Archive for March, 2007
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What it Takes to Sell to a Teenager OnlineMar 30 2007 | Business |
Editor’s note: I would like to introduce a new author to 10e20 – Kayla. Kayla is a highschool junior in New York working for 10e20 part-time on projects with a teen target market. She will be contributing from time to time here at 10e20.com to give you a teen’s perspective on things online. I got so much out of my friend Dean’s guest blogger Jessica that I wanted to continue the conversation…
Many teens today are very particular about the websites that they use. From what the website is selling, to the cursors that are being used on them. It is all very important. Usually when I am searching the web for either research papers or just on my free time checking out new stuff, I look at the site as a whole first instead of reading the first sentence or looking at the first thing I see. If there is not a lot of colors and everything is pretty much letters and a blank/boring background, I won’t stay on that page even if it is informative. For example:
6 Comments » - Posted in Business by Kayla Wolfrom
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“Focus!”:How to add a new Depth of Field |
Making your photos pop from the background by creating an illusion of a decrease in depth of field is covered in this tutorial.
When a lens focuses on a subject at a distance, all subjects at that distance are sharply focused. Subjects that are not at the same distance are out of focus and theoretically are not sharp. The zone of acceptable sharpness is referred to as the depth of field.
Check out some of these Flickr pool photos that showcase some depth of field.
OK, lets put some ‘fake’ depth of field into an image that otherwise has a some what large depth of field. The image is fine, but if we make these adjustments the subject in the photo would pop and call that much more attention to itself as you can see with the final comparison above. The original image is on the left and the new depth of field added image is to the right.
No Comments » - Posted in Design, Tutorial by Patrick Winfield
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You’re Crazy if You Use Digg’s New Friend Invite FeatureMar 30 2007 | Social Networks |
Want to Digg to know exactly who you are inviting into your network? Want Digg to know about your own little network of friends and match up exactly who is voting on your stories? If for some reason you answered “yes” to either of these questions - then start using Digg’s New Friend Invite Feature:
digg.com / invitefrom / [yourusername] <– put your username there
So what happens when you get people to sign up and become your friend?
After your friends sign-up, Digg will display your name on the homepage as a recognition that you’ve added someone to the community. Your profile stats page will also display how many friend referrals you have completed.
What else can now happen?
- Digg can easily track all of the people you are inviting. Digg can see that they are only voting on your stories (yeah - you know who you are).
7 Comments » - Posted in Social Networks by Chris Winfield
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Come on out to IMNY’s SES Charity PartyMar 29 2007 | Announcements |
Want to have fun and help a great cause to kick off SES in NY? Well then come out to the Town Tavern in Greenwich Village on Monday, April 9th for the Internet Marketers of New York’s SES Charity Party. All money raised will go directly to the Ronald McDonald House Charities, an amazing organization that works to better the lives of children and families throughout the world.
I am one of the founding members of IM-NY and am thrilled that the group’s leader, Greg Niland, was able to put this all together. This is going to be a 3 hour open bar party and we are asking everyone to donate $40 at the door which will go to Ronald McDonald House Charities. On top of that Best of the Web and Text Links Ads are covering the complete cost of the party (btw, if you aren’t using these two companies as part of your search marketing efforts - I would highly recommend heading over to their sites and checking them out).
5 Comments » - Posted in Announcements by Chris Winfield
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Reddit - Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About ItMar 28 2007 | Social Networks |
Reddit is one of the largest social news websites around on the internet. Featuring user-submitted content on a wide variety of topics such as entertainment, pop culture, web 2.0 and politics, Reddit ranks all submitted links through a democratic voting system that is open to all its users. Using complex filters, Reddit also provides a list of recommended links for each individual user, that are based on their voting habits.
Why should you bother with Reddit?
Like Digg or StumbleUpon, getting on Reddit’s frontpage can result in a large amount of traffic to your website. This allows you to rapidly create brand exposure for your business or establish a long-term reader base for your blog.
Using Reddit will also allow your website to spread virally across other social networks, forums or online communities. This generates overall buzz for your brand/concept while acting as a means to build incoming links that will benefit your search engine rankings.
24 Comments » - Posted in Social Networks by Maki P.
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“Originality, what is it?”: has this title been used…maybeMar 27 2007 | Design |
After reading this posted on a flickr I couldn’t help but ponder the idea of originality, specifically as it applies to design but also in its entirety. The designer was creating a logo when he came across a site that had a ’similar’ concept.
I feel that the designs are related, yet both are distinct in their execution, style and handling. The concepts both could have been created at the same time with out knowledge of the other. I am sure if we all pooled together we could collectively find icons, symbols or logos that looked oddly similar to them both. Also, with so many websites being created every second- a lot of them need a logo. For the logos in question being so similar is it because it’s an obvious (good) idea or because the familiarity, ubiquity of the mark has been embedded in our heads? Lets leave that one to the philosophers…
2 Comments » - Posted in Design by Patrick Winfield
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Can Twitter Serve as Highly Targeted Marketing Tool?Mar 27 2007 | Social Networks |
Many of you may know of the recent surge in popularity of the Twitter service. Quite simply, the goal of Twitter is to answer a question: “What are you doing?” Last month (as I began to use the service more aggressively since I signed up in December) I realized that not everyone is answering that question anymore. Twitter is becoming more of a microblogging tool, a news announcement tool, a networking tool, and as of late, a marketing tool.
That’s right. Twitter can be used for marketing.
Currently, the hot “bot” (literally) update comes from Woot.com, an online store that provides daily deals. As you can see on Woot’s Twitter page, the site does not feature anything but hot deals on the products it is selling for the day.
5 Comments » - Posted in Social Networks by Tamar Weinberg
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“Get some texture in there”: Adjustment layers, modes and masks |
With all the stock-exchange sites available today you have a plethora of images to sift through and use to add some cool multifaceted texture effects to an image.
In this tutorial you’ll be taken through a variety of ways in which to use combinations of multiple Adjustment Layers to enhance and balance your composition’s well as a few simple techniques that will help you to quickly create an assortment of Colour Variations of your final image.
You can use any variation of images for this tutorial. These are the images I am working from:
Step 1. Open the images and select the image that will be the base for the whole piece. I am using the portrait of the woman.
No Comments » - Posted in Design, Tutorial by Patrick Winfield
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The Most Overlooked & Affordable Keyword Research MethodMar 22 2007 | SEO |
Proper keyword research is the foundation of a successful search marketing campaign. Work with the wrong keywords and you can run your campaign into the ground resulting in negative campaign ROI (Return on Investment) – or worse yet LOI (Loss on Investment).
For marketers conducting keyword research, some of the following questions arise:
- Should you rely on free tools?
- Should you subscribe to a paid keyword research tool?
- Should you hire an SEO / SEM firm to conduct the research for you?
- And, in the end, what tools and sources can you trust most? Which tools and methods are most reliable?
2 Comments » - Posted in SEO by Jake Matthews
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Why the Age of Your Domain Name is Important for SEOMar 21 2007 | SEO |
If there’s one request that I always cringe at, it’s to disable a site because a customer decides that it is in his best financial interest to “close shop.” Later, if we own the domain name and get notifications about its upcoming expiration date, the customer may already be long gone and is not reachable with any contact information we may have for them.
I can’t say this has happened a lot, but it isn’t unrealistic either. If there’s one thing you should keep when you decide to shut down your business, it’s your domain name (and let’s hope you grabbed your website files too). But why? Believe it or not, it’s an important element for ranking in search engine optimization.
