Domozych Media

How to Save Time & Get Better Results Promoting Your Music – via/ @worldaround

wunruh — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 18:43:21 +0000

How to Save Time & Get Better Results Promoting Your Music // Audible Hype.:

All social networks and search engines exist for the sole purpose of bringing traffic to your blog/site so they can hear your music on Bandcamp. If they like what they hear, they will spend money on it, you’ll get a notification to your gmail account every time, and your paypal account will increase in size, allowing you to invest money in merchandise, start selling physical copies of your music on CD and vinyl, and fund tours so you can start taking your operation on the road. If that’s not the point of your life, I have no idea why you’re reading this.

Excellent marketing advice. We here at Domozych Media can do little but salute the conciseness by which Justin Boland addresses musicians marketing on the web!

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NO!SPEC » Why Speculation Hurts

wunruh — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 03:12:09 +0000

Speculative design work is an attempt to force inspiration without the benefit of experience. None of the designers are allowed the opportunity to get to know you and your business. They aren’t allowed the time to examine your market and industry. They simply lack the necessary data too allow them to make good, informed decisions about your marketing.

The result is that the designers are forced to develop ideas based upon their own personal experiences and preconceptions about you and your company. Without any research, or discussions with you to guide them, their ideas become less about substance and more about style.

via NO!SPEC » Why Speculation Hurts.

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25 Mind Blowing Social Media Infographics

wunruh — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 01:33:46 +0000

With the complexity and explosive growth of social media over the last few years, it’s not hard to see why so many have looked to express this information in a visually appealing manner – not to mention the benefits they provide when putting on a group presentation.

The following 25 social media infographics have been reduced in size to allow you to quickly scroll down the page. Each one has been linked to the original and it is highly encouraged that you visit the links to see them in their full size.

via 25 Mind Blowing Social Media Infographics.

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Who Owns the Rights to a Graphic Work?

wunruh — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 04:07:01 +0000

Question:

Copyright for Graphic Designers – Who Owns the Copyright to a Graphic Work?

Answer:

Unless otherwise specified in a contract, the graphic designer retains the right to his or her creations, and should always attempt to do so. When designing a work for a client, you are also selling specific rights to use it. Copyright laws protect against additional use without proper compensation or agreement.

For example: You design a logo for use on a specific product package for a cosmetics company. The company likes it so much that they decide to extend its use across their entire product line. You should be paid for this additional use, as it increases the value of the graphic work you created. For this reason, be sure to include in your contracts what the work can and cannot be used for.

Sources:

“The Graphic Artists Guild Handbook: Pricing and Ethical Guidelines.” Eleventh Edition. Graphic Artists Guild, Inc. 2003.

via Who Owns the Rights to a Graphic Work?.

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Content Management Systems Explained

wunruh — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 14:39:30 +0000

Content Management Systems we support are robust, widely-supported by the development community, powerful, and free to own (open-source). Once we install, design, and modify a system, we train you on how to keep your site up to date and current with content you add anytime!

Wordpress- once for blogs, now excels for any dynamic site! Easy to Use!
Joomla- powerful web presence system, create a community online!
Zencart- top notch, extremely powerful online shopping cart/store!
Gallery- photographer’s best friend, create and sell multimedia easily!
MediaWiki- like wikipedia? Make your own Wiki, great for instructions!
phpBB- the classic online bulletin board, your own web forum!
Moodle- educational web presence. Easily get your classes online!
Pligg- social media center, great for sharing links and info

Click Here for a General Price List on Our Services.

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What Will 2011 Look Like Online?

wunruh — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 22:03:37 +0000

Or more importantly, how will people be getting online in 2011?

If you’re planning to get an online business kickstarted, be sure it doesn’t burn out at the starting line. Think long-term strategic brand management, and remember you are growing your presence over time. To remain viable, a site must grow, and the inbound links must grow, each leveraging the other to create a kind of lattice across the net.

Long term online presence. That’s kind of the point!

Musicians know this well. Artists, entrepreneurs, marketers, and promoters know the strongest natural growth patterns in life and business are fractal. This is also true for the internet. Growing a web presence along specific keywords is the creation of a semantic web. As the implications of social search trickle down into Google’s search and Bing’s landing pages, over time that SEO structure becomes a tie-in for social media presence in real time. Real time web is coming, mobile networking is coming, and old, table-based sites are going to be left out cold by 2011.

This is what it looked like last year…

What do YOU Think?? Let us know in the comments below…

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Tonight, an email chain… weird, funny and potentially good novelty sites

wunruh — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 01:06:01 +0000

Andrew Domozych

to me

show details 7:04 PM (53 minutes ago)

http://www.bigasshotdog.com/

http://www.nicejewishguys.net/

With a little creativity, people could really get some traffic from unexpected sources.

Forward

Andrew is not available to chat

Wes Unruh

to Andrew

show details 7:39 PM (18 minutes ago)

http://www.oddee.com

- Show quoted text -

On Tue, Nov 10, 2009 at 7:04 PM, Andrew Domozych <info@domozychmedia.com> wrote:

http://www.bigasshotdog.com/

http://www.nicejewishguys.net/

With a little creativity, people could really get some traffic from unexpected sources.

Forward

Andrew is not available to chat

Wes Unruh

to Andrew

show details 7:40 PM (17 minutes ago)

brilliant

- Show quoted text -

On Tue, Nov 10, 2009 at 7:39 PM, Wes Unruh <wes@onlinesocialoptimization.com> wrote:

http://www.oddee.com

On Tue, Nov 10, 2009 at 7:04 PM, Andrew Domozych <info@domozychmedia.com> wrote:

http://www.bigasshotdog.com/

http://www.nicejewishguys.net/

With a little creativity, people could really get some traffic from unexpected sources.

