Since this might not make much sense to most of you, let me give you a visual:

See that little heart on the right? It’s hyperlinked, and it points to a site called LikeMyThought. I started seeing this stuff pop up a few days ago, until the little heart icon caught my eye – knowing that it was a hyperlink, I had to see what it was (mostly because I knew it was something created by some new, aspiring internet marketing genius).

When visiting the site, I was astounded to see that it was nothing but some big Facebook API-driven list of nonsense quotes, mantras and phrases that you could “like” and have appear on your Facebook feed, through Facebook connect. The quotes were ranked by “most liked,” which appeared at the top-most portion of the page.

Check this out: visit the site and hit “refresh.” A new quote appears, and the page’s <title> changes to accommodate it as well. Below it is an AdSense 335×280 ad, and a medium banner at top. That’s it. Gee, I thought AdSense banned content-less, RSS-driven or auto-generated sites? Hmm.

There’s more?!

Well, for whatever reason, I managed to see another one of these quotes appear that one of my friends “like”d. I hovered over the heart…but…it wasn’t that same site. It was another one, named LikeFever.info. It’s basically like LikeMyThought, except it looks less cluttered and fits one column. There’s another one, too…it’s called GoLikeUs.net. Oh, and Likesy, too. Ok – I’m guessing this is some kind of new trend here. How long until we see “Facebook Like Site CMS clones” popping up on marketing for-sale forums everywhere?

Dumb or not, these “like” sites are getting oodles of Facebook traffic. While they don’t seem to be ranking for anything worthwhile according to SEMrush, Alexa.com puts LikeMyThought on their map as it is currently around #87,800, with the lesser visited LikeFever at around 194,000…the latter of which has a nice stalagmite spike on its chart. LikeMyThought even has its own Facebook Page as seen here. Looks like they’re harvesting new visitors through good old social networking, rather than putting out the website and hoping for the best.

Just for the hell of it, I searched Google for “♥”, which wound up throwing back a “Your search did not match any documents” reply. Hmm, so much for the hypothesis that they were attempting to appear on Google page 1 for an ASCII character.

Viral Without A Cause

What’s the point of creating these sites? AdSense clicks? Does anyone even click them? For that matter, what’s the motivation of spending more than a few seconds on these sites? The worthiness of any site to get massive Facebook love is obvious, but what’s the resolve – a couple AdSense blocks that can’t possibly be paying more than a penny or two per click? The sites themselves don’t have any backlinks – I’ve counted around 30. However, they must have oodles of Facebook backlinks.

Just like all of the other fads in the past including Hot Or Not, Million Dollar Homepage & others, this has the potential of being a new contender in the quest to copy (and hopefully improve) on a popular new concept. Where it goes, however, is yet to be seen.

As for me, I’ll click the “unlike” icon next  to this one (if it actually existed).

For starters, there’s really no industry standard or expected amount that webmasters charge for paid placement or CPM banner ads on a website. Sure, there are metrics like impressions and visits, but it would be unrealistic to think that a dollar sign should be attached to each one of them. Here are several attributes that typically determine a site’s “worthiness” for being a good advertising venue:

1. Your SERP rank: If you’re in the top three of Google for a competitive one or two-word keyword, there’s no doubt that niche advertisers out there are aching to be featured on your site. When you’ve achieved ranks like these, they might even be sending you emails to ask for your advertising rates.
2. You’re an authority in a niche market: If your site is synonymous with a niche market (i.e., Edmunds.com for “car appraisals” or Zillow.com for “real estate”), then it would only make sense for your site to be part of an advertiser’s portfolio within that niche.
3. You have a solid niche following: If your site is niche oriented and has a faithful following of people who are interested in that niche, then your site is a good fit for an advertiser. Many of these sites are typically seen in the form of blogs or social networks. An example of this would be Cafemom.com for the “mothers” niche.
4. You have a premium domain name (or a high-profile exact keyword domain name): If you own Trucks.com, Pencils.com or Laptops.com, the worthiness of advertising on your site for people who sell products in those niches goes without saying.

How Will You Display Their Ads?

If you’ve fulfilled any of those attributes, the next step is to determine what kind of advertising you’d like to offer. Static, rotating or CPM?

