It’s that time of year again where we have the annual gathering of kith and kin. Besides the festivities it always seems to be a time for learning. If you are a business owner its also a time for reflection and planning for the next year. The great thing about this time of year is that you are somewhat forced to get out of the box, routines, comfort zones etc. while you are engage more with friends and family that have different perspectives.

I have noticed over the last years that it has been a time for sharing and trying new productivity tools and systems.

This year I came across an iPad app that I have found very useful right out the gate.

It’s a writing/drawing tool.  You can draw, write or make notes, with your finger, or for best results, using an iPad pen.

Since I use a white board and notepads (the organic type) frequently this has been a handy tool because I can email those notes or drawings immediately. No scanning or typing into word necessary. Awesome!

These 3 iPad Drawing Apps are convenient and save you time

1. Pen Ultimate – Lite Version .99 – email shareable

2. Whiteboard – Lite Version is Free – Pro Version .99

3. UPad – Lite Version is Free – email shareable

One of the most important features of these tools was being able to share the note or drawing immediately via email. While most app b-models want you to share, (that’s the point, especially of the free ones) many of them want you to do so on Facebook or other social media.

Bottom line, Pen ultimate was the best tool (it had good user rating numbers), with the most intuitive user interface. It is well thought out in its layout as a notebook and even the lite version has a number of options.

I like the organic process of using the old fashion pen and paper and while note apps won’t completely replace this process these are very useful tools to be able to use in client meetings for quickly and easily mind mapping, drawing ideas and doing methodology charting.

I guess this is an appropriate title for our own company startup rebrand.

After years of development, marketing and client work we realized that we weren’t a media focused company. Rather we didn’t offer advertising and typical media services as we briefly did several years ago, when we decided on the name MediaWright. While MediaWright still remains our corporate name, from back in 05 when we were just a DBA, we have decided to rebrand our stuffy corporate site to the name Grimmster.  Whoooaa! What a step out from the conservative corporate blue I was raised and trained by.

While rebranding is not without its hassles, 301 redirects, systems and design changes aside, its part of  new age entrepreneurial-ism. Since businesses are moving a bit quicker and changes are more immediate it often means that your business or brand needs to shift in order to be true to your purpose or re-purpose. We have been fortunate and continue to be a profitable startup. Yet as with many small startups we have grappled the challenge of growth and decided to take on more responsibility and new grimmsters, with new opportunities.

This may cut into the surfing time even a bit more. However its a good thing and something we are all looking forward to in 2012 as we have some fun promoting the grimmster emarketing brand. We still have yet to further develop our logo and graphics etc. around the soul of our business but rest assured we will have some adventurous new elements to inject into the business. If you care to share any ideas regarding mascots please let us know at info (at)grimmster,com. Cheers, C

1. Web Developer - FireFox  Addon

The Web Developer extension adds lots of web developer tools to a browser for analyzing all sorts of site related technical data.

2. FireBug – FireFox  Addon

Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of development tools at your fingertips while you browse. The Firebug is another tool we use daily. You can edit, CSS, HTML , and more live in any web page…great for testing before you dig into any real code changes.

3. Search Status – FireFox  Addon

A useful quick rank-checking tool. Displays Google PageRank, Alexa rank, Compete rank and MozRank anywhere in your browser, It analyses keyword density, nofollow, backlinks, robots and again much more.

4. ySlow - FireFox  Addon

YSlow analyzes web pages and provides information on why they are slow. It is based on Yahoos rules for best-optimized web sites.

5. FlagFox – FireFox  Addon

Very cool tool if you want to know some background information of a site. This tool  shows a country flag which links you to information on a map of the site and server location as well giving site security info, whois, and much more.

6. Copyscape – Content Tool

This tool checks for duplicate pages of your content on the web. Very useful if you are working with any freelancers or outsource writers. Also good to use as a quick check for external duplicate content, if you are doing an SEO Audit.

7. Google Webmaster Tools

Still free and a great tool for tracking and analyzing your website traffic.

8. Google – AdSense Key Word Tool

Google’s keyword tool that gives you monthly search traffic results for specific and related keywords. Make sure you click exact match.

9. Wayback Machine (Archive.org)

Domain History. I have used this for years. Very usefully especially if you are going to build out a brand domain and want to see if there are any negative vibes or history associated with who ever owned it before you. Also a great tool if you are buying domains as part of your link building strategy.

