Internet Marketing - Best Of The Web: January 2013

Thursday, 31 January 2013

21 Minute Traffic: Social Shopping

21 Minute Traffic: Social ShoppingWritten by Brittanie Byron, Editor of the DCS Journal
How Social Shopping Works
Multiply.com is a social networking site with over 20 million users that is all about online shopping. This site offers some amazing tools that allow business owners to create a storefront online for free! You can use a Multiply store to promote the products you sell, whether you’re a local business owner, affiliate marketer or ship to a broad audience. Multiply allows you to post

6 Chinese Online Trends You Should be Anticipating in the Year of the Snake

With the new moon in February, the Year of the Snake will be upon us. Although it won’t have the fanfare of its Dragon forerunner, there’ll still be plenty of fireworks in a year bursting with opportunities for businesses selling in China. China’s sixth zodiac animal, the Snake, is said to have many material possessions. Author informationMark TannerMark Tanner is the founder of China Skinny, a service helping western businesses better understand Chinese consumers. He has been in

SPONSOR MESSAGE: Connect Your Social Media To Revenue

With Adobe Social – part of the Adobe Marketing Cloud – you can measure how your social media spend impacts your bottom line. It’s time to find out what those “Likes” and “followers” really mean for your business. Click here to remove the guesswork.

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
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12 Ways to Protect Your Smartphone from Cyber Attacks

Every year security experts warn that our smartphones are due for a major attack.
This year is no different.
That mini computer you carry with you is a growing target for hackers. We use them to surf the Net, read email, watch news…not to mention they’re also being used as mobile wallets.
Heck. You’re probably reading this article from one now.
Smartphone Cyber Attacks: The Numbers
How serious is the risk?

According to a study by Lookout Security 40% of mobile users (or 4 out

SearchCap: The Day In Search, January 31, 2013

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the Web. From Search Engine Land: Will Facebook’s Graph Search Be Big For Bing Advertisers? Following Facebook’s announcement of Graph Search a few weeks back, there’s been no shortage of analysis...

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
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From Radio Shack, to Self-Taught SEO Expert, Court Tuttle Reveals How He Always Knows Which Keywords Are Profitable Online

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How is this for a claim to fame – earning at least $ 200,000 a year for the last four years straight online. That’s what Courtney Tuttle has achieved.
A long time ago I was researching what top level keyword phrase I wanted EJ to rank for in search engines. I decided to try the very challenging phrase “Internet Marketing”.
I searched Google for this phrase to see who was at the top and the

How 4 Consumer Brands Are Using Visual Content To Tell Stories & Engage Customers

As the online landscape becomes increasingly more competitive, marketers are finding that great content isn’t just about what you say, but how content is presented as well. Content marketing that is injected with visually appealing images not only attracts readers to your message, but it helps to tell the story you’re trying to convey.
Visually pleasing content, videos, eBooks, or graphics (to name a few) can make your customers feel a connection to your brand that they might

‘Dying Industry’ Raises Over $100 Million in 2012 – SEO is Not Dying

People love doom and gloom and this is perhaps why so many blog posts and articles this year have pronounced the end of SEO at some point or another. It seems to be all the rage to point out how SEO is somehow no longer reliable or valid, or to whine about how Google is Author informationJeet AgrawalJeet Agrawal is the co-founder of GetLinksPro, a small SEO company working with several top internet marketers and SEO companies. You can follow Jeet on Twitter.TwitterGoogle+The post ‘Dying

Next Stop for Google’s Flight Search Is Regional Results

I am originally from New Jersey and I have much of my family and many friends in the NY/NJ area. When I go ‘home’ (if I am not driving) I have a few options for airports but it’s never easy to see if it’s worth flying into LaGuardia v. Newark for a particular trip. It’s a hassle to check flights to each airport separately.
Google sees that in some areas like the New York region it makes sense to give regional flight information rather than just per airport so they

Google Is Even Confused By Their Google Places Guidelines

There is a thread at the Google Business Help forum, a forum devoted to helping business owners with their local listings in Google Places / Google Maps...

Search Engine Roundtable
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Here’s a Pep Talk

If you are going to do a video – make it great.
And if you want to make it great. And make it stand-out from the crowd – here’s how you do it.
Watch this as an example of pure awesomeness… (it brought many big smiles to my face)

Seriously, how good was this video?
ADD YOUR COMMENTS BELOW.
ARE YOU READY TO CHANGE THE WORLD?
Ryan Lee | Continuity Income | Internet Marketing
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How to Know if You’re Entering a Viable Niche

When western companies first visited a deregulated India, they were licking their fingers in anticipation.
India was a country of just under one billion people at the time, and businessmen were seeing dollar signs everywhere they looked.
But, numbers alone don’t make sales.
Many companies burned themselves trying to get off the ground, because the vast majority of people simply couldn’t or wouldn’t buy their products.
They learned — after a lot of trial and error —

How to Improve SEO on Your Sites

How to improve SEO – that’s the question everyone is asking now that Panda and Penguin have marked their casualties. While Google figures out its next launch against internet marketers, we need to figure out how to outsmart their next moves. Unfortunately, what follows in this guide will show how much Panda and Penguin spelled death for existing sites, but in a way, what comes in how to improve SEO actually makes things easier for you as the site owner to please Google.
We all know that

3 Games That Will Improve Your Business Skills

As I mentioned on this post, one must work hard but also play hard. In other words, you need to have fun regularly if you want to stay sane and be able to work hard when it comes to it. But what if you could have fun and improve your business skills at the same time? Even better, right? Below you’ll find three games which I think achieve this purpose.
1. Chess
The king of strategy games, and also the game of kings. Chess dates back to the 6th century, and today it’s played by

Taking Google’s New Image Search for a Test Drive

Last week, Google announced that they were going to make changes to their image search tool. They said it was going to be faster, more beautiful and more intuitive. Guess what – they were right.
Come along while I take Google’s new image search for a test drive.
Keyword: The Birds
At first, image search looks just like it did before the switch. But once you click on a photo, everything changes.
The chosen photo used to load in an iframe on top of the source page. This was cumbersome

Adwords Master Class

Hey folks,

Recently I did a post about becoming an Adwords consultant for businesses, you can see that post here - Adwords Consulting, and in the post I asked if people would like me to organize a professional Adwords...Adwords Master Class is a post from: Internet Marketing Secrets, Affiliate Marketing Blog, Affiliate Internet Marketing

Internet Marketing Secrets, Affiliate Marketing Blog, Affiliate Internet Marketing
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Wednesday, 30 January 2013