Forward

Andrew is not available to chat


	Your message has been sent.

Wes Unruh

to Andrew

show details 7:42 PM (15 minutes ago)

http://informationarchitects.jp/wtm4/

this is what should hang on your office wall

or next year’s version, when it comes out

I want one too..

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A Test Image – Tokyo Subway Map

wunruh — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 04:57:00 +0000

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Online Persona Management and Internet Marketing

wunruh — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 03:42:38 +0000

With Facebook, FriendFeed, and Twitter we are seeing the beginnings of a real time web strategy for constant celebrity contact with their fan base. Serena Williams may be the perfect new media star, with Neil Gaiman a close second. Both use new media for constant contact, both talk back through media to their fans and respond in real time, and both are genuine, sincere folk who do what they love best and have integrated their use of new media with their lifestyle.

There are many others – obviously we provide a shout-out on our podcasts to the genius behind Nine Inch Nails, a musical act which brought Alternate Reality Gaming to a whole new level, now effectively crowdsourcing the fan base to create ongoing media presence from thousands of different points online at once. There are others out there who get it, and are able to manipulate their layers of involvement with media to present themselves in the best possible light.

Others work tirelessly to patrol their own reputation – an SEO firm going through internal shake-up splinters off in rumors and half-told tales online briefly. Internet marketers are rarely outed as scammers, or abusers of the ongoing opt-in charges applied to credit card holders in continuity models, mainly because they’re better at playing the game than their accusers.

But they’re not the winners in social media – it’s the people who are open, honest, and accessible – because social media is a space for vetting, and reputation is an acquisition. Page rank is less important than ‘trust’ in the eyes of the search engines, but also in the social structures that are embedded within the larger superstructure. Neil didn’t end up on first-name basis with the internet because of a brilliant SEO campaign, he got there because people felt like they were on a first-name basis with him and acted as such by linking to his site by his first name.

There’s a lesson there, and we hope that if you’d like to know more about our approach to social media and internet marketing, you’ll drop us a line.

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Podcast: How to Develop a Future-Compatible Site

wunruh — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 13:46:30 +0000

You can’t afford to be slow to adapt online if you hope to be prepared for the future of mobile, or m-commerce. Today’s podcast also covers the importance of web-compatible colors, and Andrew discusses the traditional aspects of graphic design that still hold true even as we design for the future of the internet.

If you are unable to play the podcast using the player below, you can download the podcast directly with this link and listen to the .mp3 with your own player.

By 2011, more people will be accessing the internet by cell phones than by desktop computers. So take a look at your site on a blackberry, an iPhone, or any other cellphone you may have accessible and ask yourself if this is what you want your customers to see. If it looks fine to you, then you probably don’t need our services.

On the other hand, if your site is built on tables, or is reliant on flash, there’s a chance you might want to take ten minutes and listed to our podcast today to learn how we approach forwad-thinking maximum compatibility in our web design.

Look for a bonus podcast tomorrow where we’ll discuss the strategy we apply in developing site navigation.

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Social Media Strategy for Your Website and Presence

wunruh — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 15:10:14 +0000

Previously we highlighted a list of 67 different social networking sites, and today I want to examine how social media strategy can help your website and online presence.

There is an ongoing presumption among many internet marketers that linking out to websites can cause you to lose page rank, or that it sends a signal to the search engines that other sites might be more relevant for a specific keyword, harming one’s online search engine results. The truth is somewhat more convoluted. Remember, every search engine is designed to provide the most relevant data to its user, and every search engine is rapidly changing to cope with the overall surge of information being added to the internet every day.

Because of this, the algorithms (which are kept secret) also change. Signals that once influenced search decisions heavily have become less relevant, and over the last few years a couple of trends have emerged. To my mind, the most important rule of thumb is to present unique, relevant content consistently while crediting those other sites which provide interesting insights or commentary on your topic.

A corollary to this rule of thumb is that any activity which seems overly manipulative to a search engine, even if it works, will eventually become irrelevant. Before I explain specifically why social media has become such an important factor in future-compatibility for search engine optimization, I want to highlight an example of this irrelevancy which I’ve anticipated for the last year or so, the ‘NoFollow’ tag.

If you have access to the Firefox browser on your computer, I highly recommend trying out the SearchStatus add-on and setting it to highlight all nofollow links on a page. Here you can see a picture of this, simply right-click on the SearchStatus bar and then enable this feature. Now take a look at Twitter, or Wikipedia – you’ll notice that a great many of the links are now highlighted as being ‘NoFollow’ tags.

Soon after the tag was introduced, it began to be used in ways that actually contradicted the original intent behind creating the tag in the first place. Some used it as a way to ’sculpt pagerank’ believing that by encouraging search engines like google and yahoo to only index in certain ways, they could bring different content to the forefront of a search result. And it worked, for several years, however search engines aren’t concerned with what you as a webmaster or web site owner believes is most relevant, only what their user base believes is most relevant.

NoFollow tag abuse continued in other ways as well, with sites accruing mass amounts of user-generated content yet ‘nofollowing’ the links the users themselves added to the sites, effectively tricking their user base into a kind of intellectual slave labor. A great many social bookmarking sites are somewhat guilty of this, although many will argue that the vast amount of spammers manipulating social bookmarking made this a necessity on their part.

More recently, Google (who initiated the ‘NoFollow’ tag in the first place) revealed that they now place much less relevance on the tag than they have in the past. This is likely in part to their re-evaluation of the concept of PageRank, and signals a shift back toward the search engine itself being the prime determiner of content relevance. As a result, we can expect to see other search engines follow suit, eventually leaving behind a huge swath of irrelevant nofollow tags scattered across countless ‘optimized’ web pages.

