Mythbusters

You got to love the mythbusters. I mean just the idea to cut a tree with a minigun is somewhat insane and to actually do it and make it work is pretty cool.

Blogging and SEO

It’s not easy to blog. You can not just write and hope people will find your blog. You basically have to split your time between marketing, writing and SEO. I don’t think I have covered SEO all that much so I thought I should write something about it.

The idea is that you have to know what keywords you want to list for at google. A great tool is  google adwords where you can find statistics about how popular certain keywords are. Maybe there are similar keywords, like if you write about cars. The word car is probably very hard to get a decent listing for at google. However maybe cheap cars, great cars or another word is more relevant to your blog anyways and not as competitive as the word car.

You also have to remember that Google listings is not the fastest thing in the world. And there are other important things that determines your listing, like links and other SEO techniques. I will write more about that later, but just knowing what keywords you want to list for and playing around a little bit at google adwords is a great start.

Build a community for your blog

I have recently been working a lot on building a community to my blog. I have read a lot about it and the idea is very powerful. There is so many social sites out there were you can find and meet people that might like you website. Therefore I will use this post to tell you about how to use these communities to get more traffic to your blog.
I guess you already have read my post on how to keep your visitors, otherwise you can find it here. When you know how to keep your visitors at your blog you should start to build your community. That is the core visitors of your blog. The loyal ones that always comes back.

 

Why you need a community for your blog

Basically there are only benefits with having a community on your blog. People come back several times a day to talk with each other in the comments of your posts. Your hardcore fans will probably recommend your blog to friends or write about it in their blogs or websites. They will be more than happy to help you promote posts on the social networks to gain more visitors. They will keep the discussion going which means your blog will always have some comments and not look empty to new visitors.

 

How to do it

There are many great social sites out there where you can build communities. There are good and bad things about all of them and I will list it here below. Although I think you should sign up to as many as you can, you shouldn’t do it to all sites at the same time. If you have not used them before I feel that you usually need some time to get a feel for each site. However the basic concept is to find as many friends in your niche as you can and become friends with them. Below are the top sites and some comments.

 

• Twitter. This is a micro blog. You write small messages to other people. You can follow others and be followed, your followers can see your messages. It’s very easy to find a lot of friends on twitter. Basically do a search for whatever your niche is and start follow people and many will follow you when they are being followed. Those who don’t follow you and don’t seem that interesting you can just unfollow and find other friends.

 

• Mybloglog. This is a great site to get subscribers to your feed. You can import your feed which will show your latest blog posts, and they also have a RSS button where you can put your RSS. When you have added your blog you will automatically get at community there where people can subscribe to your community on mybloglog. Just find friends and many will also join your community if you become friends. The only bad thing is that they have a limit on how many messages you can send per day.

 

• Facebook. Facebook is a great site to find more readers for your blog. You can post small posts on your dashboard like twitter and there are also applications where you should be able to add your Rss feed. There are also a lot of groups on different subjects where you can meet interesting people. Perhaps even start some kind of group for your blog, but I haven’t tried that.

 

• Linkedin. I have just started with Linkedin. However there are a lot of bloggers who seem to like it and you can also post your bloggfeed in your profile.

 

• Pownce. This is almost the same thing as twitter. The difference is that twitter has more traffic but on pownce you can send more than just messages. It won’t hurt to sign up at both.

 

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My feed

 

 

 

End

Bigchampagne and the music industry

There is an interesting site that is called bigchampagne and it’s something as unusual as a site that turns file sharing into profits for the music industry.

What it does is to monitor a lot of different file sharing sites and create statistics about what people download and differences between countries. Since concerts has become much more important to the music industry, due to the file sharing. They can use this information to plan where certain artists should tour and better schedules to earn more money.

To write a little more about the music industry I’m just amazed that some of the record companies still haven’t created some kind of service financed by ads where you can download better quality songs, adapted for the web that you can download for free. I’m sure people would use that and that would probably to 90% target those who already are downloading their music anyways and not affect record sales to much. I mean since you can buy songs on Itunes legally those who still buy records probably like to buy the actual cd and everything that comes with it.

Sites like Myspace are worth billions of dollars and I think if the record companies would just put some money into it and create a better service than the pirate sites they would take a big share of the online market.

Have a blog? Keep your visitors!

I thought I should write something on how to keep your visitors on your blog. There are much advice out there about how to get more traffic for you blog by social media or writing articles but specially with social media most usually don’t come back. Therefore it’s crucial to do whatever you can to remind people of your great blog to keep them coming back.

 

Most important for a blog

There are a few things that are what you would say the core for a blog. Sure it’s great with traffic from social media or a marketing campaign but it’s not a steady source of traffic. Instead you want those loyal visitors that always come back to your blog. Another great source of traffic is the one from google.

 

I find that with all the popular blogs they have created a group of loyal readers that comment their posts and vote for them on social networks. No matter of how great your blog is most people will not come back. That is just how it is. Therefore you need to do whatever you can to make people come back.

