SeaWaves Blog

Well, when we acquired The Dog Guide it wasn’t clear what was in store. But several years later we are about to move the site out of development and into BETA status.

What does that mean? Well, you can expect that as soon as we roll into 2009, the site will have the following in place:

• A popular blog with funny dog pictures and news that is uploaded daily.
• A section on dog health with a nice collection of articles.
• A section on dog training with a fleshed out series called Canine Manners 101
• A collection of photo galleries of many popular dog breeds with many still to come.
• Information and pictures for over 200 dog breeds

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My friend Chris Garrett recently did something with WordPress that still amazes me. He took a basic installation of WordPress, had a plugin built, and effectively created a shopping site where the user is able to choose the options they want in a credit card.

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A wide-net resource article is a single article that targets the long tail of a popular search term. The wide-net resource article does not attempt to compete directly at the level of the popular search term, but rather it uses the popular search term as the foundation for multiple qualified phrases built from the popular search term.

Let me explain by using an example. Over at College Crunch, we have built a wide-net resource around the phrase “starting salary” - but we are not really interested in that specific phrase. Rather, we are interested in phrases like “starting salary for engineers” or “average starting salary for biochemists”

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Those of us who work in the web industry know that it can be frustrating to move really big files around the web. Most email hosts place really low limits on the size of an email file that you can send.

While YouTube has certainly made it easier to share videos, it also has limitations (not the least of which is that it only handles movies).

Today, I was looking around the web to find the best ways to send large files to other people without requiring that both ends download and install a certain software. Web based systems (or as the technically savvy call it - The Cloud) tend to be the simplest, most effective ways to handle file sharing. While searching I came across this list of 13 different services to move big files around the web.

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I spend most of my days promoting content in social media like Digg and Reddit. That’s because they are very controlled environments, and getting noticed on those sites is fairly straightfoward and scientific.

However, I’d trade social media for Big Media any day. For example, yesterday one of our sites got onto Digg’s front page and got mentioned in a Fox news article. Two different articles. In my view the one that got on Digg’s front page was much better and more interesting.

But, the article that got on Fox News ended up sending more traffic.

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One of my favorite blogs that we run here at SeaWaves is called One Big Health Nut. From the summer of 2007 to the summer of 2008 it was updated daily with really interesting health facts.

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A SeaWaves website called The Common Sense Investor has been sitting idle for well over 2 years.

The site does not get very much traffic at this point. However, we are in the process of resuscitating it with the hopes of getting traffic up below the 100k Alexa range.

What are our challenges?

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One of the most overlooked aspects of creating an online project is the information architecture. By this, we just mean the way information is categorized and organized on a website.

The larger a website is meant to be, the more critical it is to get information architecture right. Otherwise, changes that don’t lend themselves to the original structure will take days, weeks, maybe even months to re-organize. The use of tags or other semantic indicators can be very helpful in matching together related information.

One site that we’re working to develop right now is called College Crunch. This site is meant to be a comprehensive guide to college planning and college life. Because there are so many possibilities with the broad topic of “college” our biggest challenge has been choosing a limited set of top level categories to organize all the content under.

What we’ve chosen to do is break the site into 9 categories that we feel encompass almost all possible college topics:

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The holy grail of advertising and marketing these days is to utilize the influence of the blogosphere. One method is to use social media to gain influence on key distribution points.

But if social media isn’t conducive to the message that you are trying to market, you may need to turn to more traditional advertising. So how do you advertise on blogs without wasting money?

At the end of the day, the key is to identify your goals and then do a careful cost/benefit analysis.

If your goal is to brand a new product or service, then you should use a popular blog advertising service like BlogAds sidebar ads or PerformancingAds 125×125 blog ads. There are three things you need to consider when purchasing an ad on one of these sites:

1. Location of the ad on the site

It does you very little good to have an ad that’s hidden, out of view, at the bottom of the blog. You want the ad to be front and center, as much as possible. For sidebar ads, this means the ad should be visible when first loading the site.

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There are probably billions of blogs on the Internet. There are probably only about 100,000 or so blogs that are coherent. Of the coherent blogs, there are probably only about 10,000 that are interesting. And of the interesting blogs there are probably only about 1,000 that get read by a core group of 3,000+ committed readers on any given day.

At SeaWaves we refer to these 1,000 or so blogs as key distribution points. Your goal with blog advertising and marketing should be to find a way to get your message heard at distribution points and let the natural dynamics of the web go from there.

Let me explain a bit.

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