Meadows Interactive blog

There was a pretty big story in the online marketing world that went surprisingly unnoticed this past weekend by many tech reporters and bloggers. But if you are a member of Survey Gizmo, you probably noticed what happened. SurveyGizmo.com, a site that we use from time to time for advanced surveys, went down over the weekend because the auto-billing on its credit card used to renew its domain failed. According to CEO Christian Vanek: “Our domain registrar then expired our domain and immediately replaced it with an advertisement for their own website.  As far as we can tell there...

If you're a local business looking to grow, Wednesday's Grow Your Business Expo is the place to be. The expo is free for local businesses and runs from 4-7 p.m. on Wed., April 11, at the Mid-State Fairground Events Center in Paso Robles....

If you’ve run PPC (pay per click) ad campaigns for an extended period of time using a service like Google Adwords, you’ve probably noticed an increase in the average cost per click for many search ads over the past couple years. Which brought up a great question by a colleague of mine recently: “How much do PPC (pay per click) costs typically increase year over year?” Unfortunately, even the big search marketing outfits haven’t provided a real go-to source that addresses this topic. I think a big part of it is they don’t want to scare off clients by telling them...

We’ve been spending more and more time providing mobile app development and mobile-optimized websites for San Luis Obispo County-area businesses and content producers over the past couple years. Our latest mobile app has just been launched as a public beta in the Android Marketplace. If you like the great outdoors, and have an Android-enabled phone, this is the app for you. … Hikes in Central California is a mobile hiking and trail guide for your pocket. This content-rich app has all of the best hikes from Monterey, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara and Ventura counties, plus many more as...

BlogWorld has gone Hollywood. After behind held in Las Vegas since 2008, the BlogWorld & New Media Expo has moved to Los Angeles where the three-day event kicks off today at the LA Convention Center....

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on ProBlogger.net by MI Founder Brian Milne. As far as you know, your blog is mobile friendly. You’ve optimized the design for mobile devices using plugins such as WPtouch. You’ve started serving Google mobile ads. Heck, you even have your own mobile app. But are you turning away mobile readers with your content? Are your 2,000-word posts, bogged down with 200-DPI images and run-on sentences, negating all your other efforts?...

Well, it’s WordCamp week, which means the WordPress community’s brightest minds, bloggers, developers and designers will congregate in San Francisco for the annual event to discuss and further evolve the popular open source publishing platform. This year’s event, which will be held Aug. 12-14 at the Mission Bay Conference Center, has already sold out. Livestream and walk-up tickets may be available during the event, so stay tuned to 2011.sf.wordcamp.org and follow @wordcampsf and #wcsf on Twitter for additional details. New-user workshops are also scheduled to take place at the Automattic Lounge at Pier 38 throughout the weekend. While smaller...

This post was featured on ProBlogger.net. Thanks to Darren Rowse and his team for reaching out. We’ve all been there. You’ve been blogging for months, even years, and your blog is going nowhere fast. Traffic is stagnant. Your subscriber count has dropped off. AdSense is paying just that: cents per day. So what’s a blogger to do when they hit “the wall?” The most important thing to remember is that every blogger hits it. The key is to break through that wall or scale over it. To overcome the wall, you have to look yourself in the mirror and...

Why do you blog? It’s a question regular bloggers field from time to time, from folks with a preconceived notion that bloggers spend most of their days cranking away on a Comodore in their mother’s musty basement. (I’m an Altair guy myself.) The way I look at it, everyone has a story to tell … even us nerdy mamma’s boys on our Comodores. Blogging, at least for individuals, gives you the ability to tell that story without any gatekeepers – such as a boss or editor who may want to water down your message or twist your words. Blogging...

Now that you’ve got your WordPress site up and running, you need to install some plugins to get the most out of what the open source publishing platform has to offer. Most all of the plugins you’ll ever need can be found at WordPress.org, while a few others haven’t yet made it into the repository for one reason or another and can be installed manually if need be. Either way, it’s best to use a plugin that’s been tested by the community and has a positive user rating. You should also back up your files before installing any new...