A while ago, I tried to access a website I like to read, home of the odd and unusual, offbeat news, with plenty of gorgeous pictures to support the content, and flawless copywriting. To my surprise, Google had blocked the site in my browser, because it contained malware. This happened because of a flaw in MediaTemple’s security patches for sites built on WordPress, that allowed hackers to insert a malicious script. It had to be there, unobserved, for quite a while, if Google decided to block the site.

To my knowledge, many MT customers who host there blogs, have to pay enormous sums, sometimes ridiculously high, for hosting, bandwidth, etc. A popular site like Life in the Fast Lane has seen, no doubt, bank-breaking bills. The price would be well worth it, if the site owner had peace of mind. But if it happened once, who says that it will never happen again. Continue reading

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A five-part series on online branding for businesses by Ryan Chaffin

1. What’s in a Name? Everything
2. SEO: Marketing in the New Millennium
3. PPC as a Model of Smart Advertising
4. Social Media: Highly Accessible Advertising
5. Freshening Up: Maintaining Your Brand Image

The proliferation of the internet has completely changed how our society exchanges information. What was once the realm of letters and paper is now the realm of e-mail and electronic documents. Just as the way of relaying information has evolved, so has the world of advertising. Billboards are now sidebar ads and the Yellow Pages are now Google Maps.

For many small businesses the internet has become a boon to their services, bringing them a whole host of new customers that they never would have seen in the years before the web. But, herein lays a problem. It is one thing to recognize the changing landscape of marketing and advertising, but a completely different thing to understand how this new mechanism works. Simply putting together a novice website and then letting is fester in cyber-anonymity is simply not enough. This is where a properly placed SEO campaign can assist your company in emerging from internet obscurity. Continue reading

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What I think you shouldn’t have missed last week…

Happy Monday everyone! I hope you’re week is off to an amazing start and that you have time for some reading today as I come with interesting suggestions.

If you’re planning to boost your e-commerce sales through blogging, Michael Martine of Remarkablogger has 10 wonderful tips to help you achieve your goals.

Ian Lurie of Conversation Marketing explains a very important interdependence: social media and SEO go together and can’t possibly be separated.

We all want to increase our traffic. And Ted Demopoulos of Blogging and Business has some great tips for us to read and apply.

Erica Douglass from Erica.biz is determined to show us how to obtain a difficult, yet rewarding goal: making a million dollars with our business.

As word of mouth is such a powerful marketing tool, we all want others to talk about us and, more importantly, our business. Dawud Miracle explains how to get the conversation started.

As this week seems to be dedicated to 10-tip lists, here’s another exciting collection: read NetBusinessBlog to improve local search rankings in Google.

If you were wondering how not to pitch to a blogger, here’s Eric Karjaluoto’s (Ideas on Ideas) take on bad blog PR.

From tips, moving on to 10 commandments: Beth Kanter of Beth’s Blog: How Non Profits Can Use Social media has recently published the 10 commandments of of panel discussions.

And if you’re ever using Typepad and want to switch to WordPress, stop by Confident writing first and read Joanna’s Young guide to the move.

I do hope you’re able to find something useful on this list. See you all next week when I promise to be back with more interesting articles for you to enjoy. Have a lovely Monday and week!

Alina

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