A big congratulations to Kim, whose blog, Emergiblog, was just named in FOXNews.com’s list of 10 Best Health Blogs.
Emergiblog is the world’s number one nursing blog and has been honored a number of times. Although we help Kim manage it, the honors go 100% to her outstanding writing and wit.
Congratulations, Kim!
Over the past month and a half, we’ve been working with Jason Roberts and Adaptix Technologies on the design of an online PowerPoint replacement called Preezo. I’ve been wanting to write about it for awhile now because it is such an incredible application, but we kept everything under wraps until Jason presented at the Office 2.0 Conference last week.
Preezo was quite well received at the conference, even though it was competing against technologies that were much more mature, and Jason even scored a great TechCrunch post about Preezo, among other accolades.
Buzz is really building, and we’re excited to be part of it. Sign up today to notified when it launches!
Today I’m very excited to announce that Mark Otto has joined us full time as lead designer. I first met Mark when he won the Nursing Voices design contest back in March and have worked with him on several projects since then. He’s already a very accomplished designer, and I’m confident that you’ll hear big things for him over the next few years. He’s definitely emerging as one of the web’s top designers.
Web design was the one service that Three:Twenty had previously been unable to offer. While we definitely were able to design, our design skills were not on the same level with the other services we offered, so we rarely sought design work. Mark’s hiring changes that and enables us, for the first time, to be a full-service interactive firm.
Welcome, Mark!
If you manage a blog, or multiple blogs, you know what a pain comment spam is. Until last week I had always just viewed it as a necessary evil — dutifully deleting them as they came in — but last week the spam storm hit.
One of the blogs I manage is Emergiblog — a well-known blog in the healthcare space. Last week, a spammer started running through his list of drugs, posting a spam for each in alphabetical order (Ambien, … Valium, Vicodin, Zoloft!). Every time it hit, the author got an email. That’s a whole lot of emails — especially when they’re all spam — so I needed an immediate solution.
My good friend Matt had mentioned Spam Karma to me a while back and recommended it very highly, so I gave it a try.
I do not exaggerate when I say that this may be one of the top 10 most impressive pieces of software I’ve ever used. It’s absolutely amazing.
Imagine if you could have a really smart person look at every single comment posted to your blog and approve or reject it based on whether it was spam. That’s exactly what Spam Karma does.
Now you’re probably thinking, as I did, that there’s absolutely no way someone could teach a computer program to do that…and you would be wrong, just as I was.
I don’t know how it does it, and I’m largely unconcerned. All I know is that I flipped the switch on it (which was eerily easy) and suddenly I had a personal assistant for everyone of my blogs. It’s caught comment spam that I wouldn’t have caught. It’s even smart enough to know to ignore my other built-in settings and just take over comment approval completely.
Absolutely, totally, 100% amazing.
If you don’t have it, and you run a blog, you must get it. Simple as that. It will change forever how you feel about managing your blog. It goes on every one of my blogs from here on out by default.
I’ve had three days to play around with MSN adCenter since getting into the beta during the open period on Monday, so I wanted to post my initial impressions for any of you who might not have had a chance to get in yet.
AdCenter adds some nice features that weren’t previously available elsewhere, like demographic targeting. There are sites who will definitely benefit from being able to target a particular demographic, so this is a great feature. Google obviously thought so, too, as they just announced their own demographic targeting.
My favorite feature not available elsewhere, though, is day- and date-parting. That’s the ability to run your ads only at certain times of the day or on certain days of the week. Every site I’ve ever worked on saw higher conversion rates at certain times of the day and certain days of the week, so this will be a huge benefit to those running on limited budgets.
The first, most annoying problem was that the site didn’t work in Firefox at all. I wasn’t the only one who found it annoying, either. Complaints were flying all over at Internet speed very early on. It doesn’t help any that Firefox usage is much more prevalent among those with Internet voices than with the Internet population as a whole. And of course, those who don’t use Firefox use a Mac, which didn’t work either. Firefox users already have a filter available that blocks MSN and Overture ads by default (but not Google) so this is just another black eye for MSN.
Turns out, the site doesn’t even work in the latest version of IE — Microsoft’s own product. Those IE faithful who had already downloaded IE7 were forced to find a way to drop back to IE6 if they wanted to get into adCenter.
More frustrating, when I finally got in, was that I couldn’t figure out how to import keywords. I uploaded a simple text file several times, and it kept telling me I was missing the max bid data but never told me where it was supposed to go. I looked and looked for a sample import file, but never could find one. I ultimately just ended up inputting my keywords by hand.
After I got through my list and submitted, I had entered some keywords twice (not surprisingly). I fixed those and entered again. More errors. Another fix, another submit. More errors. I went through that loop four or five times before my small list of 30 or so keywords was finally in. Why didn’t all the errors show up at one time?
Then I waited.
And waited.
And waited.
This morning, two and a half days later, my small list of keywords still had not been approved. Unbelievable. This is one of my biggest problems with Overture, too. Why in the world does it take two days (or more) for me to make a keyword change? When Google makes the change within minutes, taking almost 1,500 times longer really isn’t a good thing.
Around lunch, I see that a rush of leads has come in from MSN. Finally! I hustle on over to adCenter (after opening IE, the only thing I ever have to open it for) and find … nothing. It still says that my keywords are awaiting approval, so I assume the data just hasn’t been updated yet. Several hours later, though, it’s still showing the same thing. Disappointing.
