Amongst other things, one of my new year’s resolutions this year (yes, I do believe in them) was to read at least a book a month. Not too big of a deal since I know a lot of you out there finish 2 books a week – but, frankly, one a month works for me… So far, #10 is What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures by Malcolm Gladwell. The book is mainly a compilation of stories that Gladwell put together from his articles in the New Yorker.

He starts off with an article about Ron Popeil from Ronco.com – you know, the guy who pioneered the satements: “Set it and forget it!” and also “But wait, there’s more!” on infomercials in the 50s. There were a lot of interesting points in the article, but, two of them really stuck with me.

1) At one point, he mentions that a true pitchman (I think that’s what he called them) does a show for an audience… suppose that 25 are interested in buying… he’ll sell it to 20 of them – and for the last 5, he’ll say – but wait, there’s more. Why? The last 5 can’t wait to buy and they’ll form the inner core of enthusiasts in the next audience that forms around the pitchman. This is a really interesting phenomenon in that crowds really do bring other crowds. No one will form around an empty table; however, if we see 5 people enthusiastically listening to someone who is presenting, we might join in to see what all the fuss is about.

2) A great product and marketing are tightly coupled. The product has to be so good that it could almost sell itself – this of course refers to the obsession that Ron Popeil had with ensuring that his products were the best. It’s refreshing to hear something like that when you’re constantly surrounded by people who think that the product is just another commodity and the marketing is what it’s all about.

This Wednesday, the Ottawa Community Loan fund is putting together another one of their “Art of the Start” events. The idea of the event is to get together a few entrepreneurs in the community to speak to aspiring entrepreneurs and share with them lessons learned.

Here are the event details:

Date: June 23rd 2010
Time: 6pm – 9pm
Location: Algonquin College, 1385 Woodroffe Avenue – building T, Room 102.

Click here to register for free

The speakers will be Tony Bailetti, Eric Dormer, and Yves Bisson, and myself.

See you there!

Over at FluidSurveys, we just launched a new version of their popup survey invite tool. This is a pretty cool feature since it allows you to show your visitors a quick modal dialog asking them whether or not they’d be willing to take a survey after they’re done viewing your website. You’ve probably seen similar surveys on a lot of corporate websites – including the likes of Best Buy and Future shop. Using this tool, you can do what the big guys do as well!

I won’t go through all the details here, you can check out the FluidSurveys blog for details but this is a feature that we’re really proud of and I know that it’ll be super useful for a lot of our customers. If you do end up using it and have any comments, make sure to forward them to me – would love to incorporate your feedback!

As most of our businesses (FluidSurveys, ReviewRoom) are online, SEO plays a critical role in increasing our customer base. Recently, I’ve been looking at a number of tools out there such as HubSpot and SEOMoz that are essentially hosted services that offer a number of tools such that help you do things like track your google ranking throughout time (i.e. see how you advanced or perhaps lost ground in the search engine listings). While looking at these services, I found an interesting company that offers installable tools that you can use to perform much of what is available in the previously mentioned hosted services. The name of the company is Caphyon and the name of the tools are Advanced Web Ranking and Advanced Link Manager.

Immediately, the advantage of buying installable software is that you’ll pay a fee once and then you won’t have to pay exorbitant monthly fees for the same service. So what do these tools do anyway?

Advanced Web Ranking

The primary goal of the tool is to help you keep track of how well your website ranks for different keywords on different search engines. In the case of FluidSurveys.com, we want to rank for a number of different keywords such as “Online Survey Software“, “Online Survey Tool“, and others. Because we serve different customers from all around the world, not only do we need to know how we rank for our keywords, but we also need to know how we rank in different countries (US, UK, Canada, Australia, …). On top of this, we also want to know how our competitors are ranking in comparison to us.

Once you have an SEO strategy in place, you will need to be able to measure how effective your strategy is in order to be able to continuously improve it. You may start out trying something and realize that it not only doesn’t improve your rankings, but makes it worse. On the flip side, if you are trying something, and it is showing promise, then you want to do more of that. Without a tool to measure these stats effectively, you are blindfolded and can’t see whether what you’re doing is working or not. Could you get this data yourself without the tool? Yes… BUT, it’ll take at least an hour every time, if not more… in other words, after a few uses, the cost of the tool is completely justified.

