SEMINARS ON NEXT GENERATION WEB SITES
Blogosopher changes name to Websitetology.

Dayton, OH August 21st 2006 There are only three ways that customers find your business website, search, links and advertising. Unless you are spending millions on advertising and people just know your URL, like Sony, Burger King or Chevrolet, they probably are coming to your site through search engines.
An entire industry of “Search Engine Optimization” (SEO) consultants has sprouted up, charging hundreds to thousands of dollars to get your site to be on the front page of Google, yet Google re-writes the rules every so often, just to make sure they don’t get “gamed.”
Another option is to pay Google to get listed as a “Sponsored Link” appearing at the top or the right hand side of search results. Studies have shown that 70% of people skip these paid placements- unless they just can’t find what they want in the normal “organic” results.
When clients of Dayton ad agency, The Next Wave, started asking how to get their site to show up in Google, agency Chief Creative Officer, David Esrati began researching how to get their own site onto the elusive “first page.” The answer turned out to not be what the “SEO” consultants were doing, but actually a new business model based on principles of what is commonly known as Web 2.0- or true interactive sites where your customers can be a part of your brand experience online. The common implementation is know as a “blog” (weB LOG) but is really a sophisticated content management system that makes building and maintaining a web site simple.
After spending considerable time explaining the technology to clients one-on-one, the agency launched a 3.5 hour seminar called “Blogosopher” to share this sophisticated yet simple solution for websites that work for business. Eight months after beginning the seminar- it became clear that business people were wary of the word “Blog” so the seminars have been rebranded “Websitetology.” The Intro seminar begins with how the web and search work, and how it is changing business- moving into an introduction of the free Open Source software “WordPress” which works to manage the site. The Advanced seminar is how to get the most out of WordPress and build content that gets the results you need.
Since implementing this solution on The Next Wave site, they have moved to the front page of Google for multiple search terms and seen a ten fold increase in unique visitors to the site in a slightly over a year.
Another benefit of using these tools to manage the site is that site maintenance costs have dropped to almost nothing, with no HTML code knowledge required. Sites that the agency used to have to charge thousands for, are now possible for under $400 including the cost of the seminar and hosting.
The next seminars will be held Aug 21, 2006 at Nehemiah University, 750 S. Main Street, Dayton 45402 from 8:30 am until noon and 1:30 pm to 5 pm. Cost is $49 for each seminar, or $79 for both. More information at www.websitetology.com or by calling 937.228.4433 Advance reservations are strongly encouraged.

Former British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli is generally given credit for saying “There are three kinds of lies; lies, damned lies, and statistics”  and then there is this Lifehacker poll- which doesn’t show the results- but says most of the geeks reading the popular blog think WordPress rocks.

They mixed 2 ides in this post- one on the best blog backend- and one on plug-ins- but we’ll forgive them (we just didn’t make the same mistake).

Lifehacker, the Productivity and Software Guide

In our recent web publishing poll, the overwhelming majority of Lifehacker’s blogger readers said that WordPress was the only way to get their words out to the world (so much so that the poll actually seems to have broken).

If you jump to the poll- the comments are helpful for learning too-

but, it’s our experience right now- that WordPress is the best for getting you to the top of Google- and that makes all the difference right now. If you are interested in having us come give a seminar to your group or organization- please feel free to contact us.

Until you start getting a lot of traffic- you won’t be ready to sell ads on your site, but- maybe you might consider placing some ads to bring that traffic. However, if you are “the expert” on any one thing- you may just have the “Right” readers that someone wants to reach. Selling ads, not just Google Ad Sense placements, can be profitable- if you have an audience someone really wants to reach.

Consider this:

If you think blogs are not a viable ad medium, consider this: Many blogs are achieving “big media” reach. The celebrity gossip blog Perez Hilton, for example, or DailyKos have 500,000 readers a day, which is a quite a “big media” reach.

Read the full article The Value of Blog Advertising | MarketingProfs.com for more information. It also has tips on what to put in your blogad.
We’ll look more into advertising on blogs in the near future here- if you have questions about how to do this and can’t wait, give us a call.