The "most web-savvy" candidate, John Edwards brings his expertise into the Presidential race.

Bill Clinton and Al Gore were web-savvy. Under their stewardship, the United States was the leader in Internet Technology. George W. Bush, however, is not web-savvy, and I.T. in the U.S. has slipped under his lack of stewardship. And a correction is needed.
We need to elect someone who understands the present and future technology, not simply drag outmoded paradigms into this new century and millennium. John Edwards may well be that man.
So far he seems the closest.

We can no longer afford a nonblogospheric as a leader. Might as well get one who doesn't read...again.

John and Elizabeth Edwards...as well as their children, are keen on the use of knowledge technology, and will thus be better at raising the skill of the citizenry, who need to learn how to fish the net and pay it forward.

Charlotte Internet is Coming

Charlotte Internet Blog

Charlotte Internet is coming...back! What started as the first Internet community in Charlotte, North Carolina, headed by Dave Beckwith back in 1995, will now become Charlotte's low-cost, high-value internet provider...thanks to the help of the legend himself, Scott Huffman -- longtime captain of Webkorner Internet Services. Webkorner will continue to offer internet services, but will focus more on broadband and business applications.

But Charlotte Internet does not stop at the internet's edge. There are many facets to the net, and many different professionals and artists who make it run well and beautifully. If we can't do it for you ourselves, we can direct you to those who can...as part of our new referral service.

If you are in the Charlotte area, and would like to try out our new service, or get involved in our referral program, drop us a line, and we'll set up an appointment.

In addition to Internet and referral services, we also offer blogging and marketing services. You can have your business, product or service featured on one of our network of blogs such as this one (Trade Street Journal) or one of our other fine blogs...including Carolina Art Blog, Wanderblogger, The Charlotte News, Idea Consultants, Carolina Blog Consultants, Planet Bizblog, and others.

Other exciting developments include VoIP (Internet Phone), IPTV, Podcasting, and much more still coming down the pike.

Yahoo Adds Blogs to Its News Section

Yahoo! News

(via Ed Cone)


SAN FRANCISCO - Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO - news)'s online news search tool on Monday added Internet journal entries as a supplement to professional media offerings — an experiment that figures to test the public's appetite for information from alternative sources.

Under Yahoo's new approach, a keyword search for online news will include a list of relevant Web logs, or "blogs," displayed in a box to the right of the results collected from mainstream journalism.

Why Search Engine Optimization Matters to Small Business

Search engine marketing (SEM) is a large area that we won’t try to cover all of in this article. SEM is the implementation of a variety of search engine processes and services to help market your business via a search engine. Today, however, we are focusing on Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Optimizing your web site to perform well on search engines can be a critical part of your online success. Search engines play a large role in how people navigate the Internet, so if someone is looking for your services or products online, sooner or later they will use a search engine. Your relevance to these search results can significantly impact the ability of search engines to deliver a user to your site. Studies have shown that those sites that show up on the first page of search results for a keyword receive six times more traffic than they did prior to their appearance.

The first thing I ask a client when we begin discussing SEO is “where does your web site get its traffic?” Most successful small business web sites glean only a small percentage of their overall traffic from search engines, if any at all. They have gotten their traffic from either their current client base or their promotions on their vehicles or other traditional advertising methods. My objective at this point is to see if an SEO plan would be good for them.

The next step is to review actual Internet search usage. The tool we use most frequently for this is the Keyword Selector Tool from Yahoo! Search Marketing. Using this tool, we can look at past activity on the Yahoo search engine. A rule of thumb is that Yahoo represents about 25% of all search engine traffic, so when you see the number of searches associated with a term, multiply by 4 to get a general idea of Internet search demand.

Oftentimes, a keyword is typed in and the telling response of “No suggestions for this keyword” is returned. You would not believe the keywords that some business owners believe are used to find them on the web. This exercise teaches us very quickly how to jump into the seat of the search engine user. Afterwards, we fairly quickly begin to identify keywords that do apply to the business that are also experiencing at least some demand based on the Keyword Selector Tool.

Now we have some direction.

The next step is to take this list of 20 or so keywords and determine with which the best opportunities exist to optimize your site. We do this several ways. One, we simply do a search on those terms and visually see how relevant the results are and what the pay-per-click activity against that keyword is. I typically just use Google and Yahoo for such research. This method is fairly ambiguous and depends a lot on experience.

Secondly, we run what is called a KEI analysis. This fancy acronym stands for a formula that looks at the demand for a particular keyword and then the supply of pages out on the Internet that are relevant to that keyword. In my opinion, opportunity exists for my client with any keyword with a KEI of 10 or higher.

Finally, we evaluate how best to deploy those keywords over your site. Should we optimize just the first page? Or should we look at creating sub-pages as well?

