Some of Alan's views on this digital marketing malarkey ... there's more on: AlanCharlesworth.com

Friday, September 24, 2010

link building amateur hour, me thinks

This is an odd entry as it is about this blog!

Most [I hope] of you will know that having more links into your website will normally raise your standing with Google. One 'spammy' way of doing this is to tour blog sites and add comments, but include a link to your website in those comments - so developing many links going to your site. This is usually done by using software programmed to go and find blogs and insert comments.


On this blog, I have it set up so that I check the comments before I publish them. And here is one comment that arrived for checking today:


Note that there are three links to the company's website embedded in the text. How do I know it's spam? Look at the message: 'Hi Dear' !!! The blog entry being commented on is not a podcast, and 'very thanks' what's that mean?

Of course, if I'm wrong, I look forward to hearing from the Toronto Marketing Company.

Friday, September 17, 2010

convenience, not price

I've been making this point for years - indeed, there is an example in my book - but shopping online is not all about saving money, and just today I had cause to confirm this belief.

I wanted a couple of digital pictures printed as old fashioned hold-in-your-hand photos. So I went to photobox [note: this is not a promo for that organization, I'm sure there are dozens of similar services out there, I just happened to have used them before]. At 10.35am I placed the order. At 6.35pm I got an email telling me the pics had been despatched and at 10.20 the next morning they arrived through my letterbox. That's less than 24 hours from order to taking possession. Cost: 10p per photo plus £1.49 postage = £1.69.

The alternative would have been to [a] drive into town, park the car, walk to Boots [or similar] and printed the pictures, return to the car and drive home. The printing cost is around the same and the car park would have been around a pound, time taken about an hour, [b] caught the bus into town and back, walking to the shop [saving the planet?], cost around a pound each way, time taken around an hour and a half or [c] walked into town - cheaper but takes a couple of hours and it was raining.

So there you go - unless I had wanted the pictures in my hand on the same day seems to me that it was £1.69 well spent. Saving an hour or more of my time was worth much more.