What is Google Places?

What determines your Google Places Rank?
Everyone is wondering what the ranking factors for local search engine optimisation. Do you stuff your Google Places page with as many keywords as possible or what?

Here are the top 10 factors that determine your Google Places ranking – From Least important to most important -

10 – Add Coupons
Google wants to see more interactivity with their Google Places section to people keep coming back. By adding coupons, it adds value to the user experience and helps with your rankings.

9 – Proximity of business
This factor used to be very important but from my own experience, it is not as important as it used to be. You still need an address within the city that you want to optimise for.

8 – Add pictures
Add pictures of your business, products and staff. Make sure you name the files appropriately so Google knows what the titles are about.

7 – Add video
Google loves videos and they have made it very easy to add your own videos. If your profile does not include videos yet – what are you doing?

6 – Add reviews
Do not add fake reviews. Help the process of getting reviews by asking your happy customers to add reviews.  Remind them to add the keywords you are targeting.

5 – Organic Ranking
Your ranking  for your chosen words in the organic search results does have an indirect influence to your local business listing. Try and optimise your site for a good ranking in the search engine result pages.

4- Contact details on your own site
This is often an overlooked factor – make sure your website has your contact details including your business name, address and phone number. If you can, put it on every page.

3 – 100% completion
When you edit your profile page, Google will give you a completion rate. To get the best ranking, this needs to be 100%.

2 – Claiming your listing
You need to claim your listing. By claiming your listing, you can make edits to your profile page and add more information about your business. Google wants you to do this and make sure that it is up-to-date.

1 – The number 1 influence factor for Google business listings – Citations!
You want to add your business name and contact details to all the business directories and websites that you should be listed on. Any directory or website that is related to your location and industry must have your details listed on it. Many directories allow you to add your business by filling out a form. To get added to industry related websites, you may need to make some calls or send some emails. With a bit of effort, you will get a number of citations that will influence your business listings ranking.

When adding citations for your business, they do not need to include your website. The business name, address and phone number needs to be exactly the same everywhere. If you find a page on the Internet with inaccurate details, you must get the details corrected otherwise it will hurt your rankings.

Wrap Up
Good luck with the local rankings and if you need help or would like me to do this for you at a cost, please email – nigel@burke.com.au or call 0421 347 932.

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It is broken into two areas -

Hot Searches – This is a list of the fastest rising searches on Google – updated daily.

Hot Topics – This is a list of popular topics in the news, Twitter, FriendFeed and other messaging services. – updated hourly.

This is useful for finding the hottest searched and talked about terms on the Internet.

You can enter terms related to your website or industry and find out what people talking about and searching for.

This is a free service and you try the service out yourself here – http://www.google.com.au/trends

Google keeps a record of daily results which you can access by clicking on change date.

Inddig
This is website that archives and analyses Google Trends so you will never miss another trend – http://inddig.com

Yahoo Buzz
Want to know what Yahoo users are searching for? http://buzz.yahoo.com

Bing Xrank
You can also track Bing searches using this tool – http://www.bing.com/xrank/

eBay Pulse
Want to find out what the hottest selling items on eBay are? Check out eBay Pulse – AU version - http://pulse.ebay.com.au/ or US version – http://pulse.ebay.com

Amazon Best Sellers
Here is a updated list of the best selling products on Amazon – http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers

BlogPulse
You can see what the most popular blog topics are right now broken down into months – http://www.blogpulse.com/trend

43Things
This site allows you to enter you goals in life and then people can add  comments and goals to that. It’s an interesting concept but can be used for keyword research – http://43things.com

Wrap Up
These tools are great for brainstorming for new ideas, keywords and opportunities.

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What is Local SEO?

A local search is defined as a search including a location, city, suburb, town, place, country or a local service.

Local Search Examples
If you did a search for Sydney Accommodation, the search results will display a list of hotels in Sydney.
If you did a search for pizza delivery, the search results will include a listing of local pizza delivery businesses.

Local search is becoming big business. It is estimated that 50% of all searches on Google are for local products and searches.

There are 8 million Google searches done each day in Google. That means around 4 million of them are for local products and services. You also have Yahoo and Bing on top of that.

Compare this to Yellow Pages. The ‘book’ was good and everyone used to use it back a couple of years ago. Today, customers have more ways to find the product or service that they require.

What’s in it for me?
Every time that someone does a local search, you could be at the top of Google and getting a lot more business.

Google, Yahoo and Bing each have their own local places.

Google Places
This is Google’s version of yellow pages. If you do a search and include a location, city, suburb, town or a local service, it will usually bring up the local business listings. The number of business listings depends on the competition and the number of related businesses Google knows about. Sometimes it may display just 1 business, sometimes 3, 5, 7 or even 10 business.

If you click on more information about a business, the Google Places page for that business will appear. Businesses need to claim their business listing and then they can make changes to their profile page.

Ranking factors – this is a complex area and will expand on this in another post if enough people ask me about it.

Yahoo Business Listings
Yahoo uses TrueLocal.com.au for their local business listings. You need to get your business listed on TrueLocal to get listed here.

Bing
Doing a local search in Bing provides business listings for your area. This is fed by Yellow Pages.

Other business directories
There are hundreds of business directories in Australia. I recommend taking the time and getting listed in all of these properly.

Wrap Up
I hope this has been a solid introduction in to the world of local search engine optimisation. If you have any questions, please leave a comment or contact me directly.

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I have created hundreds of campaigns using Adwords and optimised campaigns for a lot of customers.

Many of the campaigns created by small business owners often have the same mistakes appearing time and time again.

I have complied this list of the 10 most common mistakes that advertisers make when creating and running their Google Adwords campaigns.

1 – Choosing the wrong keywords
Choose keywords that your customer would use when searching for your products and services. Choosing industry related keywords or keywords that buyers do not understand will only put your ads in front of your competitors.

2 – Confusing Adcopy
Simply is best. Remember that the keywords used in the search are bolded in your adcopy. I see many ads that look cryptic – I cannot understand them so I am not going to click on them.

3 – Not managing the account often enough
Internet advertising is not a set and forget operation. You need to continually review your campaigns to ensure that everything is running smoothly and the best it can be.

4 – Not setting up Google Analytics
Google provides a fabulous range of tools including Google Analytics. This is vital information that needs to be used in managing your web presence and measuring your return on investment.

5 – Not measuring conversion rates
Some keywords are going to give great results – but which ones? Setting up the conversion tracking gives you vital information so you can put more money into the best returning keywords.

6 – Starting bidding wars
Being number 1 position isn’t always the best place to be with Internet advertising. Your budget will be used up by the morning and your competitors will get cheap rates after that. They will spend just as much as you have but they will end up with more visitors than you.

7 – Setting geographic area
Advertising to people outside of your service area is a waste of money.

8 -Content network or only search
This simple setting has a huge impact on your campaigns. Do you want to advertise everywhere or just in the search results when people are searching for you? You need to measure these results and find out if it’s worthwhile to advertise everywhere.

9 -Landing page
Are you pointing your visitors to your home page or to the information they asked for. If visitors have to go searching for the information on your website, you may lose the visitor entirely. If you advertise your xyz widgets, send the visitors to the xyz widgets page – not to your home page that lists all your widgets.

10 – Testing
I have seen impatient people blow thousands of dollars within a few days. You need to test the results of your campaigns and then slowly increase the budget over time.

Wrap Up
This list is in no way exhaustive but avoid these mistakes and you will get better results.

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Many business owners I talk to tell me they don’t have time to do any business planning or marketing just isn’t my thing.

The bad news is that no one is going to do your business planning and marketing without involving you so you may as well understand how it works.

Identify your ideal client
Do you know what your ideal client looks like? What do they need and want? What can you provide to them?

Define what your ideal client or prospect looks like and then you can tailor your products and services to meet their needs. You can target your advertising and marketing efforts to attracting your ideal customer.

Trying to be everything to everyone is a mistake. Focus on what you do best to the right people.

Since reading this section, I want to offer less services, do them better and say no to customers outside of my scope.

If you are a plumber, you’re not trying to get every single plumbing job available. You define exactly what jobs you are aiming for and the target market.

This is also known as customer profiling.

Discover your core marketing messages
Many small businesses have no defined marketing message at all. What are you trying to communicate with the marketplace when you advertise your products and services?

Producing marketing material
Marketing material can come in many forms. Now that you have defined your ideal client, your marketing message, you can now produce material that educates your customer so they become a customer!

There is too much great information to put a few points down in this review.

My thoughts on the book
There is many gold nuggets of information in this book. I highly recommend this book to anyone that wants to take their business to the next level.

It has got me thinking in many different ways about my business and how I want to run it and promote it. I am taking action on these thoughts and hopefully if you are already a customer of mine, you will see the changes coming into effect over the next few months.

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The book is from the US but the explanation of local search engine optimisation and Google Places information is great.

If you want a shortcut to the top of search engines, the local business listings in the major search engines may just help you.

If you do a local search, the major search engines may display a listing of local businesses.

What defines a local search?
Any search into a major search engine that includes a location or local service. A location could include a city, town, suburb, region, country or state. A local service could be for a carpenter, plumber or electrician.

Google Places
It is important that you claim your business listing before someone hijacks it! Once this is done, you can then modify the information on your Google Places profile page.

Bing and Yahoo
The section for Bing and Yahoo does not apply in Australia. Bing gets the listings from Yellow Pages and Yahoo gets their listings from True Local.

My thoughts about the book
This is a great introduction for business owners who want to learn more about controlling their local business listings. There is a list of do’s and don’ts for local listings that many business owners do not know or think about.

It’s great how the book walks you through the process of claiming your listings and explaining each of the elements of your listing.

Unfortunately, I didn’t find any secrets but some answers I have been looking for were explained a little bit more.

Wrap Up
I recommend this book for anyone wanting to know more about getting better results with the local listings. If you’re more advanced, you may not get much value from this book.

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Wordpress 3.0 became available in June and is ready to download and install.

The new features include -

• Post editor styling
• Custom backgrounds
• Custom headers
• Drag and drop mane mangement
• Wordpress login form
• Custom post types
• Author specific template
• WPMU and WordPress

If you are unsure what all these features mean, let me explain it simply for you.

The new version is more flexible allowing the blog post to be more customised than the standard template used on every page. The minor features creates better flow and a more polished blogging platform.

Why Blog?
Blogging allows you to educate your customers, show them that you are knowledgeable and give your website higher rankings in the search engines. Google loves fresh content and ranks quality content higher.

Have you thought of creating a blog?
I have created blogs for a number of our customers with some great results. It does take time and effort to setup and maintain a blog. You may not see any results for up to 6 months but in the end, it’s worth it.

I have learned so much by publishing my blog. It has forced me to keep up-to-date with the industry, analyse the changes happening and predict what the future holds to help my customers.

Wrap Up
If you are currently running WordPress, take a look at upgrading it to version 3.

If you do not have a blog, maybe look at setting one up. I am sure that if you put the time and effort required, you will be happy with the results.

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What is Newspass
Newspass will be a micropayments system for viewing premium content. This premium content listing in the search engine result pages will be indicated with a Newspass icon. When you click on the link, your Newspass account will have the cost deducted from it.

Websites such as magazines and newspapers that currently have paywalls will finally get what they want. They will have their content indexed in Google which will result in more traffic and they will be paid every time some views their content.

This revenue will be shared between Google and the content provider.

Why are they introducing it?
The search engine has been providing free content to its users since the search engine first began. This has created all sorts of problems for websites with paid content.

Google wants to provide the best results possible to every user. Currently, Google cannot serve some content but Newspass will allow them to fill the void.

When will it be available?
It is currently unknown if any when this will be introduced but I feel that it will probably be out by the end of the year.

Our thoughts
I feel that this is a win for everyone -

• Publishers who want to charge will receive revenue for articles they publish.
• Google gives its users all available results
• Users can view free and premium content on the one page providing the optimal user experience.

Wrap Up
We don’t know when this will be available or if it is true but I know the idea.

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GIMP is a free graphics program which is comparable to Adobe Photoshop. GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) runs on Windows, Mac and Linux.

I am often asked what graphic programs are good to use for basic graphic design. GIMP is a pretty good candidate for this. It can even save files in Photoshop format.

Content Websites
If you need to update your website and you need to re-touch the photo, maybe you need to resize it or crop the image. GIMP will allow you to do this.

Online Stores
Many of my customers struggle creating effective images to use as the product images. Having good quality images can make or break a online store.

You can crop the picture of your product so you get the most important part of the image – the product!

You can also use this program to create banners.

Online Documentation
GIMP includes a built-in help system but there is a user manual available which you can download here – http://docs.gimp.org/2.6/en/

Online Training
Learning how to use a new program can be a daunting experience. Learning how to use a graphics program can be even worse. There is free online training available here – http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/

Plugins
Plugins are available that make life easier for you. You can download them here – http://registry.gimp.org/and search for the task that you want done. If you are unsure what plugins to use, go to this link and read through some of the plugins. You might find a plugin that you never thought would be so handy to have!

Where can I download it?
You can down GIMP for free here – http://www.gimp.org/downloads/

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#1 – Nike Football – Write the future – 16,000,000 views

#2 - Darth Vader recording for TomTom GPS – behind the scenes – 1,600,000 views

#3 – Liquid Mountaineering – Walk on water – 5,000,000 views

#4 – Mukhtars Fødselsdag – Flash Mob – Bedre Bustur – 5,000,000 views

#5 – Toyota – Sienna Minivan – 300,000 views

#6 – Up There – Short Documentary

#7 – Google Chrome – Speed test – 2,700,000 views

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What is a conversion tracker?

How is this related to Facebook advertising?
When someone clicks on your ad on Facebook and you have installed the new tracking code on your website, you will now get the results of how many people took a particular action.

That action could be purchasing products, signing up to a newsletter or anyo ther measurable action on your website.

Your return on investment
Just like in the real world, you need to track your ROI on your marketing dollars. Advertising on Facebook should be no different.

That is why I believe advertisers will take Facebook marketing more seriously and increase their ad spend with Facebook.

Many businesses advertise in a number of places on the Internet. Results need to be measured.

My issues with the tracking code
One issue is that it can only track one action. If you installed the tracking code on your newsletter thank you page, each person that signs up would be counted as a conversion.

If you also installed it on your shopping cart thank you page, this would also be counted as a conversion.

You can obviously see that these two types of conversions have very different values and provide a different return on investment for your marketing dollars.

Google Analytics is a little bit smarter where you can provide a dollar value for each action performed. It can read the amount that your customer purchased and add that to your conversion value.

Wrap Up
This is big news for social media marketing and more companies are going to spend more money with Facebook because they can now measure their return on investment.

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A simple example would be running two ads with a different titles. The campaign may run for a week and the campaign manager will look at the results of the two ads including impressions, click through rate, conversions and cost per acquisition.

The ad that outperforms will be kept and the other ad will most like be cancelled. A new ad will then be created and tested against the previous best ad. The cycle can continue on indefinitely or until you are satisfied with the results.

Google has released a tool called ACE – AdWords Campaign Experiments. This tool allows you to create parallel campaigns to compete against existing campaigns.