Find the Perfect Hire by Tapping Into Social Media

Are you looking to hire employees, contractors or interns this year? Take a tip from a Washington Post article on how public radio station NPR used Twitter to find employees.
When NPR’s standard methods of searching for interns fell short and the organization wasn’t getting enough candidates, they decided to spread the word through a Twitter campaign. The one week effort landed a flood of applications and led to hiring 15 new interns.
NPR’s move made sense because the organization was

Be Better (The Checklist)

I won’t sugarcoat it. Competition online is tough.
Because the barrier to entry is so low (it’s $ 9 for a domain name, a few dollars for hosting and wordpress is free), thousands of wannabe entrepreneurs are gunning for your customers.
How the heck are you going to stand out? How are you going to actually make the BIG bucks promised by the “Internet marketers”?
Two words: BE BETTER.
Sure, you’ve gotta market and hustle. That’s a given. And if you think you

The Right Way to Think About Your Marketing Software RFP [+Sample]

It’s a tough world out there for marketers. A 2011 study by the Fournaise Group estimated that 73% of CEOs think marketers can’t demonstrate their impact on the company’s top line, while Jonathan Salem Baskin estimates that CMOs get fired 25% more often than CIOs, and more than twice as frequently as any other colleague in the C-Suite. With the convergence of pressures on marketers, it’s more important than ever that you find vendors (or better yet, partners) who understand your

7 Must Have Features If You Sell Products Online

TweetLast year I did a lot of online shopping, more shopping than I have ever done before.
I suspect if you’re a net addict as I am, you spent more online last year than ever before too.
According to Comscore, over $ 43.2 Billion was spent online in 2012. That’s up 15% from 2011. It’s a cliché to say now that online shopping is the real deal, and not just a fad.
You’re a crazy person if you have a product to sell and you don’t look at the World Wide Web as one

How to Download All Your Facebook Data

Did you know you can download Facebook data with your Facebook albums, photos, videos, wall posts and messages and save on your computer. All these years, Facebook has saved your Facebook activity and will allow you to save and download all your Facebook activity for free.
Download Facebook Archives
After logging in to Facebook, go to the top right corner Setting wheel icon > Go to Account Settings and click the link “Download a copy of your Facebook data”.

After you click

Google+ Surpasses Twitter to Become Second Largest Social Network

Last week, Global Web Index released its December 2012 study of Active Social Platform Usage. As expected Facebook remains on top with over 50% of global internet users actively engaged on Facebook each month. The jaw-dropper of the report is that the Google Plus (G+) network has surpassed Twitter in number of active monthly users. Author informationMichelle Stinson RossSocial Media Consultant at Firestarter Social MediaMichelle is the co-host of the popular Social Media discussion group

How to Write an Underachiever Sales Letter

How to Write an Underachiever Sales LetterWritten by Russell Brunson, the Overnight Success Maker
A couple months ago I showed you the 11 building blocks to creating effective sales letters. Here they are again: headline, your opening, connect with your reader, credibility, power bullets, testimonials, price justification, guarantee, bonus, call to action and P.S.
That article went into detail on how to write your headline (the first building block). Now, I want to show you the next steps. If

The Legal Risks in Guest Blog Posts

Ideally, guest posts are great for both your site and for you as the webmaster. For the guest post author, it’s a way to expand their reach and talk directly to your audience. For you, it’s a way to take it a little easy one day, offer some variety for your readers and improve the discourse on your site.
However, like almost anything you do online, guest posting comes with a set of legal risks. For the author of the guest post, these risks are pretty clear, they’re the author

Moving to a New Location? Don't Forget about Local Search

Posted by David Mihm
It’s obviously not uncommon for small businesses to move -- fluctuating rents, growth, lifestyle concerns for the business owner or employees, and any number of factors make good reasons to move. However, few business owners understand the Local Search headaches they may be creating for themselves or their customers as a result of a move.

Celia Bell, Assistant Director of SCORE’s Austin chapter, is currently experiencing some of those headaches and sent me

The high street and ecommerce: friends, foes or something in-between?

According to Econsultancy’s Multichannel Retail Survey, just 14% of people surveyed believe retailers do not need to operate across the various channels; brands need to start promoting their technology and channels effectively, or risk losing profits to those who are.
The multichannel high street
Technology gives retailers the chance to extend sales reach beyond the store. As consumers look for the easiest, cheapest shopping solutions, retailers must utilise their creative powers of

Inspiration, Engagement & Other Content Marketing Storytelling Lessons from Robert Munsch

I am a huge fan of Robert Munsch and have been since he visited our public school, many moons ago, to read to our class the story of The Paperbag Princess. You might remember Munsch from your own childhood; he travelled Canada and the U.S. visiting classrooms and sharing his stories, not because it was a sales driver, but because it was what he loved to do.
If you’re not familiar with his work, Munsch is a popular and much-loved Canadian/American children’s author originally from

Get More Customers to Say “Yes!”

Get More Customers to Say “Yes!”Written by Brett Curry, CEO of OnlineMarketingGiant.com
As a business owner your level of success is determined by how many “yeses” you get on a daily basis. In most businesses you need more than just one type of “yes.” You need someone to say “yes” to visiting your website, “yes” to opting into your list, “yes” to visiting your store or shopping cart, “yes” to making a first-time purchase, “yes” to your upsell offer,

3 Critical Research Steps for High Converting Copy

3 Critical Research Steps for High Converting CopyWritten by Kevin Hill, Professor of High Response
In this article I am going to talk about the most important aspect of your copy. It is something most people ignore when they write a sales letter or go into business, but it can save you from having a sales letter that does not sell a thing online.
But before I do that I want to tell you a quick story of how I discovered this secret. I was watching videos of the Fusion seminar conducted by Gary

Google Places / Local Business Management Update

Last night, Google's Jade Wang announced in the Google Business Help forum that they have made an update to the area businesses can maintain and update their Google Places / Loca Listing in Google Maps.

