While they’ve had a large number of sign-ups how could it possibly be a success if nobody actually uses it? The reality is that Google doesn’t care if people post status updates on Google+ instead of Facebook. Google doesn’t care if the average time on site is a fraction of what it is for Twitter. What Google cares about is the fact that using the massive buzz around it they were able to get over 150 millions people to sign up and put in their information into their profile.

Google makes 96% of their revenues from advertising, and advertisers don’t care how often you post status updates – they just want to know who you are.

I really don’t think that Google ever thought they would be able to create the next Facebook and get everyone and their mom to use it. But they did realize that they could get the next best thing – everyone to just create a profile and upload a picture and then most importantly provider: their date of birth, where they live, where they work, and their social graph. Google followed up on this masterstroke by getting everyone to sign their new “simplified” universal privacy policy that allows information to be shared across all of their products.

“Don’t you think that with Google Search – again I must stress with your permission – that Google will do a better job [if it knows] who you are and what you care about?” -Eric Schmidt

What does this mean for you? The ads across all Google products, which are already very targeted to you, are going to become even more targeted.

Google has always had somewhat of a problem with accurately nailing down demographic data since it was very reliant on predictive data. Now Google no longer needs to guess whether or not you are 18-25 working in the advertising industry, since you told them already. If you didn’t tell them they know enough about people visiting similar sites and conducting similar searches to create a look-alike model for you. This will give Google not only the highly targeted search data they are known for but more traditional metrics as well to take an even bigger slice of the advertising pie.

When clients have asked me whether they should be using Facebook or Google I have always said that it depends if you want to know advertise to people based on what they “like” or what they want. Soon they won’t have to choose.

After thinking about it for a little while, I realized that for the past 6 months, whenever I mention “SEO” or “Search Engine Optimization” to people not directly involved in the internet marketing industry the majority of them actually have a pretty good idea of what I am talking about. This was not the always the case. When I first started doing SEO in 2007 people always seemed convinced that I either worked for Google (especially if I mentioned AdSense) or they would just say something along the lines of “I’m horrible with computers” to hint that they weren’t quite following me.

What I have realized is that most people that have heard of SEO associate it with some news story, such as the J.C. Penney’s SEO story in the NY Times or Overstock getting caught buying .edu links off students and faculty. Many people have even heard of Google’s Panda algorithm change because it had enough of an impact on the average online business owner (either positive or negative) for it to spring up stories in major news outlets.

Here’s a Google Trends graph for the search term SEO over the past 6 years. While the top graph does seem to flatten off a bit in the past year I do find it interesting to also look at the bottom graph for “news reference volume” which shows a big jump starting in 2007.

What does all this increased publicity towards our industry mean? It means that we are in the right industry. It means that more businesses are seeing the value in showing up in Google, Bing, and Yahoo for search terms related to their own industry. Companies are hiring more SEO consulting firms and expanding their own in-house SEO teams and it means that companies are now searching for more well rounded marketing candidates that can also integrate SEO and social media into their marketing strategies.

As companies hire more SEO professionals and media outlets pay more attention to algorithmic changes the more likely it is that the next time you offer your business card to somebody they will understand what it is that you do.

The next time you are in an elevator ask the person next to you if they have heard of search engine optimization and then post your findings in the comments section!

I have been absent from this blog for about a bit because I have been working on a project that I have kept secret until the day it was finished. I didn’t want anybody to see a half finished product, so this will be the first time that I associate my new site with myself. I am giving out a free ebook called the “Fast Cash Blueprint” which I am using as my lure to feed a double opt-in mailing list. By doing so I can accomplish multiple goals:

• Create a long term relationship
• Legally send out highly targeted emails to a responsive market.
• Allow myself more flexibility as I can always test my emails to find the most effective use of affiliate links.
• Give myself a great advertising venue for premium advertisers as well as to help me launch my book next January.
• Share information with others on how to make money, I wouldn’t create a product that doesn’t help my readers.

