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Internet Marketing: It’s About Relationships

November 15, 2007 by Nancy 2 Comments

onlinemarketingrelationships.png

Want to get more online traction for your business or product? Then stop sending out cookie cutter e-mails with pathetic pleas for other website owners to mention you, your product, or your business. That approach to marketing is like a door-to-door salesman barging into your house without introduction or invitation.

As someone who owns several websites myself, I’m totally open to engaging in online conversations with you if you approach me in an intelligent, non-sales-like manner. But send me a doofus e-mail that makes it obvious you don’t know a thing about me or my business and you’ll be flushed down the drain quicker than you can say “glug glug.”

Online marketing is a multi-pronged beast. Yes, you should write articles, explore pay-per-click (PPC), get yourself interviewed, do podcasts, maintain an up-to-date blog, AND start building relationships. If you’ve been around the Internet more than 5 minutes, you’ll know from your own experience that a newcomer to any forum or blog who does nothing but push their own product is either ignored, or his posts are deleted. That’s because he has nothing of value to bring to the community. (Kinda like the family who shows up at the potluck without a dish to share.)

I worked with a horror novelist last year whose (successful) marketing efforts were focused totally on building his MySpace relationships. He sought out other MySpace users that were in his niche, or in some way related to his characters; then he simply introduced himself and started a dialog. A year later his books are flying off the virtual shelf because he took the time to build relationships.

Okay, I can already hear you saying “but I’m not an author, I’m marketing refurbished iPods!” Doesn’t matter. Relationships are relationships.

How to get started:

Find the virtual community where your target audience hangs out, and take the time to “build your house.” Engage in conversation, invite the neighbors over for dinner–meaning add interesting posts or comments about other people in the community whose work you admire, or whose comments are witty, or who wrote a brilliant tip. Offer up valuable information without being asked, and make sure what you write really IS valuable and not some rehashed crap that has “SALES” written all over it.

Stumped for how to start the online conversation? Just think about life outside the Internet and the people and businesses YOU respond to.

For example, if you’re out buying a flat screen TV, you’ll ignore the salesman who follows you all around the store and won’t leave you alone. Odds are, though, you’ll enjoy talking to the sales guy who takes the time to engage you in a conversation about your needs, the gear required for hook-up, and where you can get cheap video downloads.

Be real. After all, it’s all about relationships.

Filed Under: General Tagged With: marketing, online, relationships

Greatest Viral Videos on the Net

November 14, 2007 by Admin Leave a Comment

According to Wikipedia, “the term viral video refers to video clip content which gains widespread popularity through the process of Internet sharing, typically through email or IM messages, blogs and other media sharing websites.”

Widespread popularity is probably an euphemism. Consider that the most popular video on YouTube, Evolution of Dance, has been seen more than 60 million times!

Now, if you haven’t been following the online video scene closely, you might want to check PC World’s article titled “Greatest Hits of Viral Videos.” They have listed 25 classics of the viral video phenomenon. Below you will find our favorite ones:

  1. The Coke and Mentos Experiment
  2. Chinese Back Street Boys Cover
  3. The Angry Salesman
  4. The Star Wars Kid
  5. Ask A Ninja
  6. Chad Vader: Day Shift Manager
  7. The Legend of Leroy Jenkins
  8. The Christmas Lights House

Filed Under: Online Video Tagged With: online, pc world, video, viral

Conditional Comments for Internet Explorer

November 13, 2007 by Jonathan 14 Comments

If you have been writing code for web sites for some time, you will have noticed that Internet Explorer is notoriously strange in its rendering behavior. If you write valid, clean code, your site will likely look nearly identical in the latest versions of Firefox, Safari, Netscape Navigator, Opera, and Camino, but when you pull it up in IE, suddenly your layout is askew.

The old model was to use JavaScript or another scripting language to determine the user’s browser, and deliver content/styles appropriately. However, there has been another solution in place since IE5, which is some simple proprietary Microsoft tags called Conditional Comments.

Here is a simple example:

1 <!--[if IE]>
2 CONTENT/STYLING THAT IS SPECIFIC TO INTERNET EXPLORER
3 <![endif]-->

And here is how it works.

Because Conditional Comments start off with a “<!–” (line 1) and end with a “–>” (line 3), non-IE browsers simply ignore what is inside the tags, which means that your HTML will still validate without error. Only versions of IE5+ have the ability to parse what is inside the comment tags.

In addition to the simple “Is this IE?” check, you have a variety of options to better narrow your filtering. You can specify:

  • a specific version of IE (<!–[if IE7]> or <!–[if IE5.5]>)
  • only versions of IE prior to or after a specific version (<!–[if
    lt IE7]> or <!–[if gt IE5]>)
  • and more complicated expressions utilizing the standard IF
    expression tools (AND, OR, NOT, etc.)

What about IF…ELSE statements?

If you want to set up an IF…ELSE situation, the official Conditional
Comments documentation offers this solution:

1 <!--[if IE]>
2 CONTENT/STYLING THAT IS SPECIFIC TO INTERNET EXPLORER
3 <![endif]-->
4 <!--[if !IE]><!-->
5 CONTENT/STYING THAT IS SPECIFIC TO NON-INTERNET EXPLORER BROWSERS
6 <!--<![endif]-->

The extra “<!–>” in line 4 and “<!–” in line 6 hides the IE-specific tags from non-IE browsers, but allows the coding inside to be parsed by the browser. If you load the page in IE, the “!IE” conditional will cause it to skip over the entire expression, and so IE will not parse what is inside. Most importantly, because the IE-specific tags are commented out, your site will still pass W3C validation. Although this is a slightly complicated bit of coding, it does provide a solid workaround for IF…ELSE statements.

