Jul
21
Famous Family Histories – Biographies and Autobiographies
Filed Under Search Engine Marketing | Comments Off on Famous Family Histories – Biographies and Autobiographies
I’m posting these to try to get search engines to find some new content on FamilyLearn.
Public Library of Family Histories
Narrative Of The Life Of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave
Family History
Family Tree
Online Family Tree
Genealogy
Make a Family Tree
Jul
17
Google Hacks – by Tara Calishain & Raet Dornfest – Captured
Filed Under Free Book Summary - Online, Search Engine Marketing | Comments Off on Google Hacks – by Tara Calishain & Raet Dornfest – Captured
Google Hacks: 100 Industrial-Strength Tips & Tools
I enjoyed this book but it had no overriding theme except finding better ways to extract info from the world’s largest search engine.
Searches
Some searches I’d never used:
inurl:
intitle:
* (wildcard for words)
SEO Content and Suggestions:
Search Engine Optimization Template
26 Steps to 15k per day (visitors)
Jul
12
Adsense Does NOT Influence Google Index?
Filed Under Search Engine Marketing | Comments Off on Adsense Does NOT Influence Google Index?
When John Jonas, a Search Engine Marketing guru, carefully notiiced that his google adsense pages were getting hit by Mediapartners-Google, he thought that maybe hitting your adsense pages would get google to index the pages faster. I wondered if John was onto something but a quick search for “google adsense google index” yielded a negative response. Still, I wanted to try it to see if it would work because John was claiming otherwise. Well, I’ve very carefully tested it with new pages at www.familylearn.com and the verdict is in. John, it seems, is not right. This was my test. I added a few thousand new pages of content on FamilyLearn on July 6, 2004 and then set up a script to call the pages so that they would serve adsense one time. Then I very carefully watched the logs for Googlebot. Well, Mediapartners-Google came on schedule but Googlebot didn’t follow. I figure John must be incorrect because over a week later, there are still no pages indexed that were not hit directly by the Googlebot. Also, Googlebot hasn’t showed up searching content that Mediapartners-Google hit. I could still be wrong, but my impression after this test is that Adsense doesn’t help your pages get indexed any faster. Perhap’s John’s success was Googlebot finding a bunch of his pages at the same time that he tried the Adsense test?
Jun
28
Great Hosting Service
Filed Under Business Ideas, Resources, Principles, etc., Search Engine Marketing | Comments Off on Great Hosting Service
Paul Allen found a great deal on hosting with great bandwidth capabilities:
http://www.bluehost.com/
I need to save it for future reference. Thanks Paul. Another great resource is www.nureal.com which offers a great multisite package.
http://www.infobaseventures.com/blog/2004/06/09.html#a103
Finally, for www.familylearn.com we are going to switch to www.uvnet.net to host our servers. They have great packages and a more flexible plan than www.xmission.com
Jun
28
Focus on customer experience, not member acquisition.
Filed Under Business Ideas, Resources, Principles, etc., Search Engine Marketing | Comments Off on Focus on customer experience, not member acquisition.
In an interview with Scott Heiferman, CEO of www.meetup.com, nPost asked:
What are your insights into entrepreneurship?
Scott: Focus on how you are helping people. Most companies are focused on helping people somehow. Whether the company that runs basic services, they are providing a needed service. More often than not people get so wrapped up in the scheme around the business that they lose track of the core value. They are talking more about member acquisition, when they should really be talking about how to ensure that customers are enjoying what they are doing.
nPost: They may have lost focus on the core value they provide to customers.
