Friday, April 29, 2011

Rhythmic Marketing Strategies for Businesses with Seasonal Demand


A seasonal business can be rewarding for those who have the ingenuity and drive to see it through, even with its numerous pitfalls that can lead to its downfall. Amazingly productive only during a certain time of the year, seasonal businesses quickly lose their profit-generating capabilities during a period called the off-season. Unfortunately, off-season periods for a seasonal business can encompass most of the year leaving a very small margin for the moneymaking process.
In order to combat the dreaded period of slow income, seasonal business owners have to continuously innovate and market their products and services. This entails constant promotion and the use of a number of techniques that will help turn a profit when times are tough. It also calls for strategic planning and timely intervention, knowing when to push a sale and when to hold off or where to allocate funds to produce the greatest amount of positive change.

Rhythmic Marketing Strategies for Businesses with Seasonal Demand | Liz Strauss at Successful Blog

How do we report a problem with our search results listings?


problem with search results, search results problems, fix google listings

How can an out-of-town company compete with local competition?


google local, google retail listings for multiple locations

Tuesday, April 26, 2011

How is Google Public DNS data used?


user dns, user privacy, user tracking

Is there an advantage to using rel="canonical" over a 301 redirect?



301 redirects, rel=canonical tags

Friday, April 22, 2011

PSN Down: Hackers Deny Involvement

As the web recovers from Amazon’s 24-hour collapse of its cloud computing business — an outage that took popular services like HootSuite, Reddit and Foursquare down with it — Sony reported Friday morning that its PlayStation Network is down. Some suspect hacktivist organization Anonymous is responsible.

Sony was targeted by Anonymous after it filed a lawsuit againstGeorge Hotz, a 21-year-old hacker who unlocked the PlayStation 3′s operating system. In Sony’s original blog post about Friday’s outage, the company mentioned that an “outside party” might be responsible. That post has since been changed.

A recent post on the Anonymous’s Facebook Page seems to take credit for the outage.


PSN Down: Hackers Deny Involvement

Friday, April 15, 2011

Google Tags


Last year, we introduced our trial for Google Tags, a way for businesses to highlight their organic Google Places listing with a yellow tag that showcases offers, photos, videos, menu, and reservations for a flat monthly fee.

Since that experiment began, tens of thousands of businesses have used Tags to help potential customers make easier, more informed decisions when searching. Throughout this period, we monitored Tags closely to learn more about our users' business needs and how they used the product.

We’ve made a decision to shift our efforts toward other present and future product offerings for local businesses, and will be discontinuing this trial. To that end, we’ve now halted new signups and will be working with existing participating businesses over the coming weeks to help them meet their marketing needs with other Google products where possible.

Google LatLong: An Update on Tags

Not Another Group-Buying Site - CouponFactory Launches Digital Coupon Management Platform

CouponFactory is a platform that gives brands and small businesses a simple way to create coupons. The service includes an easy-to-use web interface , customer data collection, no set-up fees, detailed digital coupon analytics, coupon fraud control, as well as mobile, web and social embed options. The service also lets companies place their coupon widget wherever they choose.

Not Another Group-Buying Site - CouponFactory Launches Coupon Platform - NYTimes.com

Monday, April 11, 2011

Do URL shorteners pass anchor text?


301, url shorteners, page rank flow, anchor text flow thru

High-quality sites algorithm goes global, incorporates user feedback

Over a month ago we introduced an algorithmic improvement designed to help people
find more high-quality sites in search. Since then we’ve gotten a lot of positive responses about the change: searchers are finding better results, and many great publishers are getting more traffic.

Today we’ve rolled out this improvement globally to all English-language Google users, and we’ve also incorporated new user feedback signals to help people find better search results. In some high-confidence situations, we are beginning to incorporate data about the sites that users blockinto our algorithms. In addition, this change also goes deeper into the “long tail” of low-quality websites to return higher-quality results where the algorithm might not have been able to make an assessment before. The impact of these new signals is smaller in scope than the original change: about 2% of U.S. queries are affected by a reasonable amount, compared with almost 12% of U.S. queries for the original change.

MORE..............
Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: High-quality sites algorithm goes global, incorporates user feedback

Rockfish Tool Churns Out Digital Coupons for Brands - Digital - Advertising Age


They may not be glamorous, but coupons drive a huge amount of the social-media buzz behind packaged-goods brands. Now digital agency Rockfish Interactive is looking to make it easier for brands to put their own coupons into that digital conversation everywhere from blogs to Facebook using a do-it-yourself coupon creation and analytics engine called Coupon Factory.
The tool, which Rockfish Chief Marketing Officer Dave Knox likens to Google AdWords for digital couponing, allows marketers to create their own digital, print-at-home coupons or fully digital versions that can be scanned from a smartphone at checkout or loaded directly into a shopper loyalty account.
The initiative comes from Rockfish Labs, the new-business incubator of the agency, based in Rogers, Ark., with offices in or near Dallas, San Francisco and Cincinnati.
Rockfish Tool Churns Out Digital Coupons for Brands | Digital - Advertising Age

Not another group-buying site : CouponFactory launches coupon platform

Image representing VentureBeat as depicted in ...
Rockfish, a company that has its fingers in digital consultancy and business incubation, announced today it has launched CouponFactory, a couponing software platform for businesses.

Not another group-buying site: CouponFactory launches coupon platform | VentureBeat

Rockfish Tool Churns Out Digital Coupons for Brands - Digital Advertising

Image representing Rockfish Interactive as dep...

They may not be glamorous, but coupons drive a huge amount of the social-media buzz behind packaged-goods brands. Now digital agency Rockfish Interactive is looking to make it easier for brands to put their own coupons into that digital conversation everywhere from blogs to Facebook using a do-it-yourself coupon creation and analytics engine called Coupon Factory.
The tool, which Rockfish Chief Marketing Officer Dave Knox likens to Google AdWords for digital couponing, allows marketers to create their own digital, print-at-home coupons or fully digital versions that can be scanned from a smartphone at checkout or loaded directly into a shopper loyalty account.
The initiative comes from Rockfish Labs, the new-business incubator of the agency, based in Rogers, Ark., with offices in or near Dallas, San Francisco and Cincinnati.

Rockfish Tool Churns Out Digital Coupons for Brands | Digital - Advertising Age

Friday, April 08, 2011

Homeland Security to issue terror alerts via Facebook, Twitter


The Department of Homeland Security plans to use Facebook and Twitter to warn citizens about threats with its new National Terrorism Advisory System, set to launch on April 27, 2011. The social networks won’t always be used, but they will play a role when the US government deems it necessary.
The messages will likely be similar to the emergency broadcast system warnings that go out over TV and radio. The US government might as well be take leverage Facebook and Twitter given that people are on them all day long.

Homeland Security to issue terror alerts via Facebook, Twitter | ZDNet