(Another minor annoyance: I have to type my username and password every time I go to the site. There’s no way to remember my info or even for my browser to remember it, because of the way they do the form.)
So, high hopes but a very inauspicious start for adCenter. If they had the network to rival Overture and Google, you could overlook it. But they’re still in a distant third, so they have some real catching up to do if they hope to steal customers from the big two. It’s going to be interesting to watch.
As reported at JenSense two hours ago:
If you are wanting an AdCenter account, yet haven’t received an invite yet, they are having a three hour open call period today where you will be guaranteed a shiny new account. The sign up period has just opened up and will be open until noon PST (3pm EST).
Now, it does frustrate me that they don’t support Firefox. (How do you not support Firefox?!) But that definitely won’t stop me for signing up for an account.
P.S. Jen, I got blocked from leaving a comment on your blog again–the old “questionable content” error like last time.
I was the original high bidder for Blog Herald and came this close to buying it. I’ve heard lots of people ask how it could possibly be worth that much money, and others have thrown out their own theories about what I was going to do to the site, so now that it has sold and closed, I wanted to give my perspective on the sale and why I thought it was worth every bit of $72,000.
One of the things I do is buy sites and renovate them—much like real estate investors who buy properties and rehab them to bring out more of the home’s value. Like them, I’m always looking for good prospects.
Reading through ProBlogger.net on January 12, I came across Darren’s post about a Top 100 Blog for Sale and was immediately interested. I emailed Jeremy right away, and he responded within minutes. We emailed back and forth several times, and he was more than forthcoming with any information I requested—even going so far as to give me the login for the Blog Herald stats so I could poke around for myself.
After doing my initial investigation, I saw great value in several places:
800,000 Page Views/$2,000 Revenue
The site was seeing 800,000 page views and $2,000 in revenue every month, and was growing at a significant pace. The revenue alone made the site worth at least $36,000, and the consistent growth quite possibly warranted an even higher multiple. Additionally, $2,000/month for 800,000 page views seemed low, so there was the possibility of growth there as well.
Small Percentage of Traffic from Search Engines
The site was only getting a small percentage of its traffic from search engines—an amount I felt was incredibly low for a site with that kind of prominence—and I felt like I could easily double that. This was the area of greatest growth potential.
PageRank 7
PageRank is vastly overrated. There are so many other things that go into a page ranking well, but so many see PR as the end-all-be-all of ranking well. It’s not.
That said, I knew from experience that a PR7 was throwing around a lot of weight. Pages like that can make other pages rise and fall significantly with just a single text link, so there was a lot of potential here as well.
So what I was looking at was a site that was very high regarded in the eyes of its readers, blog-industry observers and search engines, and also had room for additional growth. I felt that it was easily worth $36,000 but I wanted to avoid a public auction so I went as high as I was comfortable going: $72,000. At $72K, my absolute worst-case projections showed it returning a 30% ROI after two years based on a very conservative valuation, so I felt good there.
I did end up being the high bidder, and Jeremy announced the following Monday that the auction was over. Then the due diligence process began for me. I needed to be very sure about all the factors that went into my bid before the deal closed.
During the due diligence process, I found some statistics that varied from the ones we had been working with just enough that, in the end, it was enough to make me unsettled about my bid.
Now, statistics are often very subject to interpretation. (That’s why there are so many great quotes about them.) So, not suprisingly, Jeremy and Duncan didn’t fully agree with my analysis. Even so, they did agree to accept the withdrawal of my bid.
Now Duncan has found a new buyer, and it sounds like he got a good price for it. Better yet, it looks like the new buyer will be an even better fit than I would have been. That’s outstanding. I wish them, and b5, the best of success.
When Google launched Google Base back in November, it didn’t take a genius to figure out that they were moving awfully close to eBay territory.
Then when word hit in January that they were launching an online marketplace (albeit only for video), it was obvious that they were then only a short hop away from competing head on with eBay.
Well, now it’s official. Google announced yesterday that they were adding a payment system to Google Base, the last piece of the puzzle:
While Google Base provides data structure and distribution for a wide range of content and information, a subset of items are for sale. To help users more easily purchase and sell Google Base items, we’re planning to enable people to buy items on Google Base using their Google Accounts. … For buyers, this feature will provide a convenient and secure way to purchase Google Base items by credit card. For sellers, this feature integrates transaction processing with Google Base item management.
If your business currently has an eBay presence, this is something you’ll definitely want to investigate and keep an eye on. With Google’s power to drive users to this new service, it will only be a matter days after the full release (which is still upcoming) for them to present a very major threat to eBay’s established base.
For those of you who watch PageRank (PR), Darren’s reporting that an update to the toolbar PR is underway. Remember two things:
You can use this tool to check a page’s current PageRank:
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When I’m buying sites, I especially like ones with bad design—the worse the design, the better. That’s because nothing makes more difference in the success of a site than design. On sites with little more wrong with them than the design, a good renovation usually doubles the site’s peformance at least, and in most cases that I’ve seen, the results are much greater.
So the key to making your site more successful may be the design. If so, I’ve just posted a great new article titled Website Design: Step by Step. I can say it’s great because I didn’t write it. It comes courtesy of Peter Flaschner, the founder and creative dictator over at The Blog Studio. I owe him a huge thanks.
Even though the article was originally focused on blogs specifically, the advice is just as applicable for websites in general. I think you’ll find it a great start if you’re looking a new design for your site.
