Mature websites performed their function well over the years and have become some what of an after thought to their owners.  It’s not until the march of time catches up to them and it begins to lag in the search engine results that it becomes obvious something is wrong.

When a website stops changing, it sits still and the rest of the world keeps right on going without it.  The search engines begin to pay less attention to it because they prefer relevant and timely content.  After all, they are not in the business of indexing history books.  Search engines want what their users want and they want to know about what is going on today.  They want websites that are more like news papers.

If your website has become more like a history book than a news paper, it will eventually begin to suffer its search engine rankings and a drop in traffic.  While it’s never to late to do something about this kind of situation, it’s always better to address the issue before it becomes a problem.

Starting where you left off on your website by making new pages and linking them to the old ones is an option.  However the underlying technology itself is outdated and it a good idea to look at implementing a content management system instead. 

WordPress is an Open Source content management system that has taken the Internet by storm and for a good reason.  It’s just plain great software.  It’s completely free with no strings attached, used by millions of websites and has more themes, plug-ins and other third party resources than any other platform.SEO for mature websites making it the most dynamic and easily customizable website platform in the world.

WordPress is search engine optimized right out of the box.  It’s a great starting point for an old website that needs a new lease on life.  So the bottom line in SEO for any mature website is WordPress.

So the first video really does not matter that much, but it will help you understand what they are talking about in the second video.   The second video explains the key points and what is needed to to really have an impact on your traffic.  If it’s not done just right it will have far less impact and you only have one shot at this.

The example they use is close to your website, but you in a better position than they are right now.  You’ll see what i mean in video two…

Part 2

Knowing whether or not your AdSense code is setup properly is vital and Google provides a method for finding out if it works with the AdSense Preview Tool. When you get this tool installed on your website, you will be able to easily determine what ads are on your site. You will have the capability of seeing which ads are be shown in other countries due to the fact that AdSense is geo-specific. For example, if you want to know what types of ads are shown in Texas, you can utilize this tool. You need to keep another technique in mind and that’s how to place your ads, since you can affect your revenue by proper placement. How and where you place your ad blocks on your website will determine if your income would increase or decrease. Using 250X250 and 336 X 280 ad sizes are the way to get the most from Adsense. On the other hand, you should consider your ad sizes depending on what your overall aim is. When you put ads on your site, you really should put them at the top of your site so that more eyeballs see it and more people will act on them.

If you want your AdSense income to mature, you need to write a lot of new articles. Put fresh daily articles on your site so that you can increase your AdSense money. When you have a considerable amount of content on your website, you’ll see that your search engine traffic will grow and so will your AdSense revenue. So the more visitors you get, the higher your AdSense clicks will be. In conclusion, you can make lots of money with Adsense as long as you heed the above advice and you avoid the common mistakes many people make.

These Are Good Also:
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I was reading the Free Link Analysis Service reviews over at the excellent Top Rank Online Marketing Blog  yesterday.  Going down the list stopped at each one to visit their website and maybe put their service to the test.

As usual with a cheap guy like me, I had one over riding criteria in the back of my mind that out weighed all other factors when looking at these services.  Not how much was it going to cost, but was it FREE? 

As I got to the end of the list I was a bit disappointed that none of them had Free Link Analysis Service  version of the service!  No light version or stripped down economy model.  At best one of them had a month long trial of the service and then it was time for the credit card.  I learned not to get involved in deals like that by having girlfriends that worked the same way. 

Not being the kind of guy that gives up, I started down the list of comments looking for a Link Service suggestion that might fit the bill.  Or not as the case may be…  And sure enough halfway down the list there was a suggestion http://www.linkdiagnosis.com/   So I figure 11 could just as easily be my lucky number as 1.  Or 2 for that matter…  Or 3 or 4 or 5  or what ever! So off I went feeling lucky because 11 could be my lucky number! 

Bingo!

I’m pretty sure they have Free Link Analysis Service.  The fact that I am not sure says something in and of itself.  I was so involved in what I was doing that I never lifted my head long enough to read any more banners or or stop to think about anything else.

I thought I knew the  link situation pretty good grasp of the links to these sites.   Turns out I did not know as much as I thought I did!

Open Source / Social Marketing

http://designweaver.info/  . 

My Brand New SEO Tools Blog

SolidWorks 3D Video Training Developer Website

I’m not even going to waste my thought process or your time by thinking about really neat things to say about this service.  I’ve already done that!  If your still reading this, you don’t need to continue on anymore,  Go play!!!  http://www.linkdiagnosis.com/  And when you’re ready, come on back and check out the next and last  FREE LINK ANALYSYS service. 

And for Gods Sake, if you have money burning a whole in your pocket, you go play too.  Your PAY LINK ANALYSIS services start right after this next one….  What can I say about these services other than I can’t afford them!  At least not this month, or year… 

Be sure to visit the Top Rank Online Marketing Blog.  It was their efforts that lead me to find the

Free Link Analysis Service . 

The ones below are paid Link Analysis Services

Majestic-SEO

BuzzStream Link Building

SEOmoz Linkscape

SEOMoz Linkscape

SoloSEO Link Building Tools

Yahoo! Site Explorer

Yahoo! Site Explorer

Page Inlink Analyzer

pluginSEO Beta Linking Tools

Sheer SEO Backlinks Watchdog

SEO Services Singapore

This text covers a a lot discussed subject within the search engine optimisation community. Additionally, clients and infrequently web site owners provide you with questions about what hyperlinks to get, and find out how to get them. Notice that I can’t take into account reciprocal links here, due to better alternatives, and because their effectiveness only applies to a small variety of sites, who use them underneath 10% of their overall link ratio. I’ll assessment the main varieties you want to get for your site.

The pure one-method links.
This one is solely based in good content and resources. This is the safest method of link building available as far as serps, which look at the “intent” of links. But it is usually the slowest. If your website is new, then as part of its launch, submit it to niche web directories. Start with a number of highly trusted directories, however would not have greater than 10-15% of your general hyperlinks coming from them. Don’t overlook industry-particular directories which may be paid or unpaid. These normally ship highly certified traffic and generally is a actual bargain. Directories will get you website many natural one-means hyperlinks, at a pure speed of growth. This mixture of sort and pace is very beneficial. Look for sites that will profit from providing customers your content.

Linkbaiting, or link bait.
This one shouldn’t be straightforward, and entails creativity. However it’s price every effort. Linkbaiting refers to content, movies, photographs or anything on your website that’s created with the intention of increasing hyperlinks to it. It’s extremely effective in getting links, most likely the most cost effective too, based on the price of the “bait” you employ, has no detrimental results from the search engines, at the least not for the moment, since all hyperlinks generated look natural. When complemented by social bookmarking, the networks associated with these hyperlinks will add much more worth to them.

Paying for links, or paid links.
These links can have great quick-term search benefits. These are good mainly for websites which have tons of pages with content, and have been nicely established online for years. In addition, these websites also have tons of natural links to them, once more as a result of they’d been properly established online for years. These usually are not advisable for brand new sites. Search for sites that are highly on topic with yours, and in complementary niches. A very important factor in the evaluation of these hyperlinks, like any other, is age. And the newest “Google Slap” impact were websites fall move the top 30 within the listings, is affecting primarily those which do heavy hyperlink buying.

Unhealthy hyperlinks and their effects.
Outbound links play an enormous position in the way engines like google determine who your “neighborhood” is. Bad neighborhoods will have an effect on your search engine rankings. Issues like FFA (Free For All) hyperlink pages, links farms, and so forth, fall in this category. Notice that this has nothing to do together with your pages going into the supplemental index. That is not the sort of penalty these hyperlinks trigger to your site. And the amount of unhealthy links thought-about is a big one. A small quantity of them would not trigger a penalty, but make it possible for your website shouldn’t be related in any approach to these link patterns.

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The Under Dog Blog I am talking about has not been optimized for the search query in question.  In fact, the EXACT PHRASE can not be found any where on the on the page.  (This is not a joke or a trick)

• The Blog Has No Google PageRank!
• No Inbound Links Reported By Google!
• And No Alexa Data What So Ever!

Update To Blog Post

After well over a month in # 1 position, my research subject has slipped to the # 2 position.  I’ll quit acting like a smart ass jerk and give you the facts.

Here is the search query:   poway real estate search (opens in  a new window)

The top position for this listing is due to the exact occurrence of the search query within the url itself.  I’m sure know that our would have figured it out in a few moments.

All the PR7 & 8 sites are still ranked below the Under Dog Blog so the fundamentals of this query and my conclusions appear to be intact for the moment.  The only change appears to be a new site that jumped ahead of the study subject.  It may be a paid listing that just falls lower than I’m used to seeing them land on a page.

