A couple clips from yesterday’s parade on the Boston Offline YouTube channel.

Youtube:

Youtube:

Technorati Tags: puerto rican parade, youtube

As of this morning, Boston Offline now has a YouTube channel which can be seen at http://youtube.com/BostonOfflinedotcom.  This is a great extension of the concept behind the photo gallery, to capture an essence of the city’s many ethnic events. Expect video clips from the Puerto Rican parade later today and the Dominican and Caribbean parades and Hip Hop Festival in coming weeks.

Technorati Tags: youtube, boston videos

Recently I put together a 10 Website Mistakes to Avoid for the Small Business Owner for the company’s May business mixer.   Here’s a copy:

1.      Not having a website!

In this era of technology, not having a website may make your business (and you) seem amateurish.  Some people believe if you are not on the web, then you are not serious about your business.

 

2.      Letting the kid down the street design your site

If you are going to invest in a website, get it professionally done.  A poorly designed website reflects poorly on your business.

 

3.      Not making your website user friendly

Is your website easy to navigate?  Can visitors find what they are looking for quickly?  Do you have any broken links? A frustrated visitor is a potential customer who will turn elsewhere to satisfy their needs. 

 

4.      Not making it search engine friendly

Millions of people (including you) search for products and services on popular search engines such as Google and Yahoo.  If your competitor ranks #2 for “babysitting services Boston” and you rank #200, your competitor will get more traffic…and more clients.

 

(more…)

Just installed Snap Shots, a nice little feature I’ve seen popping up more frequently in the blog world lately.   I like to link out a lot so this now gives you a preview of said links.  For example, if you pass your mouse over -> BostonOffline.com, you should see a “snapshot” of the homepage. This -> Boston Offline Media Blog should give you a snapshot of the very page you’re looking at!

Feel free to give feedback on whether you find this useful or a pain in the ass.

Since people just love reading boring documents it’s good practice to employ privacy policies, BostonOffline.com now has its very own privacy policy which can be found in the footer of most top level pages.

Technorati Tags: privacy policy, webmaster

Before you look up canonical on thefreedictionary.com, let me give you a visual on what this means and why it is no good for search engines and the overworked webmaster.
This is a recent log snapshot from one of my stat trackers, Webalizer:

If you look at #2 and #5 , you will see they are the same URL, just one has the www and the other doesn’t.  Same goes for #9 and #12. (#4 and #10 are the same but that’s not the same issue).

As to why this is no good for search engines, I will refer to Google’s Matt Cutts, SEOMoz and 14th Colony who explain it better than I ever could.

Why this is no good for the overworked webmaster (i.e. me) is it makes it harder to quickly gauge how many hits a page gets.  I have to add the hits of #9 and #12 to see how many hits the E and E Club page gets.  While I don’t mind hard work, I hate unnecessary work.  Thankfully, this problem should be gone in the near future after a little re-coding.  For all webmasters, this is something you should check out for your site too!

Technorati Tags: canonicalization, seo, sem, 302, google, web optimization, web traffic

As mentioned earlier, the sitemap is now up.  The sitemap will be updated immediately whenever a new page is added or an old page is deleted/moved.

If you have a particular page bookmarked and it’s deleted, don’t worry, the sitemap will appear automatically.  No more ugly “Page can not be displayed errors” !

Technorati Tags: sitemap, web navigation, 404

Here are some notes I took from the Digital Media workshop (see previous post).

I came 20 minutes into the presentation given by Chris Charron due to tough parking around the building.  It was based upon 7 rules.  In order they are:

1. Pick the right spot: Device, Platform, Aggregation, Programming or Marketing
2. All roads lead to advertising
3. Single function devices-and focused simplicity-rule
4. Enable network value creation (examples: kiva.com, ether.com)
5. Give up control-to users (example: meetup.com)
6. Leverage users for content creation and marketing (examples: tripconnect.com, weedshare.com)
7. User experience is the best sustainable competitive advantage

Other notes: (more…)

Over the next three days I will give a daily report about the workshops I attend at Entrepreneurship Week at Northeastern: Digital Media and Web 2.0 on Tuesday, the Networking Event on Wednesday and Raising Money on Thursday.

Technorati Tags: entrepreneur, entrepreneurship

My web host (thee of the recent 5 hr outtage) offers a $50 Overture (Yahoo’s Search Marketing system a la Google Adwords) credit to every hosting account. After ignoring it for a year and some change, I took them up on the offer and clicked their promotion link to see if the folks at Sunnyvale could serve me up some more hits.

Here’s a step by step recap:

I saw the $50 credit noted on the Yahoo page that opened up from the link so I’m good to go. First I chose to set it up on my own, Self Serve. The other option is Assisted Setup, which partially reads as follows: “Our specialists will build a campaign that’s customized to your budget and goals. They will select relevant keywords, write effective ads and determine bid amounts within your budget. You’ll receive a proposed campaign in 2 to 5 business days, and a specialist will contact you to discuss it.” This costs $149. Or as they prefer to show it: $199 $149 (The $50 markdown does not take the credit into account. The credit would be applied to the setup fee, making the final price $99)

As always be careful of fineprint:
“There is a minimum bid requirement of $0.10 per click through.” Hmm, not as Google Adwords friendly but that’s still a ceiling of 500 free clicks.

On to Step 1. Target Customers by Geographic Location
I chose Specific Regions and Target by DMA(r) or City and Surrounding Area. I had no idea what DMA was so after several Google searches which mostly turned up Direct Memory Access I found out that it was Nielson’s defintion of a television market: a Designated Market Area. I then saw that DMA was clearly defined at the bottom of the SAME signup page I was on. Moral of the story: Read the whole page so you don’t feel like a fool minutes later.

I then chose Massachusetts for State/Province/Territory and “Boston (Massachusetts,New Hampshire,Vermont)” for City. The wording can be misleading because you are not selecting a city but a much wider area.

I went back and forth betwen using this or the Zip Code option. I decided to use the former option since the website does get hits from a lot of areas in MA but out of Boston. If I eventually see a lot of “1:00″ Yahoo clicks from outside I will switch to Zip Code option for a smaller coverage area. “1:00″ clicks are when someone visits your site and leaves right away. It’s like a drive-by, the visitor gets out of there as fast as they can.

Step 2. Choose Keywords Related to Your Business
I didn’t find much success in the Find Keyword feature so I entered the most searched for keywords we have in Google Adwords.

Step 3. Tell Us How Much You’d Like To Spend
I’d like to spend zero but as that’s not possible, I chose the the minimum 10 cents per click and $1 a day spending limit. Again, fine print: “**Please note that you may be charged up to 10% above your account daily spending limit. However, charges that exceed your account daily spending limit by more than 10% may be eligible for a refund.”

Step 4. Create Your Ad
Pretty similar to Google except for a few differences.
A. Your Title can be 40 characters instead of 25 (stingy Google!)
B. You have 70 characters for Description. Yes that’s the same as Google except the G-men force you to break your description into two lines of 35.
C. They don’t allow you to have a seperate Display URL and Destination URL.

Step 5. Review and Activate Your Ad
First was setting up your username, password, email, etc. Then clicking the Activate Now button.

After thoroughly reading and re-reading their Terms of Service (do you really believe that?) I put in my business’ contact information and proceeded onto the billing section where I ran into a slight problem. The $50 credit did not show up!

I tried calling their number to no avail. I didn’t want to sign up and then have to call them later to work out the $50 credit so I decided to put the kibosh on it and try later. To be continued…

Technorati Tags: yahoo search, yahoo, search marketing, overture, google, google adwords, lunarpages, web hosting, pay per click, ppc