to gather specific information about the Interactive Agency market. We worked with financial consultants to develop the financial models to support the acquisitions and we have prepared a business plan to present to the funding community. In addition, as was announced internally last Friday, I am changing roles at Indigio. I am moving on from my role as Chief Operating Officer to focus 100% on acquisitions as the Executive Vice President of Finance and Acquisitions. My role will be to finalize the business plan, work with funding consultants to acquire the necessary funding, identify potential acquisition targets, manage the acquisition process and to ultimately integrate the new company into our structure.
The plan as it stands right now is to focus on acquiring two Interactive Agencies similar to ourselves. Ideally these companies are heavily search focused. This allows us to cross sell our other online channel management services. In the perfect world, one company will be located in the New York area and the other in the Chicago area. There are many strategic reason for this but the most obvious is that we have large clients in both those areas. Ideally these companies are currently generating between 3 million to 7 million in revenue per year, are maintaining a solid customer base, are profitable and are trying to figure out how to make the leap to the next level. Of course, we will look other opportunities but I figure it is best to just spell it out just in case someone from that perfect company is reading this blog entry.
I will make a point of keeping everyone up to date as we journey down this path. I am excited about this new role and extremely excited about the potential we have for growth if we can execute against this plan.
Monday, January 28th, 2008
As many of you know, I read a lot of blogs. It is how I start each day at work. It is a great, easy way to find out what is happening in the world. I follow close to 70 blogs in my RSS reader (if you are not using iGoogle or Netvibes, you really should). Most days I come across a few postings that are smart, concise and worth sharing.
This morning I came across a great post on SEOmoz.org (definitely a blog to follow if you care about or are interested in search engine optimization) written by randfish. I have read several of his posts over the past few months and I feel this is one of this best. I also feel this is an important topic for Indigio, as we have a lot of clients ask what is the right content management system (CMS) for them. The post makes no recommendations as to one CMS over another or even selecting a static site versus CMS. However this post does a great job of explaining that if you do choose a CMS it is crucial to make sure that is is search engine friendly, as not all pre-built or custom solutions are automatically search engine friendly. I feel this is not always understood by our clients. Often for Indigio to ensure that a CMS is search engine friendly (and remains that way over time), Indigio needs to devote time to search engine optimization.
Here is the post by randfish from SEOmoz.org:
The Question: I’m starting a new site and have no idea what I should do for software. Do I need to use a content management system, and if so, how do I make sure it’s SEO-friendly?
The Answer: It depends…
I want to try taking a new tact with this blog post and give some direction about how to approach this issue. There’s no way to tackle the question from every angle in every possible way (at least, not without 100 pages of content), but hopefully, when you refer your friend who’s launching a website or your new startup’s VP of Engineering to this page, they’ll find some helpful starting points. NOTE - This post isn’t going to cover specific CMS platforms. There’s some great web resources already out there like www.opensourcecms.com and www.cmsmatrix.org to help manage this task. Instead, this blog post will help you determine the essential questions to ask of your stakeholders before embarking on a web development project.
The first part of the question determines your need for a Content Management System (CMS) and I’ve made a handy flowchart to guide you through the process:
Nowadays, it’s exceptionally rare for a company or even a private site owner to select a static site, even when a content management system isn’t required due to the inexpensiveness of customizing free platforms like Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress or Mambo.
On to the second portion of our query - how to ensure that a CMS will be search-engine friendly. Below are 12 basic SEO issues that frequently plague content management systems (both pre-built and custom-made). By dealing with these, you’ll ensure a relatively smooth platform for content delivery: Read the rest of this entry »
Saturday, January 26th, 2008
Now… I was planning on posting this even before Tom posted a book review tonight. I’m not just trying to copy him.
Another name for this book could be “Understanding your IT department”. This book (Look me in the eye: My life with Asperger’s) was written by John Elder Robison, the older brother of Augusten Burroughs (one of the funniest memoir writers I’ve read). Even though this book is extremely entertaining, from stories of designing rocket shooting guitars for KISS (and touring with them) to stories of the fears almost all new fathers go through raising their first kid… You need to read it to better understand yourself.
Read the rest of this entry »
Saturday, January 26th, 2008
I love Seth Godin. Already a huge fan of his blog, Purple Cow and The Dip, I of course made sure I picked up his latest (and in my opinion greatest) book, Meatball Sundae: Is Your Marketing Out of Sync?
Seth uses real and profound examples of why ”traditional marketing” like billboards, radio spots and television advertising (the meatballs) and “new trends” like internet media, blogs, or anything else categorized as Web 2.0 (the sundae toppings) often fail when not in sync.
You are probably thinking what does a meatball sundae have to do with anything, right? Meat - good. Whip cream - good. No, probably not…but I am considering giving it a try.
Instead Seth uses the meatball sundae to create a visual comparison of companies trying to “be hip” by using the new Web 2.0 marketing techniques without integrating or updating the traditional marketing techniques within their marketing plan. One of the examples Seth uses is the $40 million Anheuser-Busch spent on Bud-TV, which added no new customers. His examples show how important it is for all marketing strategies within a company to be in sync or they will not be successful. The web 2.0 techniques are new and exciting, but any marketing initiative without success metrics, goals or a plan will not succeed.
I feel the lessons in this book are important for any company or interactive agency (like Indigio). For me, as exciting as the new web 2.0 marketing techniques are, it is important to remember return on investment (ROI). Unless, Indigio helps to build strategy and marketing techniques that increase revenue, create more customers or drive to a company’s success metric, we are not truly helping our clients. We need to remember this with every new initiative (and thankfully, I am proud that this is a focus at Indigio).
The book is broken into three sections. Read the rest of this entry »
Thursday, January 24th, 2008
Adwords has just released information about an upcoming feature in their Adwords interface. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Adwords pay per click, currently you can only bid on keywords in your account both in the search network and the content network. Now however there will be an option to bid on demographics. What this means is that you can set parameters for when your ad will be showing based on age and gender. You may be thinking, how does Adwords know the age and gender of the user? Well, it doesn’t! Read the rest of this entry »
Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008
This is a great posting that shows solid, practical ways to use Twitter to promote your brand and blog. It was written by Darren Rowe at ProBlogger. This posting shows how Twitter is evolving past chatter to become an amazing tool.
If you do not read ProBlogger.net by Darren Rowe, you should. I even follow him on Twitter. He is brilliant and what I like best of all, provides real examples of ways to improve any blog.
Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008
Asking software developers for status updates is always a dicey affair. One has to learn how to translate the various statuses into the reality of requirements and project plans.
Functionally Complete
Developer Believes: The application is 80% solved. All of the hard development work is complete. We just need to paint in the corners with error handling, logging, reporting, etc. Throw some CSS on top of it and call it good.
Reality: The application is 20% complete. The pages look like refugees from 1996 with little to no styling and broken or poorly implemented HTML. Only the base case works and most other use cases will result in a Page Error. Things like reporting, logging, and error handling are non-existent. 10% of the requirements have been addressed.
Read the rest of this entry »
Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008
I hate to brag, but if you’re looking at drywalling an I-Beam in your basement, the world authority might be right down the hall. No, it’s not Bob Vila. That’s right, an article I wrote on my blog about drywalling over an ibeam has attained the #1 spot in Google for search terms that include “drywall Ibeam”, “drywalling Ibeam” “drywalling an Ibeam”, “drywalling i-beam” and the like. People all over the world who would like to drywall in their basements but can’t figure out how to drywall over I-beams can now breathe a sigh of relief, because I tell them how. There are others describing the process, but Google seems to think that I’m the best (at least for a few select keywords).
Read the rest of this entry »