• Static ads are just that: it’s a box that someone pays for on a time-limit — usually per month. The box, banner or link ad will just sit there for the duration of the advertising terms. It’s then up to you to remove it once the full term is up.
• CPM ads, however, incur a “cost per mille” or 1,000 views. So, your advertiser will pay you $X amount per 1,000 views, which is set at your discretion.
• Rotating ads can be handled either way. You can charge advertisers to be included in a “rotating banner ad” that will show a new ad in the rotation with each page refresh. Some webmasters attach a CPM payment scale to these. Others may choose to simply have ads get placed in a queue and be shown until the payment cycle is up.

How to Determine A Fair Price for Advertising

If you’ve gotten a clearer picture as to how you’d like to offer up your ads, it’s now time to determine what a fair price is. The way I’ve typically done this in the past is with a series of Google searches. For instance: if I’m looking to see how much I should charge for a site about NY car rentals, I’d do a Google search for NY car rentals and throw in additional keywords like “advertise on this site” or something to that effect. Hopefully, it will result in a few niche sites’ “advertise” pages, outlining their pricing structure.

Do this for a handful of sites in your field (aka, your competitors) and see what they’re charging. If they’re smart, they did not include this information publicly and require customers to call and inquire about demographics and site stats. Many others, however, publicly state this information.

Note that there is a standardized ad size guideline. Ads come in many shapes and sizes, but they’re uniformly sized in pixels and controlled by the IAB: an organization that oversees internet ads. Make sure your ad spots conform to these guidelines, and that you don’t invent new and obscure ad sizes on your own :)

Make a list of your competitors, what they’re offering in terms of advertising options, and what each one costs. Note the similarities and determine your price based on them. Remember one thing: advertisers like to know what they’re getting into, and that all comes down to demographics: gender, age, HHI (house-hold income), number of children, education level, etc. They’ll also be interested in site statistics like daily and monthly visits, pageviews, average time on site, bounce rate, and everything else on your main Analytics dashboard. If you don’t want to make any of this public, at least put something together in Word or Excel and export it as a nice looking PDF for them to have.

To see a nicely done advertising offers page, check out the one on DigitalPoint Forums. It has it all: an explanation of what you get, how it works, screenshots of statistics and more.

You’ll find that paid placement advertising is where the REAL money comes in. No longer will you toil over penny and nickel clicks from AdSense – it’s time to look into committed $300, $400, $500/month paid placement box and banner ads. After all, that’s what separates the newbie at-home income crowd from the bigger fish!

I’m not sure about you, but this is a day that directly reminds me of the infamous July 2008 public registration of the .ME domain extension. GoDaddy literally died that day from the amount of activity it got. Let’s see how they handle .CO in about an hour from now.

Why .CO Is Getting (Over)Hyped

One of the biggest buzzes around is that .CO is a legitimate mis-typing of .COM; therefore, domains with a .CO will capitalize on the mis-typed traffic of their .COM counterparts.

Do I believe this? Not really. Why? Simply because I have never mis-typed the extension “.COM” in my life, ever…and I highly doubt that it happens to such a high extent* that these .CO’s will be receiving type-ins to the extent of any other domain extension. (* unless we’re talking about super premium .CO’s)

I could be proven wrong, though. Maybe a lot of people out there type quickly and miss the “m” on their keyboard. Regardless, that’s what domainers are praying for. Imagine owning Cars.co and capitalizing on all of those beautiful Cars.com mistypes. The bottom line is that nobody really knows what extent of mis-types will come in to .COs until their owners publicly release those results.

Also, if you haven’t heard about domaining legend Kevin Ham, read this article and be amazed. In short, he struck a deal years ago with the .CO extension after coming up with the hypothesis on how it might capitalize on the type-in traffic therein. He’s also the same guy who jumped on “.CM” extensions, since they’re also a mis-type of .COM.

My Opinion on .CO

Honestly, I see .CO as yet another domain fad. I lost my faith in domain extensions after .ME and .TEL, and the real-deal domainers out there still care about .COM and .NET above anything else…others publicly denounce all other extensions, especially these new, over-hyped ones.

Perhaps some good domain hacks will come out of .CO, I can’t think of many words offhand that end in “-co,” but I’m sure many others have already done so.

In doing a quick search session this morning on GoDaddy, I noticed that all of the good generic one-word .COs were already taken during landrush. So much for the possibility of my owning 3DTV.CO – oh well, it would have been nice. See, those are the only domains that will experience any magic from accidental type-ins. Not “BestStructuredSettlements.co” or “UsedHorseTrailers.co”.

