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The News

Yahoo already had a deal locking them into Nokia phones. Now the Yahoo mobile service, Yahoo Go, will be the default service available on Motorola phones too, starting in 2007. Here’s a quote from the I Need Hits Blog:

Yahoo! and Motorola have just announced a new deal that will see Yahoo! Go pre-installed on millions of Motorola handsets from early 2007. The new deal means that Yahoo! has now secured what could be market dominating deals with the world’s top two mobile phone manufacturers.

My Own Wild Theories, Rants, and Speculations

On the one hand, congrats Yahoo. On the other, am I the only person who feels like it’s enough already with the phones being smarter than me? I mean, I love that my RAZR can do little searches on the net, and take pictures, and do video. I don’t enjoy its Bluetooth compatibility, but I find it convenient. And in a crunch, being able to read my email is super, though it’s a bother to reply to, so I wait until I get there.

But mainly? I wish someone would just go ahead and integrate my phone service into my laptop.

Oh wait. I can do that with SkypeOut. And get free calls in the US and Canada until the end of the year. Never mind.

Ok, I jest. (You can make and get calls on your laptop with Skype whenever you have a connection, but it’s not like your laptop can take pictures or fit in your back pocket.) Still though. It seems we should be able to fit all this technology into fewer places. I don’t even care if they’re that much smaller anymore…

Popularity: unranked [?]

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Continuing from the last post about the Accessible search article on IT Director - since it double posted, I might as well continue with a few more of my rambly thoughts…

For one thing, it seems that the results are further sorted by the simplicity of the site’s layouts, and their ability to still be understood without images. So I’m finding it a fun exercise to look at the results of mine and my client’s pages in regular Google versus the ones in the accessible version.

Neat.

It also got me to thinking things like, how much does the ease of spidering your information have an effect on where it stands in the search engines? Obviously if your site’s html or php code can’t be read/rendered properly, you don’t end up properly indexed, that’s just a matter of logic. But that’s not the most important factor either, or there wouldn’t be a need for the accessible search page at all.

And wouldn’t it be neat if you could build your own version of Google into your personalized search page that tweaks the algoritm to your preference? There’d be the standard version by default, and then a link you could click that would sort them by most recent, or more relevant to a saved search you have, or length of the page, or keyword density, or title…

Alright, end ramble. I may have another post or two then I have some reports to top off.

Popularity: unranked [?]

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Interesting article over at IT-Director.com. The bulk of the first part of the article is quoted directly from the FAQ on Google’s new Accesible Search, which they announced on the 20th in their blog.

A quote:

At present most of the testing is based on the target page, which may not be a good indication of the accessibility of the rest of the site. Some indication of the quality of the rest of the site should be included.

Interesting read, and one of the few prominent publications that I’ve found to actually take a serious go at testing it and sharing results.

Popularity: unranked [?]

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You can see your first traffic from blogging literally overnight, mostly from your initial pinging, Will it be a lot of traffic? Not necessarily. If you post at the right time of day for your site, you may see as many as 100 visitors come to your blog in its first day, due to a new blog post, just from pinging. You can see more than that if you let your existing traffic know about your blog.

After a certain number of posts, to lay the foundation of an active feed, you will also start to see a trickle of traffic from promoting your RSS feed or blog in directories and feed-specfic search engines. That can happen as soon as three days in, and sometimes after 7 to 10 days. The timing you can expect will depend on your blog.

You can see your first search engine results from blogging in as little as a week. With the combination of methods I teach, it really does take just a week to start seeing your initial first page rankings. Will this mean that suddenly thousands of people come to your site as a result of that ranking?

Not yet.

The first results are like poking a hole in the side of a dam. A little trickle of traffic will come flowing out - that’s the immediate, apparent effect. The slower, more dramatic effects happen over the course of the first 80 - 180 days, depending on the difficulty of your keywords, your volume and frequency of quality content, and your persistence in keeping up your linking efforts.

The one thing you’ll need to understand about blogging for business reasons is that when your intentions are tied to your business, you aren’t going to get a lot of general b2b traffic, or general consumer traffic, which means you probably aren’t going to become one of blogging’s superstars. But if you really take the time to know your client base, you will become admired and respected by them, which is what really matters.

