Consider this example for ColdFusion on Wheels. There is a main feed with all site updates:
http://feeds.cfwheels.org/cfwheels

When I burned that feed, I signed up for “cfwheels” as my feed URL.

But if you want to subscribe to the blog only, you can subscribe to this feed:
http://feeds.cfwheels.org/cfwheels/blog

I signed up for “cfwheels/blog” as my feed URL in that case.

And here is the screencasts feed:
http://feeds.cfwheels.org/cfwheels/screencasts

Et cetera, et cetera.

It’s a very nice way to show the user what they’re subscribing to and where the URL resides in the information space.

Technorati Tags: ccm, chris peters, clear crystal media, design, feedburner, glass case, google, information architecture, internet marketing, mybrand, url, urls, usability

This series has led to quite a few compliments, and people are watching and subscribing to the videos on our site, on YouTube, and on Vimeo. I think that limiting the length to around 5 minutes has helped keep viewers engaged. 5 minutes only requires viewers to digest one concept at a time, and it isn’t a huge commitment on their part.

Camtasia for Mac has been a wonderful piece of software for getting these up so easily. (There’s a Windows version too.) My first screencast was challenging, but it didn’t require too much effort to get up to speed with how the software works.

Technorati Tags: ccm, cfwheels, chris peters, clear crystal media, coldfusion, coldfusion on wheels, glass case, internet marketing, marketing, screencast, screencasts, Social Media, video, videos, vimeo, web 2.0, youtube

The analysts call it an online marketing suite. And once analysts put a name on something like they did with this 2 years ago, you can bet that a lot of companies are building a solution.

Here’s the problem: these solutions are going to be expensive. And because the word “enterprise” will more than likely be attached, these solutions will not be user friendly. They will be clunky, unintuitive, and slow. Mark my words. Try out some of the stuff that’s out there today like Omniture (if you have tens of thousands of dollars in your budget to implement them, that is).

Another problem. These suites will need to have a wide range of features:

• Web analytics/conversion management
• Search keyword management
• Content collaboration/integration/management
• User experience management
• Dashboards and automated reports
• Campaign management
• Data mining flexibility
• E-commerce integration/management
• Social media management
• CRM integration/management

Note that the word management indicates the need for measurable results. Not just pretty charts to look at and go “Hmm…”

The list of features could go on from there. And the list will grow as the Facebooks, Twitters, and Googles create additional channels in the online marketing landscape.

The root of the problem is that online marketing suite providers will bolt on additional features, not worrying much about the user experience or how marketers need to think and work to get their jobs done. And they will continue to make it all so complex that you need to hire professional services just to keep it working. Boooooo.

Until something affordable and effective emerges, internet marketing consultants will continue to have it sweet. Inefficient, fragmented tools will allow for more billable hours and will introduce a greater cost of entry to those who want to become experts. And this will become a problem as businesses will demand more accountability and measurable results for less money.

It’s a great time to be one of the few that understand how it all works. The days are numbered for the fakes who pretend that they know what they’re doing, though I must admit that there will still be quite a few days left for them.

The revolution will be data driven. That’s for sure. And it will require opinionated tools that get the job done without trying to cater to petty feature requests.

Technorati Tags: Analytics, ccm, chris peters, clear crystal media, glass case, internet marketing, internet marketing suite, marketing, online marketing, online marketing suite, Technology, web analytics

Have you ever noticed that some magically have pictures next to them, and some are disinterested looking block face guys?

These images are called Gravatars (Globally Recognized Avatars). I know, super nerdy. Why didn’t they just name them Galactic Klinginoids and just call it a day?

The gist of Gravatars:

• You upload a square image of yourself (or whatever) at gravatar.com.
• You associate the image with an email address.
• The picture that you uploaded shows whenever you enter that email address in a blog comment form.

Sure, your Gravatar won’t show up on websites that don’t support them. But it’s a nice way to have a photo that you control appear next to your name with little effort on the sites that do support it.

