Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Get better website visibility in Google


Matt Cutts works for the quality group in Google, specializing in search engine optimization issues. He is well known in the SEO community for enforcing the Google Webmaster Guidelines and cracking down on link spam. Cutts also advised the public on how to get better website visibility in Google.


Matt Cutts answers Google questions: - Does Sitemaps depend on pageviews? - What are the top things to do in SEO? - How does Google decide to use a DMOZ snippet versus the description from a meta tag? - Should I use bold or strong tags? You will also enjoy the rest of Matt's video's at the same video site.

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Reputation, Integrity & Business Ethics

Confucius (illustration from Myths & Legends o... [Image] Do you want more sales? Then relationship selling is a great way to accomplish that goal. However, you must be prepared to consistently demonstrate your reputation, personal integrity and unquestionable business ethics if you truly embrace this sales strategy.

What makes relationship selling such an advantageous sales strategy? Simply speaking, it is all about people relating positively to other people. When I can relate to someone, I have the opportunity to begin to build trust. People buy from people that they trust before they buy from complete strangers.

The key to effective relationship selling is understanding how business ethics or values, reputation and integrity when united build a competitive advantage. Laurel Cutter was quoted as: Values determine behavior, behavior determines reputation; reputation determines advantages. When you consistently demonstrated those non-negotiable business ethics and personal values, you will create your own competitive advantage.

Read more of this article at Relationship Selling Unites Reputation, Integrity & Business Ethics to Increase Sales By Leanne Hoagland-Smith

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What's happening in the local market?

{{Potd/2005-10-16 (en)}} [Image] Online shoppers, particularly in the real estate industry, and perhaps also your field of business, appreciate local knowledge. This is where a localised business directory like adsonvids.com.au really shines.
According to the NAR, 35 percent of online buyers also looked for "information about the area" - the next largest category behind listings. Fifty percent of buyers found "neighborhood and community information" extremely valuable, again the next largest category after listings and listings features such as photos, home addresses, and maps. School reports and crime data didn't even make the NAR's list, but agent contact information did - 40 percent of buyers found agent contact information extremely valuable.

What's missing in the whole online marketing strategy is the thing that can't be automated - what's happening in the local market. That's the one piece of information that can't be automated by any listings site. Only working agents and brokers know what's happening in their local market places.

Agents and brokers make reports on local market conditions - the one piece of information that consumers can't get anywhere - unless they talk to an agent who lives and works in that area.
Source: What Internet Consumers Want Besides Listings by Blanche Evans

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Traits Of Successful Social Media Marketers

Louis XIV visiting the  Académie des sciences ... [Image] With many individuals finding great success with social media (and as an aside, a basic understanding of search engine optimization), they immediately consider themselves social media marketers and consultants (as well as seasoned SEOs) and offer to sell their promotional services. What skills, though, do successful social media marketers have that put these individuals above the average (or addicted) social media user, and better yet, above the traditional marketer? I asked several social media consultants, bloggers, marketers, search engine optimizers, and social media addicts about what they considered to be essential skills and characteristics of the most efficient and results-driven social media consultants. In the many paragraphs that follow, learn from many of the experts and hear what they consider success when using social media to engage with consumers about products and services.

Read this excellent article What Traits Define a Social Media Marketer? Posted by Tamar Weinberg

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Email Marketing

Typical junkmail. [Image] Stay at the forefront of your customer's mind. Be remembered by staying in regular contact with clients after purchase.

Email addresses of customers and prospective customers may be collected at your web site, or personally. You could provide web or storefront visitors a free gift for providing you with their email details.

Various methods can be used for email marketing, such as the regular distribution of newsletters or mass mailing of offers related to the company's product or services.

Email marketing is essentially the online equivalent of direct mail marketing. With the new spam regulations in mind, it is best to use a double opt-in method and my preferred email software is Aweber. They also give you lots of information at their site, to help create successful email campaigns.

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Latest Borrell Associates report

Newspaper vendor, Paddington, London, February... [Image] ...digesting the latest Borrell Associates report, “Online Promotions: The Big Shift,” but I think it’s safe to say that there are some surprising — and potentially controversial — predictions for local media. At the heart of the report is the forecast that online promotions — money that local companies spend to promote their own online initiatives, including public relations — “will nearly triple over the next five years to $22.8 billion, surpassing all other online advertising categories.” The report says “the inability of newspapers, magazines, radio and TV to prove return on advertising investment has led to a swing toward promotional spending.”