10. Into DNS – Domain and Server Information

Gives you lots of information about a domain, IP and Nameserver, MX records. If you are running servers it’s a quick an easy tool to use for checking the status of many things. This information is really important especially for those few SEO’s that do run there own servers, (especially cloud) and really want to generate the best Search performance.

11.  SeoMoz – Professional Seo Tools

* SEO Tools, Campaign monitoring, Community Support and much more. Known as a leader in SEO amongst Seo’s Marketers, Webmasters and Enterprise companies alike. There is a free and paid account. If you are going to have one reliable comprehensive set of tools and resources you can depend on, this is the one. But I am bias because I am a Pro Member.

Well that’s the list. These are a few of the ones we use at eMediaWright. There are a lot of tools on the web now. After years of trying many of the free ones we started to opt for the paid tools mostly because of reliability, accuracy and time. If you are relatively new to seo in the last couple of years, I would go straight to the paid ones. The reason is simple, these companies have had many years now of beta testing, getting feed back and refining. You will save your self time (which is money in most cases) Cheers. C

If you have some quality Seo Tools that you find invaluable for seo analysis, please let me know in the comments or on twitter.com/mediawright

*denotes an Affiliate Link – thought I would let you know

A Lean and Steady Startup for Online Business

Picture of a Pomalift - The innovation that lead ski lift technology. A Steady Ride to the Top.

It s been a while since writing about anything other than web development or online marketing so I thought I would throw a quick post in about a new online business blog & solution our company is launching.  See Pomalift Online Business Solutions.

To round out our online products and services program we thought that it was important to provide a vehicle to discuss Online Business. After talking with and consulting many small business owners over the years it was fairly obvious that people were not just interested in all the new trendy internet marketing toys but really more interested in how they could make some money with all this new knowledge. (this may seem obvious) So when a friend of mine from Vietnam contacted me to partner with him offering eCommerce solutions, I started thinking.

Ok, makes sense. While not all people I talk to have a full understanding of using the web for business, there is usually somewhere, tucked away, a goal to attract awareness to their site for the purposes of promoting something. Whether that thing is an idea, tangible product or service, the end result somehow has some commerce attached to it.

The actually commerce part may not be the drive such as the case of non profits. It may be just the fact that people want to have more autonomy on how they earn their income. With all the people skilled and qualified, out of jobs today, it seems to make sense that there are more ways these days to earn an income than to just put your resume out there the old fashioned way.

Beside the fact that my overseas friend has about 150 employees now and developing ecommerce clients worldwide may have also caused some intrigue.

Being a fact that we are still a small company there is a trade off of course with growing a business. When you start to take on large enterprise clients you can end up losing a certain amount of autonomy and control over things.

Having worked for some large companies in the past and knowing some of the dynamics, its prompted me to take a different approach to expanding our business.

Instead of just jumping on board the ecommerce partner wagon and getting caught up in the melee of activities I thought we would start out with a separate web blog geared to online business startups and enterprise ecommerce clients alike. While the two seem on completely different spectrums of ebusiness they are also not so different.

Both sides have an objective to build revenue. In fact it is probably more of a challenge and accomplishment in some cases to work with startups as they are unprecedented in their growth worldwide today.

Startups are fun and the great thing about startups they usually offer lots new insight into generating business online. They are usually operating leaner and the team often has fewer creative or operational constraints. On the other hand the enterprise business has greater budgets and knowledge resources.

Together we decided these two core business types would provide a good balance to giving insight and getting feedback for building online business revenue.

In the spirit of new age internet entrepreneurs… that’s what we aim for. See the book The Lean Startup by Eric Ries.

If you have any comments to add positive or other wise please let us know either here at CG Blog or over at Pomalift Online Business.  I will be launching our own Steady Startup Circle meeting mid December 15, 2011. For those interested in being part of the group send us a tweet. We will be offering some neat tech perks for any persons doing a startup and want to provide feedback during the process.

Cheers, C

What is a Steady Startup?

My contention is that startups do not have to be boom or bust rocket ships blasting out a product or service on angel or venture funds.  We agree that startups should be lean. Further, the solid and successful ones are steady in their, diligence, team building, offering, and systems over time. Growth evolving through a course of testing, feedback, experience and value through innovation and reliability.

Does this sound boring and lofty? Let us know at Steady Startup.

What are some of the current core search engine optimization and online marketing elements?

