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While a large portion of businesses are getting online and joining the rush to Twitter, its important to do so with a strategy. While coming up with a social media marketing plan is something that is very unique to every business, one aspect that is watched throughout the campaign is you must understand what information you are putting out there and what information your competitors are placing on Twitter themselves. A quick search of Twitter for your competitors can result in tracking down they're vendors, up-coming projects, customer service issues, etc. These are things to certainly keep in mind when running your own Twitter campaign or having it managed for you. For fun, go find a competitor on Twitter, I'll bet you'll be surprised how much you can figure out about them by they're follower/following lists! |
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Sunday, February 28th, 2010 | 0 Comments |
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The quick and easy way to get traffic to your website is to simply pay for it. Today, a staple of any online marketing campaign includes Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising. Whether its to promote a new company launch, a new product or target potential buyers during peak seasons, PPC campaigns can be very successful. When managing your campaign, you will want to ultimately track your conversions on this paid traffic. Sure you can buy keywords from Google at an average rate of $2 per click, but how many visitors do you convert? 20 percent? 10 percent? The average conversion rate is 3-4 percent for targeted ad's. At this rate a new customer could cost you $50 in advertising. Depending on the type of business this may be affordable or drain the profit levels for that customer.
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Wednesday, January 27th, 2010 | 0 Comments |
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-Pulled from The Huffingtonpost.com (Full story here)
The recent hack of the website RockYou exposed around 32 million user passwords, which data security firm Imperva has analyzed to create a list of the worst passwords. Want to know what terms to avoid? Here are the top ten most commonly used passwords: 1. 123456 2. 12345 3. 123456789 4. Password 5. iloveyou 6. princess 7. rockyou 8. 1234567 9. 12345678 10. abc123 An attack that exposed 10,000 Hotmail, MSN and Live.com passwords yielded similar findings. According to a researcher who examined the leaked data, "123456" was the most frequently used password, appearing 64 times in total. Forty-two percent of the passwords used lowercase letters from "a to z"; only 6 percent mixed alpha-numeric and other characters. Many of the top 20 passwords used were Spanish names, such as Alejandra and Alberto, suggesting that the victims were in Spanish-speaking communities. Nearly 2,000 of the passwords were only six characters long. The longest password was 30 characters -- lafaroleratropezoooooooooooooo.
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Friday, January 22nd, 2010 | 0 Comments |
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We came across an interesting customer this morning who had more than 1000 pages of static html. As we started talking we found that this was over the timespan of 10 years that this had grown. That obviously breaks down to 100 pages, which depending on your organization may sound like a lot or a little. Well with the same math, that breaks down to 2 pages (1.9 technically) a week. As we work to build a migration strategy to convert these pages, it's something to consider when planning out your own website. How fast will it grow? How often will I be updating its content? And depending on how you build it, how often will I be re-skinning (redesigning) the site? |
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Friday, January 8th, 2010 | 0 Comments |
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Ever wonder how many viewers can see your full site without scrolling? Well Google has released a new product called Browser Size from its Google Labs department. This application overlays a map of different screen resolutions onto your site showing your the percentage of typical users and what they will see without scrolling. The data used to generate the viewing percentages is from all visits to Google's home page so its quite accurate. To test your site, simply go to http://browsersize.googlelabs.com/ and type in your URL at the top.
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Thursday, December 31st, 2009 | 0 Comments |
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If you've got a website, chances are your trying to attract new visitors. A traditional method outside of natural SEO is to use Google Adwords to help spur a spike in traffic. A more affordable, complimentary strategy may be to advertise on local and regional blogs. These authors are almost always looking for ways to recoup a little bit of investment on their time. Try emailing the sites owner or contact your web firm to help with negotiating rates and strategies! |
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Saturday, December 26th, 2009 | 0 Comments |
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FoxyCart is a product we’ve been using quite a bit lately for small to medium sized e-commerce sites. It’s been a great product that allows us to setup a fully functional online store/shopping cart with much less effort than a custom coded solution or customizing an existing product. For a small fee, ($15/month) Foxycart handles all aspects of e-commerce for you. Foxycart supports Paypal Payments Pro, Authorize.Net and a slew of other solid payment gateways. The shipping modules are complete with support for live shipping rates from Fedex, UPS and flat rate/freight. For the two clients we are rolling out on Foxycart, this has been a perfect separation of functionality of the catalog and convenience of the shopping cart. It allowed us to write extensive logic to support the clients robust needs, without ever having to think about the shopping cart. This allowed the client to get a product that met they’re needs perfectly at a much lower cost than a custom solution. As the development of this project continues, they are continually adding more functionality. Soon to come were told is support for dynamic freight shipping rates.