 

How do you make people come back to your blog

• First of all you need to remind people of your blog. Most sign in and might like what you are writing. Then they think, “oh that was interesting” and type in something else in their browser. One way to make people come back is using feedburner. This is something that most blogs use but there is no reason not to.

 

• Another thing that is underestimated is a newsletter. Most people don’t use Rss feeds but almost everyone has email. If you don’t use a newsletter yet, you should really get one. The great thing about is that if you have a new project or whatever it may be you can always use your newsletter to give it some extra push.

 

• Another technique for bloggers is to link to similar posts in the end of each post. This is to keep some momentum going. When the visitors of your blog has read the landing post they usually leave. However if you have some links to other similar post in the bottom of the post that sounds interesting more people will continue reading and spend more time on your blog.

 

As a conclusion I would like to push the importance of just focusing on keeping your visitors and create a loyal group of readers. There are just so many benefits to this.

 

For information about how to get more visitors to your blog check out my posts:

 

The ultimate guide to social media

Lessons from google that apply to blogging

Try the Nokia 5800 Online

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I found a couple of interesting links for everyone who are curious about the new Nokia 5800 XpressMusic and G1 mobile phones. It is emulators that gives you the opportunity to “try” the phone online in your browser.

 

• Try the Nokia 5800 here: Nokia 5800 emulator
• Try the G1 “Google Phone” here: http://tmobile.modeaondemand.com/htc/g1/

 

For more information about the new Nokia 5800 check out my posts:

• More on Nokia 5800 XpressMusic
• Nokia 5800 The iPhone killer

Lessons from Google

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I often find myself reading books about interesting companies. How people succeed, how they overcame obstacles and what made them what they are today. Google is one of the most interesting companies out there and I thought I should write a series about how they created their company. This is the lessons from Google, I hope you will like it.

 

Offering Value

The Google search engine was created by two guys from Stanford. Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The most interesting thing is that they never did any marketing. Instead having a superior product in a competitive field gave them huge amount of traffic by word of mouth.

 

Basically the Google guys invented pagerank and relied on incoming links to give more relevant search listings than the competitors. However the important thing about this is to show that the old “content is king” is very true. However the opposite is also true. The main search engine at that time Altavista was already a big company, had a lot of money and investors. But they wanted to be even more and compete with Yahoo. They diversified to much with their web portal, didn’t improve their search engine and lost their visitors to Google.

 

To summarize, behind all the marketing, social media attention or whatever promotion you use for your sites, there must be something that offers value to your visitors. Otherwise sooner or later you will end up like Altavista. Therefore I can’t stress enough to put the time into your site to really offer something great that you can be proud of.

 

Don’t sell just because you can

Did you know that Google actually was for sale for only 100 000$. Larry and Sergey had created an outstanding search engine. Way better than the competitors. Then they thought they could sell it to one of the big search engines at the time and continue with their studies at Stanford. Luckily nobody knew exactly how big the search engine market would be, and more important didn’t realise why they would need Larrys and Sergeys improvements. Google is now worth billions of dollars .

 

Just because you can sell something or get a what seems to be a good offer for your site, doesn’t necessarily mean you should sell it. Sure it can be very tempting if someone offers a lot of money for a site that you created out of nothing. However if you feel you have a great thing going and the site grows why sell it?

 

Don’t change just because your site grows big and you are supposed to

I find that this is a very interesting thing about Google in many aspects. When others tried to diversify they stuck to what they did best, searching, and improved it. When the other sites pushed in as much ads that could possible fit on their sites, the Google site was clean. When you would think a company that use so much computing power like Google would need a super computer, instead they just bought more cheap regular computers that was connected in a network, as they had always done.

 

I don’t mean that you shouldn’t listen to advice, but if you have created a big site you are obviously doing something right. You don’t need to change things just because some marketing guy from a fancy company tells you to do so. Larry and Sergey always needed more computers and money to grow but even as the got investors they were very careful to run it their way and keep control over the company.

 

 

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Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google

http://www.thegooglestory.com/

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/69/google.html

Why online advertising won’t be crushed by the financial crisis

 

Many people are worried in these times. Specially a lot of bloggers have written posts about the financial crisis and seemed to be worried about how that would affect them and their online income. Sure the financial crisis is serious but before you panic you should take a look at the facts. In this post I will try to do a more solid analysis of how the financial situation will affect the online advertising.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The advertising market in general is sensitive to the ups and downs in the economy. In bad times companies have to cut costs and advertising is one of those costs. However since advertising is directly related to sales, you can’t just throw it out the window. The competition is still there and you want to keep your shares of the market.

 

The chart above shows the online ad revenues year by year. Since 2002 there has been a huge growth of the market. I counted a few years and the growth rate is about 25-30% per year in the last few years.

 

Was the dot com crisis worse?

