One of the keys to creating a powerful online presence is creating a website that truly reflects your company's brand. In order to accomplish this goal, you need to analyze and evaluate your website. Here are five questions that can help your jump-start this process:

Does your website tell the truth?
Every word that write on your website needs to be truth. Even if you think that lying about a minor detail doesn't matter, if someone finds out that you aren't telling the truth, it can result in a major negative blow to your company's brand and image.

Do you have a functional website?
Whether its broken links or missing pages, internet users truly hate when websites are not one hundred percent functional. Therefore, it's time to take a look at your website's functionality and make sure that you don't have any issues that could send visitors away.

Does your content have something to offer?
Content is the single factor that can take a website from ordinary to amazing. Everything else aside, people are visiting your website because of the content that you offer. If your content is simply there to take up space, it's time to reevaluate and start offering content that is original and meaningful.





Does your website's design reflect your company's brand?
The easiest way to elaborate on this question is with a simple example:
If you visit a website for an edgy, urban clothing line and a website for a local law firm, which one would it be acceptable for to have pictures of women in small amounts of clothing? Obviously, this wouldn't offend you on a edgy clothing website, but if you saw those images on the website of a law firm, you would immediately leave that website and lose respect for that law firm.

Although this may seem like an oversimplified example, it truly reflects the impact that design can have on your company's website. When you are evaluating your website, make sure that ALL the elements on your website convey the messages, goals and views of your company.


Does your website actually have a purpose?
Even though it is last on the list, the question is actually the most important one that you can ask yourself about your website. Far too many companies and individuals create websites which have no focus. If you created your website just because that's what everyone else was doing, it's time to go back to Phase One and figure out why you have/need a website for your comapny.

Viral marketing is one of the most effective ways to use the power of the internet to establish your company's brand.

We believe that one of the best ways to learn techniques like viral marketing is to analyze the successes (and failures) of others. To get you started on the right path, this thread will periodically be updated with different real-life examples of well executed (and not so great) viral marketing:

Warner Brothers and the Dark Knight
Warner Brothers launched an extremely creative and effective viral marketing campaign for their latest Batman movie.

The campaign started with the Dark Knight homepage. When users clicked the picture on this page, they were taken to a second page with a single graphic in support of Harvey Dent (the District Attorney in the Dark Knight movie). What happened next was the real beauty of this campaign...

Although it is no longer available, a third web site popped up. It contained the same picture as the previous web site, but this time it was defaced by the Joker.



After a few seconds, visitors to this site were prompted to enter their email address. By doing this, the user would receive an email with the coordinates of a specific pixel and a link to enter the coordinates. Once the coordinates were entered, that pixel would be removed from the image. The final result was:



So, why is this an amazing example of viral marketing? Not only did it give Warner Brothers a lot of targeted email addresses, but it also encompassed all the traits that define successful viral marketing. Not only did it incorporate a fun, trendy concept, but it forced users to spread the word about the site. Since users could only remove one pixel, it was in their best interest to spread the word to their friends and on blogs/forums/web sites that are related to the Dark Knight.

One of the ways to find inspiration for new blog posts is to read what other bloggers in your industry are saying. However, if you are keeping up with more than five blogs (which you should be), things can get a little messy. Trying to manually check when the blogs on your watch list are updated can quickly turn into a huge waste of time. Fortunately, there is a simple tool that can make this task much easier to handle: RSS Feeds!

RSS feeds make it simple to monitor and organize content from as many blogs as you want to keep track of. In order to harness the benefits of RSS feeds, you need to get an RSS reader. To make a long story short, we recommend that you go with Google Reader. Not only is it free, but it has a lot of features that make it extremely powerful and easy to use.

To get an idea of what Google Reader can do for you, check out how Robert Scoble uses it to manage over six hundred RSS feeds:



To summarize the video (and add a few juicy extras), here are the best key commands for utilizing the full power of Google Reader:


*If these key commands aren't working, make sure that you have CAPS LOCK turned off

Having a consistent flow of posts on your blog is one of the keys to gaining a regular readership. If you look at any popular blog, you will see that they almost always post at least once a day (if not more). Whether you post once a day or eight times a day, the key is finding a routine that works for you and your readers.

Unfortunately, if you have ever done any blogging, you already know that there are many things that can interrupt this steady flow. Whether it’s an unexpected emergency or simple writer’s block, posting on a regular basis can be much more challenging than many people realize. Luckily for you, if you are blogging with Wordpress, there is a solution to this common problem.



Wordpress has a great feature called a Post Timestamp. The Wordpress Post Timestamp allows you to automatically when you want a post to appear on your blog. So, you can write four posts over the weekend when you have a lot of ideas, and then have one post appear on your blog from Monday to Thursday. The Wordpress timestamp is the most effective way to ensure that your blog has a steady flow of posts.

The WP timestamp is very simple to use. The timestamp can be found on the right side of the page. Once you are done writing a post, select Edit timestamp. After that, all you have to do is select when you want the post appear, and then click the Publish. When your selected time comes, the post you previously wrote will appear on your blog for all of your readers to enjoy.

Did you know that there are seventy to one hundred thousand new blogs created everyday? Many of these are splogs, but there are just as many (if not more) legitimate new blogs. If you plan on starting on a new blog, you are going to be facing a lot of competition. Whether you are creating your very first blog or have a little experience but are launching a new blog venture, you want to avoid these five pitfalls:

Don’t Worry So Much About Your Stats: There are so many bloggers that choose to spend their time refreshing their earning and traffic statistics instead of spending that same time researching and writing quality content. If you are writing good posts and following the four tips below, your earnings and traffic will increase. There is no reason that you should be checking your statistics more than once a day.

Spread the Link Love: Linking to other blogs is essential to being a successful blogger. Instead of obsessing about losing PageRank, think about the readers and future links that will come when you link to relevant posts. Linking to other posts also makes it much easier to come up with content, because you will be able to start with another blogger’s thoughts and add your own opinions and ideas.

Do a Little Keyword Research: While you shouldn’t do things like keyword stuff your posts, it doesn’t hurt to do some quick keyword research when you are crafting titles for your posts. Integrating keywords with high volumes of search traffic into your blog can help you can additional traffic.

Choose Your Template Wisely: While your template may look great on your twenty inch monitor in Firefox, how does it look on a twelve inch screen in Internet Explorer? There are thousands of great free templates available, but just make sure that the one you choose looks great in many different situations.

Don’t Be a Hermit: When you are launching a new blog, you need to spend time spreading the word about it in the blogosphere. Participating in activities like commenting on relevant blogs, using tools like MyBlogLog and even guest blogging for others are great ways to get your name out to potential readers.

As Squidoo itself states, the web site is a different way for people to search on the internet. However, Squidoo does not index web pages or web sites. Instead, it consists of "lenses" which have been built by users just like you and me. This may sound like Wikipedia, but it is actually much different. Lenses can only be edited by the person that creates them. So, if you like fly fishing, you could create a lens about that subject. A lens can consist of things such as pictures, articles, video and more. Visitors to your lens can leave comments and vote on how good they think your lens is.

Squidoo is a great tool for web masters because it can generate two very important things: traffic and backlinks. Squidoo encourages users who create lenses to include links to relevant web sites. Therefore, if you have a web site about women's fitness, you can create a lens on the same topic and include links to your web site (with the anchor text of your choice). Not only will this help your web site's ranking in the search engines, but it will also send you direct visitors and establish you as an authority in the area(s) of your choice. The best thing about these lenses is that you can create a quality one in under an hour, and once your lens is live, you don't have to do any work to maintain it.