If you have any insights to add about this website and it’s ranking ahead of all the big boys of real estate, I wold like to hear from you.  If your interested in how to make use of this kind of exact query to url match using sub-domains and some fancy keyword generation feel free to contact me.  I have been doing this for almost 8 years on MSN and it started working in for Google after the Mayday Update and has been going strong and stable.

Matt Cutts has made it clear the Mayday update was a success, Google is pleased with the out come of the changes and there are no plans to change or roll back any of the changes.  To me that is a green light to go ahead and optimize for the Mayday Update with confidence and gusto.

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Improved Usability

Greater Flexibility

The company we work for just picked it up for $600,000.  But the home was in bad shape as of April 2010.  

I’ll post a complete set of pictures and more information soon.

I highly recomend you visit this great blog if you are intrested in Social Media; http://thesocialmediaguide.com.au/

Take a look at these great articles and I’m sure you will agree, the Social Media Guide Blog is a great resource…

The Ultimate ‘Google Reader’ Guide
Twitter For Business – A High Level Overview
Reply To Facebook Comments Via Email

And these are just the tip of the iceburg.

Music ID 2

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Hold your phone up to some music and MusicID will tell you what song is playing! Using a sophisticated music fingerprinting algorithm, MusicID can identify over 28 million songs with new songs added daily!

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It later expanded further to include any university student, then high school students, and, finally, to anyone aged 13 and over. The website currently has more than 300 million active users worldwide.

What I need to do is create a few sample blogs.  So I’m looking for a few hot  out going women with some sexy pictures to post on the blogs and something interesting to say. (nudes OK, but no hard core please).

I’ll take care of everything.  There are no strings attached and I don’t want your money, (at least not bad enough that I will ask for it).    I don’t even want your phone number.

All I need from you is for you to post something that looks nice, text and pictures two or three times a week for at least two weeks.  I suggest you have some fun driving the guys crazy while your at it.

Give me a call, Robert at 619-288-9236, or shoot me an email robertqaz@hotmail.com  if you want to go for it.

Sites you may want to look at;

http://designweaver.info/ My main web site.

http://rhombus-home.co.cc/One of my WordPress Blogs

http://wordpress.org/WordPress web site

http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/WordPress Themes

Thanks for your consideration and I’m sure you will be pleased if you choose to do this.  I’m really good at what I do, especialy when it includes human female anatomy in any way, shape or form, I do it with a passion.

Sincerely,

Robert McCulloch

What makes Piwik unique…

1. Piwik’s uses plugins that allow you to add or remove features with ease
2. Easily build custom web analytics plugins
3. Complete control of important data because Piwik is installed on your own server
4. Access statistics data using the power and flexibility of Open APIs allowing you to publishing your statistics in several formats such as xml, json, php, csv
5. Fully customizable user interface – drag and drop the widgets to create and display report especially tailored to your needs.

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What is Digg?

Digg is a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web. From the biggest online destinations to the most obscure blog, Digg surfaces the best stuff as voted on by our users. You won’t find editors at Digg — we’re here to provide a place where people can collectively determine the value of content and we’re changing the way people consume information online.

How do we do this? Everything on Digg — from news to videos to images — is submitted by our community (that would be you). Once something is submitted, other people see it and Digg what they like best. If your submission rocks and receives enough Diggs, it is promoted to the front page for the millions of our visitors to see.

And it doesn’t stop there. Because Digg is all about sharing and discovery, there’s a conversation that happens around the content. We’re here to promote that conversation and provide tools for our community to discuss the topics that they’re passionate about. By looking at information through the lens of the collective community on Digg, you’ll always find something interesting and unique. We’re committed to giving every piece of content on the web an equal shot at being the next big thing.

Who’s behind Digg?

Aside from the community, there’s a hard-working team behind the Digg site. Founded by Kevin Rose and launched in November 2004, Digg has grown to be one of the most popular sources of information on the Web through the efforts of a passionate group of developers, database administrators, designers, and other individuals. The team is led by CEO Jay Adelson, founder of the billion-dollar company Equinix (EQIX). If you’re interested in joining us, we’re looking for more talented people to join Digg, so be sure to check out our jobs page.

Photo Credit: Wink

The increasing number of WAP users who prefer quick solutions to their problems presents a scope for affiliates to tap into three major mobile channels. Namely,

• Mobile Messaging – Advertising opportunities via SMS or MMS for text advertisements, splash pages and animated images.
• Mobile Web – Advertising opportunities on the mobile web involves banner advertising, text ads and branded mobile websites which work on a CPC or CPM approach.
• Mobile Video – Mobile video includes specifically branded videos which are live, podcasts or downloaded. The advertisements here can be on the basis of pre-, post- or mid-roll adverts.

There is a major opportunity for affiliates to build on the mobile version of their successful sites in order to guarantee newer audiences and increasing the market potential. But, the pace with which the mobile browsing has been adopted by affiliates is disheartening as companies such as Commission Junction and LinkShare have been very slow in adopting it. On the contrary, Las Vegas based  XY7 Network has made an innovative move by announcing that they are the only affiliates which possess dedicated division of WAP deals and other mobile-ad inventory for their mobile phone portal-owners and publishers.

The future success of affiliate’s lies in recognizing the fact that increase in number of mobile internet users will help develop affiliate marketing in an innovative way. Bango, a mobile payments and services company states that the mobile web will soon become the key medium of generating sale and earning revenue for mobile services and applications.

The challenge here lies in creating and implementing successful mobile affiliate marketing platforms which would change the way affiliate marketing is implemented in the mobile space. Companies such as Mobpartner and Jamster proudly boast of one of the best mobile platforms today by focusing on a particular niche of mobile payment settlements with merchants and mobile casino respectively. Belboon and MediaPlazza are also big players in the mobile browsing market offering scope to thousands of affiliates via the mobile web. Affiliates can also look into various adult affiliate marketing programs on the mobile which are also worth giving a shot, but are never safe as they most often get caught in filters. Admob is another very famous site which specializes in serving ads on the mobile version of sites and blogs.

The tremendous innovation in the mobile browsing has helped mobiles become something more than a fundamental communication device. Affiliate marketing programs on the mobile web have emerged as the next most viable mobile business model which for sure is here to stay. These mobile affiliate platforms can be further used as a particular functional strategy among broad marketing strategies such as CRM, Branding, Direct Sales and Direct Marketing implemented by companies.  The projected forecasts suggesting increment in adoption rates are indicative enough for smart affiliates to know the fact that neglecting the mobile arena as part of broader internet marketing strategies will have a negative impact on their business model and revenues.

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Companies are working fast to figure out how to make money from the wealth of data they’re beginning to have about our online friendships
By Stephen Baker

A question: If you have 347 followers on the Twitter microblogging service, what are the chances that they’ll click on the same online ad you clicked on last night? Advertisers are dying to know. Or, say you and a colleague exchange e-mails on a Saturday night. Can managers assume that you have a tight working relationship? Researchers at IBM and Massachusetts Institute of Technology are investigating.

Friendships aren’t what they used to be. We now have tools, from e-mail to social networks, to keep in touch with people who a decade ago would have drifted into distant memories. Practically every hand we shake and every business card we exchange can lead to an invitation, sometimes within minutes, for a “friendship” on LinkedIn or Facebook. And unless we sever them, these ties could linger for the rest of our lives.

What do these relationships say about us and the people in our networks? Companies armed with rich new data and powerful computers are beginning to explore these questions. They’re finding that digital friendships speak volumes about us as consumers and workers, and decoding the data can lead to profitable insights. Calculating the value of these relationships has become a defining challenge for businesses and individuals.

Marketers are leading the way. They’re finding that if our friends buy something, there’s a better-than-average chance we’ll buy it, too. It’s a simple insight but one that could lead to targeted messaging in an age of growing media clutter.

The second arena for study is inside companies. Businesses such as Hewlett-Packard and IBM (IBM) are researching employees’ relationships with an eye to quickening the flow of knowledge and the generation of ideas within their ranks. One team at IBM Research, studying anonymous data of Big Blue’s consultants, concluded that employees who forged tighter e-mail connections with their boss brought in on average $588 more in monthly revenue. This is early-stage research, but the goal is to distill patterns of successful communication and replicate valuable links throughout the company.

For most of us, the business value of networked friends is tied to a third area, personal opportunity. In addition to companionship, friends online represent a turbocharged Rolodex for entrepreneurs and job seekers inside and outside companies. These collections of contacts expand social horizons, keeping us in touch with more people who can provide ideas, answers, business leads, and even legal advice. Those who master these connections stand to win a big edge: the connections and brainpower of a large team.

