http://twitter.com/RobKingston

If you’re not on Twitter yet, I seriously recommend that you join now and start interacting with your friends and the great online marketing professionals out there.

For those of you that are on Twitter, just a quick tip: Don’t be boring!

I generally go by the rule, that if what I’m posting has no entertainment or educational value, then it’s not worth posting. Simple as that. I also only add people who will follow that rule and help me establish better relationships with them.

Don’t Know What Twitter Is?

Read about Twitter NOW.

This logo is a ‘K’ … I hope?

I wonder if these people planned for this logo?

Let’s not go there.

I wonder what tools they use?

What treatment is that customer receiving?

Let’s hope that you can avoid having your business logo end up in an email like this. Although – you know what they say about all publicity…

Whether it’s the ease of a one-click WordPress install, the diminishing cost of buying a new computer or the endless stream of performance tweaks that help us improve our efficiency, there is always things out there to save our time. The way I see it, there are two things that you can do with these savings.

• Be lazy/tight pocketed with the savings
• Put those savings into creating more value for customers

I’m totally guilty of giving into the instant gratification when it comes to saving money or time. We all are. This is just an idea which I have recently stumbled onto and become aware of. While many business owners and professionals rejoice at the idea of making savings – do they do anything with those savings? Do they invest their time into creating more value for customers? I don’t think so.

Another way to look at it is like this – historically, adoption rates for new technology take several years. If you’re an early adopter and you decide to implement new, cost saving technology, you can spend more on creating value for your customers than your competitors can for a good while. This will create a competitive advantage that your competition won’t even know about until it’s too late.

So, next time that new reporting software takes automation to a new level, why not add a personal touch to those reports? Maybe if you get a new computer that converts videos quicker, you could add a personal touch to your customer service with your freed up time? Perhaps, when your new CRM system is up and automating parts of your sales process for you, you could gather MORE customer data to help create value? The list is endless…

What technologies have saved you time and money in your business? Do you usually take the lazy approach or are you creating value to help you compete?

Unfortunately at the time, I was uploading a configuration file (wp-admin.php for you WordPress geeks) to my site and I just so happened to drop the config file into the wrong directory. HUGE MISTAKE. Upon doing so, I redirected ALL traffic from www.BracingYourBrand.com to www.Journey2Mastery.com.

How I Published My Private Journal

Now this wasn’t too big a deal for me at first, since people were just just going to end up at a page stating it was closed. Little did I know, by redirecting everything to Journey2Mastery, I was also redirecting Google Feed Reader, Yahoo, Outlook, Feedburner and any other bot looking for www.bracingyourbrand.com/feed

By allowing this, I Posted My Private Journal to My RSS Subscribers.

This was HUGE for me. I write things on there that I even have trouble admitting to myself. So, as you might realise, there is some heartfelt stuff in there – stuff that is exceedingly private. Upon realising it, my heart stopped and all I could think was, “Crap! Crap! Crap! WTF.” I had just published my sex life, intentions, relationships with people and worse, to my employers, friends and followers who subscribe to my blog.

The Aftermath

Thanks to a chat with some mates of mine (props to West Loh and Cameron Mackay), I’ve finally come to terms with it and found time to post this sort of “Personal Media Relaease”. As you could imagine this will work wonders for my personal brand… and time will tell whether any publicity is good publicity.

I suppose it’s been interesting, in that I made the realisation that most people don’t care about this sort of stuff, so I’m happy in that regard. It’s also pushed me to being more open and honest – not quite brutally honest but moreso than before. It’s also helped me understand WordPress a lot more and recieve a spike in visitors.

How You Can Use This Lesson

Using this method, you can effectively hijack someone’s RSS Subscriber base and use it for malicious intent or to make a couple of bucks.

TechCrunch pointed out the obvious, that Google’s ownership of an SEO company represents a conflict of interests, but that’s not my only concern. I bet Google will look into the processes and clients of Double Click Performics and find out how they can identify sites that are manipulating rankings.

What do you think?

Back last year, Google removed the PageRank numbers off sites that they suspected were selling links. They were cracking down on people who were manipulating search results by buying links to boost their rankings artificially. This pissed a lot of people off, as you can see over with Andy Beard.

