When I first joined the team at Dynamic Edge, and Bruce told me that I’d be starting up the company’s first ever blog, I was a little (ok, a LOT) nervous. Aside from making keen observations about the quirkiness of the world around me and venting general complaints, I’d never written a blog about anything at all… let alone a company blog that was supposed to entertain and inform readers!

So, why a blog? Had I missed something? Wasn’t a news page good enough?

Not to be confused with your typical social networking blog sites, like LiveJournal, Facebook, Myspace, Xanga, et. al, company blogs serve a much higher purpose. These days, more and more companies are adding blogs because they naturally attract search engine traffic. Blog pages are text-rich, link-rich, and frequently-updated pages that often contain useful information. And, because most blogs run on simple Content Management System (CMS), it is very easy to optimize them by using keywords, headers, bolded text, image tags, and relevant links.

If your company isn’t ready to make an investment in AdWords or organic keyword research and implementation, blogging could be a great way for to get your website a little more visibility. Setup cost for a blog is usually inexpensive and doesn’t require you to change your web page.

Here are a few tips I’d recommend to get your blog on the road to good SEO:

• Use Keyword Rich Content – identify a few keywords for your article that you’re hoping will get indexed highly by Google.
• Develop a Theme – you may be able to improve your rank well by having a substantial amount of pages with a similar theme.
• Think Design – Search Engines don’t really like Flash, Frames or Java Script in your site, so keep it simple and clean and their robots will index your site a lot faster and more accurately.
• Link Smart – Search Engines index your blog by sending little robot crawlers to track what you’ve written and follow the links. Make it easier for them to get around your blog by using internal linking wisely.
• Update Regularly - The more you update your blog the more often Search Engines will send their crawlers to your site to index it. TYour new articles could appear in the index within days or even hours!
• Outbound Links - link out to quality relevant sites that your readers will find useful.
• Stay on Topic – the more tightly focused the theme of a page the better when Search Engines come to rank it.
• Avoid Duplicate Content – Google discriminates against bloggers who post the same content on multiple pages. Don’t shoot yourself in the foot!

When the idea of our UnCorporate blog emerged, it took less than three hours to get it up and running — and we immediately noticed an increase in web traffic! If you don’t have a company blog on your web domain, contact us and we can get one up and running for you!

Hasta luego!

storm

Hey! I just discovered something very cool, big thanks to Paul from programming…

Pandora. Have you heard of this? Nope, not the first woman ever, created and gifted by all of the ancient gods (Greek Mythology).

Pandora Radio. This is a totally different story. Pandora Radio is a radio streaming application developed by the Music Genome Project. So you have to be connected (one way or another) to the Internet to use it.

The basic idea is that you choose a song or artist that you like, and Pandora compiles an indefinite playlist of songs that are musically similar. As the songs play, you give them “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” and Pandora adjusts your playlist accordingly — to add more of the songs you might enjoy, and less of those it thinks (yes, I said “thinks”) you will not.

There’s a lot of science that goes into Pandora’s choosing of your songs. Apparently, there are more than 400 musical attributes which are considered every time a song is selected. The Genome project calls these “focus traits,” and there are 2,000 of them, ranging from rhythm syncopation, key tonality, vocal harmonies and displayed instrumental proficiency. Wow!

You have two options when it comes to subscription for Pandora. I’m using the free version, because I’m cheap (and I love free stuff). While both versions are essentially the same, one has ads and the other does not, so you pick your poison — fees or ads. Recently, the company also released Pandora Mobile service for most mobile phones, but it is only available in the ad-sponsored format right now. Free is good, so I highly recommend it if your phone is supported!

Another neat Pandora feature is that, if you hear a song you really like,  it gives you the option to purchase the song (or complete cd) from Amazon MP3, Amazon.com, or the iTunes Store.I haven’t explored this feature yet, but as I continue to hear new songs that are interesting to me, I may just have to!

Well, that’s all for now.

Check out Pandora here.

Have a great weekend!

Call it another shameless plug for our  programming team, I had to include this in the blog for Skyler –  our #1 stunner in Web Design. We had some feedback from our friend Bill at Fuji Arts, one of the world’s largest online purveyors of Japanese wood block artwork, and I just couldn’t wait to pass it along! So here goes:

When I interviewed for my position at DE, one of the first pieces of marketing material I was shown was a postcard that Skyler created. It was clean and simple — a beautiful, glossy design that reflected the look and feel of the brand-new website he had created. Understandably, Bruce was really proud of his work and wanted to demonstrate the caliber of work that was produced by the company.

But Skyler’s project was much more than designing a website. Fuji Arts needed a long-term solution to a really big (and expensive) problem! At the time, FA was doing 90% of their business on Ebay and 10% directly. The Ebay fees were killing their profit margin, though — eating up tens of thousands of dollars in annual revenue! Over the next several months, Skyler worked with an outside vendor to customize a reverse-auction program that could be streamlined into their new web design and allowed Fuji Arts to do business outside of Ebay. It was, no doubt, a huge investment for Fuji Arts, and a huge project for us to take on!