Here’s what my Gravatar looks like on most blogs:

It’s best to choose a photo that will look good as a square like the one above. You’ll be forced to select a square section of the image after you upload it.

As you can see in my example above, I chose to chop off the top of my head. (It looked weird from the top of my head to the bottom of my lips or centered.) That’s probably how a head shot will look best for you as well. Be sure to play around with it a little and see what looks best.

For more info, check out the video that they have posted on the Gravatar home page:

Technorati Tags: Blogging, Branding, ccm, chris peters, clear crystal media, commenting, glass case, gravatar, internet marketing, Social Media, wordpress

Consider these examples:

• With Google Analytics, you get a great product in exchange for telling Google about your site’s traffic patterns.
• Entering your information into Facebook allows for their advertisers to better target their ads to your preferences.
• Companies offering free SEO keyword research tools more than likely collect your research terms for use in competitive intelligence for other customers.

I believe that there are are a couple lessons to be learned here. It’s been said already, but I feel that we sometimes need to be reminded:

• Your business can offer free services online in exchange for information. What would be valuable marketing information for you to collect that is often hard to get to?
• We all need to be careful about what we share on others’ websites. How do you feel about Google Toolbar phoning home and collecting information about you?

Technorati Tags: business, ccm, chris peters, clear crystal media, glass case, google, internet marketing, marketing, privacy

I am a fan of FeedBurner. But URLs are permanent.

What happens when you have visitors subscribe to a standard feeds.feedburner.com URL?

• People subscribe to a URL owned by Google.
• If you want to discontinue the use of FeedBurner, you’ll lose those people because you don’t own the feedburner.com domain.

FeedBurner was really cool to offer their MyBrand service. Basically, MyBrand allows you to point people to your domain name instead of theirs. For example, when you subscribe to my feed, you’re subscribing to feeds.clearcrystalmedia.com. But under the hood, the feed is powered by FeedBurner.

This is awesome because if I ever wish to discontinue using FeedBurner, or if they ever discontinue their service, I can still host my own feed at feeds.clearcrystalmedia.com/glass-case. Basically, I won’t lose anyone in the process.

This requires a little bit of technical wizardry. If your web guy or hosting company cannot handle it, then you may want to consider switching web guys and/or hosting companies.

Technorati Tags: Blogging, ccm, chris peters, clear crystal media, feedburner, glass case, google, mybrand, rss

Video

Video on your website and landing pages causes conversion rates to soar. I’ve seen it happen time and time again. OK, so it has to be at least a decent video, but it really does help. And people are gobbling up video on YouTube at astronomical rates.

Record voice narratives and screencasts using software like Camtasia, Captivate, or Jing (if you’re on Mac).

Record yourself on your webcam while talking about a topic that your audience would be interested in. It can just be 3-5 minutes. Ramit Sethi of I Will Teach You to Be Rich demonstrates how effective you can be with a webcam and small whiteboard in a simple video about automating your finances.

Learn how to be a good marketer via video because this is more highly effective than you can imagine. And post everything to YouTube where more people will find it!

Audio

Maybe not a full-blown podcast, but you can come up with some good stuff using the poor-man’s alternative to video. A good free choice for souped-up editing is called Audacity.

Articles

I think that article-writing is different than blogging. In fact, what I’m doing right now should probably be an article and not a blog post. Do as I say, not as I do. I really need to fix this!

You (and I) should probably be writing more articles for other websites as well.

Presentations

The opportunity to give presentations online is becoming more common. Some bigger companies host speakers via webcast conferencing software like WebEx and Acrobat Connect (amongst others). And there’s always the old-fashioned way: doing them in person at local networking events.

If you don’t have an audience, post some captivating PowerPoint slides on SlideShare. This presentation on SlideShare about The Brand Gap is one of the best I’ve seen on there.

Be creative. Use plenty of imagery.

Blogging

Yup, a good way to reach out if you can stay consistent. WordPress is by far the best platform for doing this.

