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NewMediast Marketing Blog

NewMediast Marketing Blog
NewMediaist.com is a blog dedicated to the newest developments in online and interactive marketing.

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Articles

The Secrets of Social Media Optimization (SMO) - Part 1, Design
2007-11-20 21:49:00
(This is Part 1 of 2) If your company’s online marketing mix was a stock portfolio, search marketing and display advertising would be blue chips, while social media and “viral” marketing would be penny stocks. When investing in “viral” projects to be distributed via social media platforms, you must be ready to lose your whole investment for the chance of gaining an exponential reward. No business can control the outcome of a social media/viral marketing campaign; its very definition – social media – states that it is the collective which determines whether the campaign is succesful. As the creator of the campaign, you can not control whether or not its viewers choose to pass it on to their friends - all you can attempt to do is encourage the campaign’s success via its design and increasing awareness of its existence (exposure). Design There are four important points to consider when designing a campaign for viral distribution over social media: 1) You need a target ...
More About: Social , Media , Optimization , Secrets

Basic Online Marketing Skills Review: CSS / Cascading Style Sheets
2007-11-14 22:26:00
If you’re an old school web guy, you would have learned to design web pages in a grid-system using tables. This can be problematic for a number of reasons, the most basic of which is your website will load slower as a result, as although each page may contain the same design elements, the web browser has to download the design at every page. Enter Cascading style Sheets (CSS). CSS seperates the display layer from the content layer of the website - in other words, you load the website’s design once, and then only load new content at each pages. If you want to learn CSS, check out this amazing css tutorial. If you want to do advanced CSS design, check out this tutorial on CSS Floats as well.
More About: Marketing , Online Marketing , Review , Style , Online

Take that iPhone! Multi-touch interface from Perceptive Pixel
2007-10-26 04:25:00
Wild - right out of Minority Report. And available for purchase TODAY! Check out http://www.perceptivepixel.com/ for more info. One interesting point up for discussion is there are no standards established yet when it comes to multi touch interfaces - therefore moving your hand on the iphone could have a different effect than moving your hand around on a perceptive pixel display. This introduces an interesting design problem, akin to having different key layouts on the first keyboards. Dan Saffer first wrote about this concept on his blogpost A Call to arms for interaction designers.
More About: Iphone , Multi , Touch , Interface , Pixel

How to make money on the Internet, Part 2: Linkfarming
2007-10-23 05:53:00
This is part 2 in a series of posts exposing some of the more common “get rich quick” schemes people use on the Internet . Check out part 1, Keyword and adsense arbitrage. How to make money on the Internet: Part 2: Linkfarming Ever wonder how Google chooses which sites to put on the first page of its search results? It’s actually not that complicated. At a very basic level, Google looks at which websites get the most links from other websites, and then says to itself “Hey, if all these thousands of people are linking to this guy, he must be pretty good”. Hence, those websites with the most incoming links ranks highest on Google (Ok, this is an oversimplification, but this article isn’t about SEO) So, if one could command thousands of links on different website, one could - hypothetically - place any website they want on the first page of Google search results. Hence link farming was born. Link farming is the process of creating a large quantity of...
More About: Money , Make Money , Make

The Internet Staring Clark and Michael (That kid from Arrested Development
2007-10-23 05:26:00
Why didn’t anyone tell me the kid from Arrested Development has his own web tv show? Well, now you know too: Check it out @ Clark and Michael
More About: Internet , The Internet

How to make money on the Internet, Part 1: Keyword and Adsense Arbitrage
2007-10-21 22:37:00
I am regularly asked questions about online get-rich-quick schemes: how they work, why they work, and naturally, why don’t I use them and then go retire in a Costa Rica villa. As this topic is a pretty sexy, I thought I’d dedicate my next few blog posts to some of the more common online money making schemes. So, without further delay, How to make money on the Internet Part 1: Keyword Arbitrage Let’s start with the basics: what does “arbitrage” mean? Arbitrage is a term used when someone exploits inequalities between markets to make profit. For example, let’s say I am in the Canada, and want to go shopping in the USA. I go to my local bank, and discover the exchange rate is $00.98 CDN = $1.00 USD. So I take $98.00 CDN to the bank, and in return get $100.00 USD back. I then take a flight into the US to go shopping, and notice that the currency trader at the Airport is paying $1 CDN for every $1 USD. So I give the currency trade my $100 USD, and ge...
More About: Adsense , Money , Make Money

The Day Hip Hop Died - Top That
2007-10-16 21:50:00
Video from a 1980’s teenage witch teen type film. Ahh, the 80’s. Top That! - Watch more free videos
More About: Died

Stupid TTC, cash is for money markets
2007-10-11 04:49:00
And now, for a short off-topic rant: I bike to work everyday, but not when it rains, as the area of Toronto where I work (Spadina and Wellington) smells like a combination of cat piss and dead fish whenever it rains. So, as it was raining today, I took the TTC - Toronto’s Public Transit System. It’s gosh-darn expensive these days, clocking in at $2.75 for a ride that takes me - oh, maybe 20 minutes by bike to make otherwise. On weekends, its cheaper for me to drive and park (on city streets) in the downtown core than it is to take public transit. As I normally ride, I didn’t have any TTC tokens today. So, I went to a machine to buy tokens. Red light flashing, machine not functioning. I move to the next machine, same problem, but this time, there is a note taped to it! What’s this? Ticket prices are going up again, so the TTC is limiting the number of tokens I can buy to prevent me from stockpiling? Not only is this incredibly frustrating from an operational...
More About: Money , Markets , Stupid , Cash

A little bit more about me…
2007-10-09 05:25:00
I mentioned in a previous post that I recently switched jobs - I’m now at “the nice agency”, a.k.a. henderson bas, doing all sorts of fun things related to interactive media. If you’re interested in seeing some examples of the type of work we do, you can checkout the unofficial henderson bas portfolio blog. If you want to join me, check out their careers page.

World Of Warcraft Toyota Commercial (WoW)
2007-10-07 17:12:00
Check out the new Toyota Truck/World of Warcraft video. Talk about a TV commercial “designed” to go viral!
More About: Commercial , World of Warcraft

Steal music, pay lots of fines (in the USA)
2007-10-06 15:40:00
$9,250 for each of the 24 songs, or a $222,000 fine total for a Minnesota woman guilty of 24 counts of copyright infringement. The RIAA has sued about 26,000 people over the last 4 years, in an attempt to discourage people from using peer 2 peer services to pirate content. Considering downloading pirated music is on the rise, this doesn’t come as much of a surprise, but I can’t help but feel this may be more of a knee-jerk reaction than a long term strategy. If they keep suing customers, who will ultimately be left to buy their music?
More About: Music , Steal

2 money making features facebook doesn’t officially offer - yet
2007-09-27 04:06:00
The news today was all about Microsoft considered an equity stake in Facebook . At the “rumored” valuation, facebook was placed in the $10 billion range. Now I’m pretty confident to say it is impossible facebook’s current income statement/balance sheet justifies a $10 billion valuation - in other words, big expectations are factored into that number. This got me thinking: what features could facebook implement to generate more cash? (I know the possibilities are endless, but humor me). Here are two of my favourite: #1) Instant messaging software w/ contextual ads embedded. Many people already use the facebook wall/message system as an instant messenger - why not just make it official? #2) A virtual currency / loyalty points system : I have a soft spot for loyalty point systems - they introduce a whole new form of corporate participation, such as sponsored events, “branded” merchandise or profile pages, etc… What’s your favourite face...
More About: Money , Features , Feat , Ally

How to separate your business from the masses
2007-09-24 04:44:00
Sorry for the long delay in blog posts - I recently switched jobs (don’t worry, it was at my initiation), and have had to focus elsewhere for a short while - I’m also still having problems with my blog template for a continued unknown reason - hopefully I’ll find some free time to get to the bottom of that problem soon. Anyways, back on topic. For all those viewers who tune in regularly, I was in Scotland last month at the Edinburgh festival. It was a grand time, and I highly recommend you all visit it. It was also a great “case study” in how difficult marketing can be in a highly competitive marketplace. Hundreds of thousands of people pass through Edinburgh during the festival season, as do thousands upon thousands of acts. In fact, there are so many acts that the light poles get deformed from having such a large quantity of posters stapled on them at eye level: This causes a big problem: with everyone trying to stand out by having the most poster...
More About: Business , Sine

How to separate your business from the masses
2007-09-24 04:44:00
Sorry for the long delay in blog posts - I recently switched companies (don’t worry, it was at my initiation) and have been busy catching up on the work which wasn’t done while my new position was vacant. I’m also still having problems with my blog template for a continued unknown reason - hopefully I’ll find some free time to get to the bottom of that problem soon. Anyways, back on topic. For all those viewers who tune in regularly, I was in Scotland last month at the Edinburgh festival. It was a grand time, and I highly recommend you all visit it. It was also a great “case study” in how difficult marketing can be in a highly competitive marketplace. Hundreds of thousands of people pass through Edinburgh during the festival season, as do thousands upon thousands of acts. In fact, there are so many acts that the light poles get deformed from having such a large quantity of posters stapled on them at eye level: This causes a big problem: with ev...
More About: Business , Sine

Back, and better than ever!
2007-09-10 03:45:00
I’m back from vacation! Just catching up with everything I missed while I was gone. Did you catch this? Ahh, PPC rivalry! (via TechCrunch)
More About: Back

Extended Lunch
2007-08-18 04:31:00
As of tonight I am officially on vacation, so (unfortunately?) you won’t be hearing from me for the next two weeks. If you’re just dying for some newmediaesque content while I’m gone, check out some of the websites I read regularly. The Economist | Search Engine Land | Techcrunch | Springwise | Matt Cutts | Google News
More About: Lunch , Extended

SEO Linkbuilding Secret #142 - Create your own contest/award show
2007-08-17 04:28:00
This one is an oldie but a goodie - an easy way to skyrocket your web site’s pagerank. Load up Photoshop. Create an image file with a few pictures of trophies and stars in it. Throw that logo in a simple web page and upload it to your blog. Using Google, generate a list of websites you would like links from. Send emails to the owners of those websites, congratulating them on the nomination / winning of an award for best blog/best software/best photography/etc. Make sure to include the html code for the logo image you created in the email, as well as a link to the page the website owner can reference so visitors can “verify the award status”. Image grabbed from Successful Software Blog post on a very similar topic Congratulations, you have just built hundreds of relevant, one-way, high quality links to your website for free! Watch your search engine rankings soar! The “award show” back link strategy has been adopted by everyone from search engine consu...
More About: Contest , Show , Secret , Award

FREE XML Sitemap Software (Google / Yahoo / Microsoft)
2007-08-10 14:56:00
I found this neat little Java application for building search-engine compliant (XML) site maps for large websites - http://www.auditmypc.com/xml-sitemap.asp. Make sure to limit the number of threads you allow the software to use, as otherwise you may hammer your web server into oblivion. Also make sure your robots.txt file is setup properly, as otherwise the sitemap may contain links to pages you don’t want the search engine to index.
More About: Software , Google , Yahoo , Microsoft , Free

The high cost of hiring low quality labour
2007-08-07 03:16:00
I’ve always been a big supporter of hiring one great person and rewarding them appropriately rather than hiring three average/poor workers and rewarding each of them poorly. Revolution Systems Blog had a recent post about the High Cost of Low Quality , specifically with regards to the hiring of programmers. One great quote from the article: “When you work in an environment with experts things simply work. They are easier to use and require less initial training. The software is easier to modify. Requested changes happen more frequently and easily. Things just flow.” I agree wholeheartedly - whether it be video editing, web design or programming, working with an expert just makes every thing so much easier! So before you go hire that “xpert programaar with 20 yrs exp” from elance.com or your neighbors kids to produce your car dealership’s TV commercial - remember there is a reason why experts can demand the salary which they do!
More About: Labour , Hiring

How to redirect /index.php to / using mod_rewrite and .htaccess
2007-08-02 05:53:00
Nice short post today, with one quick SEO tip that can (sometimes) gain you big pagerank quickly. As previously mentioned, the search engines see http://www.newmediaist.com and http://www.newmediaist.com/index.php as two different pages (although they may lead to the same content). This means that although they are actually the exact same content, from the search engine’s perspective both / and /index.php have their own ranking criteria (also known as “link juice” - backlinks, pagerank, etc…) Now we don’t want to split up “link juice” between two pages, so we need to either 301 redirect all requests for /index.php to /, or visa versa. This can be done by a fairly simple addition to the .htaccess file. #Forward index.php to / RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^.*/index.php RewriteRule ^(.*)index.php$ http://www.newmediaist.com/$1 [R=301,L] (Reminder: Change www.newmediaist.com to your domain name!)
More About: Index , Redirect , Dire , Rect

Strange Wordpress issue
2007-07-31 06:14:00
I’m having a strange issue with Wordpress where it just forgets what the default theme is every 24h or so. To make matters worse, I have been incredibly busy the last few days and likely won’t be able to attend to the issue until the weekend. Has anyone ever encountered this problem before? Know of a quick fix?
More About: Strange , Range , Tran , Issue

Wordpress, Mod_Rewrite, Search Engine Friendly URLs and NetFirms.com
2007-07-27 15:35:00
I recently switched my hosting to NetFirms, as they are one of the few Canadian web hosting companies which allow you to host a number of domains on a single shared hosting account for free. Netfirms does have its weaknesses though. Specifically, their mod_rewrite implementation is somewhat funky, resulting in almost every script needing a rewritten .htaccess file to get search engine friendly URLs working properly. One script which has problems with Netfirms is Wordpress . If you are a Netfirms customer and can not get your Wordpress search engine friendly URLs to work properly, give the following .htaccess file a try # BEGIN WordPress Netfirms HTAccess RewriteEngine On RewriteBase / #Forward domain.com to www.domain.com RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www. RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L] #Setup Wordpress Rewriting RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !index.php RewriteRule (.*) index.php/$1 [L] # ...
More About: Search , Search Engine , Friendly

Why people gamble: an analysis of slot machines
2007-07-26 02:50:00
“You know it becomes a problem when it becomes emotional, something you can’t do without.” Studying casino and slot machine can be incredibly interesting. If you haven’t readup on the wonders of the gambling business, I highly recommend you check out this Online Stanford Design Course, specifically focused on design’s role in casinos. The online course is splitup into the following chapters: Tracing Technology and its Effects on Slot Machines The Psychology of the Slot Machine Analysis of Casino Design Casinos and Economics Social Implications $pringfield: Gambling and Slot Machines in Popular Culture Our Experience with an Online Slot Machine Simulator The Slot Machine: Concluding Remarks Very fun and interesting stuff.
More About: People , Gamble

More articles from this author:
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