“Google has pocketed one affiliate network in favor of another.”

Google, the undisputed search and ad heavyweight is now entering into the affiliate-marketing business; today announced that it is re-branding DoubClick’s Performics Affiliate as the Google Affiliate Network as it continues to integrate new assets.

It is remarkable to see that Google has only unenthusiastically re-brand Performics. At the end of August, the world’s biggest ad broker will put an end to its AdSense Referrals program, the affiliate network it launched back in March 2007. A lot of online retail merchant derives business through affiliate programs, either in-house or through an outside network, such as Amazon.com that runs its own program, and eBay recently followed suit, dropping its long-standing partner Commission Junction and taking its network in-house.

 Normally, in a standard affiliate program, publishers place links on their Web site to online retailers or other e-commerce sites and collect a commission for each referral they pass along. The unexpected launch comes as Google has long been discussing of new ad-driven business lines and integrating the recently acquired online ad powerhouse DoubleClick. Google, which established a great deal of its empire on blending ads with people’s search queries, is looking to expand its display-ad network through its new DoubleClick assets, and accelerate its video advertising both on YouTube and through the new AdSense for video product. Google purchased DoubleClick in March 2008 for $3.1 Billion.

The Google Affiliate Network so far has not been included into Google’s AdSense and ConnectCommerce.com will continue to host the affiliate network, but it will eventually be converted to a Google.com URL, Google said. Among the larger retailers participating in the Google’s network are Barnes & Noble, Circuit City, Target, Kohls.com, Citibank, Zazzle, Bank of America and Verizon.

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Moving past the Yahoo saga, the software giant is buying semantic search engine Powerset as a way of closing the gap with Google

Still smarting from a failed attempt to buy Yahoo! (YHOO), Microsoft (MSFT) is trying another tactic to gain on Google (GOOG) in Web search.

Microsoft is buying Powerset, developer of what it hopes is a smarter way to search the Web. Powerset uses so-called "semantic Web" technology that brings up results based on an understanding of a word's meaning and the context of its use. That's in contrast to the method used by the major search engines, which work primarily by matching words in queries to those on Web pages. Microsoft announced the acquisition July 1 on a blog, saying it shares Powerset's vision "to take search to the next level by adding understanding on the intent and meaning behind the words in searches and webpages." News of Microsoft's interest in Powerset was reported June 26 by industry blog VentureBeat. According to the article, Microsoft has offered more than $100 million to acquire the company. The purchase price was not disclosed.

The purchase could give Microsoft a big leg up in efforts to catch Google. Powerset and other semantic search engines outperform Google in some cases (BusinessWeek.com, 9/17/07). They respond particularly well when users want detailed answers to questions in specific subject categories for which there are a lot of Web pages with similar keywords, such as health or law. "Semantic search takes it to the third level," says Eric Tilenius, an early investor in Powerset and Kango, which applies semantic search technology to travel.

What's more, semantic search wouldn't be easy for Google to replicate. Large search engines, such as Google and Microsoft, have already scanned and indexed many of the pages on the Web. So their machines can concentrate efforts on analyzing the several million new Web sites created every year and adding them to their records. Adopting semantic search technology would require the big guys, in essence, to start from the beginning—rescanning every Web page according to the technology's fundamentally different method of analyzing and classifying Web pages. "You cannot do a patch job," says Riza Berkan, chief executive of Hakia, a semantic search engine working on scanning the entire Web. "We are building everything from scratch and this is what it takes to make it."

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Link building is an essential ingredient in ranking your website highly on the major search engines. 

There, now that we've got that brilliant grasp of the obvious out of the way let's move on to what you can do to actually create them.  Before we launch into the nitty-gritty of link building, no beginners guide would be complete without a brief explanation as to why links are important and the different elements of them.  Being a beginners guide this won't be an entirely complete list but it will be enough to get you going on the right path.  Understanding what you're trying to do will help you do it better and more importantly, understanding the “why” of the situation will help you stretch your tactics outside of this and other articles on link building.

Why Are Links Important?

To put it simply: a link is a vote.  Every link pointing to your site from another website tells the search engines that the other site finds your resource valuable and thus, the engines read this as a vote for your site.  So it must be about getting tons of links and you're done right?  Wrong.  This is incorrect as ...

Not All Votes Are Created Equal

Unlike your own vote in an election, some votes are worth more than others and some votes are worth SIGNIFICANTLY more than yours (unless of course you're a content writer for the Google.com domain in which case you obviously have the top vote).  The basic factors that affect a link's value to your website are:

The site strength – the strength of the site that is pointing to yours is a significant (and historically abused) factor in the valuation of links.  In the absence of other easily-visible criteria let's look at PageRank as a key valuation of a site's strength.  If a site with a PageRank 8 links to your site, this vote is worth significantly more than a link from a PageRank 3 site.  This is because a PageRank 8 site is, in Google's eyes, a more important site than the PageRank 3 site.