Document Sharing

Kind of like articles and blogging. But sometimes you can make cool documents, spreadsheets, and flowcharts that people would find interesting. Like all of this stuff, a little creativity can go a long way.

Aaron Wall did a great flowchart about SEO a while ago.

You can also share your documents on Scribd. Their documents sometimes get you some extra exposure in Google and Yahoo!.

The hard part: commitment

For some reason, I’m really fired up about this tonight. I probably won’t be as fired up in a couple days. I should be producing and planning more than one social artifact when I’m in an over-caffeinated mood like this. I’ll probably stay up late tonight and work on it some.

I hope that you’ll see more from me, and I hope to make announcements of a variety of social artifacts that I produce and how you can get your hands on them. I’m really going to try to lead by example here.

Technorati Tags: aaron wall, adobe, adobe captivate, article marketing, Blogging, camtasia, captivate, ccm, chris peters, clear crystal media, glass case, i will teach you to be rich, internet marketing, internet video, iwtytbr, marketing, online marketing, podcasting, presentations, ramit sethi, scribd, seo book, video, youtube

I solved this problem with a web browser called Flock. Built on top of Firefox (arguably the best browser), Flock adds different sidebars and integrates with social websites like Facebook, MySpace, Delicious, WordPress, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, and many others. This makes it an excellent choice for doing tasks that are may not exactly be defined as “work.” I call it my screw-around browser.

Probably the most useful and simple features in Flock is the People Sidebar. This allows for you to see status updates from your friends in a stream in a sidebar. And it mixes all of the different networks into one stream, which can be pretty neat. See Flickr, Twitter, and Facebook status updates all in one stream.

So now I can open Firefox or Internet Explorer around clients and rest assured that they will not learn about my exploits as a single man with a Facebook addiction. And when I open anything other than Flock, I am less tempted to indulge in those distractions. Win-win.

Technorati Tags: browser, browsers, ccm, chris peters, clear crystal media, flock, glass case, personal, Social Media, web, web browser, web browsers

The problem GTD solves

If you’re anything like me, you deal with a lot of intangible things all day. You manage information. You may have heard this called “knowledge work.” And now that email is such a widely-used medium of communication, it’s easy for people to pile work on you. You end up with more work than you can possibly handle.

In my early 20s, I was able to remember everything that I had on my plate. But as I’ve gotten older and have a ton more responsibility in my career, I just can’t keep it all in my head without forgetting about something.

GTD is the answer to this problem. It’s a system for organizing all of the information and to-dos that we must peddle around from day to day. It gets everything out of our heads and onto paper and/or our PDAs and computers. And it encourages to do this all in a fashion that works the way that we work. That way we can live in the present instead of worrying about what we should have done in the past and what we must do in the future.

My experience with GTD

I’ve implemented GTD in phases up to this point. It’s taken me about 3 weeks to see a return on all of the work that it’s taken to get organized and keep that system maintained. It’s a lot of work to manage information. But boy has it payed off.

Who it’s for

This is one of those books where I could think of at least 5 people in my life that it would help as I read it. So that’s why I’m telling you about it, reader.

If you’re finding yourself feeling buried and lost at times, I recommend investing some time to read this book. I’ve always had a sense that I should be staying organized like this, and I’m glad that I finally have a system that is realistic.

Technorati Tags: book, book review, book reviews, books, business, ccm, chris peters, clear crystal media, david allen, getting things done, glass case, gtd, organization, productivity

Why not go to Google Alerts and set up some alerts for your name and business name? Google will email you every time it finds a page on the Web talking about you or your business.

Bonus tip: link alerts

Also set up link alerts for your website. So if I wanted an alert for every time Google finds a link to this website, I’d enter this as an alert:

link:www.clearcrystalmedia.com

Technorati Tags: alerts, ccm, chris peters, clear crystal media, glass case, google, google alerts, reputation, reputation monitoring