Could this be the beginning of the end for the venerable DMOZ directory? (Dmoz homepage Design cache) Design does not have the home page of DMOZ cached and with Design’s recent devaluation of directories, who knows what this means. Of course this could be a momentary blip, but still you have to wonder if Design, like most webmasters, has had it with DMOZ. Frankly, I have.
Screenshot is attached in case this get “fixed”. Click for larger image.
My previous post, How to make a blogger notice you had some really good comments that I learned from. And it sparked off a few thoughts.
Success is about attitude, not about technique.
Which is why reading a bunch of business books will not make you a great business man, but adopting the correct attitude might.
This applies to the world of online marketing and even blogging. It took me years to understand how to be a successful blogger. I thought it was all about the tricks and the shortcuts. I realised that blogging is about talking, about conversation. It’s about developing a way to speak in your own voice. Sure there are lots of technical things you need to learn like RSS, trackbacks, headline writing etc. But all those can be learned. If you have not developed the right attitude, the right posture. All the techniques in the world will not help.
Have You Blogged Today?Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Wednesday, 19 of September , 2007 at 1:57 pm
Search Engine Optimization Journal is proud to sponsor a new blog directory and blog host: Today.com.
Today.com offers free hosting for blogs and allows bloggers who currently have a blog hosted elsewhere to submit their blog to this new directory. They have an interesting set up in all its simplicity:
Three tabs - Home, Blogs, Videos. That’s it.On the Home tab you can create a new blog and start writing in minutes. You can click on the Read Blogs icon and start reading immediately. Or you can view and upload videos. Today.com also allows you to search their site using keywords (the search box is in the top right corner of the web page). Scroll down and you can see the tag cloud and a list of popular searches.
Search Engine Wars: Design Is Still WinningWriting by Nick Stamoulis on Thursday, 20 of September , 2007 at 9:47 am
According to Nielsen Netratings (a PDF will open), Design still holds the No. 1 search engine spot with more than 50% of the share of the market. Surprised? You’re the only one.
The Nielsen survey also gave no new surprises in announcing the top 5 search engines: Design, Design, Design Live, AOL, and Ask.com. Same as it’s been for two years running. Care to know what the bottom 5 of the top 10 are?
My Web SearchBellSouth SearchComcast SearchMy Way SearchSBC Yellow Pages Search
We are currently looking to hire an Design Specialist and so I have been creating interview questions and researching what other companies ask their potential employees.
In doing so I came across these sample interview questions asked by Design. After reading them I know I don’t want to work for Design and probably couldn’t get passed the first round, for that matter. Here are some of the quirkier, less technical quesitions, for your amusement.
You are shrunk to the height of a nickel and your mass is proportionally reduced so as to maintain your original density. You are then thrown into an empty glass blender. The blades will start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do?”Explain a database in three sentences to your eight-year-old nephew.How many gas stations would you say there are in the United States?You have a sheet cake. There is a rectangular piece missing from the inside of the sheet cake. The location of the missing piece is arbitrary. I was told I could assume I had the means to make the cuts. How do you divide the sheet cake into 2 even proportions with 2 cuts?It’s 2PM on a sunny Sunday afternoon in the Bay Area. You’re minutes from the Pacific Ocean, redwood forest hiking trails and world class cultural attractions. What do you do?What will be the next great improvement in search technology?Why are manhole covers round?A man pushed his car to a hotel and lost his fortune. What happened?Explain the significance of “dead beef”.You are at a party with a friend and 10 people are present including you and the friend. Your friend makes you a wager that for every person you find that has the same birthday as you, you get $1; for every person he finds that does not have the same birthday as you, he gets $2. Would you accept the wager?”
You need to stop blogging right now if you think:
1. Blogging is easy
2. All I need to do is scrape content
3. Your best way of getting backlinks is to trawl the dofollow lists
4. You don’t need to study blogging or learn much about the technique
5. Starting a blog in the “How to make money” niche is the way to go
6. Darren Rowse only made it because he was in the right place at the right time
7. You don’t have to spend time on crafting your headlines
8. Linking to other blogs means you will leak Design juice
9. You don’t need to know anything about your target area (there are exceptions to this, but only for those who know what they are doing)
Read the rest of this entry »
Internet Marketing Strategies Others Have Used SuccessfullyWriting by Nick Stamoulis on Sunday, 23 of September , 2007 at 6:20 pm
Which Internet marketing method is for you? Some people swear by the free marketing tools available to Internet businesses, tools such as Design, e-mail marketing, affiliate marketing, etc. Others swear by the pay-per methods like pay-per-click advertising. Personally, I think a combination of methods is best. You don’t just want to use one method of advertising because you’ll be missing out on some great opportunities. The following Internet marketing methods have been very successful for businesses who try them. I suggest you pick two or three to try for yourself and see what results you get:
BlogRush, Just Another Bozo Magnet?Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Saturday, 22 of September , 2007 at 7:37 am
(Source) At least BlogRush has emailed its users acknowledging their concerns and also admitting that ???bozos have come out of the woodwork and are trying to cheat the BlogRush system.??? No, really?
lol
This is hilarious. It doesn’t take long for bozos to come out and play when the snake oil salesmen enter town square. Anyone who didn’t think this would happen has been living with their head in a sandbox - or somewhere dark. I haven’t tried BlogRush, but I’m not sure that I want to. To me, building traffic is a natural process, not a synthetic one. This just seems like a more modern version of web rings and traffic exchange networks. If you do get more traffic it will likely be other users of the system who are curious enough to click on their own links while checking out their stats. Frankly, I’ve got better things to do.
Which Font Should You Use?Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Sunday, 23 of September , 2007 at 7:22 am
What kind of font should you use for your blog or website? That’s a question that pops up from time to time. I’ve got to say that I don’t give it a whole lot of thought. That’s primarily because I stick to conservative fonts - ones that have been used over and over again - and don’t really experiment much. But if you’re the experimenting kind, be careful. It could be dangerous to experiment too much with fonts.
I’m not just being melodramatic. Some fonts just plain turn people off. They’ll leave your blog or website and not do business with you. It will be business lost forever. They may never come back. That’s a pretty costly mistake so you want to be sure to use the right font.
Geo-Targeting: How You Can Design Your Local Business WebsiteWriting by Nick Stamoulis on Friday, 21 of September , 2007 at 8:19 am
If you are a local business then you will need to geo-target your search engine optimization efforts. Do you know how to do that?
It’s not hard to build a geo-targeted website. All you really need to do is make sure that your search engine listing ranks highly for your important keywords plus your local area. It may be easier for you to do that if you live in a large metropolitan area, but it isn’t impossible if your business is in a rural area either.
