Land of Opportunity

Regular readers may have noticed about a week has gone by without a post. The time has been well spent installing WordPress 1.5 on two Windows 2003 Servers running Internet Information Server 6 (IIS6) at the office. I now have the wisdom that only comes from performing and mastering a task. You, the reader, now gain the advantage of learning from my experience without the expense of time nor the frustration of troubleshooting.

If you are planning to install WordPress on Microsoft Server 2003 and/or IIS6, here’s the inside information:
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Bluebert G. Peabody of Peabody’s Cre8tive Flow pointed me to a long, but very high quality article on ad placement.

The post caught my attention due to some recent blogosphere discussion on placement of Google AdSense ads on blogs. I, for one, made several changes in the location of the Google ads on the Land of Oppoprtunity small business blog and saw an immediate (next day) improvement in click throughs. (more…)

Originally, I had planned this week’s grand post to be the long awaited Part 2 of Marketing a Business Blog. But, recent discoveries in the blogosphere demand immediate attention.

“There’s trouble in River City!” And, ala the famed musical, The Music Man, that’s trouble with a capital “T.”

The same idiots that spam the search engines, like Google, with worthless sites are now trashing Google’s new blog service, Blogger. (more…)

Web site accessibility design is an after thought for most business blogs. And, that’s being generous, if you get my drift.

Few business bloggers, and even most conventional web masters with traditional websites, have given even scant attention to ensuring their sites are accessible to handicap visitors. Everyone assumes that all visitors will be able to see the flashy graphics, watch a video, hear an audio message, and then move a mouse to open additional eye and ear candy.

Test Your Blog

Here’s a quick test. Turn off the images in your browser, visit your blog or one listed in the blogrolls to your left, and navigate without using your mouse. (more…)

Mad Vlogger Christian Brower offers a video clip of business marketing gone bad — very, very bad. In this clip an oriental restaurant attempts telemarketing. How Chris kept a straight face during the video I’ll never know.

If you’re looking for something different for your next marketing blog post, chinese restaurant telemarketing is it.

After you’ve watched the clip and had your laughs, ponder this: How could business harness the technology of video blogging.

I see useful vlogging applications for (more…)

Dana VanDen Heuvel at Made for Marketing blog thinks so.

With the average visitor to a traditional website reading only one page, with less than a minute at that, and the average blog visitor seeing a scarcely more respectable 1.4 pages in about 80 seconds, “stickiness is dead” are fighting words. From my vantagepoint, I disagree — strongly.

Dana lists five reasons why “…site stickiness and visitor length of visit are no longer the ways that we should be looking at the effectiveness of our sites…” (more…)

RRS aggregators are a great way to read your favorite blogs. If you have not tried out a RSS aggregator before, now is the time.

You may have noticed the “button farms” on most blogs with buttons saying XML RSS, FeedBurner, My Yahoo, My MSN and/or Bloglines. (Mine are near the bottom of the left column on this page.) These buttons are links to that blog’s RSS feeds. An RSS feed generally consists of the name of the blog, the title of each post and a brief exerpt from each post. Some blog RSS feeds also contain (more…)

Tris Hussey is attending Northern Voice, a Canadian blogging conference. Tris has posted a sysnopsis of 16 blogging tips given by Tim Bray of Sun who gave the keynote address.

Key among these are: (more…)

Weblog trackbacks are one of the most confusing tools for the new blogger to master. Like many first-time bloggers, I made the common mistake of using the weblog trackback link to link to the article I was citing. My intial attempts to find a good quality tutorial on webblog trackbacks were less than fruitful. Few bloggers post on the subject.

Today, I happened upon Pamela Heywood’s article, “Blogs offer two-way dialog” on Online Business Journal

Pamela provides two important links: (more…)

Since the Land of Opportunity small business blog is about one month old, I suspect that some of you would be interested in learning what has worked well and what has not worked as well during the launch of my new business blog. First, it should be noted that I am a 10-year Internet marketing veteran and webmaster a very large small business website which attracts over 40,000 visitors each month. I already had a marketing strategy in mind albeit based on my experience with tradional web marketing and search engine optimization methods.

Strategy #1 - Content, Content, Content

The first rule of any web presence, blog or otherwise, is (more…)

Steve Smith at EContent has a very eye-opening article on 2005 Product Trends. This article is a must read for anyone who wants to be on the leading edge of breaking consumer trends.

So what are the new rising trends of 2005 according to Steve Smith?

Streaming video ads. Why have a single flash ad when you can easily stream ads using existing pay per view solutions? This is another example of the America’s adult entertainment industry pioneering technologies that are later adopted by main stream business worldwide. I’ve noted this trend for an upcoming redesign of a college recruiting website that would likely benefit from some bleeding edge eye-candy.

Blogging for Bucks. Bloggellers bloggelling to bloggell will add billions of new pages of content to ever expanding Internet. This is so hot that I’ve submitted a speaking proposal to the Association of SBDCs to train our nation’s small business counselors. I’m already counselling small businesses on how to bloggell. Watch for my first book to come out later this spring. Its on bloggelling. (more…)