Services
Digg Effect – In Living Color
A few days ago, I posted an article saying that I got “Dugg”, meaning I got an article onto Digg.com and it sent me a big traffic spike. This was for an article called “Can Linux Replace Windows?” published over on PC Mechanic. I thought I would share with you the stats from the Digg Effect using screenshots from Google Analytics.
This is a graph which shows the visits. You can see that for a couple days ago, we had a nice traffic spike. However,
The bounce rate went up quite a bit, too. Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who come to the site and immediately leave. Meaning they visit only one page and then leave the site. So, while Digg sent us more traffic, they sent us primarily people who were only interested in seeing the one article and then immediately left.
Look at the bounce rate on that one article. Amazing.
I’m not going to show screenshots of my Google Adsense account in this forum, but needless to say that the daily revenue did not significantly increase.
So, yeah, the Digg Effect basically means:
- Nice traffic spike, but short lasting
- No real increase in revenue
In short, it’s cool. But, it doesn’t pay the bills and doesn’t lead to anything long term. Digg can be part of your strategy, but don’t depend on it.
TubeMogul Offering Video Posting to Multiple Sites
Anybody in the online video arena probably posts to multiple video websites. Or tries to. The problem is that it is usually a pretty arduous affair to get this done. You have to have profiles on each video site and then individually post to each one.
To get the most bang out of your online videos, you really do want to post to multiple sites. YouTube is the big elephant in the room and will probably bring you the most viewership. But, there are many other quality video services out there, including:
By having your videos out there on many sites, you cast a wider net and catch a wider audience. And that can, in turn, lead to more traffic driven to your site.
Well, TubeMogul is now offering the ability to use their site to post to all of these sites from one central location. I have been using TubeMogul for a few weeks anyway in order to track viewership trends of my videos on Youtube and a few competitors. It’s quite nice, giving me graphs of my video views on Youtube.
Last night, I used their new upload service for the first time. It worked like a champ. It will also securely save your log-in information to each video site so you do not have to re-enter it (yes, you still need profiles on each of the video sites). My only complaint about it is that I think they should have a separate page for entering the video site profiles. As it is now, you have to upload your video first then you get the various logins as part of the launch process. It would be nice if they separated it out. It’s a bit clunky at the moment.
Chris Pirillo, who has been doing a lot of video work lately, was using Video Post Robot to post his videos to multiple sites. Video Post Robot, though, has a big long sales page that does look a bit spammy if you ask me. Heyspread.com is another one that has been brought to my attention. I have not yet tried HeySpread, but it does catch me a bit off guard that you’re uploading your video right on the front page with no profile and no security. I’d rather see the necessity to log into a profile before posting videos. But, I’d be interested in some feedback from anybody who has used HeySpread. I had heard through the rumor mill that Pirillo’s guys were using Heyspread and liked it better than Video Post Robot, but I don’t know.
TubeMogul could perhaps be a big player on the scene. Call it instinct, but I tend to trust sites that have a good design and look like they have some form of organization behind them. TubeMogul at least has that feel to me. I have no idea – maybe it is run by one guy in his bedroom. Either way, for now I am using TubeMogul. It’s a good service and I hope it only improves.
Is Twitter of Any Use to Anybody?
Twitter has turned into a bit of a phenomenon. The site has earned a love/hate relationship among bloggers, usually with them trying to figure out if the thing has ANY use at all. Well, that’s a good question. I saw a post over at LifeHacker that asked Is Twitter Worth Your Time? I was curious so I decided to look into it.
What is Twitter?
Twitter is a site which allows people to post short (max 140 characters) messages of what they are doing at any point in the day. Messages can be submitted via instant messenger, SMS on your cell phone, or directly via the Twitter website. When you send in a “tweet”, it is briefly featured on the site’s homepage. But, we’re talking only a few seconds here due to the volume of people trying to keep the internet up-to-date on every twist and turn of their lives. A look at the public timeline shows that most submissions are useless.
Uuumm….Why?
That’s what I thought. You can basically think of Twitter as a big blog site where people can post small little snippets of stuff. With only 140 characters of space to type, it’s not like you can do very much. Each person’s profile (here’s mine ) can act like a little blog. When I post an entry, it lasts on the public timeline for about 20 seconds before it cycles off the page. Just speaking for myself, I have no use for this. I am not interested in telling the world what I’m having for dinner or who I’m talking to on the phone. For a minute, it is kind of cool that you can submit to your profile using SMS or IM. I hooked it up to my cell phone and it did work fine.
