Author Archive

May 24

How to Begin Your Do-It-Yourself Marketing Campaign

By Brandon Rhodes

As more and more of the population begins to move online, harnessing traffic over the internet has become an essential component of a successful business model. Many large companies are now seeking out the services of digital marketing agencies, but the technical and financial barriers-to-entry are still too steep for many smaller businesses, who are already devoting a great deal of their time and energy maintaining their website. So, what should a small business owner, or any other do-it-yourself internet marketeer do? Read on to discover the steps you should take, and the mindset you should have to enter into the self-serve online marketing game.

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Posted in Featured, SEO, social media

Apr 11

Need a Personal Assistant? Try These Free Tools

By Aaron Couch

How cool would it be to have a robot butler? Imagine it. Here’s this nice metal guy whose sole purpose is to help you succeed in life. And I’m not talking about a neurotic robomaid, like Rosy from The Jetsons. I’m talking about a classy robot—like a mechanical version of Batman’s Alfred. Call me a dreamer, but I don’t think this is too much to ask.

Since there aren’t any Alfred robots for sale just yet, I’m willing to settle for having a computerized personal assistant. Thankfully, programmers are creating some pretty great tools designed to get us organized and make our lives easier. When used in conjunction, these tools approximate many of the things personal assistants do. Here are a few for you check out:

AwayFind

If you’re waiting for and important email and want to ignore the junk, this service is for you. AwayFind filters out the emails you don’t want, and contacts you via text message, phone call, IM, or tweet once that important email arrives. It’s like having a personal assistant holding all but your most important calls.

Sendible

For any organization, social media is a chance to engage the public on a more personal level. But yikes! Engaging across multiple platforms sure takes up a lot of time. That’s where Sendible comes in. Craft your message, schedule a time for it to be released, and select the social media services you want to carry the message. Then…presto! There’s your message, broadcast across multiple platforms. It’s easy, and beats copious amounts of copying and pasting.

Remember the Milk

This iPhone app beats the pants off a simple sticky note. When’s the last time a sticky note sent you a text message to remind you of your cat’s vet appointment? You can write notes to yourself up to two weeks away, and choose the way you’d like to be reminded. Reminders can come via email, text, and instant messenger programs like Google Talk, ICQ and AIM.

Evernote

Want to remember everything? Go ahead. Snap pictures, drag files, add links, or scribble down notes. Evernote takes whatever you throw at it, organizes it and makes it searchable. You can integrate it with your smartphone and snap pictures or write down information on the go. Evernote is free, but premium users get more options. It’s a pretty sweet deal, and I plan on using it for upcoming school projects.

Are you using any organizational tools you’re using that we left off? Please let us know by leaving a comment.

Image Courtesy of: http://blog.craftzine.com

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Aaron Couch is a journalism grad student at the University of Kansas, where among other things, he studies how social media is changing journalism. You can follow him on Twitter to see what he’s up to these days: aaroncouch

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Posted in Extra

Mar 19

Taming Your Farmville Addiction

By Aaron Couch

I admit it. I’m fairly new to Farmville, so maybe I’m unqualified to write about kicking your addiction to CG pumpkin patches and digital sheep. But, I’ve been tending my crops for a month now, and I can see why 80 million people—a fifth of active Facebook users—are also playing the game.

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Posted in social media

Feb 22

How to Make Your Own Link Shortener

In 8th grade I was in a mediocre band, and I ran an equally mediocre website to promote that band. The one thing we had going for us was used cjb.net to shorten the convoluted URL Angelfire.com has given us. Maybe our abysmal Green Day covers weren’t turning heads, but at least we had a pithy URL. But that was 10 years ago, when URL shortening was all about style. Now it’s mostly about fitting those long URLs into the character constraints of tweets and text messages. But should link shortening be just about brevity? Some organizations are taking URL shortening to the next level by using their own, branded URL shorteners.

A lot of websites use link shorteners like Tiny URL or bit.ly to facilitate the tweeting or texting of links. Those services are easy to use. Enter a URL, and they’ll generate a shorter URL that points to the original. Sure, they’re brief but they aren’t exactly stylish. Depending on what service you use, the shortened URL will start with http://tiny.cc/, http://bit.ly/, and so on. You might argue that this doesn’t matter, because readers don’t care about what a URL looks like, as long as it’s short enough to fit into a tweet. You might be right, but I’m seeing branded URL shorteners popping up more and more.

Marketers love talking about brand equity, that intangible value your brand name provides its products. A branded URL takes advantage of brand equity,  evoking the reputation of the website it’s connected to. If somebody tweets a news story, you’re decision to click on it will be informed not only by the headline, but also by where the link will take you. The New York Times branded shortened URL is http://nyti.ms. If the URL begins with http://nyti.ms you might more likely to check out the link because of the positive association you have with The New York Times.

If you want your own branded URL shortner, there’s YOURLS. Check it out. It’s great tool that lets you customize your shortened links, with a URL that corresponds with your own brand. Here’s what you need to do:

  1. Get a catchy URL and a place to host it. Learn from the nyti.ms example and try a domain that’s an abbreviation of your current one.
  2. Download YOURLS and follow the setup instructions.
  3. Since this is your branded link shortening device, make sure “private” and “custom” are both set to true. Otherwise, other people would be able to create links from your branded URL.
  4. Show off your tech savvy by creating branded, shortened links.
  5. Take advantage of all the extra goodies YOURLS provides, like historical click reports, referrers tracking, and geo-location stats.

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Posted in Business, Featured

Feb 02

Weekly Link Round-Up Feb 1

Internet Marketing Services Set For Growth as Global Search Grows: http://www.clickthrough-marketing.com/Internet-marketing-services-set-for-growth-as-global-search-grows-46/19577785/

Fan, Friends, Connected with Ochocinco: http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/news/story?id=4868696

Netvibes, new aggregator: http://www.netvibes.com

20+ Reasons Why You Need to Start Guestblogging: http://myblogguest.com/blog/20-reasons-why-you-need-to-start-guest-blogging/

How to Identify New Trends & Generate Easy Traffic: http://www.acronym.com/keyworddriven/how-to-identify-new-trends-and-generate-easy-traffic.html

From TSR Archives:

Comparing the Usability of Google Chrome Vs. iPad: http://thesocialrobot.com/2010/01/comparing-the-usability-of-googles-chrome-os-versus-apples-ipad/

Creating a Niche for Mobile Internet and Social Networking: http://thesocialrobot.com/2009/12/creating-a-niche-for-mobile-internet-and-social-networking/

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Posted in Et cetera

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