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:
This page is just links, no pics, and a white background. All of the links could lead to something that a person has been looking for, but no one wants to click on all of those boring links until they find what they want. By the time someone got to what he/she was looking for they probably wouldn’t want it anymore or they would forget what it was that they were looking for in the first place.
A good website that I have gone on many times to buy or look for shoes is:
If you look at Zappo’s site as a whole its not the prettiest or most interesting page, but it is easy to follow and you know whats going on and what will happen when you click on one of the buttons. So in the end its all worth it.
Some of the most awesome websites that teens enjoy are Official band websites. For example:
For Guster’s site the first thing you see is a cool animated picture that shows the band is really original and cool. Seeing this gets me interested in the page and makes me want to learn more about the band. I like how when you scroll down everything you need to know about the band is right there waiting for you to read or look at.
For The Killers site, I like how the first thing you see is a bright colored page that is sort of mysterious that links you to the official page. So its exciting to see what comes next. And once you get on the actual page there is background noises, and a cool background picture. Another fun thing about this page is that the links move around and don’t just sit there like normal pages. The uniqueness of these pages gets the teens hooked and helps the bands become more popular in the world.
Other sites like www.Burton.com and www.iFrogz.com are easy to explore and their home pages are very cool. You can tell that they really know how to sell their products.
To me and many of my friends, its not so much of “what” you sell, it’s really about “how” you sell it to grab the attention of us.
Editor’s Note: This post came from a simple question I posed to Kayla (via a text message) – Forget social networks for a minute and tell me what do you and your friends like & dislike online? Some of her choices made me shudder (complete Flash websites) but also reinforced my belief of: give your target audience what they want. If you have specific questions for Kayla that you would like to learn more about – please feel free to ask.
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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.
Step 1. Open your photo and determine the subject to be isolated. Duplicate the layer and on the top layer silhouette the subject by using the Pen Tool.
Step 2. Tweak the selection with the Quick Mask Mode. You can fix all the little place you were off with your initial selection. Control/Click on the layer of the isolated subject and then select the Quick Mask Mode just below the Foreground/Background Color Swatches on the Tool Palette. Using the Paint Brush add to the selection by painting white and take away from the selection with black. Once the selection is tight, copy and paste the subject on its own layer.
Step 3. Add Gaussian Blur to the duplicate layer of the entire pic. This will leave in your Layer Palette a blurred copy of the entire picture and the unaltered version on the layer below it.
Step 4. Delete some of the blurred layer using a Feather Selection. We want to keep some of the original image to complete the illusion. Use a Square Marquee and select the bottom half or quarter of the image. Go to Select/Feather and input a number, experiment with the range. I used a Feather Selection of 35. Then hit Delete.
Step 5. Layer Mode options can be used to further enhance the image. Play with the various modes and see how they react with the underlying duplicate layer. These are some various modes that I thought could possibly be used- the differences can be subtle.
Final. Flatten the image and adjust the Levels and use some Selective Coloring to bring out the blacks, whites or any other color in the image.
You’re Crazy if You Use Digg’s New Friend Invite Feature
Mar 30, 2007 by Chris Winfield | 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).
- Digg can then completely discount those Diggs – perhaps even making them count as buries instead if people only vote for your stories (even if it’s natural).
- Have a higher profile account? Digg can bury your stories/ban your account/etc.
How long before people start abusing it? Immediately. Last night I got about 25 different emails from people I don’t even know asking me to join their network. No thanks.
While I was writing this I came across this post by Russ Virante where he wrote a quick line of code which automatically adds him as a friend to anyone who visits this page and is logged into Digg:
<iframe src="http://digg.com/invitefrom/russvirante" height="1" width="1"></iframe>
As he says – if you do visit that page, don’t forget to delete him from your friends section. It will be interesting to see if Digg deletes him as a user as well even though he is just doing it to expose the flaw. How soon until LittleGreenFootballs has this code on all their pages? 
This feature also now opens up the floodgates for the bot makers getting sued by MySpace to start creating new DiggerAdders.