When I first understood the ‘NoFollow’ concept I knew this trend would eventually manifest, for one very simple reason – most people who blog, or write online, or create their own web sites, had no idea what a ‘NoFollow’ tag was and were unlikely to use it in a coherent fashion, while those few who did understand the tag abused it to further their own search engine manipulation efforts. Just like the practice of keyword stuffing in the nineties, the NoFollow tag shall eventually become a relic of an ever-changing industry (for more, see 13 Reasons why No-Follow Tags Suck at SearchEngineJournal).

This brings us to today, and the reason for a forward-thinking strategy around social media.

Google Labs is already live with its audio indexing, and here you can see that in action – similar services are available through Google Voice already, and it will not be long before Goolge implements this fully, blending their search results with content from audio, video, and even OCR applied to images. Relying simply on text to power your search engine results will become as much of an outdated idea as the NoFollow tag.

Savvy marketers are already talking about 2010 being the year of Video, in much the same way that 2009 was the year of Twitter. Understanding that the media you add to sites today can become the foundations for your website’s traffic tomorrow places you in a much better position for long-term growth. Do not rely on what has worked as a measure of where to invest your energy online, instead look to what is being developed and use that as a guide.

Here’s some related blogs around the net that also deal with this topic if you’d like to learn more:

Imagine Your Reality , Archive » Social media strategy for my … – Social Media strategy for my website and presence. Posted November 3rd, 2009 by admin and filed in Business reputation, Social Media, marketing. Tags: Blog software, Content management systems, social media presence, social media …
Stop Behaving Badly on Social Media! | Search Engine Journal – I’ma noise musician. For those of you not familiar with the genre, that means my band, Grasshopper , caters to a very small audience who likes to.
Social Media & Election Day – So I checked to see if either of you had any sort of social media presence. The answer: not really. As far as I can tell, Mayor Gray has no presence whatsoever on either Facebook or Twitter. As for you, Charlie Smithgall, …
Increase Your Company’s SEO and Website Traffic with Pro features … – His immediate marketing goals were to: create a social media presence, increase search engine optimization (SEO), increase brand awareness, and drive additional traffic to the website. Steve decided to work with Widgetbox to implement a …

And as always, if you’d like to contact us to learn more about how we can develop an integrated approach for your web presence, feel free to use the contact form below:

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Website Design and Competitive Keyword Analysis

wunruh — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 15:32:21 +0000

Here at Domozych Media we understand that building web sites is more than just designing a beautiful web page. Web sites are information humans find interesting and a space for search engines indexing the content itself, creating a semantic map of relevance for potential searchers.

At the same time, a website should bring the real world branding image in line with the larger web presence. Creating content that will attract traffic and links can take time, and often there is something of a sandbox effect that is overlayed across new domains by the search engines until they’ve determined the site’s value against the backdrop of the internet as a whole.

When you contact us, we’ll begin by discussing with you what your needs are–do you want to offer services, sell products, or simply create an informative site highlighting your business? If you are an artist, are you wanting a digital portfolio space you can easily update? If you are a musician, perhaps you’d like to sell .mp3s and ringtones, or have a calendar where you can update performance dates.

No matter what your needs, we can identify the most likely search terms people will use to find your information, then work the content and the layout of your site around specific keyword phrases that align with those terms. There are a number of ways to do this, and I have years of experience in efficiently and precisely identifying what people are searching for in any given keyword sector. The content is as important as the form and function if your site is going to be seen by the people who are searching for what you have to offer, which is why Andrew and I work together on each aspect of any given project.

Once the competitive keyword analysis is complete, I provide Andrew with a map of the most valuable terms which he uses to structure the site itself. From there, I work with him to find the best configuration of unique text that emphasizes your services, products, and information. This information architecture underlies the site from the very beginning, so as you grow you know you’re organically adding to a semantically relevant backbone in a direction that won’t decrease your relevance over time.

Also, the competitive analysis will show exactly what your competitors online are doing, and often will reveal points of differentiation where you can leverage your unique strengths against their existing sites. Obviously, this blog piece can only deal with the more abstract nature of keyword analysis, and every site design will be different, but some very basic principles are universal. If you’d like to know more about the research and optimization aspects of website design, web presence, and social media in general, my longer report entitled ‘Quaint Media and Today’s Memetic Ecology’ is available to read for free and you can contact us directly using the form below:

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Podcast: Designing for Maximum Compatibility

wunruh — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 13:41:47 +0000

Today’s podcast (which you can listen to using the player at the bottom of this post, or by downloading directly) is the beginning of a number of podcasts which will highlight how we focus on building sites people can easily use, without confusion. At the end of the day, your website is a solution to a specific concern, that of connecting with people who are interested in what you have to offer. Creating a space where people can learn about your services, products, and brand is the purpose behind putting your site up online.

While this podcast discusses the compatibility issues that arise with flash specifically, we will also be explaining how interactivity can be created using simpler approaches which emphasize your content rather than relying on the bells and whistles of over-the-top animations and flash intro screens. While there are a lot of useful ways to use flash in a website, often relying on graphics and interactivity can limit who is able to use your site. This is something we strive to avoid.

Instead, we explain in today’s audio how the technological changes in browsers and the upcoming advances in html itself are creating new opportunities in how web design can frame content, and how we at Domozych Media are preparing our clients to meet the coming revolution in mobile commerce.

Here are a few related articles on this, from the excellent blog Web Design Ledger:

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to email us using the form below and we will happily address your questions in upcoming podcasts.