Search Engine Roundtable
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Blog Design That Rocks SEO

You’ve committed yourself to blogging on a consistent basis. The copy is readable, informative, and rich with important keywords. You are writing all of the right stuff for your blog, so why isn’t it ranking better? Great SEO isn’t just about giving the search bots enough keyword rich text to crawl. Is the design of Author informationMichelle Stinson RossSocial Media Consultant at Firestarter Social MediaMichelle is the co-host of the popular Social Media discussion

Business Brand Rocks: Ben & Jerry’s Launches New Flavor

An iconic business brand rocks with the announcement of its latest product. Ben & Jerry’s, the ice cream company known for its outrageous flavors with even more outrageous names always manages to keep its products in the spotlight. See how Ben & Jerry’s handles its brilliant branding efforts and how you can do the same with any budget.
Business Brand Magic
30 Rock finale. Ben & Jerry’s will unveil its latest flavor, “30 Rock” on Thursday, just in time

Help with SEO: Easy Strategies to Implement

Help with SEO is easy to find, but hard to implement at times. There’s such an influx of new tips and strategies each day that it’s hard to decipher what will actually work for your website and what’s a waste of your time. What’s more, if you’re not highly technically savvy, you’re probably not too gung ho about learning yet more ways to spend your time behind a computer trying to figure out which plugins work here and which ones work there.
If you need help with SEO, this guide is

Ryan (R.C.) Rice: Site Flipping Success

Ryan (R.C.) Rice: Site Flipping SuccessInterview with website flipper Ryan (R.C.) Rice by Brittanie Byron, Editor of the DCS Journal
Ryan (R.C) Rice plans to graduate from college this December. But while most people are stuck in the “graduate from college, then get a job to pay off student loans” mentality – she’s in no hurry to start clocking in.
“I can get a job to further my education or strengthen my skills, but my salary will play a small part in why it is I get a job… if

How To Protect Your Home Business From A Natural Disaster

As some of you may know I live on the south shore of Long Island, and this was one of the areas that was hit by the storm surge and flood waters from Hurricane Sandy last year. We had 38″ of water in the street and 15″ on the first floor of my house, so This post originally came from How To Protect Your Home Business From A Natural Disaster

How I Handle Backups and Disaster Recovery After reading about Lisa Barone’s laptop being stolen, I got...
Receipt Scanning Software

Tuesday, 29 January 2013

JUMP New York 2013

JUMP is our one-day conference for senior marketers looking to combine on and offline campaigns, data, technologies, agencies, creative and knowledge. If the last decade was all about figuring out digital, the next is about integrating it, dissolving it into the marketing mix and finding new hybrid strategies that combine on and offline.

JUMP brings together hundreds of online and offline and marketers to not just learn to speak the same language, but to create a forum to share data,

Quick email deliverability trick

If you use email marketing to promote products or your business, you know the Importance of getting good deliverability rates. Deliverability is a metric used to measure how often your emails actually make it into your subscriber’s inbox. Now days, with spam filters becoming more critical of email content and things like priority inbox, getting the most out of email marketing endeavors is a growing challenge.
The fact is some people don’t want your marketing message. Send as much free high

Obvious but Hard Lessons in Small Business Advertising

There are two kinds of small businesses:
1) Those with a very specific niche, but a nation-wide target market (e.g. taxidermy services for exotic animals).
2) Those with a broad enough scope, but a geographically limited market (e.g. an upscale bistro).
As someone who has marketed businesses in each of these categories, the lessons in this piece apply far better to the latter category then the former.
1. Limit Advertising Efforts Geographically
No matter how tempting it is to include a

Happy Belated Data Privacy Day!

Yesterday was Data Privacy Day. I can’t believe I missed it. It probably slipped by me while I was carefully deleting my browser history, cookie cache, old social media accounts, personal photos and every bit of contact information from the web. Whew, that was quite a job.
While I was doing that, sites all over the internet were posting reports to show how seriously they take this issue of internet privacy.
Google updated their transparency report this month to include a breakdown of

SearchCap: The Day In Search, January 29, 2013

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the Web. From Search Engine Land: BrightLocal’s Local SEO Industry Survey Now Open Local SEOs are being invited to take the Local SEO Industry Survey 2013, which is being organized again this year...

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
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Top Three Inbound Marketing Strategies for Mobile Apps

Posted by robigangulyThis post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.
Disclaimer: This post is an extension of the recent Mozinar "Standing Out in the Sea Of Apps: Building an Audience of Fans for Your Mobile App's Success" and covers questions from audience Q&A. You can watch the recorded Mozinar

Quora Gives Bloggers Built-In Readership

Question and answer site Quora just announced the release of a new blogging platform. Clearly there is no shortage of these around the Internet, but this one is a bit different. Quora plans to take the posts published on its platform and distribute them to users who follow certain Q&A topics.
For instance, if you decide to write about politics, then those who follow political topics on Quora’s Q&A platform have the potential to see your posts in their feed.

The benefit of this to

New Apple iPad 128GB

Want to buy Apple iPad 128GB? Apple today increased the iPad storage from 64GB to 128GB by adding a new model to its iPad lineup. The new 128GB iPad with retina display will be available in both Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi + Cellular models and will provide twice the storage capacity!
Apple iPad 128GB
As the ever improving iPad camera continues to store more HD photos, and HD videos, and as the iPad continues to replace netbooks and traditional computers – people continue to store large amounts

How to Format USB Pen Drives Quickly

What is the best way to format USB pen drives easily. Is your flash pen drive corrupted? Did a previous virus attack corrupt your USB drive and it now works unreliably? Deleting all your files and formatting the USB flash drive might be the best way to make your pen drive work like new. So what is the correct way to format USB drives.
Note that simply deleting files from the flash drive does not format it. Although this is a beginner’s tutorial, but you would be surprised how many

Will TJX Succeed with Second Ecommerce Attempt?

Image from: Second Chance / Shutterstock.com
Last year, the TJX Companies announced that it will once again return to ecommerce, six years after its first attempt to join the online retail marketplace. Operating three successful retailer chains, T.J. Maxx, Marshalls, and HomeGoods, the TJX Companies is the leading off-price retailer of apparel and home fashions in the U.S. and worldwide. With 2012 sales at their brick-and-mortar stores expected to exceed $ 25 billion, a successful ecommerce

Microphone Tips For Recording Great Audio In Your Videos

Here’s another fun video tutorial for you in our Year of the Video series! This one is all about how to ensure you have excellent AUDIO when recording your videos. There’s nothing worse than coming across what appears to be an excellent video that you really want to watch… but it has terrible audio quality. Most people will click off in a nanosecond!
In fact, people will long forgive bad video quality (e.g. grainy, wobbly) but they won’t forgive bad audio. With the

Guaranteed SEO: Can You Get Guaranteed Results?

Guaranteed SEO, like almost any “guarantee,” has no actual guarantees. In fact, the only way to ensure you don’t get hit by Google is by not making a website at all. Naturally, this is a pretty unsound way to do business, especially in the internet marketing world, so that’s obviously not an option. But what IS an option is learning how to Google-proof your websites to the point where guaranteed SEO is a little more, well, guaranteed.
Anymore, the way to insure that you get some Google

Huffington Post to Serve Ads Alongside New Comment Conversations

The ability to leave comments is both a blessing and a curse for content sites. On one hand, they’re an invitation to drown a site in spam, they can be nasty and they can start fights between members of a community.
On the upside, they can start fights between members of a community. Come on, you can say you hate it when people start taking swipes at each other but a good text-based donnybrook can drive a ton of traffic.
The Huffington Post has found a way to capitalize on that traffic

Mobile Business Benefits from AT&T Sales

Mobile business benefited from a recent rise in AT&T sales. The increase in smartphones and mobile plans means a bigger audience and more opportunity for small businesses. Read on for details on how mobile is changing the way we do business.
Mobile Business Demand Increases
More mobile phones and plans added. AT&T announced sales of 8.6 million iPhones and added 780,000 new subscribers in a successful fourth quarter, closing 2012. The numbers mean more mobile users out there and more

Daily Search Forum Recap: January 28, 2013

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web...