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Youtube Offers Custom Player and Other Goodies
I was over on Pirillo’s blog and I saw a quick mention of a new video player by Youtube. I logged into my account and, sure enough, they’re announcing a few interesting items. You Youtube’ers will like this.
Custom Player
You can now create a custom Youtube video player. You can give it a custom color scheme. You can also choose between two different styles – one which flashes thumbnails of your other videos along the bottom of the player. The other provides a playlist to the right of your player. Very slick, if you ask me. Unfortunately, they don’t give you free reign. You cannot fine-tune the color scheme using your own color codes. But, this is still a very nice offering.
Select Your Thumbnail
Now instead of Youtube automatically taking the half-way mark of your video and making that the thumbnail for it, they now give you a choice of 3 different points on the video and you can choose the thumbnail you want. Well, 3 options is always better than one.
Youtube Mobile
I’m not sure if this is new or not, but I just ran across it. Apparently you can now access Youtube on your cell phone using Youtube mobile. Now, it won’t work on all mobile phones. You obviously need a phone with internet access. And even then, you need to be using a carrier that will allow it. As you might guess, streaming video isn’t exactly bandwidth friendly, so some phone carriers aren’t friendly for it.
When I went to try it on my Palm Treo, I first got a warning from Youtube saying that it is bandwidth intensive and that I should get an unlimited data plan before using it. Great how Google is looking out for my phone bill. When I tried to play a video, I got greeted by an “Unspecified Error”. How detailed. So, it doesn’t really work on my phone very well. I don’t know whether to blame Youtube, Microsoft (my phone uses Windows Mobile) or Alltel.
YouTube is Where It’s At
The other video sites are important, too, but not to the degree of Youtube. If you are not uploading your videos to Youtube, it is to your own detriment. That is if viewers are your goal.
Ultimate Guide To Running Your Business From Anywhere
One of the beauties of running an internet business is the ability to work from anywhere. Additionally, recent reviews of the 4 Hour Work Week, by Tim Ferris, has created renewed interest in the idea of being able to run a business from anywhere. One of the things he talks about in his book is the ability to not only reduce your work time, but to travel a lot and run the business from afar. So, get a laptop and an internet connection, you’re good to go, right? Well, not always.
Running a business means you need to use a lot of different types of software. And sometimes it is hard to make the data completely portable. Many of us have more than one computer and that leads to issues with synching data between multiple machines. Myself, I have a desktop machine in my home office. I also have a notebook computer. I like to be able to work as much as possible on either computer without really having to pay attention to where my data is and if I have the most up-to-date version of a particular file on the computer than I’m using. You try to multiply that problem out among hundreds or thousands of computer files – and you’re screwed. Sooner or later, you’re going to overwrite something and lose some of your work. It sucks. I’ve done it.
So, we want to live on the go. Not necessarily “on the run”, but definitely not tied to a particular location. Or even a particular computer. The great news is that the technology is there today to make this really easy. In some cases you might need to fork over a little scratch. However in many cases, you don’t. So, read on…
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Google’s Empire Expands into Phone Service
Whenever there is money to be made with something, Google swoops in and buys it all. That’s my observation now that it seems Google has just acquired GrandCentral.
GrandCentral is a cool service. I have not personally used it, but it claims to be able to combine all of your existing phone accounts into one managable line. Essentially, take the best features of web-enabled phone accounts (like Vonage) and centralize them and make it work with existing carriers. It really is very convenient. One of the things I love most about Vonage (and I use Vonage for my home office) is the fact that I can check voice mail through the web or via my email inbox. With GrandCentral, you can do that and more, apparently.
Google’s blog announced the acquisition 3 days ago now. According to Google:
We think GrandCentral’s technology fits well into Google’s efforts to provide services that enhance the collaborative exchange of information between our users.
Perhaps it does. However, with the growing sense of unease about Google becoming big brother, this is going to get some attention. Personally, I’m not one of these big brother conspiracy folks. I don’t like it when I see a company grow and become successful only to have the mob try to take them down to size. It happened with Microsoft, Wal-Mart – now its starting with Google.
Perhaps Google will make GrandCentral free. Wouldn’t that be awesome. But, would that mean we start getting “relevant” audio ads in our voice mail box? Oh brother.
Google Free Tools Keep Getting Better
Google is the king of free web-based tools. I make routine use of Analytics, Gmail and Google Docs. I am also using Google Groups for a new group for WebbyOnline. I have used Google Webmaster Tools for site diagnostics. In short, I’m a big fan of Google.