Once we have narrowed the list and decided on which pages to optimize, we go through the process of making your site relevant for the keyword selected. In my company, we use an optimization tool that considers the current search algorithms from Yahoo and Google (as best as they can be determined through observation) and lets us know what changes we need to make to the particular page in order for it to achieve the ideal level of relevance. Once these changes are completed, we then move on to the next page and perform the same operation until your site is relevant to the keyword selections from the previous process.

Optimizing for keyword relevancy, however, is just one battle in the effort of search engine marketing. In my next article, we will take a look at the importance of link popularity and the role it plays in placing your site above the crowd when you are all equally relevant.

Darryl Parker is the founder and President of Internet marketing and Charlotte web site design firm Parker Web Developers. This series on web marketing is intended to present useful tips for business owners and decision makers. The series precedes an upcoming book compiling these topics. Your feedback is greatly appreciated.

The Power of Affiliate Sales

On the Internet, the classic referral system has morphed into a highly automated and accountable affiliate sales program. Utilizing an affiliate program allows you to empower other people to sell or market for you in exchange for payment per lead and payment per sale, as either a flat rate or percentage of the sale. An affiliate program offers an extremely measurable return on your investment because you only pay when a sale or lead is generated.

There are two ways to approach an affiliate program. The first is to purchase your own affiliate software and establish your own distribution network through the people and web site owners with whom you have relationships. This is the very least expensive route as well, with software typically priced at $100 or more. You determine the price per lead or per sale and there are no additional fees.

The second route, which we tend to endorse more frequently, is the inclusion of your promotions in an established affiliate system. These systems typically cost a bit more to set up, but give your web site exposure to hundreds of thousands of potential affiliates and their clients. After setup, you determine the price per lead or per sale and the affiliate system provider typically charges a percentage of that price as their fee. Typically the fees associated with the system are in direct proportion to the number and quality of affiliates that can be brought to bear upon your campaign.

Once you are an established merchant within an affiliate system, you must then gain affiliates. Affiliate web site can range from link farms – sites with hundreds of links back to merchants and their products – to well-established and high volume specialty sites. My opinion is that no link is a bad link. I tend to apply very few filters, if any, to those willing to send traffic and potential sales my way.

After commission rates, the next item that attracts affiliates are the creative graphics and promotions that your company offers. Empowering your affiliates goes beyond just establishing yourself as a merchant. Once embarking on an affiliate program, time each month should be budgeted for evaluating the performance of your ads, creation and delivery of new ad campaigns, gauging hits versus sales (conversions) and interacting with your affiliate base. The more you do to help your affiliates succeed, the more successful you will be.

A final note is that affiliate programs are not overnight success systems. You are building a network of affiliates that requires time and maintenance to be successful. This network, over time, could be enormous and truly make the difference in the success or failure of an ecommerce site, but time must be allowed for that monitored growth.

The company we recommend most for affiliate sales is ShareASale.com. Based out of Chicago, ShareASale.com has a very reasonable entry price, provides an array of tools for tracking and interacting with your affiliates and, most importantly, has over 100,000 affiliates available. Check them out at www.shareasale.com

Darryl Parker is the founder and President of Internet marketing and Charlotte web site design firm Parker Web Developers. This series on web marketing is intended to present useful tips for business owners and decision makers. The series precedes an upcoming book compiling these topics. Your feedback is greatly appreciated.

Local Internet Marketing Made Easy

Coming soon to your neighborhood, CityAdNet is opening its doors in October 2005. Specializing in local Internet marketing, their services bring together web sites and advertisers to create win-win relationships. Sometimes, less is more. Go to the site and check out the details. Launching soon!

Utilizing Online Press Releases

The value of doing a press release is the exposure of your newsworthy items to a large crowd that would otherwise not know about your efforts. The phones are not going to ring off the hook, but as our analysis below show, there are benefits.

The secondary value is the improvement you gain in composing your thoughts about your company. Writing about your company is important. Blogging is one thing, but when you issue a press release, you are literally saying "PUBLISH THIS" and it has caused me to be more aware of my message.

The Trial Balloon

Using my release Trends, Taste & Travel Goes Podcasting as an example, let's explore the experience of these two different services and the overall advantage of doing a press release.

PRWeb - www.prweb.com - tracks the performance of your release via "views". I submitted my release on 9/14/05. I spoke with someone at PRWeb and the term "view" was defined as the combination of page views from the web site, views from the various RSS feeds, and views from their network of emails. They also track the "Printer Friendly Version" and "Email this story to a colleague" buttons on the release. PRWeb offers an upgrade for a minimum contribution of $10 and on up. I was pleased with the $30 level because my release showed up in Yahoo! News and Google News within a few hours of the release time.

