Archive for January, 2007
Wednesday, January 31st, 2007
The Floppy Is Dead!
This is really a lesson of how products can have a “long tail”. I haven’t inserted a floppy into a floppy drive this century, and yet until now drives have still been available to purchase, and I still see disks on supermarket shelves. While most of us stopped using it, there is a “long tail” […]
Comments Off - Posted in Blog, Newsworthy by Rob
Tuesday, January 30th, 2007
You Gotta Have a Unique Name
Witness this press release:
MEDIASPAN’S NETWORK BUSINESS UNIT HAS added nearly a dozen additional newspaper and television Web sites to its network of over 1,200 local Web site affiliates,
What is wrong?
1) No link to their site, forcing me to guess
2) Their name is a superset of a semi-popular web site. They are MediaSpan Network, I went […]
Comments Off - Posted in Blog, Promote Your Site by Rob
Friday, January 26th, 2007
The dilemna of a busy webmaster
What do you if you have more websites than you can manage? What if they are your babies, that you care about? It’s an agonizing decision, to keep something for sentimental reasons, or sell it to give yourself more time. It’s like finally putting those holey jeans (or rotten sneakers) in the bin, despite years […]
Comments Off - Posted in Blog, RANT by Rob
Tuesday, January 16th, 2007
Open Directory - up and running again
I’ve seen this before, with Looksmart. A few hiccups and folk start jumping ship. And then the management act like they don’t care, and wish they could jump too. And then we all notice folk leaving, and we leave as well, or at least just stop participating.
Apparantly editors have been unable to do their unpaid […]
Comments Off - Posted in Blog, RANT by Rob
Saturday, January 13th, 2007
Little Bricks’n’Mortar sites can still utilize email lists
I limit my email to once per month, and I have the coupons valid all month. I know nothing about website creation or HTML, but I can fill in the email form, upload my photos and play with the look. Then I hit “send,” and all 1,667 customers receive my specials in their inboxes.
Sounds […]
Comments Off - Posted in Blog, Promote Your Site by Rob
Friday, January 12th, 2007
Paid Links & Google
I just posted this in response to an article on a common SEO topic these days. It’s one thing for Google to say they will clamp down on paid links, but another for them to be able to detect them….
What it REALLY come down to is how can Google detect a paid link? Unless Google […]
Comments Off - Posted in Blog, SEO by Rob
Wednesday, January 10th, 2007
Wikipedia & Advertising
There have been blog posts discussing the huge amount of revenue that Wikipedia is missing out on by non running ads ($10s of Millions I presume), and what they could use such cash for (give it to charity?)
I reckon:
1) If you start out saying “there will never ever be any ads”, you need to stick […]
Comments Off - Posted in Big Business, Blog, Revenue Streams by Rob
Friday, January 5th, 2007
More genius from Amazon: endless.com
Why would you not buy shoes online?
1) You prefer to try them on first!
Amazon’s new store selling shoes and handbags not only offers free shipping, but also free return shipping!
This means that the ultra-canny amongst us can order products, try them on, send them back (all for free) and then order the ones we really […]
Comments Off - Posted in Big Business, Blog by Rob
Wednesday, January 3rd, 2007
Amazon’s aStore
Amazon had one of the very first affiliate programs, and almost a decade later they are still innovating. An aStore is a customisable subset of Amazon, used to promote products that your audience might like. It is stored on an Amazon server, and is really easy to set up. Shawn Collins loves it, as do […]
Comments Off - Posted in Affiliate Programs, Blog by Rob
Wednesday, January 3rd, 2007
RegisterFly: inept
I’ve tried quite a few cheap domain registrars, and my ultimate opinion is that whereas GoDaddy is exceptional, RegisterFly is hoplessly bad. Like a bad restaurant at a tourist destination, they seem to rely on the attraction of low prices, and don’t care about repeat customers.
I’m sure I could list dozens of faults, but here’s […]
