This is hilarious! Toyota hired the right firm to put this viral video together. I’d love to find out who did this. This is a great example of a video that’s funny and a video that will be passed around on the Internet and go viral! I’ve already shared on facebook and with a few of my coworkers. Enjoy!
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Wow! Just heard the news that you can manage Google AdWords on your phone now. The AdWords platform can be a bit cumbersome on my browser on a powerful PC. I’m curious to see how it does on the iphone, palm pre, and android. Watch the video below to see more on this. I’ll post a followup post after we’ve had time to test out on the different platforms.
I just visited this site and it had a message specific to my location! I’m sure we’ll start seeing more of this in the near future. Basically they have a script on their site that does a look up of your IP address to find out where you are. The web design company has staff in San Francisco, New York and the UK so the message tells me who’s closest. See below for a screen shot of the message. The problem with this though is that the script won’t always be able to look up the IP address since some networks that you’re in will block this and also some IPs that your ISP will provide you will have a different location.. none the less it worked for this site and is pretty cool!
It’s been awhile since my last post. Been super busy with Emarketed! I’m going to try and start posting regularly again.. we shall see if I’m able to keep it up. It’s tough to blog regularly. Our company blog is handled by one of our talented in-house copywriters who writes on a regular basis for us and other clients we market.
OK, back to the reason for this post. I’ve read about widget ads from Google on Search Engine Land but haven’t see one that I can remember. See the example to the left for the ad from Rail Europe that showed up on a YouTube channel I was watching. So I was able to click through to Rail Europe but when I tried to fill out the form on the ad with London to Paris to find a fare the form went black. The spooky thing about this ad is that I’ve actually been considering a trip to Europe to attend the Future of Web Design Conference. And I’ve been to Rail Europe in the last 30 days to check how much it would be to take the tube over to Paris. Hmmm.. I wonder if my search behavior pulled this ad specifically for me???
I’m on a writing spree! Two blog posts back to back. Hold on to your seats!! 🙂
I was looking for the Emarketed Facebook fan page to post the URL from the last blog I wrote and since to my knowledge there’s no easy way to find the fan page I had to do a search for “emarketed” in the search bar at the top while logged on in Facebook and got the below results from Bing at the bottom of the page. You then have the option of viewing more web results from Bing which I did and found some interesting results where we were coming up… 500 pages to be exact which were links from sites we’ve designed over the years, different social media sites we’re on, and more! I went through about 100 of these and found some interesting links. Found a college site that used one of the sites we designed and listed us as a reference for the information. Found us mentioned on several employee web pages listed as a reference, current and past employees. Also found one of our clients site that was copied and uploaded to a new domain. The site isn’t functioning properly but I’ll have to let our client know. Interesting stuff! I only made it through 100 results but might do some further digging to see where our name is being used.
I’ll have to do another blog post on monitoring your company name/brand soon! We’re currently doing this through Google Alerts but we haven’t been notified of all the ones I just found so I’ll have to look for a more extensive service. One service we’re testing out now is called Trackur. I recently met the founder, Andy Beal, of Trackur at the most recent SES in Chicago and he upgraded my account to a higher level so I can test it out. Thanks Andy! I’m sure his program Trackur will be tracking this blog post. Lets put his program to a test and see if he reads this blog post. (Andy, Please add a comment if you happen to find this blog post – i’m putting your program to the test since I’m sure you’re tracking your name and/or your company name! – Thanks, Matt) I need to get on this and start tracking our name more extensively! I’ll post a review of Trackur after we’ve used it for a month or so.
So I just read a blog post by Matt McGee over at Search Engine Land about local results in Yahoo. So I was inspired to write my own quick blog post. See the screen shot below of what a local search looks like for when I searched for: dentist. Matt points out that Yahoo was late to the game in this space but have made some improvements. Bing and Google both check your IP address when performing a local search while Yahoo actually checks your zip code that is listed in your Yahoo account if you have one.
So I know what you’re thinking. What if I don’t have a Yahoo account. Well I just did another search which is also below after I signed out of my Yahoo account and sure enough they’re also tracking the IP since they new the search was happening in Los Angeles. The IP however is not as accurate as my zip code since the first search result pulled up dentists that were closer. I’m sure Google and Bing will follow suit now!
Make sure and check out the original blog post by Matt McGee that talks about the Yahoo local results.
