the time thing has bugged me since middle-school, and the REAL problem: every time I asked a teacher or bring this up to someone, THEY GET REALLY BORED.

Concert is starting now. Bye.

fascinated that time is called primary unit by SI, but time can't "be" w/o motion. there has to be distance comparison (clock hands, crystal vibrations, planet orbit, light particle).

Monitor #3 is dying. My left eye is strained from the purple-red pre-death monitor syndrome.

"Continuous effort - not strength or intelligence - is the key to unlocking our potential," — Winston Churchill's SEM Part II

In the previous segment we talked about the need to publish regularly. The success of your SEM efforts depends on it. Today, we extend that point to include the way you say things in your published works and what you say.

 

If you enjoyed our riffing on Confucius, you'll love what's next. Ladies and Gentlemen, Sir Winston Churchill will now address your needs for Search Engine Marketing!

Amazed that a man whose heyday was several decades before there was an Internet has so much to say on the topic? This will take four installments:

1. "To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often."
2. "Continuous effort - not strength or intelligence - is the key to unlocking our potential. "
3. "We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give."
4. "However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results."

Today, #2:

In the previous segment we talked about the need to publish regularly. The success of your SEM efforts depends on it. Today, we extend that point to include the way you say things in your published works and what you say:

You say important things repeatedly.

Do you remember how many time you were told "look both ways before you cross the street!" as a young child? The message sunk in. We all know way more about Coca-Cola and McDonalds than matters, but we sure do remember who they are. And like these examples of repetitive message delivery your job in SEM is to drive points home over and over again.

Whatever you feel about that message, the point is clear, isn't it? Tell a story. Tell it again. Then look for new ways to tell the story and new places to tell it in. Wash, Rinse, Repeat. Which, naturally, brings us to budget.

We've seen businesses "do search engine marketing" once, and then stop. And it works! But just like with Yellow Pages advertising, the SEM work you do has a limited shelf life. Buy a Yellow Pages advertisement just once and it will become less useful when next year's version of the book comes out and progressively less useful over time as people replace the book that has your listing in it with a newer copy that has no such listing. And when was the last time you looked in a Yellow Pages, anyway?

The Internet has all but replaced that way of looking for people to do work for you, and a new version of the Internet "comes out" every single day. Churchill was right about that continuous effort thing, don't you think?

Lacking continuous effort, you'll ride an SEM campaign up the search engine rankings, sink soon thereafter, and then then sink even further until you start your SEM efforts again. And each time you allow a sink cycle you make it a little harder to climb back up.

Budget for Adwords, Pay Per Click, Sponsored Links, Off-page links, Blogging, and on-page optimization, implement them all, and stay on top of them. Or . . . you guessed it . . . let us take care of the whole thing for you.

-Crockett Dunn
Owner CDLLC

-Jeff Yablon
Chief Operating Office, CDLLC
President
Answer Guy Central Business Support Services

Posted via web from crockettdunn's posterous

"To Improve is to Change; To Be Perfect is to Change Often," or, Winston Churchill and Web Content

If you enjoyed our riffing on Confucius, you'll love what's next. Ladies and Gentlemen, Sir Winston Churchill will now address your needs for Search Engine Marketing!

Amazed that a man whose heyday was several decades before there was an Internet has so much to say on the topic? This will take four installments:

1. "To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often."
2. "Continuous effort - not strength or intelligence - is the key to unlocking our potential. "
3. "We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give."
4. "However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results."

Today, #1:

Anyone in business—especially the INTERNET business—over the past 15 or 20 years knows that the only real constant in business is that there is no constant; you must count on change being a continuous state of being. Agility in coping with that change is important for all businesses on many levels. In search engine marketing terms that level is your web content.

Search engines like you more the more often your content changes.

Search Engine Marketing is the art/science of getting your content ranked highly, in the places you need it to stand out. While there are many other factors involved (and we take them all into account) in getting you top ranking in Google and other search engines the single most important one is fresh content. An unchanging, static, stale website will torpedo your efforts. And unlike the unreliable German U-Boat torpedoes Churchill so easily countered, this one will sink you fast.

Truly, short of a major offense getting you thrown out of the search engine indexes having a stale site is the worst thing you can do for search engine ranking .

While "perfect" is too strong a word to associate with a single factor of change, I can say with confidence that CDLLC can and will get you a perfect (#1) listing in the search engine(s) of your choice. But it starts with content.

Bottom line—publish, publish much, and publish often. This is the easiest, most common sense thing you can do for your search engine ranking. We can even help you create content if you aren't sure where to start.

And then, we'll take care of the rest. Churchill may not have been willing to forecast the upcoming actions of Russia, but we can forecast better search engine rankings—and make them happen.