This is taking split level testing to a whole new level. You can now, more easily, compare two campaigns by bids, keywords, adgroups and placement. It also works across the Google search engine and their content network.

The problem with doing split testing is the number of factors that can influence the results. Not every day is the same and holidays, news, and trends can put the split data out.

Wrap Up
This new tool gives Google Adwords advertisers more power to create the perfect Internet marketing campaign.

ACE is currently only open to some US advertisers but will be open to all advertisers very soon.

The following video explains more about ACE presented by the product marketing manager Courtney Lischke.

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The project named Google Caffeine which was mentioned in August ‘09 is now powering the world’s largest search engine – Google.

It is also believed that the new version of their search engine will handle rich media in a much better way.

I believe two factors have had a big impact on this porject – adding social media to universal search and keeping infront of the competition – Yahoo.

Google needs to keep delivering the best possible search results in the quick time possible (real time) otherwise they could lose their spot as the world’s largest, fastest and best search engine. If Google did lose their number 1 position, they were suffer in a very big way financially.

“Our old index had several layers, some of which were refreshed at a faster rate than others; the main layer would update every couple of weeks. To refresh a layer of the old index, we would analyze the entire web, which meant there was a significant delay between when we found a page and made it available to you.

With Caffeine, we analyze the web in small portions and update our search index on a continuous basis, globally. As we find new pages, or new information on existing pages, we can add these straight to the index. That means you can find fresher information than ever before—no matter when or where it was published.”

Old search results Vs New Caffeine powered results

Speed
A simple search for “Dog” on the old search gave 51,900,000 results in 0.25 seconds. Caffeine gave 359,000,000 in 0.12 seconds. This really an amazing result!

Accuracy
This is a subjective search but from the research I have done, the Caffeine powered results wins hands down. The results were a lot better compared to the old search results.

Search engine optimisation is only going to get more interesting!

Wrap Up
The new Google search is only going to get better as more features get integrated and added. Better, faster and more accurate results benefit everyone. Now it’s time for Bing and Yahoo to show some improvements.

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We all hear about online scams but don’t think that tradition scams would get us. Having a brick and mortar office gives a business creditability. Does your website have your brick and mortar address? Maybe just a phone number? Maybe no contacts at all?!?!?

I thought I would share this video as it shows how gullible people can be when you show them the money, and also because Australians will probably not see the ad.

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This month, StumbleUpon reached 10,000,000 users. This is a huge milestone for these guys and they are celebrating with a party in San Francisco later this month. Unfortunately for people in Australia, we won’t be able to attend unless you’re in USA on the west coast.

StumbleUpon is the second largest social media site – measured by traffic. Facebook is far ahead of any other social media website.

You could define StumbleUpon as a social bookmarking website that allows users to share interesting websites with other users. StumbleUpon has taken it a step further by allowing users to add their favourite websites to different categories.

Please be aware – this is a dangerous tool – it is very addictive and will consume a lot of time if you are not careful.

How does it work?
There are two parts to StumbleUpon. You can channel surf and visit websites that are recommended to you. You can also submit sites and pages to other StumbleUpon users.

How to Stumble
You set what your interests are (marketing, self improvement, technology, computers, business) and click on Start Stumbling.

A new page will load that has been recommended by other ‘Stumblers’. If you do not like that page, click on Stumble! and you will be taken to another page that is related to your interests.

How can I submit my site or favourite site?
You can submit your site by clicking on Stumble Site and adding the category details. This will add the website to the StumbleUpon database. People when then be able to see your site when Stumbling. This is also an effective way of getting traffic.

Wrap Up
I recommend signing up to StumbleUpon and trying the service out. I think it’s a service that fills the social bookmarking niche.

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Internet advertising is easy to setup, maintain and measure it’s effectiveness. Every dollar is accounted for and every lead is followed.

You are able to setup test campaigns and measure every interaction very closely. You can setup micro campaigns that target very specific areas.

The advertising inventory is huge as well. If you have a large budget, you can easily spend that budget and reach everyone.

What is Australian businesses doing?
Australia is moving more of it’s advertising dollars from offline, traditional type of advertising to online advertising.

It is estimated that Australian businesses spent $512 million for the first 3 months in 2010. This is an increase of 17% on the same period last year.

Where is the advertising dollars going?
There are a number of different places where Australian businesses can advertise. The choice depends on the users they are trying to reach, in what part of the buying process and the user demographic.

Social media advertising
We recently saw the introduction of Facebook advertising which is going well. This allows you to select the exact user profile that your ads will be displayed to. There has never been a time where you could advertise only to 20 year old females in Sydney for example.

Search engine advertising
Advertising on Google is the largest area for online advertising in Australia. Google took 51.7% of the online advertising dollars totalling $264.75 million dollars.

I believe one of the reasons why Google keeps increasing is because of the low entry level and all the tools they give you. A small business operator can sign up to Google Adwords and start advertising their website in a very short period of time.

It is very easy to blow money with search engine advertising with Google, Yahoo and Bing. By entering into bidding wars or having little knowledge of how it is done can really affect the performance and returns.

Online classifieds
Online classified advertising is increasing but it is harder for small businesses to break into this type of advertising. These are usually reserved for large budget advertising programs. Their setup is a longer process and not automated like Google Adwords.

Online video advertising
Online video advertising takes just $5.7 million.

Email marketing
Email marketing had $7.9 million spent. I think this figure would be harder to measure because a lot of it would be setup and maintained in-house. Once an email system is setup, there is very little cost in running the program.

I believe that email marketing is very important to the overal mix of online marketing.

Overall picture
Just like in the traditional advertising world, an effective mix of online advertising venues needs to be implemented and measured. Many businesses are unsure where they can advertise. Deciding on where to advertise online and how to start seems to be the biggest issues for online advertising.

Business operators need to know where they can advertise, how to setup effective campaigns and measure the results. Just like in the real world of traditional advertising.

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Today, Facebook is used by over 400 million people and employs over 900.

Here is a visual chart to show you Facebook’s growth and events over the past 6 years.

Graphic is from Mashable! – The social media guide.

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Magento is at the forefront for shopping cart software innovation with their new mobile storefront solution.

Magento Mobile
Magento Mobile allows Magento merchants to easily create a branded mobile storefront with their existing Magento store.

The mobile version includes a native iPhone app and a new administrative manager. The Magento team will manage the submission and maintain the iPhone app in the iTunes App Store.

Mobile Commerce
It is estimated that half of online consumers will be making purchases with their mobile phone or device within the next 12 months.

This is a huge market that would give an online merchant that extra edge over it’s competitors. The mobile storefront allows your customers to purchase from your online store using the iPhone.

Admin Features
The Magento Mobile version includes your catalog, checkout, investory and reporting. The admin can change the colours and appearance of their app store very easily through the Magento admin area.

Even if customers have downloaded the app for iTunes, any changes that you make to your online store are put onto these existing downloads.

Wrap Up
I believe that Magento are at the forefront of ecommerce software. The Magento shopping cart software is still a very complex shopping cart system to use and I would only recommend Magento to advanced and high-end stores.

Setting up a Magento shopping cart takes a lot longer than osCommerce or similar type of online store.

If you have a larger budget and technical expertise, I would recommend Magento.

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2010 ONLINE RETAIL INDUSTRY AWARDS FINALISTS:

1. Best Pure-Play Online Retailer
Deals Direct | www.dealsdirect.com.au
Appliances Online | www.appliancesonline.com.au
Little Dance Invitations | www.littledanceinvitations.com.au
Trixan Body | www.trixanbody.com.au

2. Best Multichannel Retailer
The Warehouse | www.thewarehouse.co.nz
Clive Peeters | www.clivepeeters.com.au
ABC Shop | www.shop.abc.net.au
Supre | www.supre.com.au
Oxfam | www.oxfamshop.org.au
Proactiv | www.proactiv.com.au

3. Best New Online Retailer
Clive Peeters | www.clivepeeters.com.au
JasonL | www.jasonl.com.au
Birdsnest | www.birdsnest.com.au
Trixan Body | www.trixanbody.com.au
Shoes of Prey | www.shoesofprey.com

4. Best Use of Technology
JasonL | www.jasonl.com.au
City Beach | www.citybeach.com.au
Metro Cleaning Services | http://metro.cleverappz.com.au
Shoes of Prey | www.shoesofprey.com
Jeans West | www.jeanswest.com.au
Trixan Body | www.trixanbody.com.au

5. Most Innovative Online Retailer
Shoes of Prey | www.shoesofprey.com
Domino’s | www.dominos.com.au
General Pants | www.generalpants.com.au
Sportsgirl | www.sportsgirl.com.au

6. Best Online Retail Marketing Initiative
Shoes of Prey | www.shoesofprey.com
Red Balloon | www.redballoon.com.au
Personalised Plates Queensland | www.ppq.com.au
DealsDirect | www.dealsdirect.com.au
General Pants | www.generalpants.com.au

7. Best Customer Experience
Mooo | www.mooo.com.au
DealsDirect | www.dealsdirect.com.au
Appliances Online | www.appliancesonline.com.au
BirdsNest | www.birdsnest.com.au
Clive Peeters | www.clivepeeters.com.au
Proactiv | www.proactiv.com.au

8. Emerging Star
Lasoo | www.lasoo.com.au
Scoopon | www.scoopon.com.au
OzScopes | www.ozscopes.com.au
Buyinvite | www.buyinvite.com.au

9. Best Site Design
Proactiv | www.proactiv.com.au
Bras n Things | www.brasnthings.com
JasonL | www.jasonl.com.au
Barkers | www.barkersonline.co.nz
Crumpler | www.crumpler.com.au
Big Brown Box | www.bigbrownbox.com.au

10. Industry Recognition Award
Matt Bullock (eway) | www.eway.com.au
Paul Marshall (Salmat) | www.salmat.com.au
Ted’s | www.teds.com.au
Appliances Online | www.appliancesonline.com.au
Freez Clothing | www.freez.com.au
White Labelled | www.whitelabelled.com.au

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Emails and text messages are often misunderstood and a break down in communication can happen very easily. But what would happen if your domain name could be easily misunderstood?

What if your domain name would be translated to something funny or something rude and offensive?

You would think that such a thing would never happen because everything is screened before it goes out the door. A typo on a brochure might sneak through but definitely not something as important as a domain name.

You’re wrong!
Hundreds of businesses have registered domain names that are down right funny or inappropriate.

Who Represents – www.whorepresents.com
I’m not sure how a company could advertise such a domain name.

Big Al’s Bowling Alley – www.ilovebigals.com
An innocent bowling alley has a domain name that looks like – I love bi gals.

Mole Station Nursery – www.molestationnursery.com
This is a really bad play on words and the company has since changed it’s name to – Mole River Nursery – www.molerivernursery.com

Pen Island – www.penisland.net
This one just wants attention.

Powergen Italia – www.powergenitalia.com
Do these guys stand behind their name?

Experts Exchange – www.expertsexchange.com
A technical support site where people help resolve problems.

La Drape – www.ladrape.co.uk
A British company that sells expensive quilted bedspreads.

Speed of Art – www.speedofart.com
Art designer website.

Therapist Finder – www.therapistfinder.com
Need to find a therapist? Here is the therapist directory

Choose Spain – www.choosespain.com
What would you like? Pain or Spain?

Wrap Up
Can you domain name be misinterpreted? It might be too late to change but at least you are aware of the issue and might be able to do something to fix the problem.

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What is Skype?

How do I use Skype?
You need to download the Skype software which is free. You can download it here -

If you add your friends to your Skype account, you can call them from your Skype account to their Skype account for free. They can be located anywhere in the world.

You can also use Skype to call any normal phone in the world as well at great rates. For example, you can call up to 30 different countries for 2.7 AUD cents per minute. This compares to Telstra rates at 20 cents plus per minute.

You can also get unlimited calls to normal phones from $1.49 a month.

Who owns Skype?
eBay was the primary owner of Skype but it was recently sold to an investor group led by Silver Lake. The Skype business was valued at $2.75 billion USD as of November 2009 when the deal was completed.

What is the deal with the Skype 3G iPhone App?
The app allows iPhone users to make phone calls using their 3G connection and Skype. This means you could make a phone call using your iPhone and Skype from Australia to the United States for 2.7 cents per minute. This is cheaper than using your normal phone line!

The application for the iPhone has only been available for 4 days and has already been downloaded over 5 millions.

The new iPhone is expected to be released from Apple next month and is expected to support video conferencing. Skype has indicated they want to take advantage of video conferencing features which would be available to users at a very cheap rate.

Where can I download the new Skype 3G iPhone App?
You can download the new app right here – http://blogs.skype.com/en/2010/05/iphone_calling_over_3g.html

Wrap Up
Have fun with the new app everyone!

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Now you can with Google Alerts!

Why do you need to know?
Before I tell you how to setup a Google Alert, I need to let you know why it is so important to monitor this kind of activity.

The Internet is such a powerful tool for consumers. They are able to research your company and products before they deal with you. This has never been possible before the Internet – unless the customer knows someone personally that has dealt with you before.

Word of mouth is the most powerful marketing tool on the planet. Today with the use of the Internet, customers are taking their opinions between their friends into the online world.

The problem has been, how do you know if someone is talking about you?

Today, I am going to teach you how!

Google Alerts
This tool, provided for free from Google, allows you to monitor all the pages indexed by Google.

I have a number of Google Alerts setup that monitor my name (Nigel Burke), my business names (AVS Networks, CartXpress, Website Mechanic) and other products and services.

I also monitor a number of industries such as web design, search engine marketing, search engine optimisation and internet marketing.

This allows me to monitor my reputation online and keep up with industry news. Each day, I receive a report by email with a list of all the websites added to Google that include my alert words.

Social Media Websites
If someone mentions you on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, any online forum, in the news, or anywhere else, Google usually indexes these pages and will let you know when you have been talked about.

If a customer is not happy with your service, you can act very quickly to resolve their situation. Customers love being treated special and this allows you to pro-actively resolve their problems.

How do I setup one up?
It is very easy to setup. Visit this web page and fill in the form – http://www.google.com/alerts

You will now receive alerts everyday for your chosen keywords.

Read the email everyday and monitor your name and industry with very little effort. Act quickly to say thanks for that nice comment or resolve any issues of an unsatisfied customer.

Wrap Up
Do you have any questions about how this works? Please let me know in the comments box below.

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I cannot think of day when I do not use Photoshop or Dreamweaver. As I write this post, they are both open.

The industry standard for web design is Adobe Photoshop and Dreamweaver. For over 10 years, web developers have used Dreamweaver to build all sorts of web pages.

What is Dreamweaver for Website Developers?
Adobe Dreamweaver, formerly know as Macromedia Dreamweaver has been leading the web authoring industry. I remember using some of the earlier versions of Dreamweaver to build my first websites. The amateurs used Microsoft Frontpage and the professionals used Dreamweaver.

What is new with Website Designing Software – Adobe Dreamweaver CS5?
Dreamweaver has come a long way since it was first released and supports many different programming languages such as PHP, MySQL and CSS. It is more feature rich than ever before, using visual tools to help designers build professional websites.