The process is really quite simple to start a mailing list, you will need 3 basic ingredients: Traffic, a Landing Page, and an Autoresponder. Once you have these three, you just need to figure out what emails will suit your list the best. Unfortunately, this is a bit of an over simplification because as you know, getting targeted traffic is not a simple process. Here’s how to accomplish each of the parts of making a mailing list.

Traffic, this is the most important part of any web property. Everyone has their own ways to drive traffic to their websites so I am not going to list all of the options, but I will say that I do all of mine via article marketing. You will need some kind of incentive to make people want to join your mailing list. My hook is a 23 page ebook that not only teaches people how to make money, but it also has a “giveaway” license so that they can give it to their readers as well. If you would like, you could start out by using my book as a hook, you just can’t modify any of the content (including my name/links).

A landing page is probably the second easiest step in the process, but at the same time it is incredibly important. Unless your landing page makes people want to sign up for your mailing list, your efforts will be for nothing. I would suggest hiring a graphic designer for this to achieve a maximum effect. Take a peek at my new landing page: Work From Home Methods, it took me 1 hour to add the content into the template and use free graphics to spice it up a little bit. As for the price of the graphics and the template, I paid $60 total. I think for an hour of work and $60 that is a pretty nice looking site.

The last thing you will need is an autoresponder, for which I could not recommend more Aweber. Their support is absolutely stellar, I have talked to them about various aspects of my mailing list for the past two weeks and they are true professionals. The autoresponder allows you to create opt-in forms easily while allowing you to send emails without getting blocked by ISPs, and therefore providing extra legitimacy and legal protection. This is the easiest of the three steps in my opinion, the setup for my mailing list was effortless. I would highly suggest using Aweber, they are the best autoresponder company I have worked with to date.

Best of luck in setting up your own mailing list. This is one of the most important ways to turn your internet marketing efforts into a full time income, a targeted double opt-in list with a few thousand subscribers can sell advertisements at $1,000+ per email blast.

The content may still be under construction, but the graphics for the site have been made.  I have the full template as well as affiliate resources created, which means that now all I need to do is fill in the sales page with the copy (that will be a 3 week project).  I got the idea for “Weekend Marketing” back in mid-May, and I have already decided on the name, received and paid for my graphics, found a proper web host, and began my marketing campaign.  I would say the project is well on its way.

Since I know you all want to skip through what I am saying to see the pretty pictures, here they are!  Weekend Marketing This is also the first official link to my website, so taking my own advice on getting indexed as soon as possible, I figure now is a good time for the spiders to have at it.  I would love some comments on the graphics, please tell me how they work in your browsers, how they catch the eye, etc.  I especially want input on the “Peel Away Ad” that I have added, because it took me 5 hours to make the simple script work (my web host apparently didn’t have my PHP scripts whitelisted).

Now less about me, more about the process.  The process of hiring a good graphic designer isn’t necessarily a quick or cheap process.  I have dealt with a handful of designers before, and while I have been “satisfied” with the work they did, I didn’t truly love it.  If you have a project you are truly committed to, you need to take your time with every aspect of it.  I went through and got quotes from the 5 biggest direct response graphic designers in the business and looked through every single example in their portfolios to make my choice.

I had a huge range in the quotes that I received, and I didn’t go with the cheapest or the most expensive of the quotes I got.  I was torn between three designers, as all had approximately the same level of skill, and two were within $50 of each other and the third was an extra $500.  I waited a day before responding to any emails to make sure that I had thought through the process as the graphics can make or break a product.  I decided that for my product I wanted a more subdued look while still catching the eye, and for this I ended up choosing Sean Lowery.

