(Books, blog posts, breakfast cereals, whatever).



I was talking to someone yesterday about naming books, and I realized that there are three useful schools of thought here.



You can pick a completely descriptive, generic, boring name that precisely describes what's inside. Like "Shredded Wheat" or "12 Ways to Get Traffic to Your Blog" or "Installing Linux on the 8088 Platform in 24 Hours". The advantage of this approach is that Google likes it, and so do people who are quite goal directed. If you've got a Linux installation problem and you find that book at your local B&N, not only are you going to buy it immediately, you're going to do it with a smile on your face.

I think Pownce, the micro-blogging service where you make friends and stuff, is a nice product. I've used it for quite some time, and even paid for a pro account. When I did it, it was more as a show of support than anything else, uploading big files - as was the only quirk back then - isn't something I do very often.

Today I came across an AdWords ad for an automated ebook business model website. Their screenshot highlighting their Paypal account was

hosted on another site

named powersell_paypal2.jpg

did not show payments but showed withdrawals

A lot of (mis)marketing techniques are more covert though, through the use of

Posted by randfish

Last week in Whiteboard Friday: Why Your Viral Content Isn't Working, I covered the importance of creating content that goes beyond just reaching the top of social media portals into the realm of attracting coveted high value links as well. Today, as promised, I'll share the big separations between the two and some tactics to implement when launching viral content with the intention of link acquisition.

1. ReadableDomains - 5 Letter Vowel Swap

This unique tool allows you to mimic the vowel placement of certain words and outputs all possible vowel combinations. You type in a word such as "Glare" and ReadableDomains will replace the "a" and "e" with all combinations of vowels (Glera, Gloro, Glary, etc.). The goal is to generate good looking five letters. Results are instantly checked for availability.

Keeping with the theme of the creative process and linkbait graphics it seems like a good time to see whats going on with blogs and some good uses of graphics and photography. Some bloggers don't even use images, and this is fine because not everything needs it, but some do and here's to the ones who do it really well!

Steve Outing wrote a very good article at Editor and Publisher on Friday about the need for cultural change inside the newpapers around the US (found via the wonderful CyberJournalist.net). That article got me thinking that people in many different industries probably hear many of the same objections to new, social media and online tools. ("It takes too much time, conversations online are insipid" etc.)

Many people I speak to still ask the familiar question, "Is this going to be the breakout year for local?" while expressing frustration or disappointment that "local hasn't yet lived up to expectations." But local is a marathon, not a sprint. It's also more complex than the general search market, which features an ecosystem built around a small number of large and highly visible companies. Even though many of those same companies are focused on local, one could almost flip that equation when discussing the local internet: it's about a very large number of mostly small companies.

When writing a blog post I place links to relevant sources and material. I choose my links carefully and they represent what I think fits the topic best.

Trackback is an intentional way of notifying other blogs because WordPress requires you to manually enter the blog's trackback link. It also allows you to send a notification to another blog even if you don't explicitly link to them in the post. This may be done in an attempt to include the other blog in the conversation. On top of that trackbacks may be considered "the real letters of recommendation on the web." However, with the increasing disappearing of a visible trackback link is it still a popular feature?

Late last year I wrote about the future of social networks and how I envision them becoming smaller and more targeted, like aSmallWorld.net, which is a social network for the affluent.

Well the Washington Post had an article over the holiday period about niche social network sites like aSmallworld.net and how that advertisers are flocking to them.