What is Photoshop for Website Designers?
Adobe Photoshop is the industry standard for creating graphics for the web. It was and still is used by many graphic designers but Adobe have created another tools for them, such as Adobe InDesign. Adobe have made Photoshop to be more web graphic friendly with many built-in tools to optimise website graphics for the web.

What is new in Photoshop CS 5 for Website Designers?
A surprise new feature for Photosho for CS5 is the addition for 3D graphics. Many websites today use 3D graphics to create depth in their presentations.

I am surprised to see 3D as the biggest addon for Photoshop but I wouldn’t discredit Adobe for not knowing where the industry is going.

What about HTML5?
Adobe have just released a HTML5 to add to CS5. In case you do not know, most websites today are coded in HTML4 standard. HTML5 is now coming main stream with a lot of new features. It has taken over 10 years for the experts to agree to the new standard but things are now finally progressing.

Wrap Up
I am sure there are a lot of other features that I am yet to explore but it is always exciting to get the latest release of Photoshop and Dreamweaver – the industry tools for any website designer.

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There is no hard rule for when the business listings will be displayed but it usually appears when a keyword is about a location or the type of keyword would be loacation specific.

If you entered pizza into Google, it would then show the business listings. The same would happen for accomomdation, hotel or motel.

These listings can be a very powerful tool that you can use to list your business above everyone else. Managed right and you will be up the top. Do the wrong thing, and you will be removed very quickly – within hours!

Here is an example of Google Places for Wollongong Restaurants

Here are the 7 mistakes that will get you removed -

1. Adding keywords to your business title.
Adding a description or keywords to your business title may get you listed at the top for a short time but you will be dumped.

2. Adding categories with locations.
When you edit your categories, think about the services or products that you provide. By adding locations as well will not help your listing.

3. Using a non-physical address – ie. PO Box.
Google likes businesses where customers can walk in and visit the business. You cannot walk into a PO Box and look around. Having a physical address adds trust to your business and Google sees this as a good thing.

4. Using a call tracking phone number.
You need to use a real phone number without tracking. A tracking number can be a unique number so you know where your leads are coming from. I am not sure why Google penalises business for this because I do not see it as a bad thing. Business owners need to research where they are getting customers from.

5. Adding fake reviews.
It’s tempting to register fake accounts and add positive, keyword stuffed reviews but do not do it. Your competitors will see this and report it to Google. Google also looks at the number of reviews, when they were added, other reviews done by this user and how old the account is. If Google thinks something suss is going on, it will dump you.

6. Hiding your physical address.
Google explains that by hiding your physical address, that it won’t affect your listing. My testing indicates that it does affect the listing and the business listings have dropped. By showing the physical address again, the rankings improved within hours.

7. Duplicate information in your description.
Write a quality description about your business. This means unique content with real information in it.

8. Claim your business listing.
It amazes me how many business listings are still not claimed. Make sure your business listing is claimed and optimised so you get the full benefit of Google Places.

Wrap Up
Google Places can be a powerful tool that can get you a lot of extra quality traffic with a little effort.

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In Sydney, eager customers waited overnight to be one of the first people to purchase an iPad in Australia. Most Apple stores sold out of the iPad within the first day of release.

Apple has sold over two million iPads since it’s inital release in the US – That’s one million iPads per month! This number is exceeding even the most optimistic predictions.

If you have been lucky enough to get your hands on one, you will realise just how addictive it is and fun to use.

Website owners need to test their websites to make sure that their website works on the iPad and is fully functional. The iPad uses the Apple Safari browser to surf the internet.

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What is Magento?
Magento is an open source shopping cart system. It is a very complex shopping cart for advanced shopping carts. I have only setup a couple Magento shopping carts where are I have setup dozens of osCommerce, CRE Loaded and Zen Cart shopping carts.

What is available?
Previously, Magento came in two different versions – Community Edition and Enterprise.

Magento Community Edition – Free
This is free to use and aimed at expert developers and technical enthusiasts in non-mission critical environments.

Even though it is free to use, like a lot of open source solutions, developers need to be paid to setup and customise these online stores and cost more than your average shopping cart setup.

Magento Professional – $2,995 USD per year
This new edition has the following added functionality -

• Rewards points system
• Gift certificates / cards
• Strong data encryption
• Customer store credits

If you wanted to offer gift certificates and can justify the additional cost of $2,995 USD per year, I would recomend it.

If you are on a tight budget, you could look at paying a programmer to add the gift certificate functionality on for you which I believe would be a cheaper option. You would need to compare the two solutions though.

Magento Enterprise – $$12,990 USD per year
This really is an enterprise shopping cart solution for your large stores on the Internet before creating the next Amazon store! It also comes with the enterprise price tag too!

This edition comes with the following extra features -

• Enhanced content management system
• Rich merchandising suite
• Private sales
• Content staging and merging
• Advanced search
• Advanced caching technologies
• Advanced user roles and permissions

If you have the budget for such a store, it’s a great solution but you can get similar functionality from other store software.

Wrap Up
I think it was a very smart move for Magento to introduce the professional edition. There was definitely a large gap between the community and enterprise editions and could be a stepping stone for online stores to upgrade to.

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Today – YouTube has 24 hours of video being uploaded – every minute!

Today – YouTube has over 2 billion views – everyday!

People have become famous for posting videos on YouTube. Companies and individuals have created videos that have gone viral. Lady Gaga has had over 1 billions views of her videos.

Is video marketing the missing element of your online marketing mix?

Here’s a 2 minute video of the YouTube story -

Check out some of the YouTube stories here.

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What is Google Wave?

How do I use it?
To use the Wave service, you had to be invited. Today, you can sign up to Google Wave without an invitation code. It’s now open to everyone.

How do I get started?
Click on this link to get started – http://wave.google.com

Why use it?
I recommend you try out the service. It can be very useful for the right purpose and save a lot of time.

Allowing multiple people to edit a document plus it’s range of other features make it easy to collaborate.

Tell us what you use Google Wave for …

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Maybe with Google’s branding, they can push it further than any of company can?

Google has teamed up with Sony, Intel and Logitech to produce products that will compliment GoogleTV.

My problem with Google
I think Google needs to stick to what they do best (search) and not spread their wings over everything possible. It’s a branding mistake many other companies have made.

Losing their identity
When you think of Google, you think of search. With Google branching into phones, tvs, operating system, web browser, internet phone, blogs, buzz, news, email, videos, analytics etc. They are losing their identity. They are stepping into every Internet industry and now stepping into a lot of other non-related industries.

I guess when you become one of the big companies in the world, you have a billion dollar brand, $25 billion USD in the bank – you’re always looking for other ways to grow.

Will Google get broken up into small businesses to create a level playing field?

Or will Google keeping buying more companies and take over the world?

In the meantime, here is a video about GoogleTV. Enjoy.

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Their latest challenge is about privacy.

Facebook has a lot of personal information and many of their users do not think of the consequences of privacy until it is too late. Do I need to mention the Google Buzz fiasco when they published private information about their users?

Facebook listened to user feedback about their privacy and create a complex privacy system to control every bit of detail of your account.

Now everyone is complaining that it’s too difficult and complex to understand.

Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg released the following statement -

Facebook has been growing quickly. It has become a community of more than 400 million people in just a few years. It’s a challenge to keep that many people satisfied over time, so we move quickly to serve that community with new ways to connect with the social Web and each other. Sometimes we move too fast — and after listening to recent concerns, we’re responding.

…The biggest message we have heard recently is that people want easier control over their information. Simply put, many of you thought our controls were too complex. Our intention was to give you lots of granular controls; but that may not have been what many of you wanted. We just missed the mark.

We have heard the feedback. There needs to be a simpler way to control your information. In the coming weeks, we will add privacy controls that are much simpler to use. We will also give you an easy way to turn off all third-party services. We are working hard to make these changes available as soon as possible. We hope you’ll be pleased with the result of our work and, as always, we’ll be eager to get your feedback.

My thoughts
I think keeping the existing system for advanced users and creating a simply profile based system for normal users. It makes everyone and solves the problem.

What do you think?

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Compared to the North America and Europe, Australia is lagging behind in the world of ecommerce. Large department stores such as Myers, David Jones and Target do no have an online store.

The launch of the Big W store is great news for ecommerce in Australia. It means that the large chains may start investing some real money into selling online.

Online stores such as OverStocked, DStore, and Big Brown Box have been open for a number of years now. Australian consumers are getting used to buying products and services over the Internet.

About Big W Online
The Big W store has over 4,000 products in a variety of categories -

• Electronics
• Baby
• Photo
• Home & Garden
• Fashin
• Entertainment
• Toys
• Sports & Leisure

Delivery Options
Australia post is being used for delivery of products. It seems like a fairly simple pricing structure is being used. Pricing for packages are as below -

• Packages less than 500 grams will cost $4.98
• Packages less than 10 KG will cost $9.98
• Packages over 10 KG cost around $20
• Express Post is also an option but costs extra

Payment Options
PayPal is being offered as a method of payment. PayPal is not offered on other Woolworths websites such as Wooolworths and HomeShop.

Prices Online
Big W have stated that there is no price difference between it’s online store and it’s normal stores.

Features
Front page
The website appears to be nice and simple to navigate. The frontpage does have a lot of pictures and banners trying to get your attention. I think this could have been cleaner in design.

Reviews
There is a reviews and ratings for products. Customers like to read reviews and ratings from other customers. Just like testimonials can make customers feel satisfied that they are ordering a quality product.

Product images
The product images have a nice popup display. Other images of the product are displayed as thumbnails. This makes it really clear that other pictures of the product exist. I think this is very nice.

Estimate delivery
The estimated delivery charge is a great tool. By entering your postcode on the product page, you can see exactly how much you are going to be charged for delivery. There is nothing more annoying to a customer when they need to go through the checkout procedure to see the cost of delivery.

Tell a friend
The tell a friend tool has made an appearance as well. A nice lightbox appears with the opportunity to email the details of the product to a friend. Many online stores benefit having this tool.

Stock levels
You can check the stock levels of particular products as well. By entering in your post code, you can see the stock levels at many of the Big W stores. It also displays the distance to each store. If the store is low in stock, it displays the phone number so you can call that particular store. You could call the store and check for stock and maybe they could reserve the product for you.

Overview of features
The features of the website have been nicely done. You would expect that from a large department store but even they can get it wrong sometimes.

The lightboxes (popup windows) load very quickly. There’s nothing more annoying then these being broken.

The website still has a couple of formatting issues to resolve. Some of the text goes over the background in some places. I am sure they will will these up as the site continues to be improved.

Wrap Up
It’s great to see a large department store go online. Overall, I think it will help push online sales in Australia and hopefully the other department stores will follow suit.

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The left column on the search results page is more pre-dominate now with more options. A lot of people do not take advantage of the additional search options on Google. Did you know you can search through news articles, images, videos, blogs and much more?

You can also specify the time and date of your results. This means that you can do a web search with pages from this year only. This is great for researching current statistics for example.

Google has also implemented a brand result area in the search results. If you search for footballs, you now get many different areas as part of the universal search results -

• News clips
• football images
• football brands
• videos of football
• football products

All these changes are taking place to provide the user with a more user friendly appearance and better search results. Google says that by providing all these results, it adds to the users’ overall experience with the search engine.

Many people ask me why they aren’t ranked number one for their targetted keyword. I explain to them that their page needs great content and good backlinks to their site. If the content is great, people will link to it. Google will rank it higher because it is what people are looking for.

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Digital Wollongong helps you:

• hear intelligent and interesting speakers who know marketing
• meet a group a of like-minded marketers who face the same challenges as you
• have a network of people you can turn to for advice and offer your own
• stay up to date in a fun and relaxed environment
• meet some good people

We’re running our first event on Wednesday the 5th of May at 5:30pm. Thanks to our sponsors, the event is free, and if you’re on of the first 20 people to arrive on the night, you’ll get a complimentary drink on arrival.

The event sponsors are AVS Networks and Internetrix.

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If you do not have much time and you want to know more about how to get your website to rank well on Google and other search engines, this is a great book to read.

Michael’s quick explanations about techniques and strategies for SEO are great. Many books on this subject are big, heavy and full of information that you do not need to know.

On-Page Optimisation
Michael discusses simple changes you can make to your website to improve your rankings. This is known as on-page optimisation.

Many websites are not search engine friendly making the task of getting the website indexed by a search engine to be a difficult one. By optimising your web pages, Google and other search engines will be able to work out what you website is about and index it accordingly.

If the search engine cannot read your website, don’t expect it to get listed properly. Some websites using a javascript navigation tool can hurt a website because search engines cannot go past the first page. An XML site map can help fix this.

Other elements that you can modify on your site include heading tags, alt tags, meta tags and internal linking methods.

Off-Page Optimisation
This is about search engine factors that are not directly related to your website. Examples include links to your website, social bookmarks, directories etc.

You may not have control of how people link to your website but managing it will definitely help. Identify the keywords that you want to rank well in and ask webmasters to use the keywords when linking to your website.

Creating links to your website can be very time consuming, Michael gives a few methods to increase links to your website from asking other webmasters for links to submitting articles to article submission sites.

Wrap Up
This is a great book, a quick read, for anyone that wants to get involved and understand SEO. Unfortunately there is plenty of aspects that are missing that should be included, such as identifying great keywords.

There are a few gold nuggets of information such as how to research your competition and how to beat them. I really did like this part and will read that section again.

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Even as a search engine optimisation and marketing consultant, I still get them. I listen to their pitch and then ask a couple of questions. They usually have no clue how to answer them so what kind of service will they be providing?

I have done a search on their business name and they didn’t even come up first. That is a very easy task and a pathetic attempt on their behalf.

We advise all our customers to be aware of anyone calling up trying to sell them Internet services. There are a lot of people out there to take your money and there’s not much you can do about it if they do not deliver.

These telemarketers are driven by commission and can become aggressive pressuring you to sign up with them. I recommend avoiding any business that you have never with dealt with before or if they sound like they are over promising on what they can do.

They claim that having a good ranking will increase visitors and increase sales. This is true. It’s how they get you there – if they get your there at all. I don’t believe they will ever get you there. If you get banned from Google, that’s the end of it!

Wrap Up
Beware of any company that contacts you regarding search engine optimisation or marketing that you have not contacted first.

If you are ever unsure, contact your web developer or myself and I will tell you if it’s a good or bad.

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Large corporations continue to fail with SEO efforts and keeping spending big to gain market share online.

This is where the smaller players have an equal playing field – natural search engine results.

It is estimated that 43% of people click on the number 1 natural search engine result for any query. This kind of traffic for popular keywords can really help a business grow.

Why aren’t large corporations getting in on this?
They often build their sites and think about optimising it afterwards – too late!

A solid SEO friendly web site starts withe foundations – when the web site is initially being built. Making major changes down the track can be time consuming, expensive and take up time.

What can you do about it?
You can learn how to optimise your own web site or pay an SEO expert to do it for you. Then plan a link building strategy to compliment your efforts.

When your web site is ranking well for you specific keyworkds, the amount of potential customers will increase and your online sales will increase. This means more profit for you.

Wrap Up
Optimise your web site if you haven’t already and start gaining that advantage over the big guys!!

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Google has now added a new factor to the rankings of their search engine results. Research has shown that faster loading web sites adds to a user experience. They stay on fast longer web sites for a longer period of time.

