Gaffney3.com

With my recent speaking gigs across the country on how to start an online initiative and the art of effective marketing,  I’ve been trying to focus my thoughts and writing on online marketing and the specific technologies that support those efforts online.  I’ve always attempted to write about the online industry as a whole, however now with every post will I ask myself the question, “How would one use this information to either introduce or enforce a brand online?”

With my renewed focus, I was glad that I found Wordle:

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.

Wordle view of Gaffney3.com

Although they qualify their site as a toy, its value as a marketing and search engine optimization tool was immediate.

With my recent post on the final release of PHP 4, the word cloud was dominated by the wrong keywords to reflect my goal.  The article was close to my heart and yielded strong traffic, and I’m not advocating that you remain so rigid that you avoid tangents blindly, but it was immediately apparent (especially at thumbnail size seen to the right) that I needed to refocus.

As I speak or consult with different new media companies, I routinely tell them than they need to focus on the width of their site, building it out such that each page owns a single key topic.  Using Wordpress as my platform, I’m forced to do so, as is the nature of blogging.

However when it comes to a site’s home page, it becomes more difficult as all these separate thoughts collide, diluting the overall value.  Some of the questions I’m forced to ask myself as a result — I’m sure some of you have already answered — don’t seem to have a hard and fast rule.

1. How many posts should be visible on my blog’s homepage?
2. Should the posts be listed as refined abstracts, or the post in its entirety?
3. Is my design conducive to effectively communicating that which I would deem my most important thoughts?
4. Are the categories by which I’ve classified my thoughts appropriate?

Obviously, I will be looking at each one of these questions closely as they inherently affect my ability to reach my desired audience of industry analysts, journalists and bloggers.   The desired outcome for me is to be selected as a topic, contributor or interviewee for an article published in the media on the subject of online marketing.

Update:

Check out the Wordle word cloud generated from the text of this post to see if I effectively communicated my thoughts.

Thanks to keith bohanna for the correction to Wordle’s URL as “http://www.wordle.net” not “.com”.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, August 17th, 2008 at 9:56 am and is filed under Blogging, Design, Marketing, Search, Tagging, Web / Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.