So, if you want to stay under the radar a bit on Digg – stay away from this new feature. I just don’t get it. Unless there has been such a mass exodus as a result of the Top User removal and related changes (which I don’t think there has been) this is not something that Digg needs right now especially when they are so concerned with potential spammers.
If you are interested in a good overview of how it works – take a look at Muhammad’s rundown here.
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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).
Here are all of the details for the party:
- When: MONDAY April 9th from 7 to 10pm
- Where: Town Tavern at 134 W 3rd St & 6th Ave
- What: 3 Hour Open Bar Party for $40 donation at the door
- Good: All money goes to Ronald McDonald House Charity
- Fun: This charity Party is open to everybody. So even if you aren’t going to SES or don’t think you would know anyone – come on down. You’ll have an amazing time and will be helping an excellent cause.
If you would like to also contribute to this charity event (money, raffle prize, whatever) contact Greg Niland using the IM-NY contact form.
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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 liinst 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.
How do I get started on Reddit?
Start by visiting their website and signing up. After which you’ll be able to submit any stories you come across while surfing the Internet.
To vote for a specific article that’s on Reddit, you’ll just have to click on the arrows located on the left of the link. Clicking on the up arrow will register a positive vote and add 1 point to the overall point score for the article while pushing it closer to the front page. Clicking on the down arrow will register a negative vote and deduct 1 point from the overall link score and moving it further away from the front page.
Reddit also consists of several sections which are known as subreddits. These sections cover topics such as science, web 2.0 and programming.
Submitting Links on Reddit
The easiest way to submit links on Reddit is through the Reddit bookmarklet set, which allows you to send web pages to Reddit while you are on any website. If the link has already been submitted, you’ll be sent to the specific link page and be given the option to comment or vote for it.
Link submission for Reddit is a fantastically simple process. Unlike Digg, you don’t have to pick a specific category or write a description for your submission. You’ll just need to type in the URL and enter the title for your link to be accepted.
Some important guidelines from Reddit on successful submissions:
A useful and/or entertaining title can also go a long way toward piquing someone’s interest. Alternatively, deceiving readers with false or misleading titles is a surefire way to suffer karmic retribution from your fellow redditors.
Likewise, linkjacking an article from its original source in order to drive traffic to your personal blog will likely just drive down your karma. Submitting personal work isn’t taboo, but trying to flood reddit with every blog entry you’ve ever written is certain to be punished.
Reddit’s Front Page: Observations on Topics, Votes and Link Duration
Reddit’s front page features a list of 25 items, each with points that can range from 30 to 700 votes.
After analyzing Reddit for several days, I’ve concluded that getting on the front page requires a minimum of 30 positive votes that are spread out over a period of one or two hours. This influx of votes will push the item up the ranks where it will naturally gather more or less votes as it is exposed to more Reddit users.
On the other hand, Reddit’s programming and science subreddits require a much smaller amount of user votes. Approximately 8 votes for the programming section and 2 votes for the Science section will be enough to drive specific items on each subreddit front page.
Note that Reddit’s main front page features uncategorized submissions, which means two things: Links on a wide variety of topics are accepted and secondly, they are exposed to all Reddit users which means significantly more traffic than the Reddit’s sub sections.
The links on Reddit’s front page focus on a wide variety of topics such as politics, technology, design and pop culture. Almost all of them however, are links to newly published articles or reports.
While not exactly breaking news, most frontpage links lead to relatively new content that was produced within the range of one to four days from the current date. This however, doesn’t hold true for all links as I’ve also seen the odd timeless video or picture being voted up to the front page.
How long will a story remain on the Reddit front page?
I’ve looked at Reddit’s front page carefully over the span of a week and noticed that a popular submission can stay on the front page for approximately the maximum time frame of 23 hours, after which it’ll nest in the second page for a while, before slowly receding down the ranks.
I’ve never seen a story remain on the front page pass the 23 hour limit and this phenomenon also applies for the subreddits. Note that if a specific story hits the top spot in Reddit, it will be relegated into Reddit’s top links section and preserved for all-time.
