My company has a lot of blogs for the various businesses that I’m starting - 52 to be exact. Most of them are run on Wordpress, which I really like, one is run on an old install of TypePad (which is clunky, but might be because I need to update), and one is run on Tumblr.

I love Tumblr. I love the user interface, the way that you can post quick snippets of things. Quotes, pictures, text, links…it is fun to use. And the templates are awesome. The Cara Austin blog is on Tumblr, and it’s a delight to update every day.

But there is a fundamental problem with Tumblr that I wasn’t aware of before I started using it - the search engines don’t seem to like it. In the two months since I have been posting (every weekday starting March 13, 123 posts total), the blog has only received 17 visitors from Google. Every one of those visits, except one, had the term “Cara Austin blog” or “Cara Austin Tumblr” as the search term.

This is a major problem for a commercial blog. I have a personal Tumblr that I use for my own things, notes, things I want to remember - and I don’t care if no one ever comes to that site. But for Cara Austin, a musician who needs to get her name out there and needs to sell albums, this is a big issue.

I didn’t know this about Tumblr. I didn’t know that the pages wouldn’t be indexed well (or show up high) on Google. I knew that Tumblr doesn’t have comments. And I knew that Tumblr didn’t have a search engine built in. These things I decided to live with.

But I didn’t know that Tumblr had a search engine optimization (SEO) problem.

I could no longer ignore the fact after I launched another new blog on Wordpress on April 23, put up a few posts, and that blog starting receiving more traffic, from a wider variety of search terms, in a much shorter time period.

Here’s a little chart to illustrate:

And so I’m leaving Tumblr. I’m leaving with a tear in my eye, but I’m leaving nonetheless.

Photo by Jaye_Elle

I might be the last person to know this, but Tuesday is the most productive day of the week. I was alerted to this fact by this blog post, which pointed to some research by Robert Half International. But then when I went to dig in deeper, Tuesday-is-the-most-productive-day-ever was all over the Internet. 

This article says that in 2002, 1998 &1987 the data showed the same thing - Tuesday is the most productive day of the week at work.

Here’s a piece from 2002 talking about how Tuesday is the best day to get work done.

And then there’s this 1994 book: Office Biology or Why Tuesday Is Your Most Productive Day and Other Relevant Facts for Survival in the Workplace. There is a whole book about how Tuesdays are so productive. How could I have missed this incredibly important fact for all these years?

I have to admit, I was a bit skeptical at first. I wasn’t really sure that Tuesday was my go-to day of productivity. Then I was reading a post by Steve Rubel on his Micro Persuasion blog about becoming an expert, and in the post, Rubel included a chart of his Google Reader reading habits. And then it dawned on me that I should check my stats in Google Reader to see what they showed.

I typically read RSS feeds from Google Reader at about the same rate every day, with the exception of the weekends. Or so I thought! Here are my trends for the last 30 days:

Those big spikes? Those are Tuesdays!

Here is the day of week chart:

 

And just for fun, here’s the time of day chart. Anyone who knows me well - or ever worked with me - will not be surprised at the early morning lull.

 

So what does all this mean? For me, it means that it’s time to take some deliberate action. If I am more produtive on Tuesdays, I’m going to be proactive about keeping that day as productive as possible. I am not going to schedule meetings on Tuesdays, for example, because meetings break up the flow of my day. And I plan to complete one major, sticky, important-but-difficult or important-but-boring project every Tuesday. I’ll keep you posted on the progress.

What do you think? And what do your *Trends* show? Is Tuesday your go-to day?

*If you use Google Reader, you can find this data by clicking the Trends link at the top of the left-hand navigation in Google Reader.

This post is obviously off the topic of work, but my cousin is very close to giving birth to triplets, and she is blogging from her hospital room! That’s right, she is scheduled to give birth on Wednesday, was admitted into the hospital last night, and she and her husband have been able to post about the pending-birth from their room. Their blog has really been cool for our family, which is spread all over the U.S. and is obviously very interested in how everything is going.

Count this as just one more way that the Internet has completely changed how people are living their lives.

I just published an article for The Industry Standard - The allure of the .com domain name. The article deals with the reasons that the .com top-level domain has become by far the most popular in the world.

To see just how big a lead .com has over its closest competitors, check out this chart. The chart shows the top 6 TLDs and the percentages when compared against each other, not the percetages when compared against the total of all TLDs. (The data comes from here.)

As part of the research for this article, I posted a question to the Targeted Traffic Forum, which I am lucky enough to be a part of. This site, which was founded by Rick Schwartz, has the best domain-related conversations of any that I have ever seen on the Web, and the people who hang out in this forum have really great insight into the domain name industry.

