Broadstreet has been in business in its current form for about 4 years. By all measurements, business is good. We have a handful of excellent customers that really understand the Web and how it can transform their business. We continue to grow, mostly by word of mouth, and we become more productive and more efficient, making more powerful and better looking websites, and branching more and more into the marketing end of the business.
So now we enter a new phase - old school paper-based advertising which supports a paper that supports our community. I like it. What do you think?
Here are the some of the blogs I've read this week and thought were worth sharing:
www.drawncloser.com - My new favorite comic strip, drawn by my friend Jimmy Steen. You can also follow him on Twitter at @steenfamily.
http://www.chrisbrogan.com/23-essential-elements-of-sharable-blog-posts/ - Chris has some good tips for making people want to share your blog posts. I'm probably not following any of them right now, but for those of you trying to get started with a blog, some good advice. Do as I say, not as I do, my Dad used to say...
I read quite a number of blogs ever week, but I spend very little time "surfing the Web." Instead, I subscribe to blogs using RSS, or Real Simple Syndication. My RSS Reader is Google Reader. When I find a new blog that I like, I subscribe to it by looking for the following image and clicking on it.
If you want to understand RSS better, you should take a look at this video from CommonCraft:
I had the pleasure of listening to theDuct Tape Marketing Podcast recently, the March 23 episode featureing David Meerman Scott, who recently wrote the book called World Wide Rave. David makes some really interesting points about how trends get started on the Internet. He provides numerous case studies on viral videos and blog posts, and how people have used these to build their businesses.
Examples included Blendtec, a maker of heavy-duty blenders who increased sales tenfold after creating some wacky videos and the site Will it Blend?, showing their blenders chop non-food items. He also talks about Helaine Smith, DMD, a Boston Dentist who quintupled her business after publishing a free e-book called "Healthy Mouth, Healthy Sex."
My daughter Patti is in London, England for three weeks as part of the USC Law program, and we are keeping her daugther Eva. We have been having nightly Skype sessions where she tells us about her day and she is even able to read bedtime stories to Eva. It is amazing and it is free.
Downloading and installing Skype is easy. Patti has a headset that cost around $20, and at both ends we have a Microsoft Lifecam VX-3000 camera which is excellent and easy to use. The Lifecam has a camera and built-in microphone. Patti can use Skype-out features to call any phone for $.02 per minute. Typicall she calls us at home to setup the call and follows up with a video call a few minutes later.
Skype is a must-have for anyone traveling overseas.
I've become more and more comfortable putting important personal and business information on Google Apps. It's very convenient to create a document and share it with my wife or other associates of Broadstreet Consulting. More and more, when I need to create a document that is to be shared, I will create it with Google Docs and then share it.
Ever wonder what is the most popular site on the Web? ComScore is a business that measures traffic on the Web and publishes it on a subscription basis. Below is Comscore's listing of the current Top 50 sites on the Web (for the U.S). You can find this yourself by going to http://www.comscore.com/press/data.asp and clicking on United States.
This month we ran our first advertisement in the 