Reddit’s Top Links Section: Fodder for Analysis
The best way to get on the Reddit Homepage is to study and understand what type of material hits the number one spot in Reddit. All the links that have ever gotten onto the number one spot have numbers that are colored a very light orange.
For example, the screenshot below of the Reddit home page now will show that links number 1, 4 and 6 have hit the top spot before.
Clicking on any colored number will bring you to Reddit’s top links section which features all the links that ever reached the number one spot. You can sort this list of top links according to links from today, this week or even all-time links.
If you sort all the top links by all-time filter, you’ll get the latest top links in the first few pages and the older links in the later pages. This collection of top links can give you an accurate feel of the type of material that is likely to reach Reddit’s front page.
How to Become a Reddit Power User
Let’s start by examining how users in Reddit or “redditors” are effectively ranked within the system. A note from Reddit’s FAQ:
When a particular item is promoted or demoted, the user who posted it is either rewarded or punished — a system of editorial karma. In the same way that popular submissions are voted to the top, the individuals who post them get increases in karma.
Every redditor affects one another’s karma equally, regardless of his/her karma. Although democracy isn’t perfect, this experiment should supply the public with the information they demand while also rewarding those who provide it.
What this means is that Reddit’s editorial system features some degree of user self-regulation. Users who want to develop a strong reputation must contribute quality links because their popularity with Reddit users will directly reflect on the user’s status.
Prettifying your Digg profile doesn’t apply here because of Reddit’s minimalist emphasis on user profiles and on-site design. Becoming a power user simply involves spending a lot of time contributing to Reddit and actively interacting with other users.
I’d love to say that there is a shortcut to the whole process but unfortunately, the cliche of giving back to the community holds true in this case. But at the same time, effective networking in Reddit can definitely bring your submissions more exposure and editorial action.
Networking in Reddit is a simple process. The first step you have to take is to send users a private message to say “hello”. After which, proceed to add them as your “friend”.
To make someone your friend, you’ll just need to click on their username to view their profile. On the right sidebar, you’ll find a list of links, one of which is the option “add to your friends“.
Once they’ve been “friended”, their usernames will appear highlighted and a collection of all your friends’ submissions can be viewed at friends.reddit.com.
Here are some additional factors to consider when trying to network within Reddit:
- Increasing your user reach. As you can probably tell, having a large number of like-minded friends increases the likelihood that your submissions will get more positive votes, because all your submissions are tracked by your friends.
- Vote for your Reddit Friends. Voting on their stories reminds them that you are following their submissions. This also increases the likelihood that they will reciprocate when you submit links.
- Submit regularly and frequently. This adds to the community and also has the benefit of increasing your Reddit Karma, which is something like a reputation badge you can flaunt to confirm your importance and level of involvement in the Reddit community. An equivalent example would be the number of rep points and posts one has accumulated in a traditional forum.
- Comment Actively. Like commenting on blogs, this helps to build exposure for your user profile and is also a nice way to make friends with specific users. Comment often enough and you’ll find that your submissions will receive comments as well.
Getting on the Reddit Homepage
Getting on Reddit homepage requires positive votes within a short time-frame. Most articles submitted do not reach Reddit’s homepage because they were either duplicate material, submitted by users with a bad reputation or had poorly written copy.
Here are some factors of importance to consider:
- Headlines matter more than ever. Unlike Digg, Reddit has a Craigslist-style interface which doesn’t display any description text or link blurb. Your headlines are the only thing each user will see and they are absolutely crucial.
- Who submits? Successful submissions on Reddit also depend on the amount of karma that each user has or the reach of each user (number of friends, number of top links etc.).
- Submission Category. As mentioned earlier, it’ll will be easier to get on the frontpage for specific subreddits because there are considerably lesser stories competing in each category.
- When to submit? . Activity on Reddit is heavily skewed towards North American time. Submitting the article anytime from 9am to 6pm EST will allow you to get maximal exposure. Submitting in the middle of the night will not.
Seven Tactics to Get Your Link on Reddit’s Front Page
So you want to get your website on Reddit’s frontpage and receive lots of exposure for your business or blog. How do you get started? Read on for a list of my seven favorite all-time strategies to get on Reddit’s front page.
