New Media News Every Morning
Feeling the heat from Google, Microsoft reportedly asked Yahoo to re-enter formal talks about buying the web portal company. The deal could easily be worth around $50 billion, according to Bloggingstocks.
Related stories: Internet Outsider, paidContent.org, Between the Lines, Rough Type, IP Democracy, Mashable!, BloggingStocks
Originally posted on May 4, 2007 @ 8:52 am
Okay, maybe you don’t think that a blogger needs to build a brand. But in light of the response that the infographic on the You’re Brand One? post received, it’s evident that branding is important for some bloggers. That is, if you plan to either earn a living from your blog professionally or indirectly. (Darren Rowse has a great post about making money because of your blog.) In which case branding is a necessity, be it a cool, memorable brand name, an infographic, or even just a picture of you.
If you want to blog professionally, even if just to promote your consulting or other services, I highly recommend getting a domain name with your name in it, or some variation. Set up a blog and make that your brand, to promote all your online and offline activities. You may even want to use a blog name that isn’t your name. Remember that you have to compete with websites plus 70 million blogs. Or is it 15 million? Who knows. Fact is, you need to stand out, and there are many aspects to building a popular site (promotion, content, posts, etc.), but branding yourself is the glue that ties it all together.
For me, I want to be the geeky diagram/ screencast guy. Hence my brand “Internet UltraGeek”. But here’s something to consider: I didn’t bother registering internetultrageek.com because I don’t like the way it looks. This should be a factor when you decide on a brand name. For example, noted web designer Chris Pearson uses Pearsonified, which I think is great. It’s more than his name, it’s a brand. Be creative when you set up your “brand” blog. And you don’t have to post every day. Each post should be well thought out and relevant to your brand. Once a week is probably sufficient.
If you need some branding pointers, NameWire, a blog about product naming, has a post on personal branding, with links to other relevant articles including, yes, my own. Though have a look at the rest of the blog and you’ll realize how much thought goes into naming a product or service. Or at least, how much effort should go in.
Originally posted on May 4, 2007 @ 2:41 pm
Don’t feel like giving out your email address? How about a URL that anonymizes your email address? Contactify apparently does that, and uses a CAPTCHA to reduce spam. If you have your own blog on a self-hosted domain, however, I’m sure you can find a free form plugin. In fact, anyone that works online should really consider buying their own “FirstnameLastname.com”, or close variation, and using that on a Moo card. Now set up a contact form on your personal site’s “contact me”, “about”, or “services” page. Then anyone who needs to get hold of you can just use the contact form. What could be simpler? You don’t even need business cards in this case. If you don’t want to go to the trouble, then Contactify is a (supposedly) nice alternative. Of course, if you are ultra popular, you may get too much email disrupting your workflow. In which case, you may need to use an extreme email message classification system.
Originally posted on May 3, 2007 @ 9:52 am
Visible Path announced a new, free version of its business networking service, for business professionals. Anyone with a company email address can start an individual or company network powered by Visible Path.
The free service, available in a beta, is built on a new technical foundation that incorporates Visible Path’s legacy of supporting private corporate networks and introduces features aimed at individual subscribers. In particular, subscribers can: Launch their private social network within minutes from www.visiblepath.com; Connect with other work colleagues; Invite close contacts outside their company into their network; Control their individual privacy settings; Scan relationship data from emails, contact cards, calendars and more; View “first degree†relationships ranked by relationship strength; Lookup contacts in a intelligent address book that aggregates contact information; Search for meaningful connections through the network to people they’d like to reach and; Request introductions or background info from people connected to people they want to reach.
Unlike most social networking sites and business networking communities, Visible Path is a service to help business people manage their real-life network and apply their network to their daily work. Visible Path applies unique social network algorithms that automatically rate relationship strength to drive new levels of success, efficiency and trust in professionals’ social networks. Connections are limited to contacts and colleagues that know each other well; introductions and requests are optimally routed through the strongest paths.
Originally posted on April 23, 2007 @ 11:38 am
An online presence is a critical part of successfully appealing to online consumers. Most people who use Google use it for searching for businesses at least several times a month. If you can manage to show up on the first three lines of Google search results, then you’re setting your business up for success. [Read more…]
Originally posted on February 11, 2022 @ 8:35 pm