“A NEW UNDERSTANDING”
An immense new laboratory of human relations is taking shape. Millions of us are playing, working, flirting, and socializing online—and producing oceans of data. Duncan J. Watts, a Columbia University sociologist now on leave and heading a research unit at Yahoo!, marvels at the change. “When I started network research 12 years ago, we had virtually no data,” he says. Now he and his team can study the network behavior of 295 million e-mailers and legions of the 200 million Facebook users. For social scientists, Watts says, this flood of data could be as transformative as Galileo’s telescope was for the physical sciences: “It gives us a new understanding of our world and ourselves.”

But managing hundreds or even thousands of relationships is a thorny challenge. Which friends go where? A couple of months ago, Fred Wilson, a venture capitalist in New York, decided to reduce the 360 people on his Facebook crowd into a circle of intimates. He kept the 56 he could see inviting to a wedding or bar mitzvah. The rest? “I nuked them,” he says.

Others find value in a sizable following. Earlier this year, Jason Calacanis, founder of the search engine Mahalo, offered to pay Twitter $250,000 to put his account on a recommended list for the service’s users. He says he was “half joking” but believes the investment would have paid off. He figures the recommendation would have steered 5 million to 15 million new followers his way within two years and that many would have made their way to his company’s Web site. “If 10% click on a link [to Mahalo] once a month,” he writes in an e-mail, “you have about 1 million visits a year. … I’d pay 5 cents for a follower.” Lots of businesses, he says, could benefit from such followings. An airline such as JetBlue could offer discounts to the first 1,000 people who respond and “never [have] another empty seat.”

While Calacanis tries to build crowds, advertisers are more interested in understanding individuals. Decoding friendship, many believe, could be the key to getting consumers’ attention. Historically, this wasn’t so hard. Information was in short supply, and by comparison, time was cheap. Not long ago millions waited through entire newscasts just to learn who won a game or what tomorrow’s weather would be. This was ideal for advertisers: They had a captive audience.

Now we’re swimming in information. We can call up nearly every bit of news, music, and entertainment we want on demand. In fact, there’s so much of it that we need filters to block the boring or irrelevant stuff and help us find the bits we need or desire. This has created what many call the “Attention Economy.” Says Bernardo A. Huberman, director of the Information Dynamics Laboratory at Hewlett-Packard: “The value of most information has collapsed to zero. The only scarce resource is attention.” So how do we figure out where to direct it?

The easiest way is to get tips from friends. They’re our trusted sources. At least a few of them know us better than any algorithm ever could. Little surprise, then, that the companies most eager to command our attention are studying which friends we listen to. Online friendship is a hot focus for Facebook, Google, and Yahoo. They joust to hire leading sociologists, anthropologists, and microeconomists from MIT, Harvard, and Berkeley. Microsoft just established a research division focused on social sciences in Cambridge, Mass.

Statistically, friends tend to behave alike. A couple of years ago researchers at Yahoo found that if someone clicked on an online ad, the people on his or her instant chat buddy list, when served the same ad, were three to four times more likely than average to click on it. It makes sense. Friends share interests.

But it raised lots of questions. Which types of friends have the most meaningful correlations with each other? People have always confided in a small circle of intimates, often only two or three. They’ve also had wider circles of experts for specific advice, whether on cars or cooking. Then there’s a broader circle of acquaintances whose opinions count far less but who can still generate buzz about a new restaurant or senatorial candidate. By studying patterns of interactions on networks—often scrutinizing us only as anonymous bits of data—researchers are working to predict which friends we trust and which we pay attention to in each area of our lives. The data can be hard to interpret, says danah boyd, a Berkeley PhD who just signed on at Microsoft Research. (She changed her name to lower case). “You may e-mail your mother less frequently than a colleague, but it’s not that she’s trusted less.”

In an office above Palo Alto’s University Avenue, a lean 32-year-old PhD from MIT’s Media Lab pores over the data connecting millions of dots. Cameron A. Marlow, a research scientist at Facebook, has perhaps the greatest lab in history for studying friendship. He can study social media communications including wall posts, shared photos, pokes, and friend requests among 200 million people.

IGNORING THE ADS
For all its popularity, Facebook has yet to prove itself as an advertising platform. Visitors, it seems, focus on their friends and pay scant attention to ads. Few click on them, and advertisers pay pennies for page views. Consequently, Facebook, with its estimated revenue of $300 million this year, brings in scarcely a dime a month per member. The hope is that if Marlow and his team manage to track the paths of influence among its communities, the company might be able to offer more effective and lucrative advertisements and promotions.

An early step is to separate each user’s friends into clusters. Marlow pulls out a chart illustrating the social network of one of his colleagues, Alex Smith. It shows different groups of dots and their connecting links. One big and busy group represents fellow workers at Facebook. Others are high school friends, family, in-laws, frat brothers. Understanding these types of relationships could provide valuable context.

Marlow’s team recently carried out a study to determine how close we are to our friends online. They looked at how often people clicked on their friends’ news or photos, how often they communicated, and if the communications traveled in both directions. Studying this data, they determined that an average Facebook user with 500 friends actively follows the news on only 40 of them, communicates with 20, and keeps in close touch with about 10. Those with smaller networks follow even fewer. What can this teach advertisers? People don’t pay much attention to most of their online friends. By focusing campaigns on people who interact with each other, they’ll likely get better results.

It’s an inexact science, to be sure. But that’s not stopping a host of startups from hitching friendship analysis to advertising and media campaigns. A New York company, 33Across, has partnerships with social networks, instant chat providers, and makers of online applications known as widgets. Each of these partners tags users with bits of tracking code known as cookies. These let 33Across stitch together friendship profiles of tens of millions of people, says CEO Eric Wheeler. The people remain nameless numbers, but the company knows which ones are connected to which, how strong the connection is, and how many others are in their circles. Working with packaged goods companies, 33Across has focused on thousands of people who have bought a product online, sprinkling ads for the same item along the online pathways of millions of their friends.

FRIENDSHIP DATA
In an industry where the majority of ads go unclicked, even a small boost can make a big difference. One San Francisco advertising company, Rapleaf, carried out a friend-based campaign for a credit-card company that wanted to sell bank products to existing customers. Tailoring offers based on friends’ responses helped lift the average click rate from 0.9% to 2.7%. Although 97.3% of the people surfed past the ads, the click rate still tripled.

Rapleaf, which has harvested data from blogs, online forums, and social networks, says it follows the network behavior of 480 million people. It furnishes friendship data to help customers fine-tune their promotions. Its studies indicate borrowers are a better bet if their friends have higher credit ratings. This might mean a home buyer with a middling credit risk score of 550 should be treated as closer to 600 if most of his or her friends are in that range, says Rapleaf CEO Auren Hoffman.

Such intelligence could prove useful for a financial company. While no one would automatically green-light borrowers based on their friends, the friendship data could lead them to assign a human to see if the mathematical model is missing something. “They pay more than $100 in marketing to [attract] customers,” Hoffman says. “If they reject you, they lose it.”

Friendship data promise insights into not only the marketplace but also the corporation. Researchers can trace the hidden networks, identifying both the people who transmit valuable information and those who appear to block it—and how workers bypass them. By studying these patterns, managers can promote effective networkers and try to bring less communicative colleagues—outliers—into the flow.

To build up communication within the company, IBM Research scours its networks for employees with similar interests and expertise—and suggests them as friends. One key laboratory for IBM is its internal social network called Beehive, in which nearly 60,000 employees discuss patents, critique software code, and even post photos of pets. Researcher Werner Geyer and his team sift through Beehive for correlations. Working with a control group of 3,000 employees, Geyer’s team analyzed the words employees used, friends they had in common, blogs they left comments on, and many other variables. Then they suggested possible friends. Their most successful group added an average of 3.68 new friends to their networks, more than three times the average of the control group. The idea: Each new friend plugs an IBM worker into another sphere of knowledge and human contacts. “These could be valuable mentor connections,” says Geyer.

For many, the question is not how to interpret friendship data but how to manage these networks and fit them into careers. Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn’s founder, has built his entire company on extending webs of relations. The idea is that while each of us likely will switch jobs seven or eight times in our careers, we continue to build a network of friends that can sustain us.

LinkedIn’s Hoffman sees himself as a test case for the value of casual friends. He says he has 1,864 contacts on LinkedIn. While he has met almost all of them personally, he admits that it sometimes takes a moment or two to recall some of them. “I think of them as light alliances,” he says. But they have a value. According to studies, the contacts outside of our close friendships are more likely to lead us to new opportunities. Their networks have less overlap and extend into different areas.

Hoffman looks at friendship as a marketplace in which we trade favors. He says he can create an opportunity for someone by taking 30 seconds and whipping off an introduction to a friend. It’s a small investment of time with a potentially big payoff. Both of his contacts benefit, and they have Hoffman to thank. His reputation inches up. But consider the risks. If Hoffman has misread one of his weak ties, the person he recommends might end up being a loafer, or worse. In that case, Hoffman’s reputation takes a hit.

