The Blog of Hans Eisenman

Google Real-Time Search Is Here!

Google's real-time search feature means every business should be doing social media (Twitter and Facebook at least) and sooner than later.  They should also be using online press-releases (preferably SEO'ed ones like ours :), because Google is going to put all that kind of information at the top of search results from now on.  Check it out:

So all this means it's time to get on the good foot folks--the social media good foot! If you need help with a strategy or a press release or just plain need answers to some burning questions, drop me a line: heisenman AT gmail.com

Making Programming Ideas A Reality

The Social Media Revolution

Firefox Running Slow Thanks To Addons and Extensions

Don't know about anyone else, but my Macbook has been running at high speeds (hint: racing fan) for the last couple of months and it's been bugging me.

It obviously wasn't bugging me enough or I would have fixed it months ago instead of today, but it just wasn't a priority compared to some of the other projects I have running.

It seemed as if today the racing cooling fan thing hit an apex though, which is good.  It gave me a clue as to what was causing the problem. 

Pay-per-click: Hits Don't Equal Sales

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is an area I have been looking into lately as I'm very interested in the dynamics of Internet marketing.  Mainly my interest, like that of many I'm sure, stems from the fact that the Internet is the largest marketplace the world has ever seen and it is constantly evolving. 

Talking to some of my friends who are also thinking about doing some PPC advertising, I can see this is a greatly misunderstood area for most of them.   Some  seem to think they will just have to pay the cost of admission (their monthly pay-per-click budget) and the business will simply come flooding in. 

Unfortunately, website hits do not equal bankable sales. 

What happens when you pay for 100 or 1000 hits in a month and no one buys?   Maybe you just need more traffic so you up the ante and pay for more PPC.  After a while and a lot of cash, you realize that there must be something wrong with your site otherwise that traffic should be converting.

So you decide it's  your site that needs tweaking (or worse, a complete overhaul) to get visitors to take the action you need them to take to make back that PPC money that was spent.

Or maybe the problem is further upstream in the process: perhaps the keywords being used are not attracting the right visitors in the first place.

Possibly it is a combination of all of the above factors.

One thing is for sure, while PPC is a huge advance over traditional advertising, it is no silver bullet.  I run into people weekly who have spent or are spending (burning?) money with PPC and are not yet seeing the results for which they had hoped.  They are getting their hits, but that's it.

I urge anyone who is thinking about getting started with PPC to read up on it while they TEST their campaigns with very small sums until they feel like they are getting conversions to sales. 

This way you may still be paying for the education, but you're not shelling out a college tuition!

A Twitter Business Story: 2,000 followers

Here's a story about how someone I met on Twitter (http://twitter.com/JenWojcik) is having business success with Twitter.

Could you use 2,000 followers?

3 Mins About Social Media

A short video on what "social media" is or what it is doing, if you will.  Part of an ongoing series articles and possibly more short videos related to this area of technology and business.

This will probably be an over-simplification to those of you who already have a firm grip on what "social media" is all about or are heavy users of sites like Twitter or Facebook, LinkedIN, etc.

Also, here's a link to Perry Belcher's video, the one I refer to in my video.

Online divorcee jailed after killing virtual hubby - Yahoo! News

Okay I don't even have a category for this bit of news my wife sent me today.  See if you can make sense of this one!  I can't. 

Link: Online divorcee jailed after killing virtual hubby - Yahoo! News.

TOKYO – A 43-year-old Japanese piano teacher's sudden divorce from her online husband in a virtual game world made her so angry that she logged on and killed his digital persona, police said Thursday.

The woman, who has been jailed on suspicion of illegally accessing a computer and manipulating electronic data, used his identification and password to log onto popular interactive game "Maple Story" to carry out the virtual murder in mid-May, a police official in northern Sapporo City said on condition of anonymity, citing department policy.

"I was suddenly divorced, without a word of warning. That made me so angry," the official quoted her as telling investigators and admitting the allegations.

The woman had not plotted any revenge in the real world, the official said.

Going Paperless

Want to go paperless?  Been there and I'm doing it.  Here's a braindump on more or less how I have including even a little video to share a few of the tools I have used to get there.

Recently a buddy of mine, who has a very successful real estate business, was sharing with me  just how badly he wants to go paperless with his business.  Real estate people feel this pain like almost no other.  Everything has a form. The only thing more paper intensive might be the medical field, or probably any governmental concern.

Since I am paperless (I don't even take notes on paper anymore, if I have my Macbook open and running, which is almost always), this discussion with my buddy got me listing out all my favorite applications, both online (websites) and the kind you'd load on your personal computer.  He took some notes and I have yet to check back with him to see if he has made any progress in this arena. 

Meanwhile, today I saw an ad for a company here in town that promotes giving you the ability to "be paperless" so I took a peek at their site.  They are basically an online document storage company, which is all fine and good, but the ability to store documents is just a sliver of what's needed to truly avoid the use of paper at all times while one is working.  We usually all have some form of collaboration, project management and intercommunication going with others, and that makes for a pretty dynamic existence.  "Storage" is very static (little to no change).  To become truly paperless requires more than just one e-tool as a result.  I use many.

In other words, if paper is something you truly want to curb in your life, there's much more to consider than just storing it.  You can do it, though, with less effort than you might think. 

Here are some more thoughts I have had on this area.

Facing Facts About Lack of Website Traffic

The other day, I was talking to a business associate who has a non-profit site promoting a moral code for children.   She was asking me about SiteBuildIt! (SBI!) and something she said just won't leave me alone. 

SBI! is all about websites that get actual traffic and her response to something I had written about SBI! was she had "a site that she just sends people to" herself.  The implication was she didn't really need something like SBI! as a service because she was just using her site as a big electronic business card, or as a follow-up tool in her sales.

This is all fine and good, but it struck me as contradictory.  So I asked her a question:  "If you had, say, 5,000 or 10,000 or more people come to your site every week, would that help what you're trying to do?" "Of course!" she immediately responded.

It was a predictable reply, of course, but this brief exchange was enlightening to me.   It exposed something I think a lot of people who have websites feel.