1. Create a sub-domain or individual web page for Reddit submissions
Sometimes your website might fall into a genre (think RV insurance or real estate) that simply doesn’t appeal to the Reddit crowd. The easiest way to fix this is to create an individual webpage for all your Reddit-style content.
Here’s the perfect example of how this should work: Car Talk, a boring website about automobile selling, buying and maintenance is an ideal model of a website that will be generally unappealing to all casual or hardcore Reddit users.
What this company (or their marketing/SEO agent) did was to delegate a specific page on their website to this funny article about MIT admissions and recruitment. It worked. The link for this particular web page was submitted and reached the top spot of the Reddit front page, two days ago.
The article posted on Car Talk was not new but the whole strategy and execution was brilliant. By hosting it on a separate web page while keeping it structurally connected to the main domain, this meant that Car Talk’s main business and brand logo was prominently displayed to thousands of Reddit users.
This tactic is probably only good for short-term traffic because users who are interested in the specific article will not return to browse the other contents on your website, especially if they are very different from what was submitted to Reddit.
2. Build up your user profile in the community
This is one of the best ways to make sure that your submissions carry weight. Submit to Reddit regularly, network with other users and build up your friends list. The point of this exercise is to build up a history of submissions and a wellspring of positive editorial karma.
3. Send Targeted Messages to Reddit Friends
The ability to send private messages to fellow Reddit users is a very useful feature when you want to actively promote a submission that concerns your website. Don’t assume that all your Reddit friends will follow you through their friends list.
Send them a short private message saying that they might find a specific link interesting. A long term strategy would be to monitor your Reddit friends’ voting and submission behavior in order to categorize them according to specific interests or topics.
It’s a little like keeping a Public Relations notebook. Just as PR executives send out targeted press releases to specific journalists, you should send relevant private messages to your Reddit friends. The trick is to not do it so often that they’ll get irritated or detect a pattern in your submissions.
Rotate the friends on your message list and keep it to a maximum of one message per week for each Reddit user.
4. Form a Private Reddit Voting party
Form a Reddit voting group which consists of like-minded bloggers, webmasters, friends or even business associates. Get each of them to seed a specific article by voting positively.
However, it is important to note that Reddit focuses a lot on making sure that editorial karma or power is given to users who contribute to the community. Simply getting your friends to sign up for fresh Reddit accounts and solely voting for your links is a bad idea that will eventually backfire.
The end result is that your profile and the links you submitted will come into disrepute within the Reddit community. A simple solution is to make sure that everyone within your voting party submits links and votes for other stories as well.
Make sure they contribute to the community or they’ll be labeled as passive one-shot voters, which leads to a corresponding drop in karma and reputation.
5. Interpret and Critique News Material or other Popular Links
Breaking important and controversial news is one of the easiest way to hit the Reddit front page. You’ll have a lot of competition because other users will be looking to put up the latest news as well. There are two ways to take advantage of the breaking news strategy.
Take a look at the current items on Reddit and the note any news worthy material you want to critique or write about. Come up with an article that gives a unique take on the news item and submit it. This leverages the attention given to the news article.
A example of this tactic is an occurrence on the 8th of March 2007, where 14 of the 15 items on Reddit were about impeaching President George Bush and Vice President Cheney.
This suggest that specific Reddit users were leveraging the momentum generated by the initial impeachment article. See Paul McNamara’s article on Mob Rule in Reddit for more information.
The second method involves breaking news through your website. In order to avoid being labeled as a link jacker, you’ll need to come up with some original opinion and interpretation of the breaking news while making sure that you link to the source.
This is a great way to get to the home page, provided you receive some decent support from your Reddit friends.
6. Take Advantage of On-Site Traffic
By putting Reddit voting buttons, you’ll stand to gain from the natural traffic that your website receives. Your site audience can help to vote up your article on Reddit very quickly if your website enjoys a consistent traffic flow. I’ve tried this several times and it never fails to garner some additional votes. My favorite strategy is to put on a on-site voting badge and drive traffic towards the specific webpage.