All of networked humanity mingles in this vast marketplace, trading information, creating alliances, doing favors. We may not think of our connections in such mercantile terms. But for business and individuals alike, the value in online friendship is poised to grow.

Web 2.0 concepts have led to the development and evolution of web-based communities, hosted services, and applications; such as social-networking sites, video-sharing sites, wikis, blogs, and folksonomies.

The term Web 2.0 was first used in front of a large audience by Eric Knorr, executive editor of InfoWorld, in the December 2003 special issue of the business IT magazine CIO, with the title “Fast Forward 2010 – The Fate of IT”, in his article “2004 – The Year of Web Services”.

I’ve just put the finishing touches on my new Private Label WordPress video tutorials site, and it’s going to make a whole lot of Internet marketers pretty happy. Of course, there are a few people who are going to have a hard time now.

That’s because my new site removes a HUGE obstacle for anyone out there trying to get into the WordPress game by creating a video tutorials site.

Although WordPress was relatively “unknown” to the Internet marketing circle when I first made money teaching people how to use it, right now most marketers are using WordPress. However, there’s still a huge number of beginners or “newbies” entering the market. The Google trends data below shows that this trend is only going to increase in the near future.

There’s a lot of money in WordPress, and most of revolves around “How to” questions. Not everyone who wants to use WordPress is ready to browse through forums and blogs to find out how to get started, or to do more advanced stuff. That’s where step-by-step “screen cam” video tutorials provide tremendous value.

With PLRWPVideos.com, you’ll get an edge over other marketers since:

1. I create all the videos myself, from my 4 years experience with WordPress. No rehashed materials or reused PLR here.
2. All the videos you get were actually used by me in some of my best-selling products like WordPress AdSense System and Super Affiliate Blogger. That means I didn’t create them for the sole purpose of selling them to you – which is what most PLR sellers really do! They can’t make any money themselves with the PLR crap they are peddling.
3. All videos are updated constantly to catch up with all the changes and new versions introduced by WordPress. Other marketers would probably be selling outdated videos showing WordPress version 2.3.
4. You can request your own videos, and I will add them based on popular demand, This is my way of making sure I give you exactly what you need, and not what I think you need.
5. Membership is limited, which means that only a small group of people can have access to the videos. Currently the site is in BETA and I’m accepting about a small group of members only. When memberships are sold out, you can only get in if there are dropouts or if I reopen new slots.

Membership is pretty flexible, and you pay for what type of source files you want. There are pros and cons of each membership level, which I will explain here:

• Silver Member (Beginners) – Basically you get only the Flash files, and you customers can watch the videos online. The good news is that this membership is the cheapest, and most suitable for tons of new Internet marketers. It’s also great as supporting tutorials for your other products. However, you will not be able to cut, edit and mix the videos themselves.
• Gold Member (Intermediate) – This is the membership that gives you the most value for money. You get videos in Flash, AVI and other formats. If you are an intermediate level marketer, you would definitely want to offer you customers more download options as not all of them want to watch online videos. It also give you more flexibility as you can package the videos into physical DVDs if you want and sell them that way. Plus, you can also upload them to video hosting websites (provided they require a password) and distribute it that way. You can use them “out of the box” or you can edit the videos themselves, including adding watermarks, logos and much more.
• Platinum Members (Advanced) – The ultimate level of video marketing you could want, as you get the source Camtasia Studio files. With the source files you can pretty much do ANYTHING – translate the videos into a different language by adding your own voice over, add subtitles, merge or split videos, add background music, etc. Then, you can also produce these videos into any size, quality and file format you want.

So go ahead and get your PLR WordPress Videos membership today, and you’ll see why I managed to make a full-time living since 2005 just teaching others how to use and master this unique blogging platform.

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At our new Profit Web Directory, you can submit your websites and blogs starting at just $1.00 each for a basic listing, with up to 3 deep links at an additional $1 per link. I’m offering links at such a low price because I want to populate the directory with a sizeable amount of inventory before increasing the price permanently.

If you want to be among the top 10 on the homepage or category pages however, you’ll need to enter a higher bid. Being in the top 10 will definitely get you better link juice and traffic, but even the basic $1 link is good enough for most cases.

Getting one-way, non-reciprocal links to your blog is the best way to improve your search engine rankings. Besides this directory, I also recommend you use 1-way Links and 3-Way Links to get more sites linking back to you.

Submit here: Profit Web Directory

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The basic concern for a blogger shall always be the determination of ways to increase traffic and attract attention. The social media channels effectively handle both. However, there has to be a background research done, of a social networking site in order to identify the pros. and cons. before relying on it. As a seasoned blogger and social media consultant, I believe it is important to target niche sites which offer the information you want to deliver. The trick here for a blogger lies in understanding the areas to focus on while he/she is writing for the correct promotion of a particular website, product or service.

As I pointed out earlier, role of social networks in blogging is about delivering the right communiqué to the target audience and the research here proves the same:

You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to understand the fact that the top 4 results prioritize the role of communication. A smart blogger would understand how to use the data in order to reach the desired results. Engaging in discussions with the readers, using services such as twitter, FaceBook and LinkedIn for promotion will help further.

Thus, for a blogger it is important that he/she implements the following;

1. Write content which people would standup and notice when linked via a social networking website.
2. Register and comment regularly on the blogs which form a part of the niche and are relevant to the domain one writes about.
3. Places social widgets on the blog which would take visitors to the social networking profiles.
4. Puts information on the profile which would get a target reader interested in one’s blog.

These steps when followed regularly would begin to show results in due course of time. It is important for a blogger to understand the role of social networking to the core. Social networking is all about conversations and traffic. It is thus important to be accountable for your actions and be faithful and trustworthy in nature for the people to get attracted to.

Brand4Profit reiterates the same by saying,

Social Media Marketing uses the power of attraction. Your friends have your best interests at heart and advertisers do not. Social Media Marketing is based on building trust and that foundation will make Social Media a dominant player in Marketing.

Therefore, for the successful creation and sustenance of an online brand such as a blog, it is important to establish a reader base by spreading the positive word of mouth. The innate significance of social networking lies in its ability to help increase awareness quotient of your blog.

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The subject of “autopilot” blogging is perhaps the most controversial, yet the most intriguing. Imagine if you can spend one hour to set-up a blog, and continue to get traffic and income from that blog for the next 2 years without every touching it.

A lot of people ask me if it’s worth their time creating an automated blog- my answer is “It depends”.

Trying to use RSS to Blog, WP-O-Matic or other similar syndication services gets you nothing but duplicate content, resentment and a lingering headache. Needless to say, that type of autoblogging just doesn’t work anymore. So what does?

Today, you can (if you know how) get content that is 30% – 100% unique at zero cost. Yes, that’s totally unique content without getting a writer. If your content is unique then your chances of making money from your blog, especially via Google AdSense or affiliate programs, becomes significantly better.

So here’s how I recommend you build an autopilot blog today..

Step 1: Sign-Up With Article Marketing Automation for Content

I’ve blogged about Article Marketing Automation before, but what I didn’t stress in my earlier post is how easy it is to get free content in a variety of topics that are at least 30% unique.

You can choose to automatically accept any article that is more than 30% unique, or you can choose to manually approve articles before publishing them to your blog. In fact, I find that most of the users in AMA settle for nothing less than a 100% rewritten article. Perhaps that’s what you should do to, even if it means you’ll be getting lesser free content.

Set-up niche WordPress blogs and choose to receive only related content, and you may also want to use some AdSense-ready WordPress themes to make the monetization part even more automated.

Step 2: Start a 3-Way Links Campaign

Once your site has already been indexed by Google (at least 2 pages), you should sign-up for 3-Way Links and submit your site. I’ve reviewed 3-Way Links before and till today I find it to be one of the best tools to build one-way links to your blogs automatically.

Step 3: Write Articles and Blog Posts for Links

You can do this through Article Marketing Automation or other tools like 1 Way Links or even the FirePow system.

All these systems work with some sort of “article spinning” tool that spawns hundred of unique variations based on your original article. The trick is to use the article re-writing tool at Article Marketing Automation and then modifying the same article for use in the other two networks.

The AMA version is much simpler to use and it really drives you to create truly unique versions since it focuses on re-writing entire sentences. If you find it too tedious to do this yourself you can outsource your project online for a reasonable price.

Step 4: More Content More Backlinks

I’ve written about 35 ways to get links, and you may want to read through that article again to get some ideas on building more incoming links to your blog. If you don’t mind mixing up unique articles with non-unique ones, you should also take a look at the automatic article posting plugin which works wonderfully on WordPress.