While major search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo! don’t reveal all their algorithms for SEO we do know a few basics for good search engine optimization, partly because, in the case of google, they tell us. Here are a few:

1. Keyword Usage – There is a myth that the more a certain keyword is used in the content of the website the more it can help bring traffic to a website. Not true. However keywords do “dominate our search intent and interactions with the engines“. A keyword is a particular word or phrase the user is likely to type and search for, during the search process for a relevant return of content. In order for a website to develop a better ranking it should have relevant keyword in titles, text and meta data.
   
2. Page titles- The page titles of the websites also hold significant relevance for search engine optimization. The title of a page is one of the first things a user and a search engine will check before going through the website. Hence a page title with the particular keyword is of great help for search engine optimization.
3. Relevant content- The most effective way to get a better SEO positioning will be to write content in your website which is relevant to a user. The fact that “content is king” cannot be emphasized more and hence website developers should pay particular attention to the content of their website. It also makes it easier for search engines to crawl pages where content matches the users search. 
4. Site Structure- The site structure of any website has to be properly constructed so that a ‘search bot’ may easily find and crawl your website. Major search engine robots look for easily accessible websites to present their results of a search. While building your website make sure that you put what you want the search engine to see, at the top of the page and remember Robots read words not pictures.
5. Link Building- Links are like recommendations from other websites which guide the user to your website. Or like my 17 year old nephew says…”That’s kind of like Cred building online right.” Yeh thats about it! It helps you create better awareness of your website,  higher traffic and a much needed competitive edge over other websites in your market. It is one of the most important and difficult tasks of search engine optimization.
6. Social Networking Sites- Adding social media widgets and follow us links to your site is a great way to allow people, Visitors, to pass on information that they found interesting or useful to their network while at the same time building your connections and site awareness.
7. Site maps- Search engines like Google go through a page’s site map before presenting it as a potential result to the user. Basically an XML code guides the the search bots to the desired content of the users search without having to go through graphic menus.
8. Local Search- Because much business happens on a local level it makes good sense to add your business and site information in lots of local search directories. i.e yellow pages, yelp etc.  Localized searches have taken precedence over normal searches. Your search results will be giving you results according to the place where you live. Location based search. This makes your search more relevant and also helps local business.

These are just a few basic key points to keep in mind while building and planning for SEO.

What are your thoughts regarding the more core aspects of Search Marketing and search engine optimization? Let us know your comments below or post it on Twitter/MediaWright. Cheers.

Creating your own social media program online can be a daunting experience when you first start out. Fortunately the internet is a vast resource that is the perfect information tool to give you all the information you need to get the job done right. There are 1000’s of pages online where you can get all the details. While some of these sites may not necessarily be that accurate, we  have put together a few links of some of the best reads for your research when building your program.

When you first start out you will need to decide on the effectiveness and possible return on investment from managing a social networking program. Essentially you have to figure out whether or not it will be worth your efforts. The Brandbuilder blog will give you a solid understanding of the how and why’s when you are looking at the ROI for social networks.

Using Social Media is for everyone.

Getting as much information as possible is a must if you want to find your feet in the social networking environment. This social media program will outline all the details for you in plain English.

Getting into the swing of things might leave you in a bit of a spin. If you do get stuck, then you can always read up on how some of the other players have done it. This site will give you valuable insight as to how Rogue resources started off with their social media program. If you are still not convinced by an unfamiliar company, you can take a look at how NASA implemented their own program in order to substantiate how it got done by a well known company.

Social Media University is a useful site that will give you a lot of detail on social media. They are primarily focused on educated people, creating links to a variety of dedicated articles and videos that will show you exactly what to do. This particular resource gives you a quick rundown in 12 easy steps.

Wikipedia has been disputed as a reliable source of information, the basic principle still allows for useful and in most cases highly accurate information on any given subject. They have a really detailed page on how social media works and you can view it here.

Karen Snyder has put together a nice slideshow for those that don’t really feel like doing a lot of reading. She has posted an actual social media program presentation on slideshare.net .

This particular option is definitely something for the more advanced social media managers. Instead of utilizing the existing infrastructure of facebook and twitter, you have the option to create your very own social networking site. You can download and customize your own site from jcow.net. Boonex.com, socialgo.com and socialengine.net all do the same thing, they just offer different variations with a number of useful choices. You can read up on a couple reviews of these sites and get a detailed view on what they have to offer from e-commercewebdesigners.net. If you are not really interested in creating everything from scratch, you can always integrate social media functions into your existing website – kickapps.com has a number of widgets, apps and templates to create the social user experience you need for your own site.