Scott: At the end of the day measure your success by whether you or helping people or not. So many things fail when people lose focus on what they are providing to customers.
http://www.npost.com/interview.jsp?intID=INT00099
Jun
28
Breaking Tradition/ Changing A Paradigm
Filed Under Business Ideas, Resources, Principles, etc., Genealogy to Family History to FamilyLearn, Search Engine Marketing | Comments Off on Breaking Tradition/ Changing A Paradigm
I was talking to Trisha just the other day about how difficult it is to get people to change their habits for a new and better product. Just now when I had the chance to purchase cheaper high speed internet and a different cell phone service, I didn’t because I didn’t want to take the time to deal with it. It wasn’t worth it to me. Breaking tradition or making a paradigm shift is never going to be easy and quite frankly, that is what we are trying to do with www.familylearn.com. The industry is currently focused on data, names, dates and places. FamilyLearn is a new way to approach family history and life, learning from one another and our ancestors. But, from a marketing standpoint, this is going to be a very difficult task indeed. Seth Godin, the famous blogger recently pointed out: “You should also care if you’re trying to build something big and important. Because big and important things often come from changing the tradition. And if you can invent a new tradition, a new tradition around your innovation, that’s when you win big time.” ( http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2004/06/tradition.html )
Jun
28
The Most Influential and Impactful People I’ve Met Live This Principle
Filed Under Business Ideas, Resources, Principles, etc., Education and Love for Learning, Genealogy to Family History to FamilyLearn, Home, Family and Church, Ideas and Thoughts, Search Engine Marketing | Comments Off on The Most Influential and Impactful People I’ve Met Live This Principle
The principle is in the article that is on love and I found it on Paul Allen’s blog:
LOVE
Certain People have personified this for me and I’m sure there are more:
My wife, who truly loves others more than herself.
My Mother, who loved our family enough to go through so much for us.
Alan Fluckiger, American Heritage Academy, who helped me realize my inborn love for learning again.
Dr. Edward Green, General Manager at Family Literacy Centers, Inc., who taught me the power of raising others rather than ourselves.
Dllon Inouye, Professor at BYU, who taught me the power of relationships and excellence.
Paul Merrill, Professor at BYU, Professor at BYU, who cared more for student success than his own.
Paul Allen, Internet Entreprenuer, Infobase Ventures, LLC, who openned my eyes to the goodness in business.
John Jonas, Internet Entreprenuer, Programmer and Friend, Search Engine Marketing Expert, who isn’t afraid to make mistakes and sets an example for me of a love for learning as well as always being there for FamilyLearn.
Jason Johnson, CPA, Entreprenuer, Mentor and Friend, FamilyLearn Vice President, who has risked so much for a love for FamilyLearn with me–mission driven.
Jun
21
Utah Real Estate — Search Engine Race
Filed Under Search Engine Marketing, Utah Real Estate | 1 Comment
It appears that our competitors site utahrealestateconnection.com, who claims to be search engine marketing professionals, can’t use their superior page rank well enough from utah.com to move their site ahead of www.utahrealestatehelp.com. We are way in the lead with 64th ranking in Google for “Utah Real Estate” and their site coming in 339th. It should be interesting to see how quickly we can make it to the first page.
Jun
20
MarketingSherpa.com’s best blogs
Filed Under Business Ideas, Resources, Principles, etc., Search Engine Marketing | Comments Off on MarketingSherpa.com’s best blogs
Best individual’s blog on the general topic of marketing and advertising
Awarded to: Adrants
http://www.adrants.com
Honorable Mention: Seth Godin’s Blog
http://www.sethgodin.com/sg/blog.html
Best group weblog on the general topic of marketing and advertising
Winner: AdLand
http://ad-rag.com
Honorable Mention: MarketingVOX
http://www.marketingvox.com/
Best PR-topic blog
Winner: CanuckFlack
http://www.canuckflack.com
Honorable Mention: PR Machine
http://prmachine.blogspot.com/
Best b-to-b marketing-topic blog
Winner: Dana’s Blog
http://www.danavan.net/weblog/
Honorable Mention: B2B Lead Generation Blog
http://blog.startwithalead.com/
Best blog on small business marketing
Winner: Duct Tape Marketing
http://www.DuctTapeMarketing.com/weblog.php
Honorable Mention: re:invention Blog – Biz and marketing soundbytes for women entrepreneurs
http://www.reinventioninc.blogspot.com
Best blog on online marketing
Winner: Search Engine Lowdown
http://www.searchenginelowdown.com
Honorable Mention: Adverblog Web & wireless advertising in a Blog
http://www.adverblog.com
Top readers’ choice write-in vote
Winner: Strategic Public Relations
http://prblog.typepad.com
How the Best Blogs were chosen:
In April 2004, we asked MarketingSherpa’s 173,000 readers (who are mainly marketing execs at medium-large businesses and the agencies who serve them) to nominate their favorite blogs on the subjects of marketing, advertising, and PR.