Considering that I most likely wouldn’t be interested in anything but a one-word .CO — I may just throw my towel in on this one, snatch up one or two domains in the spirit of collecting, and call it a day.

In the realm of social media tracking, there aren’t many contenders. Here at the office, we use both Radian6 and ViralHeat. They both serve different functions, are to be used by two different user-bases, and come with entirely different price tags.

Slim ‘Pickins for Social Media Analysis Tools

While Radian6 is your typical full-fledged corporate social media monitoring tool, it’s not exactly user-friendly out of the box, nor is it affordable at a starting price of $600 per month.

For the at-home internet marketer, ViralHeat is the more practical decision: it gives you the only tools you’ll probably ever use in a social media tracking campaign, without all of the bells and whistles that you never will. Oh, and it starts at $9.99/month with a “pay by month” system – can’t beat that, even if you wanted to do a one-month taste test.

Using ViralHeat’s $9.99 per Month Package

The low-end package with ViralHeat gives you 5 “profiles.” A profile is simply a single keyword. For instance, “3D TV,” or “Sony.” When you select one of these keywords, the system will go forth all over the internet and look at all recent activity that has used those keywords, giving you an in-depth report in the form of line charts, lists and percentages that represent activity on all social media sites. These 5 profiles can be changed or deleted at any time, making it a top choice for the stingy (I mean, thrifty) small business owner who isn’t willing to pay more per month for a larger package.

The plan includes a 7-day history chart, as does the middle-grade $29.99/mo package. This 7-day spread gives you insight into trends over the past week – a good way to measure offline media’s impact on your company or any other upcoming, trendy topic. Metrics for these charts include Google Buzz & Twitter, Facebook, realtime web (blogs) and video (Youtube + all others: MetaCafe, Vimeo, etc.)

The only downside to ViralHeat’s lowest pricing tier is that it leaves out sentiment analysis, which identifies positive and negative mentions in social media. It’s something you’ll want if you are using Facebook for your actual company or product, and are about to do a big launch. Sentiment analysis is a key part of due diligence; make sure people aren’t spreading a lot of BS around about you or your product. If they are, be there to correct it immediately.

Tracking Twitter and Google Buzz

The following screenshot shows a view of the “microblogging” dashboard on ViralHeat. It’s a mash-up of both Twitter and Google Buzz, showing both combined and separate statistics for both.

As you can see, all of the information you really need to know is included in this account: you get an overview of positive and negative Conversation Analysis, lists of top influencers (people who talk about you the most), and trends that display which day was most successful. It will help make things painfully obvious when asking “why did my traffic spike?” The bottom of the screen shows actual Tweets. They can be sorted by sentiment: positive, negative or neutral (an internal filter stuffs them into one of these three categories for your convenience).

Tracking Facebook

For Facebook social media tracking, you’ll get similar treatment with a 7-day chart and detailed statistics on what went on during the week.

There’s no doubt that the analytics provided directly with your Facebook Page is ample enough, but ViralHeat tags on additional metrics including top fans and posts, sentiment analysis (positive, negative or neutral) and an actual mash-up list of all Facebook posts that mention your selected keyword or company name. As with all other charts, you can export your metrics to an Excel document.

Tracking the Realtime Web

This section within your ViralHeat account acts as a general bucket for web activity, where you can track what bloggers are article writers are saying about your selected keyword.

It’s the most meager section in terms of the metrics it provides, but the real beauty in it is that it lists all of the recent backlinks that term has gotten right underneath the chart, so that you can visit them directly. They’re categorized by what country the domain is in, and each one has a “stats” link that gives you insight into what that particular page is contributing to the term.

Tracking Video Campaigns

Lastly, ViralHeat will give you insight into the world of social video sharing, and how your researched keywords or company names are being perceived on the likes of Youtube et. al.

This dashboard gives you a statistical overview, listing of the top video sites mentioning your targeted term, and the top videos related directly to them. Best of all is a mash-up of links pointing to specific videos, presented below the chart.

It saves a hell of a lot of time as opposed to visiting Youtube, Vimeo and other popular sites and searching for/weeding through results on your own. I like to think of ViralHeat’s video analysis section as a big convenience, above all else…especially since we run corporate Youtube campaigns that coincide with TV advertising.

Choosing a ViralHeat Plan

First off, ViralHeat has a free no-obligations trial so that you can actually see what you’ll be getting. I first started off with the basic $9.99/month plan when signing up, but we had the desire for sentiment analysis at the office, and upgraded to the highest $89.99/month plan.