Once you have made your decision about the medium for your social networking plan, you then have to set out a plan to implement it. Making use of existing infrastructure simply requires a presence online and then you have to begin the process of increasing your contact list. Building your own network requires a complete strategy on every detail so you may want to look at possible strategies for your implementation. If you need additional information on this you can visit socialmediaexaminer.com for a more ideas on how you can get started.

As you can see, there a wide variety of options available to you when you start out with your social network program. You can work with the existing sites that already have all the infrastructure in place and you simply build your contact network, or you can build up the actual network infrastructure itself and create an entirely new niche group that can access your networking.

The options available are very versatile and can offer you the right solution depending on your needs.  Help us bring more resources and education our reader by letting us know your experience, strategy or feedback. If you have already put a social media program in place was it biult on a strategy of using a current social network platform or did you build your own social network site?

The most recent stat depending on where you look has Google holding about 65% of peoples first choice for search.
However there are few up and coming search alternative that may be making a strong impact on the search business very soon. Why? Because Google even in it’s giantism is not able to effectively develop other areas of search. Maybe as in many large companies, it’s because of it’s sheer size. Even though their buying power is vast it is not always able to easily integrate new ideas and technologies into well established systems. You have to be more careful of breaking things when making changes (thus beta testing) Or sometimes it’s just market expectations and responsibilities that prevent more radical changes, which are so easy to implement in a startup stage company.

Below is a short list of alternative search options. You may be surprised at what is in store for search, just around the corner. It may be coming from something else other than Bing or Yahoo.

Blekko – I talked to these guys during there launch at Pubcon. Free T-shirt…yeh! Pretty cool seo stats. Their mission is to basically get rid of spam and to make search more relevant to the user by using slash tags.

Duckduckgo – This search is very similar to Google Instant where a user can search for relevant information without having to click on search results.

Greplin – is a search engine that can search and index social services and applications such as Gmail, Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook and many others.

Wayjam – is a search tool that is also driven by social data. The difference is that Wajam personalizes results by being a browser extension to the major browsers, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome and Safari.

Quora – has a mission to answer users questions on just about any topic. Questions are organized by category and like Blekko it is mostly user driven.

For more detailed information, check out website magazine.

While I am still a big Google fan I think it’s good to see these alternatives coming into the market that will eventually help improve our search experience. If you try these let us know what you think and if these new search tools actually add value your search experience.

Or, Resources for Internet Marketing and Building an Internet Business in the New Age.

If you are involved in consulting, software development or internet marketing it is worth a read to understand the core concepts behind these best selling new age marketing authors. Marketing they are, because each of these folks are delivering new media and marketing methods themselves trying to convince us of the changing landscape with how we send and receive information today. Check these out. They may help you better understand developing strategies, concepts and methods for doing business online.

Search Engine Marketing Inc.

Driving Search Traffic to Your Companies Website

General all in one broad strokes on Internet Marketing. A good reference book on “How to”. Gets into enough into enough detail to give you a basic handle most aspects of Search Marketing. Mike Moran and Bill Hunt

The (Longer) Long Tail

Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More

Explains the details of basically this core theory backed by examples. : “In an era without constraints of physical shelf space and other bottle necks of distribution, narrowly targeted goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.” David Meerman Scott

unMarketing

Stop Marketing and Start Engaging

Straight forward information mostly based on Scott Strattens often hilarious experiences in New Media Marketing. There is a heavier emphasis in his strength on Twitter, Facebook and Video marketing.

Drive

The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

Personal favorite. If you’re at all a futurist you will enjoy this book. Dan Pink brings to light what, how and why people are motivated today. Drawing comparisons between motivation 2.0 and the new 3.0 model he illustrates quite clearly the prevailing winds of what drives people today, autonomy to direct our own lives with purpose.

The 4 Hour Work Week

Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere and Join the New Rich

Besides being funny as hell, Tim Ferriss discusses how we can streamline our lives to get more time to do what we want to do. There’s some good resources and takeaways in this book especially of you are self employed.

One of the best things I love about my work is that I am always learning and exploring new material related to the field of online business. The startups alone these days seem to be staggering.

If you have an internet business or you are in the internet marketing field and have read these books let us know your perspective. (Oh..Regarding the picture above; I am not a best selling author but after reading unMarketing about the BS that goes on in getting books published, I thought it would kind of fun to make my own best selling book cover and titles.