Search Engine Roundtable
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SearchCap: The Day In Search, January 28, 2013

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the Web. From Search Engine Land: With $ 14 Million More Q&A Site ChaCha Soldiers On Q&A is a great idea that really hasn’t worked. Although Yahoo Answers and a few others are still around...

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
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Monday, 28 January 2013

20 Awesome Homepage Examples to Inspire Your Next Redesign

A few weeks ago, we published a blog article featuring 15 examples of brilliant homepage design. And man was it popular! Not even a full three weeks later, the article has already attracted more than 36,000 views. Now, before you accuse us of getting all cocky on you, you should know the other side to the story. Albeit successful, many of the readers of that post ... or at least the ones who like leaving blog comments ;-) ... were disappointed in the lack of industry variety in the examples

Google+ Grabs the Number Two Spot for Active Users on a Social Network

We’ve got to stop saying that no one is using Google+ because clearly, it’s more than a blip on the social radar. The latest GlobalWebIndex report shows that 25% of global internet users are ACTIVELY using Google+. That’s what it says, but I’m not sure I believe it.

Facebook is still way ahead of the pack but look at the close race after that. YouTube and Twitter are neck-and-neck for active users but Twitter had the most growth over the past year.
Everytime we see one

Link Building – How is it different for affiliates?

I want to address the perceived difference
between the strategies used by affiliate marketers and merchants. In
researching this post, I read a number of other blog posts and a number of
presentations around the topic of how affiliates can get links. It struck me
that the tools and techniques being talked about would fit in fine with pretty
much any type of link building campaign, whether it was for an affiliate or
not.
To illustrate the point, these websites are
affiliates:

Announcing the New HubSpot Blog Apps for Your iPad or Kindle

Ever wish you could get all of our blog content perfectly optimized for your iPad or Kindle? Well ... there's an app for that! Actually, there are two. Today, we're launching our Newsstand app for the iPad, as well as our Kindle app, aimed to make the experience you have with our blog content on your tablet or e-reader much more enjoyable.
Now you can stay ahead of the curve with our comprehensive how-to’s, tips, and information about the latest news, trends, and best practices in the

Digital Marketing Growth Opportunity is Knocking: Are You Answering?

Since 2001 our “practice what we preach”, digital marketing and PR agency at TopRank has experienced growth every year. Like many frugal and efficiency focused businesses, we’ve been conservative about business operations, taking on zero debt and running pretty lean.
All of our marketing (and most PR) is inbound. We do not employ dedicated sales people or spend on advertising. This approach has kept us small but extremely efficient with exceptional project management,

Quick Tips for Obtaining a Trademark

Have you ever been through the process of registering a federal trademark whether for your company / brand or a particular product? It is a nightmare… at least it was for me. I’ve been through the process three times – one of which was successful and the other two, dismal failures. On the two fails, not only did I not get the trademark I wanted, I was out several hundred dollars.
Now, I must mention that I went through the process on my own. If and when I ever have to do it

Are You a Titan?

First, I have to admit I’ve been guilty of getting lazy so I’m not writing this from my high horse. And every once in a while I need a reminder to
Now that I’ve gotten that out of the way… are you truly doing everything you can to grow your business?
Be honest with yourself. Can you do MORE to build your dream business? Are you REALLY giving it 100% effort?
People think they are marketing their business, but they are not.
I hate to break the news to you, but creating 1

A Conversation with Gary Henderson: Interactivity Digital Conference

Gary Henderson is the Founder and CEO of Interactivity Marketing. He has spent the last 11 years managing digital marketing in various capacities. He has worked with large brands such as Ford Motor Company, AT&T, and many major hotel chains. He has also done work for celebrities such as Christina Aguilera, Jeff Foxworthy, and Carrot Author informationMichelle Stinson RossSocial Media Consultant at Firestarter Social MediaMichelle is the co-host of the popular Social Media discussion group

Meet Andy Hobsbawm, the man making coffee mugs smarter than you

Hobsbawm will tell us more at JUMP in New York in just two days time when Venky Balakrishnan, VP of Global Marketing at Diageo, joins him on stage. Together the two will present a case study of EVRYTHNG in action, but first, a sneak preview of what we can expect to hear.
It’s hard to imagine how your technology would manifest in the physical world. Can you give us one or two examples of how it would work?
Imagine if your oven could tell you the cheapest place to get spare parts for it, how to

8 Ways to Instantly Improve the Quality of Your Marketing Content

Last week, we published a post written by a HubSpot partner, Velocity Partners, that discussed the importance of creating high-quality content. If you haven't read it yet, I highly recommend you do. You can view it here.
The need to create high-quality content, however, has put many marketers in a difficult situation: high-quality content takes a long time to create, and many just don't have the time to do it.
While it'd be nice to say, "tough noogies, find the time," that's neither realistic

How To Clean Up Bad Links and Establish Trust With Link Vendors

More and more clients are coming to me for audits because they have been harmed by low-quality linking efforts, either intentionally, unintentionally, or possibly as a result of a competitor’s attempt to harm their site. As a result of having gone through several of these in the past months, I have developed a core set Author informationAlan BleiweissAlan Bleiweiss has been an Internet professional since 1995, managing client projects valued at upwards of $ 2,000,000.00. A noted industry

The SEO of Responsive Web Design

Posted by Kristina Kledzik
Will Critchlow announced back in November that Distilled's blog was updated with a new responsive design, but it occurred to me recently that we never went into the specifics of why responsive web design is so great. Responsive design has been a hot topic in online marketing for the past few months, but is it really going to become an industry standard?

Short answer: yep.

Responsive web design means that you don't have separate mobile, tablet, and PC

Sunday Series: Fastest Growing Online Electronics Retailers in December

Image from: Electronics Presents / Shutterstock.com
At Compete, we’ve compiled the fastest growing online sellers of electronic goods in the month of December. The electronics shopping category as a whole grew 3.43% over the previous December, with over 114 million unique visitors.
Topping the list is Sony’s online store, which offers a variety of products: digital cameras, TVs, laptops and cellphones–all popular gifts. Though Sony had the most growth, it had a relatively

Sunday, 27 January 2013

#SocialChat Discusses the Basics of Google Plus

Share on Twitter Share on Google+ Share on Facebook Share on LinkedIn On Monday, January 21st, Social Media specialists from all over the country gathered to pick up tips and tricks for maximizing Google Plus from guest expert, Annalise Kaylor (@annabelleblue). Ms Kaylor is Director of Social Media at Intrapromote. She built her first social network The post #SocialChat Discusses the Basics of Google Plus appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
Search Engine Journal
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20 Power Packed Tips to Create an Inspiring Workspace

Start by answering these questions:

Are you in a working environment that drives you nuts?
Do conditions in your workplace support positive and creative thinking?
Are you putting in a whole lot and yet it feels as though you are doing nothing?

