It’s been a busy week for me in wrapping my brain around some client projects including Performancing. I’m proud to uncloak Performancing Metrics, a state of the art web analytics program geared towards the blogger who wants as much data as I do.

Performancing Metrics is a new and unique web analyzer that gives bloggers and smaller web sites a more personal understanding of their visitors. Many analyzers give good summaries, and Performancing Metrics is no different – but the similarities stop there. Performancing Metrics stands out with its refreshingly clean and simple interface, innovative features like Spy and RSS feeds, and an unrivaled per visitor level of detail. You also get real time stats, outbound link tracking, download tracking, and much much more. [Read more…]

Originally posted on March 26, 2007 @ 12:06 pm

Mequoda’s Daily newsletter has a report on how Computerworld magazine’s online websites are generating 1.5-2M unique users per month and a pre-tax profit margin of about 40-50%. Few print magazines or newspapers likely pull that kind of margin. Their online revenue has apparently nearly

…tripled from about 11 percent of the magazine’s total in 2000 to about 30 percent today.

And they’re doing it with a site that could be considered hard on the eyes. Now, it helps considerably that they’ve been around in print since 1967 and publish in over 60 countries. With that kind of offline visibility over so many years, they are very likely to have site visitors from all over the world. For print media with more local markets, is the potential for online profit still there? According to the Mequoda report, very likely, yes, but the transition over to the online world has to be effective (obviously).

My advice? Start heavily promoting your website offline, while you’re still in print, and market the website aggressively in print and online. Provide enough starter content online to build traffic, and post non-print content daily. Don’t hide away front page stories behind a subscription wall after a few days like the New York Times does. Why not? Because any blogger that links to you will peeve off their readers, and bloggers are likely to stop linking as a result.

I haven’t scanned the Computerworld site enough nor looked at the magazine recently, but there’s likely content unique to both mediums. And that’s okay. Keep one important thing in mind: in the 1990s at least, most magazine publishers would tell you that neither the cover price nor subscription fees ever cover the cost of print for a given issue. It’s always been advertising that keeps a mag afloat. So with information so free online, anyone that charges for theirs (beyond, say, ebooks, whitepapers, tutorials, reports, etc., and maybe not then) is likely to get a very unpleasant slap in the face when visitors don’t return.

Originally posted on March 22, 2007 @ 7:34 am

Top 25 Marketing Blogs

The Viral publishes a Top 25 Marketing Blogs list every week. A browse through the last few lists, or via Technorati, shows that Seth Godin’s blog has been at the top for some time. I’m not 100% sure but I think the positions are being based on Alexa ranking. Hugh Macleod’s wonderfully entertaining (potentially NSFW) Gaping Void blog/ cartoons is #4 on the list, which might be initially surprising for a cartoon. On the other hand, he is a marketing strategist and the cartoon’s blog widget has made him go viral (marketing-wise, that is).

Fired For Blogging

Some employers just don’t get new media. Which is fine. What’s not fine is when they fire someone for blogging on their own time, with nary a mention of the company. That’s what happened [via Micro Persuasion] to Drew Townson, an experienced audio engineer and producer working for a company called Mercenary Audio. Part of the problem is that after Townson posted a pic of his new baby son, employees passed around a copy, which the boss saw, causing him to fire Townson by voicemail.

Nice, very nice. If you’re a blogger and aren’t up to defending yourself in court, check with your employer. Especially in those states that have weak labor laws and where your employer can fire you without cause. (Georgia comes to mind.) And you bloggers for hire might just want to keep this company on your list of clients never to accept.

Control Your Company’s Conversations

It may not be easy to stop people from creating domain names with your trademark, especially negative names, but you can buy them up and shut them down. Tate & Lyle, the company that makes the sugar substitute Splenda (aka sucralose), bought [Sustainable is Good] hundreds of negative domain names with the word “splenda” in them. Johnson & Johnson, a co-developer of the product, also bought up a number of negative domains.

I tried some of the examples listed in the Sustainable is Good article and they produce no web page – no host parking page, no redirect. So the two companies have rendered the domain names useless.

Is this something other companies should consider? One could speculate that domain squatters might then create negative domain names with trademarks not for political reasons but purely in hopes of reselling, even if through a third party. I can’t answer that question, but if it’s something you want to do for your company/ clients, the Sustainable article lists two strategies: reactive domain purchasing and forecasting.

Originally posted on March 17, 2007 @ 2:15 pm