Web sites that are slow to load are often aborted because they take too long to load.

What about your web site?
How long does your web site take to load? If your web site is slow to load, are you losing visitors? Now, you will not only lose visitors but your search engine rankings will drop.

Slow loading web site factors
The factors are all measured from the users’ point of view. How long it takes for a web site to be downloaded and rendered on a users computer screen is the measurement used.

There are two great books based on this topic by Steve Souders – High Performance Web Sites and Even Faster Web Sites.

Here are his rules for producing fast web sites -

• Rule 1 – Make Fewer HTTP Requests
• Rule 2 – Use a Content Delivery Network
• Rule 3 – Add an Expires Header
• Rule 4 – Gzip Components
• Rule 5 – Put Stylesheets at the Top
• Rule 6 – Put Scripts at the Bottom
• Rule 7 – Avoid CSS Expressions
• Rule 8 – Make JavaScript and CSS External
• Rule 9 – Reduce DNS Lookups
• Rule 10 – Minify JavaScript
• Rule 11 – Avoid Redirects
• Rule 12 – Remove Duplicate Scripts
• Rule 13 – Configure ETags
• Rule 14 – Make AJAX Cacheable

Wrap Up
If you optimise your website, your users will have a better experience and you will get higher rankings in Google search results.

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Here are some iPad stats -

• 600,000 iBooks have been downloaded since Saturday
• Over one million apps hace been downloaded on the Saturday
• Over 3.5 million apps have been downloaded since Saturday
• There are now 3,500 iPad-specific apps available
• The total number of apps downloaded, across all platforms has passed 4 billion

iPhone 4.0 OS with multi-tasking
The new operating system for the iPhone was announced last night. The new iPhone 3GS will have multi-tasking but older iPhones will not.

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As a professional web developer, I use iStock nearly everyday in producing website for my customers.

It is amazing to note that iStock started as a free service back in 2000 and still going strong, growing every month.

Here are some of the statistics from iStock in the social networking decade -

iStock is now owned by Getty Images but I still like iStock.

If you have never been to the website, go check it out especially if you are into web design, development or graphic design.

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Digg has been suffering popularity lately but they could all be about to change.

It was time for a change and the current CEO (Jay Adelson) is departing after 5 years of service with an internal email -

Got some news. After five years, forty million users, and an amazing ride, I’ve decided to step down as CEO of Digg… The entrepreneurial calling is strong…

The original CEO is back! Kevin Rose is making some big changes. He wasted no time with the two following decisions.

Unbanning all previously banned domain names

…with the launch of the new Digg will be unbanning all previously banned domains. While we will apply automated filters to prevent malware/virus/TOS violations, no other restrictions will be placed on content.

Removing iFrame

Framing content with an iFrame is bad for the Internet. It causes confusion when bookmarking, breaks w/iFrame busters, and has no ability to communicate with the lower frame (if you browse away from a story, the old digg count still persists). It’s an inconsistent/wonky user experience, and I’m happy to say we are killing it when we launch the new Digg

We hope that these two changes will help Digg revitalise itself and become a stronger player once again in the social bookmarking market.

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We are constantly marketing ourselves, our ideas, our products and services and our business. You can have the greatest product in the world but if no one knows about it, it’s useless!

So why do small business owners fail in marketing?
The difference between small business marketing and large business marketing is huge. They are the complete opposite and I will tell you why.

What is large business marketing?
Large businesses measure the results of marketing campaign by how many people now know and recognise their brand. Their goal is to get their name out there into the world. They also have larger budgets and want to spend that money to put their name into everyones’ head!

What is small business marketing?
Small business measure the results at a micro level. They measure how many extra customers they get, how many extra phone calls they got and if there was any increase in sales. They have a small budget and operate their campaigns in a much more refined way. Their goal is to get the customers in the door to spend their money – not to get inside everyones’ head.

What is the difference?
Large businesses are trying to get their name out there and small business are trying to get customers inside.

Wrap Up
How are you marketing your business? Are you putting your message in front of the right audience? Are the customers walking in the door or going to your website? Are they buying your products and services?

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The amount of palm oil used from this supplier is only 1.25% of their total use across their products but it’s not stopping the activists.

The YouTube video has had over 176,000 views within a few days and the KitKat facebook has had an extra 95,000 fans. The new Facebook fans are not happy with nestle and their Facebook page has turned into a nightmare.

Is social media giving power back to the people? Is this a warning to all corporations that if they do the wrong thing, they could be attacked by social media tactics?

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This is a guest post by Sara Lundgren who designed, setup and analysed the data from a recent survey that I sent out to our web hosting customers. This is part 2 of 2.

The power of knowing your customers
I think many small and medium size businesses are missing out on a lot of valuable information because they believe they don’t have enough time/money/resources to do proper research. I believe this is one of the biggest mistakes a business can do. There is no excuse for not monitoring your customers closely! If you don’t know what your customers want, how are you going to provide a better service/product than your competitors?  If you can’t provide a better service/product than your competitors, how are you going to stay in business? You won’t!

Don’t base your decisions on old information
Another excuse for not continually surveying the customers is that some companies think that they already know their customers‘ needs. But, and this is very important, what you think you know might not be (actually, it seldom is) the truth. We found this out first hand with our survey. Many businesses base their strategies on assumptions and old, outdated information. This is a very dangerous strategy because what was true five years ago, or even last month, might not be true today. In hypercompetitive industries, such as the internet industry where technology and competitive structures changes rapidly, all companies (large corporations as well as small businesses) need to constantly monitor their customers’ needs because they constantly change.

If you know what your customers’ needs are you can adopt your strategies and processes to that and the customers will get what they want, you will get lots of business, and everyone is happy!

What are you doing about it?
Setting up an online survey like the one we did doesn’t take long and it is well invested time. When was the last time you evaluated your customers’ needs? Are you continuously surveying your customers? Do you have any smart tips to share on how to do this? In my next guest blog post I’ll share some of my tips on how to construct a good online survey.

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Jetstar is leading the airline industry with innovative social media tactics with the recent announcement that it will direct 40% of its marketing budget to social media -

“We’ve conducted some very successful marketing and PR campaigns via social media in the past 18 months, including YouTube and Twitter, and the response has been phenomenal,” said David May, Jetstar’s head of marketing.”

In comparison to social media, traditional marketing is increasing in cost but I believe the effectiveness is decreasing -

“Social media offers more value for money and is a smarter way to reach our customers – which is what Jetstar is all about.”

Jetstar has previously has sales exclusively on Twitter with proved extremely successfuly -

“In line with the increasing need to talk to smaller, interconnected communities; communities that when aggregated deliver large numbers of engaged and involved brand advocates, we are likely to shift a large percentage of Jetstar’s above the line media spend into digital areas, with an increased focus on social media,” said Richard Smith, managing director of Jetstar’s media buying agency Maxus.

More information can be found at MarketingMag – Social media 40% of Jetstar’s marketing budget

Wrap Up
What are you doing with social media to help your business?

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What is Remarketing?
The remarketing tool allows advertisers to hit the user days later to try and get their booking or purchase.

Example of Remarketing in action
Imagine someone wants to go to a concert in Sydney. The user visits a particular hotel’s website in Sydney but does not make a booking. The next day, they go to the booking website for the concert which is part of the Google Content Network – they have Google display ads running. The ads that they see are for the hotel they visited the day before. This is remarketing through Google Adwords.

Using this new tool
This new tool is available in your Adwords account if you advertise with Google. More information about this tool can be found here – Now Available: Reach the right audience through remarketing.

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What is the GoogleBot?

There are many factors that Google considers when indexing web pages. Here are a couple of questions and answers about how the GoogleBot works and how to get better search engine rankings.

What is host load limit?
Host load limit is the number of connections that your webserver allows at any given time.

A webserver with a lot of busy websites, would be limited to the number of connections each website can have.

That is why it’s important to have a reliable host that does not have overloaded servers. This means that the GoogleBot can index your website quickly and entirely without being restricted.

What is crawl budget?
Google will index a number of web pages on your website which is directly proportional to your PageRank. The lower the PageRank, the less pages of your website will be crawled. If you have a higher PageRank, most, if not all of your pages will be crawled.

The better your PageRank, the deeper the GoogleBot will go with indexing your website.

How does duplicate content affect crawl budget?
If the GoogleBot crawls three of your web pages and they all have the same content, Google will only index one of those pages and scrap the other two pages. It will then assign a lower PageRank value because of the duplicate content resulting in less pages being indexed by Google.

Are Session IDs bad for my website?
Google does not recommend the use of session ids for a number of reasons. They look ugly which is hard for the user to remember the address and less users are likely to click on a complicated link.

Google and Yahoo both have tools to remove unwanted variables in the address bar. Any variables that do not add value to the user’s experience can be removed for indexing.

Does 301 redirects take the link juice?
If you move a page or even change domain names, it is highly recommended to use 301 redirects. The link juice is carried to the new page. If the original page has a PageRank of 3, the new redirected page would take it.

There is some decay in the PageRank value but much of it is carried on.

What is a canonical tag?
Google has a fantastic post that describes everything about canonical tags including the new cross referencing of domain names. Specify your canonical.

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I was hoping to get more information on how to market my blog better to increase the number of readers.

Internal communication
What I did get from this book, is how blogging can help big businesses by running internal blogs to help communication within a large organisation. This is great information for the corporate world but no good for the one man blog (ie. mine).

Blog styles
There is a good section on the styles of blogs that exist. Wright calls them – the barber, blacksmith, bridge, window, signpost, pub and newspaper. It gives you an insight into what type of blog you are running or wish to run. Many blogs are a mix of the different styles but it gives you ideas on how to improve your existing blog.

Managing your online social presence
This is a very under-estimated area of social media. Many large companies do not pay attention to what is being said about them or even to find out what is being said.

When a potentially bad situation comes up in social media, companies need to deal with the situation in the best possible way. When businesses react to a vocal customer in social media, they are in full public display. By handling the situation properly and promptly, you can win back that customer and may more through the power of viral social media.

Wrap Up
If you want a book that is targetted to the corporate blogging world with only some information for smaller blogs, this is a great book to read. Do not expect much in the help of getting a lot more readers. I’m going to keep looking for a real blog marketing book.

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• Poker Face – 374 million views
• Just Dance – 272 million views
• Bad Romance – 360 million views

A total of over 1 billion online video views.

She is closely followed by Twilight saga with 980 million and Soulja Boy with 860 million, as of today.

What is she doing that makes her such a star? Maybe add your comments below.

Here are her three top videos -

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• http://toyota.com.au/corolla
• http://toyota.com.au/corolla-series-8
• http://toyota.com.au/corolla2009

Still unsure? read on and I will explain which one to use.

What is Cyclical Content?
Cyclical content can be defined as information about a product, service or event that comes out each year or period.

You may have an awards event that is on every year or a new model of a product every six months.

The mistake most web designers make when working on your website
Many web designers will make the website address for your event, product or service with the date attached to it or the series number or something like that. For example, the awards website address that you have this year is http://yourname.com.au/awards09

What happens next year and people are searching for your awards website address in Google? They type in the name of your awards but what address comes up? This year and all your previous awards website address will be competing against each other.

The answer
The best website address to use is the same one every year or every time the product is released.

These are good addresses because it says the same -

• http://toyota.com.au/corolla
• http://yourname.com.au/awards

It doesn’t matter what year it is, the current information for your awards will be found in the same spot. Previous years’ award information won’t be competing against other years.

If you wanted to look at the 2006 model of the Toyota Corolla, you would use this address – http://toyota.com.au/corolla/2006. If you wanted this year’s model, you would use – http://toyota.com.au/corolla.

Wrap Up
I hope you understand how to use your website address in the most practical way to keep ranking your website high in the search engine results.

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Today, there are over 80 million domain names with the system serving as a platform for $400 billion US dollars in econmic activity. The Internet today generates more than $1.5 trillion US dollars per year.

People often question how we found out information before the Internet. Remember when you

• had to go to the travel agent to make any travel plans
• selling your old things in the garage was done using a garage sale – not eBay
• you got the phone book out to call anyone
• price comparisons were done by visiting a number of shops
• product reviews were done by asking questions
• receipe books or pieces of paper were used when making a dinner
• an overseas phone call was kept short because it was too expensive
• correspondence between businesses took days – no emails
• faxes were used all the time for businesses
• videos were rented from the video store
• short videos was only seen on the funniest home video show – not youtube

We’ve come a long way in 15 years. What will the next 15 years bring us?

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If you sell the same products as other merchants, are your descriptions of your products unique or copied from the manufacturers website?

Did you copy your content?
If they are copied directly from the manufacturers website or from a competitor, you run the risk of being banned from Google or at least penalised with your search engine rankings.

Make your product descriptions unique
The benefit of having unique product descriptions may give your website a better ranking. Having your own product description that you wrote means you can make it more targetted for specific keywords giving you more control of your ranking.

Search engines love content that is unique. Customers like reading product descriptions that say more than what’s your competitor websites.

Wrap Up
Make your product descriptions unique!

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Will the introduction of the iPad revitalise magazines if they take advantage of this opportunity? Wired Magazine and a couple other magazines are leading the pack with new formats of their magazines.

Wired Magazine

It seems that everyone has forgotten that digital magazines have been around for a long time. I think that magazines could have done this previously using existing technology but the iPad has the cool factor attached to it and the big players are jumping onto the digital magazine bandwagon.

Wrap Up
The final two questions are – how will publishers charge for their magazines and how will advertisers be able to be added without being ignored?

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This is not a book about generating buzz for your business by blogging. If you are wanting to learn how blogging can help your business, you will want to read another book.

I’ve read a number of books about blogging and this book is unique. It’s unique because I cannot think of any other books that explain the number of money making techniques used for blogging. It even talks about buying and selling blogs.

Blogging for money
Blogging is often thought as a hobby based activity. A bunch of enthusiasts who enjoy talking about a particular hobby and they do it for the fun of it.

This is not true for the professional blogger. They do it to earn money. By picking the right niche for your blog, your blog has more chances at succeeding.

Blogging Networks
These are used to get more exposure for your blog, share the skills of other bloggers in the network and earn more money.

Wrap Up
This is the professional bloggers manual. No other book holds such great information about blogging for money.

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Google has just introduced a new social media platform called “Buzz”. The difference this is that it’s tied into the Gmail service. There are 150 million users of Gmail every month.

This means that their new social platform has 150 million + users from day one. Now there’s not many companies that can enjoy that kind of power when launching a new service.

Is the Internet ready for another social tool? Time will tell.

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I hope the new office makes me feel better because you need to work in a good office. I feel like I’ve gone a bit stale in this office so I hope to get a kickstart in the new office.

Thank you for following my blog so far and my next post will be from my new office!

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What to look for
Have you received an email that didn’t quite look right? If a bank sends you an email and asks for your login details, you know it’s a scam. The same for a social media website or online store website.

Bank phishing emails
You may receive emails from banks you are not with so it’s easy to tell that the email is a scam because you’re not with that bank. But what happens if you get an email from your bank. How do you know if it’s legitimate?

