January 13, 05 by kenrich
Today was a very busy day at work. I’ve been diving full-force into learning Internet marketing and I am preparing to put together a full marketing plan for our business. In the meantime, I have already begun to start marketing our site. Our business has been around for nearly four years now and we have had virtually no marketing to our credit. This should be just the shot in the arm our business needs in order to get our business growing.
So today I began researching all of the tips and tricks that Internet marketers use when promoting a web site. These include link-building, search-engine optimization, e-mail campaigns, creating targeted web content and banner-exchange programs. And those are just some of the free options available. I don’t exactly have a lot of money in my budget for our first annual marketing campaign, so you know most of my efforts will focus on the free campaigns this year.
In preparation for this campaign, I have been making upgrades to our company site (Orvado Technologies) to make the site easier to navigate and to include more valuable content. Having good content will help to create searchable content for the engines and to help encourage inbound links from other sites.
January 11, 05 by kenrich
After launching my re-designed Linux Docs web site, I noticed a significant drop in traffic. It seems that even though the site appeared empty, users were still accessing the large collection of HOWTOs on the site. A HOWTO is a plain text document addressing a specific task.
So I have begun translating the latest version of HOWTOs into my wiki site. I’m sure I will lose quite a bit of traffic in the short term, but I wasn’t earning any money off that site anyways. The site is just basically a way to give something back to the Linux community which has helped me to learn how to setup and administer a Linux computer.
This year, I have committed myself to promoting the money-making aspects of my business more. Our web development business has been languishing over the past few years due to a lack of marketing and sales. We don’t have the money to hire someone even on a contract basis. My plan is to take on this role myself and learn as much as I can about sales and marketing this year.
January 04, 05 by kenrich
Today, I launched a re-vamped version of the Linux resource site: Linux Docs. I really didn’t do much work in re-building the site. I lost a lot of valuable code on the old site due to a hacker who exploited a vulnerability in my phpBB forum software which is why I needed to re-build the site.
So the new site is running Wiki software which allows for collaborative content management. Wiki is web authoring software originally created by Ward Cunningham who based his software on the old HyperCard software for Macintosh. Since them, Wikis have been very popular with the most popular one being WikiPedia. In addition to this, I also added the excellent Phorum software to run very simple discussions on the site.
Since I don’t have time to update the content on the site myself, the Wiki solution is about the only solution that will work. If you visit the site, you will notice that there is almost no content on there right now. This is because I had no “real” content on the old site except for HTML version of the man pages. Needless to say (but I’ll say it anyways) - It’s going to take a while before the site becomes useful for Linux users. I have learned a lot from Linux and this is my way of giving something back.
