New Site Media Group » Charlottesville Website Design

Three simple rules for effective blog posting

Steinar — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 18:21:13 +0000

I’ve been working on a number of website design and SEO projects in Charlottesville and the biggest hurdle for most clients is the fear of blogging. In this post I will share a simple three step process for creating an effective blog post to help make your blogging experience more enjoyable, effective and rewarding for both you and your readers.

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Effective Blog Posting
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First, tell the reader what you are going to discuss. This accomplishes two things: one, it keeps you focused; and, two, it helps your reader gauge relevance right away. (hint: search engines like this too for indexing)
Next, explain why the post is relevant or important. You don’t want to just ramble on without any purpose. Helping your reader understand why something is important to them is a terrific gift.
Finally, close with a call to action. Is there something specific you would like the reader to do with this information now? Call you? Leave a comment? Share with others? This will really depend on your post, but a call to action is critical if you intend on creating dialog or moving the discussion in a new direction.

And remember, blog posts don’t need to be long & professionally written. The more you relax and let the ideas flow, the more comfortable you’ll get and the better your writing will become.

What others rules or guidelines do you apply to blogging? What’s your approach? Follow me on Twitter and let me know!

TinyURL.com – shorten that long URL into a Tiny URL

Steinar — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 17:26:34 +0000

Setting and using Tiny URL’s is easy and very useful. They’ve become increasingly popular if not necessary to communicate on Twitter, for example, since the site only allows comments up to 140 characters.

TinyURL.com – shorten that long URL into a Tiny URL.

The idea is that instead of sharing a url that may be long and complicated to follow, TinyURL translate that long URL into something much shorter, easier to remember, and in some cases more likely to be clicked by your readers.

For example, I just built a Facebook page for New Site Media Group. Rather than using the direct link of

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Charlottesville-VA/New-Site-Media-Group/69444992655

… I chose to create a TinyURL which is much simpler:

twww.tinyurl.com/nsmgfb

Visit tinyurl.com to get started today!

Facebook | New Site Media Group

Steinar — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 17:19:06 +0000

The New Site Media Group Facebook page is now live and updated using the latest release of Facebook Pages. We’re adding new content and discussions everyday so check it out and become a fan if you’re interested.

Facebook | New Site Media Group.

Why Facebook Pages? Because Facebook is growing by 170,000 users every month and widely know as one of the leading social media sites for individuals and business to connect. Of course, we use a variety of social media sites to communicate with our market and Facebook is a must for us.

If you need help setting up a Facebook page of your own, please let me know and I’ll help guide you through the steps. There are some nuances that are not immediately apparent so it’s nice to learn from someone who has gone through this before.

2009 Internet Marketing Trend #9 – Behavioral Analytics

Steinar — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 21:56:24 +0000

Behavioral analytics is understanding how customers interact with your company online and more importantly why. Analytics continue to improve, Google Analytics more notably as well as Woopra, which both offer a complete, robust view into visitor behavior. The trick is integrating this with other data sources, such as social networks to understand what drove them to your site in the first place, and thus determined their path once they found your site.

Solutions to capture this level of behavioral analytics are still in the future, but the core systems are available to get a very strong understanding as to how customers interact with your site. Successful website managers leverage the important data they gather from website analytics and adjust content, format, and messaging accordingly. Much like your annual strategic plan, a website requires regular updates to response to changing customer behavior.

To learn more about behavioral analytics and how your company can learn more about your customers online, please call me @ 434-806-3272.

2009 Internet Marketing Trend #7 – Mobile Marketing

Steinar — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 21:38:12 +0000

The #1 mobile phone in the world is the iPhone and with over 10,000 applications and 1 million application downloads, it has set the bar for mobile marketing. Mobile marketing is leveraging mobile phone technology to communicate with your customers or prospects. This could include mobile advertising, a mobile version of your website, or more interactive communication such as via Facebook, Twitter, RSS feed, or blogging. And yes, your can even share videos on most of these newer devices.

The potential here is staggering as mobile phone usage rates continue to increase exponentially. More and more, people rely on their mobile devices for information, not just making calls and checking the time. Spend 5 minutes on a college campus or airport lobby and you’ll soon appreciate the explosive growth of mobile communication and the postential for mobile marketing.

To be a market leader, you must embrace mobile marketing. It sounds strange, even fictional, but trust me, this will be the norm for the next generation and you must get your foot in the door now to set the bar within your industry.

Call me @ 434-806-3272 if you like to learn more about Mobile Marketing and how your company can leverage this great opportunity.

Blogging from my iPhone

Steinar — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 17:29:57 +0000

Well, it was inevitable – I finally got an iPhone and I absolutely love it. Posting from anywhere? Who wouldn’t love that? More to come as I learn how to make the most of this great new way to communicate with my readers.

Apple’s iMovie Makes Internet Video Easier in 2009

Steinar — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 20:36:06 +0000

Personally, I love iMovie and am excited at the prospect of some improvements this year including better integration with video hosting sites, such as Youtube. Clearly, internet video is getting much easier to publish – great news for everyone.

Apple will offer a significant update to iMovie at next week’s Macworld. It will largely focus on Internet video in the Cloud for the YouTube generation.

I’ve heard that iMovie will largely (if not entirely) be a Web Application and Apple would offer its users to “upload your movies to us and edit them there.”

There are currently a few online applications that let you do video editing currently. Google’s Youtube is also adding rudimentary editing features.

I am not certain if this means that iMovie is now entirely a Web Application or if Apple is offering a “Cloud” component to its iMovie application.

iMovie in the Cloud would also offer users the ability to easily view their movies on iPod Touches or iPhones. If the application is entirely Web based, it means that potential customers include the “other 90%” of users who use Windows.

- Computerworld Blog

Online Survey Shows Internet Video Marketing Works

Steinar — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 18:19:35 +0000

Someone mentioned to me once or twice that Internet video marketing not only worked but that it worked REALLY well. I didn’t doubt it but you know how it is… you probably have no desire to film yourself talking to camera (a fear I may now have to overcome) and then there is the time it takes to create the video (which is actually no time at all – it’s certainly a lot less than it takes to write a blog post).

It isn’t enough to just put your videos out there and hope people see them. Like anything online you need to pick the best keywords, do some promotion, and if you want viewers to do something in particular after watching your videos (instead of moving onto someone else’s video) there has to be a strong call to action and/or motivation for them to click away from YouTube.

The basic findings in a national phone survey that ended in December show:

48% of internet users said they had ever visited a video-sharing site such as YouTube. A year ago, in December 2006, 33% of internet users said they had ever visited such sites. That represents growth of more than 45% year-to-year.
15% of respondents said they had used a video-sharing site “yesterday” — the day before they were contacted for our survey. A year ago, 8% had visited such a site “yesterday.” Thus, on an average day, the number of users of video sites nearly doubled from the end of 2006 to the end of 2007.

This is valuable information that should be calculated in your efforts to promote your website. If you aren’t using video in your advertising, based on these surveys, you are probably missing out on a lot of potential traffic.

YouTube Now 25 Percent Of All Google Searches

Steinar — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 18:31:11 +0000

Video search on YouTube accounts for a quarter of all Google search queries in the U.S., according to the latest search engine numbers from comScore. Its monthly qSearch report, which was released on Thursday night, breaks out the number of searches conducted on YouTube.

If it were a standalone site, YouTube would be the second largest search engine after Google. More searches are done through YouTube than through Yahoo, which has been the case for the past few months.