Forums are a great way to send traffic but unless they are heavily trafficked, they won’t send a lot of visitors during the crucial 1 to 2 hour period after a submission at Reddit. The fastest way to get heavy traffic to your website is to submit the same webpage to social websites like Digg, Netscape and StumbleUpon.
Other strategies include the traditional method of pitching a specific article on your website to bloggers, in the hope that they’ll link to it and send you some visitors. Getting linked by a huge blog like Lifehacker or Boing Boing will send traffic that can be roughly equivalent to getting on the Digg and Reddit homepage.
Just a note. Don’t send traffic to your article page on Reddit because it’ll be too obvious that you’re trying to gather votes. Send them to your webpage and make sure the Reddit voting badges are prominently displayed. Voltier.com has written more about this topic of using on-site traffic.
7. Optimize your Submissions
As I’ve mentioned earlier, the subreddits enjoy limited competition so submitting your link to both the subreddits as well as Reddit’s main section will ensure that you get a higher chance of getting on the Reddit front page.
Being listed in the frontpage of a subreddit will allow your link to get exposure, which may lead to enough votes that will push the link to the main Reddit front page.
Your submissions will also be optimized when you write intriguing headlines that grab attention and scream for click throughs. Seeding your submissions with comments from friends is also a great way to direct focus towards the submitted link.
Final Thoughts on Reddit
Being an avid user of Reddit with my personal blog, I can attest to Reddit’s effectiveness as a means to create widespread viral awareness. The results have always been fascinating, especially when it comes to the word-of-mouth publicity and buzz generated through social linking by Reddit users with blogs.
The sheer variety of material covered in Reddit appeals to both users and marketers alike. Niche websites or products/services can all be effectively promoted on Reddit through all the strategies I’ve listed above.
While Reddit definitely has a lot of potential when it comes to generating traffic, the most important point is knowing how to leverage the exposure given to your website once it gets on the Reddit front page.
Do you want to build brand awareness or would you rather have repeat visitors, potential customers and blog subscribers? These are some factors to consider before you direct your efforts towards using Reddit as a marketing tool for your business or blog.
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“Originality, what is it?”: has this title been used…maybe
Mar 27, 2007 by Patrick Winfield | DesignAfter 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…
Merriam-Webster define original as this:
1 archaic : the source or cause from which something arises; specifically : ORIGINATOR
2 a : that from which a copy, reproduction, or translation is made b : a work composed firsthand
3 a : a person of fresh initiative or inventive capacity b : a unique or eccentric person
Bad artists copy. Great artists steal.
-Pablo Picasso
Now we can all agree that Picasso new what he was doing (yes-I know he wasn’t a designer), and even if he didn’t he was doing things right. This quote, I believe, refers to the need to push existing ideas and methods and filter them through the individuals subjective mind and personal experiences.
In the early 20th century originality did not play a role in the relationship between Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso as they pushed the ideas of cubism and collage. Both of their works of the time were very much like the others, some were almost identical. A specific artist that inspired Picasso’s and Braque’s early experiments with this flattened space was Paul Cezanne, but they pushed this distortion just a little bit further.
When this image of a bunch of web 2.0 logos came out a few months back, the color schemes are obviously very close with a high majority of them being blue and green. This could be considered a design trend which is the process of getting others to follow, of their own free will, your actions or style.
Trends are important because the set the stage for the next innovation in design, or what have you, to come along and show how it is different and new. We have all seen the assortment of cell phone designs and technologies that have been sprouting up, but when the iphone came out- it was exciting because it was fresh and new in several ways- it is still just a fancy phone.
Originality is the art of concealing your sources.
-Benjamin Franklin
Originality is closely linked to creativity and thought of as the result of the creative process. Originality can vary from culture to culture with more emphasis on this ideal or that one. With so many people do so many similar things, how can there be anything original anymore? Well we all are all so different for starters, but maybe an anthropologist can better articulate and answer that one.