PR.com - www.pr.com - free business registration and submission of press releases. I submitted my release on 9/17/05. However, I found their site to be a bit cumbersome and have a long laundry list of items they wanted completed. The benefit is that apparently they have many subscribers. I was able to find my release through them coming up in search engines with a few days - and not just on their site.

The Results

As of this writing, 9/24/05, I am seeing decent results in the search engines. When I type in the phrase "Travel Goes Podcasting" in quotes (necessary because of the ampersand special character), I received 583 results in Google, 6 results in Yahoo, 133 results in MSN, and 12 results in Altavista.

PRWeb.com reports the press release was viewed 115,539 times. 550 of those views were by what they estimate as "Pickups" which tracks media outlet views. I would guess they do this by email address or known IP addresses. The release had 7 prints and 1 forwarded email (which was me).

I could not find statistical data on PR.com.

My business site typically gets about 25 hits a day (average over the last few months). This went up to mid-40s right away and did go into the 50s per day (I put out another release on this past Monday). Both sites (www.cyemerus.com and www.parkerwebdevelopers.com) both experienced a temporary surge in link popularity as the release went out. As of this writing, the link popularity has returned to previous levels on Cy's site. Also, my hit count on my business site has returned to the mid-20s.

We did see a 10% gain in podcasting views and subscriptions, which at the end of the day is a payoff. Neither of us got a call from a potential customer or a writer, but we were both able to use the press release in three different sales calls (1 for Cy, 2 for me). I see this as another payoff. Finally, I was encouraged enough with the perceived value of the release to my sales team, that I issued another. The feedback I am getting is that it is good to have these to refer to as almost historical data. There is also some level of legitimacy perceived by potential clients when your article is showing up on Yahoo! News and such outlets.

Darryl Parker is the founder and President of Internet marketing and Charlotte web site design firm Parker Web Developers. This series on web marketing is intended to present useful tips for business owners and decision makers. The series precedes an upcoming book compiling these topics. Your feedback is greatly appreciated.

How to Select and Manage a Business Domain Name

Selecting and managing a domain name properly can save you a lot of frustration in the future. Here is some guidance I offer my friends and clients when they ask me about this most important task:

1. Does the domain end in .com? The .com top level domain (TLD) is by far the most popular and most recognized TLD. The most successful and most memorable web domain names will end in .com.


2. Does the domain reflect your business correctly? The company name is the best route here. When either that is not available or if you are trying to promote a particular campaign, keep in mind that someone should be able to look at or hear your domain name and understand what it is that you do.


3. How long is the domain name? Not that size always matters, but the shorter the better in this situation. My domain, www.parkerwebdevelopers.com, is a bit to bite off, but I selected because it is my company name and there is no question as to what I do.


4. Is your domain easily misspelled? Some examples are fortimes.com (could be fourtimes.com or 4times.com) or an uncommon name or word that may be hard to spell. Other examples are intentional misspellings of words so that you are able to find a .com address that is available (i.e. smallbiz.com or webkorner.com). If you are concerned about this, tell a few people the domain name and have them write it out for you. This will give you a quick idea of the effectiveness of the domain.


5. Multiple domains for a single company are not a bad idea IF you are planning only on using them to track your traditional advertising efforts. However, I do NOT recommend using multiple domains for your online promotion effort. An important factor in your Internet presence is link popularity and this effort should not be diluted by more than one domain to promote. If you go the multiple domain route, select the primary domain that will be used online with search engines and other promotions and stick with it.


6. Buying a domain. Purchasing domains is a fairly straightforward process. I recommend www.godaddy.com for price and ease of use and ongoing management. For less than $10 a year, you can have your own domain name reserved. By managing this process yourself, you can save a lot time in the future (especially if you have multiple domains).


7. It is also my recommendation that you set up your domain to automatically renew. There is nothing like being successful a year later and all of a sudden your domain expires and your site drops. I’ve seen it happen, it isn’t pretty and, more times than not, it seems to happen just when the site is needed most.

Darryl Parker is the founder and President of Internet marketing and Charlotte web site design firm Parker Web Developers. This series on web marketing is intended to present useful tips for business owners and decision makers. The series precedes an upcoming book compiling these topics. Your feedback is greatly appreciated.

Podcasts to internet radio.

Blog Business World

"It's time for some dream time and idea brainstorming. Let's examine the situation, involving the use of podcasts, as a basis for internet radio content..."

Carnival of the Vanities at Sophistpundit

Blog Business World

"The 145th edition of the longest running internet blog carnival, the well known Carnival of the Vanities, is up at at Adam Gurri's political and philosophical blog known as Sophistpundit.

Carnival of the Vanities is the original collection of blog postings, assembling some of the best and wide ranging bloggers on the internet.

This week's Carnival of the Vanities entries include politics, literature, science, medicine, technology, business, culture, comedy, and sports."