The other cool thing about the tool is that it’ll show you visual graphs of how you’re ranking for different keywords across search engines over time and even how you rank against your competitors. The most important thing for us, that I found to be lacking in other tools, is the ability to track yourself on Google in different countries. As you know, the search engine rankings look different in every region and can even vary from city to city. This is especially important if you want to show your visitors from different countries different landing pages. You’ll basically need to know if the pages that you want to be showing are showing to the right people.

“Advanced Web Ranking” does also provide some tools for keyword analysis (they’ve also got a really cool keyword research tool). If you wanted to rank well for a term such as “Online Survey Software”, then you’d want to make sure that certain elements were present on your page. You’d want to ensure that you have the right keyword density and that your keywords have prominence on your page without being spammy. Using the built in keyword analysis tool, this entire analysis and even the comparison of the same metrics with your competitors is a click of a button away.

Finally, the tool also has the ability to produce reports in seconds. These are great for showing others in the office how the website ranking is progressing. The reports are actually HTML based and dynamic. In other words, the reports produced are web pages – you’ll even be able to upload them somewhere for sharing. The data in itself is also available in csv format so you can open the data and manipulate it as you wish in MS Excel.

The only real downside to using a tool like this vs just using a hosted service is that you’ll have to run the tool on a daily or weekly basis so that it can go and grab all the latest rankings. The software does make up for this, in a way, by allowing you to schedule the updates- although, for this, the program has to be running. Interestingly enough, if you really wanted to, you could also just get the server version of the software and run it within your own network. The cool thing about the server version is that you’ll even be able to add users and authentication to ensure that only the right individuals have access to the data. Through the roles/permission settings available, you’ll even be able to determine who can see what – basically all the fancy stuff that you would need to make use of in a multi-user environment.

One advantage of a hosted tool, though, is that you technically don’t have to worry about losing your data. The company that is providing the service will usually keep its promise on maintaining backups and ensuring a certain level of up-time. With a desktop-based tool such as Advanced Web Ranking, you’ll have to take the backups yourself. The good news, though, is that the tool does make it easy to procure these backups and also makes it easy to load them back.

Before I wrap up, I’ll talk a bit about the other product from Caphyon: Adanced Link Manager…

Adanced Link Manager

One of the important elements in SEO is to ensure that you have quality links pointing back to your pages (i.e. link popularity). If we wanted FluidSurveys to rank well for “Online Survey Software”, it would be tremendously helpful to have other websites that talk about relevant topics (survey blogs and such) to link back to FluidSurveys.com. In an ideal world, the text of this link would say “Online Survey Software.” Generally speaking, the more links point back to your domain, the more your domain will have authority. Search engines will naturally show domains with more authority higher in search engine listings – hence the need for a powerful link manager to help you manage this process.

In order to be able to track how many sites point back to your website, you can use a tool such as “Advanced Link Manager.” The tool will not only tell you how many websites and domains point back to your site, but it’ll even tell you what “anchor text” is used for these backlinks. In traditional Caphyon goodness, you’ll also be able to graph how these stats change over time + do the same for competing websites. The software also allows you to do much of the same things that you could do with “Advanced Web Ranking” – creating and sharing reports, exporting results, etc…

Finally, the software also allows you to figure out if websites that you are linking to are exchanging the favor – in cases where they’re not, you can take action respectively if it makes sense. From a competitive standpoint, you can also find out how your competitors are getting their link juice – this can give you ideas on which websites you can contact in order to get links pointing to your site as well.

Conclusion

I did spend most of this post, talking about Advanced Web Ranking and Advanced link manager. This doesn’t mean that this is the only software out there. You should choose something that works for you and has the functionality that you need. I found about these products on SEOBook.com. They actually strongly recommend the software on their tools page. They’re pretty reputable and so I trust their recommendation + the tools are working well for us at our company

I purchased the Motrola Milestone (Android Phone) from Telus pretty much the day it was available in Canada. Why? Well, I get a big kick out of being different. Practically everyone I know owns an iPhone and so frankly, it’s become old – past it’s prime.

It’s a great phone and I love the Android Operating system. I’m not going to talk about why you should choose Android over the iPhone… there are lots of blog posts on that. However, what I will say is that I have yet to find one unique point about Android that is noteworthy. Sure, it’s an open source operating system and Apple is all about closed systems – but, does the average consumer really care? When the iPhone first came out, it was different – really different – people talked about it.