Anything from singing, dancing, painting, photography, gardening to cooking can have elements of creativity that are based off of an existing idea. If I am cooking a chicken quesadilla, I pretty much have to have chicken, cheese and tortilla but I can add my own touch of creativity by the way I arrange those elements and the extra things I add in as well as the way I prepare and present the food. How about tire design? Nobody is making a rounder tire, but there are innovations with production of the tire, the materials used and the craftsmanship in general.
I do not feel that the designer on flickr was erroneous in anyway even if he did reference the other sites logo for inspiration. If the logo looked to much like the other it may come down to who had the strongest brand recognition and then viewers would say ’symbol y’ looks so much like ’symbol x’, because the are more familiar with x. If it was a direct copy of the mark I am sure it would be a case for the courts.
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Can Twitter Serve as Highly Targeted Marketing Tool?
Mar 27, 2007 by Tamar Weinberg | Social NetworksMany 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.
For marketers who use Twitter, this is a great way to reach out to a different demographic. As you may be able to see from the screenshot, Woot currently has 1302 followers. Those 1302 followers, who made the choice to follow Woot’s announcements, receive highly targeted and desired traffic about products that Woot is selling.
Is this the only reach of Twitter? Apparently not. Today, TechCrunch announced that Twitter will be introducing web services, which will should broaden the Twitter audience.
Interestingly enough, for those who are not able to commit to blogging, particularly due to time restraints, using Twitter would be an interesting exercise for companies to try communicating their own announcements. Some blogs already provide headlines on the Twitter site. But if you didn’t have a blog, you could limit your announcements to 140 characters (that’s a Twitter restriction) and share what you think would best serve the community that follows you. This would, as previously stated, save time and give you the opportunity to have a “blogging” voice in “microblogging” terms.
If you’re looking to get on the Twitter bandwagon, tell your family and friends and let them sign up so that they can follow your business. The site itself makes broadcasting a lot easier with a very targeted audience.
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“Get some texture in there”: Adjustment layers, modes and masks
Mar 23, 2007 by Patrick Winfield | Design, TutorialWith 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.
Step 2. Isolate the areas you would like to focus on. I isolated the face using the pen tool, get the most accurate traces possible. Zoom in close if need be. Make each selection in its own layer and name it if that will help.
Step 3. Activate the next layer to be used, this will be the darkened ambient layer. I selected the clouds layer for this step. Select the Multiply Layer Mode and position it in the way you like. Experiment with the placement until you are happy. Now Ctrl-click on the Face layer to make a selection. Click on the Layer Mask icon in the palette. This will instantly apply a Layer Mask that displays the Cloud Multiply on the face only.
Step 4. Deselect the ‘link’ icon that joins the layer to its Layer Mask. This will allow you to move and alter the Cloud layer, while keeping its application zone restricted to the ‘face’ selection. Click on this Layer Mask in the Layer toolbar to edit it, and then use a large brush to remove the overlay from the eye, nose and mouth area.
Step 5. Activate the next image, dragon statue image, and apply the Layer Mode to Hard Light. Repeat the face Layer Mask technique to restrict the Hard Light to the face. Select a medium brush and remove some of the dragon statue from the face in the areas that need less, make sure you are working on the layer mask. Apply the same steps to the last texture to be applied, the rock detail. Use what ever Layer Mode you feel works best, I used a Layer Mode of Vivid Light and lowered the Opacity.
Step 6. Duplicate the untextured base Face layer and bring it to the forefront or top of the layers palette. Add a Layer Mask and hide the whole layer. Now brush around the edges of the chin and hairline to bring out the natural highlights and contours that may have been obscured by the underlying textures.
Step 7. Add a Movable Flare to the composition. To make that ,create a new layer, make a square selection and fill with black. Render a Lens Flare Filter>Render>Lens Flare in the centre of the square. Set this layer to Screen, you may have to erase some of the hard edge if it shows. You will now have a movable light source that can be placed anywhere on the composition and not fixed to one spot. Place this in the origin of the highlight area, wherever that may be. I placed some on the curve of the dragon statue piece and also on the head jewels. For some subtle effects apply the layer mode to Overlay for these flares.