The question I posted was this:

I am working on an article about how the .com extension has maintained the highest value and allure compared to other top-level domains. I’m curious if anyone has interesting thoughts or theories as to why .com is so much more valuable.

I got some really great responses, and I wanted to include some of them here.

Joe Alagna, CentralNic:

95% of the largest brands in the world and their sub-brands advertise .COM domains every day on TV, Billboards, Radio, in Print, and Online. Here are the top 10…

Company | 2007 Ad Spend

proctorandgamble.COM (et. al.) | $3.4 Billion
att.COM | $2.3 Billion
verizon.COM | $2.1 Billion
generalmotors.COM (et. al.) | $2.1 Billion
timewarner.COM | $1.7 Billion
fordmotors.COM (et. al.) | $1.6 Billion
waltdisney.COM (et. al.) | $1.3 Billion
johnsonandjohnson.COM (et. al.) | $1.3 Billion
sprint.COM | $1.3 Billion
newscorp.COM (et. al.) | $1.3 Billion

Total for just the top ten advertisers in the US | $18.6 Billion

There are 18.6 billion reasons that .COM is the most recognized Tld on the planet (benefiting all .COM owners in the world) and this doesn’t include the long tail which is a larger piece.

The biggest advertisers in the world advertise .COM domains. Dot.COM is burned into our collective consciousness every hour of every day. It’s as simple as that.

 

Mark Teaster:

I’ve seen the arguement go around many times - and the explanation that seems to fit best to me was always the “implied” restrictions on .net (As Networks etc ..) and on .org (Non-profit and various Organizations).

 

Derek, Aardwolf MUD:

Somewhat philosophical, but this is similar to how language itself develops. The words we use for most things are arbitrary, if a “rose” had been called an “esor” then, by convention, it becomes a standard. If “Blog” had been called “Webiary” (web diary) we’d all be using that term. It doesn’t matter *what* the term is, but once it is established it takes generations to change it. You can’t just suddenly declare that a “blog” is now known as a “webiary” and everyone falls in line. This is where .COM is, imho.

 

Paul W. Smith Jr., Realty Net Sales.com LLC:

I think also, if you asked the majority you will find their favorite website is a .com. Allot of us visit .com for daily activities. The .com is synonymous with the internet, for instance you can ask people if they have gone to your myspace page and you don’t have to say myspace.com. Also, have you googled it, again, no mention of google.com, just google. Ebay.org, nahhh, that even sounds funny. You can type in google.net and it redirects to the .com. The .com is the internet.

How about your favorite news site, car site, travel site, search site, etc….. Dot com is the gold standard. Name an interest or hobby and I can name a .com website for you but I cannot name a .net or .rw .or .ps, or .tv etc…

Will it change? Possibly but it took a generation to learn, it will take a generation to change.

 

What do you think?

My latest article just went up at The Industry Standard - YouTube, Hulu & Joost: Is there room all three video sites? Go give it a read.

In that article, I cite some statistics from Compete.com and point to the graphic on those stats - here it is:

 

I wasn’t really able to go into all the pros and cons of the various services in that article, but thought I would take a bit of time to break things down a bit more here. First of all, YouTube is kicking all other video services butts, and will continue to do so. It has momentum, users and let’s be honest - it’s fun (and easy) to use. Not to mention that YouTube is owned by Google so there is bound to be continuing innovation with the service, which Robert Scoble claims is in the pipeline as I write this.

Joost is in some trouble. The main issue, as far as I can tell, is that they require users to download their proprietary player in order to watch any Joost videos. I was on the site and wanted to check out an episode of MacGyver (who doesn’t?), but I didn’t because I didn’t want to take the time to download Joost to my computer. This will kill them if they don’t fix it.

I love Hulu so far. I am a sucker for a clean design and easy-to-use interface, and Hulu has both. Plus, there were a bunch of TV shows and clips on the site that I was interested in watching, and with a simple click, I was in business. It was easy to use, the video was high-quality and my experience was great. But Hulu isn’t perfect. For example, it’s not available internationally (there are licensing issues), and it has a limited number of videos available at any given time. Perhaps the weirdest thing about Hulu is that although it features embeddable videos, after a period of time those links break because the videos are pulled off the site. Weird. But even so, I really like Hulu.

In fact, here’s a clip from Hulu for your viewing pleasure (at least it will be pleasant if you like The Office). And this is another user testimony for Hulu - even though I know that this video will no longer be available one day, I like the service so much that I am willing to risk it.

The first time that I became really aware of how unusual it was to be a female start-up founder was a couple of months back. At the time, I was writing a series of articles about entrepreneurship based on the book Founders at Work (you can find links to all the articles here). When I finished the series, I sent a note to Jessica Livingston, the author and co-founder of Y Combinator, to thank her for the book because it had a big impact on me. The following is a small snippet of her reply:

“I am especially pleased that you have started your own thing as a woman. Female founders seem so few and far between.”

