It’s 2008. It’s actually over a month into the new year.

Is your website where it should be?

Brand new (fiscal) years can be overwhelming and exciting all at the same time. However businesses, be they solo or corporate, need to be on top of things, and that’s where Anubis Marketing can help.

We’ve got lots of really exciting things about to happen around here and we are just loving that feeling…
We want to help you feel that way too!

Call us now to see how we can make your internet dreams a reality!
(518) 843-9633

(photo credit)

I’ll just get right to the point(s):

• We’re slacking on blogging. This is clearly not good, as we really try to encourage our clients to be heavily active with their blogs, yet we can’t seem to get ours on a good schedule. So that’s one thing that we’re really going to focus on in the immediate future.
• We’re bored with the layout of the site. Aside from the issues we had yesterday and this morning (a 500 Internal Server error caused by something with our .htaccess file that we didn’t discover until after we deleted our entire installation of WordPress), the site as a whole needs an overhaul in many ways, one being design. Quick fix: Redesign it. Quicker fix: Get someone else to design it. Lightning quick fix: Get another theme and tweak it until we get what we want. We’re still fussing with this one, so if you see things looking a little odd around here, you’ll know why.
• Our focus is too widespread. We’re narrowing down the services we offer up outright, and reserving certain things for either current clients, or for really special potential ones. Don’t get nervous - It’s not like we’re getting snobby or anything here! It just means that based on our current workload at the time of your request, we’re going to have to work hard on scheduling and time constraints.
• We love WordPress and want to contribute more to the community. Focusing on themes, we’re planning on releasing a bunch of free ones and premium (paid) ones in the coming months. The legal stuff and the actual theme work is a little time consuming, so please bear with us, but this is a promise we’re making now to the WP community, both current and future.
• We want to expand some of the services that we’re not giving enough attention to at the moment. One of the things we love to do is help coordinate marketing events. We’ve done this in the past for Darren Rowse of ProBlogger.net, both online and offline, and it’s something we really enjoy. (Plus, we’ve been told we’re pretty good at it!)

So there you have it - just some of the main things we’re looking at changing up around here. Stay tuned, because we’re really excited, and we hope you’ll feel that way too!

(image by cbanck)

I haven’t had a chance to do much by way of posting, so I thought I’d just come on and make a few cool announcements (in no particular order of importance):

• We’ve recently finished two really fantastic sites: New Day Publishing and The Teich Group. New Day publishes Christian children’s books and audio, and The Teich Group is a strategic marketing agency for K-12 publishers.
• Our rockstar problogger friend Darren Rowse was featured in Forbes.com’s top 25 web celebs. Way to go, Darren! I’m so proud of you!
• Darren’s wife had us build her a new site to showcase her vintage fabric art. Go check it out!
• Liz Strauss from Successful (and Outstanding) Blog(gers) made Anubis Marketing’s blog an official “S.O.B.” (Successful Outstanding Blog)! Thanks, Liz!
• Our longest running client, The Saratoga Comedy Club has opened in a couple new venues in the past couple months! To think, when Jodi and I first met, they had two regular clubs. They’ve just added a third, The Comedy Centre in Rutland, VT at the Holiday Inn. Shows start February 1, 2008. Way to go Jodi and Vinnie!
• We also managed another project for product development firm Nectar, Inc., incorporating a new installation for their site to have an updated product design and development blog with commenting features and other “bloggy” type things.
• I (Lara Kulpa) am now the sponsorship manager for SOBCon ‘08, a bloggers’ conference (new site coming after the new year) being held in Chicago this coming Spring. If anyone’s interested in sponsoring the event, please contact me for a sponsorship kit and more information.

So there you have it! I told you things have been hectic around here!

I’d like to thank everyone who has subscribed to our RSS feed recently, and to wish you and yours a very happy holidays and a fantastic 2008!

Well it got me thinking about how amazing all the publicity has been for the sponsors, for ProBlogger, and even for the readers of the site who get to share a little more about their own sites with all the readers of the site.

What it also did was remind me that Anubis Marketing’s two year anniversary is coming up on October 13th! (You know, I still can’t believe that sometimes!)

So being inspired by everything going on over at ProBlogger, I’d like to see what we can manage to come up with over here at Anubis Marketing for our two year celebration!

If you’d like to sponsor a prize, get a little publicity and traffic, and help us celebrate two years in business, please send an email with the following info:

• Details of your prize offer, including any relevant links that might help explain it.
• Don’t forget to include the monetary value of your prize.
• Your name, company name, and a link to the site you’d like to see represented in the giveaway.

Looking forward to seeing what people come up with!!