6 Reasons Why the Latest Version
of one of the Most Known CMS’s is the Greatest Yet

The Future of Joomla

Since its introduction in the year 2005, Joomla has become one of the most broadly adopted open source Content Management Systems (CMS) on the web, providing web publishers with a series of features at zero cost from the very beginning. Now, six years later, Joomla 1.6 has arrived and it is a vast improvement on its predecessor, which had already been around for almost 3 years.

Here is an overview of the core differences that Joomla 1.6 brings along over its predecessor and why they take the usability of this CMS platform to a whole new level.

1. Better Menu Manager: With Joomla 1.5, many users were left disappointed with the lack of depth of the Menu Manager, which at the time just showed four boxed-shaped options at the moment of creating a menu. However, now with Joomla 1.6, users are presented with a much more flexible and integrated Menu Manager that blends in a far more transparent way with the display of menu links.

2. An Overhauled Interface: The new interface of Joomla has received a much welcome improvement as well, with a far more elegant design, better buttons, much better (and more logical) menu organization and many other time-saving details (like the new different SAVE buttons) that make the user experience much smoother overall.

3. Access Levels and Group Organization: With Joomla 1.6, users can choose from many access levels and can also group other users and can assign those groups to any of the existing access level they want.

4. Add Metadata: Joomla 1.6 brings in the possibility of adding meta descriptions and even keywords for categories. Also, articles can change the page title and names can be added to page titles as well.

5. Access Control List: One of the best features that Joomla 1.6 brings over its 1.5 counterpart, is that almost any element of the system can now be controlled using the new ACL system. Also, each element of the ACL System can be accessed in an easier way and can also be set either individually or in groups. And when set individually, items are now able to inherit the settings from items on higher levels, like a single article automatically inheriting the settings from the category to which it belongs.

5. Better Template Styles/Control: The new version of Joomla allows users to apply a series of different setting and looks to any given template and provides also support for layout overrides. And what makes this new feature even more interesting, is that it applies to front end templates and to administrator templates as well.

In summary, the new version of Joomla is by far a vast improvement over its predecessor in ways that will appeal to both advanced users and novices alike. With these changes this CMS platform instantly becomes far more interesting, which will help it acquire users in greater numbers.

If you want to know more about this new version of Joomla or simply have something to say about it, feel entirely free to post a comment or follow us on Twitter.

Facebook is used by millions of users around the world daily.  Ads are displayed on each user’s profile, from different companies, on each side of the home and profile page. There are often about 10 ads on each page containing information about 10 different products/services or organizations.

Since there are many people online looking at these ads at one time, they are likely to interest a user because these ads are displayed only to appeal to the interest of the logged in Facebook user. This is done by monitoring what is being clicked on and viewed by the user. These ads are attracting possibly, thousands of new customers to businesses worldwide.

How can you use Facebook.com for your business? One strategy is to make your page useful. For example testimonials and product/service reviews. You want people to know your business and to get the word out how great you are at what you do. Facebook is like creating word of mouth online.  Making your page useful and not just a sales pitch can help drive users to look at your website

Let’s take a look at your Facebook business page. You have only a few likes, some photos and you have maybe some links to external sites. Where is the interesting part? What does your business do and why out of the hundreds of thousand businesses on Facebook should they use yours? Are you good at what you do? Do customers love you and give you thumbs up. You need to include some information on your page that makes the customer want to know more. This is then provides a good incentive to click on external links. Link to a blog you have, link to articles that are related to your product or service, link to videos, link to forums where discussions take place, etc. You want people to seriously like your page, not just be another number.

A few possible Facebook goals and strategies.

1. Create more awareness of your business throughout the Facebook site

2. Get 1,000 likes or more by the end of the Year

3. Have at least 5 visitor comments or shared items on your page every week or every other day

4. Turn Facebook into the top referrer of traffic for your business page

5. Get 2000 entries into a Facebook contest that you are holding.

These goals are simple enough to follow and once you make them the next step is to break them down into small tasks easy enough for you to reach. Let’s take a look at the first goal. You want to create more awareness of your business throughout the Facebook site. How can you do this? Try linking and building networking connections with already well established Facebook businesses. These can be your affiliates. They can help promote you to their already loyal followers and help give more visibility to your business out. You can also create a twitter account in conjunction with your Facebook. Having a lot of followers on Twitter and directing them towards your Facebook is a good way of helping create more awareness.

There are many ways to use facebook for business.  Yet these suggestions are quick and easy to follow and can bring more awareness to your business Facebook page. Check out Facebook’s create-an-ad feature as a lot of ads are shown everyday.  Let me know what you thoughts, do you think Facebook is a good tool for business?