The Venture Skills Blog

I am a Digger, not a prolific one, I don’t spend all day on it, I’m not a “top” digger just Joe Blogs normal.
I am a Stumbler no power account here just an interest in Stumbleupon and until they took it away a healthy but not amazing audience score.

Therefore I am uniquely qualified to give you this guide as I am in the same boat as you when it comes to leverage traffic from these sites.
The statistics in this post is based on server logs, and Google Analytics data from a range of web sites over the last 4 months, most of the posts had minimal traffic from either source, it includes data from 2 front pages on Digg and what I’m dubbing a “super stumble”. Various people have contributed data so a big thanks to all of them including Nick, Olaf, and Ash.

A final note, these are stat’s we have collected and personal thoughts, think of it as a rule of thumb, for example advertisement you may get a front page Digg and make thousands with a good advert but I’m not sure you could do it 9 times out of 10.
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Whether your an individual a company or a marketing/SEO company reputation management will become part of your business and business strategy, knowing what’s being said about you and your clients is not only important but in many business paramount.

Having decided that this is the case your question is how to best to keep and analyse your reputation and brand, you could

• Hire a reputation management company (that would be us right )
• Employ a full time specialist
• Do it or get some one to do it yourself

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I have run an update to this post on my blog timnash.co.uk: Does Flash SEO still suck?

Nothing gets up the semantic web developer lobby noses more then the bane of their lives Flash. After spending months developing perfectly semantic well formed XML compliant HTML some upstart art herbet comes along and ruins their day by showing the boss his latest web site. No amounts of appeals about it won’t be searchable or accessible will help. The lure of flash is to great for many companies and while you may be saying its not accessible the boss is pointing to large corporate sites like Marks and Spencers and Starbucks are using it and ultimately you will loose the battle, but wait this story is not over the Arty farty herbert is a web designer and hasn’t got a clue what your talking about when you mention htaccess and so you end up having to actually launch this monstrous baby, sounding familiar?

Adobe Flash (formally Macromedia) is a great tool for developing highly artistic multimedia applications, it has the accessibility and searchability of a brick. If you are serious about getting organic rankings the only advice is stay away from Flash, I mean it stop reading this post it will not help!
Still here? You either failed to read my last sentence or are being forced into this satanic world so lets get on with trying to make flash searchable. Read the rest of this entry »

I haven’t done a Friday round up for a while so hopefully this new look Friday round up will bring a cheer to your faces on Friday the 13th for those who haven’t read one of my Friday round ups they contain a large dose of sarcasm -Tim

Google Checkout UK

The big thing this week is Google checkout is now available for merchant providers in the UK, so expect a whole range of new deployments on UK websites. Google has taken its time getting to the UK with this service but its hopefully worth it. Signup takes less then a minute from Google checkout website.

Ask is getting a mathover

Widely reported but Ask have announced a new search algorithm code named Edison which has been described as turning the engine into a more “social search service”. It’s not yet deployed but expect a large amount of scare stories mixed in with a lot of increased search activity from nervous webmaster in the near future. More coverage from Search Engine Land and SEO by the sea.
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One of the most important things about Search engine optimisation and any sort of on-line marketing is being able to measure our success. Enter Google Analytics a free service from Google which

generates detailed statistics about the visitors to a website. Its main highlight is that a webmaster can optimize their AdWords advertisement and marketing campaigns through the use of GA’s analysis of where the visitors came from, how long they stayed on the website, and their geographical position.

- Wikipedia

It first appeared in 2005 after Google bought its parent company who’s software was called Urchin (indeed the script is still referred to as Urchin as we will see later) and is now used on literally thousands of blogs and sites across the world. Unlike many tracking software that your web host may provide you Google Analytics uses Javascript as its mean of tracking by placing a cookie on your visitors system. The pro’s of this includes the ability to find out far more about visitors, but also leads to privacy issues, and because javascript can be turned off and cookies disabled visitors can “avoid” tracking. Even with these limitations its still a great system and one we use on all our sites where possible.

Getting it up and running is simple so lets get started!
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Tim has written up a short article for Engtech regarding reputation management the article an Introduction to reputation management is well worth a read if you use or are planning on using the web for any thing other then personal stuff, or if you plan to get married!

Tim has previously written a longer series on reputation management for Webdigity forums a few months ago, and has been using the term and discussing personal branding for several years. He might not have been the first to use the term but he was certainly one of the early promoters of something that is steadily heading towards being mainstream.

We grabbed a quick interview with Tim who is normally the only writer on the Venture Skills blog about where he thinks Reputation management is going…
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