I think it might be because I don’t live in Silicon Valley (where I live, start-ups themselves are few and far between) but I hadn’t thought too much about the rarity of a female founder until I read Livingston’s email. Since then, I have thought quite a bit about it. And today, this post - Girls in Tech (Yes, They Exist) - by Sarah Lacy crossed my Google Reader, and I wanted to share it. One of my favorite bits:

“It’s understandable not wanting to be treated as a “token.” But the way I look at it, if I’ve got disadvantages of being a woman in a male-dominated industry, why not take the advantages?”

The topic Sarah’s post is that men and women are different. And it’s true, that might account for there being fewer women founders. But, although it may have been said many times in many ways, I think it’s a mistake to gloss over the issue of having kids. It is possible that I believe this is such a major factor because I read Penelope Trunk’s blog, which, honestly,  scares  the  hell  out  of  me. (Go read some of those posts, you’ll fall in love with her blog, but you’ll be scared, too!)

For every start-up founder, I think, balancing a career with the rest of life is something to think about. But as a woman, the issue rarely leaves my mind. It adds urgency, pressure and stress. And I’m sure for some women, this trifecta of bad emotion is enough to keep them from starting that start-up.

What do you think?

Today I was on the AllThingsD Web site because I wanted to comment on a post from Kara Swisher’s BoomTown blog - Twitter: Where Nobody Knows Your Name.

After I got to the post…

1. I scroll to the end of the comments, discover that I need to login. Click the “sign in here link.”
2. Enter user name, first and last name, email address.
3. Arrive at a page that says “Before you can use your new user name, you must first activate it. Check your inbox and click the link.”
4. Go to my email.
5. Open the message.
6. The message says “To activate your user, please click the link. After you activate, you’ll receive “another email” with your login.” (The quotes around “another email” are theirs, not mine)
7. Click the link in the email.
8. Arrive on a page that says “Your account is now active!” My username and password are on that page. But where is the post that I was originally trying to comment on?
9. Go to the home page and try to get back to the article on which I originally wanted to comment.
10. Scroll to the bottom of the comments section.
11. See that I still need to login. Realize that I didn’t copy my password before and I don’t know what it is.
12. Go to my inbox and open the second message from AllThingsD.
13. Login to the site & post my comment.

This was a tedious process that could be simplified, but I’m not even upset about it. I understand the reasons behind requiring registration on a Website, and I’m not opposed to giving up some data for the privilege of using a site for free. It’s what happened next that really got me thinking.

After I successfully posted my comment, I went to my passwords spreadsheet - the one that I keep on my computer (the one that is a massive security risk) to update it with my latest username and password information. I entered the information for AllThingsD - on line 49.

That’s when I realized that I am up to 49 separate username/ password combinations. And this is just for the sites that I track on my spreadsheet (I don’t have my Gmail account on there, for example, because I for some reason don’t think that I could ever forget my Gmail username/password). I would consider my Web usage to be on the high side, so most people probably have fewer passwords to remember; but I would say that my organizational skills are above average, so most people probably don’t keep a neat spreadsheet of all their user names and passwords in it.

If I’m having trouble managing all my combos, other people must be too.

OpenID, which aims to eliminate the need for multiple user names and passwords across multiple Websites, will hopefully be the answer to the password crisis, but there are still too many problems with OpenID for it to currently be a viable solution. OpenID poses some security risks, many companies that claim to have adopted it haven’t really, and OpenID doesn’t allow companies that use the system to “own” the data of each and every site visitor, which is good for the users but bad for the companies (and what’s bad for the companies, they will hesitate to implement).

But OpenID - or something like it - is desperately needed. By me.

Photo by Erik Charlton

That was my alternate title for the story I just wrote for The Industry Standard - up now on the site: 10 reasons that start-ups absolutely should outsource (almost) everything.

From the titles I’ve chosen, it’s pretty clear that I am a huge fan of outsourcing. Since I am the only full-time employee of my company, I am a big outsourcer. Outsourcing has been a great way for me to scale quickly without breaking the bank. I’ve written about this before, so I won’t rehash everything here, but if you want to read about my experiences with outsourcing, here are some choice selections:

- Globalization, outsourcing and Pure Incubation
- How to hire a Web designer using eLance
- How to prepare for the globalization of your Internet business

And I found out today that all this outsourcing has had a positive impact on my business - for the first time (March 2008), I was in the black.

I am a fan of celebrating the small victories (and believe me, it was small), so I’ll be celebrating this weekend. Have a good one.

