There are some words and terms that I wish would just Go Away.

A friend of mine sent me an ad for a job recently where they were looking for an “Internet Guru” to work on their website. The word “Guru” to me ranks right up there with “Foolproof” in that as soon as you read it or hear it you know in your bones something is going to go terribly wrong in a “Kiss of Death” kind of way.

The last time I answered an ad like that we ended up going back and forth for a couple of months with nothing that was ever really accomplished. I just couldn’t make them understand that what they wanted was just not possible (for me to do anyway) and close, but a little different was just not good enough for them. Finally we agreed to part ways amicably so it actually could have been much worse than just a waste of both of our time.

It’s been about six months now and occasionally I check their domain to see if anything is there. There is nothing so far and I am curious to see what the end result will be. Maybe if they take the word Guru out of their ad it will work out better.

I found a good post by Doug Hall from the American Inventor TV show called “Death to the GURUS!” and I agree.

More…

I have a page on my site with some of my favorite new sites that are showing up on the web. These are not my sites, but they are the kinds of things that I like in a website. There are different reasons that I picked these sites, they all look good, and are clear and easy to use. They don’t use Flash at all or use it only when necessary and never for navigation. The graphics are good, but not overpowering. Sometimes I just like a picture or the name. Some of them are not in English and I still know what they are about.

The newest one is called PRINCIPE DI NAPOLI. This site is not in English, but I have a pretty good idea what it’s about. The colored pencils across the top of the page caught my eye immediately. Lots of white space makes the actual content stand out. The script writing for the menus is a bit hard to read, but it does fit the style of the site.

More…

Here’s something just for some fun on a Friday. (Not responsible if you get caught playing at work)

Using all kinds of light sources LEDs, glowsticks, flashlights, even fireworks, combined with time-lapse photography, this artist creates some unique 3-D art.  Very cool!

More…

Here’s a great example of giving away a great product to make money. Pentaho is an open source business intelligence application and if you are thinking about buying new software for your business you need to check this out. It’s free and they have some great demos available.

According to Wikipedia business intelligence (BI) is a business management term, which refers to applications and technologies that are used to gather, provide access to, and analyze data and information about company operations. Business intelligence systems can help companies have a more comprehensive knowledge of the factors affecting their business, such as metrics on sales, production, internal operations, and they can help companies to make better business decisions.

Pentaho is a complete business intelligence platform that includes reporting, analysis (OLAP), dashboards, data mining and data integration (ETL). Use it as a full suite or as individual components that are accessible via web services.

This looks like a wonderful application for almost any business. It’s free to download and it’s a very fast install. It’s still seems a little unfriendly, but growing more user friendly by leaps and bounds. It now looks like the next OpenOffice release to include Pentaho BI as well. Pentaho’s reporting engine, Pentaho Reporting, will be integrated with the next release of OpenOffice.org, version 2.3, which is due out in the second half of this year, according to Lance Walter, vice president of marketing at Pentaho.

How are they going to make money with it, you ask?

The answer is Training! They charge for training.

This is the great thing about Open Source. They are giving away a great product that won’t lock you in to any one vendor and will provide you with free updates to keep your installation current and secure. The best part is that the business only has to buy as much training as they actually need.

More…

It’s always a good idea to add new content to your site. The best kind of content is some that you create yourself. There are many different ways to do it and I am always on the lookout for some new ideas to create and promote my content. Most if these promotion ideas involve sharing your content with other sites.

While sharing your information is something I strongly believe in, my tip for you today is to always post your original content on your site first before you share it with anyone. The reason I say this is that while I don’t believe there is a duplicate content penalty that you hear about these days from Google or any other search engine they do give more weight to the site that publishes the content first and not as much importance to the next site.

As far as developing new content, here’s a good post on the 10e20.com site called “10 Helpful Hints for Creating Strong Web Site Content”

More…

Here’s something just for some fun on a Friday. (Not responsible if you get caught playing at work)

It’s almost the 4th of July (Independence Day here in the US) and what better than some cool fireworks wallpapers from Phantom Fireworks?

More…

I have a page on my site with some of my favorite new sites that are showing up on the web. These are not my sites, but they are the kinds of things that I like in a website. There are different reasons that I picked these sites, they all look good, and are clear and easy to use. They don’t use Flash at all or use it only when necessary and never for navigation. The graphics are good, but not overpowering. Sometimes I just like a picture or the name. Some of them are not in English and I still know what they are about.

The newest one is called Guilago. This is a fun site and that’s the first thing that you notice with the cool Flash animation right on top. The navigation it right at the top and even though the are using Flash effects it looks to be done in a way that is still search engine friendly. This is a great showcase for the artist’s talents.

More…

I had a friend who I met a while back at a PAPEN meeting contact me recently. Her daughter is a real estate agent and she was trying to put together a website for her business.

She had paid someone to design her site over a year ago and still has nothing up. The designer told her that he would start to work on her site as soon as she sent them some content (which she still hasn’t done).

My friend had jumped in to help her daughter and went about researching the subject of website content and SEO. She has come up with an impressive list of reasonably current and accurate information. Unfortunately there is just so much there she doesn’t know where to start.

It’s hard to give advice about this kind of thing when you don’t know the site owner or the designer, but I did think she should consider a couple of things.

1. I have written about this before. Decide what you want a visitor to your site to do once they arrive! Then decide on content.

2. Make a “contact me” page for her site. That’s pretty simple content that she has readily available. A contact me page will do a couple of things for her. It will get her a page on the web, which is one more than the empty folder that she currently has. More importantly it will get her started by giving her a template page that she can use for the rest of her pages.
My friend told me that her daughter has a lovely business card which should probably be the starting point for this page (colors, logo, etc). “Any journey starts with a single step.”

3. She currently has her listings on her real estate companies web pages. I advised her to find out what kind of tools that her company provides for their agents for their own site. I have learned that many times companies will provide good resources for their agents to use in their own personal sites.

I also pointed her to a post on the search engine land site by Jill Whalen. It’s called “You Can’t Fake Real Content” where she points out a simple truth that content is only good if it’s relevant to your human visitors.

More…

People tell me that they don’t have any idea how do incorporate the new marketing techniques into their website promotions, or they don’t have the time, or they don’t have the expertise.

That’s just called “So What!”

You don’t have to know about any of these things to be a good promoter, you don’t even have to have a website to use this kind of viral marketing. You just have to be on the lookout for opportunities and know that there are many ways to take advantage of them.

On the Marketing Profs Daily Fix Blog there’s a story about a sandwich shop owner who finds out one of his customers is trying every one of his sandwiches and blogging about each one. He had the bloggers URL printed on his bags. Even if his shop didn’t already have a site he’s still taking advantage of the new social media.

Opportunities like this are everywhere! Don’t close your eyes to them, look for them.

More…

Viral marketing is a term for website promotion where one person tells someone about your site or promotion and they tell someone else and then it keeps on spreading. Kind of like the old shampoo commercial (and so on…) or the flu!

If you are lucky enough to put together a good one of these it can be the best, most economical advertising there is.

It is possible to plan a pretty good viral marketing campaign, but my personal view is the best campaigns are the ones that don’t have that in mind when they start out or at least it’s in the back not the front of their minds. It always seems when you try to so something like this on purpose it feels forced and never does as well as you expect.

It’s the unusual situations that seem to make the best campaigns, sometimes you can take a bad situation and turn it to your advantage. A good example of this happened to Dell recently. The Viral Garden blog offers a great viewpoint.

More…