If you receive an email from your bank, be cautious, it’s highly likely to be a phishing email. Have a look at the link addresses in the emails. A real bank address would be – http://anz.com.au. A phishing website address may look like this – http://anz.com.au.vcsts.za/login

eBay phishing emails
I just received one that appears to be from eBay, that’s why I am writing this article right now. The subject is – eBay Member : You Received a Question From eBay Member fresh.tickets. It looks official. The body of the email looks exactly like an email you would get from eBay if someone really was asking a question about one of your auctions.

I don’t have any eBay auctions running right now so I knew straight away that it was a phishing email.

There are 9 links in the email. 8 of them go to real eBay pages. Even the link to the member’s profile is real.

The link to “repond” to the questions leads to the bad website. If I submitted my details on the bad website, this person might be able to access my PayPal account and other details on eBay.

The damage bill
It’s estimated that $3.2 billion dollars is lost every year in the US from phishing. Customers need to be smarter with their login details and do not provide it to anyone who simply asks to confirm their account.

If you do receive a phishing email, you can forward it to the real company so they know about it. I think this is more important for smaller stores so they can put out an announcement as soon as possible.

Are online stores affected?
Any online store can fall victim to a phishing attack. It usually happens to the larger companies such as Amazon but it can happen to any store. If your online store is attacked, you need to notify all your customers of the phishing attack. Describe what a phishing attack is and tell them to ignore any such emails that ask for their login details.

Wrap up
Customers and companies need to be aware of online crime and protect themselves from falling victim to such attacks. When your company may have been attacked, be pro-active about it and let your customers know as soon as possible.

If these cybercriminals keep getting away with it, they are going to keep doing it and the costs for doing online commerce will only increase.

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A couple of things first before we look at what’s available, you need to answer the following questions

What is the purpose of the website?
Is the purpose of the website to sell products online, take bookings or simply provide information to your customers?

How often will you update it?
Some website are updated everyday while otherwise are only updated once a year. Will the updated be done by your web developer or do you want to do it yourself?

What is your budget?
Do you have any idea how much your website is going to cost? There are a lot of people that just want to take your money, but there are also people who will give you a fair price for a good website. Get multiple quotes and trust your instinct.

The types of websites available
Websites can be broken into the following three types -

Static website
This is a website with one page up to a dozen pages with a contact us form. This is ideal for small businesses that want a web presence without a large investment in developing the site and ongoing fees.

Site updates are done only a couple times a year. I do not recommend leaving a site without any changes for longer than 12 months. You want to demonstrate to customers that you have an up-to-date website with current information on your website.

You can make this website yourself using a website builder or have it professional designed by a web designer.

Flash websites would be included in this website type because changes usually need to be done in Adobe Flash.

It is commonly referred to as a brochure website because it’s purpose is similar to a printed brochure.

Content Management System (CMS)
CMS websites are template driven and suitable for websites that are update often. It could be updated a couple a times a day or a couple times a month. These websites consist of two areas – the public website that everyone sees and an administration area to manage the content.

CMS websites require more investment to setup but updates can be done more easily. With little training, the business owner, receptionist or other employee can update the site. The user simply adds, modifies or deletes the content through the web-based administration area. The web developer is only required to make major changes such as modifying the template.

Examples of open source content management systems include – Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal. Some companies create their own CMS software but requires a large budget and more time to develop.

Shopping Cart System
Online shopping carts are very popular today enabling small businesses to compete with the big guys. Customers are comfortable purchasing online and paying by credit card. Many online stores have started as owner operators and expanded into large businesses employing hundreds of people.

Shopping carts can range from one page order forms – a static web page suitable for 10 products or less; or full e-commerce systems (suitable for 10 to 50,000 products) with backend administration capabilities to add, modify or delete products.

Examples of open source shopping carts include – CartXpress, osCommerce, Magento, CRE Loaded and Zen Cart.

Website designs
There are two popular types of website designs available – custom design and templates. A custom design may be suitable to give your website the same look and feel as the rest of your business. Website templates allow you to see what you get before the project is started. Website templates are available for all types.

You can browse our templates here – Template Shop.

Wrap up
You may use one type of website or a combination of website types within the one website. Some website have a static section, an online store and a blog (CMS).It all depends on what your needs are.

Before you talk to any website developers or designers, know the purpose of your website and browse the web to get some ideas. This will be very helpful when you talk to your web developer.

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To get to know our customers better, AVS networks sent out an online survey to all of our customers, and the results we got were very interesting.

Purpose for online presence
The number one reason for our customers’ online presence seemed to be “to provide information”, followed by “marketing” and “communication”. An interesting comment than one person made was “because in 2009 you are expected to have a website”. While this is very true, it might also be a good idea to put some extra thought into what the primary purpose behind your website is. Simply being online is not enough.

Where does your website fit into your marketing strategy?
You also need to figure out where your website fits into your overall marketing strategy. Is the principal purpose with the website to market your products? Get more traffic to you brick and mortar store? Selling products? Positioning your brand? What is your brand positioning? And is the online brand image coordinated with your offline brand image? If you have a clear message it will be a lot easier to communicate it successfully.

Types of online marketing
The majority of the AVS customers  are not actively marketing online, but the ones who do uses Search Engine Optimisation, e-mail marketing and Google advertisements. Interestingly enough, only a small number uses Social

Media marketing.
We all know that word-of-mouth is one of the most powerful tools to market your product offline. Why? Because having someone else talk favourably about you product is always more powerful than saying it yourself. Having said that, if social media is used in the right way it will lead to positive word-of-mouse which will be way more effective than any other marketing campaign you can create.

Marketing channel of the future
With this information in mind, I’m surprised than more companies aren’t using social media. It is definitely the marketing channel of the future. I believe that social media is so powerful because it makes interaction possible. Social media invites the customer to be part of the marketing process, if fact, it puts the customer in charge. The consumers are no longer passively fed with mass marketing messages, but can pick and choose between the millions of marketing messages that they are buried in every day. The marketing messages that the consumer likes will be passes along to other consumers. A social media campaign that is run smoothly will therefore be very effective.

Online strategy – why do I need one?
Another interesting point in the survey was that most companies did not have an online strategy, but almost everyone still believed that having an online strategy is important. By being online without a proper strategy, many businesses have neglected the most effective marketing tool that they have: their internet presence. Many of these companies spend thousands of dollars on web-design and development, but fail to plan and implement a good online strategy. In her online article about internet strategy  (http://marketing.about.com/cs/internetstrategy/a/aanetmarketinga.htm), Laura Lake compares being online without a proper strategy to starting a business without a business plan, placing an yellow pages ad in an irrelevant category or paying thousands of dollars to have a billboard ad created and placed where there is no traffic. Which is something no business owner in his right mind would do.

Summary
So, my advice for all the small and medium size businesses out there for 2010 is to START PLANNING. Evaluate your business goals, your brand positioning and make sure you are sending out the right message. Put some thought into your website and what you want it to communicate, and try to incorporate social media marketing into your new online strategy.

A good way to start is by conducting a survey among your customers!

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Some of the popular news readers include Google Reader and Microsoft Outlook.

You may have seen the RSS icon on blogs and some normal websites. Whenever a new post or change is done to that website, the change is sent to your reader.

Some blogs only show a summary of the posts making you click on the link if you want to read the full post. Some blogs show the entire post in the RSS feed. Images and videos are shown in posts with a reader.

The benefits
You can read all the blogs and newsgroups in one area. If you are subscribed to a lot of blogs, you will appreciate the time saved instead of visiting every blog individually checking and reading new posts.

How to set up Google Reader
This is very simple. Create or login to your Google account. Click on News Reader and follow the prompts.

Using Google Reader
I start everyday by reading the latest blog posts from industry leaders. It allows me to stay up-to-date with the latest trends in Internet Marketing and eCommerce.You to would benefit from staying ahead of the competition and knowing the latest developments in your field.

I have my own opinions which I express on this blog which a lot of people read everyday. Learning how to start your own blog is a whole post, just to introduce the concept to you so we will leave this one for today.

Wrap Up
What can I say? If you’re not using a news reader, you wouldn’t be reading many blogs and not staying ahead of your competition!

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News Corporation recently blocked Google from indexing their articles and it seems they will be coming out with a paid model soon as well.

This is known as a paywall where you have to pay a subscription fee or a per article fee to read your news online.

It brings up an interesting question – Are you willing to pay to read the news online?

The research
Research figures around the Internet say that some people are willing to pay up to $3 a month to read the news online – which is currently free. It’s not a lot when people pay around $1 per day for a daily newspaper.

I guess people are more willing to pay something they can touch such as a newspaper than pixels on the screen.

Online advertising
If you have recently visited http://news.com.au, you will see advertising all over the place. It is getting more and more animated and in your face. Sometimes it takes over the entire screen!

If they are going to charge to read the news online, they will need to drop all the advertising. People will not pay if there are ads on the page.

Has the free-to-read advertising model stopped working? When was the last time you clicked on a banner from a news website. The advertising is usually very untargetted and the people visiting the website are there to read the news. Not to be sold products and services. If they were searching for something, they’d use Google or Yahoo.

Wrap Up
Are you willing to pay to read the news online? Do you think this new pricing model for newspaper websites work?

I do not believe they will get any more revenue from switching to this pricing model of a paywall. They might change back to the free model when they realise that not many people are going to pay to read the news online.

What are your thoughts?

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The Magazine Publishers of America have released the 2009 data for magazine advertising revenue and number of advertising pages.

Magazines in the US have suffered a large drop in revenues and pages last year (2009).

Here are some examples in advertising revenue -

• Business Week – Down 31.2%
• Fast Company – Down 26.9%
• GQ – Down 22.4%
• Inc. – Down 46.4%
• Maxim – Down 18.7%
• Newsweek – Down 30.4%
• People – UP 3.8%
• Rolling Stone – Down 14.7%
• Scientific American – Down 41.8%
• Ski – Down 29.4%
• Skiing – Down 40.4%
• Sports Illustrated – Down 12.8%
• Time – Down 13.3%
• Transworld Snowboard – Down 17.5%

Overall, magazine revenue is down 18.1% and the number of pages for advertising is down 25.6%. This is a huge blow to the magazine industry in the US. I can only imagine that Australia will have similar results unfortunately.

Source

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This is smart marketing. What other marketing tools cost only your time and effort? What other marketing tool allows you to reach billions of people quickly?

Just like the real world, word of mouth marketing is a powerful tool. Social media is the online version of word of mouth.

The entreprenuer now has a large business and the cash is rolling in. Everyone in the social media world has done the hardwork to get the work out there. He sells his business and can now retire.

What about products and services that suck?
We’ve all bought products and services that have not lived up to their promises. Do we keep our experience to ourselves or do we tell all our friends in our online social world who then tell their friends?

Chances are many people will complain about the product or service that sucked. These in turn shows up when potential customers research the product or service. When they see bad reviews, you have just lost the customer!

Remember the old sayings – it takes 9 good comments to make up for one bad comment? And bad word of mouth travels faster than good word of mouth?

What to do?
When you launch your product or service online – make sure that you’ve got a fantastic product. Then you can get people excited about it and talking about it. This will spread good word of mouth and a successful business.

Are you focusing on social media before your product is ready?

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Yelp has raised over $30 million in venture capital and revenues are around $50 million dollars. There are 26 million Yelp users in the US, Canada and the UK and 8.5 million reviews.

It seems like a lot to pay for such a website but Google will have plans. This includes putting Google ads onto the site which would probably generate enough cash to pay for the acquisition.

Google has about $14 billion USD in cash reserves which makes you wonder what else they are going to buy? They could nearly buy Yahoo with this much money.

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The local video store under threat
Most video stores and chains have ignored the online world and will suffer a slow death in 2010 and beyond. IBIS World research predicts that the video rental industry will lose $20m in renenue in 2010.

The video rental industry has had a number of threats of late including NetFlix – an online video mail subscription service, DVD vending machines and new disc formats. A lot of people are legally and illegally downloading their movies today.

I’m just waiting for the day when Fox Studio and Warner Brothers successfully start selling their movies online for immediate download directly to customers instead of using distributors.

Travel Agencies
IBIS World research predicts the travel agency sector to fall by $46 million. Customers are now purchasing their travel services through discounted travel websites and directly with airlines and hotels skipping commissions.

Photo Processing Stores
Online photo services are increasing because customers can now upload their photos and receive their prints in the mail within a few days at a much lower price. IBIS World is predicting a 5.7% drop in revenue in 2010.

What does this mean for me?
Is your industry affected by these predictions?
Will your industry be affected in the near future?
What are you doing to take your services online?

Wrap Up
There is no stopping the online train now. It’s been proven many times over that the early adopters are usually the most successful. If you do not shift with technology changes, it will shift without you!

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How are you going to make 2010 the best year ever?

1. Stop watching TV
2. Better time management
3. Set your goals
4. Exercise everyday
5. Educating yourself

Stop watching TV!

The average Australian spends (I mean wastes) 21 hours every week watching TV. That’s over 1000 hours a year! That’s 27 x 40 hour weeks. You could have a second full time job!

When you come home to an empty house, do you turn the TV on straightaway while you start doing things? Stop this habit.

When you finished watching your TV shows, ask yourself this question – how am I a better person from this experience?

If you stopped watching TV or limited the amount of TV that you watched, what could you achieve?

Have you disconnected from many of your family and friends?
TV takes up so much time. If you didn’t watch so much TV, do you think you would have more time for your friends and family?

I’m going to be moving house in a couple of weeks. We do not intend on getting a TV set up. If we do, it will be used for special occasions or watching movies.

Time Management
Where is your time better spent?
Work out what is wasting time. Investigate where your time would be better invested. Where is your time most productive?

Do not over work yourself
With all the extra time you have, it’s easy to become addicted to work. Life is about balance between work and play. When you are working, work hard. Don’t work half heartedly.

Spend the rest of your time with your friends and family and other productive activities.

It’s amazing how much I get done when I have a break from work. A short stroll resets my mind.

Set Your Goals
Do you know what your goals are?
Identifying and defining your goals is one of the most important details for any business or person. You need to know what you are trying to achieve and why.

Have you set them?
Do they have a due date?
Have you written your goals down?

Exercise everyday
My best days start with a 6 am workout
If you are not physically fit, you may not be mentally fit. That’s not for everyone but something as simply as a morning walk will get your brain thinking.

How much exercise?
Everyone needs to exercise 45 to 60 minutes a day. When was the last time your worked out? What was your last excuse? You need to make this one of your priorities for 2010 if you want more success.

Educating yourself
Why do some people succeed and others do not?
They are continually learning – everyday. It’s called education and nobody is going to do it for you. Successful people know the latest trends and continually learning new ways to succeed.

If you do not make the effort to learn everyday, no one else is going to do it for you. We are in an information explosion period. Choose your subjects and materials carefully and dedicate yourself to learning it.

Wrap Up
With everything you do, ask yourself – Is this moving me closer to my goals?

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Search engine optimisation (SEO) can be defined as optimising your website so search engines can rank your website in the natural search results, as high as possible for those targetted keywords.

But is all the effort in SEO really worth it?
Should you put all that time and effort into optimising your website so that when the search engine bots come through, that your page will rank higher?

Should you even think about paying an SEO professional to do it for you? What return on investment can you expect?