Read the rest of this great information at ‘Startling revelations’ in new Borrell report by Cory Bergman

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Time For Your Business To Get Online

24-hours-clock painted by Paolo Uccello in San... [Image] Of all of the components of Internet marketing, prospective customers and clients expect a business to have a website. In fact, not having one could raise a red flag to a prospect. Online usage has become so pervasive today, many prospects might easily choose to do business with a company that they can get up-to-date information on 24 hours per day, 7 days per week.

Today, Internet marketing is evolving into a broader mix of components a company can use as a means of increasing sales - even if your business is done completely online, partly online, or completely offline. The decision to use Internet marketing as part of a company's overall marketing strategy is strictly up to the company of course, but as a rule, Internet marketing is becoming an increasingly important part of nearly every company's marketing mix. For some online businesses, it is the only form of marketing being practiced.

Source: Internet Marketing 101: What is Internet Marketing and How Can it Help My Home Business? By Randy Duermyer

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Know what Google is and what it wants

Google Inc. [Image] If 10 years ago you’d say to someone that the New York Times would be a failure, they’d literally laugh in your face. After all, it’s an established resource with a huge subscriber base reaching all across the country.

But it’s old school. It doesn’t represent how people digest news anymore.

Considering all that the internet has to offer, it’s really no wonder we’re seeing businesses, no matter what their size, who aren’t adapting, losing.

Know what Google is and what it wants. Google delivers relevant information quickly and easily. To achieve this, does Google want web pages stuffed with keywords shouting for attention or do they want real, relevant content pertaining to specific subjects?

...if you’re not constantly swimming towards new ways to find the eyeballs of your customers, your business is gonna sink like a stone.

Paragraphs above, quoted from Eyeballs Prefer Google By Tim Paulino

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Blogs are not a business elective

回形针(paper clip) [Image] Blogs Will Change Your Business. Look past the yakkers, hobbyists, and political mobs. Your customers and rivals are figuring blogs out. Our advice: Catch up...or catch you later

Editor's note: The May, 2005, cover story, "Blogs Will Change Your Business," continues to receive lots of attention online. But many of the details in the story are out of date. So we've called many of the original sources and asked readers to help provide fixes and updates. For the version of the story with 2008 annotations, please visit www.businessweek.com/go/08/blog.

Go ahead and bellyache about blogs. But you cannot afford to close your eyes to them, because they're simply the most explosive outbreak in the information world since the Internet itself. And they're going to shake up just about every business - including yours. It doesn't matter whether you're shipping paper clips, pork bellies, or videos of Britney in a bikini, blogs are a phenomenon that you cannot ignore, postpone, or delegate. Given the changes barreling down upon us, blogs are not a business elective. They're a prerequisite.

Source: Blogs Will Change Your Business by By Stephen Baker and Heather Green

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Wednesday 30th July - What's New?

Every two weeks I find and collect some wonderful reading for you, related to promoting your business online and about what's happening on the internet, relevant to business advertising and marketing.

Remember to let me know, if there is anything about which you would specifically like to know more. I'd be more than happy do do some research for you and post about it at the relevant blog. Let me know by getting in touch at adam.adsonvids.com.au No need to be shy about that, I love hearing from you. :)

Here is the latest list of my blog posts for you, plus a couple of extras that I added in between my fortnightly blogging...

Blogs are not a business elective
The Frontiers of Interaction
What's happening in the local market
Reputation, Integrity & Business Ethics
Time For Your Business To Get Online
Marketing And Advertising Your Business On The Internet
Email Marketing
Get better website visibility in Google
Word Of Mouth Marketing Tips To Advertise Your Business
Use Web 2.0 to Make Your Business Flourish FREE!
Traits Of Successful Social Media Marketers
Know what Google is and what it wants
Latest Borrell Associates report
Create A Marketing and Advertising Video For Business
Friday 25th July - What's New?
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The Frontiers of Interaction

Along with other races introduced in Star Fron... [Image] Want to know more about...

a) the future of technology,

b) the speed at which things change,

c) who will eventually control the Internet,

d) what we can do about it, and

e) how pervasive technology will become in the next few years?

The Frontiers of Interaction event was mostly in English with some Italian language sessions. You can watch good quality recordings of most sessions on the Dolmedia Frontiers of Interaction page.

I got to know about this great series, at www.masternewmedia.org

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Friday, July 25, 2008

Friday 25th July - What's New?

The Royal Mile in the Old Town during the Edin... [Image] Hello again!

As mentioned in my last post, the adsonvids blogs will be updated each two weeks, plus there will be a blog post at The Hub every Friday, with latest news from adsonvids.

This is the update for this week and next week I'll be adding a whole lot of great material to the other adsonvids blogs.

