Internet Marketing Toronto - Ignite!

The Creative Economy - How To Create Lasting Value In Your Company

Phil Mckinney takes 20 minutes to explain how knowledge economy is becoming a commodity and creativity (ideas) is the new skill of the future.

I’m a big believer in creativity - the ability to consistently generate ideas for new business, products, services, or general improvements to your existing business or processes. It’s a skill we all had as children but as we progress through the education system it’s systematically beaten out of us. There is good news! You can get that skill back. More importantly you can encourage your employees to do the same - and reward them for the efforts.

If you’re interested in knowing how you can transform your business I encourage you to listen to this short podcast from the Killer Innovations Podcast on the “Creative Economy“. It’s a recording of the morning keynote speech Phil gave on April 4th, 2008 to the 5th Annual Business Alliance Bootcamp for Growing Companies and Entrepreneurs.

My hope is that after listening to this episode you’ll be just a little more interested. Interested in your business and how you can get it moving forward in new and exciting ways!

The Importance Of Experimentation

As children we love to try new things. I know, I have a five year old at home and he has without a doubt the best ideas for things to do around the house. Unfortunately our education system is setup in such a way that overtime discourages us to try new things. Instead we’re taught to conform an follow direction.

In this new era of information technology and the creative economy, a business cannot afford to have a group of employees who don’t know how to think, develop ideas and test them out. How else can a company grow and expand if it cannot be creative and experiment with things to see what works and does not?

These same principles are applicable to Internet marketing. The pace at which the Internet and services running on the Internet demands that we be creative and experiment with ideas at much more rapid pace. For example, Facebook is now offering paid advertising on it’s site. If you’re target market matches the demographic profile of Facebook users this may just be a tremendous source of leads for you. Unless you test it out, how will you know? The options available to a business change every week and you need to be out there find and testing these them out. By doing so, you’ll be guaranteed to find sources of good traffic and leads for your business.

In addition you’ll develope awareness of your site, increase your back links count, and untimately improve your natural search engine rankings which will lead to increased “free traffic”. So why delay? There is virtually nothing to lose and everything to gain.

Instructables.com - Good for Traffic and Links!

I came across this site today and was impressed by the concept. As usual, I investigated further and wanted to see if instructables.com held some SEO value and traffic value. Low and behold, it does!

The site and concept is really cool - somewhat of a hybrid between Yahoo Answers, YouTube, Flicker and others. It is a social site for learning and teaching others “how to” do things like replace LED lights in your keychain, make knitted octopus pets, or even make burlesque tassels - if your into that sort of thing!

It looks like you can register and account and post instructional videos, slide shows and written explanations about whatever it is you want to share with the community. Within the post, you can also post what looks to be a followed link back to a website. The individual page rank on a particular instruction site isn’t very high but if you do have a valuable video that gets promoted to the first page, you will probably get some great traffic out of it!

So there you go… happy late Valentines Day… no go make some burlesque tassels!

Yahoo! Is Experimenting With Delicious Bookmarks In The Search Results Pages

Yahoo! is experimenting with displaying results from Delicious along with the regular search results.

I love it when companies try new things. It means they are innovating even if it’s a small incremental innovation. In this case it’s Yahoo! They bought the popular Delicious book-marking service a few years ago and are just now experimenting with including results from Delicious with the regular search results.

While this is still an experiment it could really make a big difference for clients wishing to rank well in Yahoo! By having your content well book-marked in Delicious you can start to see more traffic from Yahoo! to your site.

We’ll keep you posted on the results of this experiment as it evolves over the next several weeks and months.

The Physics of Information - At The Perimeter Institute

Bob McDonald hosts an all start panel of Physisits at the “Permiter Institute” discussing The Physics of Information - could the Universe really be a simulation? Listen and decide for yourself.

I’ve filed this under Innovation and Creativity simply because listening to this podcast will open your mind causing you to think critically about your surroundings and your impact on them. Loosely it’s related to computers as well because part of the discussion is how the Universe compares to a computer and software program - as well as a discussion on whether that program can be manipulated!

Download “The Physics of Information” and listen to it. You’ll be amazed at what this all star panel of physists have to say about our universe. Things like - everything is information encoded in bits. Or, the universe could be a simulation but no one knows who’s programming it. Or, how the universe compares to a computer.

This episode is absolutely fascinating. Please give it a listen as I am sure you will find it fascinating as well.

Writers Strike May Lead To A Migration To The Internet - According To Main Stream News

Main Stream news today (Rogers 680 News to be exact) is reporting that because of the writers strike movie and television viewers may shift to the Internet for their daily dose of entertainment.

If that happens, and I am sure it will, the writers will too! This news is a great supporting example of my prediction that this writers strike will give on-line content a boost! Sites such as Heavy.com and Will Ferrel’s FunnyOrDie.com will likely see a surge in traffic over the next several days.

Writers Strike is On - Will They Move To The Internet?

The movie and television writers strike began today.

It’s official, the writers strike has begun today. I don’t watch too much TV beyond reruns of Seinfeld so I’m not concerned about the actual impact on shows. However, as I mentioned in a previous post my speculation is that if this strike drags on we may actually see some of these writers taking to the Internet to write some of their own stuff without the networks. I think it could actually increase the level of innovation from a content perspective on the Internet!

What do you think?

The Writers Strike Could In Fact Force A Period of Increased Innovation On The Internet

Writers in the US Television and Movie industry are poised to strike sometime soon. They are fighting for increased money associated with digital distribution of their work.

While many are concered what this will mean to their TV shows - I on the other hand see this as a huge opportunity in the making. If they strike - it could very likely push alot of these writers (or other writers) to produce a whack of content on line through their own means. We could see a quick up tick in the number of Internet only shows in a very short period of time. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what happens!