There’s no  guarantees
No one can guarantee number one position for your chosen keywords for the natural search results. You might get emails in everyday with promises but still no real guarantee.

The statistics
The number one ranking website for any keyword has an average click through rate of 56%. So if 1,000 searches are done for that keyword each day, that’s 560 visitors each day on average.

Of these 560 visitors you get daily, 5% purchase a product – that’s 1 in 20 people. That’s a nice conversion rate and works out to be 112 new customers each day from that keyword. If the average purchase was $100, that’s $11,200 a day in revenue. That number 1 ranking is worth a lot of money.

Imagine if it was a popular keyword and it was being searched 100,000 times a day – 56,000 visitors a day and up to 11,200 new customers a day in an ideal scenario. That’s $1,120,000 a day. Now we’re starting to talk big business!!

Would your business benefit from this kind of traffic?
Any online business could benefit from this kind of traffic. On the Internet, targetted traffic is king. It earns money and it’s what some businesses survive on.

Competition is heavy in the search engines and the most profitable the keywords, that more likely there is going to be more competition.

Conclusion
SEO is definitely worth it and can take a company from being good to great! If your website is not search engine optimised, you are not helping the business at all.

If you have any questions about SEO, please contact me – nigel@burke.com.au

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A well executed viral marketing campaign quickly catapulted her into stardom. If the social media wheels didn’t start rolling for her, I do not belive she would have been heard of outside of the UK.

YouTube and other online video websites
Within 9 days of the competition, the audition performance had been viewed over 100 million times. The total number of views today is over 300 million times. The live cast of the show would have been lucky to be a tenth of this number.

Email Marketing
One of the best known tools for getting the order out to everyone is through emails. People sent the link of the YouTube videos to all their friends. I received a number of emails to watch the “amazing video that I had to watch” as recommended by friends.

I could have forwarded the email onto all my other friends but I’m not much of an email forwarder myself. I get enough emails as it is but I know a lot of people would have sent it onto their friends and family to watch.

Facebook
Fan clubs on facebook appeared with one of them having nearly 1.8 million fans. Facebook gives Susan Boyle more publicity and reaching millions more of people.

Twitter
I checked Twitter but Susan doesn’t appear very much on here. There were a couple of fake profiles but this social media tool didn’t seem to help Susan.

Forums
A number of fan websites appeared and fans discussed Susan’s new found fame with other fans through forums.

Social Media Bookmarks
People posted links to Susan’s videos, facebook pages and other online media using Digg, StumbleUpon and Reddit. The link on Digg was so popular that it was on the frontpage generating more publicity for Susan.

Blogs
With the Susan Boyle phenomenon, bloggers wrote about Susan and what they thought of her. Bloggers have the ability to embed videos directly from YouTube and other online video websites. Their readers added comments and all this generated even more publicity.

The Result
The well executed social media campaign which was pushed along by the TV show’s producers, made Susan Boyle the largest ever debut album for a female artist with over 5 million CDs solf worldwide in the first week.

The Wrap
I do not believe that Susan Boyle would have experienced such a success like she has if it wasn’t for social media. Millions of people got behind the move and posted about it all over the Internet. This gave Susan free publicity to many more potential fans.

Are you convinced that social media could help your business sell more products and services?

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It’s not until you are told of the change that you would realize it.

Go to http://google.com but do not move your mouse. Only the search box and logo are visible. Once you move your mouse, the rest of the details appear.

This is just one of many changes Google has made that is not visible to the general Internet population. By writing and researching for this blog, I read about nearly every change.

Many of these changes are advanced and meaningless to users but as an Internet marketing expert like myself, they are important.

Your Internet marketing consultant should be aware of all the changes Google, Yahoo and Bing do so your website ranks at the top for your targetted keywords and stays at the top!

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I have been on Twitter for a few months now and yet to see real value from it.

I’m following 2,000 people because that is my limit but I’m not reading many of the tweets that come in. Maybe I am following the wrong people because most of them are about network marketing and making money.

It might be time for a clean out and following some better Twitters.

There is about 500 Twitters following me now. When I post a new blog entry, I normal send a tweet but I’m not seeing any traffic from it.

Is Twitter really worth it?
This makes me wonder if this company is really worth a billion dollars? It has no revenue and any advertisements are going to be ignored.

I see more value in the Facebook platform yet they are still having issues trying to make money from advertising.

Spam Tweets
I am noticing that many of the tweets that I receive are spam. I don’t read many of them because everyone is shouting out to get me to their website.

The statistics from January to November 2009.
The number of new users in July was 9.4 million down to 7.1 million in November. How many of these accounts are really accounts?

The number of Tweets has been increasing more. Are people using this as a real communications tool or are spammers using Twitter to help market their websites?

Conclusion
Will Twitter stand the test of time? Will people remember Twitter as a fad or will it keep growing into a important communications tool?

If Twitter cannot find a better purpose, with real people and less spammers, it may not be be really worth it.

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The domain renewal scammers send out thousands of letters everyday to domain owners and they still get many people’s money. Often the domain name is not renewed after it’s being paid for.

If you receive a letter from a company that you are unsure about that is Internet related or you have received an invoice that you are just not sure about, contact your web developer, hosting company or even email me direct. They should be happy to answer any questions regarding any invoices or letters that could be a scam.

Companies that you need to be cautious of include -

• Domain Registry of America
• Domain Registry of Australia
• Internet Names Group

We recommend throwing all their letters into the bin because they are ‘domain slammers’ (scammers).

Don’t get caught in this scam – use your common sense.

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There are thousands of blogs launched into the blogosphere everyday. How many of those are going to be successful? Why do they fail? and how can you build yours differently?

This practical guide will take you step by step through the process of setting up a successful blog.

Research
This is the first thing anyone should do before that start a blog and after reading this book, I believe it’s one of two fatal mistakes majority of blog owners make.

The book discusses the following topics related to research -

• Determining your focus – Who is your audience? the purpose of your blog?
• Comittment issues – How much time will you dedicated to blogging?
• Tools available – Make sure you start with the right blogging software for your blog

Setting up you blog
Getting the design and functionality of your blog right from the begininng can save a lot of work down the track.

The book discusses what tools are available for your blog, which ones are important and why.

Maintaining your blog
A blog that is not updated can make you look bad but as the book discusses, this depends on the type of blog and the information in the blog.

Marketing your blog correctly can make or break your blog. Using tools like RSS allows your visitors to subscribe to your blog and get notified when you make a new post.

Conclusion
The book is suitable for all levels. Beginners will learn terminologies and concepts that are vital pieces of information required before setting up a blog.

Advances users will learn from the authors experiences and tools they use. I’m an experienced Internet user and had a few ‘uh ha’ moments and learnt some new pieces of information that I will be using from now on.

If you are going to setup a blog, make sure you are passionate about what you write about and that when the times get tough (no one is reading you blog) that you keep pushing through by continually posting and marketing your blog appropriately!

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Why are some people successful and others are not?

I do not believe that you could pin point it to one particular skill. It’s a mix of a number of skills. Some you could consider natural but majority of them can be learned, developed and cultured.

Today I want to talk about how you can become an industry leader. By doing this everyday, you will become the leader in your chosen field.

Study your chosen industry just one hour per day

It is as simple as that. By reading, researching, listening and learning for one hour everyday about your industry, you are guaranteed to become a leader. That’s 7 hours every week and over 300 hours a year.

Today knowledge is power. By keeping up with the latest industry trends and being ahead of your field is everything.

Read a book every week
When was the last time your read an entire book? Set aside some time everyday to spend by yourself while you read. Books do not take that long to read if you read a small chunk every day.

Before you begin reading, write down what you want to learn from the book you are about to start reading. Read with a purpose in mind.

I try and read a book every week. Each book is usually on a different topic within Internet marketing or social media or programming. I’m going to start reviewing them on here as I finish reading each of them.

Read industry magazines and papers
If you do not read them, who do you think is? Your competition of course! Learn what is going on in your field and stay on top of it.

Subscribe to related blogs
There is a wealth of information available on blogs that is updated daily. Get yourself a blog reader and subscribe to blogs that are going to get you ahead in your industry.

Learn while you commute
Many people spend hours every week traveling to and from work. If you drive to work, listen to an audio series instead of the radio. You can listen to podcasts or audio books while you drive.

Information overload
It is easy to get wrapped up with all the information that is available today on any topic using the Internet. You need to learn how to scan through the junk and get to the meat.

Each day, I scan through 200+ posts about Internet marketing and e-commerce. I might only read about 20 of them but by doing this each day, I am keeping up with the latest trends, techniques and strategies out there today.

Writing this blog
When I started this blog, I did not realize how far behind I was with my industry. By starting this blog, it has forced me to learn what is going on with the big players such as Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter etc and looking at opportunities that exist.

I recommend anyone start a blog even if you are not after readers. By typing out everything you know about your industry, you will realize just how valuable and knowledgable you are.

Conclusion
If you read 1 hour every day, 7 days a week for 46 weeks a year – that totals 40 x 8 work days. That’s nearly 1 1/2 months spent getting ahead in your field.

Read the best information about your industry for one hour every day and let me know how you go.

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Author : “Pen Kits & Pen Blanks – Timberbits.com“

Most people dream of handing the letter to the boss that says “I quit!” However the reality is very seldom realized.

Starting your own small business is very daunting and traditionally, doing so means mortgaging the family home or borrowing from family and friends.

Where to start.

Ebay has now the perfect vehicle to test and develop you business model and skills. With a few click and some loose change in your pocket, you can compete in a level playing field with the big boys in town.

Should your sales start to pick up and you get into the rhythm of selling on ebay, you will very quickly notice the advantages and disadvantages of eBay.

Pro’s and Con’s

The main disadvantages of eBay is mainly

1. the enormous fees that it charges, and

2. the price wars and race to the bottom which quickly erodes profits.

The next level.

Once you have developed a customer base, it’s time to start to lead them to an environment that you control. Lead them to a place where the big corporation can’t dictates how much their share is (before your even earn a cent), away from the “hand of god” that can delete all your listing because of a complaint of a righteous customer, away from a place which shares all your business statistics with your competitors.

By leading your customers to your own web site, you take back control and you also save a lot of money in the process.

Your website is your shop – give it some street appeal

Have you ever visited a web site that looked like it was done by a 8 year old or a newbie to web design? You wouldn’t get a dodge carpenter or a friend of a friend to fitout your retail premises – we all know this is the case we walk into some shops, why do the same with your web site?

With the invent of the web – small business can compete with the big boys in town. Spend a bit of money up front and get a professional to do the job. To fit out a retail shop professionally expect to pay over $250,000. A professional website is less than $1,000.

I always get complimented for how professional Pen Kits & Pen Blanks – Timberbits.com looks. It cost me less than a $700 to get started – that’s less than 1 months of eBays fees. Now my website’s volume has grown to more than 5 times what I sell on eBay. I now save thousands of dollars a month just on eBay fees, not to mention the time and frustration on eBay.

My word of advice is as soon as you start selling more than 20 transactions a month on eBay, start to invest in a website. When you do build a website, don’t go cheap – we all know what those websites look like, pay a professional because you get what you pay for.

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I ask them what are their goals of their websites? They usually reply with the same comment – To increase sales.

But what are they doing to promote and market the website? What tracking to they have in place? What changes have been done to improve the site?

So today I am going to describe a couple of points that can get websites back on track and increase their return on their website.

Identify The Goals & Purpose of the Website
You need to determine what purpose is for the website. Is it to increase brand awareness? Provide information and to get customers in the door?

Have you set measurable goals for your website? You need to define what success is for your website and work out ways to reach those goals within a certain time frame.

Optimize your website for search engine visibility
Can a search engine read the content of your website? Is it being indexed? What keywords are your targeting?

I see a lot of websites that are poorly optimised for search engines which is the number 1 source for traffic. People are searching for your product and services but your competition is getting the business – not you because your website does not come up in the natural search results.

Website Marketing
Are you advertising online? Are you tracking where the leads are coming from? Do you know your acquistion costs for a customer?

The Internet is an amazing tool for business. You can set advertising budgets to the dollar, you can see exactly where customers are finding you to the words they enter into a search engine to find you, and track visitor trends.

There is no other tool like having a website performing well for you.

What value to do you provide to your visitors?
If a customer were to visitor your website today, what are they going to walk away with? Only sales material or will they leave smarter?

The sell, sell, sell techniques worked in 2001 but visitors want more. They want to know what’s available and how they will benefit from using your product or service. There is a global marketplace that we are in today – there is a lot of competition.

Demonstrate that you are an expert and give customers value by visiting your website.

Get involved with social media
Become familiar with social media ettiquet and start a blog, a Facebook group, comment on other blogs, start a wiki for your industry.

The main message here is to just get involved in social media but play nicely.

Conclusion
Get your website to be a market leader in information. People will link to your site and you will get more traffic. This traffic will convert into customers.

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Viral marketing is the phenomenon of other people passing along your ideas to friends via email or blogs or other online means…for free! Best of all, there is very little costs in setting up the costs compared to advertising campaigns. You could compare it to people handing out your business card to all their friends because they think it’s cool.

Here are some tips to make video go viral. Creating a video is easy and it is free to post onto YouTube. All you need is a simple $300 digital video camera, a YouTube account and an idea.

Most importantly: Your video needs to be funny or amazing or remarkable or have some fascinating information or be controversial. Basically the video needs a reason for people to pass it on. If you can find pass along value connected to your organization and its products, great. I’m not a fan of stupid contests or celebrity endorsements unrelated to a company and its products.

Tip # 1 – Homemade is just fine

You don’t need to hire a professional. A homemade quality video can work great. But plan ahead and shoot several takes to get it right.

Tip #2 – Your video should be no longer then 2 minutes (preferably less)

Think very short. You need to get to the punch quickly. Although YouTube will accept a video that is less than 10 minutes, smaller than 100MB try to make the video between 30 seconds and 2 minutes.

Tip #3 – Make your description clear and specific.

To best promote your video, you’ll want its text description on YouTube to be accurate and interesting. Use descriptive keywords and language that people will find when they search for videos like yours. And use the correct categorizations on YouTube so people will find it.

Tip #4 – Don’t attempt “stealth” fake customer insertions to YouTube.

Some companies try to sneak corporate-sponsored video onto YouTube in a way that makes it seem like it is consumer-generated. The YouTube community is remarkably skilled at ratting out inauthentic video, so this approach is fraught with danger.

Tip #5 – Try a series of similar videos to build interest

Sometimes a series of videos works great. The Blendtec Will it Blend? videos are a perfect example. The even sell t-shirts now!

Tip #6 – Tell everyone about your video!

When you upload your first few videos, you are likely to hear a deafening silence. You’ll be waiting for comments, but none will come. You’ll check your video statistics and be disappointed by the tiny number of viewers. Don’t get discouraged. It takes time to build an audience. Make sure people know it is there and can find it. Create links to your video from your home page, product pages, or online media room. Mention your video in your e-mail or offline newsletters, and create links to your video as part of your e-mail signature and those of other people in your organization.

Tip # 7 – make sure bloggers know about the video

Sending a link to the video to bloggers or commenting on other people’s blogs (and including a link to your video) is a good way to build an audience. If you comment on blogs in the same space as yours, you might be surprised at how quickly you will get viewers to your video.