Surroundings can have a big impact on your mood, emotions, and productivity. When your office space feels dead and lifeless, you’re employees and customers, not to mention yourself, may also feel dead and lifeless while you’re there.
Create

UberConference: File Sharing During Conference Calls

Audio conferencing service UberConference recently announced integrations with popular productivity and collaboration services Evernote and Box, giving business users more options for sharing notes and documents during their conference calls.

Sharing files and documents during group calls can be essential to making sure all team members are on the same page. Presentations, meeting agendas, or current projects can all help make sure that calls run smoothly, but not all conferencing solutions

How to Audit Your Website for Improved SEO and Conversions

When was the last time you gave your website a checkup? Website audits are extremely valuable and absolutely necessary before beginning any large-scale SEO or website redesign projects. Auditing your website can determine whether or not it's optimized to achieve your goals, and if not, how you can improve it to increase performance.
So if you've never audited your website before, it's been a while since you have, or if you're planning a website redesign in the near future, use this post as

Answer Customer Needs by Building a Customer Advisory Board

Posted by JackieRae
We sure do love feedback at Moz. One of our biggest contributors to feedback is our Customer Advisory Board (which we lovingly call CAB). Who doesn’t love sharing the work they do with a group of awesome people, hearing their insights, and learning how to provide the most value to users based on their feedback?

Dana Lookadoo sporting her Customer Advisory Board shirt at MozCon.

A few weeks ago, our VP of Growth Marketing, Joanna Lord, did a Whiteboard

5 Writing Articles You Should Read

This week on The Lede …

Web Design is Still About the Words
How this Man Sells $ 30,000,000 in Wine Every Year via Email
Ripe Prose in the Dairy Case
The Raw Power of an Ultra-Specific Headline
Seth Godin on Slow Media

Want to grab even more useful links (beyond those that make The Lede)? Follow @copyblogger on Twitter.
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Web Design is Still About the Words

What would the web look like without words? In a simple, powerful little excercise, Mr. Reyes answers that question for us

Q&A Site Quora Launches Free Blog Platform

Last week, LinkedIn announced they were shutting down their Q&A section which prompted me to ask the question “are we over the Q&A concept?” Now here comes Quora with a new twist – Blogs on Quora. I’m not sure if that helps or hurts my argument but let’s take a closer look.
The set-up is ultra simple. Name your blog, choose one of two plain themes, add a logo and you’re live. Now all you have to do is post. To test the system, I set one up to go along

Four Ways You Can Benefit By Using AdWords Scripts

The best kept secret for saving time and improving results in AdWords may very well be AdWords Scripts, a lightweight automation tool that is easier to use than the API but more powerful than the standard interface and the AdWords Editor. As highly as I think of the AdWords UI (I helped build it...

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
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Facebook Puts Their Foot Down, and Other Marketing Stories of the Week

I’d like to take a moment to remind you of something Seth Godin once said: “How dare you settle for less when the world has made it so easy for you to be remarkable?”
The world of inbound marketing, too, has provided so many amazing elements for us to use to our advantage, so it’s time we stand out above the rest and conquer!
To start, we’ve compiled this list of marketing stories of the week to help you get a better understanding about what’s changing in the world of marketing.

Overcome Writer’s Block for Increased Earning Power

Overcome Writer’s Block for Increased Earning PowerWritten by Howard Berg, World’s Fastest Reader (Guinness)
You will definitely get excited by what I am about to share with you in this month’s article because it will identify and solve the dilemma of writer’s block. How many times have you had a writing deadline, and your mind went completely blank? You sat in front of your computer screen hoping for a breakthrough, but nothing happened.
First, I will reveal what causes this

Online Marketing News: Google Gets Explosive, Facebook Graph Gets Creepy, Tumblr Gets Sexy

How to Play the Content Marketing Game
Content marketing software company SocialEars share 14 methods for winning the game of content marketing in this fun infographic. Follow the rules to earn more relevant eyes on your content; be careful, though, over-promotion could result in your company losing the game.
While it’s certainly true that promotion is important, the infographic misses the mark in exactly when this becomes an important consideration. As TopRank CEO Lee Odden has said time

Search In Pics: Brin On NYC Subway, Google+ On Who Wants to Be a Millionaire & Android Train

In this week’s Search In Pictures, here are the latest images culled from the Web, showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have, and more. Google+ On Who Wants to Be a Millionaire: Source: Google+ Yahoo China:...

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
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Video Recap of Weekly Search Buzz :: January 25, 2013

A busy week at Google this week, we had a Panda refresh - version 24. We had Google deny the January 17th possible update...

Search Engine Roundtable
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How to Create Your Own Custom Linking Campaign

How to Create Your Own Custom Linking CampaignWritten by Mike Richey, CEO of Coolbubba Multimedia, LLC
There are many factors in search engine optimization which contribute to your site’s ranking, what terms you rank for, and generally, how well you do with marketing your site.
By far, the number one factor to ranking well in the search engines is incoming links… inbound links pointing to your site from other sites with the anchor text (the blue words you click on to go to another page)

Saturday, 26 January 2013

The Weekly Compete Pulse

We’ve compiled some of the top stories from around the web this week. The big news is that Facebook has Instagram, and now Twitter has Vine. You can share short six-second videos in your twitter stream with the app, now available for iOS. Read more about the tool and its potential implications on Techcrunch. What does this new tool mean to marketers? Chris Brogan shared eleven things businesses can do with the new video app.
Data seems to be the buzzword of 2013 in the marketing world. A

4 Simple and Powerful Tips to Get the Most From Conferences

Today’s guest post comes from Dave Taylor.
If you’ve been in the online marketing industry for more than a year or two, you’ll already have figured out that there’s no better use of your time than attending a professional conference, expo or workshop. It’s not about the content of the sessions themselves, and it’s not even about the expo hall but about everything in between. The parties. The informal meetings at the bar. The opening reception. Even the “speed dating” or

Website Optimization Services: Signs You Need One

Website optimization services seems to be a dirty term for many hardcore internet marketers. But when it all boils down to it, if a website service gets the job done for you when you can’t do it yourself, there’s nothing wrong with getting a little help. Sure, it can get pricey, but then so can churning your wheels day and in and day out trying to learn everything yourself and reinvent the wheel.
Website optimization services come in many forms. Some work on the actual design while others

A Year Later, Google’s Block Sites Feature Remains Blocked

In 2011, Google rolled out a feature allowing searchers to block web sites they don’t like from appearing in its search results, which drew great attention. That got dropped last year, when Search Plus Your World was launched last January. A year later, Google says there are no firm plans for...