Step 8. Apply a Channel Mixer Adjustment Layer. This is the best way to build a dynamic color scheme from scratch. Experiment with the different values in each channel and observe the effects each has on the image. Also apply a Curves Adjustment Layer to bring out the depth of the piece.
Final: Apply a Color Balance layer to the whole piece. Tweak the Highlights towards yellow and the Shadows toward blue. Play with the curves again to get the right amount of depth in the image.
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?
All of these are relevant and important questions which tend to hinge on the size of your company, your experience with search marketing, your budget and your marketing / business plan phase. Professional tools and methods for keyword research abound. Many industry professionals develop proprietary tools or look to well-known sources including Keyword Discovery, Wordtracker and relative newcomer Wordze. Others rely on these tools in conjunction with Overture and Google. A useful, concise post by Lisa Barone at Search Engine Guide walks you through the keyword research process and Shari Thurow also walks interested parties through the intricacies of mining keyword data to find the “big pictureâ€.
But what if you are not a professional and are intimidated by the vast array of tools online? You’re not sure where to start your research. One of the most reliable, trustworthy, affordable and accurate tools available is the process of conducting keyword research by interviewing the people closest to you and your company. This process can be one of the most accurate and reliable keyword research tools available to you. It is a great starting point for any campaign and is often be overlooked in the whir of buzz and tools available.
Particularly for small businesses, the interview process can be one of the most successful forms of keyword research going. It is an affordable way (the only cost is time) to start to focus your keyword research and really get to know and discover the core terms on which to optimize and bid. It can be a solid foundation on which to build out and guide your keyword research with more advanced tools as well.
So who should you begin to interview for this research and why? Who knows your business, process, brand, locale, niche products and services the best? And what is the best way to extract valuable keyword information from these groups who know your business so well? Once you extract keywords from them, how do you make sense of it all and rate the value and relevance of the various words?
The following are the most important groups that I focus on and here are a couple of starter notes to be aware of:
Interview these groups in person, over the phone or via email, whatever is easiest. Just make sure that if you are meeting them in person, to catch them when they can actually focus and think clearly on the points for which you’re requesting feedback. You might ask them some of the following as baseline or standard questions:
- What Ten terms or keywords do you associate most with my business as a whole, and my specific products and services.
- What terms come to mind when you think of my business as a whole
- Why did you choose to work with or buy from my company over my competitors?
Hint – if you can and have their approval / consent – record the conversation – you’ll get great snippets that you’d never imagine getting from any keyword research tool and you will have them saved!
Interview these Groups and give them the following suggested “Trust†Levels – 1 being the most trusted group:
Current Clients, Trust Level – 1: Clients (or customers) are the people that you are searching for and they are searching for you, so they have the best, most accurate keywords. They’ve found you before, so if you extract how they found you or thought of you originally, and apply that to search, chances are, this will be successful again. You can glean keywords from that you never would have found elsewhere. Don’t forget former customers and clients because they have been through your store, site and processes and will give you feedback on the “experience†of your company as well.. Customer keywords are the most valuable because they may have found you with them and they spread word of mouth business to you with specific terminology that others will use to find you.
Employees, Trust Level – 2: Long time employees, especially Sales People are the best to interview because they know the business best and chances are they have interfaced with clients before. Sales people speak with customers all day long. Sales people know industry buzz terms because their lives depend on it. They also know the competition – they know your business and make a living with it, so they will describe it with great accuracy and truthfulness. Long time employees are usually passionate about the business and will give you really accurate focus.
Family and Friends, Trust Level 3: Family and Friends have heard you complain of your growing pains and rave about your successes over the years, so their collective memory will prove to add great insight for your keyword research. They’ve seen you work your butt off to grow your business over the years. They’ve heard you bitch and moan about your business and describe in all too much agonizing and heroic detail. They’ve listened to you preach about your products and services day after day and so they will help restore the collective memory keyword bank for you – almost immediately.