Tip #8 – Experiment a lot to find something that hits

While I think it is difficult to purposely create viral marketing buzz, it is certainly possible. Create a number of campaigns and see what hits, then nurture the winners along. Think like a venture capitalist or movie studio and try a number of things in order to get that elusive hit.

Good luck. And if you do create a cool video, let me know.

Post Author: David Meerman Scott is a marketing strategist, keynote speaker, seminar leader, and the author of the hit new book World Wide Rave. His previous book, The New Rules of Marketing & PR is an award-winning BusinessWeek bestseller and is being published in 25 languages.

You can read David Meerman Scott’s blog here.

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Coupon & promotional codes
Traditionally and still used today, you would get flyers in the mail box with cut out coupons. These were targeted to customers who would go to the effort of cutting out these coupons and taking them to the shops to get their discount.

Do you remember the times that you were waiting in line at the store and you see someone with a coupon in the line and then you realize you have forgotten your coupon to get your discount? The person with the coupon code is a price sensitive customer who goes to the extra effort of getting that discount.

These same customers are shopping online everyday and still looking for those discount codes. Many of the pizza chains in my area use online coupon codes for online ordering.

How to get your coupons codes out there
Many of the shopping cart software packages that are offered today often include coupon code functionality. You simply create a code by entering a keyword, the discount given – fixed or percentage, expiry date and number of uses allowed.

Promoting your coupon codes
Once you have your coupon code ready to promote, where do you promote it? There are many different places that you can promote your coupon code but the essential thing is to get it to the right customers at the right time.

• On your home page – You can tell visitors when they load up your front page that a discount is given for a certain range for a limited time.
• Special landing page - You can create a special landing page for your Adwords or Yahoo campaigns and include your coupon code on the landing page.
• Social media site – You can have a link from your Facebook page, do a tweet using Twitter or offer the discount code on your blog for your blog readers.
• Mail out – You can include the discount code when you do a direct marketing campaign or sending out flyers.
• Coupon code websites – This is a powerful tool and used in the right way, can get great results. These websites list all the coupons submitted by users to share with other users.

Depending on what your goals are and the type of offer will depend on what method you use to get your coupon code out there. You don’t want to be offering coupon codes if the customer is already going to be buying the product at the listed price.

Google recently published the following data which shows how popular it now is for customers to search for coupon codes online -

*Graphs provide by Google

These graphs demonstrate the popularity of people searching for coupon codes and promotions codes. You can see the holiday period spike in searches will be coming soon so now is the time to start promoting your codes.

Work better than other products
Some products work more effectively with coupon codes. They include popular products and commodity items. It’s up to you to do your market research to see if your competitors are offering coupon codes and if the market would respond well if you started offering coupon codes.

Conclusion
Using coupons effectively can mean more business. Make sure your website uses coupon codes effectively to take full advantage of the price sensitive customer.

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This is one of Google’s ways to give back to the Internet community by educating developers and designers to make better websites. This in turn is supposed to make the web a better place.

Tutorials
The site has some great tutorials and you can visit them here – Tutorials. Some example tutorials are -

• Use compression to make the web faster

• Capturing and analyzing browser paint events using Page Speed Activity

• Compressing your JavaScript with Closure Compiler

• CSS: Using every declaration just once

• How gzip compression works

• HTTP caching

• Improving website performance with Page Speed

• Make the mobile web faster

Participation
You can participate in discussions about making the web faster here – Share and discuss

Useful Tools
There are some fantastic tools the Google lists here. You can access the tools page here – Try useful tools. Some examples are -

• Page Speed
• Closure Compiler
• Closure Tools
• Cuzillion
• Xdebug
• AOL Page Test
• IBM Page Detailer
• Microsoft VRTA
• MySpace Performance Tracker
• Yahoo! YSlow

I highly recommend you check out the educational tutorials and test some of the tools they have made available and listing on the site.

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Backlinks are key to getting a great search engine ranking.

Next time you send an email to say ‘thank you for doing business with us’, maybe ask that customer to do a blog post if they have a blog. You can return the favour by adding a blog post about them. It’s a win-win situation for everyone – you both will get inbound links to your sites and a higher search engine ranking.

Try and get them to add some links to your site with the keywords you are targeting if possible.

You may not notice a big difference with one or two posts about your business but think if 20+ posts are done about your website. Now that will help you search engine ranking!

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The book does not talk about the complexities of setting up these tools but discusses the concepts and letting you know what’s available. It really gets you thinking into how you can leverage these tools to create exposure for your business using social media tools.

Blogs
For search engine optimization – content is king. Blogs can be a powerful tool to create a high ranking website.

There are many reasons companies should use blogs such as they can put a face to your organization, used for announcements, putting ideas out there, creating a feedback loop. The book explains each of the benefits of having a blog.

News Releases
I believe that news releases are under utilized today. News releases have had a new lease of life thanks for online tools. You can publish your news releases to online news services such as PR Wire to get the word out there.

A great tip about news releases from Scott is including keyword links in your news releases to help your search engine rankings for those keywords.

Wikis
A wiki is site created so people can add content and share knowledge. Anyone can contribute to the wiki and they can work very well.

Creating a wiki about your industry can create credibility for your business. People love working with other successful businesses who are on the forefront of industry changes and knowledge. By creating a wiki, you too can have this creditibility and be known as an industry leader.

Viral Marketing
The beauty of social media marketing is the speed that ideas spread. By understanding the new rules of marketing, you have the knowledge to manage and grow these campaigns.

Scott provides some great examples of viral marketing and how the companies responded to these campaigns. Many of them were just created by the customers themselves. He explains what you need to do when this happens and to make it work in your favour.

Podcasts, Vlogs
Some people may not be great writers but they are create speakers. If blogging is not for you, could look at creating podcasts or video logs.

Buyer Personas
A buyer persona is the different types of personas of your customers visiting your site. When you built your website, did you create it for one buyer persona? Did you identify the different buyer personas and build a site that is targeted at each of these personas? Scott talks about how to identify them and how to create multiple call of actions for each persona.

Conclusion
This is a great book to get a general overview of the tools available for this new social world we are entering. Experienced Internet marketers can learn about the different tools available that are not often discussed in Internet marketing.

THE NEW RULES OF MARKETING & PR
How to Use News Releases, Blogs, Podcasting, Viral Marketing & Online Media to Reach Buyers Directly
By David Meerman Scott
Wiley; June 2007
$24.95; 978-0-470-11345-5, Cloth

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The total advertising industry in Australia is currently worth $13 billion dollars a year. Traditional advertising has been declining over the past year especially with the global financial crisis hitting many businesses but online advertising is still increasing.

Online Advertising Vs Traditional Advertising
Traditional advertising is so expensive compared to what you can do with online advertising. You cannot measure the reach very easily, it’s often very untargeted and so much of the budget is wasted. You are trying to grab the attention of as many people as possible. Other advertisers are trying to gain peoples attention and pull them away from your ad.

Online advertising allows you to collect data about every visitor that comes to your website. You can see what traffic sources are producing the best results. You can run pilot campaigns before taking the campaign to full scale. You can jump in front of your potential customers right when they are looking for a service that you can provide.

The future of Internet advertising
Internet advertising is feasible for any business to setup. TV advertising and even newspapers and magazines are not feasible for many businesses that are running today. Unless you are a medium to large business, would you like at using traditional media only for building a brand.

A mix of online and offline advertising, worf of mouth (plus social media marketing) can be an effective way to generate more business.

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Are they really growing?
In reality, newspapers and magazines are not growing. I forgot the last time I bought a newspaper or magazine and think they are a waste of paper. When was the last time you bought a paper or magazine?

Advertising revenue from traditional media is falling. That is because the ads in these publications are not as effective as they used to be. I used to advertise in all the computer and Internet magazines in Australia with a full page ad. But as more competitors started advertising in the same magazines, our return on investment fell and we pulled out.

News are it happens
Newspapers and magazines cannot keep up with the news quick enough. A monthly magazine is often out of date by the time the reader gets a copy. Blogs and other websites have up-to-date content. Many websites display content as it’s happening.

I don’t think newspapers and magazines will ever die but I do not think they will ever be as big as they were.

What do you think? Are websites and social media replacing newspapers and magazines?

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Customers are turning to the Internet to do most of their product research. With search engines and other websites, customers are dealing with businesses all over Australia and the world – not just in the local area anymore.

Introduction of Metropolitan and Mobile Books
To earn more money, Yellow Pages introduced new lines – Regional books within metro areas and Yellow in the Car. This means that advertisers have to spend more money to make sure they cover their area.

Google Local Search
Google is becoming more targeted with their local searches. When this becomes mainstream, it will be necessary to be listed in here. I think there will be more local websites appearing helping people find local businesses.

Our Experience with Yellow Pages
We have cut back completely on all our Yellow Pages advertising and the online version got us zero results after spending 6 months advertising on their website.

What do you do?
When researching about your next holiday, booking airline tickets, booking show tickets … Do you turn to the Yellow Pages and start dialing? Do you go into town and go into the shops? Or do you do what most people are doing – getting on the Internet and doing all your research ang bookings online? So who is going to get the big yellow book out and use that as their research tool?

What has your experience been with Yellow Pages? Do you still use it? Will you be advertising in the Yellow Pages next year?

Maybe you should look at moving some of your advertising budget from Yellow Pages to Internet advertising?

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This is information that your SEO expert does not want you to know. SEO experts charge thousands of dollars to apply this to your website.

1. URL – The URL is the web address. You can name the page with the targeted keywords.
   Action – Name your pages accordingly.
   Example – http://yourdomain.com.au/keyword.html
    
2. Links – The links in the page should be related to the targeted keywords. These are just like references and by reading the references, you should be able to work out what the original page is about.
   Action – Name your links so they are related to the targeted keywords.
   Example – <a href=”apr.com.au”>Australian Produce Report</a>
    
3. The title tag – Do not simply place your business name here. Search engines rank the first words as the most important keywords for your site.
   Action – Place the most important keywords first and then your business name.
   Example – <title>keywords | page name | Business name</title>
    
4. The description tag – This does not have as much weight as it used to have but it is still important. Many search engines still look at this for keywords and even Google may use it as the description for your page in it’s search results.
   Action – Imagine that your visitor has not seen the page and write a good description about what the page is about.
   Example – <meta name=”description” content=”a great description of the page”>
    
5. The keywords tag – Search engines may not put much weight on to the specified keywords but it is still good to include it because every bit helps.
   Action – Enter a list of the most important keyworkds into this tag.
   Example – <meta name=”keywords” content=”a list of great keywords”>
    
6. The heading tags – Search engines look at the heading tags throughout your document and define what the page is about. Many websites make the mistake of not using the heading tags at all so the text looks like a long blurb to a search engine.
   Action – Using heading tags to break up your text into headings and subheadings using the search engine recognised way.
   Example – <h1>Big heading</h1> … text … <h2>Sub heading here</h2> … more text.
    
7. Bold text – Does your site use bold text? Using bolding on your most important keywords in your text. This will make it easier for a human reader and search engine bot to understand it – but make sure that it still looks good. Afterall, you need to make pages that humans can read and not pages that are simply only optimized and readable by search engine robots.
   Action – Use bolding for your most important keywords in your content
    
8. Text – Your chosen keywords should be the main discussion points on this page. If you have chosen a keyword but have not mentioned it in the content, should you be really targeting that keyword or maybe you need to add more content so you include the keywords.
   Action – Check that your target keywords are aligned with the content.
    
9. Alt text – Do your images utilize the image description element? If you load a web page without images, you should be able to make out what the images are about using the image description information. Search engines only read text and not images. The alt image value appears when you rest a mouse on an image.
   Action – Describe every image on the page and add your targeted keywords where you can. Remember that Braille readers and speech synthesizers use the alt text value so do not confuse these readers.
    

How could we forget these basic rules?
When making a web page, we often think about the marketing and the selling perspective of the page. We often forget that search engine robots need to read these pages too. On the other hand, we need to create pages that humans can understand as well.

Search engines try and replicate how a human would read a page but sometimes, they need a helping hand. By implementing these elements correctly on all your web pages means that search engines will recognise the content and targeted keywords more easily.

Conclusion
You now know how to optimize your on-page elements for your website. Now go update your website with your new found knowledge!

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The idea was formed in 1998 by GoTo, a search engine portal. PPC has now become one of the main forms of advertising online. This has created some very competitive marketplaces and can be expensive. Some marketplaces are very inexpensive and can be very profitable.

The Benefits of Pay-Per-Click
There are many reasons and benefits for using PPC advertising. Here are some of the benefits -

• Get instant traffic to your website
• Create test campaigns
• No waiting to be listed in the organic search listing
• Allows (smart) small players to compete against the big guys
• Spending controlled on a daily, weekly or monthly basis
• Anyone can setup a PPC advertising campaign in Google, Yahoo or Bing.
• Continually test landing pages, ads, keywords before putting more resources into the campaign

The Cost of Pay-Per-Click Advertising
The great thing about PPC is you control what you spend. For popular keywords, the budget can be limitless. Industries such as insurance and car rentals can be very expensive and push the smaller players out.

Some keywords can be very profitable resulting in high conversion rates. Having a great ad, the right keywords and sending the visitor to the correct page can make all the difference for a successful campaign.

I have personally seen websites that were previously getting very little traffic and poor sales results – to becoming an overnight success because the world did not know they existed. Once the right traffic was sent to the site, the website started producing great profits and operations expanded.

Always Testing
Pay-Per-Click campaigns allow you to continually do testing. You can run a PPC campaign for one day or even an hour and see how people respond to the ad that you have created, the landing page that you are sending the traffic to and track the keywords that you are targeting.

You can do split testing where you run two ads in rotation and see which one runs best. You cannot do that with normal print media.

Tracking Results = Return on Investment
Through the use of Google Analytics and similar programs, you can track all online transactions. You can see the following information -

• The exact keywords that the visitors enter to find your ad
• The pages they view when they visit your site
• The cost of the ad
• The conversion rates resulting in working out the ROI

Why Pay-Per-Click is Important
If you are not advertising your services to your potential customers, your competition will and they will get your new customers. Can you afford to lose customers?

Your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts will be wasted if you target the wrong keywords. PPC allows you to fast track your SEO by testing the keywords before you even attempt to optimize your site for those keywords.

Warning – You Can Lose Money
Google and Yahoo are targeting small businesses to start advertising online by offering free credit. Please be educated before you setup your own campaigns. If you do not know what you are doing, you will lose money. I have seen business with one keyword in their keyword list, poorly written ads and sending visitors to the wrong page. I have even seen ads sending visitors to broken pages!

Professional Pay-Per-Click Consultants
If you do not know what you are doing, I recommend using a professional service. They will charge for their service but in the long run, it can save you thousands of dollars and a lot of time.

A professional Pay-Per-Click consultant will -

• Research for the best keywords
• Enter negative keywords
• Create professional copy for your ad
• Pre-qualify visitors so you are only getting buyers to your website
• Point visitors to the correct pages on your website
• Setup multiple campaigns
• Optimize your ads to have a strong rating
• Continually test keywords, ads and the land pages
• Control the spending of your campaign
• Analysis the existing competition
• Generate reports based on the performance of your campaigns
• Answer any questions you may have

Conclusion
Pay-Per-Click advertising can be used in many ways to help your website get more sales and become more profitable.

