Well, it’s that time of year again, and yes, this is the obligatory “Happy Thanksgiving” post. But in all seriousness, as we enter the holiday season, it’s important to reflect on the past year and all the things you have to be thankful for. Quite frankly, it’s something you should do on a regular basis, but let’s face it, most of us only worry about it from November to January.

Tis the Season for Thanksgiving…

I’d love it if the team and our readers could take some time and just give a shout out about what they’re thankful about. At the risk of sounding like a kiss ass, I am certainly thankful to be in the position I am here at ProspectMX. I work with some great people, I’m constantly learning new things… and I’ve got seniority I can lord over other people… kidding, kidding (sort of).

For real though, the internet marketing field is not only an exciting one, but incredible in it’s flexibility and need for creative thinking. Where else can you go out for a few drinks with your coworkers and wind up with tons ideas? Some are brilliant, some are hilarious, some are ridiculous, but all useful. Plus, once executed, those ideas can result in thousands of dollars in revenues from traffic, links, media notice, etc.

It’s a remarkable industry, and it’s nice to be a part of something that continues to grow and evolve.

Thanksgiving Fun Facts

I’m a sucker for fun or little known facts that have no practical use… so, here are some I found to add to my repertoire (and which are guaranteed to make you feel fat!):

• The average person consumes over 4,500 calories on Thanksgiving Day. (And we wonder why Americans are overwhelmingly overweight…)
• Turkeys can drown if they look up while it’s raining.
• American eat over 530 million pounds of Turkey on Thanksgiving, while more than 45 million turkeys are cooked and eaten on that day.
• Ripe cranberries of good quality will always bounce. (Um, you may want to wash before eating if you experiment with this…)
• Domesticated turkeys can’t fly, but wild turkeys can fly over 55mph for short distances.
• Turkeys can have heart attacks. Apparently when the Air Force conducted test runs and broke the sound barrier, fields of turkeys would drop dead.

Dang… I feel really, really bad for turkeys all of a sudden. But luckily not quite bad enough to go vegetarian this year. I can’t vouch for the validity of some of those facts… credit goes to the 1-800 Flowers website.

Have a blessed Thanksgiving everyone!

I’ve been reading a lot of bloggers lately hyping up this new link building service called Tynt. According to a quick Google Blog Search, 1,083 mentions of Tynt have come up over the last 7 days. It is also getting enough buzz across the innerwebs that a client was savvy enough to email me about it this morning.

Allegedly, Tynt is a cool service for bloggers and other creators of written web content. Tynt provides a piece of Javascript that creates a backlink to your blog post or site when your content is copied and pasted by a third party into a content editor.

Below is an example of Tynt at work. Thanks to Patrick Altoft of Branded3 for noticing that the Daily Mail in the UK uses it, and blogging about it on BlogStorm. He wrote a great post that helped alert me to Tynt. His post was also so good that I impulsively scrolled my mouse over his text, hit “CTRL + C” on my keyboard, and hit “CTRL + V” on this blog post.

Tynt At Work

Tynt Insight monitors copy and paste behavior on billions of page loads per month across hundreds of thousands of web sites . Our data shows that up to 6% of page loads results in a user copying content! On a site that has 20 million page views per month – cont

Source: Add links when people cut and paste your content with Tynt

My Reaction To Tynt

Wait a second… where’s the link?!?!

When Tynt works its magic, the title of Patrick’s blog post on BlogStorm (Add links when people cut and paste your content with Tynt) should have been hyperlinked directly to his post. After all, I directly copied and pasted his content into my Wordpress editor – no Jedi mind tricks here.

So… where’s the link?

The Problem With Tynt

Turns out Tynt’s Javascript code inserts the link to your blog post the second someone copies and pastes your information into a WYSIWYG text editor.

In contrast, I use an HTML editor to create my blog posts, rendering Tynt’s magic useless. Also, because of the way Tynt’s script works, their attributions are very easy to remove. A novice web plagiarizer can easily take them out of a post once they have copied and pasted your content.

Tynt is promoted as a “provider of SEO benefits by generating more links back to your content that are search engine visible.” Read more: http://www.tynt.com/#ixzz0XnNAbeTL

See – even when HTTP code is used for link placement, it is still ineffective.

Is Tynt worth adding to your site to be an assistant to your link building efforts? Sure. But will it actually produce a quantity of links for you? No.

I get that bloggers and news sites are tired of having sites steal their content, and I 100% agree with your gripes. As an alternative to using Tynt for building links when your content is stolen, I would personally recommend Wordpress users check out Joost de Valk’s RSS Footer Plugin.