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A Quick Look at Simple Customizations for Wordpress Themes

wunruh — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 16:34:46 +0000

In the video below, I show you how I switched the theme on my blog, then performed a little bit of theme customization to remove the categories and tags underneath the posts on the front page.

If you cannot see the video, you can download the high-quality .mov file or watch it on youtube. This is only a quick example of the kind of in-depth customization we can perform at Domozych Media, and highlights the flexibility of the Wordpress interface. If you’d like to contact us regarding your own site, you can do so using this form.

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Really Simple Syndication (RSS) and You

wunruh — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 13:59:30 +0000

Yesterday we introduced the very first Domozych Media podcast. Today we wanted to talk a little bit about Really Simple Syndication, or ‘RSS’, and how it can help your site not only maintain an audience, but actually grow your web presence. Here’s a link to our feed validation results which show our podcast feed is easily readable across any RSS reader. And here’s a link to our actual RSS feed. When we build a fully functional site for you, there’s a number of feeds which will be accessible and we will be able to repurpose those feeds across a number of other third-party sites, some of which I highlighted in an earlier post.

For today’s example I want to focus on the site FriendFeed, #18 on that list of 67 social media networking sites, a site which was recently acquired by the larger social network Facebook. Here you can see the FriendFeed site for the book The Art of Memetics, which incorporates a number of different RSS feeds from several different sources. Being able to combine RSS feeds from your dynamic pages, such as those produced through the blog’s content management structure, or those pages created as you add new products to your shopping cart, creates an additional RSS feed which can then be folded into the front page of your site, or republished on a dedicated Twitter profile, or reused across any one of those other ‘lifestream’ style social networks that are listed on that previous post.

RSS began over a decade ago as RDF, but within a few months was renamed. It remained a somewhat obscure use of XML until blogging became a widespread approach to content management, at which point RSS adoption grew and the competitor Atom also drove developer’s interest in designing cross-compatible readers that regular people (i.e., non-techies) could easily configure to keep up to date with news and information from their favorite sites. Take a moment to review the history of RSS on wikipedia if you’d like to learn more.

Today, every major browser incorporates an RSS reader, and there are a number of stand-alone RSS readers as well. Sites like Yahoo and Google incorporate RSS readers on their home pages, and software, such as iTunes, relies on RSS to keep up to date with podcasts. Updating your static site to incorporate RSS feeds can help you to maintain an audience over time, as well as provide an avenue for you to announce specials or updates to your products or services.

If you have questions, or would like to contact us to remodel or design your web site, you should send us an email using the form below.

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Podcast: Creative Commons and Open Source

wunruh — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 23:01:05 +0000

In this first podcast, Andrew and I discuss the importance of Creative Commons and the open source software development community in our approach to web design.

We go into detail regarding why we publish under a creative commons license on the podcast, and then segue into a discussion regarding open source software and the open source community. Future podcasts will cover web development and online marketing concerns, and you can expect to see a new podcast every four or five days.

The tones at the beginning and ending of each of our podcast episodes come from the track 17 Ghosts II from the band Nine Inch Nails (live video here) which itself was released under the same Creative Commons license we publish this blog and the related audio and video media.

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Domozych Media Updates

wunruh — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 16:19:38 +0000

Andrew and I have been working together to produce the most flexible, cross-compatible solutions for ourselves and our clients in the Albany, NY area. Domozych Media will work with any specific client-type, from non-profit through to a larger business. We strive to create an attractive, user-friendly site/application specifically for maximizing customer experience or whatever intended results you require.

We’re updating this site with more information and extensive demos to showcase some of the techniques we can bring to your project. Be sure to read our About Us page to learn more, and stop by our Portfolio page to see some of the sites we have constructed and maintain. We work with open-source products and create our own modular web sites using licensed software. Take a look at our demo shopping cart, which can easily be configured to work with your products, be they digital or physical.

Building on the back of open-source software like Wordpress and Zen-Cart means we can access the vast community resources to address and troubleshoot and given situation. This blog is run on a Wordpress framework with a few specialized plug-ins and a great deal of web customization. Our shopping cart is a secured install of Zen-Cart, and can be customized in a number of visual ways and integrated with PayPal or your preferred payment vendor.

Information marketers can create and maintain newsletters and autoresponders through a customized shopping cart, or we can integrate your own email sign-up forms with non-intrusive javascript pop-ups, like this one demonstrated on our site, to highlight site news. Musicians with a fully installed Zen-Cart can sell .mp3s or give them away for free directly to their fans, without paying fees or royalties. Literally any digital media can be marketed directly through on of our sites.

We work with you to design the most effective approach for your specific needs. If you’d like to contact us for a consultation, simply let us know in this email form:

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Search Engine Marketing or Search Engine Optimization?

wunruh — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 03:39:44 +0000

Do not be fooled, the internet is a highly competitive place. If you have a good idea, product, or service, and there’s value in it, chances are someone else has it already up for sale online. Take heart! If there’s no money to be made, there wouldn’t be competitors. A healthy competition is a sign of a healthy niche, and in internet marketing a healthy niche can sustain you, so long as you are properly positioned. Getting into that position requires getting and maintaining traffic to your site, and in sales terms it means structuring your online presence as an entry point into your sales funnel. A lot of marketers have experimented with both search engine marketing and search engine optimization to reach the largest possible audience, and we have experience working with both of these approaches.

First, let’s explain what we mean. Search engine marketing is using search engines themselves to carry your marketing message to your desired consumer demographic. This generally falls under the rubric ‘Pay-Per-Click’ advertising, or PPC, although search engine marketing is tied directly to links spread through a search engine results page, while PPC campaigns can extend through content networks and are offered by more than just search engines.

