Ronda, Spain, Spanish, Themes, and Everything Else

I've taken a bit of an interest in the subject of big bold Outdoor Advertising just recently, mostly because I think the same principles can be used online and I'm trying to learn how the experts do things.

Have a look at the 'Wear a Seat Belt' billboard, now this is clever. As for the guerilla marketing image on the mini, I've seen those when I've been driving around, now I know who's responsible Hah! Read More

When it comes to SEO, I'm no expert, I know what makes sense, I take a lot that I see around the 'Net with a grain of salt, and whenever possible I experiment, and I take advice from experts. So far I've done OK, I usually rank in the top half dozen pages for most of the major keywords I'm targeting, for example a search for 'serendipity templates' will usually find me pretty quickly.

The thing is though, doing SEO on your blog is one of those intangible things that a lot of people don't do right, or aren't able to measure in isolation from normal organic popularity of their blog. Measuring the results of your experiments is easy with regular HTML pages which don't have commenting functions, usually aren't updated all that often, and don't usually take advantage of the built-in social networking that comes with having a blog. Read More

I don't often link directly to another blog but today I'm going to. If you want to see the power of subliminal advertising at work, and understand just how much you are affected by it in your day to day activities then do yourself a favour and watch the video the Marketing Blagger's entry the power of subliminal advertising.

Now imagine how you can use these techniques in your own business. I think the trick for any small business owner would be to take a good hard look at their business surroundings, see what your customers are being exposed to as they approach your business, and see if you can find some way of incorporating these ideas into your brand campaign.

How much do you suffer from hayfever? Personally I have to endure a couple of hours of sneezing, headaches, and red eyes every morning, I'm sure I could blame it all on the carpet in our apartment. So we're seriously looking at replacing the bag type model we've got even though we've only had it a few months, which is a shame because we spent a few Euros buying it but it just isn't doing the job.

I've heard about how good the Dyson vacuum cleaner is so we may end up getting one of these. Their latest TV advertisements have certainly piqued our interest and I gotta tell you it seems like a really groovy machine. Read More

Introducing my latest Blogger XML template, Hawaii, so named because of the bright colors and flower print in the header. The design was produced using Inkscape by Pixabella. You can see my demo blog with the Hawaii blogger template.

I plan to produce other versions of this template, with the columns changed, and maybe a different color header image, so let me know in the comments what you're looking for. The sidebars in Hawaii are 180px wide so should be able to handle most sidebar widgets or advertising. Read More

Think about a successful advertising campaign, picture in your mind how you were first exposed to it's message, what impact did it have? In researching this article I found myself thinking of the impact that advertising has on my buying decisions, and I came up with a startling observation. I respond to branding messages, perhaps not immediately, but definitely at the buying stage.

Let me give you an example. Every night I have the TV on in the background while I work. My mind automatically switches off when the advertisements air, it has to be a pretty special ad to catch my attention. I don't read newspapers anymore, and hardly ever listen to the radio, so almost all of the advertising that I'm exposed to is in the form of billboards. Read More

For the last month or so I've been promoting this blog pretty hard, actually spending more time on carlgalloway.com than most of my other sites in an effort to increase traffic and boost revenue. All of my activities have begun to pay off now and I've managed to increase monthly revenue from this site to over $500, from only $300 a month ago.

In a previous entry I talked about blog promotion for beginners and offered some basic tips for increasing traffic. I've also talked about some basic SEO that you can do that will improve your ranking in the major search engines.

So, cutting to the chase, what's involved in taking these steps further, your site should be indexed and getting steady traffic now, and it's time to ramp this up. This is where we both get to learn together, you see this blog has always just been my personal templating site, a site where I talk about things of interest to me, a place to call my own and not worry about making money from it. Not anymore. Read More

I finally updated Andreas Viklund's 1024px template for Blogger XML, and while I was doing it I also added the ability to change the color of all elements on page. Don't like the default color blue, no problem, change it using Blogger's Fonts and Colors screen. See the 1024px blogger template demo.

The original 1024px Classic Blogger template is still available, but I think most users now want the XML version. Read More