Being transparent is one way to build relationships, brands and profit. Starting a business blog is one was to accomplish that. This article on business blogging is a good start.
Just one word of advice. If you are going to have a blog, have a blog. Update it at least once a week, more if possible. If you can’t commit to content on a consistent basis, you may want to initiate another form of communication other than a blog.
I used a bit of code on the above page to redirect blog.nickfromneptune.com to www.nickfromneptune.com. Of course this was after migrating the contents of the blog domain to the main domain.
I think the blog domain has served it’s purpose. Everything is going to live on the proper domain now. At least for the time being.
The content from the page I mentioned above that was useful for my 301 redirect purposes is below.
Redirecting entire sites with 301
The 301 directive is quite powerful. You can redirect not just single files but entire sites, for example when changing domain names e.g.
redirect 301 / http://www.you.com/
The first “/” indicates that everything from the top level of the site down should be redirected. As long as you are using the same paths and filenames, then this option is a very simple way to perform site redirection in the situation where you have only changed your domain name.
If the site redirection doesn’t work for you, check to ensure you have the trailing “/” on the destination URL. You may also like to try some of the other suggestions in our basic tutorial on the apache mod_rewrite module.
For those of you who like media.
For those of you interested in ranking well in the search engines, here are a few resources for keyword researching…
You can also do some advertising with Google adwords. Put in tons of keywords via using the keyword generator and you brain and see what gets activity.
Here is the An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth by Bruce Mau.
http://hotzone.yahoo.com/b/hotzone/blogs2401
Sometimes technology is a great voice for people who would have never had one.
I just searched for Pier Village Long Branch in Google. I got a bunch of sites that mention the Pier Village, but not the Pier Village site.
Quick Web Lesson
This is because the the site was built in Flash and Flash does not get indexed in search engines. That means the search engines won’t find any bit of text in that Flash file. It also means that this page will be found sooner than the Pier Village site will be if someone searches for Pier Village Long Branch.
I did find the site by searching for Pier Village, and that’s good. But this is only because www.piervillage.com is the domain and Google is smart that way.
Also, if you were to search for pier village mcloone’s pier house, I would think you would see 2 listings. One for the Pier Village and one for the Pier Village Mcloone’s Pier House page. But alas, you won’t. As a matter of fact, you get similar results to the initial search on Pier Village Long Branch.
This would be different if part of the requirements in the web document were to “build the Pier Village web site with best search engine marketing practices to ensure proper spidering of search engines.” This is web speak for, “Your site will be found on the web.”
If you have a site that you’d like found on the internet, feel free to shoot me an email and we can chat.
http://www.webinknow.com/ - marketing blog
http://www.productmarketing.com/productmarketing/files/emp/ - more marketing with downloads!
http://www.fightthebull.com/putinthering.asp - measure the level of BS in your copy. It’s surprisingly accurate.
Here’s a nice source if you use rss, blogs, online marketing, search engine optimization, direct email, etc.
Originally published on Yahoo…
Yahoo links tend to disappear over time, so I posted the original article here.
Sun May 1, 5:23 PM ET
PARIS (AFP) - Traditional media such as newspapers and radios are casting an increasingly covetous eye over the growing number of Internet blogs, hoping to cash in on a slice of the action.With daily newspaper circulation in decline, the highly critical and at-times irreverent world of the personal online journal with its potential to attract millions of readers is looking more and more attractive.
Media mogul Rupert Murdoch even warned the American Society of Newspaper Editors last month that the owners of traditional media cannot afford to be complacent.
Young people “want their news on demand, when it works for them. They want control over their media, instead of being controlled by it. They want to question, to probe, to offer a different angle,” Murdoch said.
“Where four out of every five Americans in 1964 read a paper every day, today, only half do. Among just younger readers, the numbers are even worse.
“So unless we awaken to these changes, and adapt quickly, we will as an industry, be relegated to the status of also-rans, or worse, many of us will disappear altogether.”
According to the US web consultants Perseus, blogs are increasing at an incredible rate. In 1999, just 23 blogs were thought to exist.
Now there are more than 31 million, and the figure is set to reach 53 million by the end of the year.
That is a huge global community of people, all with something to say, for better or worse, on every topic under the sun.
In the United States, bloggers have even turned into media watchdogs when CNN’s Eason Jordan resigned after an army of bloggers exposed shortcomings in his coverage, ignored by the more traditional media.
The bloggers were also instrumental in exposing problems in a story last September on the National Guard record of US President George W. Bush by CBS’s Dan Rather — who retired from the evening news in March of this year.
In South Korea, 30,000 people contribute to the country’s new, sole online daily OhmyNews.
“Blogs allow readers to retake control of the way in which they read information. They don’t want to read information in a linear fashion, and they don’t need to be told what they should read,” Loic Le Meur, vice president of California-based web editor Six Apart, told AFP.
“Blogs are a revolution, the revenge of the amateurs.”
Already some newspapers have moved towards trying to incorporate the bloggers’ world within the pages of their own papers.
The Guardian newspaper in Britain turned a young Iraqi into an overnight success when it picked up his blog filed during the height of the 2003 war in Iraq.
Salam Pax’s vision of the horrors of daily life was soon scoring 20,000 hits a day, and The Guardian eventually recruited him as a journalist.
In face of huge news events such as the war in Iraq, the traditional media “can’t turn a blind eye to what is going on on the blogs,” said sociologist Jean-Marie Charron.
As well as recruiting would-be reporters, media outlets are also giving free rein to their journalists to launch their own blogs.
“While some journalists have set up their own blog, others are publishing whole online magazines,” said Six Apart, which organised a meeting of 300 bloggers from 22 countries in Paris last week.
The initiative in France was started by the left-wing daily Liberation, and the number of blogs is multiplying, the California group added.
Launched in December 2002, “skyblog” from Skyrock radio targets the 12- to 24-year-olds, and now counts some 1.9 million blogs, with 5,000 to 10,000 new ones being created daily.
“It gives the new generation a new means of expression, of freedom, of exchange of ideas,” said Skyblog boss Pierre Bellanger.
Last year Skyrock’s electronic platform counted for some 20 percent of the radio’s 25-million-euro (32.35-million-dollar) turnover.
According to Le Meur at Six Apart, blogs can be a rich source of revenue in several ways, from advertising to sponsorship.
“Several brand names are beginning to seek out those bloggers who are influential in their fields, to pay them and get them to test products.
“Media see in this an opportunity for this to evolve from a brand that diffuses information, to a brand that gives its readers their say.”
Le Monde Interactif (Le Monde Interactive), the top French information site with more than 14 million hits a month, launched its blog network in 2004.
It now has about 2,200 bloggers. Setting up a blog is reserved for subscribers only — currently some 60,000 — but they can be read by all.
“It’s a fantastic format for journalistic expression which allows an almost instantaneous dialogue with the reader” for a major event, said director Yann Chapellon.
Thousands of people turned to their blogs during the death last month of Pope John Paul II to voice their thoughts, with many using the Internet to share their faith.
For the first time three correspondents for Pelerin, a French Catholic magazine with a circulation of 300,000, wrote about the funeral rites in blogs.
For deputy editor-in-chief, Benoit de Sagazan, their blogs had a double advantage. “They allowed up-to-the-minute reports, and also allowed the correspondents to tell lots of intimate details which would have been impossible to publish on paper due to the lack of space.
“The blog allows a more direct and spontaneous tone.”