Have you ever gone to a sports game or the beach, but not had a way to bring a drink with you? Never fear, just pick up some Reef Dram sandals. Doesn’t make sense to you yet? The sandals have a built-in flask that can fit 3 ounces (or 3 shots) of whatever liquid your heart desires.

The sandals feature a canteen with a screw that can be opened up using an included key, a mini-funnel, and measuring bar to see how much liquid you have left. You can pick a pair of these up for about $45.

These are in succession to the Fanning’s which feature a bottle opener on the bottom of the sandals. My roommate has these, and loves them.

This is a great example of a company thinking outside of the box. While the products aren’t the most intuitive thing in the world, it’s enough to create a buzz and generate a ton of sales that otherwise would not have had any attention.

I was reading a post over at ProBlogger in regards to the debate between disabling comments or not on low traffic blogs. Should sites with low traffic disable their comments? There are two main arguments for each side.

Enable

You don’t want to promote the fact that your blog has low traffic. People will see “0 comments” on a lot of posts and think just this. This negative affect could keep people from coming back or from posting comments at all. It’s a known fact that discussion will likely cause more discussion.

Disable

If you disable comments you are obviously losing the ability for users to interact with you and readers through the site, plus you are losing valuable content. The main goal is to turn somebody who is just reading a post on your site into a dedicated reader, and comments definitely help do that.

I believe that there are two options to choose from in terms of the best thing to do:

1) You can turn your comments off completely until you are at the point where you are generating 100-200 unique visitors/day. By the time you are consistently generating this amount of traffic, it should be enough that people will naturally make comments in key posts.

2) This option ties into option 1, as you should do this as well. Rather than your comments link saying something like “0 comments” or “No comments”, change it to “Post a comment” when there are no comments. This method doesn’t advertise the fact that nobody has commented on your post. Another option (the route I chose) is to choose something like “Be the first to comment” which does advertise that you have no comments, but also entices your readers to be the first to add their thoughts.

How Do I Change The Text?

This method works for Wordpress.  Simply go to your theme editor, and edit your main index template.  Depending on the theme that you are using, there may be some variations…so feel free to post comments with questions, and I can help you out.  Search for the word comments, and you should be able to find the line of code that displays the output.  I changed mine to this:

<?php comments_popup_link(’Be the first to comment &#187;‘, ‘1 Comment &#187;’, ‘% Comments &#187;’); ?>

The first line there between the ‘   ‘ is what Wordpress will output when there are 0 comments.  Simply editing that text can make a powerful change on your blog.

Update: Part 2 has been posted where I look at companies that start with H-O. Part 3 has also been posted where I look at companies that start with P-Z. I have also compiled a best of the best list.

I spent the time to look through 414 websites of publicly traded companies in the technology sector starting with the letters A-G, and chose the 45 best designs. This is part 1 of 5, covering each range of letters, and then I plan on having the best of all designs to come up with a final list of best corporate designs in the tech sector. These companies obviously all have money and a budget to make a killer site, lets see what can be done. More site after the jump:

3COM

Activision

Actuate

Adobe

Akamai

Aladdin

Alcatel-Lucent

Apple

Applied Innovation Inc.

Continue Reading »

There are some very interesting rumors going around in the ad serving technology market today. DoubleClick, which is the ad server for huge sites such as Yahoo! and AOL, may be bought out by Microsoft…or even Google.

The company was purchased by a private-equity firm for $1.2 billion, but it looks like they are interesting in selling the company, or even creating an IPO for an estimated $2.0 billion. Microsoft is said to be one of the top choices for picking up DoubleClick. What would this mean for competing publishers such as Yahoo! and AOL?

The most interesting part of the news is that there are rumors of Google developing its own ad server that would compete with the likes of DoubleClick’s system. The ad server system would be nothing like AdWords, but it would allow publishers to traffic any kind of ads, regardless of it being from Google or not. The questions to ask is:

• Will it cost money?
• If it’s free, how will Google monetize on it?
  • My guess is that publishers would be required to run at least a certain percentage of Google ad inventory
• Who will the customers be?
  • Is it mean for any site that needs an ad server? Or will it be for corporate companies such as AOL and Yahoo!? Or will it meet both markets?

Whatever happens, the next few months will definitely be interesting in the ad serving world.

We know that one of the most important aspects of running a successful blog is write content consistently. Read my article on the most optimal number of posts per day to learn more. So what’s the best way to come up with new content, and how can you manage that? I’ll explain my techniques in detail.

