Archive for June, 2006

In speaking to hundreds of people a year about marketing their websites, there always seems to be a theme among them. I’ll get to that, so bear with me. First I have to explain where I am coming from before I say where I’m going on this . . .In reading through the news this morning, everything seems to be either in love with MySpace or bashing it – Yes, I am getting very tired of the MySpace bandwagon. Finally, I see an article that talks about the bottom line results of the investment. From Internet Outsider: “Judging from the year over year comparisons in the “Other” category, in which…

I’m surprised by the number of people that fire up their analytics programs and blindly expect to be “spoken to” about the status of the site. I’m not sure what people expect, as clicking through endless charts and graphs yield as much information as quickly paging thru that novel you’ve been putting off – neither results in much enjoyment or insight. Avinash Kaushik has another excellent post about the topic of what makes a good metrics analyst. The mix is a great balance of what I usually called curiosity, intuition, exploration and customer-focus. Avinash creates a Top 10 list with the aspects of what makes a great analyst. I…

In an article at CNet, Piper Jaffray’s Safa Rashtchy, an Internet media analyst, believes the internet revolution is just underway. Social networks are becoming the fastest growing online communities, far surpassing the portals such as MSN and AOL. In specifics, MySpace has grown 119% in the past six months (up to 27.4 billion page views from 12.5 billion). In fact, MySpace now has 48 million monthly visitors, nearly 75% of Yahoo. The social network is not going away soon. In fact, it is splintering and growing in rapid fashion. As like minded people find each other, they begin their own sub communities and develop again. The Medusa-like growth of these networks is attributed to the…

From Duct Tape Marketing, John Jantsch explains the three C’s of a Universal Business Strategy – could this be The Unified Theory?

From the thinking that ultimately, every business is an information business, in that marketing involves information communication. Jantsch’s 3 C’s are: Content, Contact, Community.

Jantsch explains,

“Content is simply the development of highly valuable content. Contact is simply making contact with a audience hungry for this content and finding ways to package and offer this content/information no matter what you really sell or make. Community is taking a group that enjoys your content and contact and finding ways to bring them together to make the content…

With the release of their 6.1 product, ClickTracks has taken a step away from the pack of analytics vendors by providing a tool within the product to find “bad patterns” in paid advertising. Ideally these patterns will help site owners and managers to identify click fraud and other unnatural behavior, but it will also be a useful tool in quickly identifying ads or ad groups that are simply not performing well and costing money. Hot on the release of the product, ClickTracks made a huge announcement last week when they offered $1,000 of the purchase of the ClickTracks Pro, JDC or Agency edition for Google Class Action Lawsuit Members. The Class Action…

I recently found that one of my favorite web sites, woot.com has expanded into wine. For those of you that may not be familiar with Woot.com, the premise is surprisingly simply – “One day, one product.” It’s like Christmas every morning to see the product for the day. It is usually an electronic type of product, though the range can be from vacuum cleaners to wireless G routers (I got one!).

And now, Woot has expanded into wine. For afficianados, this will be an amazing alternative that destroys the typical wine-of-the-month club drama. The tagline is now “One week, one wine.” Woot features different cellars and wine choices…