Competitors, Trust Level 4: You may not be able to interview competitors directly. And, they may have slightly different products, services, capabilities locations. As well, you may not want to compete directly head to head with them. Put a slightly lower weight on them. Look at the copy that they are using on their site and collateral, their page titles etc. Don’t copy them, but try to gain an understanding if these words have been successful for the competitor or not. Go to your competitor’s place of business, or send someone there and pick up some of their brochures, business cards and see what they are talking about in their reception room and lobby – there may be keywords lurking in BOLD print.
Suppliers, Trust Level 5: Review some of the terms that your suppliers work with on their own campaigns – if they will let you do this. (some situations may not be applicable, but others will be quite relevant).
Further, Varied Trust Level: Labels and SKU’s- if you are a retailer, read your suppliers product labels and see what ingredients and raw materials are in them. Look at the boxes that you receive shipments and send shipments in – there are keywords on them that relate to your business. Review your SKUs – people search SKUs like crazy in comparison shopping and generally in broader search. There may be some hidden gems.
You can change the Keyword Trust Level to fit your business, the above are merely suggestions.
Finally, once you have all of your keyword interviews complete, you might take things one step further and begin to rank and rate the quality of the keywords in a spreadsheet. In Each Trust Level Group, you can assign a relevance number to each individual keyword. Relevance is subjective, but basically is how accurately you think that the word or phrase reflects your business, products and services. At the end, you can come up with a sort of weighted value for each term. (Trust + Relevance = Keyword Strength) This is not an exact process, but it will give you a good measure of what value to place on specific terms.
With the keywords that come out of the “Interview Keyword Researchâ€, you can then go to more advanced keyword research tools – some of the above listed tools – knowing that your are starting from the source of your business, with a true understanding and confidence that you are working with the terms that reflect your company the best and most accurately for searchers. You can then derive more empirical data and use terms on both the Organic Optimization Campaign as well as on the Paid Search Campaign.
By interviewing those people closest to your business – your clients, suppliers, employees, and even family & friends you’ll find a ton of great new keywords. You’ll likely find that your keywords are really specific and you will not only save money on your research, but you’ll end up with a truly targeted foundation on which to either optimize your site, begin your PPC campaign or on which to build out more intense, tool-based keyword research. The keywords and concepts that you’ll derive from this process will drive conversions over the long run and allow you to be successful in finding the keyword hidden gems.
Oh yeah – one other point: once your campaign is up and running, your site statistics (web analytics) package can be one of the best, most important (and most fun) sources to back-check and revamp your keywords and how successful they are on an ongoing basis!
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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.
Consider the idea that you are creating a brand new website. The domain name is unheard of and therefore is unranked. You search for your domain name in Google and find nothing. Weeks later, your brand new site is still nowhere to be found. Time passes, and your site may start appearing in the search results, but the progression is going very slowly. Google is crawling your site with caution. They don’t know you well and are determining if you can be trusted.
An element of trust is important for ranking well on search engines. Trust can be conveyed through linking strategies, like when your site is linked to from a site that Google already considers to be an authority, but age, too, plays an important role.
Why should it matter? Simple. Considering recent studies showing the spammy nature of brand new websites, how is Google supposed to know that your site is more legitimate than the other spam site (including on their own domain)? It doesn’t. Google is not human. Trust comes with time. Spam sites don’t last for a long time and certainly won’t be linked to from authority sites.
The problem is that if you lose your domain name, it’s likely gone forever. If it expires, it goes into a pool and it will get snagged pretty quickly if the domain name looks like a worthwhile investment on the part of people who actually make it their business to buy domain names that could make them rich. If you’ve made a name for yourself and have to shut down without keeping the domain name under your ownership, but later, you realize that you’ve made a regrettable decision, you might have a hard time getting your “brand” name back (especially if there are no associated trademarks). You’ll end up likely having to build a brand new name — and you’ll have to concern yourself with regaining that trust once again. If you don’t own the old domain anymore, you can’t set up 301 redirects to retain any rankings you might have. You’re back to the beginning.
Depending on the TLD (top level domain) you choose, your domain renewal shouldn’t be more than $15 per year in the worst case scenario. Even if you’re not sure you’ll ever use the domain name again, it’s a small price to pay for the time and money that you will have to reinvest in building your credibility in the search engines again.
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