I get a lot of my ideas from other sites and blogs on my RSS feed. If you don’t already have a list of RSS feeds that you subscribe to, sign up at Google Reader, go to your favorite sites, and start adding their feeds. I’ll get other ideas based on my own experiences, so if I figure out a solution to a constant problem or something cool happens in my life, etc, I’ll normally want to write something about it.

I always want to make sure that I have enough content for every day, so you don’t want to think of 20 things to write about and post them all in one day, just to have nothing other days. When I think of a new topic I want to write about, I’ll go to the write post section of my Wordpress admin, enter a headline and add any notes such as URLs in the body section. Once you click save (make sure not to hit publish or it will go live on your site), it will become a draft. I’ve blurred the contents, but you can see I have a ton of ideas for posts that you will eventually see in the future:

When I feel like writing some content, I will go to the manage page of my Wordpress admin and I can see a list of all of my draft topics. I can simply choose whichever I want to write about, and get to it.

85% of the time I write my content ahead of time, and use the “Post Timestamp” feature to publish the post sometime in the future. For example I’m writing this on March 26th, but I’m planning to have it go live on the blog at 8am on March 28th:

Utilizing these methods will ensure you don’t forget any of your blogging ideas, and will make sure that you have continuous content.

If you have any suggestions for coming up with and managing your blog content, feel free to post your comments.

One of the biggest keys to running a successful blog is being able to write new content on a consistent basis. At the minimum I try to post at least one piece of content per weekday to keep my readers happy. In my opinion the most optimal amount of content per day should be 2-5 posts spread out throughout the day. More than that becomes too much, and less than that is usually not enough to keep readers coming back. Keep in mind this is my personal preference. Blogs that post news (such as Engadget) should have many more posts per day just because there is way more daily content out there for them to deliver.

When I’m going through my feed reader, I usually skim through the feeds that have a ton of new posts in them (such as Digg, Engadget, etc) because I just don’t have the time to take a long look at everything there. Normally a post will have to peak my interest based on the headline and/or graphic in order to get my attention and give it a good read. Blogs that are updated 1-5 times I typically will click on and pay more attention to just because there isn’t much to sort through.

Lets take a look at some of my favorite blogs out there and see how many posts per day they make on average. I’m going to look at the number of posts made in February:

John Chow - 98 posts = 3.5/day average
TechCrunch - 149 posts = 5.3/day average
ProBlogger - 78 posts = 2.8/day average
HarpzOn - 116 posts (26 days of March) = 4.46/day average

As you can see, these all fall into my range of optimal amounts of posts per day to make a blog truly successful.

How many posts per day does your blog do? What do you feel is the most optimal? Post your comments below and let me know.

This month my blog was the “Blog Of The Month” according to John Chow. John’s blog is popular, he is ranked in the top 200 on Technorati, has almost 4,000 RSS subscribers, and is ranked the 3,537th (as of writing on this) most popular site on Alexa. So what does getting your blog featured as a dedicated post on his site do for you?

There are five major benefits from getting coverage like this:

Traffic

The most obvious benefit is a gain of traffic. Because John and I have similar interests, many of his readers would more than likely be interested in reading some of the content that I write. This brings in very targeted traffic that hopefully becomes sticky. By that I mean I expect to gain a few dedicated readers of my own. While the traffic was not a tremendous amount, I was definitely happy. Here’s a chart that shows the spike as soon as it was posted:

All said and done John’s post brought around 350 unique visitors directly to my site from 3/21-3/24. They also averaged 2.64 pages per visit, so they were definitely reading some of the content. Keep in mind, we’re only talking about people that clicked from JohnChow.com. There was also an influx of traffic from Google Reader and Bloglines (100+ uniques), this was people clicking into my site that were reading his post from their feed readers.

This traffic generated some reader interactivity as well as there were a ton of comments posted, a boost in RSS subscribers, and a few new inbound links. Plus you can’t forget the traffic that will continue to come over time.

RSS Subscribers

My RSS subscribers jumped up from 10-20 subscribers to 30-40 subscribers. I suspect this number will continually get higher as more of his readers discover that they like the content that I offer.

Name Recognition

According to the actual article on John’s site, it has had 1,772 views (views are counted when a reader specifically goes to the article, and not when they see it on the main page) and 50 comments. That’s a lot of people that may not have known who I was, that now do. My blog is new, so maybe some readers didn’t find the content that I have now to be appealing. In the future if they find something they like, they will be more inclined to stick around since there is some recognition involved.

Inbound Links

Many of the new readers have their own blogs, and mentioned something that I wrote in theirs. This brought new traffic, helps with my Google and Technorati rankings. It also introduced me to some new people and blogs I would have never seen or talked to before. This alone is one of the most valuable benefits.

