Land of Opportunity

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…)

This weeks Carnival of the Capitalists is up at Beyond the Brand. The CotC is a weekly roundup of some of the best business and economics blogging during the past week or so. (more…)

TechWeb’s messagingpipeline has an article on the recent Forrerster Research report Best And Worst Of E-Mail Customer Service, 2005.

The gist of the report is that 54% of consumers use email asking for customer service. The report points out that most government agencies and businesses are doing a poor job of “answering the mail.”

The article highlights 3 key problems and 5 recommendations by Forrester Research.

Among the problems are failure to deliver essential content, (more…)

Darryl Gehly has an excellent piece on shopping cart abandonment over at Darwin magazine, a companion site of CIO.com. Seldom is shopping cart abandonment written about except to complain. Darryl’s article is one of the best and is a definite must read if you have an online shopping cart.

Darryle states that, according to Forrester Research, conversion rates average about 2.4 percent. This is a large drop from the already low 2.9 percent average conversion rate of 2003. (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…)

Dress for Success is a long established personal marketing and sales guideline. Dress for Success is also the name of a very successful book by John Molloy. How to Dress for Success for Less is the title of a new dress for success training video offered by Men’s Wearhouse.

For a limited time, Mens Wearhouse is offering free Dress for Success DVDs. Men’s Wearhouse describes the video as (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…)

SBC Yellow Pages just delivered their massive SBC Yellow Pages book, advertising nearly every small business in central Arkansas. Advertising in the SBC Yellow Pages is not cheap. Many small businesses have taken loans against houses and business assets to pay for large ads in the Yellow Pages directory. Did they get their money’s worth? Experienced Yellow Pages advertisers think so, inexperienced first-time advertisers sometimes don’t get the results they were expecting.

As fate sometimes does, while my SBC Yellow Pages were being delivered (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…)

Hispanic retro-acculturation is the subject of a recent blog post at HispanicTrending that caught my eye. The article, by Suzanne Irizarry de López , Managing Partner of Multicultural Insights, a minority-owned market research company, appears as a result of impromptu group marketing by Juan G. Tornoe on Strategy, Juan Tornoe of HispanicTrending and Suzanne Irizarry de Lopez.

Sylvia writes that while “marketers have been focusing on whether Hispanic consumers are acculturating vs. assimilating,” ” many Spanish speaking consumers are increasingly (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…)

I just returned from the monthly Italian language Meetup here in Little Rock. Meetups are informal social gatherings of people with similar interests in a particular topic. Topics for Meetups range from political to cultural to intellectual to fun.

Meetups are usually held in books stores, coffee shops and restaurants. As Meetups occur mid-week, on what are usually slow nights for many small businesses, Meetups often bring additional traffic and sales. (more…)