As an early adopter that loves to talk to others about new gadgets, I can’t think of a single major differentiating factor to sell Android to my friends. In Seth Godin terminology, I can’t point out the Purple Cow. I am still stuck with the old 2.01 version of Android, and I hear that there are some cool things coming out in the next version but I really hope that the Android guys are thinking about building that one major differentiating factor that the iPhone won’t have. In order to help the concept become truly viral, early adopters need something to talk about, plain and simple.

First of all, it’s been 8 months since my last blog post. That’s actually quite ridiculous, I agree. I would say that I was “busy” as most people do – however, I really hate that word – and so I won’t. Plain and simple, I have no excuse

The good news, though, is that I finally decided to give FourSquare a try on my new Motorola Milestone by Telus. It’s a pretty cool app. Essentially, the app allows you to “check in” to different locations in your city – or around the world – same concept as checking into a hotel. Whenever you check into a location, you get points. If you add a location into the app that didn’t exist before, you get even more points. It’s essentially a game – as with most games, the more points you have, the better off you are… surprise!

The most interesting part of all of this is that some local stores have begun rewarding people who check in a lot to their location. If you are the person who checks in the most to a specific location, you become the “mayor” of that location. Some pubs for example, offer a free drink to their “mayor”. Today, I added two new locations to FourSquare… give it a try… it’s quite entertaining

We just announced over at FluidSurveys.com that we will be offering one time fee surveys. This is a big development as many customers around the world have been requesting this from us and we feel that now is the time to deliver. We’re very excited about this and hope that our customers enjoy the offering

Essentially, anyone can create a survey with FluidSurveys and collect unlimited responses for a one time fee of $19. Most other survey companies will charge $19/month. We decided to change the way the game was played and offer our pricing on a per survey basis. We feel that this will serve the needs of a great deal of people. Please head over to FluidSurveys.com and give this a try!

The best part is that ReviewRoom doesn’t stop at just helping you accept applications on your website, it also helps you review those applications (with a group of reviewers) and helps you make decisions on them (i.e. who should win the competition? who should get the grant?).

What is so great about ReviewRoom v2.0? For one thing, we’ve taken all of the feedback that we’ve gotten from a variety of customers:

Carleton’s Foundry Program
TiEQuest
New Ventures BC
Forty Under 40
uOttawa EIEF
Ottawa Community Loan Fund
Impact
and much more…

We’ve incorporated all of the feedback and this new version is truly impressive. Further to this, customers will now be able to modify their competitions on the fly and even create their own competitions without ever having to talk to us… They could just set up the rules themselves. Impressive? We think so. We’re looking forward to this new launch…. will put up another post when it’s ready.

Aydin.

I’ve recently become very interested in search engine optimization. It’s quite an interesting field as it’s always growing and changing. Like most other fields, you’ll really have to follow a lot of blogs/forums in order to keep up to date.

A question that I’ve recently been asking myself quite a bit is whether we should launch international versions of FluidSurveys… i.e. fluidsurveys.ca, fluidsurveys.co.uk, etc… The primary reason for this pondering, of course, is because FluidSurveys currently ranks very well in Canada but not as well in the United States. It’s interesting because we have offices in the US and Canada and we target users in both countries. In terms of our customer base, we have customers all over the world…

So the question is, why do we rank so well in Canada and not so well in the US?

From what I’ve been able to gather, this primarily has to do with the fact that most of the backlinks that we have pointing to the website come from Canada and our webservers are located in Canada. It seems very weird that search engines should even care where a site is hosted. I always figured that people would host their websites wherever they could find good service… Why should someone have to host their website in the UK if they want to rank well there. Although, I can’t be certain that this is a determining factor, I hope that it isn’t…

In terms of Top Level Domains, yes we do own some international domains but we have them all pointing to the .com (permanent redirects). All of our backlinks are to the .com as well so those domain names shouldn’t play much of a factor.

But, backlinks can’t be the only factor though… it wouldn’t make sense since search engines would still have to determine which countries the backlinks belonged to… I suppose top level domains are one of the ways that search engines can figure out which countries those backlinks are coming from… I think that the one remaining factor is content… I think that the content on the domains probably plays a major role here as well…

So, if I had to summarize, I would have to say that the most important factors in ranking well internationally (in order) would be:

1) Content in Your Website (name of country, name of city, language)
2) Meta Tags (i.e. specifying language)
3) Backlinks from Websites from your Country
4) Top Level Domains
5) Location of Your Server

Again, there is no way to know for sure unless of course someone from Google/Microsoft would like to weigh in…

Aydin.