Useful business & marketing links: August 2005

I’ve been covering so many interesting business and marketing sites over the past couple of weeks that if I leave them only in my favourites folder, I’ll simply forget about them.

A few of the interest sites/pages I’ve encountered recently I’ll list below:

Shak does blogging

Shak has started his own blog.

Shak is a frontiersmen on the internet, and somewhat legendary in the webmaster world - he’s also just moved to China to develop business opportunities there, having already visited earlier this year.

Before leaving he told me that he’d been advised to always keep an overnight bag packed, so that once the business boom is over the sh!t will hit the fan - and when it does, leave quickly.

Hopefully he won’t be leaving anytime soon, and hopefully his blog will also survive the Chinese censors.

Fred Wilson on Recession

Fred Wilson has spent 18 years in Venture Capital management. He posts that the US economy is facing a downturn.

From a VC point of view, it’s a time of challenges and opportunities, where long-term investment projects need to simply get their head down, grin, and bear it until everything is over.

Still, there was plenty of warning that the UK would hit a recession in 2004, but that didn’t happen - though the signs are clearly showing that we’re on the brink now.

With a number of parallels between the recent US and UK economic booms not least being powered by an overactive property market, and the constant concern of how falling dollar values will impact the world economy, I’m going to be keeping an eye out on how any threat of recession hits the USA.

WebMasterWorld does a UK Pubcon: Sept 25th 2005

WebMasterWorld are doing a PubCon this September in London. This could be an interesting social networking event, though perhaps not as much as the Edinburgh SEO Roadshow. Perhaps I should ask Brett Tabke if he’s made much money exploiting the purchase of threadwatch.net.

Conversion Chronicles

A marketing site called Conversion Chronicles - a marketing site to spend more time on and read up more thoroughly on.

Public Relations and Technology

Mike Manuel posts an interesting observation of Old School vs New School Marketing.

It could be a blog worth paying more attention of.

SEO Book sued

Aaron Wall took over moderating SEO at v7n after I left to go full time SEO. Sometimes I wondered if that created a sense of weirdness, but I would still class him as a great guy and even a friend.

The whole Traffic Power weirdness is turning into an issue much bigger - get it straight from the (SEO) horses mouth.

Sending HTML e-mail

I’ve never paid much attention to invoicing, but as I’m now technically running a VAT registered limited company, I need to take invoicing much more seriously.

Ages ago I posted an article on Platinax by Herman Drost about how to create and send your own HTML e-mails. I’m going to need to implement that - and teach my mum. :)

Using Google Sitemaps

I’ve never really touched Google Sitemaps. To tell truth, I’m not convinced at it’s benefits personally for my sites. I already do a good job of getting indexing done, and pages will often have fresh content anyway due to rotating links. I don’t want Google reloading my pages everytime a link rotates.

However, in areas where they don’t, I may yet find a complete guide to Google Sitemaps to be useful.

Syndicated Content

Syndicating content is something I’m not involved enough with - whether in syndicating my own content via articles, or republishing others. I actually began a project once to reprint syndicated articles on Platinax, but dropped it as the volume would have been low-quality and doesn’t fit my plans for here.

However, I look at the Ezinearticles site and I see a thing of beauty - a place to submit to, and a place to publish from. Do you need a site with a particular theme? Here’s your content for it. I’ve already asked one of my webhosts to upgrade 40+ reseller accounts to make room.

WebHostingWorld

Speaking of which, I’m finally developing Web Hosting World properly, which publishes my own knowledge and experiences of the webhosting industry.

Having been involved with the webhosting business for about four years now, and figure that some of my comments, observations, experiences, and outright reviews may well be useful as a reference point.

Dynamic Keyword generator tool

Barry Schwartz - aka, RustyBrick - releases a tool for keyword matching, including broad match, phrase match, and exact match, for Google Adwords.

O’Reilly Radar

Tim O’Reilly recently faced a backlash against text link advertising on their extensive developer network. I’m sad to hear that Site Sift could be a casuality of Google’s punitive dealing of the case.

Tim’s blog, O’Reilly Radar, however, is something I should keep an eye on.

Yahoo! Web2.0 beta tags

Another dream for the world of synidacted content - Web 2.0 beta tags - each comes with its own RSS feed.

Nick Wilsdon’s internet marketing blog

I was positively surprised to find myself on someone else’s blogroll - even more so when I find myself loving the sheer simplicity of the template that he’s using. Platinax is badly presented, and along with the SuSE linux page I think I have the inspiration I need on a redesign…

Nick’s internet marketing blog is somewhere perhaps worth stopping by every now and then - especially if the great Douglas Adams quote in the corner is indicative that here’s a marketer who actually has a sense of humour.

Graphic Design templates

I’ve heard of a number of companies outsourcing some degree of printing services. As a marketing company I see it as an integral area of concern. So I was pleased to find a site selling stock graphic design templates. Maybe a base to start from…

Clearly Business

Clearly Business is a Barclays sponsored site. It’s content-rich, and I’m sure there’s learning to be had there.

Web Design tips

A List Apart is one of the premier “design in action” sites. I don’t visit enough. Perhaps referencing the link here will prompt me to do so.

Bob Massa on sales and marketing

Bob Massa is someone who achieved something of notoriety a few years back by suing Google - however, he’s an experienced search marketer who writes a lot of sense. He’s also started blogging at Threadwatch, and it’s a cracking start.

Sales and Marketing blog

Sometimes it seems that sales and marketing is all about keeping the positive attitude. With a photo covering his site showing a beaming smile, I can only hope that sales lead blogger Brian Carroll keeps going longer. An infrequent visitor, I should visit more…

Advertising Blog

AdRants is an old favourite I again keep forgetting about (you may have noticed by now that my bloglines conked out a while back…). Definitely worth a visit for a continuous update on the world of advertising.

Bloggers of note on search, marketing, and technology

Additionally, it’s worth keeping an eye on the postings of Grey Wolf, Todd at StuntDubl, Jason Calacanis, and Jason Kottke…

and of course…

Marketing and technology news

Threadwatch has become my prime interface for learning about search marketing and technology news. By running through his list of 200+ blogs he monitors, Nick Wilson saves me the trouble of doing so.

Which means when my bloglines software stopped working, I didn’t feel like I was missing anything important.