Monthly Archives: January 2011

Create a Blog

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Create a Blog Easily
You want to get started on your own website but do not know where to start. There are those such as GoDaddy that have excellent services for hosting and blogs using content management systems such as WordPress. However if you need and want to make the process of creating an impressive site easily without having to read a book or hire a programmer consider Squarespace. You can create a blog using their free trial and get up and running instantly. They have used the kiss principle (kiss as in Keep It Simple Stupid) to create a blog management tool that is easy to use but just as important it creates an amazing site for you.

Difference Between Basic Blog and Amazing Website
When you create a basic blog you have the ability to create a new page or a new post which is a story or article. You can enter an image and you are up and running. Now to create an amazing website Squarespace has added features you will want but never thought you could have as most big sites have it but it’s not easy. So Square space has added features for you. Here is what I mean. They have a module for both the iPad and the iPhone which allows you to update your blog or website from anywhere at anytime. For your blog you can pull information from other social networks, have all your information pulled and placed on your blog. Their templates are fantastic. A template is the design of your site, so you can just choose one of many and modify it without any programming or design experience to make it unique to you. You can also check statistics of your website to learn more about your visitors. Take a look at what they have to offer. Follow the create a blog link above for a free trial.

Amazon Email Service

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Use the Best Email Service
These days you do not need to reinvent the wheel. Most importantly some of the largest and most successful e-commerce companies are not only telling you how they do what they do but letting you use their infrastructure. Sounds crazy doesn’t it, but in Amazon’s case it is true. Obviously they email a large number of customers for a variety of reasons. Chances are this system of theirs has been put through a battery of tests and obviously proven itself over time. What if you could access it on a ‘pay as you go’ basis? You can. Here what they have to say about it:

Through a simple API call, businesses can now access a high-quality, scalable email infrastructure to efficiently and inexpensively communicate to their customers. For high email deliverability, Amazon SES uses content filtering technologies to scan a business’s outgoing email messages to help ensure that the content meets ISP standards.

Read more here at Amazon.

Google to Add More Jobs in 2011 Than Ever Before

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Jobs, Jobs, Jobs
One of the best places to work, or so they say, is Google and now they are hiring. See this blog post here to learn more. They stated they would add more jobs in 2011 than ever before. The largest past year was 2007 with over 6,00 people so 2011 will be even more. This says a lot about their success. I would not venture to say this says a lot about the economy but only that this one company is succeeding very well as always.

Google Accomplishments
Why work there? Here are some of their 2010 accomplishments of note. Android, the moblie OS, now runs on over 100 devices and there are more than 300,000 activations a day. Um, uh, wow. Chrome, their browser, has over 120 million active users and they state that their Google Apps had 1 million business converts. If you want to work on the above, as well as mobile and display advertising, cloud computing and more, that is one great place to get your feet wet.

2010 Internet Stats

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Internet Statistics for 2010
The most recent stats I posted were related to the 2010 holiday season and the record breaking sales days. I came across this excellent article here at Pingdom. Every time I review internet statistics I am always amazed at how large the numbers are. Here are some interesting figures taken from their list, go to their site to view all and they also included the references of the numbers origination.

  • 255 million – The number of websites as of December 2010
  • 21.4 million – Added websites in 2010
  • 1.97 billion – Internet users worldwide (June 2010)
  • 14% – Increase in Internet users since the previous year
  • 2 billion – The number of videos watched per day on YouTube
  • 5 billion – Photos hosted by Flickr (September 2010)

See more detailed stats at their site.

Restore Online Shoppers Confidence Act

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Bill Related to Online Sales
An interesting Bill passed, S.3386 Entitled Restore Online Shoppers’ Confidence Act, can be found here at OpenCongress which is a great site by the way. You can read the entire text of the bill at this site. There have been issues online of unscrupulous marketers doing more than just fulfilling the initial customers order. From selling the customers information without the customers consent and in some cases passing along the credit card information to make a second purchase of another item or service on behalf of the customer without their knowledge or consent. The desire of this bill is to combat those individuals head on. To better understand the bill itself read it here with the additional commentary (and funny) from attorney Mike Young.

US Citizens Cannot Make Money on Facebook, Overregulation?

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US Citizen? No Money for You!
I found this article at the Wall Street Journal site interesting. Apparently the latest private offering of shares in Facebook excludes U.S. Citizens (U.S. clients of Goldman Sachs Group). Now before you get upset with Goldman it seems that they needed to do this in order to properly comply with U.S. Securities laws. It has to do with advertising.

Don’t Worry Your Lack of Profit is to Save You Against Yourself
According to the article there is an SEC rule dealing with private placements in part reads “cannot be the subject of advertising, general promotional seminars or public meetings in connection with the offering.”, now that is a U.S. regulation and other countries are less strict. Therefore Goldman is only offering this placement to those outside the U.S. One might call this over-regulation, however others may say you are too dumb to know better so the U.S. is saving you from yourself as you cannot possibly know how to invest.

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SES New York 2011

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March 21 – 25th, 2011 at the Hilton NY
The years first SES event will be at the Hilton in New York from March 21st to the 25th. From their email about the event:

… SES is taking the lead in dissecting the new online marketing landscape and figuring out what it means for you. SES continues to be the industry’s leading forum, delivering marketers the broadest scope from which to view the industry and learn to fully integrate all the dimensions of search, taking advantage of all the possibilities.

The best prices are found here if you register prior to Jan 21st.

One Trillion Data Points

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Online Advertising Report
Project Rubicon has just issued their online advertising report for Q3 of 2010 utilizing over 1 Trillion datapoints. As a lover of data I have to say being able to have that much data from which to make projections and or analyze the market is fantastic. You can find their report by following the link, as well as prior quarterly reports.

CO Domain Coupon

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CO Domain Coupon
As part of your domain strategy consider also getting a .co domain. You can use a co domains coupon and enter it at checkout. There is a promo code box on the right in the GoDaddy checkout and you simply enter DOTCO1099 to get $5 off a .CO domain.

* ! * Special : 65% Off .CO Domains * ! *

DOTCO1099 – 65% off .CO domains [ Click this Link ]

* works on .COM also , use the coupon code “DOTCO1099″ at checkout

Why get a .CO domain?
There are many reasons you may want to obtain a .CO domain. If you have .COM domains and someone were to type them in quickly and leave off the “M” as I do occasionally then they may go to another website if you do not own the .CO version and forward it to your site. You can create new sites or just protect those you have.