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- yahoo local results with no yahoo account
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- yahoo local results when signed into yahoo account
For the 2nd time in less than a week Google has added a small text link under the search box. The last advertisement was for the new droid phone. Today Google is promoting free WiFi over the holidays at 47 airports and on Virgin America flights. Now I just booked a flight yesterday to Chicago for SES (Search Engine Strategies Conference) in December and if I would of known about on flight WiFi I would of paid extra to go with Virgin! Hopefully all airlines will adapt to the new technology being used called Gogo Inflight. I wonder if Gogo is related to Google. I think it is safe to assume that Google owns this company or will acquire it soon. Oh but there’s a catch on Virgin. For a limited time it’s free! From today until January 15, 2010. Just like the drug dealer giving you a little taste to get you hooked. Google and Virgin want to give you a little taste of surfing the net at 35,000 feet. I’d definately pay an extra $20 or so to surf the net on longer flights. I don’t think I’d pay much more than this though. We shall see!
So I assume some others will post on this subject matter later today. I’ll post some recaps later. I don’t personally mind the short little text ads that Google’s placing on the home page. It is a form of advertising and I wonder what type of deal Virgin and Google worked out to get this in place. I didn’t see any direct links to Virgin from the pages explaining the deal so they might of done this intentionally since there was some uproar in the community about the link over to Verizon on the droid announcement. My only concern about this is that Google would start opening this up to others and start cluttering up the home page. People have come to appreciate the clutter free search page! Lets keep it this way Google!!
You must be kidding!! Just read a blog post that mentioned TomTom, one of the largest providers of GPS devices, has a $99 iphone app that gives you turn by turn driving directions in the US and Canada. I wonder how many people will be rushing off to itunes to get this GPS app. My Palm Pre has this built in and I’ve used this twice in the last 4 months. TomTom also has different countries available. So I went back to itunes and found that MotionX also provides a similar GPS but it’s only $2.99! And lastly the blog post that mentioned this said that Google is now offering this service FREE on all new android phones! Here we go again, Google giving it away free! News of this has brought the stocks of TomTom and Garmin down steeply. Check out more about this here with a very thorough blog post covering how Google has gotten into the map building business and the businesses of giving it away free.. or less than free. 🙂
Wow! Just saw GoDaddy deal for $15 per month for unlimited space, unlimited bandwidth, and unlimited domains. You could host hundreds of sites for $15 a month. I’ve seen some pretty good deals out there but this takes the cake. Oh wait, Host Gator is also one I’ve used and they have a similar plan for $8. I’ve been very happy with Host Gator, from reliability to support they’ve been great! Their plan comes with your own toll free number which includes 100 free minutes! Both the GoDaddy and Host Gator plan comes with a free SSL cert in case you need to have a certificate for ecommerce or other secure transactions. For a control panel I’d recommend cpanel which Host Gator provides. It’s much easier to use. The Go Daddy panel can be difficult and limited in what you can do. Both come loaded with plenty of software so you should be good to go. My favorite of course being WordPress, a great blogging platform! Both plans also come with a credit to Google Adwords in case you’d like to market your new site through pay per click advertising. Host Gator seems to be a step ahead with this one as well by offering $50 while GoDaddy offers a $25 credit. GoDaddy makes up for this though with a $25 credit to facebook (sorry facebook! wordpress wouldn’t allow me for some reason to link to you). Host Gator offers a 45 day money back guarantee while GoDaddy does not, but both are cheap and you can go month to month. Drum roll please….. dndndndndnd And the winner for the affordable web hosting award goes to HOST GATOR!! Good job Host Gator!! They also provide green web hosting that are powered and cooled by wind power in the state of Texas!! They also have a fall special so signup before Nov 1st to receive 20% off your order. And I have no affiliation with them I swear! Just a happy web hoster!
WEB + MARKETING 
Good example of an active blog
Just read a blog post by Tim Ferriss, the author of the 4 hour work week, and was blown away at how active his blog is! I know he gets a ton of traffic due to the fact that he has a best seller out but I was still surprised by this blog post. He had close to 600 people that retweeted this blog post and close to 200 comments. If you scroll through the post you’ll see Tim actively responds to people in the comments section. In my comment I ask Tim if it’s really him and not one of his many assistants. Let’s see if Tim responds to my comment or allows my comment. At one point I heard or read that Tim has over 50 personal assistants.