There are quite a few new things happening, which is very 'top secret', so you'll need to wait patiently for those!

Meantime, have a look around a new page and a new video too. When you get to our adsonvids home page, you will clearly spot an intruder.

What were the team thinking, when they placed that obtrusive, red button amongst all those blues? You'll not want to miss out on the opportunity of this
Reality Check for your business marketing.

If you've been reading the Social Media blog, and a few of the others, you'll recognise the importance of getting your profile up, at social networking and bookmarking sites.

I've been busily adding myself to several of the more popular ones. Go on! Jump on in, the water's fine... go to the bottom right-hand side of this blog (and any of my our blogs). You'll see a heading titled 'Where In The World Is Ads?'

Click on any of those icons, join up and then ...be my friend! :)
Have a top weekend and I'll be back for you, next week.

Cheers, Ads

P.S. Notice we're featuring at Zemanta again? Look below:

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Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Create A Marketing and Advertising Video For Business

Comparison of high and standard quality YouTub... [Image] Video is a great tool to build a personal relationship with your audience. Your visitors get a more true sense of how you might be in person. Using video to connect with your customers is so much more effective, because the average attention span of your web visitors can be measured in seconds.

If you watched 60 seconds of video and then tried work out how much text you would need to say exactly the same thing, then I think you’d be surprised at how much more of your message reaches your web visitors by way of a video, because it is never simply the words you speak. Video conveys your voice tone and body language also.

According to comScore, Americans watched 10 billion online videos, during the last month of 2007 alone. So many internet users are viewing online videos, yet still so few advertisers are actively engaged in reaching them. One example that I did find, of a well-crafted video marketing approach, can be seen at the adsonvids.com.au site. Businesses need these types of services, to support them with getting their message online and into their local markets.

You can create your own videos and put them out at the various video submission sites. It definitely puts you ahead of the game with regard Google rankings and being seen in the first page of customer online searches. However, there is more to effective video marketing than just slapping video content up on your web pages and dropping them into YouTube.

Here are your basic steps to creating your own online video. For each of these, you can do a Google search to find the best available tools.

The first step in making an online video is to get a video recording device that will allow for downloading the movie to your computer after shooting your film.

You're now ready to spend time on pre-production and planning. Remember to highlight a single-focus broadcast, keep it simple and avoid diluting your message.

Movie editing software allows you to preview and edit your videos on your computer. There are very cheap versions and there are those that allow for creating amazing effects. You will want formatting and compression tools to convert those AVI, WMV or MPEG files into lean, mean, bandwidth-friendly Streaming Flash videos (SWFs).

Next, search for players, software programs or web codes, allowing you to embed your videos at your own sites or blogs.

To truly get your message found and crawled by the search engines, you will need to submit your video at the many video submission sites e.g. YouTube, Google video, Yahoo video. Video upload time, at each site, depends on the speed of your internet connection. Various formats may be required too.

Like most businesses, the time it takes to learn about these things and to produce a video is better spent elsewhere, and therefore the task is best outsourced to an expert. To gain the respect of your potential clients, it is important to stand out as an expert with your video marketing campaign. You want to create original and high-quality content. First impressions do count.

Video will change the way people market products and services on the internet, even if currently, the internet is very much driven by text and still graphics. With new video publishing technology, that will change very quickly, because video has the power to touch people's emotions. Business marketers and advertisers, who learn to master it, will definitely have the edge.

Croz is a talker and thinker. check out his website www.croz.com.au Also check out this website where Croz is helping a young lad earn one million dollars in one year www.thehappysecret.com
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Marketing And Advertising Your Business On The Internet

Sign at the Googleplex [Image] Having a professional, online presence is absolutely necessary in order to compete in today's marketplace. There is a pool of internet users, and all are potential customers for your business. A website is important for attaining and retaining local customers. Many buyers expect businesses to have a web site.

Your online marketing needs to be effective, efficient, systematized, highly leveraged and provide excellent returns on your advertising budget investment. For people to know about you, they first need to know that you exist. So it is important to develop visibility in the right places for your business.

If you're serious about your site (and therefore, your business) being found by your target clients, i.e. people most suited to your product and online visitors who are specifically seeking what you have to offer, then search engine optimization is something in which you need to take interest.

The goal of search engines, such as Google and Yahoo, is to give internet users the information they want, when they want it. There is a huge collection of elements to keep track of and do correctly, when optimising your web site for the search engines.

Millions of people are using social networks, and it is worth trying to figure out how to reach these massive and networked audiences. Social media, such as blogs, podcasts, videos and social networks, are great at building potential relationships, growing a community, serving an audience, helping people find your business, and several other things.

