To create a successful site, you must find a need and then fill it. Tabeze is trying to do just that when it comes to domain name research.

One of the basic problems of many domain name research tools is the time it takes to determine whether or not each domain is already registered or not. Another is that it can be hard to brainstorm because it is hard to keep track of your past ideas and use them for inspiration.

Tabeze Changes How Domain Name Research Is Done…

Tabeze is basically an AJAX domain name research tool. It allows you to create as many “tabs,” or domain name searchers, as you’d like. Each tab allows you to determine whether or not a domain name is registered. You can use as many tabs at a time as you’d like—I can’t usually type fast enough to use more than 4 or 5 at once. When you get a result you’d like to keep, just leave it on the page and open up another tab. It’s really cool to be able to research multiple domain names simultaneously and to be able to see all my searches on one page.

…But Has a Few Kinks to Work Out

I had problems with the page occasionally locking up if I had too many tabs running queries. That was frustrating because I have to copy down all the research I’ve done so far and reload the page. I lose the ability, unless I re-query all the previous domain names, of seeing all the research I’ve done on one page.

One feature that I really, really wanted was the ability to reorganize the tabs—I kept wanting to click and drag the tabs to reorganize them and group them into related sets. Grouping ideas is one of the best roads to great brainstorming, and I missed the ability to do that. The other feature I wanted was to query multiple domain-name extensions at once and view the results in a table or list that would normally be hidden but would appear when I hover over or click on a tab.

Tabeze Needs to Grow Up

Well done, Tabeze, finding a need and doing a pretty good job of filling it. Please, please fix the connection problems I run into sometimes and add a few features to make domain name research much easier and snappier. If the server didn’t crash, I’d use Tabeze, with or without new features. Until then, I have to stick with the Network Solutions domain name research tool.

Google recently came out with a new tracking code for its Analytics service. It has a cool new feature, but validators also choke on it.

Let’s Fix the Code

Virtually all browsers in use today understand that they should ignore what’s in between <script> tags. For the most part, we don’t have to insert comment tags <!-- --> any more. Unfortunately, most validators still choke on what they find in between script tags. So technically, you could leave comment tags out, but in practice it’s very annoying to have the validator spitting back a big pile of errors.

To “fix” Google’s tracking code (which in theory should be perfectly fine) so that it doesn’t result in validation errors, simply add comments around the contents of the script tag, like so:

A Cool New Feature

The nicest feature of the new Google Analytics tracking code is that it has Javascript code that automatically detects whether the page the code is on uses a secure, https:// connection or a normal, http:// connection. No more having to write your own detection code to include a different script.

Personally, I think adding comment tags is a small price to pay to get a tracking code that validates and automatically detects the transfer protocol. Thank you, Google.

Some people have wondered: is Blog Rush against the Google AdSense terms of service?

Blog Rush, as I see it, is NOT against Google AdSense’s terms of service.

The Google AdSense blog says:

As many of you already know, our program policies strictly prohibit any means of artificially generating ad impressions or clicks, including third-party services such as paid-to-click, paid-to-surf, auto-surf, and click-exchange programs. These programs offer incentives for users to view web pages or click on ads, resulting in activity that is harmful to our advertisers.

Google wants to make sure that site and blog owners aren’t providing people with an incentive (beyond normal interest and curiosity) to click on AdSense links.

Blog Rush Is in the Clear

If you examine each part of the quote above, you can see that Blog Rush does not violate any of the statements made.

No one is paid to click on AdSense ads after they land on a page they found through Blog Rush. Doing so does not result in a reward for visitors.

No one is being paid to surf or autosurf—in money or clicks. Even if you surf your own site for an extra 1000 pages, you’ve only earned impressions. If your article titles suck, no one is going to click them. This will be even more true as cheating is weeded out of the impression system. You can see this even now—the cheaters are generating thousands of extra impressions, but no extra clicks. Click-through rates are simply falling. If someone does click through, it’s because they are truly interested in what you have to say.

Blog Rush is not click exchange—no one is using the system to agree to click each other’s AdSense links.

There is no incentive to view other web sites’ pages.

Because Blog Rush in no way affects visitor behavior in relation to AdSense ads, it does not violate the terms of service. So go ahead and join Blog Rush and see if it increases your blog traffic.