Either way, you must make sure you automate content and link building as much as possible. As opposed to other blogging models like authority blogging or niche blogging, you simple cannot spend too much time on an individual blog.

Although the social bookmarking hype has sort of died down since Facebook and Twitter started to hog the limelight, it’s still as useful today as it was before. Using a plugin like Auto Social Poster you can automatically submit all your blog posts to an “x” number of random social bookmarking sites automatically. It works beautifully.

Step 5: Start More New Blogs

Indeed, the most crucial part about auto-pilot blogging is the continuous creation of new blogs. However, you can only do this if you have successfully managed to automate the blogs, which means you no longer work on them yet the content and links keep coming in.

However, as you create more and more blogs, it become rather difficult to manage them all. I recommend you create them by “batches” of 3-5 sites at the same time, using the same themes and plugins whenever possible. Here’s where some mass-blogging tools like WP Blaster or WP Cloner comes in handy.

A more robust blog management system like FirePow is ideal but you may not want to go that far if you have your own system or way of doing things.

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When most bloggers started writing before 2006/07, they did it for a passion on the subject, a need to communicate their ideas, and a way to make more friends. Just like a kid who has yet to see the evil in the world, their intentions were pure and idealistic. Making money was not only an afterthought, in some circles it was blasphemy.

To write a blog post that made you money directly was a sin. Paid blog posts and affiliate links were frowned upon.

But over the past year or so I see more and more bloggers “selling out”. They promote affiliate products from their blogs in a blatant way, and make no apologies about trying to make a living from their virtual real estate. A lot of them are also becoming aware than the old advertising model of making money from blogs is fading to obscurity.

But is it really a bad idea to try to make money from your blood, sweat and tears? Is it wrong to expect monetary returns for sharing insights, tips and experience about a certain topic?

I’ve always blogging about how to make money blogging. I didn’t bother with how to change the world by blogging – I just wanted to teach people how to use it as an ATM machine.

Looks like, that’s the way blogging is going anyways. Traditional A-list bloggers are becoming hardcore Internet marketers. The process is slow but the trend is obvious.

What do you think?

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In case you haven’t logged into your Feedburner account in a while, then do it now. All Feedburner feeds have moved to Google’s URL and the new access for your feeds are at http://feedburner.google.com

When you log into FeedBurner you’ll be asked if you want to move your feeds to an existing Google account, or create a new one. If you’re already using Gmail then you have a Google account, so use that and migrate your feeds today.

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http://www.millionmasterpiece.com/about

How can you create a true snapshot of our global society, and sum up its diversity in one single picture? Simple. Get together one million ordinary people from all around the world, and get them to work on the picture together in the world’s largest ever artistic collaboration. A collaboration where everyone is equal, where all outcomes are valid.

Sounds like chaos?

Well, yes. Nobody knows what will happen when one million people create a single work of art because nothing like it has ever been tried. Will the result be a crazy patchwork of individual images? Will some larger picture emerge from the chaos? Let’s find out!

So how does it work?

We are asking you to draw a small square image using software on our website. You don’t need to be an artist or be able to draw – you can make patterns, write words, doodle – what-ever you want. Your image will be one of one million images that will make up the entire picture – The One Million Masterpiece.

You can choose to make your picture fit in with the surrounding pieces, or make it stand out, by using a preview feature that shows your image with the context of your neighbours. You can change your image at any time if you don’t feel happy with it, and you can exchange messages with your fellow artists using our community pages.

Why should I get involved?

There are so many reasons!

Firstly, you will be part of something that really matters. This picture is trying to capture a snapshot of the society in which you live, and who is better qualified to make a statement about your world that you?

Secondly, you will be a published artist. Your image will be printed and displayed in some of the most prestigious art galleries in the world. You will also be a world record holder, having taken part in the largest artistic collaboration of all time.

Thirdly, you will be helping to make our world a better place. By making a donation we are hoping to raise over £3.5 million / $6.5 million / €5 million for global humanitarian and environmental charities..

And Twitter is a great source of traffic. The problem is most people say to make money from Twitter you need to build a large base of “Followers”, and in return Follow others. So they keep up to date with whatever it is that you want to announce to the world in less than 140 characters, via Twitter. In fact there are tons of Twitter plugins for WordPress that lets you manage your Twitter account easily.

But there’s another, easier approach to achieving the same results, using Viral Twitter Profits. Study the form below:

Basically, you offer something in return when your visitors spread your marketing message via Twitter. It could be a discount for your product, a blog contest, a giveaway, a free report, or anything of value. In the Viral Twitter Profits form that you install on your website, your visitors are asked to input their Twitter login and password.

The predefined message automatically gets added to their Twitter account and they can now claim their reward. Potentially, your message could get thousands of clicks right from day one – even if you don’t have a Twitter account yourself!

Visit Viral Twitter Profits and fill up the form to get a 50% discount, and in the process you’ll see exactly how this works. Very powerful stuff indeed.

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Hmmm…What does this mean? I’m interpreting it as they are trying to help coach small business owners to utilize their technology in the best way to provide an optimum consumer experience for their customers yielding maximum profitability and hopefully, if they’re lucky, an increase in consumer retention.

While I appreciate Microsoft’s entrepreneurial economic resurgence desire, I am not convinced that this 20,000 square foot facility located conveniently (ahem) in Redmond, Washington at Microsoft’s HQ was the way to really reach out to the American people.

You would think that during these “challenging economic times” people would be shutting down stores not opening them, and I can’t help but be pessimistic about the self-promotional nature of this endeavor.  While many services that are provided to help people are certainly self gratuitous in some shape or form, it seems like Microsoft could have taken the show on the road, setting up a moving exhibit showcasing their services in multiple markets that would have reached a much larger (and much more representative) demographic.

If the show wasn’t made for the road and if the objective really is to help their average consumer, creating a “store experience” that would best help people “cut costs, create efficiencies, streamline operations, and drive customer loyalty through connected experiences” shouldn’t they have setup shop somewhere on 5th Avenue here in the NYC, in the Mall of America, Union Square in San Francisco, Phipps Plaza in Atlanta, Tyson’s Corner in Virgina, or perhaps in the Grove in Los Angeles, all prominent (and highly trafficked) consumer retail markets?

Instead of taking their “showcase of new and emerging technologies” to the average consumer, they are keeping it homeward, which seems to clearly decrease the reach and magnitude of this endeavor.

How much of an impact that this “Retail Experience Center” has on Microsoft’s image, sales, and how helpful it is for the average consumer within this target demographic remains to be seen.

One thing that resonates with me from Microsoft’s press release is how important consumer loyalty is.

I’m not certain what Microsoft’s tactics are for addressing that need, but I hope to make it over to the National Retail Federation 98th Annual Convention and Expo here in NYC where Microsoft says it will be showcasing this center at booth no. 637, so I can find out.

What are the best ways to utilize technology to hang on to your consumers while concurrently generating new ones?

Now this is the million (multi-million?) dollar question, one that I constantly work to address as I build relevant CRM tactics, programs, and initiatives for many of my clients that integrate with their overall CRM strategy.  Obviously there is no clear-cut answer, but there is a resounding theme that echos through: you absolutely have to talk to your consumers.

(Photo courtesy of Microsoft)

Blogs Attract More Search Engine Traffic

Blogs attract search engine traffic.  Blogs already have a search engine optimized site architecture. Most are set up with a clear navigation, where every page is set up to link back to the main page.  They are all well-linked right out of the box.   You don’t need to optimize your blog in most cases.

Blog Directories and Site Submission

Many of the top blog directories can be found on this Top 55 list.  But before you head over there and start submitting, you should know a little about how to optimize your blog. Then your new listings can help your blog get the best keyword placement in the the search engines.

Tip One: Blogs and SEO – Keywords

You can target a general high traffic keyword you have little chance of ranking well for and get barely any traffic. Or you can shoot for a keyword that gets a moderate level of targeted traffic resulting in more subscribers and sales. I like to call this a “lucrative keyword”. Whatever you call them, here’s the most important thing: They may not get you the most traffic, but they often bring the most profit.

More Web Site Traffic and More Sales? Not Always

You may be surprised to learn that there isn’t always a correlation between high traffic and high sales. Many of the most profitable sites in the world get moderate traffic because their lucrative keywords result in a much higher ratio of visitors to buyers.

Length of Search Query is a Factor

A recent article in Information Week stated that the highest conversion rates from search engine traffic comes from people who do four word queries. The great thing about your blog is that it can get so well-indexed that you have the potential to show up for any number of four word phrases that are relevant to your industry.