Google Docs Sports New Features
This morning I logged into Google Docs and noticed it looks quite different than it did before. The most notable change is that you can now organize your documents into folders. The list of folders is now on the left side of the screen and the list of documents are on the right – pretty much just like Explorer in Windows. On the spreadsheet side of things, it is now much easier to create charts. The spreadsheets now support comments as well. For the full list of improvements, check this out. The beauty of Google Documents is that it allows easy collaboration. You no longer need all the fancy document sharing tools built into Microsoft Office. You can do it for free using the web at Google Docs.
Analytics Continues to Impress
I covered the re-design of Google Analytics back in May. Again, they have taken an already great tool and made it better. The reports are so much simpler to use than they used to be. All the graphs are Flash generated and load quickly. The put all the data people want most right in front of them, whereas it used to take many clicks and hunting to find what you needed.
Gmail for Business
Late last week, I decided to use Gmail for business. I needed to find a way to let my virtual assistant handle some of my email. I was thinking about installing a mail client to a second PC here in the office and providing remote access via Logmein.com. That would have worked, but with some of the recent webcam setup work I’m doing, that PC can be a little busy and I didn’t want my VA to unwittingly kick the cam offline. Next option was to hook it up with Kayako eSupport. Now, I own a license to this software and it really is killer helpdesk software. However, its almost too bulky and I was worried about the spam overflowing the thing. It then dawned on me – what about Gmail?
I already had a Gmail account for personal use, however I logged out of it and went to create a new account. After I had created the account, I was poking around the settings and was pleasantly suprised to see that Gmail now allows direct access to a POP3 account. Perhaps I’m just a latecomer to finding that one, but that’s incredibly useful! I thought I was going to have to set up forwarding accounts from my server to Gmail, but apparently now Gmail can actually log in to up to 5 external POP3 accounts and bring the email into your Gmail account. Gmail, in other words, is a full mail client – not just a box for your Gmail account which you then need to find other ways to pool your email into. And, of course, being that this was business email, I don’t want to use Gmail.com in my email addresses.
So, now my VA is able to check email for those accounts on the web with no hassle at all. It really gets me thinking if I want to use Gmail for my own mailbox. I’m still using Outlook here, and with the soon to-be-released version of Cloudmark Desktop for Thunderbird, I was thinking about a Thunderbird switch. But, I must say that having it online is elegant and convenient. And needless to say, if my hard drive ever dies again, my email would be fine. Only problem is I cannot import past email into Gmail.
Web-Based Computing
Perhaps someday we’ll all conduct all our computing needs in a web browser. It’s almost to the point now where you can practically get away with it. Software as a Service (SAAS) is very real.
How to Use StumbleUpon to Promote
A few months ago, I signed up for StumbleUpon. I downloaded and installed the toolbar on Firefox and started surfing. Pretty cool. However, I had seen a few people talking about using StumbleUpon for promotional purposes on their websites, with apparent success. Some were talking about driving thousands of visitors PER DAY to their sites using the system. But, I could not find any clear information on what needs to be done to make that happen. I mean, I can use StumbleUpon as an end user all day long, but what do I really need to do to use it to drive traffic to my own site?
I did some research into this and I thought I’d pass it along.
What is It?
StumbleUpon is a social website which allows users to share and recommend websites that they find in a networked setting. When you sign up for the service (for free), you will install a toolbar to your browser. The network of sites is organized by user-generated tags, not by a search engine spider. So, it provides a way for you to view what others have found cool, organized by tags so surfers can find sites in their own interests. The primary way of getting around is the “Stumble” button in the toolbar. When you press that button, you are taken to a random website that was “stumbled” by others and that fall within the areas of interest you define at StumbleUpon.
From an end user perspective, its a huge time waster. I can spend hours “stumbling” around the net randomly and discovering all kinds of great sites I knew nothing about previously. Getting started is easy. Just head on over there and create an account and install the toolbar. Nothing more to it.
What About Promo?
StumbleUpon is known for being able to generate massive amounts of traffic to a website. It all starts with somebody “stumbling” your website. Essentially, this is done by one of your readers clicking the “I Like it!” button on the toolbar while on your site. They’re giving you a thumbs up when you do that, and that puts your site in the network. If they are the first ones to vote for your page, then they will get a dialog box saying that they discovered the website. They will be prompted for a quick review and for a series of tags which best fit your site. Once they have “discovered” your site, your site is then available for other StumbleUpon users to surf into using the toolbar.