I very rarely give out free advertising to business partners, but he truly did an excellent job with this project.  We had about 20 emails back and forth and multiple redesigns as I know exactly what I am looking for.  I couldn’t have asked for any more, I love the design, the affiliate resources, and he delivered on every little detail and more.  If you want to have a big product, you will need big graphics.  If you plan to make an opt-in page, ClickBank product, blog, etc. make sure to get a quote with Sean, he will work until your are satisfied.  The key to success when hiring a designer is to have an image in your head and hold true to the basic design, but allow the expert to make it into something that will sell.

Feel free to check out Sean’s website here: Minisite Graphics and make sure to leave me some comments on the images.  You guys are my first wave of testing!

My analysis on this would be that they are fully aware that the sites that rank well in their algorithms are due to people gaming the system, so by logic the most skilled internet marketers will be the ones that rise to the top.  As a result, the best content will typically go with these marketers as all sides are trying to maximize their profits, but they realize this creates a system where it becomes extremely difficult for an average person to climb through the hierarchy.

In short, I view it as a move that signals the start of a trend of decentralization of power as they try to give some of the smaller websites a shot at some of the keywords that haven’t spent as much time building links.  As the ebook is heavily focused in on the various on-page SEO factors I feel it plays into the trend I have been noticing in which Google has started putting far more emphasis on the on-page factors than they have in the past.

One way or another, it was certainly an intriguing move and it looks like it will work out to be a good resource for new webmasters.  Hopefully they add it to their webmaster guidelines so that all new marketers can see it and get a little boost in the right direction.  Since I’m sure you guys would like to read it yourself you can either visit the official Google blog, or download the ebook.

On that note feel free to download my own ebook, which goes into the SEO topics that Google will never share with anyone else.

The first thing you should do once your website is live is post the domain to Google and other search engines.  I have always used AddMe for my search engine submission just because it was the first thing on Google when I created my first website and they have never let me down.  I wouldn’t sign up for the newsletter though, it is basically just all advertisements.

The second thing you should do is create a sitemap and submit this to Google’s Webmaster Tools, this will ensure that all of your content gets included in the index, not just your homepage.  There are plenty of free tools out there to create a sitemap, I typically just use whatever is at the top of a Google search.

The third step is to check your website’s onpage search engine optimization, especially check to see that every page links to another page in some way, try to have as many pages link to each other as possible to give a more thorough distribution of PageRank and spidering later on in the process.

The fourth step is pretty simple, create a robots.txt file for your website.  Without a robots.txt file search engines are not allowed to index your website, and as a result you won’t ever get indexed.  Just create a blank text file that says “User-agent: *” then next line “Disallow: ” named robots.txt and put it on the domain level directory on your server.  Leave disallow blank unless you have pages you don’t want indexed.

The fifth step is the most fun, because this is where you will get your first backlinks to your website.  This is the key to getting indexed in hours.  The way that Google determines when to index your site is either by putting you in a line via webmaster tools, or by finding your site via their crawler.  It can take months to get indexed without any backlinks, so it is essential that you build backlinks pointing to your site.  The way I typically do this is by submitting my site to StumbleUpon, Digg, and Furl then I go onto all of the forums I post on, and change my signature to have a link to my new website.  As a result, I rarely have to wait more than 5 hours to get indexed.  To make this even more likely to be successful, post on popular do-follow blogs as well.

Sixth step is simply checking the results, a day or so after following these steps try typing site:www.yourdomain.com and see whether you have made it into Google.  If you are, congratulations, start working on your content and building relevant links to start ranking for keywords.  If you aren’t wait 3 days and if you still aren’t then start commenting on more blog posts, especially new ones.

With this site, I typically see my new posts indexed within half an hour, I have seen them indexed in as little as 7 minutes before (As a side note, this post got indexed 5 minutes after it was posted).  To get more tips and tricks download my new ebook which is an internet marketing ebook with a focus on blogging, “Blogging 101: Traffic and Link Development Tips”.