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

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25 Killer Combos for Google's Site: Operator

Posted by Dr. Pete

#sitebox { border: 1px solid #bbbbbb; width: 90%; padding: 4px 10px; margin-bottom: 20px; font-size: 120% } #sitebox a { text-decoration: none }

There’s an app for everything – the problem is that we’re so busy chasing the newest shiny toy that we rarely stop to learn to use simple tools well. As a technical SEO, one of the tools I seem to never stop finding new uses for is the site: operator. I recently devoted a few slides to it in my BlueGlassX

Holy Grail of eCommerce Conversion Optimization - 91 Point Checklist and Infographic

Posted by CueBlocks.comThis post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

Invest in building filthy rich user experience, consistently and throughout your store. That is what stores with deeper pockets (like ASOS, Zappos & JCPenney) do to achieve better conversion rate than your store.

This article will take you

Daily Search Forum Recap: January 25, 2013

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web...

Search Engine Roundtable
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Twitter Partners with Vine to Share Mini Looped Videos

If you’re into six second videos then Twitter has a fun, new tool for you called Vine. (Shouldn’t it be called branch? Get it? Twitter bird – tree branch. . . )
Vine is a camera gizmo for the iPhone. You use it to shoot a six second video and then the app creates an auto loop so it plays over and over and over and over. . . you get the picture. Here’s a sample:
Flickbook vine.co/v/bMp2XwKaHFQ
— David Grayson Kenyon (@dGrayk) January 24, 2013

It makes me dizzy but

Another January Mozscape Index Has Been Released!

Posted by carinoverturf
Just 13 days ago on January 11th, we released the first Mozscape index for 2013. And today, we're launching the latest January Mozscape index - another two indexes in one month! Mozscape data has been refreshed across all our applications so you can see the latest data in Open Site Explorer, the Mozbar, PRO campaigns, and the Mozscape API.

This index finished up in record time, running smoothly on the high power cluster compute machines in

I Own 100 Trillion Zimbabwe Dollars!

I am the proud owner of 100 Trillion Zimbabwe dollars, actually that does make me a trillionaire, but I just wish they were US dollars instead. I love currency collecting and today exchanged a novel 100 trillion dollar currency note and its actually the highest value currency note ever produced for legal tender anywhere in the world. Its not fake and is a true collectible for currency collectors, but its not as valuable as you would expect.
100 Trillion Zimbabwe Dollars

It is actually the

Making Your Website Faster

Making your website faster is now one of the best ways to make Google happy. Forget about optimizing your page for keyword phrases and the like; now you need to work on load times and server side settings. But before you go getting your pants in a knot over having to make changes through your hosting server or making a lot of HTML changes to your page, realize that you don’t necessarily need all of that to make your site faster. There are some organic ways to do it if you really want to know

Twitter Makes Video Marketing More Accessible With GIF-Like Mobile App, Vine

We'll make this one fairly short and sweet, folks, because well, that's what it is. Yesterday, Twitter announced the launch of its new, integrated mobile video app called Vine. The GIF-like app, which was acquired by Twitter in October 2012, enables mobile users to capture and share short videos of six seconds or fewer, which complements the brevity of 140-character tweets quite nicely. Why is it GIF-like, you ask? Because these short videos play on a loop, just like an animated GIF

Clate Mask of Infusionsoft: $54M Ways Your Small Business Can Benefit

Clate Mask, CEO of Infusionsoft, a company that specializes in sales and marketing automation, joins Brent Leary to discuss the recent investment of $ 54 million dollars the company received from Goldman Sachs and also their acquisition of GroSocial, a suite of web-based tools that allow you to build and track social media campaigns – and the benefits these recent events will bring to you and your small business.
* * * * *
Brent Leary: Having recently raised $ 54 Million from Goldman

Friday, 25 January 2013

SearchCap: The Day In Search, January 25, 2013

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the Web. From Search Engine Land: A Year Later, Google’s Block Sites Feature Remains BlockedIn 2011, Google rolled out a feature allowing searchers to block web sites they don’t like from...

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
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R.I.P. – Top 10 Failed Social Media Sites

As you read this, more than likely Facebook, Twitter and even LinkedIn are as common to you as the Internet itself. However, many have already forgotten the large social media players of the past that have utterly failed. It doesn't seem that long ago when names like MySpace, Friendster, and even Digg were all the rage. These monster social media sites had their "time in the spotlight" but now they are long forgotten, slowly dying or even worse, drifting along with little to no growth. The post

Check These Business Interviews/AMAs on Reddit

Reddit has a type of post called AMA, which stands for “Ask Me Anything”. Basically famous/smart/weird people go there (either voluntarily or upon request) and answer to questions from the community.
Since there’s no moderation, the questions are very direct/interesting, and most of the time so are the answers. The format is a bit strange, but scan the text for the commenter name in bold, as those as the answers from the interviewee.
It might also sound like a small feature,

Save $100 on SMX West: Search Marketing Expo in San Jose, CA

The landscape of search and search engine marketing changes constantly.
To keep up, stay ahead, grow your business, and get more (and better) traffic to your site, you need the right help.
Search Marketing Expo is a conference that offers more than 50 cutting-edge sessions (as well as invaluable networking opportunities) covering the search marketing strategies and tactics you’ll need to thrive in 2013 and beyond.
Whether you are a beginner or a search marketing expert, whether you work

How to Market Your Business on Pinterest

It is possible to have a great marketing present on Pinterest. This is especially a case for companies in creative fields, especially home-improvement or hobbies, such as scrapbooking. However, websites that don’t have a lot of images may not be so successful at Pinterest when it comes to sharing their own content, especially if they’re wanting to share content that doesn’t have a catchy image attached to it.
If this isn’t the case, they may be more successful on

The FBI Uses GetGlue to Help Locate Stolen Objects

For the last few seasons, USA Network has used make-believe crime games to promote their series White Collar. This year, they’re getting real and the FBI and GetGlue are all in on it.
The promotion is called “Real Life White Collar Crimes.” The website includes photos and information about some incredible stolen goods that have never been recovered, such as the Ruby Liberty Bell.

At the bottom of the page is a statement encouraging anyone with information to contact the FBI.

