I am always amazed on how many small business do not invest the time in knowing their audience and target market.

Digg changed their algorithm and the community is not too happy about it. It takes close to 200 diggs at this point for some of the users to get on the first page of digg. Just three months ago, all it took was close to 50 or 60 diggs.

Since Ayat has been writing about persona creation, Rand hosted an excellent white board Friday on the topic of creating personas.

We answered the question of how much you should pay for a freelance copywriter. So, how much should you pay for a designer?

Brand awareness as a campaign goal? Sounds like a bad idea to me.

Posted in Miscellaneous

We like to keep our readers up-to-date with any changes we’ve made or intend to make, so here goes:

• New design: We just released the new design of the invesp earlier this week. One of the main complaints I received on our previous blog is that the middle section of the blog was too wide which makes reading posts a little difficult. As you can see, we went to a three column format, reducing the size of the middle section. We are still working through few bugs with the new templates and hope to get everything working properly by early next week.

• New voices: You will start seeing some new voices on the invesp blog to provide you with a wider variety of opinions and expertise. Chris Garrett, Gina Makkar, Laura Evans, and Stephen Da Cambra will be sharing their thoughts and expertise with us on regular basis.

• Landing page optimization whitepaper: This whitepaper will be around 30 pages filled with tips and techniques to increase your landing page conversion rate.

• Landing page templates: We will be making couple of the templates for landing pages available for everyone to use. These templates will provide a good starting point to anyone who is running a PPC campaign and would like to use a professionally designed landing page.

Happy Reading!

Posted in Business, Miscellaneous

We very often forget how blogging started as a personal diary, but has become a venue for businesses to connect with their clients. Personalized bloggers are finding it more difficult to find an audience. Mohsin sheds some light on the topic sharing tips of how to become a semi-problog.

Are you suffering from computer issues like Steven has recently? Well don’t fret, the folks at freelance folder have some tips in order to avoid computer catastrophe.

Considering video-blogging? CT Moore shares tips from the top video bloggers to get the show on the road.

If want to improve your blogging, make sure to read what 10 great bloggers tell us about mistakes they made As beginners.

Viral Marketing is a technique we all wish we can implement. Linda Bustos shares a great story of great customer service that resulted in a strong viral campaign.
Have a great weekend!

Posted in Miscellaneous

We focused so much on mybloglog during the summer but it seems that the service does not have same flare it had once. Steve discusses how to use MyBlogLog as a branding tool

Would you post a low quality article or rather not blog, when running out of ideas? I would say you shouldn’t. But what do you think?

 I lost track of the number of social media/networking sites. Here it is; the count is up 233 social media websites!

What your price? okay, maybe I should ask what is the price for your blog?

How much does your content engage visitor? should I even ask that?

Looking for a good way to do keyword research?

Top 25 Web Design Blogs 

Posted in Miscellaneous

These words might sound a little funny coming from me. Yes I am someone who checks his email tens of times everyday (according to the 4 hour week; I’m wasting  a lot of valuable time doing so!).  And I do carry a smart phone to make sure I do not miss a single email. But don’t get me wrong; I do not hate email because it is taking over my life. I hate email because as easy it is to use, it is not always the best way to communicate. I can not tell you how many times I told Ayat I would love to stop everyone in invesp from using email (or chat for that matter!).

It is not immediate: Email can be one of the worst ways to communicate when thing need to get the job done right away, You send the email and can only hope that the recipient checked his email and that he already started working on the task. How many times did you hear the excuse, “Woops! I didn’t check my email”. Or even worse, how about when your email lands in the spam folder? Chris sends me his guest blogs regularly and although he is in contact list, outlook insists on putting Chris’s email in the spam folder. Sorry Chris, my outlook has a mind of its own!

It does not build a relationship: I communicate with other bloggers via email regularly. However when I want to take the relationship to the next level, a phone call is the way to go. I smiled when I read Dawud Miracle wrote that we should forget email and pick up the phone.

