Please find above the slides from my presentation “Content For Traffic: Q&A For Search Advantage” from the Content Is King conference yesterday hosted by PureContent.
Videos to follow….
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This is the Google UK’s head office (shared with other companies such as AMEX) clearly showing a fire on the roof. This picture is from Jon Swaine.
Started by a BBQ on the terrace of a Google floor the fire was reported out by 2.30pm.
Via coverage from the Telegraph and Techcrunch.
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1. Office grandeur is wasted money. Spend the cash on making your website better instead. An excessive office gives off the wrong signals when getting profitable is key.
2. Coffee? Get a good coffee machine, yes it’s a personal thing, but the smell of fresh coffee kick starts the morning for me.
3. Meet standing up. A meeting room is important but not essential. Stand up meetings around a PC are quick and to the point. Try change of scene and meet in the local coffee shop.
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Question and answer websites have an inherent problem, it’s really hard to find questions to answer that you know about. Im really excited to announce that the developers at Blurtit have started to address this issue through the launch of the “Suggested Question” feature. Check out the video at the bottom of this post for a walk-through.
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Turning a small niche community into a business that has benefit from all stakeholders takes creative thinking. In this post I’m going to review BackofTheNet.info and come up with some ideas that could help move the site forward. I’d also like to open the comments up for further montisation ideas, so please post your ideas in the comments!
Site: BackofTheNet.info
Communtiy: PES and FIFA (football games) on the Xbox & PS3 (players community)
Current montisation channel: Adsense
Size of community: >10k
Strengths: Active community; Links from xbox.com
Owners comment: “We get [>5k] unique visitors a day, most of them come for FIFA information, and the others are returning members. We have a custom built shoutbox (ajax + php) which gets most of our page hits as it’s where members go to chill out, chat, and arrange games & stuff.”
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Su.pr (pronounced “super”) is a clever new service by Stumbleupon merging URL shortening functionality with Twitter and Facebook status updates to generate stumbles and hence traffic. It is currently in Beta, sign up codes can be found on Twitter @stumbleupon. The interface is clear, easy and simple to use, definitely a well crafted piece of work.
Su.pr home screen
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Natal Body Controllers From Microsoft
Project Natal is controller-less game play using body movements to control the Xbox 360 console. In reality if it works out as good as the videos shows then Microsoft have scored a home run.
Digg Ads – Fully Blended
Digg is about to launch an ad system that allows sponsored stories within the Digg listings, spot the ad:
The question is will the Digg community become blind to the sponsored ads? Or will they turn out like a paid inclusion version of Digg? Read the full announcement on the Digg Blog.
Seth on Product Development Buffet Style
Interesting post by Seth using the analogy of a Dinner Buffet to explain how to expand a product range effectively.
Deeper would mean a bacon-focused buffet, a dozen bacon dishes, including chocolate-covered bacon. Deeper would mean a chocolate-obsessed dessert bar, ten cakes, fondue, everything.
Deeper gets you people willing to drive across town to visit you.
The other choice is wider. Instead of adding a handful of dishes that mildly please the people you already have, why not add brown rice and tofu and vegetarian chili?
In summary: Increasing your quality significantly (deeper) or making a new product line to expand (wider) your market size works; Slight improvements in quality keeps your existing clients happy but doesn’t win new ones.
Definitely read the full post at Seth’s blog.
Bing – Video Search
Microsoft recently launched Bing a search engine comparable to Google. The normal search is fine, but where this search really holds it own is video.
A video search results page is a great video wall in which a mouse-over on video gets it playing.
Lets check out what Seth has to say:
Or watch the new Natal body controller promotional videos:
Google Wave
This changes things:
Sign up for updates to Google Wave.
Whales Stealing Fish From Lines – Caught On Camera
At depths of 328 feet (100 meters), the massive mammals were shown plucking the fishing line at one end to free the tasty black cod at the other end—like shaking apples from a tree, scientists say.
Watch the whales:
Full scientific details at National Geographic.
Tweeting Bar
Interesting SEO/PR stunt, the bar that tweets when a beer is poured @tweetingbar
Source: http://blog.360i.com/360i-news/introducing-tweetingbar
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What makes a great entrepreneur tick? What drives them to go the extra mile to success? These lesser known facts about Steve Jobs might just give you a clue.
Fact #1 Steve Jobs has Syrian roots.
After his birth in San Francisco to an American woman and a Syrian man he was given up for Adoption.
Fact #2 Atari and HP Turned Jobs Down.
Atari and Hewlett-Packard both turned down start-up funding requests from Jobs in the day:
So we went to Atari and said, ‘Hey, we’ve got this amazing thing, even built with some of your parts, and what do you think about funding us? Or we’ll give it to you. We just want to do it. Pay our salary, we’ll come work for you.’ And they said, ‘No.’ So then we went to Hewlett-Packard, and they said, ‘Hey, we don’t need you. You haven’t got through college yet.’
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Thanks to Tom Markiewicz and Frank Gruber for the link. [read more…]
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In this post I’m going to share some of the factors that have helped Blurtit.com increase its traffic from organic search. Many of these common sense techniques are really simple and can be applied to any size website. SEO on large sites is challenging in its scale as it’s not possible to optimise individual items, so we had to find solutions from within the analytics data of the site. [read more…]
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Are you stuck for questions to ask at interview? I’ve just collated a list for a business partner and it seemed to make sense to share these on my blog. Carefully selected questions can give you an insight into a candidates attitude towards work. Although asking difficult question shouldn’t be avoided, making the interviewee defensive will make the process harder. [read more…]
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These CEO’s are taking a pay pounding, some for the good of the company, some because of shareholder and board pressure and some because of lower stock options. These figures are based on information published by the companies, some relate to pay going forward and others for last year. It’s clear that some CEOs are leading the way forward out the of the current economic problems whilst others are being pushed into the pay cuts. Overall, according to Forbes, chief executives of the 500 biggest American companies took an average 11% reduction in overall compensation in 2008.
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Excel is a powerful tool bloggers can use to save time formating the HTML content of top list posts (you know, the popular top 10 type of posts). Chances are, if you are making a top list, Excel (or a similar spreadsheet application) will be used to collate the list. Using basic Excel formulas it’s quick to turn the list into a chunk of HTML code that can be simply cut & pasted into Wordpress. And with the spreadsheet ready it just takes 10 minutes of research time to build a top list.
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