Google “Trust”

When you launch a blog, Google doesn’t trust you right away. You can build that trust up by writing good content, updating frequently, and gaining trust by getting linked on sites that are trusted by Google. Understanding this method helped me get out of Google’s Sandbox in a very short time by writing content that was good enough to get linked on sites like Autoblog, John Chow, ActiveTuning, and more.

How Can You Get Featured On John Chow’s Site?

There are two main ways to get featured on John’s site.

1.) Become the blog of the month. Per John, these are the requirements:

Don’t email me asking if you can be a blog of the month. The answer will be no. Future members to the Blog of the Month will be based on how well you can grab my attention. I am looking for blogs with great content that are updated a lot.

2.) Buy a ReviewMe review. At the time of writing this, it will cost you $300 to get your site/blog/product reviewed by John for a featured post on his blog.

Some of you are aware that I was one of the two people behind SmashMyViper.com. I’ve always been a big fan of those quirky ideas to make a million dollars, and SmashMyViper was definitely one of them. I found an interesting concept (although more than likely not a million dollar idea) called “The Big Brown Box“.

The concept behind this is to collect a big brown box worth of stuff to auction off. The box already has almost $15,000 worth of stuff in it. The coolest tangible product is definitely the Dell XPS Laptop, the rest of the products are all provided by businesses, the biggest being a $10,000 web traffic package. So the way I look at it, it’s interesting to see the kind of stuff that are provided to go into the box, especially if non-businesses start submitting things. For the business, they have the chance of getting mentioned on the blog with a link, so that should provide some promotion back to them. This in turn would generate traffic and allow them to monetize the site.

I realize that Alexa is not the end-all-be-all of traffic, but according to them, the site is not generating much yet…but if it does get some press, it has the chance to get much bigger. From a business perspective, you can provide something now, and if they use it and link to it, it has the possibility of generating some good traffic back. Of course this is all based on the fact that a lot of press is generated. Remember, get in early to reap the most benefits. Advertisers on SmashMyViper.com that started out first got the most bang for their buck. The people that started out promoting AGLOCO first will most likely see the most referrals.

Let me know if you decide to donate anything, I know that I’m thinking about it.

I found an excellent tool provided by Feedburner if your feed is run through them. It’s called FeedFlare, and if you don’t already have it activated, get on it! FeedFlare is the feature on the bottom of each RSS feed post that shows you important links such as “E-mail this * Add A Comment * Digg This, etc”.

I’ve seen it on other blogs before, but I just started to look for how to add myself tonight. Login to your Feedburner admin and click on the optimize tab. On the left you’ll see the FeedFlare option on the menu. Once you click that you’ll see all of the options for the different “FeedFlares” you can have. I added the 4 above for now, as you don’t want to have too much that it overbears the reader. If you don’t see something you want, you can browse the catalog for more, or even develop your own using their API.

Something that takes just a few seconds to add can drastically improve your blog, increase interactivity with your readers, and bring in new traffic.

If you aren’t already a part of the Woot! revolution, then today is your lucky day.

What Is Woot!?

Woot! is a cool concept for an eCommerce store where they sell just one item per day until it sells out.  They normally have really cool deals and some neat products with hilarious descriptions.  The community on the site is very strong and they have a large following.  Minutes after a product is posted you will see tons of comments with helpful links such as prices online, reviews, opinions, and more.

The most notorious product they sell is known as the “BOC” aka “bag of crap”.  These literally sell out completely in a matter of seconds after going live.  The bag of crap is essentially $8 shipped (They are $1 each, but it is highly recommended you purchase the maximum quantity of 3, and $5 to ship).  Everything on Woot! is $5 for shipping, even if it’s a 60″ plasma TV.  The bag of crap will have very random products in it, but some select lucky people can end up getting things like a 60″ TV or an expensive MP3 player.  It’s always funny to see people post pictures of what they got in their BOC’s.

What Is A Woot! Off?

A Woot! Off is a day where Woot! decides to sell a bunch of products one after another.  As soon as something sells out, a new product pops up.  Normally they will throw in a random BOC in there, so be on the lookout.

Best Way To Track Woot!’s

The best way to watch the Woot! is to use the WootAgent.  The WootAgent is a simple application that runs in your taskbar and will show a popup notification when a new product comes up.  Especially for days like today, you don’t have to keep refreshing the site to see when the next product is up…so when something good comes on, you have the opportunity to buy right away.

Good Luck!

Good luck on the Woot! Off today, and let me know if you end up getting anything.  I’ve come very close to getting the rare BOC once to the point where I had my credit card info in, but by the time I finalized my order they were gone.  I will be on the lookout for another one today!