After reading over Michael Gray’s testing with this plugin, the RSS Footer Plugin seems much more effective at putting content bandits to work for your link building efforts than Tynt.

As a internet marketing company, it’s our main goal to help companies rank their websites higher in the SERPs.  That’s what we’re good at and that’s what we do.  But it’s my job as a designer to make the pages look good; an equally important proposition.  A well designed page gives your company and your product more credibility.  If your website is ranking high and features a great product yet looks like it was made in the late 90s by a neighborhood kid, chances are todays web consumer won’t be thrilled.

So with that in mind, and this being my first blog post in the holiday season, I have decided to share with all the readers of this blog some helpful tools and tricks to make your site look better.

1) Color scheme.  This is one of the most important things to focus on for the design of your site.  Granted, many sites are colored based on the corporate color scheme, but there are always ways to to spruce it up with complementary and secondary colors.  My go to tool for finding color schemes is the fantastic Color Scheme Designer by Petr Stanicek.  This is a great tool where you can enter a color hex code and automatically generate a color scheme.  Another great tool is Adobe Kuler, a newish tool that I feel I have yet to even scratch the surface of.

2) Standards.  If web 2.0 was centered around rounded corners and shiny buttons (I’m sort of kidding), then web 3.0 will surely be about standards.  It’s no longer only important that your page looks good, it has to be coded correctly as well.  And this isn’t just to satisfy people that care about code.  Properly coded web pages save bandwidth, function (for the most part) well in multiple browsers, and are easier to have function in mobile browsers.  The best resource for standards web design and development is A List Apart by Jeffrey Zeldman.  His new edition of “Designing with Web Standards” was released a few weeks ago and is an extremely helpful book.

3) Firebug. Want to see what that form would look like just a smmmmidge to the right? Want to know why that image is overlapping your text.  Firebug is the thing to get!  Firebug is a free plug in for Firefox (you are using firefox aren’t you?) and allows you to edit elements of your css code in real time without actually changing any of the code.  If you don’t have it…get it! A necessary plug in.

4) Fonts. As anyone who has developed websites will tell you, the variety of fonts you can choose from on the web is very limited.  Do you want Arial or Georgia?  Yeah.  That was a problem I have run into for a long time and have finally found a solution.  It’s called “Cufon” and allows you to upload a font that is then converted to a javascript file and is placed in the header of your website.  Then it replaces text in various css tags to be displayed in that font.  It is very cool and does not change your css coding of words inside tags.  You can check it out here… http://cufon.shoqolate.com/generate/.

Well there are some little tips and tricks to use to spruce up your website.  I hope you found them useful and your website has a happy holiday season.  If you have any suggestions or questions, the comment area below is a good place to put them.

Most projects fail. According to the Standish Group, only 32% of all projects succeed, which is defined as being delivered on time, on budget, with the required features and functions. Those are pretty dismal figures and don’t bode well for customers and project sponsors who are investing in projects.

There are a number of things that project managers and teams can do to try to improve performance. But what if you’re someone who is working with an internet marketing company? Do you, as a client, have a role to play in helping to increase the chances of your project succeeding?

I believe you have a significant and important role. So… how can you help your internet marketing project team help you?

One of the most important things you can do is understand some basic project management concepts and adjust your expectations in accordance with those concepts. I don’t want to get into the nitty gritty of project management here, but I believe it is necessary to give an overview of a basic project management concept, the theory of constraints, and how it applies to managing internet marketing projects.

The Triple Constraints Concept (aka the “Theory of Constraints”)

All projects have three core components: scope (the work to be completed), cost, and time to accomplish the work. For a defined amount of work, we can reasonably say it will take a certain amount of time, given a certain level of resources.

The challenge is to keep the triangle in balance. Say, for example, you would like to include additional items into your project – perhaps a nice feature for your website, a tweak to the design, etc. These projects increase the scope. Therefore, an adjustment to the cost and/or time is required. If cost will be higher, then the time required to complete the project will be longer.

If you want to move the deadline forward so that the project is done sooner, then scope or cost will also need to be adjusted to reflect the changed time component of the triangle. Scope can be reduced in order to get done sooner and/or we could increase the cost so that we can acquire more resources to apply against the project in order to get done sooner.

I believe that simply understanding the triple constraints will help you communicate more effectively with the project manager of your internet marketing campaign and the team working on the project. It will also enable you to have more realistic expectations about the scope, cost, and time components of your project.