Enter Mike Whittaker. He was looking to sell his clapped out old washing machine, and listed it with no reserve and a starting bid of $1. Here’s how he described it:

Scary washing machine. No really, its terrifying!

It’s the loudest most violent sounding washing machine I have ever encountered. It makes guests scared and children cry. I’ve lived with it like that for almost a year and it still scares me…

…If your in a fix and need a cheap washing machine and are either completely deaf or hate your neighbours this baby is for you.

So what happened as a result of this?

• The washing machine sold for $5160.
• TV and international press coverage
• 800,000 views on the auction
• 800 comments on the auction
• The video went viral on YouTube
• A new website and online business was born for Mike.

Pretty amazing. He grabbed the viewers attention, gave them some plain talking, informal, amusing copy to read through and the result took his scary washing machine global…

Here’s a neat graphic which displays the pros and cons of each, click the image for the larger version:

Just a quick post to dispel a few myths around Google, and what needs to happen when you have a brand new website built.

Q. Do I need to submit my website to Google?

No. Google is smart. Very smart. So smart in fact, you do not need to ‘submit’ your website to them, chances are they already know about it…

Google is a fully automated search engine that uses software known as “spiders” to crawl the web on a regular basis and find sites to add to our index. In fact, the vast majority of sites listed in our results aren’t manually submitted for inclusion, but found and added automatically when our spiders crawl the web.

- Taken from Google Webmaster Central

Q. What about the other search engines?

Yahoo and Bing however, do require a manual submission to get included in the index. The process is extremely simple and takes no longer than a few minutes, here are the links:

http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/ (You will need a Yahoo account)

http://www.bing.com/docs/submit.aspx

Q. How long does it take to get included in Google’s index?

Done correctly, you should see your website in the search engine index in about a week, although the past dozen sites we have built have been noticed in about 3days.

Remember – this differs from ‘keyword ranking’ which takes considerably longer, depending on the keyword.

Q. How do I know if my website IS in the Google index?

A quick and easy way is to put: ‘site:http://www.tbomedia.co.uk‘ into the search box and hit enter. No results? No indexed site for you…yet. This also works for Yahoo and Bing.

Here’s a neat little infographic which explains what application to use, and when. I would add Twitter to the PR list, its great for engaging with customers:

Content you can mange includes;

• Text (New pages, news items, blogs etc)
• Photos
• Video
• Music

The best thing is, you can manage all this with no technical knowledge. You just log into a secure control panel and select what you want to manage. You can read more about Content Management here, in our services page.

1. Web 2.0

Web 2.0 best describes the next generation of internet technology born in late 2000. For example, services which fall under this category include;

• Blogging
• Social Networking
• Wikipedia
• Flickr, tagging

The list goes on. The idea with the Web 2.0 movement is using the internet as a platform to offer rich user experience and online services, and not packaged software.

2. Micro Blogging

A new trend, which is owed almost exclusively to Twitter. Microblogging allows you to keep updated (and update others) with small pieces of easily digestible information. For a business, this can include news snippets, product offers and promotions.

3. Mashups

A mashup combines different sources of web technology to produce a single end result. Common Mashups involve using the Google maps API.

So three of the hot topics covered, but what about the rest? Head over to the Social Media section under services to find out more.