Target Your Blog for More Traffic and Sales

It isn’t just the four word phrases that get converting traffic – there are two and three word phrases that can bring you traffic and sales. Targeting your blog discussion to a two or three word phrase that has a high yield of traffic, and yet has little competition, is not a dream of past Internet days. Another recent study revealed that surprisingly high percentages of search engine queries debuted as late as 2004.As long as there are new developments, new products, services and trends, you’ll never have a shortage of these terms if you learn how to discover them.

Tip 2: Blogs and SEO – Keyword Placement

Your blog can be set up to repeat the keywords that you want to target just enough times to establish a theme. You can take full advantage of this in your post titles, your category names, the pages URL names, or even a combination of Technorati tags and the text of your permanent links that appear after each post.

Tip 3: Blogs and SEO – Timely Posting

Instead of pinging at 15 minute intervals when your site hasn’t been updated, or even pinging after every single post, you can actually get better results if you update or ping just once during one of three sweet spots in the day – typically early in the morning (or at least before noon).

Check your web site statistics. If you’re getting spidered every two weeks or even monthly, you can increase your number of spider visits by blogging on the anniversary of the period that the spider comes to your site. It takes a bit of monitoring, but you can often predict when the date of your last spider visit was. An even faster way is to ping at a time when the spider is reading a page that carries your update.

Tip 4: Blogs and SEO – Get Linked

Turn on your site feed(s) and use them to promote your blog. Robin Good’s guide can get you some great one way links.If you sparingly include the lucrative keyword you selected in tip two in your title and description, all those link backs will contain the keyword term you most want attention for, which is often noted by the spiders as they follow the link through to your site.

Once there, if you use these and other tips to skew your blog a little more to the search-engine-friendly side, the synergistic effect is better, more profitable traffic.

Tip 5: Blogs and SEO – Frequent Updates

The more you post, the more food for the spider, which can cause the spider to react by splitting up its job into several visits, whereupon you have even more content, and so on, until the spider just adds you to a more frequent schedule of returns.

For example, my main site gets spidered several times daily by Google, and yet I can go a week without an update with no change in spider visits. This means my pages get indexed more often and my new pages show up faster. Think of what that could do for the launch of your next product.

Bottom Line: Blogs and Search Engine Optimization

You’ll be happy to know that you don’t have to slave over long blog posts several times a day, all day long to get similar results from your blog. In fact, some blog software will let you set up your posts in advance, so that you can have posts show up daily even though you technically only blog once a month.

A few small changes to your blog can draw more search engine traffic without turning off your blog visitors. Done properly, this gives your audience more of what they were searching for in the first place.

Tinu Abayomi-Paul is a website promotion specialist and author of five books and ebooks for the online entrepreneur. Her last project was a contribution to Rok Hrastnik’s comprehensive guide to RSS: “Unleash the Marketing & Publishing Power of RSS”. You can find more of her daily tips on RSS, Blogs, Google tools, and more, at her main blog,

Around four billion tissue packs are distributed every year in Japan. An internet survey of over 100,000 consumers show that 76% will accept the tissue packs, with over 50% saying that they’ll definitely look at the ad. In terms of appeal, tissue packs are more welcome than flyers and are more likely to be retained by the recipent.

Why? Because tissue packs are useful. People need them in their daily life and their lifespan is not limited to the time it takes to look at the ad, before throwing it away. Flyers and junk mail easily go in the bin, while tissues can be kept and gradually used for a period of time. Some consumers are likely to glance at your ad several times before they exhaust all the tissues.

What will the consumer see? Alongside the offer/pitch, company logos, phone numbers, website urls and addresses are usually the basic information included in the advertising inserts. Large and small companies often use tissue-pack marketing as a general branding strategy or a specific tactic to launch a new product or service offer.

Image Credit: Examples of tissue packs

It’s a simple but useful way to spread a marketing message and reach the people you want to target. There are two main things I like about it:

1. It is more than an ad. It is useful to the recipient. Bundled value asset (tissue paper) facilitates initial acceptance of ad message. It may also increase overall retention.
2. It is persistent. The message usually stays with the consumer for the lifespan of the pack: there is continual and repeated exposure over a period of time.

A tissue pack isn’t the only asset you can use. The basic strategy is to tag a marketing message to a portable functionality that extends its lifespan and value. Packs of specially branded chewing gum. Most people don’t mind chewing gum. Cardboard binoculars during a music festival. It helps people to see better. Anything that makes your message more than an ad increases the likelihood of it being accepted and retained by potential customers.

I’m not suggesting that you should start creating ad copy and bundling them with tissue packs to pass them out in your neighborhood. Of course, that can be done. But if you’re not keen on offline promotions, the principles of the tissue-pack can be carried over to online marketing.

Web users are going to tune out the typical ad that sells and sells only. Some automatically remove all image ads via a browser addon like Ad Block Plus. Display ads do work to get attention but a holistic marketing plan should also involve the use of ads, pitches and offers that are substantiated by an attached asset which extends its value.

An ad that isn’t just an ad. An ad that doesn’t just involve a pitch and sell. An ad that is actually useful for the recipient. An example: affiliate marketers give away free PDF reports as teasers to show actual product depth. Inside these informational reports are links and more details on the actual offer. People will read and pass around reports embedded with marketing messages because they find something of value in them.

The same goes for consultant firms who release white papers as an indirect way to market one’s skills and services. Establishing thought-leadership via educational reports focused on the needs and interests of one’s target audience is an effective way to build a reputation that will attract sales leads and referrals in the long run.

An advertisement for your firm, website or business doesn’t always have to look like a pay-per-month graphic banner. An ad doesn’t have to stand alone and face consumer resistance. Learn to bundle it with assets that extend its lifespan and value to your target. It helps in message retention and may even assist in the spread of word-of-mouth.

To receive updates on new articles, subscribe to Dosh Dosh today.

a

Advertisements that Work: Lessons from Tissue Pack Marketing

Social Bookmark

There are some things that you need to consider about this approach if you plan to continue to grow your business through online marketing during this difficult time, because online marketing isn’t the same as the marketing you may have done in the past. You cannot take the strategies and tactics of traditional marketing and apply it to how you participate on the Internet and expect to see solid results.

Old media was designed to sell ads. That’s how you and I got access to TV programming and cheaper newspapers- because advertisers paid the freight. That is how the Internet started out and, in many ways, advertisers still pay part of the note for sites/services/features that we enjoy for free. The difference is that, in the online world, the Internet doesn’t care because marketers no longer get to interrupt and try to command our attention, insisting that we see their message. Similarly, advertisers have lost the ability to carefully control what we know about their brand and what it stands for – we have such proliferation of information available that we can quickly and easily find out about a brand’s stance on issues of importance to us.

This is one of the main concepts that we try to talk to people about with regard to Social Media Marketing: brands need to fundamentally change their posture in order to succeed in this new marketing environment. It’s no longer about pushing a one-way message; instead, it is about providing relevant content and creating a natural draw for that information with your targets. It’s about listening to your customers’ interests and sending them information they’ll value and care about. It’s no longer about your brand and what you do, it is about what you can do for your prospects and customers.

There has to be a wake up call for marketers because the online world is becoming the primary media for reaching our target markets. According to a study released today by Pew Research, the Internet has overtaken newspapers as the primary source for news, but you must remember that the same rules do not apply to online marketing. As a marketer, you need to give up on the idea of pushing what you sell as a one-way message and embrace more direct communication with your targets, and focus on creating relationships and joining in the conversations that are already taking place online- conversations that involved you and your brand. You need to be a part of those conversations, so the time to engage is now.

I’m not an economic or financial expert, but I do know that they are doing an amazing amount of artificial manipulation of our economy, and all of that is going to eventually turn things around for this country. The U.S. is the biggest business in the world, it is not going to tank; we’re just going to have to ride it out for a little while until things start to turn back around. That being said, why would you sit and wait to start securing your place within this new marketing space? With such a small window to secure your position on the forefront as an communicator with your prospects and customers, can you afford to wait until this official recession is over?

Social media has and will continue to change the way we get health care information, interact with and find health care providers. It is a resource for information, patients, sales and employees. Health care organizations must understand how to use and take full advantage of the Internet and social media.

The California Health Care Foundation (Jane Sarasohn-Kahn, THINK-Health) published an article titled “The Wisdom of Patients: Health Care Meets Online Social Media”. They state that “Social media on the Internet are empowering, engaging, and educating health care consumers and providers. While consumers use social media — including social networks, personal blogging, wikis, video-sharing, and other formats — for emotional support, they also heavily rely on them to manage health conditions.”

They go on to state that “The collective wisdom harnessed by social media can yield insights well beyond the knowledge of any single patient or physician”. “The outcome of this development is “Health 2.0” — a new movement that challenges the notion that health care happens only between a single patient and doctor in an exam room.”

