The Blog

Today I have been thinking about link strategies - mainly because I need to add a paragraph about it for my mini case study on web 2.0 marketing for Chris Fill.

As well as looking at your web site content in terms of key words, spider bots will follow links to and from your website. If there are a lot of links, then this may influence your position on search engines. Unscrupulous e-marketers simply spam many different sites with irrelevant comments along with a link to their site. Luckily, as the logarithms used by search engines increase in sophistication, this technique becomes less effective.

Used intelligently, links can enhance brand values and the visitor experience. Many blogs encourage meaningful discussion by allowing comments and trackbacks (a link to a page which references an article), as well as link exchanges with other like-minded bloggers.

Our first spikes (when we had a rush of new registrations on version 1 of the learnit widget) were when we were written about on Mashable and Jane’s E-learning pick of the day. I have used the trackback facility on these sites, so if you now visit the links - you should be able to see a trackback to this article.

With 9678 users (12:00, 22nd March) we are slowly moving towards the 10,000 mark. There have been only a few new links to the site in the last 24 hours, but there are now 17,800 mentions of learnitlists on the Internet. A slower pace of growth suits me just fine as we have some kinks to iron out before we publicise the widget any more. As J & M have pointed out, our first new users started finding us one calendar month ago. I think 10,000 people isn’t a bad basis for a beta test.

I spent a large chunk of yesterday comparing word lists. My assumption had been that I would not know if there was a mis-translation between English and another language that I’m not familiar with. After we lost our French translator, I decided to have a look for myself. M built a system on Friday where words which were the same in both languages were highlighted, and then added another bit so that I could edit the word lists. So… several hours later I have made corrections (courtesy of Alta Vista Babel Fish) to Portuguese, French and Italian. These still need to be loaded up. I hope M will do that tomorrow. Once I have repeated the exercise for all languages in a western script, then we can think about conducting some awareness raising.