Personally, I think that plan is overkill for any at-home business owner, as the only notable perks you’ll get are the 40 profiles and 30 day history (instead of 7). However, we have both a PR and Marketing team totaling a couple dozen employees that uses the account daily.

Is Social Media Tracking for You?

If you’re looking for the most affordable and practical way to measure social media analytics, ViralHeat is your current best  bet in terms of useful metric reporting and price.

In all, it’s not worth your while to bother with social media tracking if you’re throwing out Facebook Pages and videos for the hell of getting backlinks or casual followers, but it’s a must-have if you take it seriously and really integrate these technologies with your brand name, or to maintain relationships with your customers. You’ll WANT to see how it’s doing, otherwise, you’ll be missing out to the point where your campaign will be mediocre at best.

Until Google Analytics supports social media analysis (which I doubt, unless we’re talking about Google-sponsored social media services like Buzz, Wave and the alleged Google Me), ViralHeat is a solid contender that won’t hurt your budget.

Newbie forewarning: most, if not all of these sites are “nofollow.” Note that this shouldn’t be a deterrent in any way, as “links are links” and they all contribute to your site’s success, especially in a world where social is influencing SERPs! More recognition (and a constant stream of it) is what you’ll be looking for these days in the world of social SEO evolution.

Note that this is not a list of all bookmarking services with buttons – just the ones that don’t suck and are worth your consideration!

Social Networking & Bookmarking Buttons for General Topics

Facebook Like button: The new “like” continues to be liked itself amongst the webmaster community. Simply insert some simple code on your site with the iconic “Like” button, and it will get sent straight to someone’s Facebook page feed when clicked. Facebook’s opportunity doesn’t have to be explained these days; therefore, it’s not something to ignore. I’ll always feel that Facebook Like works best on universally “interesting” articles, especially if it’s humorous.

• Use it if: Who doesn’t have a Facebook account these days? Hell, just use it, period! Facebook is on fire right now, and the “Like” script is unobtrusive. The audience is so huge, that it includes tons of interest level subsets. It can’t hurt to try it out!
• Solid alternatives: MySpace Share, Twitter Retweet button

Twitter Retweet button: Still a valid way to share, Twitter seems to be getting overwhelmed by the fact that Facebook serves the same purpose in a more engaging way. Regardless, it’s still a big platform that can give your articles a great deal of exposure if seen to the right user(s). Thanks to things like hash tags, your article can get further exposure based on what category it’s hashed under. Twitter continues to be one of the big three (Twitter, Facebook, Youtube) in the realm of social media analytics and sentiment analysis.

• Use it if: …you use Twitter as a part of your branding strategy. Since you’re on the site a lot, it would be a good idea to tie this functionality into your articles so that you can not only get more Twitter exposure, but more followers as well.
• Solid alternatives:  Facebook Like button

Google Buzz button: You may or may have not used it already, but it’s kind of like a social networking mash-up. Think of it as having the mobile “where in the world am I?” geo-targeting of Foursquare or GoWalla, combined with the front page feed of Facebook. It’s mostly used by tech geeks and lesser known by anyone else at this point in time. People who use the Droid and other Google-sponsored phones may have the Buzz app on it. Do individuals’ Buzz results show up in SERPs? No…at least, not at present. Technically, Buzzes go to a “user account” rather than a public web page like other popular social bookmarking sites. However, they can go viral, and Buzz is a perfect example of a ‘trust marketing’ tool, as people are recommending links to their friends (of whom trust their judgment). Don’t believe it? Just look at the Google Buzz activity that Mashable.com’s articles get.

• Use it if: …you have a lot of internet geeks, marketers or otherwise who visit your blog. Presently, they’re one of the biggest user bases of Buzz until the program becomes more publicly accepted.
• Solid alternatives: Google Wave This

Digg “Digg This” button: This site constantly evolves, and continues to be the quintessential news sharing site. Digg traditionally shines for articles that reveal something new (the newest smartphone dissected, a new planet or dinosaur fossil found, a political blunder, a bizarre tradition, etc.) or otherwise incredibly interesting or off-beat. Digg and especially the Digg community have gotten harsher on backlink-hungry webmasters than ever before – expect your submissions to be “buried” if they point to affiliate sites or promotional pages.