Photo by bfick

People ask me all the time where I get the images that I use on my blog. There are two sources - and one tool - that I use to find and manipulate the images.

1. Flickr - This is by far my favorite site for free images because of the wide variety and types of images that are available. The community of users that upload their pictures to Flickr - from all over the world - ensures that there is a vast collection of images of varying quality (some are incredibly good). The trick with using Flickr images, however, is that you need to use images that are governed by the Creative Commons license that fits with what you’re doing.

Here is a list of Flickr’s Creative Common licensing policies. Basically, the “Attribution License” is the most liberal, and allows you to use anyone’s image, manipulate it how you want to, and do most things that you would want to do with it - as long as you give the author of the image credit. My suggestion if you don’t want to get into the intricacies of Creative Commons licensing is to stick with these images. As of today, there are more than 7.5 million images with this license on Flickr, which is certainly a big pool of images to choose from.

Here’s the link to the images with that license.

Just make sure that whatever you do, you give credit back to the photographer. I use “Photo by photographer” with a link to the Flickr page at the bottom of posts. You can do that attribution any way that you want, however. (Hat tip to Skelliewag.org)

Photo by muha…

2. stock.xchg - This site has a database of very good free images that you can use for your blog. Just type in your search, and look to see what you can find. You will have to register to download images, and make sure that you check the “Availability” of each photo. If it says that “standard restrictions apply,” you can use the image. Sometimes, however, the photographer must be notified or approve the use of the image before you post it. So be careful to check this out.

BONUS- A great cheap tool for screenshots and minor editing of photos

If you have Photoshop or another major image editing tool, use that. But if you don’t have a great image editing tool, consider using SnagIt from TechSmith. There is a free 30-day trial and the tool is only $39.95 for a single-user license. I use this tool ALL THE TIME and it’s been really helpful. The learning curve is short and it can handle all the simple editing tasks that I do on my blog.

Do any of you have any other great free image sites that you use? If so, please post them in the comments.

My latest article for The Industry Standard is now up online: Three online video formats for the future. In the article, I take a look at the current state of online video advertising, and make some suggestions about where video advertising might be able to head in order to stay relevant to the medium and to move beyond traditional ad formats.

In the course of researching for the article, I came across a lot of great online video stats. These are in addition to some earlier articles about online video that I posted to this blog. Those articles are here:

Online video stats for September 07
Video is not going to kill the Internet in 2010
Some more YouTube stats

The new data covers a wide variety of information, from online video usage to online video advertising metrics. I just am going to include it here because it’s great information for anyone who is following online video. I’ll also include links to all the sources so that you can explore the information in context.

Online Publishers Association - Online Video Advertising, Content and Consumer Behavior (PDF)

This report contained a great deal of useful data, particularly about audience reception to online video advertising, including the following statistics:

• Over 40% of U.S. online video users watch online video on at least a weekly basis; over 70% at least monthly.
• 80% of U.S. online video users have watched an advertisement in an online video. Of those people, 52% took action after watching that video; 28% looked for more information; 19% clicked a banner ad that accompanied the video; and 16% bought something as a result of the ad.
• 56% prefer that the advertisement is related to the video content.
• Both 15- and 30-second pre-roll ads are effective at lifting brand awareness; 30-second ads outpace 15-second ads in “likeability.”

Advertising.com - Bi-Annual Online Video Study: First-Half 2007 vs. Second-Half 2006 (PDF)
This study bills itself as the “who, what, when and what works of online video consumption and advertising.” The most surprising data from this study is the age range of online video consumers.

• 31% of 18 to 34 year olds watch streaming video; 69% stream video more than once per week
• 69% of consumers 35 and over watch streaming video; 47% stream video more than once per week
• 95% of those surveyed are streaming video at home (vs. 4% at the office and 1% at school); 45% of streaming takes place in the evening.
• 42% of consumers have forwarded a video clip to a friend
• 94% of consumers would prefer to view ads than pay to watch a video
• 63% of consumers would prefer ads that are shorter than television ads
• Consumers are 8% more likely to view a 15-second advertisement through to completion (vs. a 30-second advertisement)
• The 30-second pre-roll slightly outperforms the 15- and 5-second ads when measured in terms of click-through rate

BtoB - Interactive Marketing Guide

comScore - More than 10 billion videos viewed online in the U.S. in February (08)
This is the most recent data that I could find - the highlights:

• U.S. Internet users viewed more than 10 billion videos in February; this is a 3% gain vs. January, and a 66% gain from February 2007
• 135 million U.S. Internet users spent an average of 204 minutes watching online video in February
• 72.8% of U.S. Internet audience viewed an online video
• The average online video duration was 2.7 minutes
• The average online video viewer consumed 75 videos