It should be noted here that because of the somewhat random nature of the network, visitors that you get from StumbleUpon are likely to give you a high bounce rate. The toolbar essentially allows the reader to “channel surf”. And just like on television, you tend to flip quickly through the channels until you find something that grabs your eye. Well, its EXACTLY the same with the Stumbleupon toolbar. You will find that StumbleUpon visitors are:
- Fickle as hell with a very high chance of moving on quickly (but you can minimize this with some work…see below)
- From all over the place
- Won’t really click on any ads
So, I’m certainly not saying that StumbleUpon viewers are high-value, qualified traffic. But, its still traffic and you can do what you can to make them more qualified once they arrive. A couple of things you have going for you are the fact that SU users come in based on interest. Plus, unlike one trick ponies like Digg that are good for a spike of traffic, SU can actually provide a pretty steady stream of traffic.
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The Importance of Surveys, SurveyMonkey
I recently signed up for an account at SurveyMonkey after re-realizing the importance of surveys. Here’s the story…
My largest site, PC Mechanic, has actually been seeing a slight, but steady decrease in overall traffic. Nobody in this business likes to see decreases in traffic. Sure, all sites vary up and down on daily traffic, but when you open the Analytics account and look at a multi-month range and see a slow, but steady decrease over time, that’s not good. Even a flat trend is an emergency condition, because if you’re not growing, you’re actually contracting in relation to the rest of the web. So, the goal is to be seeing MORE traffic, not the same and certainly not less.
I’m left to wonder why this is. Are people bored with the site? Are we not providing what people need and want? Has our market just changed and now we’re not catering to a growing audience? My inclination is to go with the third. After all, PCMech hit the scenes and grew quickly back when PC ownership was a bit more exclusive. Today the computer is as common as a toaster. And, additionally, building a computer (the major draw to PCMech is building a PC) is now being done by a more exclusive group of people. Pre-built computers today are affordable and they get the job done. Without doubt, you will get a better quality and a more suitable computer by selecting the parts and building your own, but just because I and a select group know that doesn’t mean that the market as a whole knows that.
But, I could guess all day. In the end, its just me sitting here trying to get into the minds of my visitors. That’s stupid when I can directly ASK THEM. Hence, surveys.
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Verizon FIOS Review
As anybody in this business will attest to, fast internet connections are a requirement of doing work. There were the days when I ran this business over a dial-up connection. It wasn’t by choice either. One move I made when I was younger ended up with me on dial-up AFTER having had Roadrunner. Trust me, there is little worse in the computer world than having to revert to dial-up after being spoiled by broadband. Faster is always better and that is why I just today had Verizon Fios installed.
For some time now, I have been using Bright House, which is the company doing Roadrunner cable modems in this area. The service has been fine. The TV that came in over the same lines was a little weak. The signals were not always that good (it varied and I don’t know why) and there was heavy pixelation on some of the digital channels. The phone service was OK, however I thought their voice mail system was rather weak. Perhaps a year ago, Verizon installed fiber optic lines in the neighborhood. I held off for some time actually getting on the service, and now I’m not sure why.
So far, I am happy with Verizon FIOS. I got the package deal, which means I have phone, TV and internet all coming into the building. The internet is sporting a 20 mbit downstream and 5 mbit upstream. Needless to say, that’s a crapload of bandwidth. The TV picture is MUCH clearer, even without the use of high definition. And the phone service…well, its the phone. It works.
The only downside so far is that I had to give up the TIVO. I love TIVO, and their interface is second to none as far as digital video recorders are concerned. Now, it is possible that I could have gotten this TIVO to work with Verizon’s fiber optic service, but it would not have been able to function at it’s full potential. For one, my Series 2 TIVO will not record HD content. Additionally, the TIVO cannot accept an incoming signal directly to my knowledge. With cable, the TIVO can work as its own cable box. It therefore allows the second cable box to be used to record from a second channel while you’re watching another. With Verizon, the box has to sit first on the chain, which means at the most, TIVO would have to control the settop box via infrared and could only record non-HD content one channel at a time. Kind of limiting. So, I had to ditch the TIVO and get Verizon’s DVR. It does all the same things…its just not as nice an interface.
The important thing here, though, is the internet service. That was my main reason for doing it. I found a couple of speed tests online, one at SpeakEasy and another at SpeedTest.Net. With SpeakEasy, I’m getting a 6626 kbps downstream and 771 kbps upstream using the Atlanta server. With SpeedTest, its 8146 kbps down and 847 kbps up, using the Tampa server. Not bad. The only latency I have here is waiting for remote servers to respond. Great for doing internet work, I must say.
If you can get FIOS, its definitely worth the time and hassle to switch. Dealing with their 800 number can be frustrating, but the service quality is still good.
I'm David Risley. I've been making my living as a blogger for over a decade. Blogging is my business and how I support my family. With this blog, I'm just gettin' REAL and telling you how this business works. 