I recently learned about a new traffic generating system called Blog Rush. I’m usually very skeptical of such systems, but this one had some very interesting unique ideas that kept me on the hook just long enough to try it. The system is in Beta, and there have been a few hiccups more than most Beta launches, but on the whole it is working as advertised.

The Idea Behind Blog Rush

The basic idea behind Blog Rush is to create a network of similar sites and facilitate the exchange and dynamic rotation of links between these sites. Each site in the network installs a widget that lists five links to blog posts in the network. Your blog’s widget will show the links from other blogs, and your blog will be linked to from other sites’ widgets.

Blog Rush Referrals

So how does the system decide which links to show? Through an impression tracking and exchange system. Each time your blog shows the widget (1 page impression, 5 link impressions), you earn the right to have your blog linked to for one impression on someone else’s site.

Because you are creating 5 link impressions for each page impression, but only receiving one, the system has 4 extra link impressions per page impression to hand out.

For now, Blog Rush has done two main things with these extra impressions:

1. They have reserved one link impression for themselves to use for advertising and handing out bonus impressions.
2. The other three are used for rewarding referrals to the system. If you refer someone, you get an impression for every impression they earn. The same thing happens for each level of referrals, all the way down to ten “generations.” You get less and less of an impression at each level (level 10 earns you 1/8 of an impression), and the fractions add up correctly to three total impressions.

Blog Rush Inequality

There was a person who left a comment on the Blog Rush blog who was concerned about unequal impressions. His example stated that if there was someone who had 1,000 impressions vs. someone who had 100, a growing deficit of available impressions would be created. This would be true, but only if you have too few sites. As you increase the number of sites, the deficits and surpluses will tend to average out almost perfectly, especially over time. Blog Rush has already served more than 40,000,000 blog headlines, so I’m not worried about the availability of page impressions to show the link impressions I’ve earned.

Cheating on Blog Rush

The biggest problem with Blog Rush so far has been some cheating. Many bloggers have created ways to game the system by creating bad pageviews—for example, using a script to auto-load pages to earn impressions, even though no human ever sees the pages. These cheaters have sucked up impressions earned by legitimate bloggers and have nearly killed click-through rates. However, Blog Rush has switched to a manual review system for new blogs and is purging existing blogs that aren’t meeting standards, so this problem should be fixed soon.

Click Through Rates on Blog Rush

My last concern about Blog Rush will be click through rates. How many impressions will it take before someone clicks and visits my site? The last time I checked, I had nearly 300 impressions without a click. It can take over a thousand impressions to generate a click, though, so no final verdict here… The headlines you write for your blog posts will also be extremely influential on your click through rates, so write headlines that will grab attention and will be short enough to fit in the widget (7 words, 40 characters or so).

It can’t hurt, so go try Blog Rush. I have visited some blog posts that sounded interesting, so it has value for discovering new information, even if no one clicks your links. And if I’m clicking links, there’s a chance I will visit your blog some time!

This may be old news for most of you, but Apple has released Safari for Windows. You can get the download here.

Lots of people wrote about how increasing support for Safari increases support for the iPhone development community…

I’d like to focus on what it means for the web design/web standards community.

Simplified(?) Testing

My initial impression, like many others’, was to rejoice in the fact that I can now test Safari without having to buy a Mac. That impression turned to horror as I thought things through—what this really is is another browser, adding another layer of testing and complexity to my life. However, we can hope that Safari for Windows closely, if not identically, mimics the rendering behavior of Safari on a Mac.

Seeing as how I don’t own a Mac, I have no idea whether or not Safari is the same (or at least close) on both operating systems. Does anyone know?

Web Standards Support

Two months after Safari’s release, I have not heard of or encountered any real problems with Safari. It renders web pages in essentially the same way as Firefox and Opera—standards-compliant, that is.

Future Issues

Well, truthfully, going forward we hope there will be fewer and fewer issues. I’d love to see more and more browsers following tighter and better-managed specs for (X)HTML and CSS. Which browser you are using should fade in importance as far as web standards are concerned. The fact that Safari was released and then downloaded over 1 million times in 48 hours and hasn’t made any waves or compatibility issues is an encouraging step in that direction. Congratulations on a solid launch Apple, even though I haven’t made it my primary browser.