FOOA - As a whole
FOOA had it’s ups and downs. I was most pleased with meeting all the people I got to meet, next to that was some of the presentations. I know that Carson Systems has learned quite a bit about conferencing with this one, and I think that marketers, publishers, and the like are probably the pickiest of the bunch. (Yep, that includes myself.)

One of the main things I heard nearly everyone talk about was that they felt like they were at a big sit-down tradeshow more than at a learning conference. Presenters that had 30-45 minutes of speaking time typically filled it with “This is what we do and why you should use our product/service,” rather than explaining things in more general terms. Sure, sponsors deserved to have some exposure time (because they were lined up upstairs and few people actually went up there to see them) but an entire 30 minutes on PayPerPost just unnerved people. Most of us knew what PPP is, and have already made our firm decisions whether or not we want to use it. Same with BlogAds. Though it was kind of humorous to hear the thinly veiled insults at each other.

VideoClix
Outside of that, there were a few speakers whose services I hadn’t heard of before. VideoClix was one of them, and I thought it was a really neat idea. The concept is that you can take any video clip and highlight certain pieces (their examples were fashion shows and then a clip of Mike and Sully from Disney’s “Monsters, Inc.”) and when the user clicks on that character, dress, purse, what have you on the left hand side of the screen, a picture of that item (or a knockoff) shows up on the right hand side with a purchase option. The best part of this was the fact that once you highlighted a character or item, even if it went offscreen and came back, it was still being tracked.

The Deck
Another interesting, albeit elitist concept was The Deck. The sites that are “members” of The Deck are very simply designed, and contain NO other ads than the one single ad that’s placed there by The Deck on behalf of advertisers. There is a non-competition clause, where if say, Coca-Cola decided to place an ad on one site, there will be no ad for any other soda company on any other site in the network (currently totaling about 15 sites) that month. Plus, Coca-Cola would have the first refusal for the following month - meaning that if they wish to continue their ad in the network, any other soda company that was in the queue would have to wait again. The sites in the network boast millions of pageviews per month, and The Deck only accepts advertisements from products and services that the members of the network have paid for and/or used.

Numeric Analytics
I got to speak with Numeric Analytics upstairs as well as hear a presentation from Pete Affeld. The big thing is that many advertising clients aren’t fully aware of all impact of their advertising efforts - most only hear about the positive. But it takes knowing about the negative (or lack of) results to really fine tune any advertising campaigns properly, so that’s where Numeric Analytics comes into play. Their services are geared towards advertising clients and are made to help them get better information about their campaigns.

Darren Rowse - ProBlogger/b5media
I spent most of the time down there with Darren, and there are more pics later in the post from the meetup we had at The Speakeasy. I really loved Darren’s presentation though (despite his fighting off the flu, he was entertaining as well as informative)… it was one of the few that took a humorous approach and appealed to both publishers and advertisers. His presentation was about “dating” in advertising - meaning romancing each other (publishers and advertisers) to make the most out of the relationship. He focused on providing clear and concise statistics to potential advertisers, and valuable offers to bloggers and publishers. It was one of the few presentations that actually got a giggle from the audience from the beginning. Way to go, Darren!

On day two, Darren, Matt and myself went across the street to Pronto Pizza for lunch. The “butlered lunch” there at Gotham Hall left much to be desired… we were HUNGRY. Here are a couple shots from there, and I believe Darren has more he’ll post soon enough. I was honored to be with Darren as he tasted NYC style pizza for the first time - I even explained “the fold” quite well, I think!

Those were just a couple highlights - there was much more to it but I don’t want to bore you all! After Day One, Carson Systems set up a little “happy hour” after party at 230 5th Ave. We mixed and mingled on the rooftop, and here were some photos I took. (Don’t mind the one with me in it - I was exhausted after having been up since 3am and traveling down to the city that day!)

Saturday I met up again with Darren, and with Shai Coggins (another b5 coolie person) at Carmine’s for lunch. Carmine’s is one of my favorite places to eat in Manhattan, and since Darren loves Italian food, and Shai had never been to NYC - I figured it a perfect place to go. At one point, Darren had snagged my camera and taken a few candid shots of me yakking away - I do believe I was gushing on about one of my favorite crooners, Michael Buble at the time.

After lunch, I brought Darren and Shai to Battery Park where we checked out Lady Liberty, some street dancers, and a sculpture that was previously at the World Trade Center. After that, we hit up the meetup, (which was wonderful) and that’s all there is to say about that! *phew!*

Yes, there are even more photos…

Others who’ve posted updates:

Elaine Vigneault - LOVE HER!