Search engine optimization is the practice of creating sites and linking to them in such a way as to increase the visibility of those sites to search engines themselves, naturally bringing the best information to the top of search engine results pages. Or at least, what the search engines determine to be the best information through the algorithms by which they’ve been programmed. Because of the vast complexity of the internet, and the limited (although staggering) capabilities of search engines themselves, the practice of search engine optimization has become an ever-evolving discipline, where a few very basic rules can be said to remain stable over time.

Both search engine marketing and search engine optimization have serious flaws. Playing entirely by one approach or the other will slow the development of any online endeavor, and a good web designer will be familiar enough with the basics of search engine optimization to save you headaches down the line. We recommend creating sites with sitemaps to help guide search engines as they explore your site, and rely on a few content rules to expand your presence rapidly.

We also provide an in-depth review of keywords and the costs associated with aggressive PPC campaigns on search engines, yet we will likely advise against search engine marketing except in precision demographics for local businesses seeking to reach out only within a certain zipcode, for example. The reason is simple – in organic search people are looking for something specific, relevant, and of lasting interest. Creating a site filled with the details a searcher is seeking provides ongoing value to the searcher and the owner of the site, and that value remains even after the searcher leaves the page. If you’ve merely purchased a PPC link, the result is clearly marked as an advertisement, you are paying for the click through to your site, and once you’ve paid for that click, even when it doesn’t end in a sale, you’ll have to pay for the next click.

I have seen this pay off handsomely in terms of local return on advertising investment. At the same time, indiscriminate use of search engine marketing can quickly suck all the money from your advertising budget, leaving you with only a temporary bump in your site’s traffic. Search engine optimization, on the other hand, only goes so far if you’re in a very competitive niche where much has been written about the service, product, or information you provide. In these situations, constant, unique, and high-volume media posts to an associated blog may be enough to start drawing attention to the site from the search engines, but breaking upward in terms of traffic may require the kind of boost only a few well-crafted Google Adwords or Search Advertising on Bing can provide.

If you’d like to learn more, ask us a question, or find out what we suggest for your specific situation, drop us a line:

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Online Social Optimization and Lifestream Toolsets

wunruh — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 15:15:38 +0000

I’ve written about when I started using Twitter, and my current list of Twitter profiles may seem excessive, but that’s only the start of my digital footprint. The purpose behind the different profiles becomes more evident as you see the way it is tied into my FriendFeed and Tumblr profiles, and I’ve even developed a wordpress site designed to capture and recombine all these feeds into an auto-posting system so anyone who wants can track my personal shadow as my attention moves through this digital space. I’ve done this for a number of other clients as well, and I’ve found that this background layer of constant updates has helped sculpt their online presence over time, organically generating a significant body of associated data around their online identities.

Tac Anderson calls this ‘Being a Social Media Ninja’ and his blog post explains how he set up this very same approach for Microsoft Store, although he relies on Posterous as the primary lifestream hub for Microsoft rather than a private wordpress install. What’s most important, though, is that you find a way to approach a lifestream that is best for you and that incorporates the keyword phrases, the social media, and the organic reputation structure you want to associate yourself, your company, and your brand with over time.

Online social optimization is something I’ve been studying for years, beginning with a grounding in early social issues that arose from email and chat rooms and progressing into a life-long study of memetics and belief patterns in social bodies that form both online and off. Socially optimized behaviors manifest in many, many different ways. Today’s digitally enhanced social body can perform intricate social action with a remarkably low-level entry point into the group’s organizing network. The implications of this are far-reaching, and over time the transformation this has had on social issues and a philosophy of governance will become more apparent.

My focus has been on understanding the reasons why one tool is chosen over another, and what trends can be anticipated over time. Working closely with Andrew here at Domozych Media has allowed me to find ways to maximize this knowledge base and adapt it to real world branding concerns. Social media is easily the most powerful direct response mechanism ever conceived, and properly used it will invigorate companies, political campaigns, even the entertainment industry. I began by working closely with musicians, artists, theatre troupes, and independent film producers, and that ongoing collaboration led Edward Wilson and I to write ‘The Art of Memetics,’ a DIY guide to effective word of mouth marketing using social networks both online and off.

The experience of self-publishing and distributing this book led to the formulation of an approach to marketing I labeled ‘OSO’ – or ‘Online Social Optimization’ – which encompasses three interrelated fields, online reputation management or ORM, search engine optimization or SEO, and social media optimization or SMO. The principle is simple – each of these three fields overlaps the next, and by approaching each situation through a holistic, top-down view rather than the more narrow adherence to one methodology over another, a more successful organic structure can be built for longer-lasting results and greater communicative reach throughout society.

Using lifestream technologies online is one of the trends I predicted early on, and the development of these mashups of social networks, social media, and status update trackers has exploded over the last few months. Friendfeed, Posterous, and Tumblr are three great examples of this kind of lifestream application, although we’re now seeing more and more social networks incorporating lifestreams into their own networking features. We are skilled at web development which incorporates this kind of technology to best position you in your respective field.

If you’d like to learn more, feel free to contact us with the form below:

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Web Design for Internet Marketing

wunruh — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 14:17:09 +0000

It’s not a secret in the internet marketing world that web design needs to be simple, flexible, and fast. Our tableless approach creates exquisite squeeze pages to harness cross-compatible accessibility on any internet-ready device. Sony mylos, Palm Pilots, Blackberry phones, iPhones, Wiis, Xboxes, and Playstations, netbooks – if you can use it to surf the net, you can read a squeeze page and landing page we built.