• Use it if: …your site deals with occult, interesting, amazing or unique situations in article or picture format, feature a Digg button on the upper left of each article page.
• Solid alternatives: Mixx button, Reddit button, Yahoo Buzz Up button, Slashdot bookmarklet, Newsvine seed
• Second string alternatives: Kirtsy This button, Propeller bookmarklet

Delicious.com “Bookmark on Delicious” link: A lot has changed beyond the old URL it was once known for (del.ico.us). It has become a major player in the social sharing world and is even used as a top social tracking metric in social analytics. Delicious is a top choice for personal bookmarking, too. It makes it easy to ‘tag’ and associate links with a nearly limitless number of tags that are limited to your imagination – a great way to classify a link with a long-tail niche term (you can use pluses or minuses in place of spaces between words in a keyword). Hey, if giant sites like Flickr use it throughout their entire site, it must be worthy.

• Use it if: …you don’t know what other bookmarking service “fits” for your site. A lot of people use Delicious, and it’s a safe blanket-bookmarking service to rely on.
• Solid alternatives: Diigo button (formerly Furl.net)
• Second string alternatives: Faves.com Fave It

StumbleUpon Submit button:  In terms of worthiness, StumbleUpon has been one of the most controversial sites amongst webmasters. Many favor the rolling bursts of traffic that it can foster, while others ridicule its inability to be part of a solid backlinking strategy due to its short-term or one-time-only results. Regardless, it’s a huge site with a community of “Stumblers” who can bring attention to your page, video or picture. The StumbleUpon button “stumbles” your site, or gives it a notch, increasing the chances of it being seen via random stumble within its category. Stumbles build an inertia-like momentum; the more stumbles you get, the more probability your site will show up at random to site users.

• Use it if: …your user base mainly includes bored people looking to kill time – StumbleUpon is a great time killer for people looking to discover new things. If your site is interesting enough to fit the bill, it might be a good match with a StumbleUpon Submit button. Note: I almost considered not putting StumbleUpon on this list due to the more-than-likely chance of a short term traffic burst,  but results may vary.

Social Networking & Bookmarking Buttons for Niche Topics

LinkedIn Share button (Wordpress only!): Regardless if you use it or not, LinkedIn has still positioned itself as the “Facebook for professionals,” and is more notably being used by recruiters sick of bad Monster.com or CareerBuilder applicants flooding their inbox. It’s also a place where people create and join groups relevant to their background or profession; in essence, a site of niche businesspeople. This button will let LinkedIn users share your page with their entire network.

• Use it if: …your site is a job networking or job seeking site, LinkedIn Share is an obvious fit in either case.

Sphinn “Sphinn It” button: Got a site dealing with internet marketing, SEO, SEM or online business strategy? This community is dedicated to these topics, and is frequented by marketers looking for quality advice. It’s a place to get noticed for all of the hard work you’ve put into that SEO hypothesis, those flowcharts proving some kind of point about online marketing trends, or anything else that would be of extreme interest to an online marketer.

• Use it if: …your blog is primarily about internet marketing and/or any of its facets, and you write meaningful, content-rich articles that serve as valid resources.

Tip’d “Tip It” button: It’s a social bookmarking site for financial news only: the Tip It button will give your article a notch on the site, hopefully pushing your article more toward the top (think of it as a financial Digg). The best part about Tip’d is that it caters to the topics that tend to never do well on other social sites: primarily, those about law and accounting or economics.

• Use it if: …your articles pertain to topics in the fields of law, investing, real estate or economics.

Fark “Fark It” button: Fark’s purpose is to draw attention to various articles of interest elsewhere on the internet, as chosen by its site users. Sites that get the green light will make it to the front page, which is a high visibility area that may result in the dreaded “Digg Effect” of server congestion. The Fark button is simple and doesn’t include a counter; however, it gives your page a vote to appear on Fark’s home page.

• Use it if: …your material is quirky, humorous or deals with “stupid news.” Make sure it’s a unique story you’ve pursued on your own, and not just a copy of something else.

N4G News Tips link: N4G or “News For Gamers” is a social article site dedicated only to gaming-related news in the current day. The popularity of stories on N4G is signified in temperature-like “degrees.” Only the most popular articles of the day make it to the front page, out of hundreds of daily submissions.

• Use it if: …your run a video game news site dealing with game reviews or topics of interest only of today’s game releases.

Select a Button…and Run With It!

Using the guide above, choose which sharing button makes the most sense on your site.  If two prove to be a good fit, include both. Just think: many people who have Twitter also have Facebook, just like many people who use Buzz might also use Digg.