The last time the economy crashed during the dot com bubble, 2000-2002 with 5 trillion dollars in marked value wiped out, the online advertising market dropped 25% when it was at it’s lowest in 2002 as you can see in the chart. You should also have in mind that the dot com bubble was directly aimed at the online companies and may well have been a lot worse for the market than the financial crisis will ever be. What I mean is that during the dot com crisis the Lehman Brothers of the crisis was  Boo.com, Yahoo and other huge sites which must have almost destroyed the reputation of the Internet market.

 

Another important thing is the consequences of the huge growth of the market. Even if the market drops some 25% as in the dot com bubble 2002. we will pretty much have the same size of the advertising market as in 2007 when we reach rock bottom.

 

Predictions for the future

Zenith: The Publicis Groupe media buyer thought the online advertising market would grow 26.7% during 2008. Now they have lowered it to 23%. However this means the market is growing in 2008 despite the financial situation.

 

Imran Khan a JP Morgan internet analyst has lowered is expecting a growth of the market to 16% during 2009. The search ads seems to do better. An expected growth of 27% this year and 26% growth 2009. The market seems to shift towards these performance based adds, like google adsense, which explains the huge growth projections.

 

Emarketer expects a growth of 17% during 2008. The investment bank Cowen has lowered it’s expectations to a 16% year by year growth from the 19% they projected in 2007. However they also claim that search will stay strong.

 

Moreover I’m sure that online advertising is the way of the future. There are so much more possibilities with ads on the internet than in any other media. You get very targeted traffic and you can get them linked directly to your website. As many people that are using the internet world wide we are probably not even close to what the market really is worth.

 

The search advertising

Everybody predicts that search advertising will do very well even in these bad times. “search advertising will continue to perform well in a weak economy.” quote from Imran Khan at JP Morgan. The Google ads also has some fundamental differences than other ads:

 

• They send very targeted traffic
• Everybody can buy adds, it’s not entirely depending on companies
• It’s a very global market.

 

The Google chief economist Hal Varian said: ”During periods of slow economic growth, the last thing an advertiser wants to cut is its spending on search-based advertising,” Since many bloggers gain a good amount of their earnings through google ads, you should probably be fine.

 

Last words

After a lot of reading and investigating I have found that the most interesting and important parts of the online advertising market is that:

• None of predictions by all the serious professionals I have read actually thinks the market will shrink. It will just won’t grow as fast. But even 16% growth is by all means huge.
• The search engine ads will most likely do very well even in bad times. This will probably be a relief for all bloggers and owners of smaller sites that probably use Google adsense for their main income.
• The constant growth of the market that will most likely continue for many years until the market has matured.

 

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Sources:

http://online.wsj.com/public/us

http://www.paidcontent.org/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble

http://www.internetnews.com

http://www.tmaemarketing.com/blog/

http://www.copyblogger.com/grow-your-blog-community/

http://

Why I’m disappointed with Apple

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is one of the new computers Apple showed today. It’s very similar to the other Apple laptops but there are some news. The trackpad is click able. Which means there is no button in the bottom of the trackpad as the other laptops usually have. Instead you can click directly on the trackpad.

 

However I’m disapoited, I think Apple have made a some mistakes:

 

• No netbook
• The new models look to much like the older ones
• The price

 

The biggest mistake is that Apple still don’t have a netbook. I’m sure that the netbook market will explode soon. A lot of people think a netbook will be the gift for Christmas 2008. I’m also sure that if Apple would just have a product out there they would crush the competition. They have very popular laptops, they have the iPhone, but they don’t have anything in between. If they would create a reasonable priced clean designed Apple netbook, it would be almost impossible to fail. Moreover it would have potential to be the next iPhone.

 

Concerning the new models I guess Apple is playing it safe. However they can’t create similar models for years and years and expect that people will buy them forever. I would have liked to see something new. Something interesting. The last thing is the price. Apples products have been overpriced for some time now. Sure you pay for the name and the image, but I would like to see something more reasonable prized for customers that are not prepared to spend all their money on a laptop. A netbook would be one way of solving this. Another way would be to start another brand that focus on that part of the market.

Pirate city, great for watching movies

 

 

 

 

 I want to recommend a great site I found a few days ago. I guess everybody is familiar with the torrent site http://thepiratebay.org/ Although it seems that the two are not affiliated. Nevertheless Pirate city is a great site. It’s not a regular torrent site, instead they do video streaming for movies. This means that you don’t have do download the movie to watch it. You basically just click the play button and you can see it directly in the browser.

 

I was most surprised about the amount of movies they have. I have no idea of how many there are but they are sorted alphabetically and I counted the ones under “A”, which was 76 movies. It should give you an idea of how many there are.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When I tried it I was also surprised that it worked as good as it did. I watched an entire film without any problems with the sound or the picture. There are also a lot of new movies. For example you can watch The dark knight, Hancock, Mamma Mia or Indiana Jones. Although I haven’t seen any of those so I’m not sure about the quality of the new films.

 

Finally I probably should mention that just like on youtube it’s not illegal to watch streamed movies online. If the pirate city is committing a crime by providing this service I’m not sure, it’s probably depending on the technique they are using streaming the movies. At least they claim that they are linking the videos from other sites.