Successful sales pages online are different from web structures built for internal networks. Joint venture partnerships are driven by email marketing. Below is a borrowed image, taken from Flickr and used under the creative commons license (something I wrote about on this blog previously), which can be seen as an array of ‘touch-points’ to find potential leads using a social network:

At the center of this hub is where you want to be able to communicate your brand message, your internet presence, with the support of a flexible infrastructure that can be adapted to each of your offers. Internet marketing moves at a different pace than the quaint world of traditional media, brick and mortar office hours. The internet is global, and open, and accessible everywhere – with the right web design, and the right marketing architecture in place, you can be too.

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How to Strategically Manage your Brand.

wunruh — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 16:15:49 +0000

One’s brand is more than a color or a logo – it’s a story your clients and customers tell themselves in relation to your services. Not all of this conversation is externalized in the form of community conversation in digital space, but that which is should be carefully monitored. Cultural feedback is essential to understanding the best possible forward action.

And in today’s world, your brand’s viability relies on a clear understanding of online communities that do respond to and discuss the product, service, and additional elements of the brand’s narrative.

Time management is likely the most important factor in online reputation management as a whole – if a ‘meme gets legs’ in the right community it can be like a wildfire, a spectacle that draws huge audiences, often driven by a sense of irony, hyperbole, and self-parody that can transform (or even deform) the brand’s initial semiological intent. With the proper tools already calibrated, email alerts can notify you to these instances involving your brand as they occur, in real-time.

While tracking in real time issues that connect directly to your business and brand might seem like a lot of work, the real work is all done by the search engines themselves, and the return on investment down the line is immeasurable.

Real metrics make all the difference. Studying not only what people are already saying about your brand but what they are looking for specifically in the related semantic spaces online allows you to craft your message to your target demographics search pattern. Content for your web site design comes from your audience, and addresses their concerns immediately. This kind of resource management online creates a clarity and efficiency at every level of the process, and in the video below you’ll see me explain in detail how I use internet search metrics to establish this kind of clarity.

After having watched the above video, you may be interested in following some examples of other blogs around the net I found using this research information. I assembled these posts not only to highlight the different content also associated with these topics, but also so that when this blog post is indexed by search engines and other web spiders, they will find deeper, related content connected to this blog post. Remember, the internet itself is run on information. The more unique, clearly-worded, and hyperlinked you make your content, the more the search engines will reward your content with higher placement on their results page.

RISK MANAGEMENT:

the graying bar: let’s not forget the ethics – my brain’s been doing a lot of “scootering” lately: forgetting a fact, then remembering it, then forgetting it again. (see wapo article, “where’d we leave that darn fact?,” feb. 11, 2007) for well over a month, i’ve “forgotten” to …
How risk management affects agile approaches – confused of calcutta – As promised, I ordered a copy of Michael Power’s new book, Organised Uncertainty. And I’ve given it my first riffle-through, preparing my plan of attack for the next wave through the book. It’s a fascinating read for people of my …

RESOURCE MANAGEMENT:

Library Resource Management Systems conference – The National Information Stanstards Organization (NISO) is offering: Library Resource Management Systems: New Challenges, New Opportunities, on October 8-9, 2009, in Boston. Speakers from libraries and vendors will be discussing their …
Human resource management: general guidelines for constructing … – he Human Resource Management has become a backbone for running a business successfully. It comprises of multiple functions.

TIME MANAGEMENT:

thinking like an mba – being offered in january – 12 , 2009 and ending feb. 6., 2009. the four one-week modules include topics on project management, time management, money, resources (people) and change management. the class is free and upon completion students will …
why is time management important? how to get things done fast in … – if you start your day without planning exactly what you’re going to do in your business, it’s unlikely that you will be productive and get a lot of things done. you need a simple, but deadly effective time management system. …

One final note. If you’re interested in learning more about the software I use in the above video, feel free to pay Noble Samurai a visit. And if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to send us an email with the form below.

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Embedding media across many platforms expands your online presence…

wunruh — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 02:55:58 +0000

Our Website Design team focuses on modular and scalable sites along with strategies for attaining high rankings for relevant, high-volume search terms. One of our tools is to mirror media in several locations as a way to make it more accessible, and to enhance the scope of your online presence.

Here, you can see an image imported from Flickr, embedded in this blog. In Matt Mason’s book The Pirate’s Dilemma, freely available to read online here, Matt sets forth a principle on p. 168 where he states – let your audience create new identities and distinguish themselves. Enabling that ability in your audience, and in your business, creates a new social space where your audience can embolden your brand over time. Musicians who have mastered this create huge followings, educators and experts can generate transformation in society (simply look at the growth of TED, both on their own space, and their massive youtube following).

The right website can change your world. Designing a structure for effective business marketing, with landing page, squeeze pages, effective home pages that index in the search engines and are found by searchers in your area can revitalize your business. Your web site is your face to the world. We can create many different paths for others to follow back to you. Using Flickr to store images is only one way to take advantage of all the internet has to offer.

And let’s not forget Twitter. Twitter is the RSS feed people actually read. Not only that, but it can become much more, from a place to advertise new positions available to qualified applicants (a great employment agency tool) to an update feed announcing special events and historical dates of religious significance as many churches and synagogues online have begun to do. Twitter and online social networking is essential to driving inbound, search-based traffic to any online site.

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Watch Sesame Street – Mad Men – Youtube Clip

wunruh — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 20:42:57 +0000

Above is a wonderful and ‘viral’ video from SesameStreet and their youtube channel. It illustrates some basic truths about marketing, both in content and in the form in which that content is distributed. As a media object, as hypertext, it is flexible – even plasticized. It can be copied, forwarded, resized, and updated from behind with new overlays. Layers upon layers of code can be added to it, and it have a specific address where it can be thought to exist – yet it also exists on countless other sites that have also embedded it on their pages as well – and with over four hundred thousand hits it can be said to be a successful video for the profile SesameStreet which uploaded it to youtube.