I wrote a few months ago introducing Tag A Cloud as a possible method for generating free traffic to a site. At this point, I think the results are mixed.

Starting Off

I signed up with Tag A Cloud back in January. I put a link on my site in a blog post I wrote about Tag A Cloud, and then I simply clicked on my own link each time I visited my site. I usually browsed a few of the other links that were there, too, doing my part to help drive a little traffic. The day I put the link up, my site visitors started to click through as well.

At that time, there weren’t nearly as many links, and many of them weren’t upgraded, so if you could make your link on the Tag A Cloud pages larger, you stood to gain a decent amount of traffic. I know I clicked on the larger links, especially to see why they were larger—was there something about the site that was driving clicks or traffic?

Leveling

Like role playing games, leveling up is addicting. My visitors and I drove about 190 clicks to Tag A Cloud, and my tag is now level 9, which means it’s now a larger version of the standard black text. No bolding, underlining, or colors yet. I wonder how far you have to go to get more than font-size upgrades.

Google Juice

In my last post about Tag A Cloud, I wondered what Tag A Cloud would do with the Google page rank it would surely get. Their rank is up to a 6. That question is still to be answered. They may not need to think about it, though, if enough people keep paying to have their tags upgraded.

Noise. Lots of Noise.

Tag A Cloud recently introduced their “Point Shop” which allows tag owners to pay to upgrade their tags in an effort to make their tag more visible and drive more traffic. Most of the sites that joined early on have had their tags upgraded through natural clicks to and from Tag A Cloud, too. Between all the upgraded tags and the paid highlighting that many have been doing, Tag A Cloud is starting to look rather noisy. It’s harder to make sense of the big pile of tags. Since they’re displayed randomly, it’s a little tricky to find a tag you know was there before from earlier. They need a save-a-tag feature that lets you save tags to your own personal tag page.

Free Traffic

Despite the noise, Tag A Cloud has delivered 27 clicks to my site. This may not seem like many, but it’s nearly as many as I have ever received from any other directory-type listing, and certainly in a shorter period of time. If you don’t need to pay attention to it, then your interested visitors will do the work of clicking through to Tag A Cloud and increasing the prominence of your tag. If you have to babysit your tag, however, the invested effort compared to the traffic you will get is an ROI that doesn’t make much sense. I think I may make one last push to get my tag to be more visible and drive traffic, and then I am probably going to let it go dormant and let the link on my site and the tag on Tag A Cloud do all the work.

DiamondLime is two years old today. Happy Birthday!

I haven’t posted as much in the last year as I did the year before, but I have managed to make (in my opinion) quality posts. I also managed to keep posting through some busy stretches at work and the birth of my second child, Lucy. I know, there are plenty of people who write higher-quality posts more frequently through a lot more adversity than I have had, but who’s comparing blogs? I’m glad mine has survived.

As for the coming year, I don’t think I will make any promises, but I can say that I will keep writing and that I have some fun ideas for where this site can go.

Thanks to all of you (both of you?) who read my blog. Stick around for another fun year!

We’ve released a new version of SeboMarketing.com!

Old Site

The old version of SeboMarketing.com had a number of problems with it. Many of these problems fell into “The cobbler’s children have no shoes” category—as Internet marketers, we know better than to make some of the mistakes that were being made, but we’ve been so focused on our clients’ sites that we neglected our own.

Click to Enlarge

Table-based Layout, Invalid HTML

Our site was put together with a dated version of DreamWeaver, and so the layout was based on a series of nested tables and the HTML was awful. The use of CSS was limited, and the code was bloated and full of presentational elements and markup.

Too Little, Stagnant Content

The overall size of the site was less than 30 pages. The content hadn’t been updated to show some of our new clients, any news from Sebo Marketing, or even new copyright dates.

Insufficient Navigation

Perhaps the greatest sin for a site that is meant to have a clear conversion path and to present Sebo Marketing in a good light is the fact that its navigation was confusing and inadequate. It was difficult to find the client bios or case studies that had been placed on the site, and it was nearly impossible to know what part of the site you were on.

