See The Mother of All Lists.

Darren Rowse over at Problogger is doing another “31 Days to Build a Better Blog.” In his second lesson he encouraged those participating to create a list post and then to submit the list into the comments of his post.

My good friend emailed me the below excerpt a while ago:

I was woken up about 6:30 with a banging on my door (my neighbour) telling me that my car had been broken into and so was hers and the cops were on their way. I panicked at first thinking of my golf clubs in the trunk.. However when I got down there aside from a car full of glass from the broken window, and a massive rock (I mean like a boulder) in my front seat nothing was stolen.. Not even my ipod sitting on the front seat. Stupid junkies looking for cash it had to be.. They did not take anything at all.. even my neighbours camera was sitting on the front seat and they did not take that.. It was more than super annoying..

This real-life story is a great analogy to modern day web marketing. It is not a far stretch to liken us marketers to a thief taking using a large rock to smash through our users realities. Yet, how often do we leave behind the most valuable objects. We are so focused on our own agenda that we miss the obvious. As with my friend, in the end we only annoy our users because we are not taking what they expect us to take.

I had to laugh when I came across the error in this ad. It makes it even more funny that the ad is promoting an institution of “Higher Education.” Let this be a lesson to always proof read your ad campaigns before launching them. ~Paul W.

A badly done banner ad--spel chekc poepl

My good friend Jenny emailed me the below excerpt last Friday morning:

I was woken up about 6:30 with a banging on my door (my neighbour) telling me that my car had been broken into and so was hers and the cops were on their way. I panicked at first thinking of my golf clubs in the trunk.. However when I got down there aside from a car full of glass from the broken window, and a massive rock (I mean like a boulder) in my front seat nothing was stolen.. Not even my ipod sitting on the front seat. Stupid junkies looking for cash it had to be.. They did not take anything at all.. even my neighbours camera was sitting on the front seat and they did not take that.. It was more than super annoying..

Marketing Theif

Recently I was invited to teach web marketing at a local community college. When asking the class what the first step of marketing was I received an overwhelming answer of SEO.

This seems to be the vast perception of internet marketing. However, there are actually two steps one should take before even beginning search engine optimization. With this post I want to focus on the On Site Optimization (or OSO) step (the other step I will discuss in a later post).

OSO is a critical step to initiate before even attempting SEO. The reason for this is that OSO focuses on conversion; whereas SEO focuses on traffic. No matter how much traffic you get if you don’t have conversion it is pointless.

The last several posts have been about my mistake in not branding my blog right. Recently I stumbled across a cool website, brandidentityguru.com, that helps you determine how strong your branding is.

There were several things that I found really interesting. First, was the Branding Test. This little quiz has you go through 12 questions trying to assess the strength of your brand. I first quizzed MyMarketer.net but the questions were much more tailored to business than a blog (though there were several questions that helped). So I decided to assess Oracle’s marketing branding, since I work with the marketing department so much. Below is the outcome, keep in mind that the outcome is skewed to my opinion:

wikipedialogo.jpg Wikipedia is an interesting beast when it comes to marketing. I’ve learned this lesson from the article Scott wrote on me in Wikipedia.

My business partner Janet completely freaked when she heard that I had blogged about being on Wikipedia. Janet blogs daily on Wikipedia for Podango and felt from her research that anyone who boasts about being in Wikipedia gets removed.

Sure enough, not two days after blogging about being in Wikipedia someone tried to delete the Wikipedia article. I am not quite sure why the article wasn’t just outright deleted, but rather a notice was posted that if the author didn’t respond the article was going to be deleted.

domain01.jpg Before I go into the results of the case study I want to personally thank those that participated. For two weeks I had a core group of volunteers who faithfully checked on five different whois search engines. Their assistance and suggestions really helped in putting all this together. To get some background on the case study read this post and this post.

My case study was based on the belief that shady whois search engines were being pinged whenever a domain search was being conducted. If they saw numerous pings they would snatch the domain and try to sell it back to you.

With this belief, a group of about 20 people for two weeks did whois searches on specific terms. Here are the terms and the whois search engine we tried the terms in:

corplogo01.JPG The rumors are happening again. Yesterday, Slashdot reported that Apple’s stock dropped today because of a fake e-mail.The fake e-mail purported the delay of Leopard, the next version of Mac OS X. The e-mail also declared a delay for the iPhone, perhaps the most hyped gadget of all times.

The e-mail went out to thousands of Apple employees and one of the employees forwarded it on to the online magazine Engadget. Engadget published the information and Apple’s stock dropped 2.2% in mid-afternoon trading.

Does anybody else find it as strangely coincidental that this is the third false rumor that has affected a billion dollar company within a three-week span?

Case Study In yesterday’s post I blogged about my theory of shady companies becoming registrars and then stealing people’s good domain names. Today I hope to see if we can show conclusively if this theory is true.

I propose that we do a case study to see how long it takes for a domain name to be stolen when numerous whois searches are being done on that name. Yet, I want to chose a name that no one would possible want, like: jibjobnoblobhogsog.com. This way we can be certain that the names are being stolen.

I also want to test this on the five major whois directories: InterNic, Network Solutions, Register, GoDaddy, and Whois. This way we can see if certain directories are being targeted. It may also help us form some other possible theories.