We got to meet "Silflay Hraka", the creator of the Carnival of Vanities, and even share a few beers with him after the Triangle Blogger Conference in Chapel Hill, North Carolina (USA) ((Earth)). A swell gentleman with good ideas.

Going on Now!

Microsoft & Lockergnome Present Gnomedex 5.0
Seattle, Wa.

What is Gnomedex...
Business Models Brought to Life
The People Aggregator
A tap into the Conversation Economy
Movers, Shakers, & Deal Makers
Thought Leaders, Industry Influencers, Entrepreneurs
Continuous online conversation and PR
The most affordable conference of its kind
Important for new, existing company strategies
Essential for the success of Internet businesses

How To Rank Well in Google ?

"...ensure that a site grows as organically as possible. "

"Much of this information is a goldmine for web developers and internet marketers."

Wikis, Weblogs and RSS: What Does the New Internet Mean for Business?

Knowledge@Wharton


FROM THE WEBSITE:
The Internet may be entering a new phase that will decentralize control inside companies, enable employees to collaborate more easily, and drive efficiency. But corporations that want to use the web strategically to build corporate value will not just need to make radical cultural changes, they may also need to master a new vocabulary with terms such as Wikis (software that allows anyone to update and edit web pages instantly and democratically); Weblogs (online journals more commonly known as blogs); and RSS (really simple syndication) feeds, which distribute content from the Internet.

Arcane as these terms may sound to anyone but the initiated, the technology behind them is hardly fancy. Wikis, blogs and RSS feeds are relatively simple tools that will have a huge impact on the way people -- and companies -- communicate and do business. So how is the Internet changing? How can companies seek to understand the technological effects of these changes? And what cultural adaptations should companies make to capture value from these new tools?

Read and learn about your future.

The New Internet

Blog Business Summit

The new internet
16 Jun 05 by DL Byron
The Knowledge@Wharton site explains the new internet in a Q/A with Kevin Werbach and Janice Fraser. The new internet includes lots of terminology and excitement from developers, users and can totally confuse a business person. As I learned in Colorado, all of these technologies, including blogging, don’t extend much farther than the blogosphere. I expect that to change soon enough and Wharton’s article is a good read for those that are lost. Blogging apps are probably the best example. (I’ll exclude tag clouds, amateurization, and folksonomies for another day.) I’ve seen audience members just blank out on what blogging is until you show them the application and how easy it is to use.

Links available on the site.

Is RSS advertising -- placing ads in 3rd party RSS feeds -- the next hot media buy?

MarketingSherpa.com : Practical News & Case Studies on Internet Advertising, Marketing & PR

...now that Google's started putting AdSense ads into RSS feeds, and major news sites such as USAToday.com and NYTimes.com are seeing double-digit monthly leaps in RSS-usership, we bet reach won't be a problem by 2006.

Interested? Check out our exclusive behind-the-scenes look at how Citrix's GoToMeeting just tested RSS and Podcasting ads:

The Personal Blogs of Internet Marketers

from My Internet Marketing And Promotion Blog

Mark compiles an impressive list for those of us who want to know.

Small Business Marketing Blog Channel Experts

John Jantsch :: Duct Tape Marketing
featuring 9 of the best and brightest small business marketing minds blogging on specific small business marketing topics.

Zane Safrit - Business Life
Georgia Patrick - Customers Count
Dan Janal - PR Leads
Troy White - Word Wealth
Martin Jelsema - Buzzworthy Branding
Jill Konrath - Selling To Big Companies
Don The Idea Guy - The Idea Department
Mark Beck - Internet Marketing Unleashed
John Jantsch - Duct Tape Marketing

MarketingSherpa's 10 Best Blogs for 2005

MarketingSherpa.com : Practical News & Case Studies on Internet Advertising, Marketing & PR

OK. So we're not in there. Tomorrow is another day...

Umbria Communications - Sifting Plankton from the Oceans of the Internets

Providers of Deep Insight

From their website:

Umbria Communications collects the unsolicited opinions and perceptions of the online community (blogs, message boards, chat, etc.) and turns it into actionable market research about companies, products, people and topics of interest.

Using proprietary natural language processing and machine learning technologies, Umbria dissects the who, what and why of online opinion to provide deep insight into the buzz about you, your products and your competition.

10 Commandments for The Era of Participatory Public Relations

Micro Persuasion

Here are Steve's 10 Commandments:
1) Thou shall listen
2) Remember that all creatures great and small are holy
3) Honor thy customer
4) Thou shall not be fake
5) Covet thy customers
6) Thou shall be open and engaging
7) Thou shall embrace blogging
8) Thou shall banish corporate speak
9) Thou shall tell the truth
10) Thou shall thinketh in 360 degrees

To read more about them, point your internets to this blogpost.