In an article about “Hospitals and Social Media” on Hospital Impact, Tony Chen states that “you might be surprised at how savvy some hospitals already are”. The “Cleveland Clinic is on Facebook”, the “Mayo Clinic Health Policy Center is also on Facebook”, “Partners Healthcare is on SecondLife”.

He also explains that hospital CEOs are participating in blogs and provides two examples, “Nick’s Blog (CEO of Windber Medical Center in PA) and Paul Levy’s blog (CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston)”.

This video Social Media and Health Care Practices explains how “social networks have created enormous opportunities for pharmaceutical and health care marketers to reach their patient and physician customers.”

Recruiting

Social Media is changing the way health care organizations recruit and communicate with potential employees. In the article Recruitment Marketing: Is Social Media Cost Effective for Recruitment, Part 5 by Ira Kaufman on 24 Aug 2008 he dispels “5 myths about social media and recruiting.

“Why use print to market a job (e.g., CNN nurse position) when there are often many unfilled positions already listed inSocial Media the newspaper? Social media is a low-cost promotional method that can pinpoint your exposure, get you links to your website, high search engine placements, high traffic and return visitors to your site. You are appealing to the community of users that have interest in your job opportunity.

A Kansas City recruiting web blog explains how recruiters are using social media.“KC Recruiters, Learn How To Use Facebook To Make $$$”, “New Twitter Tool Gives Recruiters the Edge” and “Rehabcare Launches First Podcast”.

A health care recruiting blog (employmentguide.com) posted an article about “Integrating Social Media Into Health Care Recruiting”. They state that implementing a forum “gives candidates and recruiters alike the ability to ask and answer questions about anything that is deemed important to them. For the job seeker, this gives them the ability to further brand themselves beyond the resume. For the recruiter it opens the door up to see what kind of personality a job seeker has by the way they answer certain questions.”

There are numerous blogs, forums and information sites. Jobsinpods.wordpress.com explains that “Candidates are already finding information about your place of work through all kinds of social media from Facebook to Youtube. Profiles on LinkedIn now allow you to take part and provide some measure of input directly from you.”

If you want to learn more about how Social Media is changing the way we learn about Health Care and the way we select and interact with health care providers visit the following web sites.

Blogs

Share Health Up-Dates

Patients Helping Patients

Physicians Discuss Cases and Issues

Information and Interaction

Discussions and Video

Johnson and Johnson blog with a YouTube video

Cigna is now on Second Life

SEO is a hot buzz-word and the searches for SEO companies has been steadily on the rise since 2004 according to Google Trends. With adverstising budgets being trimmed and marketing dollars dwindling in the face of our now “official” recession, I want to explain to you the reasons why you should be actively investing in Search Engine Optimization for your organization.  

I’m going to lay out some of the reasons why SEO is one of the best marketing investments you can make in this time of economic uncertainty, where every dollar has to count.

Search traffic will not be affected by the Market
Sales might drop and conversion rates may falter, but raw search traffic isn’t going anywhere. A recession doesn’t mean that people stop searching the web. Internet penetration and searches per user are still on the rise, and Search Engines are not going anywhere.

Unparalleled ROI
A MarketingSherpa survey of 3,053 client-side marketers determined that SEO was viewed as the most valuable marketing solution in terms of ROI; even higher than email marketing to in-house email lists. ROI is everything – especially in uncertain economic times.

The Web Outperforms Other Marketing Channels
When organizations look at the paths that lead to sales and income (a critical analysis whenever budgets are under scrutiny), the web almost always comes out with one of two assessments: Either it’s a leading sales channel (especially from an ROI perspective) or it’s deemed to be an area with the greatest opportunity for growth. In both scenarios, web marketing and SEO take center stage.

SEO is Losing its Stigma
Google is releasing SEO guides, Microsoft and Yahoo! both have in-house SEO departments and the “SEO is BS” crowd have lost a little of their swagger and a lot of their arguments. No surprise – solid evidence trumps wishful thinking, especially when times are tough.

Targeted Traffic
Traditional “push” marketing/advertising options often have you publishing an advertisement in a place where you’re hoping it will get a lot of eyeballs. That’s great, but the real question is: who owns those eyeballs? Are they the right people? Do they want or need what you’re offering? Good SEO keyword research can tell you a lot about your targets like what they are interested in and how they are searching for it. When you choose your keywords and optimize for them, you’re addressing an existing need or desire – and you know that the majority of visitors from search engines are looking for exactly what you’re offering. In short, SEO helps to drive highly qualified traffic to your website and gets your message in front of the right people.

Marketing Departments are in a Brainstorming Cycle
A high percentage of companies are asking the big questions – “how do we get new customers?” and “what avenues still offer opportunity?” Whenever that happens, SEO is bound to show up near the top of the “to be investigated” pile.

Web Budgets are Being Reassessed
Paid advertising is tapering off, and global conversion rates are still very low for pay-per-click. When managers meet to discuss how to address budget concerns they should be talking about improving how they grab that “free” traffic, instead of paid traffic.

Someone Finally Looked at the Web Analytics
It’s sad, but true. When a downturn arrives or panic sets in, someone, maybe the first someone in a long time, checks the web analytics to see where revenue is still coming in. Not surprisingly, search engine referrals with their exceptional targeting and intent-matching are ranking high on the list.

Don’t get me wrong here, because I am most definitely biased on this subject. I run an Internet marketing agency that specializes in SEO and Social Media marketing, but so I would always urge clients, prospects, everyone to make SEO an integral part of their marketing budget. The reasons are simple: people are not reaching for the yellow pages anymore. They are sitting in front of a computer all day, so when they need to find something, they go to their favorite search engine and look. With over 60 billion searches online every month, I guarantee that people are looking for what you offer. Wouldn’t you like them to find your site and not your competitors’? SEO can make that happen for you.

Sources: IGraphix & SEOmoz.org

How do you justify the value of Search Engine Marketing (SEM)? This is a question that we constantly have to answer to business owner to justify the value of hiring an Internet marketing firm. Since SEM is a long-term strategy for returns that depends on consistency and accumulation, establishing that return on Investment can be difficult. Here are a few suggestions on how to best integrate web analytics data with other tools to prove the value of SEM.

The key is your analytics software
The key to measurability is that it be as detailed and as comprehensive as possible, and that is one of the most compelling arguments for how powerful Internet marketing can be. There are many great analytics packages out there, and one of the best just happens to be given away for free from our friends at Google – Google Analytics. With the right analytics package in place, you should be able to pull a remarkable amount of information about how people are finding and using your site, and this information is going to be critical to determining the success of your marketing program. First, we’ll look at how people are finding your site.

Understand how people find your site
Search Engine Marketing is all about making sure that people find your site instead of one of your competitor’s sites. Your analytics tool should at least be able to track the critical metrics:

• Which keywords or search terms drive traffic from organic (natural) searches?
• Which sites are referring traffic to yours?
• Which search engines are people using to get to your website?

Identify the search terms and keywords
You also need a keyword ranking tool in addition to web analytics. There are a variety of these tools available, although most of the decent tools out there are have at least some cost associated with them.

Since the foundation of any Search Engine Marketing plan is SEO, it’s recommended to optimize each web page for the few most relevant keywords, depending on the amount of content on the page. The keyword ranking tool is crucial because it’s equally as important to understand how visible your website is for these words and phrases. For example, if you’ve optimized your site for the keyword ‘website design company’, does your site show up in a top listings within the major engines when a user searches for the term ‘website design company’?

Integrate analytics with keyword tracking
Once you have a handle on your website’s keywords and search terms, its time to go a step further by comparing this data with your analytics reports. The key question is: are the keywords you’re optimizing for the words that are actually driving traffic to your website? If not, your SEO program needs to be re-focused.

It’s important to reach prospects when they are in the early stages of the buying cycle, the people who are searching for general information. Why? Once your site has achieved visibility within the general search listings, prospects have the opportunity to dig deeper and learn more about your offerings.

You must track SEM-driven conversions
When you designed your site, what was the goal? Is your site’s content designed to provide information, generate leads, or both? Often times PPC (Pay-Per-Click) landing pages are designed specifically with conversions in mind, while other pages within a corporate website are more informational and simply describe the product or solution offered. We always advocate that clearly pronounced calls-for-action be present on all of your site’s pages, because you never want someone who is eager to contact you to waste even a nanosecond searching for your contact number of form. SEO campaigns for consumer-oriented sites are typically focus on tracking orders and sales, but in the world of B2B, marketers must be able to track other types of actions (conversions) such as white paper downloads, sign-ups for virtual tours and newsletters, contact form registrations, and even phone calls.