… And now, we’re happy to report that it’s paying off!

“Fuji Arts had a surprisingly huge sales month in January,” Bill told us. Interestingly, he reported that his sales were 80% Fuji Arts website and 20% Ebay this time around. “This switch is very big for us and a relief,” he added. He recognizes that making what he called an “unknown seismic shift” seems to have worked for his company — “even in this awful economy,” he added

“We got big enough that the change was a little scary,” Bill explained. He says Fuji Arts is like a completely different company now, and he loves the change. “The ability to operate on the website platform without the restrictions, fees, rules and headaches of Ebay is incredibly freeing,” he beamed. “I could go on all day about it!”

…

Bill, thanks for letting us use your story (and your quotes). We’re very glad that we could be a part of your success story!

…

Skyler, way to be the man!

…

Need some custom programming to get your website up to snuff? Let us know!

Earlier this week, I mentioned how a handful New York City lawyers are trying to make the shift from billing by-the-hour to a flat-rate, case by case basis. If you haven’t been reading our newsletter, e-mail blasts, or this blog, you probably missed the part where we announced that we’ve expanded our services to include a one cost solution to your business technology. But during this past week, we acquired our first testimonial!

Here’s the story:

We met Autowatch last December and courted them with the idea of Fixed IT right away. Actually, they were among our first handful of clients to try out the new service plan — so it would be a new experience for them and us.

Things have been going mostly well over at the client site, although they did have some networking difficulties to overcome at first. Once that was settled, everything was smooth sailing… until last week.

Early in the morning, Dan — the guy who sits at the desk with three extra monitors, watching for trouble tickets from users and computers alike — noticed a warning message for a server over at Autowatch. This would be one of our first big emergencies since starting Fixed IT, and it was a great opportunity for us to “show our stuff,” if you will.

Dan immediately notified Trevor (Autowatch’s client liaison) and he was on the line with Gordon Henderson right away — letting him know that there was a problem. “He said that it looked like our server was overheating,” said Henderson. “But the server didn’t feel hot at all.”

Truthfully, we didn’t really know why their server was getting so hot. By the time the phone call had ended, the server was reporting that its heat level was critical. There was only one thing left to do: power it down.

Within a few minutes, Trevor was on his way to Autowatch. Upon arrival, he went through some physical diagnostics and determined that the heat sink was not connected to the processor in the server, and there was “a lot of gunk inside,” as Henderson put it.

From the initial heat warning until the heat sink was re-attached and everything was back to normal, Henderson estimated that maybe three hours had passed. “What’s cool is that, even though we had no idea anything was wrong, we were able to get it fixed before there was a big problem.” He said.

Since joining the DE family in January, Henderson says that he’s been “very impressed” with our Fixed IT service. He guessed that the time we spent working on the server saved them several days of downtime — if not a week. “I know that if we didn’t have you guys, we’d have been down for a long time!”

“Around here, we sleep better at night for two reasons,” he said.”First, it feels like somebody is always watching what’s going on with our computers.And second, we don’t have to worry about it.”

They’re definitely glad that their server survived! Without the constant monitoring provided by Fixed IT, that thing would be toast, literally!

**Special thanks to Gordon Henderson at Autowatch for contributing to this blog post! We’re very happy to be working with you, too :).

Dynamic Edge isn’t the only company on the planet making the shift away from hourly billing! Last week, we were featured in Michigan Business Review as a company shifting our business model to adapt to the changing economic climate.

Granted, it’s not a full shift.

We’re still offering hourly services to customers who prefer to handle their IT on a pay-as-you-go basis, but most of our new customers and many of our most faithful, long-standing patrons see Fixed option as their chance to keep their technology budget under control in 2009.

I read a blog post today by Nathan Bomey (writer from MBR) about how lawyers are starting to make a similar shift to meet the changing needs of their clients. He picked up the story in the New York Times, and read that the rough economic climate is making clients more demanding, leading many law firms to rethink their business model. The reason? For years, clients have complained that the practice of billing for each hour worked can encourage law firms to prolong a client’s problem rather than solve it.

It seems logical that companies who use services like ours would have similar concerns, but “IT People” and “Lawyers” don’t share very many stereotypes… this one included.

For our customers, Fixed IT is peace of mind. They’re getting more help than they would normally, their server/laptop/computer health is constantly monitored, and when something big happens (like a blackout that causes a server crash) they won’t be strapped with a $6,000 invoice for services they need to get their business back online. Every month, our Fixed IT customers know what will be on their bill — no surprises. That’s why we’re making the shift.

If you want to know more about Fixed IT or Dynamic Edge, contact us. Someone is always available to help you with your questions!