Urban Vancouver

It is a go. eMarketing 101 has finally decided to move one step ahead in its advertising and is pleased to announce that we will be working with Adhack, the DIY (Do it Yourself) Advertising community to create video ads for eMarketing 101. If you want to be part of this great journey or want to contribute in some way, please find the eMarketing 101 commission summary on Adhack.com. This is going to be a lot of fun. I will post the ads here as we progress and you will be able to comment.

Now, if you want to do the same thing I do to market your company more efficiently online and elsewhere (they do all kinds of ads) at a fraction of the cost of any major advertising agency, please feel free to visit Adhack.com for more information or communicate directly with James Sherrett, Director of Adhack: james@adhack.com. His talented team will help you develop the powerful advertising ideas that will bring you and your business on a positive viral spin.

1. new
2. verify bug
3. needs test / test needed
   
4. needs patch /patch needed
5. patch review
6. commit review
7. committed / accepted / fixed

Somehow I don’t think that the FURminator was meant to be in the Kitchen & Dining category of Amazon. What do you think?

I'm going to be doing a short interview with Global TV with my thoughts on the Blackberry Bold, which "launches" today on Rogers (apparently, reports say that the product isn't actually available in stores).

Of course, this is currently a GSM phone, so it's one more piece in Roger's arsenal vs. Telus and Bell, which both have the same set of CDMA phones. The newest phones are released on GSM first, and the CDMA versions lag by months, if they are available at all.

I've never been a huge fan of the Blackberry… as a consumer phone. I think that's still the case. This is definitely a great upgrade, but unless your company is paying for it, you're more likely to get an iPhone for home use. In addition, the Bold is more expensive with Rogers - $600 without contract, $400 with 3 year contract, vs. $200 (8GB) or $300 (16GB) for the iPhone.

If you're a current Blackberry users that loves the keyboard and scroll wheel, then you'll like this upgrade. Otherwise, we're waiting for the Blackberry Thunder (the touchscreen version) to potentially be "more like the iPhone".

Related links:

• Boy Genius Report: Blackberry Bold review - we've been rockin' it for a month
• Mobile Computer UK: RIM Blackberry Bold Review
• iPhone Blog: YouTube Video Review of iPhone vs. Blackberry Bold
• Boy Genius Report: Blackberry thunder, touchscreen

It is impossible to ever see the Whole Picture. The Whole Picture is at least fifth dimensional. Our vision is limited to the third and we can only guess at the forth.

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I would like to thank everyone who participated in my simple contest to win a 4GB SDHC memory card. The entries have been tallied, sorted, sifted, rinsed and hung to dry for a little bit but I have managed to randomly select a winner with help of Miranda from the iPRGroup. Even though I enjoy working with the people from the iPRGroup, they did not have anything to do with this contest, but I wanted to randomly select a person and Miranda is always there to help out their clients.

How does one randomly select a winner?

I went into geek mode to select my contests winner. I generated a MySQL query to pull the list of comments for the contest, sorted through them to remove my comments loaded them into excel and inserted an extra entry if you wrote a blog post about the contest and linked back to it.

Having Miranda select a random number between 1 and the total number or entries I manage to come up with the person who won the 4 GB SDHC memory card.

And the winner is…

Bright Star (B*) of 2008brightstar365.blogpost.com

If you are into photography check out the Bright Star photo a day blog to see some exceptional captures on a daily basis.

Congratulations! I will be contacting Bright Star via email.

Thank you to everyone who participated in this contest. It was so far the best contest yet that I have personally run. Expect more contests to be run in the near future. If you are wanting to be notified of the next contest to win free stuff then make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

From InsideRIA:
It might be debatable whether a native app written Objective-C is an RIA, but most of the are internet connected at least part of the time and lots of the coolest iPhone apps I’m using run right in Safari on the iPhone. It’s not however debatable whether or not iPhone has raised the bar for slick and aesthetically pleasing UIs and if you’re going to develop a web app or native app for the iPhone you need to meet that bar to succeed. On that note here are a couple resources to make your iPhone apps look like Apple’s very own apps!

In yesterday’s installment of this week’s holiday SEO series, we covered hot product research and how to boost your rankings for these items’ product pages. One of the tactics was to target bloggers and other media for Christmas gift guides or product reviews.

Again, the more quality links a product page has pointing to it directly, the better chance it has of ranking well in search engines. Plus, a diverse link profile (you have some links pointing to deeper pages, not just your home page) makes your site look more authoritative as a whole to search engines.

So when you do acquire these deep links, you want to keep them. But often in ecommerce - product pages come and go. So it’s important to make sure your links still give you benefit even when pages disappear.

I recently searched for “top geek gifts” and found Wired Magazine’s Ultimate Geek Gift Guide from 2005. It links to 26 products - most are deep pages on the manufacturer or online retailers’ sites. Though an old list, it’s likely the page still gets a lot of traffic. It certainly ranks well, and the links are valuable to SEO forever.

But only a handful of these product pages still exist, a whopping 13 (that’s 50%!) of them are now Not Found pages with no links back into the site, and no suggested alternative products.

Bad for customers, bad for SEO.

Only 20% of the pages preserved the link juice by using a 301 permanent redirect. 3 sites redirected to the home page, while Alienware redirected the page to its Desktop Computer category (one more link for you, Alienware - Merry Christmas) and Sonos to its What to Buy section.

The 301 (permanent) redirect does 2 things - it sends a visitor to a real page on the site, and it tells search engines to pass along any incoming link “juice” (Page Rank) to the page that is redirected to. Whether you redirect to the home page, category page or similar product, the link pointing to your domain helps the overall link popularity of your domain. But redirecting to a category or alternative product page other than the home page is preferable for a few reasons:

• It’s more specific for the user. If you redirect the page for a wireless keyboard you no longer carry to all your wireless keyboards, it’s more relevant to the visitor than dumping them on the home page.
• It boosts the rankings for the category or page you direct it to.
• It keeps diversity in your link portfolio. Search engines like to see that not all your backlinks point to your home page - looks more natural, and looks like your deeper content is valuable.

How do you accomplish this? John Honeck has a great technical article for programmers on how to set up permanent 301 redirects on ecommerce templates in ASP.

You never know when someone will link to you or to what page, so it’s best to make this standard procedure for all your pages.

Free Webinar: September 11th, 2008, 9am PT/12pm ET
Guest Panelist: Bryan Eisenberg, Co-founder and Executive VP, FutureNow, Inc.
Register to Attend...

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