Mentos, Diet Coke + The Age of Conversation

AOC BannerThe Age of Conversation re-launches today on Amazon.com with the Age of Conversation Bum Rush. If you haven’t bought or borrowed a copy yet and are wondering what all the tweets, twits and talk is about, let me fill in the blanks:

The Age of Conversation is an anthology of the bite-size nuggets of new media insights from 100+ marketing bloggers. If you’ve already got a copy, you can find me in chapter #11.

All the profits go to Variety, The Children’s Charity. If you buy a copy, you won’t make my wallet any heavier but you’ll help some kids that really need it. Chris Wilson is spearheading the bum rush, and they’ve gotten it up as high as #53 at Amazon’s business section. It looks like it has slid a bit to #57. If you own a copy already, I’m sure adding your review over there would help people that are pondering whether to buy it or not.

It’s been interesting to read some of the comments over at the thread on Digg. As marketing dynamics transform from a world one-to-many messages to many-to-many, how is spam going to be socially defined?

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Post comments like a madman with CommentKahuna

CommentKahuna is Windows software that can be freely downloaded for the price of an email address from PortalFeeder. It is designed to search for blog posts that rank in Google for a particular phrase and makes it easier to comment on them. Once you’ve typed in your keyword phrase it will locate up to 50 blog posts on the topic you’ve searched for that are ranking in Google. It also shows the Google PageRank for each post and has options that can be tweaked to filter by PageRank if that kind of thing floats your boat.

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Linklings: Trust, Disclosure and Pain

DISCLOSURE BREEDS TRUST. John Chow’s post on blog credibility highlights the need for transparency in blogging and points out the often overlooked importance of the About page. As we all begin to use more and more social networks, a centralized “About Me” page is going to be more important. Identity is the foundation of trust — the more people know about you, anxiety is removed from the trust relationship. One of the things that has helped to instill trust in Chow by his readers in spite of his “slightly evil” money-making approaches is the radical openness he shares with readers about his dreams, monthly profits and even what he has for dinner.

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Radiohead makes millions with free digital content

While the AP headline may be “Most Fans Paid $0 for Radiohead Album”, half the real story is buried in the piece and the other half isn’t really there at all.

In October, Radiohead offered up their latest release “In Rainbows” as a digital download on their website with a “fill in the blank” price to be determined by the customer. Customers could pay whatever – including $0 – that they felt the music was worth to them.

Now the data is in and 38% of the people worldwide, when faced with a legitimate option to pay nothing actually paid an average of $6 for the music. The average for U.S. purchases was $8.

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Are you a webpreneur? Join me at Bizquarium

A quick programming note — as my project backlog is beginning to even out I’m going to be returning to a posting schedule of 3 to 5 times a week here on SMOblog. I’ll be doing about the same over at Bizquarium

What is Bizquarium you ask?

I think it’s going to be a fun project. The ultimate goal is to create a website that helps bloggers, niche marketers, and other webpreneurs make the most out of their website using WordPress and other online applications. There are many topics that I am passionate about such as user interface development, SEO, email marketing and website optimization that I would like to cover and I’d like to keep SMOblog more focused.

If you have an interest in tricking out your blog or making more money online, pay me a visit over there and sign up for the Bizquarium RSS feed.

Please don’t be scared away by the newbie look of it all when you get there — I’m starting with the default WordPress theme on purpose. The Bizquarium website is going to be built up on the blog step by step — starting from scratch. Of course, along the way I’ll be mixing it up by covering a broad mix of topics related to the overall goal.

I’m interested in any feedback or suggestions that any of you may have in regards to Bizquarium. Feel free to comment on this post or on one of the ones over there.

Need an RSS feed for DealDotCom’s daily deal?

DealDotCom -- RSS feeds for the daily dealI’ve been experimenting with developing an RSS feed for DealDotCom for another project and I think I have it mostly licked. I’ve been testing it in the sidebar here at SMOblog, and it seems to be working fine.

What is Deal Dot Com?

If you haven’t heard, it is essentially a clone of Woot.com for Internet marketing products.

What is Woot.com? Well, essentially Woot.com is a social shopping site where they sell one product a day at a deep discount and people discuss the product and share their thoughts. Not only is this invaluable way for businesses to move mass quantities of a product, it serves as a sort of impromptu focus group for that product as well. But I digress… Continue Reading »

Google has me comfortably numb

I really enjoyed a comment by mlankton on my earlier post “Living in the Google Biosphere: The dreaded paid link”. In it, mlankton said:

I’m with Google on this one. They made the better search engine. They made the yardstick for sites to measure themselves with. They have an interest in serps and pagerank meaning something, and paid links undermine that.

That is awfully hard to disagree with. I think that Google has made such incredible strides at making the Internet more useful, more enjoyable and more profitable for so many.

However, there is a natural byproduct to all of these wonderful things. Google has progressively gained leverage over website owners and we’ve reached the point where they are able to influence our behavior with implicit threats. Continue Reading »

Customize your RSS feed for BlogRush

Custom RSS for BlogRush
So far I like BlogRush a lot and think it has great potential. One of the problems I see with it that can be improved upon then is that you cannot select what posts you would like to promote via BlogRush with your syndication credits.

Why syndicate what you had for breakfast across the network?

Your blog may be an intimate place where you share many things with your readers that may not be appropriate for the network-at-large. Unfortunately, BlogRush offers no way to declare which posts you want to share across the network and which you don’t.

I’ve worked up a better way of doing this for SMO Blog and I think other bloggers that use WordPress might be interested in doing the same. It’s in everybody’s interest to keep posts to BlogRush at a high level of quality so that people don’t begin to tune it out.

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BlogRush promotes your blog while you sleep

One of the best ways to promote your blog is to increase your exposure within your niche of the blogosphere. BlogRush has just arrived on the scene and promises to do exactly that with the added bonus that about the only thing you need to really do to get started is to signup for free, embed the widget in your sidebar, and pretty much forget about it.

BlogRush is a “co-op” for bloggers. Here is how it works…

BlogRush is a crafty little widget. Continue Reading »

The 24 Hour Challenge: Internet Marketing Without Sleep

I’m going to string myself out on coffee and spend the next 24 hours straight promoting The Age of Conversation online. Not only do all profits from the book go to a worthy cause, the book itself is a virtual smorgasbord of inspiration and ideas from 100+ marketing professionals across the world.

I’ll be liveblogging my adventures here, so stay tuned for updates while I drive to the neighborhood café, roll up my sleeves at get to work…

Many of my fellow authors have been busting their tails getting the word out – I can’t wait to join them. Continue Reading »