The best way to know a good combination is to look at the big sites that are already savvy on social networking: Mashable, Time.com, CNN. They’ve already done their research before making a final decision. Look at the big sites in your niche…what are they using?

If you’re a “regular” on any particular site, it would be insane not to use that site’s button on your pages. So, if you Mixx all the time and have built up an impressive profile and friend list, it would only make sense to use the Mixx It Up button on every page of your blog!

How About Those All-In-One Social Bookmark Services?

If you simply can’t or don’t want to pick one of those ‘everything in one’ buttons that create a rollover displaying multiple bookmark icons (i.e., ShareThis, AddThis, Social Marker, Add To Any, etc.) is a perfectly valid thing to do. Just beware of the fact that people are less likely to use a specific service in those buttons, and that many visitors hesitate to even use them at all. (Personally, I think ShareThis is the superior one amongst them all – it even has its own built-in analytics, and also an official ShareThis Wordpress plugin).

In essence, this shows a pro and con of using specific buttons: they’re very convenient for people who use those particular services, but worthless for those who don’t.  On the flip side, all-in-one buttons are great because they include all of the popular services. However, many people are too lazy to use them, especially if they can’t find the service they use if it requires clicking the “more” link within the pop-up.

What’s the Best Place to Put a Social Bookmarking Button?

I think it’s safe to say that the most advantageous places to stick them are within the upper left corner of your body content, underneath the heading (considering you don’t already have an AdSense banner stuck there).

Otherwise, it’s commonplace to include it under the header, flushed left or right – your choice. A really bad place to include it would be away from the content, such as in the page header or in the sidebar – that wouldn’t make much sense at all.

Consider ending your article with yet another social bookmarking venue, rather than making your visitor scroll all the way up to the top to access it.

Perhaps certain bookmarking services do better under an article than above it? How about a quick way to have your visitors publish your link on their Facebook feed with a “Facebook Like” link right after your article’s conclusion, while the awesomeness of your article is still fresh in their mind and potentially of interest to their friends? These are the tests you should perform.

Whatever button ‘fits’ with your site should be considered an overall part of your site’s marketing strategy. It’s a tool that makes your site become easy to share on a specific social bookmarking service, as opposed to hoping your visitors will copy and paste the link into their account. Using the more relevant service will mean more pleasing results – do some due diligence and decide which one makes the most sense for your individual sites!

Google Apps is an enterprise-level set of office tools that’s used on the corporate level to set up mass Gmail accounts, calendar sync, and all of that other stuff that’s typically done through Microsoft Office. However, they also have an equally awesome Standard Edition for people like you and me who don’t want to pay anything.

Google Apps Standard Edition essentially gives you a Gmail account that you can use for your own domain name. You can create whatever account you please, such as “info@mysite.com,” “sales@mysite.com,” “admin@mysite.com” or anything else. You can do this for multiple domain names, AND, have all emails across all domain names flow into the same inbox. So, you can have emails from “info@mysite.com,” “info@myothersite.com” and “admin@myblog.com” flow to the same place.

The only catch with the Standard Edition is that your reply will be sent from the primary domain name that you set your account up with. In other words, in looking at the example above: if we created the Google Apps account with “info@mysite.com” and reply to an email that came in from “admin@myblog.com,” the reply would be visibly set as “info@mysite.com.” It’s best to create your Google Apps Standard Edition account with your official business’ URL. I personally used my LLC’s domain name for it. Alternately, you could also create a Google Apps account for every single domain name you own.

How to Create A Google Apps Standard Edition Account

Visit the standard edition site and proceed with the new account creation process.

Eventually, you’ll have to add MX records to the domain name you set your account to – this can only be found through your web hosting account. Personally, I’m running off of my own VPS server, which is running the WHM control panel system. Google gives instructions on how to update your MX records (since you probably don’t know how to do it, unless you’re a server geek) for all different platforms: WHM, GoDaddy, cPanel, 1and1, and several others (simply search their help section for “MX records” and you’ll find more results).

The Google Apps dashboard appears after you've logged in, giving you access to your email and other Google features.

When you create your account, simply bookmark the direct link for your new email account. It can be found at “mail.google.com/a/mydomain.com” – you’ll also automatically get a Google Calendar, Google Chat, Google Docs, Google Sites and Mobile account with it. You can also create up to 50 users: joe@mysite.com, mike@mysite.com, mary@mysite.com, etc., and give each of them their own login.