-Crockett Dunn
Owner CDLLC

-Jeff Yablon
Chief Operating Office, CDLLC
President
Answer Guy Central Business Support Services

Posted via web from crockettdunn's posterous

"Never trouble another for what you can do yourself." -Thomas Jefferson and Web Design

In his letter to Thomas Jefferson Smith in 1825, Thomas Jefferson included the following two items in his Decalogue of Canons for Observation in Practical Life:

• "Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today."
• "Never trouble another for what you can do yourself."

Just as with our friend Confucius, TJ's wisdom applies to your business web presence.

In web context the translation is this: Eliminate the bottlenecks that slow down and reduce efficiency in your web content publishing process. i.e. : reduce unneeded expenses of both time and resources.

Everyone is a content contributor—or needs to be. Why send word processor documents to a webmaster for translation to "Internet language,"  when you can handle most of the work yourself in your content management system (CMS) , having authors self publish? Yes, there are times when you might want the kind of relationship with your webmaster where he does certain things for you that you could do yourself.  However, if someone's time is more valuable spent programming and working on databases and web servers than acting as an administrative assistant, shouldn't you strive to work that way?

With CMS, you can often publish web information as easily as you can write it on a word processor. That's the kind of process CDLLC implements, and you should ask us how simple it would be for us to do it for you.

Save time. Increase efficiency. Save money. Make your life and those of the people you work with easier and more satisfying.

Or just keep throwing away money instead; your choice.

-Crockett Dunn
Owner CDLLC

-Jeff Yablon
Chief Operating Office, CDLLC
President
Answer Guy Central Business Support Services

Posted via web from crockettdunn's posterous

CMS is a Beautiful Thing, or Confucianism Part IV

"Good people distinguish things in terms of categories and groups."

In prior Confucianism-inspired posts, we talked about the benefits of using Content Management (CMS) at your website. We've made the case for organizing, ordering, and arranging web pages, so now onto breaking bottlenecks in controlling costs and maintaining efficiency while moving forward with today's standards. With navigation management addressed, here are some other bottlenecks that we eliminate by using a CMS:

1) Without CMS, each time you redesign the website look-and-feel you create a need for extensive programming. This becomes both a people management and a cost issue.
2) Now add the need for multiple contributing editors/authors having to get their content to a "webmaster," and costs explode. Again.
3) Adding functionality, like forms, e-commerce, and online payment? More programming and webmaster skills get added, too. A CMS reduces the costs associated with these—tremendously.

CMS makes life easier by separating/disentangling content editing, copy writing, and navigational elements of your web site, design, and functionality.

1) Design becomes a separate module- a wrapper for the web pages. With CMS you change this design wrapper in one place, and the changes take effect globally throughout every page of the website.
2) As many content editors as you need can login, protect pages, and change just the content they're responsible for without the risk of breaking the design.
3) Applications that "do stuff" are programmed and arranged independently, so modification and re-programming creates no risk to the rest of the website.
4) And while we've already mentioned this, it bears repeating for the cost savings it brings you: changing the order and hierarchy of the navigational links becomes as simple as making a few clicks with a mouse.

Sounds almost like magic, right? With a CMS, the magic comes from putting all your stuff inside a database, grouped and categorized with an eye toward Internet presentation as needed to suit your company's needs relative to customers, vendors, employees, and whomever else stumbles upon it. The pieces are stored separately so they don't get entangled with one another, and "global site elements", like search engine META tags, polls, online payment, and sign-up forms are all grouped separately so changes to them only have to be made once!

And with a database, EVERYTHING is easier to categorize and group. For example, if you set up and write an FAQ section and it grows unwieldy, it's stored in the database so modification of the Q&A is a snap.

CMS is all about simplicity. How much so? Let's take our buddy's words, and summarize them as though he was hosting a radio program, circa 2010:

Confucius, out. (thanks, Ryan Seacrest!)

-Crockett Dunn
Owner CDLLC

-Jeff Yablon
Chief Operating Office, CDLLC
President, Answer Guy Central Business Support Services

Posted via web from crockettdunn's posterous

From Web Pages to Web Sites, or Confuciansim Part III

"Good people order and arrange" Had enough Confucius yet? 'Cause that old dude had the Internet pegged! http://cdllc.blogspot.com/2010/02/from-web-pages-to-web-sites-or.html

Posted via web from crockettdunn's posterous

Planning Your Business Web Presence, or Confucianism Part II

"Study the Past if You Would Divine the Future" - Confucius. http://ping.fm/N3Pqb

Nostalgia

I remember when this was totally cutting edge and like the coolest:

Oddly, this was cool, too:


Then again, this was really cool, too (you know the guy from Pulp Fiction?):