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Saturday, November 7th, 2009 | 0 Comments |
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We have seen quite a few outages as far as customers go over the last two days who are on Qwest. If you are a customer on Qwest, please contact them if you are having any issues. |
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Thursday, October 29th, 2009 | 0 Comments |
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Lately we have been receiving a lot of complaints on increased spam in email boxes so we thought now would be a great time to give some suggestions to minimize the spam hit. If you do not have a spam assassin on your email account already talk to your hosting provider about getting one. This will drastically help cut down the unwanted emails in your inbox. Another key thing to do in preventing spam is to remove all email links off of your website. These mail to links cause a massive amount of spam and this is because spam bots crawl your site looking for those links and will hit them over and over again. A good thing to do is to remove that mail to link and replace it with an image of your email address or even better, add a contact form. Now, a contact form will not solve all of your problems. New spam bots have come out that are now attacking these a bit more than they use to. A great way to avoid this issue is to add a captcha field. Many of you have probably seen the little boxes with a word and some numbers that you have to fill out before continuing a form. This is what a captcha is and it will cut down your spam significantly. For more tips visit www.oldtownmediainc.com |
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Wednesday, September 30th, 2009 | 0 Comments |
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Many of our customers come to us looking to work with them on Google Adword campaigns. While Adword campaigns provide great traffic, they are largely unsustainable in the long run as a primary source of traffic. With common Fort Collins keywords going for $1-$10 a click, a business cannot sustain itself on those costs. Keywords can run as high as $45+ PER CLICK! Take, "mesothelioma attorneys san diego" which goes for a whopping $46.11 per click. A better strategy would be to use Adword campaigns to generate some buzz and traffic while growing your sites ranking naturally through better content, coding and structure. This will allow you to minimize the cost-per-click charges monthly obtaining new customers. After all, you paid $3 or $4 to get the customer to your website, whats your conversion rate on each visitor to your site? |
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Monday, August 31st, 2009 | 0 Comments |
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With Apple’s iPhone rapid acceleration as the phone of choice for new consumers and business professionals, its clear there’s a market for these users. In a report dated April 2009 by Admob, iPhones are now generating 43% of all mobile web page requests, compared to Microsoft’s SmartPhone taking 5% of the share. This changes the dynamics a bit for supporting these new users on your web site. While the iPhone does a great job of displaying normal web pages, it does not have the ability to display sites built in Adobe’s Flash product. This may seem trivial until you actually go to a web page like Applebees.com that is built in Flash and try to lookup store hours and information on the road. It cannot be done. With such a large amount of traffic with people on the go and such a great device in their hand, it only makes sense to create an iPhone specific site for these users. This allows your impulse customers walking down the street, to shop on your site, gain access to hours, contact information and maps. Locally, therentalhotspot.com has implemented an iPhone site to cater to the mobile user base of CSU. Within three months of implementation, the iPhone site accounts for nearly %25 of the sites overall traffic. |
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Wednesday, July 29th, 2009 | 0 Comments |
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This morning around 8am Mtn time we found a routing issue on Verizon's network for customers in the North East Area. It appears to be a hand off issue with Level3 but we are sure. Hopefully this will be resolved quickly! |
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Wednesday, July 8th, 2009 | 0 Comments |
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Googles set to launch its new Chrome Operating System in mid-2010. It appears to be a lightweight OS that will be more of a web-centric OS. This seems to be a pretty decent time to enter the netbook arena with Microsoft stuck still selling the books with Windows XP as opposed to Vista. Go Google! |
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Wednesday, July 8th, 2009 | 0 Comments |
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Looks like Apple has released the iPhone 3.0 upgrade around 1pm Mountain time. This should bring some much needed fixes to the iPhone and close the wish-list gap.
As with the 2.0 release, the activation servers at ATT/Apple seem to be pegged today so it looks like when the download finishes, you will have to wait your turn to update! |
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Wednesday, June 17th, 2009 | 0 Comments |
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When the iPhone 3.0 software release was announced last week one new feature included is the ability to tether your iPhone to your laptop and use it as a modem. This feature will not be active for US customers at the time of release until ATT can wrap up their software development to support the new hardware. Ill post some more info once I hear from ATT on a release date. |
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Monday, June 15th, 2009 | 0 Comments |
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Our new site has gone live Thursday, June 4th. What do you guys think? |
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Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009 | 2 Comments |
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a great beta product from Adobe on testing browser compatibility. https://browserlab.adobe.com/index.html |
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Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009 | 0 Comments |
Fort Collins/Colorado
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Marketing
Press Release
Web Design
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A competitive advantage with Twitter
SEO - How much are you really paying?
Top 10 Passwords exposed
Why should I database drive my website?