Popularity: unranked [?]

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A lot of people wonder what makes a successful blog. Most of the time it becomes apparent to me that if someone is asking me that question, they don’t know why they’re blogging to begin with.

Success with blogging, and whether or not you have achieved it, will depend entirely on whether or not you have reached the goals you set with blogging to begin with.

What’s that?

You never set a goal with blogging? You started a blog because it was the thing to do?

That’s okay, we can fix that. Set some goals for what would make you think that the exercise of blogging was worthwhile to you.

I know that many people get into blogging for the traffic. Well, I already had traffic when I started blogging, so it’s not why I began to blog at all. Truthfully, I wanted to be closer to you. I wanted to be able to share my thoughts about traffic, to give tips and ideas, to report news in real time, and do it in a fast, streamlined fashion. With blogging, every time I do a new post, every page of my site that is part of the blog updates to let any new person know that I had something new to say.

The best part of blogging to me, wasn’t the shift and increase in search engine traffic that I observed. That was a great side effect, partly because it was an effect I could duplicate for my clients.

The best part of blogging was actually getting my first comment. And the thrill doesn’t go down with each subsequent comment I get. It makes the spam that sometimes comes through worth it as well. The interaction is by far the best part to me.

But let’s get back to you.

In the back of your mind, you might have been thinking “If I become a famous blogger, I’ll have all this traffic, and then I can sell more of my product or retire on the advertising income.” It’s not entirely unheard of to get more traffic, more sales, or make money from your content. But getting to the point where your advertising income or the increase in sales from blogging will feed you is hard, daily work. Just establishing the basic traffic pattern will take you several months. We’ll talk about that next, though.

The first step to reaching any of those goals, is picking one, dissecting what it truly means and reaching it.

For example, if you want more traffic from blogging, you’ll have to understand eventually what kind of traffic is created from blogging.

You may get new people, who read one thing and leave unless you connect to them in each post.

If you already have an ezine audience, you may get a group of readers who get to know you on another level, one that lets them get to know you as a person, which facilitates more repeat traffic, as they come to have more interaction with you, or to read what you say next. With this, you’ll have to be ready to give them some advice, a way to test what you say, and/or you’ll have to learn what they discusions they want to read or participate in.

Getting more traffic from blogging means that you’ll have to learn a bit more about the interactions that surround blogging, and why people read blogs to begin with.

Popularity: -5% [?]

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We’re all friends here, right? And I’m not afraid to talk about things that concern my friends but aren’t considered polite conversation.

So I’d like to talk abut the sorted topic of coin.

As you all know, I’m on the verge of releasing either a collection of products or one mega-product that breaks the steps of getting free traffic down into manageable steps.

What’s coming up a lot in that topic is that $97 is a high price for some people.

Now I know I could charge $97 for this product, and find people who would pay that with absolutely no problem. It’s definitely worth that price, and it would sure get you a lot more than $97 worth of traffic if you followed the directions.

But I want this to be a wide release, and to help as many people as possible. So I have two questions, coming up in a minute, but before I ask them, I want to do a short preface so you understand where I am coming from.

Even when I was flat broke and had no credit, when it came to a business investment, I could come up with up to $200 for a business purchase if it would either save me money or make me money. And I’ve been pretty broke. What I’m seeing a lot of people say in the other thread though, is that $97 is a lot of money to you. Now, I’m still not at the point that I would wipe my behind with a $100 bill, and I hope I never will be, because that’s insane.

The second part is that, when it comes to selling a product that other people are going to profit from, creating a $97 product leaves room for everyone to profit. Creating a $27 product doesn’t leave much of an affiliate income.

So here are the two questions.

1- What is your price barrier when you are making a purchase to improve your business? I ask because a lot of my colleagues read my blog, and this might help me, and them, make more products that are in your budget, or break some of our products down into more manageable purchases, and also have other high end products for the other side of our market.

There are a lot of us that care evenly about how much it would help you and how much of a profit we’d initially make. So this is your chance, speak up.

2- Would you rather make half of $97, but make fewer sales, or make half of $27 and make more sales? I ask because I could break the product down into products that are available both separately and as a big unit.

Don’t forget to leave your links in the answer.

Popularity: 4% [?]

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