You may wonder how you can track calls that are coming in from your website, which is crucial for certain industries where the prospect is much more likely to call than email due to the specific nature of inquiry. For example: a custom fabricators of granite counter tops and bathtubs, or a commercial real estate developer. For any industry (or site, for that matter) that intends to drive phone calls to contact your sales force, the ability to track those leads that come in from the site is crucial! Setup a unique phone number, either local or long-distance, so that you can easily run regular reports on the incoming calls. There are a variety of solutions available for this, such as services like Kall8 that will let you register numbers and setup reporting schedules for specific campaigns, and more.

Measure your link building progress and effectiveness
Are you tracking the effectiveness of your link building campaign? Cultivating links from other relevant, quality sites not only helps search engines place value on your pages, but it also helps drive targeted prospects to your website. Link building is a long-term strategy so you need to have very specific tracking for these efforts in order to justify their effectiveness. A variety of different software options are available for this as well.

If you aren’t conducting a link building campaign or, like most businesses we talk to, you have no idea how many sites are linking to yours, then try this:

• The easiest way to determine websites linking to yours is by conducting this Google search: link:www.yourwebsite.com
• To find additional sites that might be linking to yours, try: @yourwebsite.com

Now for a better picture of how people are working Again, compare this linking information to your analytics data. Are your link partners actually driving traffic to your site? Linking should always be an ongoing initiative, so use these insights to continually improve your linking initiative. If you find that one type of site is driving more traffic, or higher quality traffic, than another type — focus future link building research in this direction.

Measuring additional off-page initiatives
What about all the other off-site or off-page initiatives that make up (or should make up) your strategy? Such as:

• Social media -Measure traffic and results from your social networking profiles, social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, and blogs and blog sites such as Technorati.
• Video SEO -Measure traffic and results from video community websites like YouTube.
• Optimized PR -Measure results from sites where your press releases and articles are posted.
• Email campaigns – e-marketing has so many amazing features for measurability, each campaign should be carefully quantified for continual improvement.

All of your marketing efforts should be tracked, in one form or another, by your analytics package in order to properly justify the value of your online marketing efforts. And since online marketing meets all of the qualifications for S.M.A.R.T. marketing; SMART objectives should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-based.

Bottom line: web analytics is the key to effectively measuring SEO success. But you have to combine your analytics data with keyword ranking reports, linking reports, and other conversion metrics in order to track improvements over time and to proactively establish the value of SEO.

We made this offer to several of the associations we have spoken to about online marketing and we’ll do the same for you! If you contact us, Valeo will provide a free Internet marketing analysis of your site as well as to integrate Google Analytics into your site for FREE! If you’re not tracking your site then you need this software, and it is 100% free to you.

Contact us now and find out more…

On the internet, you can see the same popular pictures in websites of every language. Russian, Chinese, French or English. Images transcend linguistic and cultural barriers faced by text. There is no need for machine or human translation. No need for mediation.

Like videos, images can spread very quickly online with little artificial push. Are they inherently more ‘viral‘ than textual content? It is difficult to say with certainty if it indeed has a higher potential for popularity. But images have undeniable value in spreading ideas. Especially when they are elegantly integrated with the use of text to present information.

Unique, original images can attract an audience. They are not only high quality content for an interested readership but they can be useful promotional tools for anyone interested in gaining more attention. A particular form of image is relevant to this purpose: the infographic.

Visual representations of information, data or knowledge. These graphics are used where complex information needs to be explained quickly and clearly, such as in signs, maps, journalism, technical writing, and education. They are also used extensively as tools by computer scientists, mathematicians, and statisticians to ease the process of developing and communicating conceptual information.

You’ve seen infographics everywhere. In books, magazines, newspapers, instruction manuals, maps, public signs and business reports. Visually, they come in many forms as well: charts, graphs, emblems, cartoons, diagrams and illustrations. Any image is suitable as long as it effectively works to convey data in a way that fulfills a specific or general purpose.

These graphics seek to inform. They can be a supplement to existing textual content or a hermeutically sealed construct, a stand-alone presentation which covers a subject in full. A complete statement and explanation that everyone can cite as a reference.

Infographics are a form of concentrated nutrition for data consumers. They are multi-vitamins, fulfilling basic info requirements in a simple hassle-free way. Like a pill, knowledge is condensed into essential components, enough to satiate your basic informational needs. They give you a general overview, one you can convert into talking points and social currency.

The amount of information they convey and the style used will vary depending on its purpose. Who is the intended audience of this piece? What specific frame or idea angle do you want to emphasize? How much abstraction and simplification is necessary for data to make sense?

Here are some examples from Princeton University’s International Network Archives. These infographics each give you a brief overview on a topic. See this page for full images and more.

The finished infographic is often beautiful to behold. Swirling gradients of color form into tangible shapes, contextually arranged to demonstrate quantifiable meaning. It’s easy to take it all in at one glance. Your eye darts around the numbers and skirts between the illustrations. You interact with it. You are thoroughly absorbed in its display of coherence.

And after looking, you’ll often think of sharing it. Maybe save the image, attach it to an email and fire it to a friend. Maybe you’ll include it in your latest blog post or tweet it. Or you’ll log into your favorite forum, drop the link and see what everyone else thinks.

There are many ways to propagate these images once they are produced. Apart from the usual social media channels, you can provide link codes by hosting the images and providing the html which points back to your site. Or you can package it into PDF formats along with other similar infographics to make a mini-report.

Unlike textual content, these images often do not include much text: you can consider pre-emptively translating them into other major languages so they can be shared more widely among different audiences.

They can also be produced on a regular basis as feature content. As a pictorial representation of information, infographics are often considered to be unique even if the data shared as already been elaborated elsewhere in text articles. Therein lies its appeal to a readership that might be jaded by the repetition of ideas in the content of other media sources/websites.

Good Magazine is an excellent example of a site that recently started creating infographics (known as ‘Good Sheets’) as regular online content. The print editions of these images were also given out free of charge at Starbucks. The combination of online and offline distribution is something that is suited to the nature of one-page documents like infographics.

Next time when you’re planning on sharing specific ideas or data, consider using infographics. They are a terrific way of making information accessible and a useful primer that will pique the interest of your intended audience. When created and marketed effectively, they can be part of a powerful viral strategy to magnetize attention to your website or business.

P.S I intend to write more on the topic of information design specifically as it relates to marketing. This is something I’m recently interested in and hopefully you’ll find it entertaining and useful. And by the way… Happy Thanksgiving to all my American readers and friends!

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Infographics Can Help You Spread Ideas and Attract Attention

Social Bookmark

One of the problems that I come across is just the amount of time that it takes to find the great blogs to follow. Weeding out the ones that are irrelevant or a waste of time can be a time-consuming and frustrating process, so you need some help.

A cool tool that I came across is called Toluu which let’s you add a feed that you like, and it will find the best results for other, similar blogs. Unfortunately, you have to get invited at this point- they are trying to control the number of registrations so that they don’t overload their system, but that’s how Gmail started out and it won’t last long if they keep up the good work. You can check the site out and request an invite and they will send you one when they have the capacity.

I think this marks the beginning of yet another new breed of web based applications and SaaS (Software as a Service) that will cater to the exponentially growing number of blogs and other social media content that exists. To see a really cool video of the times we live in and how quickly our world is both shrinking and expanding then see our post from a couple of weeks ago about The Speed of Things

Dave has done a great job getting the word out about how effective Social Media is for online marketing in Memphis, but I’m seeing a growing trend that everyone wants to focus on Social Media right now since it is the new ‘hot’ thing out there. Let me first say that I am a true believer in social media marketing, but I can’t say enough that it has to be part of an overall online marketing strategy. I talk to every client that we sit down with about the amazing benefits of social media marketing, but it is not likely to bring high levels of success if undertaken as a singular effort.  Marketing, as a rule, should not operate inside of a vacuum and that goes for Social Media Marketing as well.

Social Media Gone Wrong
Recently, there has been a ton of buzz about Motrin’s social media campaign that completely backfired. In case you missed it, this commercial was a Web video ad for Motrin was developed by the folks at McNeil Consumer Healthcare, which is a unit of Johnson & Johnson. The ad was targeted at mothers and talked about the physical pain involved with carrying an infant in a sling. Watch for yourself and see what you think:

The ad was intended to show empathy for young moms, but ad came off as too flippant for some and a hger campaign of angry mothers started building on Twitter over the weekend with thousands joining its ranks, tweeting angrily about the Motrin campaign.

Equally swift was the company’s response, which came early Monday when Johnson & Johnson plastered the front-page of the Motrin.com site with an apology. They stated, in case anybody missed it – “We have heard you.”

This is a great example of how using Social Media went terribly wrong and why consultants who are pushing Social media marketing as the be-all, end-all of online marketing may quite possibly be giving some less-than-ideal advice to their clients. That’s why it is important to understand how all the pieced come together for a successful online presence, so keep reading, and we’ll continue to tell you how to do it!

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