I will be writing more articles to explain the different ways you can advertise your site online and setting up your own campaigns. If you have any questions, please email nigel@burke.com.au

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You can use this feature here – Google Maps and click on Real Estate.

Realestate.com.au and Domain.com.au are angry
News Corp who owns 60% of realestate.com.au and Fairfax Media owns domain.com.au are very upset. They are big spenders of advertising on Google and have now been shot down by Google by providing free real estate listings.

They are now re-evaluating the millions of dollars they spend with Google.

Simon Baker, the former boss at realestate.com.au said “Google was moving from a search engine to a portal what is now serving up the end data itself.

What’s Next?
It seems that Google is putting it’s finger into everything these days. Will these moves help Google become more popular or is it going to hurt Google in the longterm?

Have your say below ..

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The file types include normal documents, videos, photos, maps and more.

How is it different to an email?
Imagine an email where it could be edited like a conversation by a number of invited people. Unlike emails that are bounced around to a number of people with different sets of replies, a Google Wave would allow one page that has everyone’s contributions and accessible by any computer.

It’s a live document where all participants can watch and interact together. We can all relate to miscommunication with emails with information all over the place.

But will a Google Wave resolve this problem?
I think having all the information at a central point where everyone can see the same information is definitely on the right track. Collaboration is a very important function because many of us are working with people that are in multiple locations across the world.

Group Projects
We all remember what it was like doing group assignments at school or university. The students do their part of a group assignment and submit it to the organizer of the group. People end up writing the wrong content, there is duplicate content, people write conflicting points, the list goes on.

I believe that if Google Wave works for students, it would work well for businesses.

Conclusion
I can see many uses for the new Google Wave application but only see the live document being useful. It does not sound revolutionary to me. Google is hyping this up a lot and there is a lot of talk about it on the Internet.

They are encouraging developers to build applications that use the Wave framework. Maybe some developers will be able to provide more applications that will help us work in an online world.

Click here to find out more about Google Wave.

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Melbourne Cup is the race the stops the nation. It is expected that $230 million dollars will be gambled on this race from punters and an incredible $1.67 billion over the four day race carnival. Many people take a day off work and go to the races, go to Melbourne Cup functions and have office parties. It is even a public holiday in Victoria!

Would your business benefit from advertising for the Melbourne Cup? Could customers interested in the Melbourne Cup use your services? You may not be based in Melbourne but this is watched by half the population in Australia. Is that a big enough market?

Melbourne Cup search on Google
I did a Google web search for “melbourne cup” and there is 17,500,000 results but there are only 4 advertisers which are gambling websites. A search for “melbourne cup catering” has 48,900 results and many more advertisers.

Could your business be advertising for melbourne cup services? What about other events?

Event Specific SEM Campaigns
You can create specific SEM campaigns that target the event. You would need to choose related keywords, create related ads and maybe even create a special land page to send people to. The campaign may only run for a couple of weeks leading up to the event and then you could turn it off. Maybe re-use it for next year.

The benefit of setting up an SEM campaign and paying for the traffic means that you don’t need to optimize your website for the event keywords. You can apply a budget and only pay for the performance.

Conclusion
I hope I have you thinking about setting up event campaigns to targetted events utilisng search engine marketing.

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It is estimated that more than half of the 1.6 billion Internet users online today use non-Latin characters in their language. These people will be able to register domain names in their local language very soon.

Will this just be another revenue raising exercise where companies have to register more domain names to protect their intellectual property?

Support languages
There is 17 languages to be introduced include Arabic, Hebrew, Japanese and Chinese plus more.

I think it’s going to be very confusing when advertising these international domain names. They will obviously be geographically targeted but also towards the locals only.

English people understanding the new domains
I’ve seen many different character sets when using keywords in cybercafes while traveling around. Sometimes you are only in a country for a few days before moving on. I just do not know how outsiders will be able to use these domains. Having an English domain name as well is just going to double up on everything.

English people have been very lucky on the Internet. Imagine if the Internet was all in Chinese? Everyone would have to learn Chinese otherwise they would not be able to do much on the Internet.

Conclusion
The technical work involved to accomplish this is a bit like introducing IPv6. These are both mighty tasks which I think need to be overcome to continue the growth of the Internet and open it up to more communities.

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Word-of-mouth can be one of your most effective mediums for spreading the word about of your services. The problem is that if a customer has a bad experience, the bad news is going to spread even faster ( 10 times faster!) and you’ll have to work hard to repair the damage.

Deals Direct Example
The online department store – Deals Direct, are in trouble with the ACCC this week. The ACCC has received a large number of complaints about bogus savings claims, and inaccurate or misleading product descriptions on their website. They promised to clean their act up but is the damage already done?

This got me thinking about our customers and other online stores. Too often I see online store managers who copy and paste information about the products they sell from other online sources. But is the product information correct, up-to-date and accurate?

The same rules apply
Online retailers often forget that the same rules apply to them as do the brick and mortar retailers. Online retailers need to check their refund and warranty policies for the products that they offer and stand by them when required.

The costs of complying with the required law is offset by the reduced risk of the ACCC taking action against you and help with the goodwill you will give your customers.

Conclusion
Spending a few minutes ensuring that your product descriptions including warranty and refund policies are correct will ensure a good relationship with your customers. Customers will know where they stand if there is a problem and the relationship can continue on with problem resolution is clearly documented.

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This indicates the strong growth of websites in Australia. The number is increasing with 1,500 domains registered everyday.

The total number of .com domains has reached 184 million. China is the second largest extension of domain names and it continues to grow as China’s Internet gains in popularity.

AuDA to publish domain expiry list
Some domain name insiders have had access to lists of domain names that are due to expire. They are then able to register the domain names before they are made public. To create a level playing field, AuDA will now be publishing a list of domains that will expire and specify the exact time that the domain name will be available to register.

Register your domain name today
If you are thinking of registering a domain name that is available, I strongly suggest you register it as soon as possible. Once the domain name that you want has been taken by someone else, acquiring that domain name could be a very expensive option.

Domain names are affordable and easy to register. There’s no excuse for not registering the name that you are thinking about.

If I am talking to a customer and their domain name is available. I suggest to them that they should urgently register the domain name with any of the domain registration companies available out there. I don’t care who they register it through, be it us or one of our competitors, I just tell them to register it. Even if they are only thinking about using the name.

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I am writing this post today because we had a victory today. A customer has regained control of her domain name. She was in a very bad position and nearly lost it. She did not own the domain name, it was registered through her original web designer who was now uncontactable. After a number of threats and no replies from the web designer, he finally replied and released the domain name to the proper own. She has now regained control of her domain name. That’s a happy ending.

How can you check who owns your domain name?
You can check by doing a whois search on your domain name and check the contact details. This is something that many businesses know that they can check and hence why many businesses don’t know who owns their domain name.

In Australia, it is better management because domains need to have the customer’s Australian Business Number (ABN) on the registration form. If this is wrong or needs to be changed, the domain needs to be deleted and then re-registered. This costs the customer time and money.

You can check your domain name using one of the two links -

• Australian Domains – AusRegistry
• Global Domains – Whois.org

Why should you care who owns the domain name?
You will not be notified if the domain name is up for renewal or if it is transferred. If your domain name expires, your website and emails will go down. This problem is often overlooked and the hosting company normally gets the blame because the customer thinks their servers are down. This is not the case. A simple WHOIS search would indicate problem.

Your website could be transferred to a third party without your acknowledge. If this happens, you’ve may have lost your domain name and you need to contact the domain registry (AuDA or ICANN) to investigate.

How can I update my domain name contact details?
You can log in to the domain management interface and update the contacts details. These details should be provided to you from when you registered your domain name.

I hope this will help people understand the importance of owning their domain name.

Please share any stories you may have about your domain names that you did not own or any other horror stories that you have heard about this.

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Here is Google’s definition of it

Google Social Search is an experimental feature that helps you find relevant public web content from people in your social circle, when you’re signed in to your Google Account. For example, search for [ restaurants ], and restaurant reviews by your friends and other contacts may appear more prominently in your results. Join the Social Search experiment at http://www.google.com/experimental

Here’s a demostration of the Social Search

How Google Social Search Works

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The new name is now Vegemite Cheesybite about an online poll and telephone survey of 30,357 people. I’m not sure what’s cheesy about it but the new name did not generate the same amount of free PR that iSnack 2.0 achieved.

Here’s what Hitler had to say about the new iSnack 2.0

What do you think about the new name? Maybe you have some better suggestions?

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Would you like to know what consumers are looking at purchasing during this holiday spending season? Well we’ve received research sourced from Google/OTX Consumer Intentions for Holiday 2009. This is very interesting data because it shows you the type of people that are now doing online shopping by the category popularity.

Plan to Purchase by Category Analysis
It is surprising to see clothing and fashion having such a high purchase intention. For many years, online retailers and shoppers complained that clothing and fashion would not sell very well on the Internet. This results shows that customers are now ready and comfortable purchasing clothes online without feeling or trying on the clothes.

This proves that online shopping has moved passed the early adopters stage and into a more mature marketplace as everyday people are now making many purchases online.

Entertainment items have always been popular with online shoppers because the logistics of delivering the items is relatively easy. Retailers can easily email items such as tickets or mail DVDs without many problems. The return rate I imagine would be very low which equates to cheaper and more competitive prices compared to brick and mortar retailers.

I think buying toys online has been popularised through eBay which has had quite a success in selling toys through their online auctions and eBay sellers’ online stores.

Technology Categories Analysis
Video games are popular again these holidays especially with the rise of the Nintendo’s Wii Game Console, XBox and Playstations.

Digital cameras are now much more affordable and incredible specs these days. The internet used to be a great tool to compare digital cameras but it is interesting to note that people are now looking at making their digital camera purchases online.

Amazon has now launched their ebook reader on a world wide basis plus they now have added competition from Sony and other product manufacturers. I think they were anticipating that ebook readers would be a hot item this Christmas but it appears to be off the radar for these consumers.

What is your online store going to do?
Is your online store ready for the Christmas Holidays? Please tell us in the comments below what you have done to prepare your online store for the upcoming holidays.

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You can do this automatically using a Google Data Feed through your shopping cart software. Whenever you add, delete or modify any products in your shopping cart, they are updated in Google automatically. Ask you shopping cart software provider how to set this up if you are unsure.

Introducing Google’s Merchant Center
Google has now made it even easier to manage what products you have in their index by using the Merchant Center. You can also check the status of all the products that are in the index as well. You will need a Google account to use this service but it is free to sign up.

Visit the Google Merchant Center to get started today.

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I did not receive his phone call so at 1.45 pm, I called his number. He said that it was too late now because everyone’s gone home. I thought great, I’ve been waiting for his call and I’ve got no service. He has lost my business.

Getting Customers to Your Door
As a business, you spend so much time and money getting customers in the door, to your website and on your phone – you cannot waste opportunities.

If you are busy when a customer calls, get their phone number and tell them that you will call them back when you have a better chance to dedicate time to their questions. The customer will appreciate your full attention when answering their questions.

Promises are Promises
If you promise a customer that you would call them back – call them back! If you cannot keep a simple promise like a phone call, what will a potential customer think of your service? How many sales are lost because the salesman did not return a simple phone call.

Have you forgotten to call a potential customer? There’s no better time than right now to call that new potential customer.

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Do your product images look professional? Do they say ‘buy me’ to the viewer?

The Benefits of Great Product Images
Having high quality product images for you shopping cart and website can make or break the success of it. Too often I see websites with poor to average photos of products. The business has done a lot of work to the website in getting it ready and spending money to drive customers to the website, then they display poor photos of their products.

Have a look at the flyers that come in your mail box from Woolworths, Coles and other retailers. All the product images are perfect. They want you to buy their products so they have the best product images. You too can have great product photos by spending a few dollars or buying the equipment and doing it properly yourself.

Do-It-Yourself Photography
If you want to do this yourself because you have a large number of images, a bit of time and a turnover of products, you can invest in some photography tents by searching through eBay. Most digital cameras today can take high quality photos if you know how to. There are a lot of resources on the Internet to show you how.

Professional Photography
If you have a limited number of products that you will have on your website, it may be better to use a third party photography studio. You can send them your products, they’ll take the photos, optimise them, send you quality images and send your products back.

With your new high quality product images, you will be selling more products immediately.

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No, it is not hype and it is increasing everyday. A report compiled by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) shows Australia’s commitment to this form of advertising with 18.5% growth for 2008-09 financial year compared to the previous financial year. We spent $1.8 billion dollars for the year, ending 30 June 2009 and $453 million in the last quarter.

Where is Internet Advertising Spent?
Internet advertising can be broken down into the following areas including % of total advertising expenditure -

• Search and Directories – 49% (25% growth)
• General Display – 27% (19.6% growth)
• Classifieds – 24% (6% growth)

This is definitely a strong growth area where the big players are putting in large amounts because they see the value in it. I can only see this area increasing compared to other advertising mediums including TV, radio and magazines.

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How do you check?
You can check by typing in the following to any search engine – site:yourdomain.com.au (changing the word yourdomain.com.au to your domain name (ie. site:avs.net.au)

• Google
• Yahoo
• Bing

This will bring up a listing of all the entries that the search engine has of your website.

If you no results are found, then you are not listed in that search engine. In the near future, we will show you two ways that will get your site listed on all the major search engines.

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Windows 7 is a lot less resource hungry. A quick look in Officeworks with two laptops side-by-side, showed that Vista was using 1000 MB of memory and Windows 7 was using only 750 MB of memory. That’s 25% less memory being used, a difference I think that would be noticeable on most computers.

Windows 7 Features
A cool feature for Windows 7 is the multi-touchscreen functionality. This allows you to control the computer with a touchscreen monitor and you can use two hands or fingers on the screen at once. If you have used an iPhone or iTouch, you will know what I mean. You can zoom in and out on objects using two fingers or move them around.

Microsoft are wagering a lot on Windows 7 to be successful but the launch has been relatively quiet which makes you wonder what Microsoft are up to. Bill Gates has not done a big publicity speech and there has not been much in advertising for Windows 7. If anything, people like Gerry Harvey have a lot riding on it because PC sales overall are down.

Here is a link to the tour of Windows 7 – http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/features/tour.aspx

Have you used Windows 7?
Are you running it now?
Are you going to upgrade to Windows 7 and if so, when do you plan on doing it?

I plan on upgrading shortly because I think it’s going to run smoother than Vista and XP.

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Nigel Burke

Welcome to my blog. The purpose of this blog is to help Australian businesses succeed on the Internet. You could be setting up your first website or looking at increasing sales on your current website.

The Internet world is constantly evolving and you’re too busy working in your business. It’s near impossible for the average business owner to keep abreast of the latest marketing techniques and web technologies. In a time poor world that we live in, I hope to inform you of the latest developments that you can implement into your online strategies.

Expect to hear the latest news, insights and my advice on running a successful website. This will include information about domains, web design, internet marketing and social media.

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