Tech Blog Pagerank is Back »

I happened to notice that at some point over the past few days, our pagerank was restored to the tech blog. That is good news, I guess. My main concern w/ our “offending” blog was the potential risk of de-listing (de-indexing). That would be a big problem, of course.

Anyway, yay for us, although before we were penalized for selling advertising, we had a pagerank 5, so we slipped a bit – meh.

Cool Tech »

File this in the “Wow, the World is a Small Place” category: I ran across this site the other day. It lists public Internet camera feeds from around the world and I thought it was pretty cool (these are only family-friendly camera feeds, so any pervs out there are going to have to get their fix elsewhere ).

Also cool, and my personal favorite, is the visual map showing the sun’s path across the planet. I think this is really amazing.  It shows you who is in the dark right now. The Opentopia site is really great and there are many more cool things on the site so take a few minutes and poke around.

Things I Learned About Myself This Year »

I could successfully defend myself against a fearless swarm of not more than 25 five year old children.

I feel cheap because my dead body is not even worth $4,000. But my wife holds my life insurance policy that says otherwise .

The amount of electricity produced by my body could light up 3 light bulbs, 71 iPods or 1 Xbox 360. But to keep the fridge running would take 4 of me. I don’t think the world could handle 4 Anthony’s.

I have a slightly better than 50/50 chance of surviving a Zombie outbreak. I don’t think I like those odds.

Search Engines Best for Local Search »

When you are looking for a local business, do you reach for the phone book or do you head to your favorite Search Engine? That is one of the topics researched by WebVisible and Neilson and blogged about by Search Engine Land.

The roughly 2,000 respondents were chosen at random and asked several questions related to local search and online advertising. The results were quite surprising to me. For example, Search Engines are the number one source for information on local businesses:

• 74 percent used Search Engines to find information on local businesses
• 65 percent used the print version of the Yellow Pages
• 50 percent used the Internet version of the Yellow Pages
• 44 percent used Newspapers
• 33 percent used print White Pages
• 29 percent used Television
• 18 percent used Internet review web sites

I am not sure about the age demographic of the people polled. I think the older generations probably tend to stick with the traditional methods of getting business information – primarily phone books and newspaper, but I don’t know too many young people who even look at the phone book, let alone use it to find business information if a Search Engine is available. I personally only use the phone book when 1) the Internet is not handy OR 2) when I know the business I am looking for is not going to show up on the Internet because they don’t have a web site, to which I say, “Get a web site – its almost 2008!”.

Here are some other interesting percentages:

• Today, 78 percent use the Internet more to find local businesses than they did 2 years ago.
• 6 percent use the phone book more than they did 2 years ago to find local businesses.
• 52 percent use the phone book less than they did 2 years ago.

What this information should help to reinforce is that whether you are a small business or a large corporation, you really need to have a web site AND your web site must be accessible to your potential customers, which means it must rank well in the Search Engines because that is what the majority of them are using.

This does not mean that you should completely forget about listing your business in the phone book (although we are not listed in the phone book and we have more work than we can handle) or quit advertising in the local newspaper, although we don’t do that either because newspapers, tv and radio can’t seem to tell us how many people heard or saw our ad and I don’t like gambling with my limited advertising budget. If I spend a grand on Internet advertising, I can tell how many times my ads were displayed, how many times people visited our web site through one of the ads, where the visitor is from, how long they stayed on our site, what pages they visited and lots more. Try that with the newspaper, radio or tv.

Internet Advertising Expected to Double »

According to a report released by Internet Marketing research firm eMarketer, Internet advertising spending by US advertisers is expected to double by the year 2011. This is bad news for traditional advertising methods such as newspapers, television and magazines.

Internet advertising includes methods such as:

• Display ads (banner ads seen on web sites)
• Paid Search ads (also known as Pay-Per-Click or PPC and includes Google AdSense)
• Rich Media (Online video advertising)
• E-mail advertising (Ads embedded in e-mail)

One of the main benefits Internet advertising has over traditional advertising is the ability to track the advertising campaign results in ways that you simply cannot do with ads run in newspapers, magazines and on television. An ad placed in traditional print advertising provides no guarantee that even a single person will see your ad. The best “guarantee” that a newspaper or magazine can give is when they tell you the size of their circulation and all that really means is that they will print your ad that many times, not that your ad will be seen that many times.

Ditto for television advertising, especially with Ti-Vo, DVR and other similar methods available for skipping commercials.

This type of thinking is probably a big reason why traditional marketing budgets are being trimmed by US companies.

In 2006, Internet advertising accounted for about $17 billion of the more than $280 billion spend on all advertising, which included newspapers, television and magazines. That is a 6% share of the market. In 2007, that dollar amount increased to $21.4 billion of the $287 billion total or a 7.4% share. As the accompanying chart shows, eMarketer predicts that the trend will continue to increase, doubling by 2011.