Video and audio are great tools to build an experience with your potential audience. It gives people a sense of how you might be in person. Video content shows up in Google's natural rankings, let alone sites like YouTube, Google Video and Yahoo Video. Astute marketers are making their moves now.

Like most businesses, the time that it takes to learn about these things and to produce a video is better spent elsewhere, and therefore the task is best outsourced to an expert e.g. services like those provided by adsonvids.com.au create all of this for you, and in a short time.

Blogs are known to attract large number of traffic. This is due to the nature of blogs, being very dynamic and constantly changing daily with new information. That is the reason blogs are constantly indexed by search engines and updated regularly. Blogs are also free to set up.

Writing a newsletter on a regular basis is a great way to keep people returning to your website. There are many tools and resources that show you how. When building an online mailing list, you are also creating a virtual asset that can be sold alongside your business as goodwill. It also gives great leverage for joint ventures with other list owners i.e. you can trade a message to each other's lists.

Write articles relevant to your industry and publish them at the various publishing sites e.g. ezinearticles.com and remember to post comments at other blogs related to your industry, these create links back to your own site or blog. If you can make the time, publishing a book on a topic immediately establishes you as someone who is interested in your field, and gives instant credibility. Also, write your own press releases and submit them to the many free press release submission sites.

Pay per click advertising can be like walking a minefield these days and you can go through a lot of money very quickly. Again, it is best to get expert help with that kind of online marketing activity.

Add your link to reputable, high quality directory listings, for example craigslist and dmoz, remembering to also list yourself at relevant social bookmarking sites or join up to some of the numerous social networking sites.

Engage in some of the obvious and, readily available to you, non-internet activities such as adding your web address to your email signature, placing it on your business cards and stationery, promote your web site via traditional media outlets, donate a product to a local radio station contest, or get a decal put on the rear window of your car.

This article has only a short list of the types of strategies you need to put into action if you want your site found by your customers. Getting your business listed on page one of a Google search result is highly competitive and takes a lot of time, research and effort.

Croz is a talker and thinker. check out his website www.croz.com.au Also check out this website where Croz is helping a young lad earn one million dollars in one year www.thehappysecret.com
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Monday, July 21, 2008

51 Guerrilla Marketing Advertisements

View this brilliant slideshow with 51 Guerrilla Marketing advertisement ideas. It's bound to present an idea or two for your own marketing campaigns.


Source: Richard Menneveux’s Blog

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Thursday, July 17, 2008

Google's Core Ranking team


Ball Game [Image] Amit Singhal is a Google Fellow in charge of the ranking team at Google.
He's worked in the field of search for the past eighteen years and came to Google in 2000, working on Google ranking ever since.
The most common question he gets asked about Google's ranking is "how do you do it?"
Of course, there is a lot that goes into building a state-of-the-art ranking system like their's.

In this Introduction to Google Ranking, Amit shares the philosophies behind Google ranking.

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When a reputation nightmare happens

Something on my mind[Image] While the online world is transforming business, it is also transforming the way potential customers, employers, employees, and mainstream media is finding out information about your business. The blogosphere has begun transforming search engines into conversations about your reputation.
When a reputation nightmare happens, companies face the challenge of removing those negative results off the first few pages of the search engines or with getting information out there that provides a balanced dose of positive articles.
Unfortunately it is often impossible to get a negative article removed from search engine results, but it is possible to make sure that it is hard to get information to show up instead.

Here are 10 recommendations for establishing a healthy presence and reputation on the search engines.

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How to “Green” Your Marketing

Greenhouse gas emissions per capita in 2000 [Image] There’s no question that the environment is one of today’s “hot topics,” pun intended. Many consumers are now searching for ways to lower their carbon footprint, and creating a demand for eco-friendly products and services. It’s a new marketplace that is ripe for the picking for savvy marketers.
Do you offer a collection of green products but don’t know how to capture this new growing audience? Or are you an established green brand in fear of how to cope with an influx of competition?

Read some great tips on structuring a marketing campaign that shows your environmentally-friendly side.

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Running a social media campaign

A Volvo B9TL(SBS7357B) operating on Svc. 196 a... [Image] Certainly, there are quite a few ways to do short run marketing and advertising campaigns on social media with the goal of grabbing traffic. Depending on which of the myriad of routes you choose, they can all range in effectiveness.
In my nuanced view, however, running social ads, banners on MySpace, or even instream ads on a podcast alone don’t really qualify as running a social media campaign.

