In early January Sky News asked if they could interview me for an evening show about the latest Internet news. The show is going out tomorrow night at 7pm.
Unfortunately I won’t be on it because the person who arranged the interview didn’t notice the word “Leeds” in my email signature or company address and assumed I must live in London (doesn’t everybody?). The end result is that today when they rang to arrange everything and found out I didn’t live in London they told me that they didn’t want me on the show anymore.
If any Londoners would like to appear on Sky News tomorrow there is a slot available. I won’t be watching.
Now I wish I hadn’t told everybody to watch the show.
Blogstorm is around 18 months old and I wanted to post some details on how 2008 has been.
We started in June 2007 and now have just over 4000 RSS readers. In terms of traffic 2008 has seen the blog get over 1.1 million page views from 776,887 unique visitors.
The traffic this year isn’t actually very high when you consider in just 6 months of 2007 we got 823,000 page views and 569,000 unique visitors. The difference is easy to explain – in 2007 it was possible to get a blog onto the front page of Digg whenever you wanted. In 2008 it isn’t.
The most popular post was this one with 106,000 page views, even without a Digg front page.
Took some pictures of the snow in Harrogate today. After half an hour trying to get the car off the drive I called it a day and built a snowman instead.
Most roads from the village are blocked apparently so it’s probably a good thing I didn’t get very far.
This week we are busy with new & existing clients so blogging is taking a back seat.
In the meantime here is an iPhone picture of the snow outside the Branded3 office window looking across our conservatory, BBQ area, garden and tennis courts / basketball area.
A few people seem to have misunderstood the Blogstorm Newsletter – it isn’t the same content that’s published on the blog.
The newsletter goes out a few times per month (we’ve only sent one so far) and focusses on techniques that for some reason I don’t want to reveal on the blog. The last newsletter was excellent according to the feedback I got so the next one needs to be even better.
To sign up you need to fill in the form on the top right of the website (see image below).
Quite often I have interesting SEO observations that for one reason or another can’t be posted on BlogStorm.
Instead of keeping these a secret I thought it would be fun to start a newsletter which goes out a few times a month with observations, strategies and other interesting features. Read more →
Today we are pleased to be launching a brand new feature for BlogStorm – a postcode searchable directory of companies in the UK offering all types of marketing services.
Currently in beta the directory is going to be a paid directory (£100 per year review fee, more about that below) but for the next few days we are offering free submission to get the ball rolling.
The aim is to offer business owners in the UK easier access to local suppliers.
The directory is fully postcode searchable, includes Google Maps of each companies location, as well as a downloadable vcard of the companies address for importing into Outlook. Read more →
This weekend we’ve been putting the finishing touches to the new BlogStorm design and it’s now live on the website (best viewed in Firefox while we iron out some bugs).
As well as looking a lot better than the previous design the new theme offers increased flexibility for new features. We chose to use the fantastic Thesis Theme because it has a great codebase that you can build from and customise to your hearts content. WordPress as a CMS doesn’t offer users the ability to modify blog design very easily but Thesis fixes that and the latest version even lets you alter widths and colours from the control panel. Read more →