Google Apps' email account looks and functions identically to Gmail, except you use yourname@yourdomain.com!

I can tell you as a fact – nothing looks more professional and gives more credibility than owning the “info@mydomain.com” email address for your online business domains. They’re even required for certain business-related ventures, directories or organizations you might join in the future.

Conclusively: if you love Gmail, don’t know how to set up your own email addresses, need to set up multiple email accounts for your associates, and want to have one main account that collects all of the emails coming in from several of your domain names into one convenient place, then Google Apps Standard Edition is the answer to your prayers!

Here are some facts about companies (especially small to mid-size companies): there’s usually nobody in the office who knows a damn thing about the brand protection elements of internet marketing.  These days, you’ll probably find a graphic designer who does minor website graphics here and there, and maybe an SEM guy who does AdWords, but nobody who really knows what the hell they’re talking about in regard to advanced brand integrity, domaining or anything of that nature.

Good cybersquatters know this. I’m also convinced at this point in time that the best cybersquatters on earth do not exist in the United States, but elsewhere. You’d be a fool to cybersquat in the US, it’s probably the most difficult country to do it and get away with it.

Corporate Weaknesses that Cybersquatters Exploit

Here are two of the biggest vulnerabilities I’ve seen in my career in small to mid-size businesses, in regard to protecting the brand name (more specifically, domain names) online:

1. Nobody’s educated about cybersquatting: That’s right, upper management usually doesn’t understand the point of owning the .com of your brand name. They only thought about the actual company name. They don’t know that cybersquatters go for misspellings, plural versions and other variants to capitalize on type-in traffic. Oh, and they don’t know what type-in traffic means, either. They know so little about the world of cybersquatting that they wouldn’t even know to say “let’s hire a guy who knows about this stuff.”
2. Nobody’s willing to spend thousands to sue someone over a cybersquatting case: What I’m  about to say is so true — companies tend to send cease and desist letters as empty threats that will never be acted upon. I’ve heard corporate counsel say “we’ll send the letter, but I’m not spending $15k to take someone to court over a domain name.” I’ve heard it MANY times, actually. To a bigger extreme, most small-mid size companies don’t own an international trademark and won’t even touch an international cybersquatting case with a ten foot pole.

With that being said, the two things cybersquatters have going for them are 1) misinformation, and 2) the cost and time involved in the court process, which is enough to scare most people away. In essence, cybersquatters are like great Texas Hold ‘Em players – the call the bluff of any cease & desist that comes their way. The occasional squatter sitting in his mother’s basement will cave in to a C&D, but many won’t fall for it.

The best thing any ‘web guru’ (God, I hate that term) working for a company can do is to spend a good day or so typing in domains based on their company’s name, brand names and variants, and buy all of the major .com versions right away so that they’re in the company’s possession. Don’t forget the “CompanyNameSucks.com” version, too.  If your company runs franchises, be sure to start working on an internet policy that restricts franchisees from doing certain things (like registering domains without your approval). If you don’t take these actions, a cybersquatter will.

Carelessness in Domaining Can Hurt

The worst case scenario I’ve ever seen was for a multi-national, $600 million company who didn’t even own the .net domain name to their own one-word company name. It was registered in the earlier half of the 2000’s by a cybersquatter in South Korea, who is still running a parked page on it. Given that the .com site was pulling in about 7,500 uniques per day and is a popular international brand name, there’s no doubt the .net was getting some healthy type-ins.

Here are all of the aforementioned elements coming into play that I mentioned before: 1) nobody knew/cared to do anything about it in time, 2) nobody is willing to pursue this in court, 3) it’s international, so, the Korean legal team would have to go after it, and nobody is even willing to reach out to them and request this.

Cybersquatter 1, Big Corporation 0.

I could rattle off a whole bunch of other scenarios I’ve seen: plural domains, common exact-word misspelling .com’s, .ca’s, etc. – running on parked pages, with or without a “this domain is for sale” link at the top…all of which were careless, stupid and easily avoidable issues, even in the early 2000s. However, the cybersquatters who are still benefiting to this moment are having a field day.

Many other huge corporations still sit back oblivious to their cybersquatted trademarked names, benefiting someone else’s monthly payroll. Which companies are on the ball, and which aren’t? Maybe Rolex is up on these shenanigans, but how about Invicta? Maybe John Deere knows about cybersquatting, but what about Toro?  Cybersquatters do their due diligence, even if these companies don’t.