Relevance – the relevance of a site linking to you is, if anything, more important than a site's strength. If you run a bed a breakfast in Utah a link from a PageRank 3 bed and breakfast will be worth more than a link from a PageRank 5 web design site.  This area is a bit grey in that it relies on the engine's ability to determine what is relevant and what is not however we've seen evidence that this area is strong at this stage in the game and is only becoming more important over time.

Anchor text – the actual text used to link to your site is extremely important.  I've seen extremely strong sites get beaten out by weak ones simply due to the poor use of anchor test.  If you're building links to your site be sure to include your keywords in the text that links back and, if possible, the exact phrase you are trying to rank for.  At the same time, you can't make all your anchor text exactly the same – how can that possibly look natural?

Position – the position of a link on a page and the number of other links on that page impacts the value of a link.  A link in the footer of a page is given less weight than a link near the top, a link in the content of a page is given more weight than a link in a list of links and a link on a page with 50 other links is given less weight than a link on a page with only a few other links.  If we think about it – this makes sense.  All of these things indicate whether the site with the outbound links actually intends for one of their visitors to click the link or not.  From an engine's perspective – the more it appears that a site wants a link to be clicked on, the higher the weight that link (or vote) is given.

Admittedly there are a number of other factors but this is a beginners guide.  Following the considerations above will insure that as you make each link decision – you're odds of making the right choices will be significantly higher than if you ignore them.  Ignoring them may not get you penalized or banned but it will make your task far more time consuming as you secure less valuable links and thus need to build far more than following he right methods.

So far we've covered briefly the why of link building, now let's get into the real-life, here's-how-to-do-it side of things.  Below I'm going to cover three of my favorite link building tactics.  These are tactics that apply to virtually every scenario.  The number of ways to build links is only limited by your imagination however and this should not be viewed as a comprehensive list.  This is, after all, a beginners guide and I'm trying to list the tactics that apply to virtually every scenario.

Side Note: Reciprocal Link Building

I'm not going to count this as one of my favorite and so it won't count as one of the three noted above and I'll only touch on it briefly.  There have been a number of assertions that reciprocal link building is dead.  This is simply not the case.  I have seen and competed against sites that were very successful with reciprocal links as their primary link source.

The problem with reciprocal links isn't so much in their value which does seem to be a bit lower than non-reciprocal links however often more easily attained.  No, my problem with reciprocal links is in the management.  Unethical webmasters' removing links after you've put the link up to them, sites expiring and not being renewed, sites getting penalties of their own due to their bad tactics are all inconveniences the reciprocal link manager must deal with.

As an SEO company, a huge issue we faced was leaving our clients with this task after a campaign was over if they decided not to go on a maintenance package.  Non-reciprocal links may be a bit harder to attain in some cases however that issue is much easier to overcome than the sum of all these issues.

And now on to the top three ...

Articles

If you're paying attention as you read this you'll probably have guessed that I'm a fan of article writing as a link building method.  If you look to the “about the author” section you'll notice a link to the Beanstalk site (and if you don't, well ... let me know as somebody's stealing it without permission).  While I genuinely enjoy writing and sharing my experiences with others – the purpose of getting the article distributed is primarily as a link building tactic, secondarily as a great source of qualified traffic and thirdly for my own enjoyment.

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Bill Gates, who for years was the richest man in the world, is also one of the smartest. But even he couldn't figure out how to beat the Internet-how to transition his grand old monopoly software company, Microsoft, into a business that thrives on the Net. And so he begins his retirement today from Microsoft as the PC era's biggest winner, and the Web era's most spectacular casualty.

It's pretty well known by now that the Internet, for all its world-flattening glory, is a destroyer of businesses without parallel. How many companies roared along for decades, minting money, only to see the Internet eat their business plans? We live in a media age and the media industry is Exhibit 1 in the murder trial. Newspapers, magazines, music, television, movies — all of the traditional models are dead or dying as bloodied moguls everywhere scramble to survive. But the Net has brutalized old-line business across most industries-retail, tele-com, financial services and the technology industry itself, is, ironically, no exception.

Few companies not born on the Web have figured out how to thrive there. (Apple, with its post-PC iPhone could be the shining exception.) As Gates turns his attention full time to philanthropy, I wonder what will be left of the great company he founded, Microsoft, by the time Gates picks up a Nobel Prize for Peace. Clearly, a business with $26 billion in cash reserves isn't exactly at death's door. And Microsoft continues to be enormously profitable, thanks to its operating system monopoly. Thanks, that is, to Gates's genius.

But big, complicated operating systems such as Microsoft's latest, Vista, aren't necessary in the Web Age, where applications are delivered for free and on demand — often without users even being aware of it. The Net is where the money is, and it's the one place that Gates-like so many others-hasn't left his mark.

He saw the Internet missile coming of course. But by the time he sounded the alarm, it may have been too late. (Read his famous "Internet Tidal Wave" memo, sent to the troops May 26, 1995, over a year after the browser company known as Netscape launched.

Gates was always more accustomed to being a disruptor than being disrupted. At the age of 25, he licensed a primitive operating system, PC-DOS, to IBM for $80,000 rather than sell it outright, a move that's usually ranked as one of the Greatest Business Moves of All Time. Gates figured that many PC makers would copy IBM's open architecture, and make their own PCs; they'd need to license an operating system, too. PC-DOS soon became MS-DOS, an operating system for all IBM clones, and Microsoft was on its way to becoming the one thing that billions of PCs around the world would have in common.

From 1980 until 1994, when Mosaic/Netscape emerged, Gates played a scratch game, parlaying his little "Micro- Soft" company into an empire that defined the PC Era. By opening up Windows to third-party developers, he created a platform that made many developers rich, and built out an eco-system that put a desktop in almost every home.

But there is no greater blinder than success, even for a visionary like Bill Gates. By the time he realized the tech world was quickly shifting from PCs to the Network that connected them, his moves were limited. A fiercely competitive man, he reached for the obvious lever, and attempted to tie the late-starter Internet Explorer browser to the monopoly he created, the Windows operating system. The move was mercilessly effective and beat back rival Netscape, which immediately saw its commanding share of the browser market disappear.

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Caution is almost always the practice when editors are faced with a story that may have legal repercussions. Embedding a click-through to an Internet search results page may just skirt the law.

FINALLY Deputy Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Abdul Razak has come out to deny that his wife Datin Seri Rosmah Mansor was involved in the killing of Mongolian translator Altantuya Shaariibuu.

Over the past week news editors – whether in the mainstream or new media – had been grappling with how they were to report on the June 18 statutory declaration by Malaysia Today owner Raja Petra Kamaruddin, given the possible legal repercussions.

In his declaration, Raja Petra says he was reliably informed that three people – including Rosmah – were present at the scene of the murder of Altantuya Shaariibu in October 2006.

It’s only to be expected that in reporting on it the traditional media would avoid naming the individuals mentioned in the declaration, for it could be defamatory and potentially sub judice even.

What’s interesting is that even New Media practitioners adopted a mixed response to this development.

Political analyst Khoo Kay Peng, writing about it in his June 20 blog entry RPK’s Bombshell, names Rosmah as well as provides a link to a copy of the statutory declaration.

When The Star editor-in-chief Datuk Wong Chun Wai wrote about it in his June 22 blog entry RPK, IGP and AG, he provided a link to a story published in The Star’s website that did not name names.

In Jeff Ooi’s original June 23 posting, Hot Potatoes, he too refrained from naming names and also provided a link to The Star’s no-names-named story from the previous day.

“This blog would refrain from the details, as the IGP (Inspector-General of Police) had warned that the matter could be sub judice as the Altantuya murder trial was ongoing,” Jeff wrote.

However, in an update to the posting, just a few hours later, he does mention names.

Rocky’s Bru of June 23 – Emergency motion to discuss a Statutory Declaration? – quoted an extract from a news story published in The Star about DAP leader Lim Kit Siang calling on Parliament to discuss the allegations.

Rocky himself did not name any names, but he described the prominent individuals mentioned in the declaration.

He also provided a link to the declaration as well as a link to another blogger’s posting that does name some names.

So, as you can see, among the prominent socio-political bloggers the stance is somewhat divided. What about the online news sites?

Malaysiakini boldly ran a story on June 20 with a headline that names Rosmah. It also hosted a copy of the statutory declaration.

Malaysian Insider, in contrast, held off from running a story until June 24. But when it did so, it ran three articles, including a commentary.

All three named names. None of the stories has a link to a copy of the declaration, though.

I can certainly understand why there would be some hesitation, even among New Media types, to name the names mentioned in the declaration.

Alleging that someone was at the scene of a heinous crime is certainly defamatory.

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Do not outsource your online marketing if you want to attract and keep customers.

That is the conclusion of market researcher Ponemon Institute, which surveyed 900 British IT and marketing professionals on whether their online marketing activities breached customers' privacy.

Ponemon, on behalf of internet security firm Strongmail, found two-thirds of firms had suffered data breaches, even though three-quarters believed their organisations complied with privacy laws and regulations. Fewer than one in five would tell the customers concerned if their information was disclosed.

Half of those who reported breaches said the breach was due to the outsourcing of personal information to third-party marketing organisations. Marketers said these breaches had cost the firm new and existing customers.

More than seven in 10 firms understood that personal data may not be shared with third parties.

Despite this, data protection professionals said they would share information on gender (73%), home address (66%), name (65%), cellular phone (53%), e-mail address (52%), home telephone (46%) and marital status (46%), Ponemon found.

Marketers are most likely to share gender (87%), name (86%), home address (85%), e-mail address (81%), marital status (80%) and home telephone (73%), it said.

But only 4% of data protection professionals and 3% of marketers would share individuals' national ID. Both groups would not share job performance data, movie rental history and biometrics (voice, fingerprint).

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There was a time not too long ago when the business implications of social media were unclear; resistance to it on the part of corporations, therefore, was somewhat understandable. Web 2.0 seemed like just the next Internet fad in a series of many, and while it was viewed as having value for individuals and enthusiasts, it didn’t seem viable for corporate use. But corporations need to realize that social media is here to stay — and that in it lies the future of marketing.

According to a recent BusinessWeek article, 11.2 percent of online adults in the U.S. publish content on a blog at least once a month, 24.8 percent read blog content and 13.7 percent comment on it. And the younger the demographic, the higher the number. The days of mainstream media monopolizing information is long gone, with certain blogs attracting millions of visitors each month as people seek out a more personal spin on information. And as the web becomes more social, people are beginning to value relationships and conversations more than the passive consumption of information. BusinessWeek’s concluding advice: “Catch up…or catch you later.”

ocial media is a lot more than just blogs, however, and a combination of blogs, social news and networking sites, along with new ways of consuming media online (YouTube, Flickr, Last.fm) have changed the world of marketing and advertising. No longer is it just about broadcasting your pitch and plastering your message all over the place; instead people expect corporations to engage with them through social platforms in a person-to-person fashion. As Bob Metcalfe notes:

People listen better and longer when you just talk to them and listen back. All too often professional marketers lose their credibility by hyperbole, hubris and amplification. It seems to me self evident that just talking with people is more effective than shouting and repeating yourself as if your audience was comprised of deaf idiots.

One term used to describe this evolution is Social Media Marketing; another is Conversational Marketing — a practice that involves engagement and interaction, a two-way communication rather than a one-way flow of information. While some companies continue to struggle with this new form of marketing, others have embraced it wholeheartedly. One such company is Samsung, as is evident in the marketing strategy for their latest phone.

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A new version of the Firefox Web browser is scheduled for release Tuesday with improvements in security, speed and design.

Many of the enhancements in Firefox 3 involve bookmarks. The new version lets Web surfers add keywords, or tags, to sort bookmarks by topic. A new "Places" feature allows users to quickly access sites they recently bookmarked or tagged and pages they visit frequently but haven't bookmarked.

There's also a new star button for easily adding sites to your bookmark list — similar to what's already available on Internet Explorer.

Other new features include the ability to resume downloads midway if the connection is interrupted and an updated password manager that doesn't disrupt the log-in process.

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Long famous for being two steps ahead when it comes to technology, it’s no surprise that ERA Real Estate began investigating the possibilities of creating an online listings distribution model back in 2006 when firms like Zillow were just out of the gate.

“We understand the changing marketplace and the fact that so many consumers are first going online to do their initial home searching,” explains ERA Senior Vice President of Marketing P.J. Martin Smith. “We want to be where consumers are looking for listings-and it’s important for sellers that we’re able to provide their property the full exposure of the entire Internet.”

ERA quickly developed arrangements to distribute ERA listings through several online listing channels, including sites such as Google Base and Zillow. The idea is that consumers will travel from these sites to the ERA.com portal, and then to individual ERA brokers and sales associates. Put simply, ERA is using its online distribution channels to drive consumers to ERA listings and their agents.

Bill Cogan, vice president of interactive marketing at ERA, explains that it’s important to work with several channels in order to reach as many consumers as possible. “You have consumers that become comfortable with one site and trust it as the source for homes, and then you have customers who are surfing the Internet and looking at many sites,” he explains. “Using different sites allows us to touch more customers-one customer might like Google, but another customer might like Zillow.”

At press time, Zillow was recording five million visitors per month, with 90% of Zillow users reported to own a home. One of the key draws of the Zillow site for these homeowners is its “Zestimate” valuation feature, which lets visitors get an idea of what their home is worth. More recently, Zillow has added features such as Zillow Discussions, a forum where visitors can talk to each other, and “Dueling Digs,” where site visitors can get home improvement ideas by choosing between two pictures and picking their favorite.

“Zillow’s unique features have proven to be most useful for those looking to buy or sell a home, and as a result, current and prospective buyers and sellers make up approximately two-thirds of our audience,” says Jorrit Van der Meulen, Zillow’s vice president of partner relations. “This highly targeted audience makes Zillow an invaluable marketing channel for our listings partners who are not only looking to distribute their listings broadly, but to reach the most relevant audience possible.”

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by Renee Baribeau

In two short years, Desert Healing Arts has grown to be the number one community resource of Holistic happenings in the Coachella Valley. Daily, we receive calls for referrals to healing arts practitioners and social entrepreneurs providing all kinds of services, from lawn and garden care to contracting. Our website received over 8000 visitors last month, and all our practitioners receive referrals directly from our web-based advertising. How did we accomplish this task?

In the beginning, I had a dream, but no idea of how to create a web-based promotion, a website, or an email-based advertising campaign. I am offering you a chance to learn from my travels through the Internet.

This summer, we are proud to present a series of classes designed to teach you how to grow your business through use of the Internet. Learn to:

Create interesting marketing pieces that will entice people to generate enthusiasm for your soul-driven work. Learn the basics of networking. Learn about language that sells.

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A common misconception is that your job search starts once you decide you want to make a career change. In reality, there are simple things you should do on a regular basis to position yourself to be successful in your job search whenever that time comes. Given our industry is experiencing dramatic growth in SEO jobs, I want to outline a few strategies and tools that are specific to search marketing which you can use to proactively manage your job search and be in a position to find that ideal SEO job.

1. Market Yourself and Establish Your Personal Brand Identity

Establishing and managing your brand identity is beneficial to you as a job seeker in search marketing for two primary reasons:

• It creates new channels for employers to find you and therefore opens new job opportunities;
• A visible brand identify reinforces your professional search marketing experience and skills.

In simple terms this is about how you market yourself to the community and public. Do you blog and what you are blogging about? How heavy is your participation in SEO forums and communities? What does your LinkedIn profile say about you? Are you speaking at SMX / PubCon / SES? Do you participate in local networking organizations like SEMNE or the SEMPO New York Working Group?

If you are actively managing your personal brand identity, new job opportunities are going to find you faster than you could have otherwise found them. This is important because the best job opportunities are typically not found via a Monster or a Careerbuilder job posting, but usually through personal networks or referrals. Managing your brand identity drives both.

Additionally, reviewing a candidate’s personal brand is rapidly becoming a standard part of the process for employers and recruiters when they are evaluating candidates for search marketing positions. This is not to say that you are going to get a job because you are blogging on a regular basis, or that I am advocating you invest all of your time in becoming the next Danny Sullivan or Rand Fishkin. However, you should recognize that recruiters who specialize in search marketing do look at your online presence and activities, so it is important you spend time cultivating your personal brand identity.

2. Search Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile

LinkedIn has become the online networking tool of choice for recruiters. It is rare that I speak to a corporate recruiter, staffing agency employee, or member of a human resources department who doesn’t leverage LinkedIn as a major part of their strategy to recruit new employees.

The reputation of LinkedIn within the recruiting world is very high because it has created an online community that does a very good job replicating the professional network relationships that traditionally drive most placements. Companies now have a user-friendly and well-designed tool to connect with the best talent in the market. Therefore, you want to ensure that you have “search optimized” your LinkedIn profile.

There are several good articles on the web about how to maximize your LinkedIn profile (just google “linkedin optimize” or “linkedin maximize”), so I will not reiterate the points here. However, I do want to comment that as a search marketer you have an inherent edge on the rest of the LinkedIn community. In essence, if you utilize basic search optimization strategies with your LinkedIn profile, you will be in a better position with your job search.

Here are a couple of examples of how your search marketing experience will help you maximize LinkedIn:

• LinkedIn’s search tool is primarily content-driven, so if your summary, job titles, employment history and other profile text are keyword-optimized, you immediately have an advantage over other candidates;
• Every connection, recommendation, and group you belong to is, in essence, another inbound link to your resume. If you conceptualize these LinkedIn components as links and then develop a “link-building strategy” for them, you will rapidly increase the size of your network and opportunities available to you;

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Search Friendly Development - Highlights the most important elements to consider for search engine optimization (SEO) when building a web application infrastructure and provides tactical details about how to implement those elements. Topics include:

* Developing a crawlable infrastructure
* Considerations when developing rich internet applications (using technologies such as Flash, Silverlight, and AJAX)
* URL rewriting, redirection, canonicalization, and visitor tracking

Moderator: Vanessa Fox, Features Editor, Search Engine Land

Speakers:

Nathan Buggia, Lead Program Manager, Microsoft
Maile Ohye, Senior Developer Programs Engineer, Google
Sharad Verma, Sr. Product Manager, Web Search, Yahoo

Nathan from Microsoft is starting the day off and tells us the "Truth about SEO." There are a lot of big hard problems: affiliate tracking, session management, rich internet application, duplicate content, geolocation, understnading analytics, redirection, error management, etc. HTTP is a stateless protocol. With search in the mix, all designs built from 1995-2000 kind of have broken in 2005 and beyond. Cloaking isn't ideal. What differentiates advanced SEO from normal SEO is analytics. Being an advanced SEO means you have more experience or are at a larger company but you need to make sure all appropriate things are instrumented and use it for your logical thinking. Do not implement something because someone told you on a panel that it's a good idea. He doesn't recommend PageRank sculpting. But everything on the web is an opportunity cost. A competitor might be doing what you aren't doing.

Watch out for complexity as well. That's something that a lot of people get caught up on. If you build cloaking or conditional redirects into your website, it gets very complex. Multiple URLs will cause problems; you have to track 404s, getting rankings, etc. All these variations are complex. It's hard to find problems.

Look for the simplest architecture possible to solve the problem for agility.

Microsoft says cloaking is not all bad but it's not the second or third solution that they recommend. Every search engine says don't do it, though. Try it with caution.

All websites have the same first problem: accessibility. That's where people should start especially if there's no analytics in place to tell you. Can crawlers access the site? Do you have Flash or Silverlight or 301s or 302s or images? It's a simple topic but Microsoft has a team of SEOs who focus on the top websites and these "101" problems are still problematic there.

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If you visit the various internet marketing forums or subscribe to other marketers' email lists, you will probably have been told that you have to build an email list in every niche you enter. However is this really the case, or are there times when it doesn't make sense to build a list?

Most affiliate marketers promote products in more than one niche simply because the more niches you are in, the more money you can potentially earn. However it can be really time consuming promoting a number of different products in different niches and yet we're constantly being told we have to build an email list of subscribers so we always have an audience to market to.

It takes a lot of time and effort to both build a list (making an opt-in form and/or a lead capture page and driving traffic to this page) and maintain a list. Although you can promote product offers to each list you have, you also need to constantly provide good quality content to your list in order to build a relationship with your subscribers and keep them signed up and interested in reading your emails.

Now as you can imagine if you are involved in say ten different niches, then this task will become a nightmare, and even if you outsource the task of writing content, it will still be quite costly and difficult to manage.

However, the good news is that there are definitely times when you can enter a niche and not have to build an email list. In fact there are certain instances where you can make more money by not building a list. For example, if you are in a smaller niche where there are only one or two products you could sell as an affiliate, then there is little point in building a huge list just to promote these few products. You would be better off just promoting and linking to these products directly from your website.

There are also niches that are so saturated that you are unlikely to make as much money as you would imagine from your list, simply because there are so many other marketers competing with you. Therefore any subscribers you may have will also probably be subscribed to lots of other marketers' lists as well, so your open rate could be very low. A classic example of one such niche is the make money online / internet marketing niche.

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by Ben Wills

I still hear people ask “What’s the point of Social Media?”

I still hear people say “Social Media is a waste of time, and new marketers’ playground.”

I hear people talk about the value of Social Media for businesses. And they have no idea what they’re talking about.

But the absolute worst of all is this: They don’t know, that they don’t know, that they have no idea what they’re talking about.

Ontolo-what?

An ontology is a way to observe things or systems, and to organize these observations for use in a more powerful way. For your business, this “more powerful way” will be to ultimately contribute to the survival of your business.

The fundamental concern of an ontology is to study the way things exist by asking “What actually exists?”

The structure of an ontology is simple: It is a description of a Subject, Object and the Relationship that exists between the Subject and the Object.

When you being applying this thought process to physical objects, for example, you begin to see that “the way things exist” changes as its use changes.

Let’s look at a coffee table. The purpose of a coffee table is defined through the language of its name, which is defined in its use. It is a table, instead of the floor, to place coffee upon.

So, then, what is a coffee table when you put your feet on it?

A foot-rest. Right?

So is it a coffee table, or a foot-rest?

We quickly see that both are correct, because “the way that something exists” is defined within a context.

Your Business IS the …

That’s great about coffee tables and foot rests. Good to know, right? But what about your business. Do you know what your business really is?

Let’s break it down.

If we want to understand what a business really is, we’ll take the ontological perspective, and apply it to fundamental functions of a business: A Customer, and a Product or Service. Without both of these things, the business ceases to exist.

In the ontological perspective, if the Customer is the Subject, and the Service is the Object, then what’s left?

The Relationship between the two: The Business.

Business is NOT About Relationships

Your business is not about relationships:

Your business IS the relationship that exists between your Customers and your Products or Services.

Apple is NOT the iPod. Apple is NOT hipsters. Apple IS style, modernity, reliability, and creativity. This is the experience, and therefore the relationship, that Apple Customers have with Apple Products.

Microsoft is NOT Windows. Microsoft is NOT corporate technologists. Microsoft IS unreliable, non-innovative, easy to use, and easy to break. This is the experience, and therefore the relationship, that Microsoft Customers have with Microsoft Products.

So, if what constitutes your business is the relationship between your Customers and your Products or Services: What is your business?

If you see that what your business is, is not up to you to decide, but that your business is defined by the context that your customers declare, then you’re on the right track.

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by: Josh Gampel

I have been recruiting in the search marketing industry for over four years, and I am still intrigued by the individuals that I come across everyday. Search marketers possess a unique combination of both marketing and technology skills that are unmatched by any other profession. My experience has been that most search marketers are extremely smart and usually have very brilliant marketing minds, and represent the best-of-the-best that marketing has to offer.

Therefore, it probably does not come as a huge surprise when I tell you that one of the most common questions I am asked by people who are just beginning their search marketing careers is, “what skills do I need to acquire to be a successful search marketer?”

I normally choose to answer this question by asking a couple of questions myself. My questions are focused around assessing the search marketers’ experience and where they see themselves heading professionally over the next several years, as opposed to defining specific skill-sets the search marketer should identify on acquiring. I do this because I believe what is most important to a search marketer is ensuring they have a strong base in fundamentals given the changing tactics of the industry.

1. Do you feel you are stronger with the analytics and data side of search, the creative side, or are you fairly well balanced between the two?

I believe most successful search marketers have a good balance between “left brain” and “right brain” thinking. While, I am simplifying this — and keep in mind I am definitely not a brain surgeon! — the left side of your brain drives analytical and logic thought processes.

Search marketing is a numbers-driven business. The ability to manage and interpret large amounts of data and then translate your analysis into an action plan is key to a successful search campaign. To be successful in SEO and SEM, you must be very “left-brained”.

The right side, which contributes more to your creative thought processes, is equally important for a search marketer. You can look at all the data in the world, but you still need to develop a page that is visually appealing and user friendly at the same time. When you develop that piece of content which drives high volumes of traffic to your client’s website, that is the right side of your brain at play.

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just before a big holiday weekend and an overseas trip my web hosting company’s server for my main email account imploded. For the past day, no email.

While that company will go nameless for now (out of respect for three years of great service), I’m definitely thinking of jumping ship. Regardless of all the IM and social networking I do, email is my digital lifeblood and having gone through this a few years back with another web hosting company, the signs are not good.

So how does a web-worker today find a better web hosting provider?

Today being the operative word because a) The quality of these companies wax and wane and who was hot is soon not. b) The industry has become so commoditized it resembles a locked room of starving river rats, c) Said industry knows you will search for terms like “web hosting rating”, “web hosting buzz” and “web hosting top 10″ and SEO stuff those result pages, let alone spiking the punch with “impartial rating services” that somehow always recommend the same firms.

Just to add to the fun, a great deal depends on what you need and what you’re prepared to pay for: If you’re an independent web-worker who remotely consults but just needs a service where you can hang out your web site shingle and get your email that’s one set of criteria. But if you’re a .NET or LAMP developer (never will the twain meet, at least not on web hosting companies), or plan to do a podcast, run your own blog, or are flirting with video, you’ll want as much server as you can reasonably buy. And if you’re like me and just answered yes to all of the above, I commensurate with your suffering. There ought to be a Hallmark card!

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There has been much discussion about the future of SEO lately. A-list bloggers galore are writing SEO's obituary, much to the dismay of site owners and search engine marketers. Earlier this week, Mike Grehan delivered his thoughts on the matter over at ClickZ. He also started a thread in the Search Engine Watch forums to discuss his post.

Here are some main takeaway points from Mike's post:

• SEO will give way to a new form of digital asset management and optimization. This new SEO will place a much larger emphasis on optimizing a range of file types, from PDFs to images to audio/visual.
• More effort will be placed on feeds to search engines. Not just XML feeds into paid inclusion and shopping comparison, but also feeds with other types of information, such as local, financial, news, and other verticals.
• Mobile will become much more popular, search will gradually become more of a personalized experience.
• Personalization and digital asset optimization will end 1999-style ranking reports, as search engine results will be based on blended results from end-user specifics, such as geographic location, time of day, previous searching history, and peer group preference.

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In Google we trust - but should we?

A question increasingly asked is whether Google is becoming a dangerous monopoly. It is a very serious question. If we end up with one company controlling search - the gateway to information - it could be catastrophic if it abused its position. Google is already technically a monopoly with nearly 70% of US search and as much as 90% in the UK on some surveys. But it is highly unusual for two reasons. First, it lacks the typical symptom - charging excessively for its products. Nearly all of Google's products from search to document storage are free. What kind of monopoly is that?

Second, Google is unusual in that unlike Microsoft, which controls over 90% of PC operating systems and associated software, or even Cisco with over 90% of enterprise routers, there are no insurmountable barriers for new entrants. It is true that Google makes vast profits from search-linked adverts that it exploits ruthlessly - and the more it appears as the default search engine on users' toolbars, the more it risks abusing its power. But even so, you only have to switch to another bookmark. For Yahoo, at least on my computer, simply type "Y" into the URL field and up it comes. If you tried Yahoo in a blind tasting, could you tell the difference? I can't. Type in part of a distinctive sentence from today's Guardian and see for yourself. Others, such as Microsoft's revamped Live Search and Ask.com, seem less good.

So why is Google popular and is it dislodge-able? It all comes down to that frightful word "brand". But Google is unprecedented because it built up its brand without any paid advertising. We did it for them. It became a verb in record time. It became one of the world's most profitable brands in barely a decade. Think Coca-Cola versus Pepsi (leaving aside the hundreds of millions spent preserving their brands). The story is that Coke's ill-fated Classic was planned to taste more like Pepsi which used to win in blind tastings - though Coke would win if samplers knew what drinks they were tasting. There is a fatalism shared by the likes of Wall Street's Henry Blodget that it is inevitable that internet companies gain market shares of over 90% because they are "natural monopolies". Piffle. New search companies don't have to spend hundreds of millions on marketing and branding as they would for a soft drink or an operating system.

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Most Search Engine Optimized (SEO) Press Release Ever: Tips for Building the Perfect SEO Press Release

To create the most Searched Engine Optimized press release ever, Bill Balderaz of Webbed Marketing, the Columbus, Ohio Search Engine Optimization agency (http://www.webbedmarketing.com/columbusohioseo.html), recommends using your most important keywords in the first sentence of the press release.

"In creating the most Search Engine Optimized press release ever (http://www.webbedmarketing.com/mostsearchengineoptimizedpressreleaseever.html), we focused on creating a release with our most important keyword phrase-- 'most Search Engine Optimized press release ever' into the copy. We also make use of related phrases, like 'tips for creating SEO news releases' and 'how to write a Search Engine Optimized media release.'"

Balderaz explained that he also included photos of his dogs, chickens and children in the release. "Uploading pictures greatly increases pickups of Search Engine Optimized press releases," added Balderaz. "Cute kids and animals are some of the best pictures to include," he said.

"In addition to focusing on the content and photos, we released the most Search Engine Optimized press release ever on PRWeb, although we have also used Webwire," he said. He also mentioned ClickPress, 24-7 PressRelease.com, and PRLeap, in case there is anything to the concept of latent semantic association. He mentioned that all of the above online newswires were useful in getting Search Engine Optimized press releases indexed in Google News and Yahoo! News.

"Search Engine Optimized press releases are things that should be written in the passive voice," Balderaz added.

He explained that a well search engine optimized press release must be found by your online influencers, consumers and the media. "No one goes to Google News and searches on 'Webbed Marketing' and not many bloggers have a Google alert set up for the term 'Webbed Marketing.' But influencers, bloggers and the media do search newswires for news on 'Search Engine Optimization' and 'SEO'. Over time, this release will also be indexed in the main search engine indexes. As people search for 'Most Search Engine Optimized press release ever', this press release should rank well."

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Google Adds Image Ads to Image Search

Google - now with more ads!

Google Image Search will soon produce picture-based ads, Google announced Monday. Just as web searches from Google.com produce text advertisements on the right-hand side of the results page, ads will also be incorporated into Image search results.

There is a "direct connection" between image search and commerce, R.J. Pittman, product management director, said at an event held at Google's Mountain View headquarters. "If we can align the nature of the images from the advertisers with the nature of the images from Image Search, it will help users find more of what they're looking for. You'll see that these renderings show a fairly seamless user experience rather than just a stack of ads across the top."

No word on when the ads will debut, but while I was checking Image Search this morning to see if the ads were showing up yet, I found a nice little way to waste time.

Google Image Labeler is a game of sorts that consists of nothing more than looking at images and suggesting possible keywords, but Google pits you against other users and alerts you when you've matched on certain terms, making it oddly addictive. It actually launched back in 2006, but I only just stumbled on it.

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