How Unique Does Content Need to Be to Perform Well in Search Engines? - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish
We all know that content needs to be unique to rank highly in the SERPs, but how "unique" are we talking? From a content creation perspective, it's imperative to know what duplicate content really means and to understand the implications it can have on SEO.

In this week's Whiteboard Friday, Rand discusses what makes content unique in the eyes of the crawlers, and the bane of duplicate content.

Video Transcription

"Howdy SEOmoz fans, and

A Bootstrapping Recipe to $3 Million

What constitutes a successful startup? If you ask the global entrepreneurship media, they will tell you financing. Ask naïve entrepreneurs, they will tell you the same.
But I have always believed that a successful startup is a function of customers, revenues and profits. Financing is optional. You identify a market gap, build a product to address the gap, develop a business model, and generate revenues and profits.
ifood.tv has done just that.
In 2006, co-founders Vikrant Mathur and Alok

Is Customer Service the New Marketing?

Image from: Customer Service / Shutterstock.com
Many marketers are evaluating what role customer experience and customer service should have in their 2013 marketing goals. The answer is not cut and dry, but depends on what is best for the company.
Today’s consumers tend to base purchase decisions on social media, reviews and referrals from friends. They are interested in marketing, but only if it matches their expectations about the brand. Customer Service is one of the best avenues to

How To Estimate Incremental Revenue Opportunities With Impression Share Data

When looking for opportunities for growth, most search marketers try to find ways to estimate how much they can scale up their paid search effort, and what would be the impact on ad spend, revenue volume, and efficiency. There are lots of different ways to go about this – one way I’d like to cover...

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
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How to Transform Yourself Into an Agile Business Blogger

Many inbound marketers and business bloggers get so caught up in (or weighed down by?) the idea of creating blog content, that after hours or days of looking at a blinking cursor, there's nothing but an outline or a few introductory sentences to show for their work.
Well, I guess that's one way to approach business blogging.
But another way is the agile way -- the way that lets bloggers go with the flow, respond to new opportunities, and generally get over the fear of the blinking cursor and,

Charles Bukowski’s “Secret” of Good Writing

Henry Charles Bukowski, Jr. was, in my opinion, the greatest American fiction writer of the last half of the 20th century.
Fortunately for his book sales, most think of him as the archetypal drunk, misanthropic male pig. Whatever else he was, he was also the archetypal writer, a force of nature who knew exactly what to do to a blank page.
He thought and talked deeply about the craft of writing during his lifetime, and on many occasions, he bluntly voiced his opinions about what works, what

10 interesting digital marketing stats we've seen this week

Google's Q4 earnings

Google reported its Q4 earnings this week, delivering $ 14.4bn in revenue, a 36% year-over-year increase, and earnings of $ 2.9bn, up from $ 2.7bn in the same quarter in 2011.
All told, Google produced over $ 50bn in 2012, a record for the company.
Google's search market share drops below 90%

UK internet users made 2.7bn visits to search engines in December 2012, an increase of 400m visits compared to December 2011.
This represents a 17% increase year-on-year, and

Yandex Launches Experimental “Wonder” Voice Social Search App For The US

Yandex, the company behind the leading search engine in Russia with a presence in Turkey, has taken a radically different direction to its search activities by launching a voice social search app called “Wonder” on Apple’s iOS platform for the US market. Described by the company...

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
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Thursday, 24 January 2013

Tumblr’s New Posting Tool Puts the Emphasis on Fast and Photos

Tumblr may be a blogging platform but you wouldn’t know it from their front page. I don’t know if it was their intention all along but, the free blog site has become known for it emphasis on graphics over text.
Because of this, it attracts an artistic crowd. Fashion, comics, art, architecture, design – they all flourish here. As does visual humor and celeb sites with miles and miles of both legit and manipulated photos.
These numbers tell the story:

Yes, it’s a busy

Follow Up: The Power of Follow-Up in Internet Marketing

Follow up on your leads in internet marketing is just as important as following up on them in the offline sales business. Never assume that your customer is sold on your product and doesn’t have another vendor in mind. On the flip side, you also shouldn’t assume that just because they left without buying means they will buy from another vendor. They might be back; you never know. And because you never know, you need follow up.
Selling and follow up is all about making the customer like you

SPONSOR MESSAGE: Top 10 Ways to Improve Digital Experiences

This white paper discusses: Why 77% of firms #1 goal is improving customer experiences How analytics and testing boost online relevance Download now »

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
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SearchCap: The Day In Search, January 24, 2013

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the Web. From Search Engine Land: Yandex Launches Experimental “Wonder” Voice Social Search App For The US Yandex, the company behind the leading search engine in Russia with a presence in Turkey,...

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
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The Magic Bullet Virus (by Dean Hunt)

This is a guest post by Dean Hunt
A virus is spreading through the business world, a virus that could be fatal to businesses if it continues.
I call it the “magic bullet virus”.
“What’s the magic bullet virus Dean you little tease you?”
Great question handsome RyanLee.com reader.
Allow me to explain with a recent story…
A few weeks ago I got a call from a client of my creative agency, he was so excited that he brought his business partner onto the call

The Martin Luther King, Jr. Guide to Inspirational Copy

I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.”
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down

Should Livestrong sever ties with the Lance Armstrong brand?

Image from: elcerebrohabla
Does the Livestrong Foundation need to further re-brand themselves in the wake of Lance Armstrong’s confession to using performance enhancing drugs? Trust is a necessary component of building a strong brand, and the scandal has tarnished it. Non-profits do not have a product, only a compelling mission which must bring in donations.
The Livestrong Foundation has made critical strives to protect their brand. First, it has expanded from its roots to become a major

21 Minute Traffic: Q&A Cash In

21 Minute Traffic: Q&A Cash InHow WikiAnswers Work
WikiAnswers is an online community where anyone can ask questions, and anyone can give their answers. They can be about any topic so it’s easy to find industry, and even area specific questions. Once a question is posted, it is archived on the site along with all contributed answers and can be indexed in the search engines. This means you can answer a question once and get traffic from it for months, or even years.

The best questions to

Google Helps Audi Drivers Get Around

Google has teamed with Audi using Google Maps and Google Earth to help drivers find what they need and to more safely get from Point A to Point B.
In the process they are catering to a high end crowd that likely make corporate decisions as well. Hey, I bet the “if it’s good enough for Audi it’s good enough for us” strategy has more impact than one might think.
Here is a video from the Google Lat Long blog showing the service in a perfect world.

Notice that the language

That Update Google Denied; Seems Like A Brand Signal Update

On January 17th, we reported on a pretty significant Google update that Google denied and then five days later they pushed out a Panda refresh. No...

