Mymotech

One of the ways that you can market your company or product is to place well timed comments on a blog. There are varying degrees of effectiveness, the low end being comment spam (boo) and the high end being what I am about to explain here.

I created a post on Dec. 22nd called Technorati Addiction. In the post I mentioned two different products, Technorati and the Perfomancing for Firefox blogging extension. I got two comments on that post. One was from David Sifry and one was from a guy names Manish. Here is where all the similarities end. Let’s take a look at these one at a time.

Mr. Sifry’s comment

Hey, glad you’re finding Technorati useful! We’re working really hard to make a tool that’s useful to you…

Please send us feedback about how we could serve you better! You can also reach me at dsifry AT technorati DOT com…

Dave

Well, wasn’t that nice. Dave Sifry found my blog because I posted about his company, Technorati. He then commented that he was glad that I was using his product and then invited my feedback and left a method for further communication.

Now on to Mr Manish’s Comment

Performancing is a nice little add-in. For a much more advanced blog editor, check out RocketPost:

I designed it.

Note: I removed a link from this comment before I approved it.
In looking at this comment what do we see. Mr Manish pseudo-compliments the Performancing extension, and then proceeds to tell me that if I want to play in the big leagues check out his product, RocketPost. He designed it. Which I guess is supposed to make me feel that I can trust him. So what’s the problem? In this comment there is no conversation. Manish makes a statement and then leaves (a statement that manages to belittle me in the process). And in the process tries to leave a link, so that any other visitor to this page will be able to go right to RocketPost and buy their product. The funny thing is this. RocketPost may well be a useful and wonderful product. It may be a much more awesome tool than Performancing for Firefox, but I will probably never try it. BUT since I am not one to hold a grudge and since I have mentioned Performancing a bunch of times in this post which means that maybe Manish will be back, here is what you could have said to be a more effective blog marketer.

I have been hearing a lot about the Performancing extension these days. I am going to give it a try. I designed a similar tool called RocketPost. I would encourage you to check it out and let me know what you think of it. We are always looking for ways to improve it and make it a better product. You can contact me at manish AT rocketpostDOT com.

So there you have it. And the moral of the story, I have already begun working on a way to improve Technorati and add functionality that will make it cooler than it already is. Watch this Space. :)

Technorati tags: Technorati Blogging Marketing Performancing

One more post. dot dot dot.

Uhhh, hello.

If this works then the U2 concert post will be relegated to the archives and my CSS troubles with IE will be over at least on my main page. And since the majority of internet users use IE one of my most glaring usability issues will have solved itself without my lifting a finger. Of course, this will make the December archives a usability nightmare, but I am willing to live with that for now. Until I learn something about CSS. More than text decorations I mean. Ok, I gotta go post this and go check.

Update: Hurray. Problem badly solved. IE works for the main page, and I promise to never put large images on my homepage again.

I have never been a fan of Technorati. It always seemed so “too cool” for me. But I messed with it a little bit over the last couple of days. I registered my self, registered my blog, dinked around with their pinging service, searched around for posts where I could find myself, and other stuff like that. Wonder of wonders I had 3 whole visitors today from Technorati. Suddenly I am interested. Today I had about 18 visits to my site. Now keep in mind that Google analytics is using a first party cookie so that means that I have pretty good tracking of visitors versus visits. SO that means that I probably accounted for 3 or 4 of my visits today. Now Technorati referrals take on more importance because of their large percentage of visits compared to the overall number somewhere around 21%.

I also had one direct visit from Delhi, India. A direct visit is a visit that was initiated with no referrer. ie the URL was typed in, it was clicked in an email, or selected from a bookmark. So whoever you are from Delhi, welcome. I love web analytics. It helps me be mindful of the fact that there is always a very broad diversity of people on the net. They all have different motivations and reasons for coming to a site, and once they come who knows if they will ever come back again. I hope so, but mostly so that I can have more than 18 visits tomorrow.

NOTE: this post was created with the Performancing for Firefox extension.

Well, I haven’t even come close, but I thought it worth reporting that my attempts to monetize this blog have met with a small gram of success. Obviously, it is not time to quit the day job, but it’s a start and it feels great.

I got turned on to Performancing when Aaron Wall bought Threadwatch from Nick Wilson so that he could spend all his time with Performancing. And these guys have gone and done a very nice thing indeed.
They have created a Firefox extension that allows you to blog to any number of blogs that you own within a split screen. But wait there’s more…

They have also built in some cool functionality such as drag and drop text from the page you are on like so,

WordPress.com and the full version of WordPress are configured to strip out certain HTML tags and attributes when anyone but an admin posts. That means WordPress.com users can’t use inline CSS. The option under Settings, “User CSS for content style,” should be turned off for blogging on WordPress.com.

This will wreak some havoc with your paragraphs when you use the align buttons because the div tags don’t get closed where you expect. You can switch to the HTML editor (< A >) to close the div tags manually.

For anyone who blogs a lot or blogs on multiple blogs this will defintely save time.

I am going to post on topics that matter to me that are business related I think. Not that I will be more professional but rather I will be more prolific I hope.

What I am reading:

• SEO Book
• Matt Cutts
• SEOmoz
• Pure Evil

Wow, Here I am with a new blog. My last one died a slow painful death. But this one I promise I will take care of better. Including adding some links, and pointing out little foibles about people I meet along life’s journey. This is gonna be great.

I am going to try to figure out what my blog should be about. Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm…