Wild Streak

While I’m still holding off on buying a tablet computer, millions of others have acquired one in recent months. According to the Pew Research Center, the number of adults in the USA who own tablet computers nearly doubled from 10% to 19% between mid-December and early January this year – and uptake of e-book readers [...]

Google is starting to whack more web sites that have too many ads above the fold (ATF). Acting on complaints from users who land on sites and find they need to scroll down a fair way to see the actual content, Google has announced an “algorithmic change that looks at the layout of a webpage [...]

Most blog owners would appreciate positive comments about their posts. However, sometimes these glowing glumps of text are nothing more than link spam. Weeding out this sort of thing is a good idea as the more of us who do it, the less attractive it will become as a spamming technique. Some of it is [...]

The looming “blackout” of the English version of Wikipedia has been big news and other webmasters have expressed a desire to follow suit. But how do you hobble your entire site for a day or so and make a statement to all who visit your site during that time without putting your Google rankings at [...]

I was going through a backlog of various marketing newsletters from the past week and just about every publication mentioned Pinterest at some point. There was a time in the past I didn’t take much note of new social network sites being launched that were attracting a bit of attention as it was happening every [...]

Google is addicted to speed – and a recent article in their quarterly newsletter gives a bunch of good reasons; some of which online businesses should take note of. Google Engineer Urs Hoelzle, author of the article, makes a very interesting observation – if all the Internet users in the USA have to wait for [...]

If you’re going to offer something as lightweight as a free executive summary of a horribly expensive report – don’t make it a shopping cart item and force folks to go through a lengthy checkout process. I received an email today about a study relating to online marketing that offered a free executive summary of [...]

While shopping cart abandonment is generally considered A Bad Thing; we’re reminded it’s a part of the online shopping process. I’ve been out to a few sites today checking out various products, but haven’t bought a thing. But I will tomorrow or later in the week – and a couple of items will come from [...]

On many occasions over the last 15 years I have been incredibly thankful I gave up drinking before getting involved in the online world. I’m a reasonably cautious fellow when sober who usually contemplates purchases carefully, but that used to change with a few drinks under my belt. Actually, if I could have limited my [...]

Social media can be a dream for online business, or a nightmare as the world’s largest domain name registrar recently discovered. A single posting on Reddit has caused quite an exodus of domain name registrants from GoDaddy. A user named selfprodigy posted he was transferring 51 domain names from GoDaddy because of the company’s support [...]

Most forum/blog commenting guidelines are a joke in that they are not enforced. Let’s turn that around in 2012. As I’ve said a few times in the past, the quality of conversations in forums and blogs seems to have greatly degraded over the years. I’m not referring to the spam that slips through, but the [...]

If you’re going to send marketing emails, it’s probably not a good idea to send them from a “do not reply” address. That’s just rude. Yes, we’d all like our customers and potential customers to click a link or observe whatever special process to contact us in order to make life easier for customer service [...]

On a couple of occasions I’ve decided to pre-arrange disposal of my body in preparation for when the grim reaper comes a-knockin’, but organising a bargain basement cremation entirely online has been impossible; so I’ve given up in each instance. However, it looks like the funeral industry is finally starting to get it right – [...]

If you’ve been tinkering with SEO for any length of time, you’ve likely heard of Matt Cutts. In case you aren’t aware of him, he’s part of Google’s Search Quality group and often communicates with the webmaster community. While he has his own site, Matt also drops in on other blogs from time to time [...]

I’ve been blogging since before the term was invented. I’ve never considered myself a journalist, but many bloggers see themselves that way. It could be a dangerous mindset. Journalists enjoy quite a few freedoms in many countries and bloggers sometimes mistakenly think they have all of the same privileges. For example, a judge in Oregon [...]

I’ve just deleted what feels to be the eleventy gazillionth Christmas sale email and I think if Santa was standing in front of me right now, I would feel compelled to shoot him. People know Xmas is coming up. They don’t need to be reminded by every merchant in the world of that fact nor [...]

The schmaltz of the affiliate marketing and “make money online” world sometimes gets to me. Any email that mentions something “a good buddy” of the sender is doing (selling) should be ignored, or at least treated with extreme caution. If it starts out with “Dear friend” (or variations of this) as well, just nuke it.. [...]

Each year, Google makes around 500 tweaks to its search ranking algorithm – and now the company is going to be telling us more about those changes; and more often. Major updates to Google’s algorithm certainly don’t go unnoticed – those occurrences are given names such as “Jagger”, “Florida”, “Caffeine” and “Panda”. Debates on SEO [...]

I swear, if I stumble across another infographic today, I’ll be cleaning barf off my notebook screen. Infographics, a visual way of presenting information, have been around for a long, long, time. Something has happened in the last 6 months or so that has seen the number of them explode – it’s almost like they [...]

Black Friday and Cyber Monday online sales both broke records this year – and the latter had the additional highlight of no-one being maced. According to comScore, Cyber Monday hit $1.25 billion in online spending, a jump of 22 percent on Cyber Monday in 2010. The cash splash was the heaviest online spending day in [...]