In order to understand the world of marketing, it is perhaps best to get familiar with some of the terminology that is commonly thrown around. One such term (or acronym, rather) is DAGMAR, which stands for Defining Advertising Goals for Measured Advertising Results.
DAGMAR is absolutely critical to any marketing or advertising campaign, because without it, you’d have no real measure of whether said campaign was a success or a failure. DAGMAR is the actual process of developing, defining, and establishing your goals for a particular ad campaign. These goals will vary widely depending on what you wish to achieve with your particular promotion.
Take blog contests, for example. Way back in May, I talked about how contests are a great bang for your buck, because the only money you really need to put forward is the prize. Invest in something relatively inexpensive that is also very appealing to your target audience. Some people give away iPods, other people give away straight cash. Whatever the case, you need to captivate the interest of your audience and get them to enter your contest.
The key to determining whether your contest was a success or not is to first define what is the goal of your contest. Perhaps you want people to blog about your contest, sending several backlinks your way so that you can improve your search engine presence. Perhaps you want to grow your readership, encouraging contestants to subscribe to your RSS feed. Maybe there is a particular affiliate program that you want to take advantage of, and you’ll base your success on the number of conversions. Whatever it is, you need to first define this goal.
And that’s what DAGMAR, or Defining Advertising Goals for Measured Advertising Results, is all about. Remember, these have to be measured results. Put an actual number to your goal rather than simply saying that you want to increase RSS subscriptions. Say that you want to increase RSS subscriptions by 25% or 50%. An actual number will make it clear whether the advertising campaign (a blog contest, in this case) was a success.
Part of growing our BlueFur community means adding new features to our site, cPanel and customer resource center. Over the next few months we will continue to add these features as we ‘Evolve’.
Today we added polls to our blog sidebar as one of the first initiatives towards growing our community and getting input from you. Each week we will post a new poll topic to vote on which can be just updated on the sidebar, updated in a blog post or both for maximum exposure.
This weeks poll is now live below…
Earlier this month, WordPress 2.3 was released, bringing funky features like native tag support. As part of the update, the “incoming links” on the WordPress Dashboard starting getting served by Google Blogsearch rather than Technorati, the service that we’ve all grown accustomed to. Some people applauded this change, because Google Blogsearch has a larger reach and can recognize incoming links from sites other than blogs. Traditionalists preferred Technorati and despised the switch.
Well, in case you missed it, Matt from MattsBlog.ca came up with a custom WordPress plug-in that lets you go back to the Technorati way. The appropriately named Technorati Incoming Links plug-in is a breeze to install. All you have to do is download the zip file, extract it, and place the technorati-incoming-links.php file inside your blog’s plug-in folder (typically wp-content/plugins). Once uploaded, you go to the Plugins section of your WordPress dashboard and activate the Technorati Incoming Links plug-in.
Speaking for myself, I prefer Technorati incoming links over Google Blogsearch, simply because the latter also serves up internal links. Your incoming links list gets cluttered with links that you have given to yourself, effectively shrinking the usefulness of the Incoming Links section to start with. After all, the reason why it’s there is so that you know who’s linking to you and where your traffic is coming from.
How do you feel about Technorati vs. Google Blogsearch? Do you have a preference?
Early last month, I talked about the value of a college education and how people who graduated from university are much more likely, on average, to earn more than their non-graduate counterparts. That’s a general trend, but there are certain exceptions to that rule. Perhaps the two best known exceptions are none other than Bill Gates of Microsoft and Steve Jobs of Apple Computer.
Bill Gates always did well in school with a particular knack for mathematics. Fortunately or unfortunately, he had very little interest in formal schooling, instead finding himself in front of a computer for hours on end, working on his hobby and other interests. He got accepted into the very elite Harvard University, starting out with a pursuit as a pre-law student. Again, he found himself disinterested in classes and eventually dropped out of Harvard, founding Microsoft with Paul Allen in 1975.
Steve Jobs had a more modest route to fame, but the path was much the same. Instead of attending an Ivy League school, Jobs enrolled in Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Whereas Gates managed to stay in school for a period of time, Steve Jobs dropped out of Reed College after just one semester! He continued to audit courses there, but he was not formally enrolled. He went on to form Apple Computer with Steve Wozniak in 1976, just one year after Microsoft was created.
In some ways, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates can both be thought of as quitters. They dropped out of school when they realized that there were greener (in many senses of the word) pastures elsewhere. There’s a saying that winners never quit and quitters never win. I think that we can all agree that Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are pretty big winners, even though they may have “quit” school.
Â
I have been working on our branding the last few weeks and working with our customers to find our Law of the Word and our Law of Credentials in the hosting industry. I did several customer brainstorming sessions as to what they think our credentials, word and niche in the industry should be.
There was a common conclusion coming for all of these sessions that we are fostering a community with our blog and unlike other hosts that we encourage involvement in our evolution by customers.
With that said I think that is where we can fit in. We can be the first Community Evolved Hosting company. Our word being community, our credentials being ‘The Leader in Community Evolved Hosting’.
What do you think?
I will be posting some follow up ideas on how BlueFur can continue to foster that community and make it easier to evolve with our communities input.
Today we upgraded our