When I think of a truly effective social media campaign, I imagine something along the lines of what Cisco is attempting currently, or what Gary Vaynerchuk has done with his personal brand and produced media.

Source: Don’t Treat Web 2.0 Like Web 1.0 by Mark 'Rizzn' Hopkins

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Using video to build trust in business

popular, who me? [Image] Video? Gary Vaynerchuk is the poster child for demonstrating authenticity while building trust in his personal and business brand. Another great example overall would be what Ben Yoskowitz is doing at Standout Jobs. Learn from that.

Video and audio are great tools to build up an experience with your potential audience. It gives people a sense of how you might be in person. Even though you could edit the hell out of your media such that you’d still show up as polished and professional, it’s one more wall coming down between a “no” and a “yes.”

This is an excellent article with some brilliant online business marketing information, see Social Media Starter Moves for Freelancers by Chris Brogan

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Importance of good visibility in the search engines

Day 198 [Image] Like it or not, most people use search engines to find information on the web, and the search engine they use the most is Google. If your site cannot be found in the search engines, look what you may be missing out on:

* People who perform web searches follow up with an off-line action such as a visit to a store or a phone call at least 82% of the time. (TMP Directional Marketing)

* Of all in-store purchases made in key categories, 89% of them were made by people who had done research on the web prior to making their purchases. (BIGResearch)

Clearly, your business needs a web site that can be found in the search engines!

From The Secret to Search Success by Lauren Hobson

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Control and creativity within Australia’s media

A woman reading SMS messages on her mobile pho... [Image] Many television programs can only be produced because of the revenue generated by viewer interactions through telephone or SMS voting. News services extract surplus value from the costly business of journalism through repackaging and representation on the Internet and, more profitably, through mobile phones.
It is within the following three characteristics that we might begin to discern the battleground for control and creativity within Australia’s media:
* interaction is the new content: by which I mean that there is an increased significance within the media of human interaction, as opposed to the previously dominant processes of creation, distribution, reception or discussion of content;
* distracted and fascinated: by which I mean the rise of user or audience behaviours that simultaneously embody much greater levels of engagement with media while at the same time reflecting an attitude in which users are easily distracted; and
* you can get it for “free”: by which I mean that media consumers understand that while some media and some information must be, should be, and often is paid for, that equivalent, similar or better media and information products can be obtained at no apparent or extra cost.

Read the full article at Traditional media and the new media audience By Matthew Allen

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The SEO benefit of blogging

Simple example graph of Web traffic at Wikipedia. [Image] Blogs are known to attract large number of traffic.
This is due to the nature of blogs which are very dynamic and constantly changing from time to time with new information.
This is the reason why blogs are constantly indexed by search engines and updated regularly.
If your site is using a blog format rather than a traditional website, your content will be indexed much faster.
Once you started one, you need to find ways to generate traffic to your blog.

Find out about ways to do that, at Blogging – a Fun Way to Generate Traffic

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Internet information and users behaviour

Eslite Bookstore in Taichung Chung-yo Departme... [Image] Information will be available anytime, anywhere, anyhow - but the real value lies in people.
People are now information publishers and relays, they’re giving it personal input and then make it worth to their friends and connections. They also become part of the influence information would have onto other people because they’re recommending it using social media tools.
What’s really important looking at the information sharing way of working in the new “social web” is whether information is consumed, used, and re-shared by adressees. Which means people are important, but the way they shape information to send it is way more important.

Read this series of articles on the topic of internet user experience written by Romain Péchard

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Thursday 17th July - What's New?

Zemanta finds new suggestions to select from, with related articles and images to dress up your own blogs. I find some very handy links in there whilst I'm researching for you.
Well, today I was totally surprised to find one of our own blogs popping up in Zemanta ...that is the best news I've had today. We're famous after only a couple of weeks blogging! See the 'Related Articles By Zemanta' box at the bottom of this blog, it has our blog post featured...

The adsonvids blogs will be updated each two weeks, plus there will be a blog post at The Hub every Friday, with latest news from adsonvids.
I'd neglected to tell you this bit of information, and I then had the thought that you might like to know what to expect!


Have a relaxing weekend. This is Ads, signing off for another week - doing your online leg work, to bring you the best and latest.

Be sure not to miss any of today's picks. There is (as usual!) great information in today's published blogs:

The SEO benefit of blogging
Internet information and users behaviour
How to “Green” Your Marketing
When a reputation nightmare happens
Importance of good visibility in the search engines
Lemonade Out of Lemons
Google's Core Ranking team
Running a social media campaign
Control and creativity within Australia’s media
Using video to build trust in business

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