My co-worker Luke forwarded a nice article.

Hey guys,

Here is a great article I came across that really has some great ideas for driving web traffic. Many of these are tried and true techniques but there are also a lot of other innovative ways included in this article as well….

http://seonoobs.com/104-ways-to-get-backlinks-mega-backlink-guide/

Some of the items on the list are questionable. But it does exemplify why it is hard to make your blog stand out in the mega-crowd of blogs on the Internet. Just posting blog posts won’t drive traffic; you have to do a lot of grassroots effort.

I ran across a couple of very interesting articles/posts -

1. Olinda - a social broadcast radio with beheavior mining and a hardware API! Read here.

2. Google’s upcoming data center plans. Can you imagine how big a data center Google needs…? Read here.

A lot of us  have been in webinars and web conferences. I have attended many and even presented in one. I really loved it and was amazed when they first came out with the concept back in the late 90s. I think it must have been 1998 or 1999. I am not sure if WebEx pioneered it, but they were the first ones.

So recently when a client asked for my help setting up a webinar he could host (it is his first time), I pointed him to WebEx. We went to the webex.com site together and tried to sign him up for a webinar. The web site was really good at giving some information. There were a myraid of options but fortunately it was easy to locate the section that talked about webinars. However, there was no pricing online. So, we decided to pick up the phone and call Webex. The person on the phone was nice and took down all the information - but was nothing more than a secretary. He could not give us pricing and had to setup an appointment for someone to call us back. Alright, I walked over to the client’s office again at the appointed time - but no one called. Finally, almost an hour later we got a hold of our appointed inside sales rep. He said it was a “consultative” approach to tell us what the pricing is. After answering some of the same questions as before here is pricing we got -

33 cents a minute for the web conference

20 cents a minute for the audio portion (which, btw, he shared only after we specifically asked about the audio portion)

Adding up to 53 cents a minute. I about fell out of my chair. Client is expecting around twenty attendes, for about 60minutes. That would be $636.00 for a one time webinar!

Ok, so it was time to shop around. We, Right On Interactive, use ReadyTalk from time to time. And have had good very experience with it. I wasn’t sure how much we paid, but I knew it wasn’t 53 cents a minute. So, next place to shop was ReadyTalk. A quick call to the ReadyTalk sales number told us that the rates were 13 and 8 cents for web & audio portion. Much better! That adds up to 21cents per minute per attendee, or about $252.00. Still expensive but cheaper than client driving out-of-town to present in person.

I was reading Marketing Sherpa this morning and came across this interesting case study about how a simple change to your newsletter can make all the difference.This is a great reason to start doing that email testing that you have been putting off because the results can be amazing. Every email that goes out without a split is a missed opportunity to gain insight into your recipients behavior.

clipped from www.marketingsherpa.com SUMMARY: Sometimes even the smallest change can make a world of difference in your email design. See how one publisher transformed a related stories link into a gray utility button and immediately saw a 190% increase in clicks and traffic is up 6% on a different landing page. It’s an easy tweak that if you haven’t considered, you may want to test on your own newsletters.

I am proud to announce that I have an article published in a new book titled “Email marketing by the numbers”. The book is authored by email marketing expert and well known blogger Chris Baggott. It’s really a collection of expert articles and anecdotes by various authors. Chris, an avid blogger, public speaker and email marketing expert hit upon the idea to publish a book that allowed the best email marketing minds to come together and provide insight about email marketing. The book covers various topics ranging from general email marketing concepts, deliverability to database marketing.

I lend my voice around database integration and APIs. With integration you can continue to use your current applications, but use “APIs – Application Programming Interfaces” to extend the application. Given my history around integration and custom software development space, I talk about what is integration and how it can be used within email marketing.

Here they are from Avinash.

Normally I would make a crack when someone creates a top ten list where they put themselves at the #1 spot…but hey, the guy is an analytics guru!

# 1: Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik
# 2: Web Metrics Guru by Marshall Sponder
# 3: Google Analytics Blog by Jeff Gills
# 4: Web Analytics World by Manoj Jasra
# 5: Eric T. Peterson’s Analytics Weblog by Eric Peterson
# 6: Increasing your website’s conversion rate by Robbin Steif
# 7: Unofficial Google Analytics Blog by Michael Harrison
# 8: Lies, Damned Lies… by Ian Thomas
# 9: WebAnalytics.be Blog by Aurélie Pols
# 10: Web Analysis, Behavioral Targeting and Advertising by Anil Batra

Have fun!