Domozych Media understands the nature of new media, and can help you integrate audio and video components within a greater structure. When you embed a video into your site, you may want it available on youtube… or vimeo, or viddler, or revver, or one of a number of other third-party sites depending on your audience… or you may want the video itself to be private and accessed only by customers who’ve paid for the video – as is the case with some online training products. Either way, we can build you that scaffolding for your online vision.

Building a web presence means modularity, focus, and preparation. A small business owner who knows precisely where they’re putting advertising and marketing energy can make a pretty good assessment of any given strategy.

By focusing on simplicity and compatibility, and building for the user (not the client! – read this report to learn why!) a web designer can take advantage of the existing social networks more efficiently, and can adapt to changing technology more readily. Twitter, Facebook, and Friendfeed now make up the primary focus of trends, and help one to think in terms of clouds and presence rather than sites and indexing traffic. While it says web design, graphic designers, hosting, Flash, database development, and marketing based in New York on the domain when you search us out online, we also have the critical approach to media that is necessary in our transmedia world.

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What are the Requirements for a Well-Anchored Web Presence?

wunruh — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 15:01:51 +0000

I’ve written before about social profiles, both the benefits they provide, and the problematic nature of relying on a third-party for your internet presence. Social networking can provide you with valuable market research. It can also become a series of unconnected, forgotten, and abandoned profiles generating no real value but cluttering up your online reputation. I always suggest that social networks be evaluated closely before you invest the time it takes to join a network, and that you should never rely on a singe social network for all of your online promotional efforts.

Social profiles need to be attached to a space, a central hub you can update from the back end. Not only does this mean you shouldn’t rely on Myspace to be the only place where you promote your band, it also means you shouldn’t rely only on Ebay or Etsy to be the online shopping cart that powers your small business.

Social media is at its best when it is an open, not a closed system that provides measurable and real-time results across a decentralized network. While it is game-changing, it can also be corrosive to traditional marketing strategies. Having a web site you can update completely, archive, and restore from a back-up is a guarantee your presence won’t be washed away by the changing relationships people have with internet technology.

Your central hub also needs to be built on a framework where you can at edit and modify the content as you see fit.

Social media is a real-time space, and your online presence benefits tremendously by real-time responses. We structure your site in such a way that you can easily adapt your schedule to a few light online touches that draw ongoing attention from social networking hooked into your own content management system. And if you’re in the ‘Tech Valley’ here in the capitol district around Albany, Latham, Colonie, Troy, or Amsterdam, you know your website hosting questions can be answered in person, and we can show you how to anchor your existing social network profiles to your promotional efforts.

These anchor points need to be on your own domain name, and you should have email addresses tied to that domain name. We can help you do this easily, and show you how updating your approach to social networking increases your efficiency and productivity over time. Feel free to email us today if you’d like to learn more:

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What’s your plan for long-term growth?

wunruh — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 03:53:24 +0000

Earlier today this article appeared on my inbox:

Research has shown that mental stimulation similar to the stimulation that occurs in individuals who frequently use the Internet may affect the efficiency of cognitive processing and alter the way the brain encodes new information.

The article went on to say that

searching online may be a simple form of brain exercise that might be employed to enhance cognition in older adults

That it in effect promotes the development of connections that didn’t previously exist within their brains. That’s amazingly powerful stuff – the Internet can actually rewire your brain – and if you’re online now, you’ve already experienced this!

Neurological networks mimic brain patterns – the same can be said for cities, as researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute across the Hudson River have shown recently. It also happens to be the best way to construct a web presence for maximum outgrowth potential. That’s the approach with Domozych Media. We build a web presence that targets multiple channels while balancing maximum compatibility concerns.

We have most of the beta site up now, you can see some of our existing portfolio and clientele, and more is on the way.

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What WIRED Says about Bathrooms Might Shock You…

wunruh — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 01:13:55 +0000

Shocking New Mobile Study Concluded..

A sampling of 2,625 adults concluded that 75 percent had no objections to anyone using laptops, netbooks and cell phones in the bathroom.

That’s right – WIRED.COM Explains…

Sixty-two percent of the 2,625 adults who took part in the survey agreed that cell phones, laptops, netbooks and other electronic devices are part of daily life.

Fifty-five percent also thought the demands of business mean people must stay connected, even if it involves taking a laptop on a holiday or answering a cell phone during a meal.

Increasingly, the demands of the internet require mobile devices be able to connect in place of the traditional desktop. What good is a website if it can’t be viewed?

These statistics show a trend toward mobile computing which small businesses cannot afford to overlook. Domozych Media has specialized in small business web solutions that can fit your budget and put you in charge of your online presence. We develop web sites that can be navigated easily, and can adapt your existing site or create you one from scratch that mobile users can access.

So next time you’re in the bathroom, whip out that cell phone and check out our demo site at http://domozychmedia.com

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Contact us directly through Email

admin — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 15:11:17 +0000

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Search Term Research

wunruh — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 15:37:34 +0000

We survey keywords connected with your site to find ways to connect you with those who are actively searching for your products or services. So it was with great interest I read the article ‘The Myth of Great Search Engine Results’ by Danny Sullivan posted on Search Engine Land. Search engines are themselves always evolving, and the strategies involved with reaching a searching audience change as well. Staying on top of the latest research and implementing a web design structure that is flexible enough to adapt to new approaches is our passion.

