The comments you leave on a website — are they garbage or a gold mine? Disqus says comments are more popular than you might think and has big plans to make money off them. Read more at paidContent »
In the new app economy, organizations no longer own all the data they need to make accurate business decisions. This loss of control requires data marketplaces and data syndication models that few enterprises are currently prepared for. Apigee’s Anant Jhingran looks at three important steps that companies need to take to succeed in the app economy. Read more »
The iPhone 5 is a few weeks old but according to one mobile advertiser, it’s already getting more mobile web traffic from the iPhone 5 versus Samsung’s Galaxy S III, which launched in June. There’s still an Android win here if you look deep enough. Read more »
Thanks to more traffic that can be sent via CDNs and cached at the edge, the shape of the Internet is changing. Instead of data traveling back and forth over long-haul pipes, today’s Internet looks like streams of data flowing to reservoirs at the edge. Read more »
These days, WordPress acts more like a development framework or a PaaS (Platform as a Service), says WooThemes CEO Adii Pienaar. And in the last year, several new services have sprung up to help make WordPress a platform in the truest sense of the word. Read more »
Toronto-based Polar Mobile, which provides a digital media distribution platform powering the apps of some of the biggest media companies in the world, including Conde Nast, Sports Illustrated and The Wall Street Journal, announced a new $6 million funding round on Monday. Read more »
Everyone knows about Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but did you know December 21 will be a big online traffic day next year? Here, courtesy of data center power Equinix, are other big data, big web traffic dates to prep for, in chronological order. Read more »
The uptake of the iOS 5 update for Apple customers was fast and far-reaching. But what did that look like to the ISPs who provide the bandwidth for Apple customers to update? Here’s a chart that shows what Sonic.net saw. Read more »
Major Internet sites like Facebook, Twitter, Apple.com, Best Buy and Buy.com saw an outage this afternoon, as Akamai faced DNS-related issues. For about an hour Monday, those issues slowed down some Akamai sites, while keeping users from accessing others altogether. Read more »
Web discovery engine StumbleUpon is now the biggest traffic driver among social media websites in the US, according to global web analytics service StatCounter. The company unseated Facebook at the top during June 2011 .The ten-year-old StumbleUpon has been working diligently at its comeback since 2009. Read more »
AdMob, the mobile advertising network, has released its latest metrics report (PDF), which looks at trends for the year. In 2009, one of those would be 150 percent growth for iPhone OS devices on AdMob’s network, with the greatest growth for the iPhone and iPod touch […] Read more »
Yesterday, I read the Unconventional Guide to the Social Web, and although I found a lot of useful information in it, one thing has stuck with me since reading it. Your blog is your mothership. Don’t neglect it for lesser tools.
This is an important thing to keep in mind when marketing your business online. There are tons of ways to build a web presence, including a variety of social media and networking sites, but nothing is as important as your blog.
Maintained correctly, your blog is the one tool that will get you the most traffic, and it’s the tool over which you have the most control. If you set out with the intention of posting three to five times per week, within a year, you will begin seeing significant activity around your site. Within two to three years, you could easily be an authority in your particular niche.
But, how can you make sure that you don’t neglect your blog (or mothership)?
#1 Spend time there.
Visit your site or blog frequently (ideally, several times per day). This helps you stay connected with your vision for your business, and it also helps you stay in tune with the usability of your site, as well as find ways to improve it.
#2 Keep it updated.
It’s very easy to allow a month to go by without posting a single blog entry. Naturally, the frequency of your posts will depend on a number of factors, most important being your own goals for your site, but you should post on a regular and consistent schedule so that your site content remains fresh.
#3 Engage your audience.
Ask questions, make thought-provoking posts, and most importantly, monitor the comments on your blog. If someone replies to one of your posts, take the time to respond, and if you really want to impress the person, email him or her with a thoughtful “thank you for following” message. Read more »
