We are moving!

Hello again

The removalists are here! I mentioned some time back in my other blog on careers and innovation that I was planning on moving my blogs to a single new blog at http://www.OwenMcNamara.com and to use WordPress instead of Blogger - see this article for the reasons why. Well that day has at last come. So from now on my blog posts will be on the new domain which you can get to by clicking here.

Why use my name as the URL? Well, many experts recommend that if you work a lot on the internet, which I do, that you should protect your own name by registering it as a domain (so if you haven't already done that I suggest you do - it costs very little per year and you don't need to do anything with it but at least it will be yours.). I tried to come up with a new interesting name for my blog, and couldn't. My previous blogs were about quite different topics and my new blog will also cover a range of topics that interest me so for now I will use my own name as the blog name. It is the best name I could think of at the moment.

My aim in the new blog is that my posts and newsletter are full of content, not ads, and so you will notice most of my articles in the new blog are longer than the average blog posts you have seen. Yes, there are some ads in my posts but only a few select ones. My aim is to keep them to a bare minimum.

Sometimes I write a blog post or article once a day, and sometimes none for a week or two. It depends on what other projects I have on. I develop and maintain my own commercial websites in a number of different market segments, and I work as a Consultant in Technology Project Management, Software Management and Internet Business Management and Marketing. For your information, my main consulting business website is http://www.KnowledgeStream.com.au which I will completely update sometime in the not too distant future but it gives you a guide.

In addition to my blog posts I do sometimes put together more comprehensive newsletters that people will enjoy and find useful. These will be in the form of a PDF newsletter that I place on my new blog site and then email you a link so you can download at your leisure. My new blog has a simple free newsletter subscription form where you can enter your email address and automatically be sent a short email with a link back to my blog whenever the site is updated or there is a newsletter. That saves everyone time.

I hope you find the new blog and newsletters interesting, informative and valuable to you. Don't hesitate to contact me with any comments, questions or suggestions at my new blog.

Until next time

Owen McNamara

http://www.OwenMcNamara.com/

Latest Alexa Rank and Time to Change Domain Names

Lately I have been working more and more on our e-commerce site which has left me less time to do some blogs, which is a pity because I enjoy blogging. I will get back to it soon with some more results and lessons from what I have been doing. As for that Alexa rank I mentioned in the last few posts - well it continues to grow as our traffic grows. Today it is under 485,000 and continuing to rise up the rankings. The e-commerce site (not this blog) now has around 2000 people per month visiting it and that is growing rapidly as well. It is going to be very interesting to see just how high the site goes before it settles down. I also continue to expand the site and its content and range of offers almost every day so it has a way to go yet.

On a completely different topic, the problem of propagation time for a new domain name cropped up for me this week, not a big problem, but definitely an annoyance. On Tuesday morning at 4:30am in fact, I finished off a small site for a friend of a friend in the UK. Yes, I am in Australia, and my host is in the US, and she is in the UK. Isn't it great to live in an internet enabled World? The site was fun to do and we ended up with a great result using a mix of text, and video for a particular sector of the health market. But what was interesting was the time it took for the new domain name to ripple throughout the internet DNS systems. I had read that it can sometimes take 2-3 days before a new domain name is active but previously it has only taken a day.

I registered the domain at my US Host company, and under a day later the domain worked for me. But the person who needed the site in London urgently couldn't see it until over a day after I could, over 2 days after registration. It was interesting how the domain name servers in my network had been updated a full day before hers. I am not sure why, but I have read enough to know it happens. In this case I could see the domain here in Australia, another person in Ireland could see it, but not on the particular network in London. Normally that wouldn't matter too much but this time we were in a hurray, with very short notice to get the site up and running. That is the way it goes. It is up, and running and everyone is happy but I am still curious about why it takes so long for the DNS systems to update.

If you are actually transferring an existing domain from one site, host, or address to another then there are ways that you can change the TCP TTL values a few days prior to the switch so that your actual domain name change takes as little time as possible. To read more on this consult the DNS article in Wikipedia. But you still have to make those changes a few days before.

Until next time


Owen

Alexa rank breakthrough

Just a quick update to my last post, today our e-commerce or ecommerce (which do you prefer?) shopping site that we operate as a part-time activity has just hit the top 1 Million in Alexa! We have done that on our own without the use of any SEO companies. In the future when we are more profitable I may well engage a specialist company to assist, and there are some good ones out there, but for now am content to work away at the Search Engine Optimization of our business sites myself.

I am very pleased with the results and have lots of plans for the site. Its Alexa rank is now 994,840 and climbing quite dramatically. But it is important not to get carried away with one ranking or another, as happy as I am about making it to the top One Million already what does it really mean?

What is even more important is how it ranks in terms of the keywords we are targetting - can it be found by our customers when they are looking to buy something? Is it linked to by many other sites? Do people buy from it or just browse and leave? How long do people stay on the site or do they just "bounce off"? Do customers come back? Does our site provide some real value to customers? Do the customers recognise that value? Can it be easily found in organic searches? Does it achieve our business goals such as making a profit? Does it generate leads for backend sales and profits? And much much more.

A much longer post is brewing on this topic but meanwhile here are a few great articles I came across recently on the topics of Search Engine Optimisation, Keyword rankings and similar topics. Hope you find them useful.

• http://www.alexa.com/help
• http://blog.alexa.com/2009/04/why-does-my-alexa-rank-jump-around-the.html
• http://www.google.com/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf
• http://www.submitplus.com/trafficpro.htm
• http://www.orangesoda.com/search-engine-optimization-blog
• http://www.seoquake.com/articles/en/
• http://www.orangesoda.com/pay-per-click-blog/what-not-to-do-on-your-ppc-campaign/
• http://blog.orangesoda.com/no-secret-sauce-to-ppc

Until next time

Owen

Latest Alexa Rankings of our Sites

Many posts ago I mentioned the Alexa rankings of this blog
http://the-small-internet-business-blog.blogspot.com/2009/02/measuring-search-rank-of-this-blog.html

and the Top One 500 to One Million sites in the World.
http://the-small-internet-business-blog.blogspot.com/2009/02/top-500-sites-on-web.html

So what has happened to the search rankings of this blog, and several other sites we run since then?

Where were we?
Back in mid February this blog, my career blog: http://careerblog.owenmcnamara.com/ and our new and very rough at the time company website: http://www.knowledgestream.com.au/ were all unranked. That is if you went into Alexa (http://www.alexa.com/) there was insufficient data for any of our new sites and so they had no ranking.

Now where are we now?
Today this blog ranks at 3,400,745
(http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/the-small-internet-business-blog.blogspot.com)

The Career Blog ranks at 2,503,229
(http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/next-career-move.blogspot.com)

Our company website, definitely better than it was, ranks at 2,093,571 (http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/www.knowledgestream.com.au)

My new, as yet empty, WordPress (or Joomla and Wordpress - still thinking on that) blog ranks at 3,220,059 (http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/owenmcnamara.com)

And our new e-commerce web site, launched just one month ago already ranks at: 1,456, 787

How we did that, in such a short time, is a long story and I will put together a blog sometime. I wonder where all those sites and more will be in 3, 6, 9 months from now? I expect they will slowly grow and then plateau, but I am not sure what the level of that is as yet.

To put those numbers above in perspective go to the SiteInfo section of Alexa (http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo) and try out a few company sites you know to see where they are. Some will be very high and some much lower than you expect.

What does it all mean?
Does the Alexa ranking of your site matter? What is the relationship, if any, with the organic search results for your site? Should you care?

Well, like most things, it depends. I will continue this very interesting topic in my next blog later in the week.

Until then, below is a presentation I came across that has some useful information.

Owen

Top 10 SEO Public Relations Tips: TopRank

View more presentations from Lee Odden.

Innovative Internet Video

Recently I came across another really innovative educational video that has nothing to do with internet business but everything to do with education, information exchange and presentation and just what can be done with imagination and the right tools.

The following extract explains the video: "Tomas Nilsson, a graphic design student from Linköping University, tells the story of Little Red Riding Hood with animated infographics. The video (below) was inspired by Röyksopp's Remind Me and has that ever so familiar European electronica music moving things along. Covering topics from grandma's nutritional value to the aerodynamics of the traveling bus, the video is very tongue in cheek and totally worth the three minutes of your life."

Have a look, you need sound on as well and just think what can be done with that sort of video. Then compare with the great Common Craft videos I mentioned in the previous blog. Both styles are interesting, innovative, imaginative and engaging. I hope you like this.


Slagsmålsklubben - Sponsored by destiny from Tomas Nilsson on Vimeo.

To read more go their site: Flowing Data Website"


Enjoy

Owen

Educational Videos - How does the Internet Work

Sometimes I come across things that are just so good I have to share it. Have you heard of the company: "Common Craft". They are a small company that develop wonderful training videos that you can watch at home for free, but if you need to use them for business of course there is a fee.

Here are a couple of their videos for your pleasure - simple, clear, effective and very creative.

How does the Internet Work?



How to improve the way you search on the Internet



Aren't they great?

Here is a link to their website: Common Craft Website

Owen

Email Marketing

Recently I have been reviewing email marketing tools, often called autoresponders for my own business. For those that don't know the term autoresponder is confusing to many: there are the simple autoresponders in your email system and email marketing autoresponders. Most email accounts will enable you to set up a simple autoresponder that for example replies to any received email when you are away on holidays, but no more than that.

For internet marketing and ecommerce much more sophisticated email marketing tools are needed and readily available - at a very reasonable price. These tools enable you to for example, set up entire sequences of emails to be sent out at set times to your email lists, to collect users email addresses in an opt-in form and to enable people to unsubscribe from your lists - all automatically! These tools will also comply with government standards for anti-spam. They also enable you to track your email newsletters to find out if users/customers/members are reading them or not.

In the next few posts I will discuss several of the main systems available and today I will start with one called Get Response.

Here is what you get with it:

- Personalization of emails
- Unlimited follow-ups
- Complete import and export features
- Send a broadcast email to your entire list all in one shot
- Attach files to any or all of your autoresponses
- Track your leads and responses
- Your choice of 19 different domains names to send from
- Send HTML-enhanced messages
- Your own "confirmation" screen
- Selective broadcasting
- Block unwanted email addresses
- Bounce-back management
- Full activity reports via email
- Free, unlimited technical support
- and more!

To see the full feature list with demos click here or on the icon below.

And for those in the affiliate marketing business you will be surprised that GetResponse allows you to purchase their products for yourself on your own affiliate link and still be rewarded for it! Most companies do not allow that at all. I believe GetResponse is being very smart with that approach and they have a great product. So check it out. I did, and bought it for my own business and am using it every day.




I will discuss some other well known email marketing tools in later posts.

Owen