Most useful thing you learnt this week

[Gurtie]

Inspired by a commet of Dogboys, I meant to start this last week..... a thread for random but useful info you picked up which doesn't merit an entire discussion of its own.


for me, from last week; you can show a different corporate profile to Linkedin users depending on their own personal profile - including targeting by location and industry http://marketing.linkedin.com/solutions/company-pages/overview-tab (download the pdf's)

[Rupert]

That the wine society will now recommend wine to go with you food:
http://www.thewinesociety.com/Shop/FoodMatching.aspx

Not web, I know, but hey.

[jetboy]

Dom Joly went to school with Osama Bin Laden.

It's been a slow week.

[Rupert]

Actually I have learnt something marketing. That even with my products, the image counts for less than I thought.  That the products I sell most of are still the "Best Sellers" and "Special offers".

Sometimes I forget the obvious.

I also discovered some more key phrases to target by surfing my stats,


And that it IS worth asking the advice of my 19 year old part time Customer Services help... She has some bright ideas

[Elaine]

6 things.

that visitors rarely buy the product they originally click to visit the merchant's site - but often buy something else (I, really, already knew this)

that I shouldn't have produced secondary product pages containing all the essential information - no reason to visit the merchant's site

Google sees such pages as thin, duplicate content

I don't need Pandas to screw over my site - I'm quite capable of doing that myself

I'm a certifiable, blithering idiot.

You're never too old to learn - just takes more time

[ukgimp]

Elaine. Can you repurpose the merchant specs ?

Or put all the specs in a robots excluded directory. Useful to your clients but not visible to google. 

[Elaine]

I'm pretty certain I've aggravated the situation by compiling all these extra pages (knee jerk reaction to the US Pandemic!) and the few visitors I am getting are not clicking through to the merchants sites - bit of a bugger when you're an affiliate site!
Going back to basics.

[Drastic]

Yahoo Pipes is great for manipulating rss feeds.

[DrCool]

If you have a decent blog on a topic that is getting some decent traffic and rankings throw a couple thousand datafeed pages of products on it.

[jetboy]

Well Jason, I kept going, and now I've got Heartbeat and Pacemaker working on a couple of servers. This is very cool, and definitely beats out Dom Joly.

FYI, this is where you have servers in a cluster, and they check on one another to check they're all working OK. In my case I'm setting up an active/passive pair of load balancers and reverse caching proxies. All the traffic goes through the active box unless it fails. At that point the passive one steps in and takes over the IP until the original one's back on its feet.

[buckworks]

The most useful thing I learned this week confirmed something I already knew: the SEO power of old-fashioned public relations.

I've been involved in a new site / new brand that was officially launched this past Tuesday. A professional publicist sent our news release to hundreds of relevant print editors, bloggers etc., as well as posting it on PRweb. The story, which is genuinely buzzworthy for its target audience, has received significant attention. Many quality sites wrote their own version of the story, but some just used the news release as is, complete with our carefully crafted links.

When plans started late last year, the domain / brand name did not exist as a word anywhere on the web except on a couple of those weird random word-mix sites. When I checked ten days ago there were a handful of references to the name from sites that monitor domain and trademark registrations.

This morning, five days after launch, Yahoo is returning 3600+ results for the new brand name, and Google 21,000+. Google isn't reporting any links yet, but Yahoo is showing 250+ and the number is growing every time I check. The quality ranges from obscure personal blogs to the websites of more than one magazine that you'd see on newsstands in North America. Fun stuff!

[ukgimp]

Buckworks, sounds cool.

Traffic?

[buckworks]

35,000+ visitors since launch on May 10; average 4.79 pages per visit.

[jimbanks]

I learnt that a hangover and the start of a cold can often feel the same - body feels like you've had the crap kicked out of you, sore throat.

Also learnt that many Americans are not very good at managing interruptions and prioritising. If I heard "can I put you on hold" once I heard it 50 times. What makes the person calling, or walking in, more important than me?? Why is walk in or real phone higher priority than Skype?

And lastly, dougs looks dapper in a tuxedo!

[Gurtie]

this week I learnt (again) that stating the obvious is well worth doing because it's often not obvious to everyone.