Currently we are developing a comprehensive research brief for a client which includes country-specific analysis of keywords and related communities related to the site itself. This kind of groundwork often suggests a site structure, reflecting in the layout the actual information needs of the research audience that will access this site. Another way is highlighted in the article above, where Danny takes on Bing, Yahoo, and Google’s results for the term Search Term Research and evaluates their results. Remember, as he points out, the search engines still have a long way to go before they’re perfect.

This leaves a lot of room for specialization and growth. Organic search engine results grow over time. Knowing where search engines are going to look is only half the battle – we can also prepare and present sitemaps to the search engines themselves once the site is constructed, further engaging with the search engine technology.

What we do with search term research may appear complicated, and the list of tools for search term research itself can be somewhat daunting, at least at first glance.

I’ve written elsewhere about the problem of metrics in social media but with keywords we can see precisely how many people, on average, are conducting searches. Keyword research does not carry with it the same ambiguity about numbers that social media experts must struggle with, instead a comprehensive survey can be made of precisely what has been searched for and said about a given keyword in exhaustive detail. This research can provide a precise map within which your message can be placed. Information retrieval is a social issue, and the internet is a series of nested, interlocking file sharing networks. With the right search term research you can be sure you’re maximizing your exposure across the net.

Our comprehensive brief may highlight opportunities for communication around your keyword. This process often shows areas of competition and trends that otherwise slip by unnoticed. One such tool is the Google Keyword Tool that suggests related keywords, an excellent way to creatively assess a specific topic. If search term research is a new concept to you, may we suggest you might take a few minutes researching terms related to your interest, and see if you can picture how this semantic mapping might help in your unique situation?

You can always email us directly with your web design and internet marketing questions using the form below.

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Podcast: Why People Use Search Engine Optimization

wunruh — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 19:02:48 +0000

Learn about the three types of searchers! You can download this podcast directly or listen to it using the player below.

If you look at long-term strategic planning when you’re developing your website, you’ll want to listen to our podcast on why people use search engine optimization.

Andrew Domozych discusses the purpose behind understanding user behavior and Wes Unruh explains how we approach scalability in creating a website. We explain the reasons you might want a website, and the purpose behind search engine optimization.

This podcast is about ten minutes long and is work-safe.

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Podcast: How Site Navigation Strategy Increases Website Traffic

wunruh — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 13:20:10 +0000

In this podcast, Andrew and I discuss how we discover the most applicable site navigation structure based on keyword analysis. In creating a web site, every aspect of the site is important. Here we discuss why this is, and provide a few pointers on how to break out of the traditional web design.

This is a bonus podcast, in response to a question, and you can play it using the player at the bottom of this page, or download the .mp3 directly to your computer or device. Look for our next podcast on search engine optimization next week, and don’t hesitate to contact us at 518-595-9734 if you’d like a website remodeling consultation.

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67 Social Media Networking Sites Other than Google #Buzz

wunruh — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 15:08:22 +0000

Usually when I bring up social networking, people respond with ‘oh yeah, I think I have a facebook’ or ‘I’ve got a myspace but I never check it.’ More and more people have Twitter accounts, maintain a blog, or track bookmarks with delicious, digg, or stumbleupon, but that seems to be about it. When I show them the vast array of services available, they are often overwhelmed. How do you know which ones to use? Is there a way to target only the relevant ones? The answer is – well, sorta. This isn’t rocket science, but it is always evolving. Right now there are four ‘meta’ social networking sites that I want to introduce you to – you might think of this as a library of web 2.0 services.

The only way to know what works best is to try them all, and evaluate the results. Social media is its own language, a language of keywords, visuals, profiles, and feeds. There are a number of sites that attempt to consolidate the vast array of social networking into a few easily used dashboards, but even those have their issues – all of these third-party sites work independently of each other, and sometimes sites go down, or change their interface, or rebrand themselves, creating gaps and voids. Even the sites that seem stable and backed by a large corporation have bugs, or lose data, or alter their links in such a way as to make interfaces less useful for online social optimization purposes.

Don’t get me wrong, I love using interfaces to work with large numbers of these sites at once, and today I want to highlight four sites. Those four sites are Knowem.com, Onlywire.com, Ping.fm, and Go2Web20.net – and today I’m going to focus on the sites that Onlywire and Ping can update for you.

Bear in mind that Knowem lists over 300 social sites, and provides a very slick interface to help you discover social spaces where you can create your own profile. I’ve been working with it for the last few days, and have found a whole host of sites that I’ve never seen before, each with their own unique spin on the social networking concept. From ‘lifestream sites’ that integrate other sites, to multimedia portfolio sites, to niche video sharing – the list truly goes on and on. If that’s not enough to overwhelm you, Go2Web20 certainly is – featuring well over 3,000 web 2.0 sites, Orli Yakuel has created one of the most comprehensive indexes of social networking and online software services this side of Google itself.

So where does one start? Well, I’ve evaluated a number of auto-updating sites, and what follows is a list of the sites that can be easily updated through both Onlywire and Ping. Some of these are more relevant than others, and ultimately we will advise on which have relevance to your specific situation, but I wanted to provide a glimpse into the staggering array of social media services available.

Remember, you don’t have to sign up for every single social network to have an effective web presence. Collaboration across a number of social sites with others in your field becomes easier when you can focus on a few well-established sites. However, having your presence established, even in across just twenty or thirty of these sites can be incredibly time-consuming. We specialize in finding the best possible online ‘fit’ for your specific needs. We can also advise on existing social networks, and explore ways for you to maximize the effectiveness of your daily online routines.

If you’d like to learn more, feel free to contact us using the form below:

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Domozych Media

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