There is more to communication than words: I remember reading that the value of communication is effected 70% by body language, 20% by the tone of the voice and only 10% by the actual words used to communicate. With email, you completely lose the body language and tone of voice factors. That means that your communication is only at 10% effectiveness! How many times did you send an email that was completely misunderstood, did not communicate exactly what you wanted, or was taken out of context?

Things can go bad real quickly with email: My first project fresh out of college was with a government client. The work was a lot of fun and challenging. However, there was a huge cultural difference between the consulting company I worked for and the government agency. One way or another, the technical teams flamed each other via email on regular basis. These angry emails did not help the relationship with the client at all. Whether angry emails come back to hunt or not, I follow the 24 hour rule before sending an angry email (the cooling off period).

80% of the emails I receive are useless: And I am not talking about all the spam we receive. How many of the regular emails you receive are a must read? I also discovered that most of the time sends me an email with a title urgent, it is most likely urgent for them and not for me.

So, here it is. These are the reasons I hate email.  So, tell me why do you hate email? Yes, I am implying that everyone does

Posted in Miscellaneous

Thanks to everyone who participated in our “subscribe to the Invesp Blog RSS” contest! We have received all the entries and will announce the winner in Thursday’s blog (September 6th, 2007). We hope you continue to visit, read and comment on our blog. Also, keep looking out for our next contest…coming soon!!

Posted in Miscellaneous

Please email the contest secret word to contest@invesp.com. All entries must be emailed by 11:59 pm EST, Friday, 8/31/2007.

Wish you all luck!

Posted in Miscellaneous

This tips comes from Avinash 2.0: Are you looking for cool blogs? Just type site:networks.feedburner.com in Google search enjoy.

Vandelay Design is becoming one of my very favorite blogs. Steven writes about using outbound links to grow your blog.

Paul shows by example how to use long tail title tags to improve Google ranking

The guys from gearyi talk about what your site conversion rate should be

Avinash answers six interesting web analytics questions

Posted in Miscellaneous

I was listening to Talk of the Nation on NPR last week week. If you do not follow national politics, you would not consider the topic of that episode interesting. Neal Conan was interviewing Matt Bai, the author of “The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers, and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics.” Matt argues that democrats’ policy of presenting a unified front is affecting their ability to create new ideas that influence ideology and culture. The interesting part  of the program was when a professor of history dialed into the show and was the first to comment. He started by saying that he was shocked why none of the democratic candidates went to the LDC and instead they chose to go the some blogger convention. The professor continued to ask, “Where did these stupid bloggers come from.” Unfortunately the link on NPR’s site to the recording of this show is not working.

So here are some thoughts:

Blogging is popular. Or is it? With over 60 million blogs online in May, blogging is popular. Yet there are many people who still do not have a clue about it. I wonder how much of the population actually reads blogs regularly. So I conducted a quick informal survey. I asked the client team members what blogs they read regularly. Of a team of 20 engineers, only one of them read any blogs. But this doesn’t mean blogging isn’t popular and hasn’t caught on.

Bloggers are affecting national debate: Yes politicians are finally listening and it is our turn to do some of the talking. I am cynical by nature so I wonder how much of this will continue after the elections. Of course it does not stop with politics. Large companies are acting much faster to resolve customer complaints when bloggers write about them. Yes, I finally feel empowered.

What are you reading? This blog is about marketing. Most of the blogs I read are business blogs in nature. If bloggers who write about politics are causing such a stir, I decided that I should expand my horizons and add different types of blogs to my reading list.

What do you think?

Posted in Miscellaneous

Don’t forget that before August 31st, we will pick one lucky RSS subscriber to win either $400 in cash!

All you have to do is subscribe to our RSS feed and look for a secret word that will be included at the end of one of our posts. The message will only be shown to those viewing via RSS.

So, subscribe to the invesp blog feed here.

And good luck!

Posted in Miscellaneous