Blogging

I think it was back in 2010 when I met up with an old high school classmate. Let’s call her “T,” and she was in between marketing jobs. I reached out to her because we had an opening for a CMO at my old engineering firm and thought she would be great for it. She had recently worked on some really cool NGO campaigns and I liked her forward thinking. I eventually convinced her to throw her hat in the ring for the CMO gig but that’s not the most important thing I learned from our get together. ...

Trends come and go in the blink of an eye these days. Usually some market disrupter comes along and changes the game with a shiny new thing. Sometimes it’s a service or product that gets shutdown. That’s exactly what happened here. This is the story of Google Reader and the rise of Social Sharing. Before Social Sharing was the “thing”, RSS was the life blood of blogging. Many bloggers (myself included) reached thousands of RSS feed readers daily. I had over 1,000 RSS readers during my heyday but over the past few years I watched that number dwindle to maybe 12 people now. What happened? Some of that is because my posting frequency went from a regular daily/weekly cadence to not posting anything for months, and some of it was that I didn’t catch the Social Sharing wave. ...

Long time readers know that I’ve wrestled with different CMS engines on this site. I started with Wordpress, then switched to Expression Engine, and then back to Wordpress. Along the way I tried Text Pattern and even Posterous. Expression Engine and Text Pattern are just plain terrible and I wouldn’t recommend them. Wordpress is a great entry level CMS and it’s great for non-technical people. In minutes you can have yourdomain.com/blog via your host or through wordpress.com. Posterous was also a favorite of mine. The ease of posting via email made me fall in love with it. Too bad they sold it to Twitter and Twitter killed it. Damn you Twitter! ...

I posted about the power of Data Mining when analyzing your blog’s traffic and how to maximize your Google Adword advertising relative to your Adsense earnings, but I forgot to mention one critical thing! Search Engine Optimization (SEO)! SEO is just a process to organize your blog, or website, in such a way that you’ll end up at the top when ever an Internet user searches for something that is relative to your site. If you advertise your blog using a Pay Per Click method, like Google Adwords, then being ranked at the top of searches is really important as Ms. Danielle points out! It won’t come as a shock to readers of this blog that Data Mining can really help with your SEO! Techniques like associative analysis and cluster data mining are great ways to discover who’s clicking what on your site. Associative analysis is used to estimate the probability of whether a person will purchase a product given that they own a particular product or group of products. Cluster data mining, on the other hand, can identify the profile or group of customers that are associated with a particular type of Web site [via Data Mining and Business Productivity, by Stephan Kudyba]. These two techniques are critical if you want to maximize any e-business! Now here’s the caveat, before you can start data mining your site, you spend a few months gathering website statistics and data. However, this doesn’t preclude your ability to start optimizing your website for better web searching. Here are a 5 tips that I’ve been using that have had a great traffic impact in my blog’s short life. 5 SEO Tips: ...