Anyway 3GN Media, a site I ran with Yaro Starak, was slapped for selling links last year. However on a second glance today, it’s back up to a PR3 on the homepage — and we’re STILL selling links! Hmmmm…

Why Do We Have Our Page Rank Back?

I have two theories about this and we have had a lot of changing circumstances which may have affected the situation. Here’s what I think:

• Change of Ownership
• Addition of a Blog Frontpage

Change of Ownership

Back in January, Yaro decided to sell all of his sites – 3GN Media was one of them. Selling the site obviously changes the ownership of the site around to another person.

Addition of Blog Frontpage

Initially we had no frontpage for 3GN Media. It was an empty directory besides a lonely .htaccess file which redirected people to the “/forums” sub-directory. After we got slapped by Google last year we setup the blog as a Frontpage and still sold links on the site.

My guess is that it either snuck past Google’s hard-hitting palm, or it’s got enough links going to it, that even with being penalised, it warrants a PR 3.

What Do You Think?

Open up in the comments… This has me confused still.

I’ve always been skeptical of the types of users more likely to click on ads but this is just amazing. Read this:

…heavy clickers skew towards Internet users between the ages of 25-44 and households with an income under $40,000. Heavy clickers behave very differently online than the typical Internet user, and while they spend four times more time online than non-clickers, their spending does not proportionately reflect this very heavy Internet usage. Heavy clickers are also relatively more likely to visit auctions, gambling, and career services sites – a markedly different surfing pattern than non-clickers.

Isn’t that something? Should we follow CPM or CPA for buying into ads instead of CPC?

I think if you’re going to be running display ads in auctions, gambling sites and career services sites, you might want to be weary about going by CPC instead.

Somehow I can imagine those game-like ads on MySpace would get a lot of click-throughs from this audience, too.

Check out the full ComScore report about heavy clickers here.

(Image Credit)

Basically, MyBlogLog is looking to combine all the personal data from your social networking profiles into one easily accessible site. No longer will you have to remember 20 different sites to login to, to check.

That’s the big problem with these social networks these days, there are so many of them, it’s hard to keep up. It seems like converging these networks and making use of RSS, XML and other data formats is really going to be the future of the web.

As for this small project I’m working on which is along similar lines as this, you can expect to see it within the next week or two.

Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.

Here is the old 2004 definition by comparison:

Marketing is an organizational function and a set of processes for creating, communicating and delivering value to customers and for managing customer relationships in ways that benefit the organization and its stakeholders.

I won’t rehash about what I wrote about the new definition on Small Business Branding, but I will say that the major focus of this definition over the old one is that it’s intention was to broaden the scope of marketing to more groups. This telegraphs the opportunities currently available to marketers and for that reason, I think it’s important to understand the new definition. Despite being a bit late, I think it’s worth mentioning that one of the major themes for this definition was highlighted all the way back at Mplanet 2006, when this was cutting edge.

According to another article their last definition didn’t really catch on, but here’s to hoping this version will.

For more information on the new definition as well as others which pop up, visit the Marketing Power blog here.

Around about seven people rocked up at the Brewhouse and chatted about how they made their living online. We have a relatively diverse range of skills in the group, ranging from coders, designers, internet marketers, salesmen and business owners and we all got along swimmingly. Topics of the night included SEO, domaining, torrents and outsourcing. Here are the guys that made it last night:

• Stuart Hilditch
• Peter Laurent
• Ben Wilks
• Mike McMahon
• Angus Scown
• Rob (didn’t catch your last name)

I managed to take a few photos from the night, but my camera was very dodgy and I had to photoshop them to make them legible. You should get the picture though.

Right-Left: Mike McMahon and Stuart Hilditch chatted about coding, making money and internet business.

Right-Left: Rob and Angus Scown had a good long chat about developing sites.

Right-Left: Peter Laurent and Ben Wilks talked on domaining, SEO and all the degrees that they should have done 10 years ago.

I think for the next meetup we’ll do something a little more structured and at a place where the younger crowd can meetup, as well (Draicone). I have a few ideas up my sleeves… Also, what are you thoughts on eventually doing workshops?

I hope everyone enjoyed the night as I did. I look forward to attending the next meet up – perhaps in a month’s time.