So what are the drawbacks?

The main drawback is that Conditional Comments can only be used in HTML, not in an external CSS file. However, there are many ways to still use Conditional Comments to your benefit. For example, you could easily set up a supplemental CSS file for Internet Explorer and then use Conditional Comments to call up that CSS file:


<link href="stylesheets/styles.css" media="screen" rel="stylesheet"
type="text/css" />
<!--[if IE]>
<link href="stylesheets/ie.css" media="screen" rel="stylesheet"
type="text/css" />
<![endif]-->

Overall, Conditional Comments represent a simple alternative to other browser-sniffing methods when all you want to do is identify IE, especially if you are just trying to put an IE CSS/HTML workaround in place.

To read the full, official documentation about Conditional Comments,
check out Microsoft’s site.

Filed Under: General

Free Linux eBooks

November 13, 2007 by Admin 3 Comments

A couple of months ago I made the switch from Windows to Linux, and I doubt I will ever look back. Sure, sometimes business endeavors force you to use Windows applications, but other than that Linux gets the job perfectly done.

If you are considering to migrate to Linux as well, or if you have already been using it for a while but want to improve your knowledge, you might want to check the free Linux eBooks library on Homelinux.org.

You will find pretty much everything you need, from tuning the performance to shell scripts and kernel programming. Below you will find my favorite ones:

  • Easiest Linux Guide Ever
  • Linux in a Windows World
  • Migration Guide
  • Practical Linux
  • Ubuntu Hacks, Tips and Tools

Filed Under: General Tagged With: ebooks, free, homelinux, linux, ubuntu, windows

Will Mainstream Media Become Profitable Online?

November 12, 2007 by Ryan 1 Comment

A debate has been raging for the past several years over how to make online news media a profitable business venture. I am not talking about one-man blogs or faux news startups, which have minuscule overhead costs and therefore a much shorter road to profitability.

mainstreammediaprofitable.jpg

I am talking about the mainstream media corporations that realized they must find a way to utilize the power of the Internet, and that they must do so quickly. These companies have hundreds of reporters in the field, and incur enormous monthly expenses to maintain their coverage over a wide range of topics.

Some have argued that bloggers are the new breed of journalists, and that they will eventually replace traditional reporters and their employers. This could work at a very localized level, but perhaps without the mainstream media corporations, a great deal of news coverage would dry up. Ninety-nine percent of bloggers could never get to national, industrial and entertainment leaders with the same ease and consistency as correspondents for mainstream media corporations.

It is in the interest of bloggers and social media that the mainstream media companies survive. That is why talk of Digg and other mushrooming social media sites – not to mention the growing number of blogs whose readership surpasses most print magazines – killing off mainstream media outlets is not completely accurate.

The bigger problem is that mainstream media publishers have failed to realize that the Internet is not merely a vehicle to carry their traditional text-based content. The Internet is a unique and interactive medium the potential of which has barely been tapped. Not only that, the Internet is also able to be bent and shaped, to be constantly changed to match growing needs, unlike print, which comes in one format and one format only.

A lot of great minds and creative folks have pored over this issue without any significant breakthroughs as yet, so don’t think that I am going to provide the golden egg here. What is becoming increasingly clear is that publishers, both big and small, are going to have to learn to harness the Internet as a teaching medium, a platform not only to disseminate information, but also to interactively connect with and convey knowledge to their readers.

How this will work with hard news is still somewhat up in the air. Most Internet users have been conditioned to expect to find their news for free in a certain kind of format. It is going to take a bit of reeducation to convince readers of the value of an interactive teaching environment, of being presented with true knowledge of a topic or issue rather than mere information.

When someone does finally figure it out, the next shift in the presentation of online media is going to enable mainstream publishers and bloggers alike to become masters of a new medium that has the potential to eventually blow away print, radio and television. And just like after every other innovative new wave to hit the Internet, the early adapters to whatever evolutionary step online media takes next are going to control the field for the foreseeable future.

Filed Under: Media Tagged With: bloggers, journalists, maintream, Media, online, profitable

Welcome to Daily Bits

November 12, 2007 by Admin 2 Comments

Back in 2004 Google carried out its initial public offering of shares, for a price of $85 a piece. A couple of weeks ago these same shares broke the $650 mark, shooting Google’s market capitalization to over $150 billion.

That is more than three times the value of General Motors and Ford combined. Even more interesting is the fact that Google does not sell products. It does not produce anything you can touch. It simply collects and organizes information. All the information.

What can we learn from this? Many things, but perhaps the most important one is the fact that the Internet is revolutionizing the way we communicate, live and work.

Mind you that Google is not an isolated case. Think about Facebook, Digg, Youtube. Better yet, think about how many people are starting to make a living with personal websites. Blogs that are competing head to head with mainstream media.

That is what Daily Bits is about. From software to Web 2.0, from online marketing to social networks. In simple words, your daily dose of Internet and technology.

Filed Under: General

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