Theron’s Flickr Set

Ari’s Recap (Few Guys From Work)

John Keegan’s Flickr Set

Rich Minx’s Recap

Chris Conley’s ProBlogger Meetup Recap

Behind The Buzz - Live Blogging the FOOA

• Tina Dame-Zawisza - Tina’s one of the stars of the new hit reality show on ABC “The Ex-Wives Club” (her episode aired Monday, June 4th, 2007). Tina had us build her a site a while back when she was doing more of her modeling and acting work, and we decided it was time for a fresh new site because of the show.
• Lynn Jones - Lynn’s another wonderful lady I met because of Tina, who is also on the show (I’m not sure yet when her episode airs, but check out her site - I’m sure she’ll post it.)

I’ll be spending the latter half of this week at the FOOA Conference and with Darren Rowse at a meetup on Saturday night - all in Manhattan. I’ll try to post while I’m there, but conference trips are never predictable!

Please, PLEASE advertise this on your blog, even if you’re not from NY, not planning on attending, or what have you. I promised the folks at Eat Drink & Be Merry that I’d get them lots of blog traffic - so please help me to not let them down!!

That said, I’d love to see you there - please let me know if you plan to attend! (And head over to Darren’s to let him know as well!)

Where: Gotham Hall

When: June 7-8, 2007 - 9am - 530pm

How: Register online! I’ve been given a 10% discount promo code to share with my readers because I will be attending (Thanks Darren and Ryan!).
Enter the following on the registration page: 10p3rc

Cost: 1-day pass $795 / 2-day pass $995 / Conference in a box (CD with video and audio of all sessions) $895

You can see the list of speakers at the event here: FOOA ‘07 Speakers and it’s sure to be a really remarkable event! I know I’m super excited to be able to attend!

Also, stay tuned for more information on the next ProBlogger meetup NYC scheduled for June 9th! I’ve been working on settling on a location and fine-tuning the details, so the announcement will be made Monday or Tuesday. Darren’s going to be in town for the FOOA conference, so he wanted to set up another event and I’m proud to be a part of helping get us all together again!

If you missed the last one (my links: 1 2 / Darren’s recap: 1, this would be a great way to get in some double-duty on your trip to the city! Hit up the conference on Thursday and Friday, hang out the next day in the city, and then meet up with Darren and all the other “ProBlogger” friends and fans on Saturday night! It’s a win-win for sure!

More details on the PB meetup coming soon!!!

• Saratoga Comedy Club - We did a complete overhaul on the site, building it back up from scratch using WordPress for the content management system. The site now offers full RSS feeds, so those who enjoy the club locally can get the news and updated schedule right to their feedreaders. It features a much more streamlined look, with less clutter than before. I’m really pleased with the way the site’s turned out, as are Jodi and Vinnie and their patrons to the club.
• Laugh and Heal - Brand spankin’ new site for comedian John Mulrooney. His old site was extremely outdated (For those of you who might understand this, it was built (and currently maintained) with FrontPage 3! I didn’t know any computers out there could still run that!) so we really needed to do a brand new site. There are a few tweaks still being made at this time, but for the most part, it’s exactly what John wanted, and his fans are already coming through to compliment it!
• Comedian Steve Adiletta - Steve Feels Funny - Steve wanted a site without too much “clutter”, a sort of “shiny” appearance, simple yet dramatic. I grabbed a theme I found at WordPress Themes and did some image tweaking and code editing to get it just right. Proof positive I can work with any budget and provide either tweaked themes or fully customized ones!
• Readings by Waterfal13 - Psychic offers a variety of readings via phone, IM, or email. She also needed a brand new site, as her other one gave her too many limitations and didn’t give the opportunity for flexibility or SEO. We’re now working on updating her content and doing some marketing work to get more traffic as well as provide a way for her to make some money by selling advertising on the site.
• Maurice Walker - Nashville Council At-Large - You might remember Moe from the first season of “The Biggest Loser”, but now he’s garnering for a seat on the Nashville City Council. Moe and I met a while back and when he decided to run, he came looking for a campaign website. The site’s still in progress, but it’s live.

So there you have it… there are a few more in the works right now, but we’re trying to focus more on the consulting and PR work we’re doing. We’re pretty busy on the design/SEO/marketing end, so if you’re interested, get in touch with us right away to book a spot on the schedule. If you’re looking for PR campaigns or on-site consulting, we’ve got a few spots open in the coming months, so act now!

Guess who won a copy of Six Figure Blogging? (Hint: I’ll give you three guesses, and the first two are for the other two winners.)

Many many thanks again, Darren - You’ve done so much for people, and it’s truly an honor to have met you. I can’t wait to get my copy and get into it. I’ll have to post some reviews for sure!

via: NYC ProBlogger Meetup Prizes