My website was hacked by somebody that redirected all search engine traffic to a site that downloads a virus and then tries to sell you software to remove that virus, when repairing computers I have run across this Smithren strand of viruses before.  I can’t figure out why I can directly access my site, but any time I type the name of my site directly in to my browser I have no issues.  Then I start troubleshooting to see how to fix the problem, I’ll go through the steps I did for troubleshooting now.

1. Login to your control panel and view when your files were last modified, if any .html files were modified check to see if they added a meta redirect.  Ex: “meta refresh=meta http-equiv=’refresh’ content=’0; url=http://www.example.com/”
2. Check the last time that somebody logged into your control panel (previous to your current login), see if you remember logging in then.
3. Check the last time somebody uploaded something via FTP (Ah Ha!), this was where I noticed the issue.
4. Check if your domain is pointing to your name server, and see if any 301 redirects have been added.
5. Check to see if there is anything weird in your .htaccess file, this was my issue.  Somebody used my FTP server to overwrite my .htaccess file with their own which simply said “if it is any of these search engines: “listed the search engines”, redirect to their website”, I won’t show the actual code because I don’t want to spread the knowledge around.  Once you see that your .htaccess is redirecting elsewhere, simply empty it out.

Now you have fixed your problem temporarily, but what else can you do?

• Check to see if your .htaccess file is public by typing http://www.example.com/.htaccess, it should return a “403 access denied” error.  If it doesn’t, that is a big issue, change it to a hidden passworded file in your control panel.
• Change the passwords for your FTP accounts
• Change the password to your control panel
• Contact your web host to find a way to better secure your websites in the future (and most likely their own servers as well, they will want you to report these things)

Then all you have to do is go around ranting and raving about how much money you lost and how much time it took to fix the problem, and then continue on with your day.

Website security is a big issue, the best place to learn more about it is a web hosting forum.  If your website gets hacked it is very possible that people will report it to spam watch sites and the search engines and you could easily lose all the time you spent on search engine optimization.

The thing I always find funny, is that the people that are trying to exploit this Digg traffic are typically submitting stories so far from the Digg base that it is comical.  I wish I could find one that I saw a month ago, because commentary on it would definitely make it to the front page.  It was a post a travel website that was about visiting Puerto Rico that randomly injected “We use Linux for our server and we love Obama AND Ron Paul!”, which at least shows they get the concept.

These are the reasons why your post will NOT make it to the front page of Digg, despite the fact that you would really like that:

• Your post is plastered in affiliate links
• You are a travel agency, cable company, fake rolex salesman, pharmaceutical company, or “mak mone on internet!” website.
• You are far too obviously appealing to the Digg crowd by overstating your love for the current Digg fad.  (I love: Obama, Ron Paul, Linux, Macs, internet meme’s, hacking, microchips, Nader, Google, trashing Palin, sharks [don’t ask me, lately that keeps making front page], Nvidia, dissing Fox News, video games, Flying Spaghetti Monsterism, anti-creationism, people “fail.”ing).
• You cannot consider your mastery of the English language to even be “conversational” (Kind of like how my roommate speaks “conversational Spanish” on his resume).
• You don’t include one of the above topics.
• You post something with no chance of going viral, you need quality content such as Sneezing Panda
• You are over the age of 60
• You are under the age of 15
• You are part of either: “The Establishment” or “The Problem”
• Your posts all include that really annoying embedded Digg button despite none of them being interesting
• You smell like a Republican
• You can’t recognize any of the top 100 Digg’ers
• You are “too cool for school”
• Nobody cares about what you are trying to get people to Digg, since it is bogged down in ads.
• Most important of all: You actually don’t realize that this post is sarcastic yet true.

So there you have it, if you wish to see 75,000 visitors on your website so they can crash your servers and then point you towards a Digg post on why you shouldn’t use Windows hosting, study this list and make the necessary modifications.

*cough* And on that note: My Barack Obama.

