2008 Olympic Opening Ceremonies
Posted on August 9, 2008
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What a spectacle! I hope you got a chance to catch at least a part of the Olympic Opening Ceremonies in Beijing. China went all out on the show and it was surprisingly pretty impressive. I have to say my favorite part was probably the tai chi performers. There were 2008 performers moving in unison. Can you imagine what it took to organize that type of act? Its hard to manage a small business on a daily basis but 2008 performers all moving at once, it was simply amazing. Another cool idea the Chinese used was the huge piece of white paper they put on the ground where the parade of nations took place. In front of the paper there were different color chalks and as the athletes walked they chalked up the paper which made for a neat look. If you missed the show I’ve included a clip of some of the spectacles.
A Huge Expense
The Games have cost china somewhere in the range of 40- 50 Billion dollars, which is a massive amount of money. It was clear during the opening ceremonies and looking at the venues that no expense was spared. The Olympics have become an international political statement and China wants to be sure to wow the world. To give you an idea of what an enormous amount of money China spent on the Games I thought we could look at GDP. The C.I.A. fact book lists at least 137 Countries or territories with a GDP less than 40 Billion dollars a year. There are only 190 countries listed. So that makes the 40 Billion spent on the Olympics pretty interesting.
FeedBurner Now Available for Dormenomics
Posted on August 8, 2008
Filed Under Technology, Uncategorized, Wordpress | Leave a Comment
After some final tweaking in the last twelve hours FeedBurner is now available for Dormenomics! It was relatively easy to set up and surprisingly did not take too much time as I had expected. Often when you set up new accounts with technology products like this it is difficult to get going within 24-48 hours because you have to wait for things to settle and be approved. I didn’t experience any problems like this with FeedBurner which was refreshing. I’m sure FeedBurner has been an excellent company from the start but it might be possible that its takeover by Google has streamlined every process even more.
The FeedBurner Idea
The basic premise behind FeedBurner, for any reader who may not know, is rss or Really Simple Syndication. This allows bloggers to submit there feed to the network and in turn any readers who want to can simply subscribe and view a live text feed of the blog in any online reader. Each blog has its own feed URL which the posts are published on. Subscribers using FeedBurner, or other similar feed readers, then subscribe to the blog posts without having to visit the site every day. It is much easier for subscribers to read the site with a reader. Although it is much harder to monetize than a normal blog it helps to build readership and following thanks to its ease of use.
Some Simple Steps to Set Up FeedBurner
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Head on over to FeedBurner.com and set up a free account for your blog.
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Next, you will need to set up your blog feed. If you already know your blog feed than you can enter it in the field that is provided (you can’t miss the field). If you don’t know your feed it is generally something like http://yourblogtitle.com/feed. However, you can also just enter the URL for your blog and Feed Burner’s automatic feed searcher should pick it up for you. Just follow the setup process through until the configuration page and be sure to click the Pro option because it is now free since Google has acquired it.
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Now you need to put the code for your feed onto your site. This will allow people to subscribe to your blog. If you do not have any rss or feed buttons such as this one
go to the publicize tab in the FeedBurner main page. Select the option to add chicklets and this will allow you to choose one that you like and give you the code for that chicklet. Then, either using a wordpress textbox widget or imbedding the code directly into your script place the widget on your site. -
Technically you need to imbed the code for your feed into your widgets but a very simple way to do this is to download the wordpress plugin FeedSmith. This will do all the FeedBurner coding work for you. Simply download FeedSmith here. Next, upload it to your plugins folder. Once it is uploaded you need to activate it and enter your feed URL, which if you remember you can find in your FeedBurner account homepage.
So that is pretty much it, just a few simple steps to get your FeedBurner account up and running. Once you have that done it is time to focus on writing good content and driving some traffic to the blog, like what I have to do now!
-Charles
Working for your idea versus working on your idea
Posted on August 6, 2008
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Everyday I have a set number of goals I would like to accomplish, which never really goes as planned. It always seems that as I work on one topic I then happen to stumble across another topic and tend to get a bit distracted. The main focus of today though is to think about working for your business rather than in your business. The idea behind this is that often times you can get caught up spending so much time working with customers, orders and developing your site that you do not spend nearly enough time working to market your idea. This is definitely a hard balance because everyone wants to make sure that their business is viewed as the best from outsiders. You can build the sharpest, most user friendly website in the world but if no one ever sees it because of poor marketing than all of your work was in vain. Make sure you do at least a small amount of marketing which will multiply with time.
On Dormenomics I definitely encounter the problem of spending too little time marketing and too much time building the site. However we are very young and therefore I am going to focus on providing good content for a small amount of users which will hopefully allow us to grow over time. Eventually I will focus more on the marketing aspect but we need to develop a strong site base first.
Just be sure to try to keep a balance between both!
-Charles
Diversify, Diversify, Diversify
Posted on August 4, 2008
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Doesn’t it seem like you hear that word everywhere today? Especially with the current market condition any one that had all their eggs in one basket, most noticeably the stock market or particular banks, were hit very hard. Well the same thing goes for advertising. On a blog it is important to make sure you have different sources of revenue and not just Google ad sense. If one ad channel begins to fail or fall behind the other, the idea is that another one will pick up the slack or at least provide a secondary income stream. This is the method that we will be employing on this blog to hopefully maximize its income potential. Google ad sense, bidvertiser ads, and text link ads are all being used on this site. An important point when diversifying your ad stream is to maximize the amount of ad space you are comfortable with. Some publishers and bloggers choose to use all the space possible, which can look good but sometimes cluttered. Other bloggers choose to use less space and provide an ad free environment. It as all part of the fell you want to give off on your blog, just try out different layouts, that is what we are doing now.
Not Just for Advertising
Diversifying your traffic stream is also an important idea. Dormenomics uses entrecard which is a great service for bloggers in any niche or area of interest. But it is important to make sure that you also have other channels of traffic. This could consist of publishing article on sites such as ezine articles and possibly even some small, low cost ad campaigns to drive initial traffic to your site. Just be sure to always have a back up channel for most everything on your site.
-Charles
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