This is why cybersquatting is still alive. Smart squatters don’t go after god-like organizations like Microsoft, Dell, or Disney; they’re going after the ones who probably have an internal weakness, or no system in place that has enough of a backbone to do anything about it. Just like the way hackers find a weakness to exploit, so do cybersquatters.  With that being said – to be a good cybersquatter, you have to be a good risk-taker. You’d have to know which companies would probably never pursue you in court. You’d be the kind of person who would let a 30 day term on a C&D letter go by, and wait for the next move (if any).

It’s important for any SEO in the USA to keep one thing in mind – it may be the beginning of our summer, but it’s not the case elsewhere in the world. I’m keeping a close eye on forum posts from Europe, Asia & elsewhere – it seems like everyone has a general complaint about Caffeine in one way or another. Especially affiliates. There goes the summer traffic hypothesis.

As for me? I was hit hard – I’m running over a dozen sites, and nearly every one of them has gotten a severe hit in traffic – even my 10 year old video site. Take a look at just a few sites. Yeah, ouch:

In taking a closer look at Caffeine, it appears to have been refined greatly (check out this article from Mashable on the subject). Reliance on old SEO practices have less weight and bow down to relevancy, which comes from assumptions due to social networking trends; accuracy, which comes from keywords (that includes synonyms!) and newness – think “late breaking news,” the Associated Press will probably get serious love from that aspect. There are even speculations that exact-name domains mean more with the new update (i.e., Cars.com ranking for “cars”).

Does Google Caffeine Hate Affiliate Marketers?

The biggest complaint amongst affiliate marketers is that the new system favors big brands rather than small affiliates. Whether that’s true or not, I really don’t know and reserve judgment…however, if you’re running a “thin affiliate” site, then you’re more than likely going to feel a lot of pain. Affiliate sites with little or no content are getting hit worse than ever – just visit any internet marketing forum and read the hysteria to see what I mean.

Things will only get worse for affiliate marketers on Google, especially if it puts a heavier weight on social networking activity. How the hell are you supposed to advertise your eBay affiliate store on social networks? It’s going to be a nearly wasted effort, because nobody is going to want to bookmark or suggest your used carburetor affiliate site to anyone else. The rules of advertising article, video, blog and service sites do not apply to affiliate stores. If your affiliate store is mostly hand-written content as its focus, that may be a different story.

Continued Worries with Google’s Algorithm

There’s no doubt about it, I’m worried about what’s happening to Google. Some sites simply can’t get new content on a regular basis, nor would they “fit” with social networking…so, they should be punished for it? This is still unknown. In the meantime, I’m going to keep pushing my efforts on Yahoo and Bing. The traffic is less, but it’s more predictable and neither are known to roll out indexing updates to the extremes that Google takes them.

It certainly doesn’t help to get hit with summer lag on top of this fiasco, either! It’s a good thing I don’t rely solely on affiliate marketing income to pay the bills. How has Caffeine affected your online efforts?

This link is located on the right-hand column of your main feed, under the heading “Get A Facebook Sneak Peek.” The page that follows explains the concept of what is undoubtedly Facebook’s stab at Yahoo Answers, a well-aged service where people who have a free Yahoo account can browse a massive, ever-updating database of questions and community-submitted answers. Yahoo Answers enjoys great search engine rankings for very competitive terms (check out my Yahoo Answers case study, if you hadn’t already).

In other words, this certainly isn’t anything new. There’s no doubt that Facebook will keep tapping into this massive community to perform even more functions than it already does – if they didn’t, they’d be stupid not to.

Where does it go from here? A “Facebook Answers” section could prove to be successful, given the sheer number of Facebookers currently out there, and the site’s standing as one of the most visited websites on Earth. However, will it compete with a household brand that already does well on search engines? Maybe, if it also starts getting loved by Google, Yahoo & Bing. Otherwise, it will be a closet accessory.

What does it mean for internet marketers? It depends. On Yahoo Answers, you can at least reference a link back to your site once you’ve reached a certain “level” with your account, making it a no-follow (but potentially high visibility) backlink. Will Facebook follow suit, or will they restrict links? Will they have mercy on affiliate marketers, or punish ‘em like they do with affiliate links posted on Facebook Pages? The answer to that will determine if this is another good venue for bringing from FB traffic to your site(s). Only time will tell, of course!

This article was taken from Pixelrage.net – Ramblings of an Internet Marketer

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