Feel free to sign up for my RSS feed or comment on this post

Below are the top 15 ways to make sure that anyone that would normally be interested in what you have to say flee from your site and go elsewhere for their information.  If you don’t believe me, simply try it yourself for a few weeks and see what it does to your site

1. Start your post with a hoplink for a ClickBank affiliate product, this is always promising.
2. Spend more than half your content asking your visitors to do things for you (email friends, social bookmarking submissions, comments, subscribe via email). *cough* You don’t mind, right?
3. Don’t spell check your posts, tehre is no raeson y u need gud grammor to mak money on internet!!
4. Don’t use paragraphs, people love to read solid chunks of text.
5. Don’t include any links, images, bold/italics, or anything that might make people look at your website for longer than 7 seconds.
6. Allow any comment to go unmoderated, everyone loves reading about various ED pills while they try to get their information.
7. Include completely off topic posts, I love hearing about your love for beluga whales in your “internet marketing blog”.
8. Don’t utilize social media, they are unlikely to click on your PPC ads so listen to the people on DigitalPoint that say that this traffic is therefore useless.  No need to have actually interested readers.
9. Decline all trackbacks, whenever somebody is interested in your blog and talks about it you should hide this fact from others while pissing off the other blogger.
10. Make sure to divulge your hate for everything, everyone loves a blog that is simply a long rant.
11. Go on internet marketing forums and say “Hey look, I found this awesome site: [insert site]!!!” while also having it in your signature, nobody will guess it is yours and make fun of it.
12. Use pop-unders, pop-ups, and pop-overs as well as exit ads to get people to sign up for you affiliate products, because clearly people will appreciate this.
13. Always hotlink images from other sites, especially ones that clearly visit your site as well, nobody would ever change the image to something incredibly offensive.  While you are at it, make sure you have lots of dead pages (404) on your site.
14. Lies!  Make sure you lie to your readers as much as possible… I made $17 million today just by writing this blog post!
15. Don’t offer any useful content, ever.  All content should be written to make money or to help with Google.  Useful content would never develop any links naturally, it must all be artificial.

There you go, it is just that simple.  Follow these easy steps and you will be well on your way towards losing all of your RSS subscribers and daily visitors.  Simply rinse and repeat, inserting a copy & pasted ad copy as your posts every once in a while and you won’t have to worry about people chewing up your bandwidth.

Often on forums I hear people asking where to get a good backlink checker, search engine results placement checker, etc.  I am a big fan of new tools, so if you know of a great tool feel free to post it in the comments and I might stick it into this post.  Here’s the list of tools that I typically use once a week for my websites:

Yahoo Site Explorer – A tool that displays all of the backlinks to your website that are in Yahoo’s index, as the second largest search engine this results in a very good overall picture of your backlinks.  Google’s “link:” command is basically worthless but Yahoo is willing to divulge the extent of their link discoveries.

Search Engine Genie Google Position Checker – One of my absolute favorites, this is a tool that you can use unlimited times (free!) for checking where your website ranks in Google for a given search term 1000 rankings deep.  I use it all the time, so they deserve a free link, I highly recommend it.

SmartPageRank Backlink Checker Tool – This is another great tool, it checks the number of backlinks to your site and then gives you the option to also get the PR of those pages, anchor text, and presence of “nofollow” tags on the links.

Google Blog Search – A great tool for bloggers as it shows the links incoming to your site from other blogs.  Not everything that links to you will generate a ping, so this is a great way for bloggers to check how they fare in the blogosphere.

For traffic checking I typically use Google Analytics and MyBlogLog, I prefer the layout of MyBlogLog to G.A. so I typically check that more often than analytics.

Remember not to get too caught up in statistics, many people will literally spend hours checking how much money they are making, traffic they are gaining, etc.  A watched pot never boils, and the time you spend checking stats will take away from the time you spend building links and traffic.

If you have any other great tools, feel free to post them.  If not, subscribe to my RSS feed