New Site

The new version of SeboMarketing.com is much improved over its predecessor. Besides a visual update, we have made the following improvements:

Click to Enlarge

Valid HTML, CSS Layout

Because it’s a new site, there are probably some few mistakes left lurking in the HTML of the site, but overall SeboMarketing.com is now 98% valid. The layout and presentation have been effectively separated with the use of stylesheets. Maintenance and the next visual update to the site should be a breeze.

Updated Content

We updated and added a lot of content. We have all of our clients whose sites we’ve completed listed, and we have case studies to show the success we’ve had since we last updated our site. We’ve also posted some informational articles about different aspects of Internet marketing.

Clear Navigation

The navigation on the site is leaps and bounds better. A more complete list of options is presented, and a highlighting scheme for showing the visitor where they are on the site has been put in place.

Additional Credibility

Finally, since we last updated our site, Sebo Marketing has been recognized as an Adwords Qualified Company by Google. Pay Per Click advertising is an important facet of our service offerings, and being an Adwords Qualified Company strengthens the trust that our clients, both current and potential, can have in us.

In conclusion, we’re happy with our new site, and we’d love to have you come take a look sometime.

Many user-generated content sites face one (or several) problems, including the following:

1. Copyright Issues

   Site users occasionally post content that is copyright, or steal the content generated by others on the site.

2. Quality Issues

   Without an incentive to do high-quality work, users will post “just good enough” (or “not quite good enough!”) content to fill a particular purpose.

3. Quantity Issues

   Without motivation to create more, communities don’t have enough users contributing content.

A Solution to Some of User-Generated Content’s Problems

Getty Images, which specializes in all sorts of digital images, has purchased Scoopt, a company that is using a new model for acquiring and distributing user-generated images. Users who contribute images that are chosen for distribution are compensated with a percentage (currently 40%) of the image’s sale price.

This model could be a solution to issues two and three from the list above—a financial incentive would motivate the public to submit high-quality (more likely to be chosen) images more frequently.

I think this is a novel approach to an application that could really use the “wisdom of the masses,” and perhaps one that could be applied to other content-types or industries.

Is there anything that your customer-base or audience could do for you that you wouldn’t mind paying for?

Let’s imagine that you have a hot new web service. An AJAX-powered, Web 2.0, community-based Google killer. Let’s also assume that, like most new web services, you have limited time to reach critical mass and profitability before you run out of money.

How Do You Promote Your Service?

So what do you do to promote your service? What methods are available to those who are strapped for cash and time?

• Viral Campaign

  Create a video, contest, game, or activity that people want to pass on to their friends and that uses or mentions your service.

• Press Releases

  Put a press release out to every possible effective PR source. Accurately describe the benefits of using your service.

• Reviews

  Ask bloggers, magazine and newspaper columnists, technology pundits, futurists, educators, and other influential experts or members of the media to have a look at your service and share what they think.

• Word of Mouth

  Encourage, promote, and assist people to take the effort to share

• Pay-Per-Click

  You could pay to drive traffic to your site, but this would only work for a start-up under the above conditions if the cost per click was low and competition sparse.

In short, you should gratefully accept any interest or exposure for your product, especially if you are receiving qualified prospects.

Mum’s the Word

What would make you swear off one of these methods? Expense is a big one that might be involved in a few of the items listed above. What else? Not much.

But that’s precisely what one particular service is doing. ChaCha Live Search’s user agreement has a clause that limits its guides from asking people to become guides in public forums, blogs, or classifieds. Let’s think about this for a moment: ChaCha could potentially be receiving large numbers of interested, qualified guides, but is limiting itself to the people who fall into its guides’ close group of friends and family.

That seems silly to me. ChaCha is dramatically limiting the speed at which word of mouth can travel by limiting who its guides can invite. What’s wrong with the total strangers who express an interest in ChaCha and have the skill to do a good job? Nothing. And what would ChaCha have to lose if it accidentally let someone less skilled or interested through? Nothing. So why clam up its guides, its most effective advocates?

Breaking the Silence

Instead of clamping down on what people can say about you or your service (especially legally), you should try to help people to discuss and promote your service. Make it easy for them, and create incentives that will attract the right kind of people, rather than controlling the methods by which the word can be spread. Remember, your promotional methods will be vitally important to the success of your service, and you don’t want to punish or limit those who are helping you.