It’s awfully easy to start a blog on an impulse, but equally difficult to keep the effort up posting consistently over the long-term. So we cut nominated blogs that had been started after January 1st, 2004 (you guys can try again next year.) A total of 29 blogs qualified for the next round.
Next, we invited all MarketingSherpa readers to vote for the best Blogs in the six categories listed above, plus a write-in category where they could put any blog’s name. We included hotlinks to every blog so folks could check them out prior to voting.
We also allowed nominated blogs to post links to the voting form for their own readers, however we asked all voters to evaluate every nominee in a category and not just one single blog. (Which worked out fine.) However, MarketingSherpa staff were not allowed to vote, or influence results in any way.
Voters were asked to rate each blog in a category by one of three designations – "Excellent", "Not bad", and "Blah". To make sure everyone understood what was expected from an "excellent" vote, we included the following instructions:
#1. Personality:
Is there a clear personality? Do you feel like you know the writer(s)? Is there a feeling of intimacy that may be missing from mainstream media?
#2. Usefulness:
Is the information either darned useful or very enjoyable to read? Did it make you think, or laugh, or click? Are there handy links to other places?
#3. Writing style:
Is it a sales pitch badly disguised as a blog? Is it a long-winded column instead of a snappy, slightly-informal blog? Is it just news briefs without analysis or insight?
#4. Usability & design:
Is the typeface easy to read? Can you find links to archives? Is the writing concise and skimmable? Are graphics limited to what’s useful or fun?
#5. Would you revisit?:
Is it useful or engaging enough for you to visit it again someday? Or will you forget it the minute after you vote?
On June 2nd, we closed the voting form in order to tabulate winners. 826 people had cast votes. Roughly 35% of votes appeared to come from links from the nominated blogs. Interestingly, these voters swelled our numbers but didn’t appear to change the overall results. So, the same blogs almost certainly would have won even if only MarketingSherpa readers had voted.
Also interestingly, in several categories, the blog that was probably the best known to voters prior to voting, did not end up being the winner. So, fame didn’t make a big difference.
We did see some evidence of attempts to sway results in our write-in category, where several particular blogs were nominated in a rush of votes all at about the same time, and then never mentioned again. (The voting form did not allow duplicate entries per computer, but people with multiple computers or persuadable friends got around that a bit.)
However, our chosen write-in winner appeared entirely genuine, as it not only had the most write-ins, but also was repeatedly named throughout the entire 32-day voting period.
What did winners get anyway?
Aside from fame, hotlinks, and glory, winners received an award icon they can put on their Blogs (if they choose) to impress visitors. They will also receive a lovely MarketingSherpa Best Blog 2004 t-shirt to wear all summer and make their neighbors jealous while mowing the lawn.
Again, our thanks to everyone who helped make our Readers’ Choice Blog Awards successful. Get your voting cap ready for next year!
Jun
20
Paul Allen is helping me out with the class
Filed Under Business Ideas, Resources, Principles, etc., Education and Love for Learning, Search Engine Marketing | Comments Off on Paul Allen is helping me out with the class
Paul Allen is helping me with my class by sharing his reading schedule and MyFamily.com site. I need to record the link to remember it.
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