Search Engine Roundtable
Original

RLSA: A Practical Use Case

Share on Twitter Share on Google+ Share on Facebook Share on LinkedIn Through the holiday season, I began using Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA, formerly known as RFSA or Remarketing For Search Ads), and now it’s a regular part of my SEM repertoire. The tests I ran were on Holiday/Christmas products for an e-commerce The post RLSA: A Practical Use Case appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
Search Engine Journal
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Top UK Online Marketing Influencers & Bloggers in 2013

For the past 2 years we’ve been publishing a list of the top UK focused internet marketing blogs in advance of speaking at events. This year I’ll be presenting on Creative Content Marketing at SES London February 19th.
Since bloggers do more than just write posts, I’ve shifted the focus of this list from blogs to individuals. With the increasing importance of authorship and personal brands, I think it’s important to consider individual bloggers and the content they

The Top 10 Ways to Get the Traffic You Crave

Sometimes I wonder if the Internet turned us all into a bunch of traffic junkies.
I mean, you’ve felt the cravings right?
Oh, sure, it starts out innocently enough.
You build a website, start a YouTube channel, create a podcast, whatever your passion may be. You create some content. A few people stop by and complement your work, giving you that thank-God-somebody-finally-noticed-me feeling.
That’s when they cravings start. Not strong, at least not at first, but you find yourself

Start Me Up! A profile of Convertable

In one sentence, what is Convertable? 
Convertable is a web-based analytics tool that captures powerful real-time insights about each individual user who submits a contact form on websites (as opposed to Google Analytics which provides aggregated stats).
What problem(s) does Convertable solve?
Most contact forms only shoot off an email containing the information that a user fills out whereas typical conversion tracking tools only provide aggregated data with no easy way to attribute

Overcoming The “NEGATIVE” Attitudes Around You

You know, one thing that drives me mad is when I hear people say “I can’t do it” or “I am scared of failing”… the problem is we are all pressured into a mindset where in many cases, we just do not even TRY because we are scared of failure.
I honestly cannot tell you how many times I have been there myself in the early years, listening to people around me who told me I was never going to succeed at working for myself and that I should “Get a Real

6 Best Self Defense Keychains

Which are the best self defense keychains for personal safety. Everyone carries a keychain in their pocket to hold car or house keys, and its a good idea to carry these tactical keychains which have various handy features to injure assailants and prevent crime if needed.
Recently we posted an article about personal safety apps which you must have on your smartphone, and these self-defence keychains are also a good idea for all women to carry in their pocket.
Personal Safety Keychains
Fury

Wednesday, 23 January 2013

Blockbuster Closings Latest Result of Move to Online Video

Not all that long ago it was not uncommon to get up out your chair, leave the house and visit Blockbuster to get the latest videos or games.
Now Blockbuster is becoming a real live look into the death of a segment of the video rental industry. We’ve been watching newspapers on the decline for years now (in their print form that is) and according to reports things are simply not getting any better for Blockbuster even after they were bought by the Dish Network (I missed that one) in 2010

Facebook Mobile App #1 in US, Beating Google Maps

Well, if Apple was looking to take a bite out of Google with its own native Maps app it appears that it has worked, at least in the short term.
According to comScore, Facebook has replaced Google Maps as the top mobile app in the US in 2012.

That is certainly interesting but Google need not fret based on the following data also from comScore

What should be of most interest is that Google Play number. No matter what statistics or reports or whatever come out, it is obvious that Android’s

Study Shows Many Facebook Visitors Come Away Feeling Frustrated, Envious and Unloved

Think about the last time you were on Facebook. Maybe you skimmed through photos of your sister’s vacation in Hawaii and your best friend’s new baby. Marvin posted that he got a new job and he’s so excited. Susan has a new boyfriend and a publisher just bought her first book. It’s wonderful. It’s inspiring. It’s enough to make you want to jump off a tall building into a small, damp sponge.
If you came away from Facebook feeling anything less than joyful, you

7 eCommerce SEO Tips for 2013

Share on Twitter Share on Google+ Share on Facebook Share on LinkedIn Making eCommerce work is becoming increasingly difficult. Google wants to be the sole affiliate on the Web, and Amazon has gained so much market share that it’s difficult to get noticed as an alternative. The search engines increasingly remove commercial sites from the The post 7 eCommerce SEO Tips for 2013 appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
Search Engine Journal
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The Three Things This Viral Video Gets Exactly Right

If you’ve been on Facebook for more than ten minutes, you’ve seen a friend share an interesting video.
Today I want to talk about one that was shared with me — about why it worked, what you can learn from it, and how you can break a complex piece of content down to get insights for your own material.
After I took a few minutes to watch the video, I immediately shared it. And then my friends shared it. And their friends shared it.
When I see that happening in my social media

Start Internet Marketing Today: What’s Holding You Back

Start internet marketing right now. No, I mean it. Right now. You’ve been thinking about it, talking about it, researching it, and quite frankly, doing everything you can to create “busy work” for yourself. And what has it gotten you? Probably not even your first dollar. Now granted, it’s prudent to do a little research before you jump headlong into something. But at some point, you have to wean yourself off the milk and take a bite into that big juicy steak, even if you only have baby

The Top 5 Mistakes Restaurant Websites Make

A good website is a really important for a restaurant. Many people visit restaurant websites before they decide to actually go and eat a food at a restaurant. A restaurant website should really offer everything a potential customer could need.
Restaurant owners, below are 5 things that I often see wrong with restaurant websites and these 5 things can really hurt your business:
1) A Website That is Not Viewable on Mobile Devices
Anytime we travel, we use various apps to determine where we might

Google Announces 24th Panda Refresh; Not Related To January 17th

Despite it being just five days from extremely strong signs of a Google update, which Google denied, Google announced yesterday on Twitter that they have pushed out a new Panda refresh.
This would make the 24th revision or refresh to the Panda update since launching in February 2011.

Search Engine Roundtable
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A Guide to Searching and Using Pictures in Your Posts

Share on Twitter Share on Google+ Share on Facebook Share on LinkedIn As a poem lover, I have tons of poetry blogs on my Google Reader that I dutifully read every morning. This is my everyday newspaper. It gives me everything I wanna know. The poetry hubs I visit have prompts for members sometimes to The post A Guide to Searching and Using Pictures in Your Posts appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
Search Engine Journal
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Designing for SEO

Posted by Justin TaylorThis post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.
Disclaimer: This is a supplemental post to the Mozinar “Designing for SEO: Improving Site Visibility and Enhancing UX.” Justin Taylor answers Q&A from the Mozinar and expands on the question that was asked most frequently by

9 Website Must Have’s That Your Website Needs

I work with small and medium sized companies to help them attract more sales leads. One of the starting points that we look at is a companies website.
Often times, companies miss adding items to their website that will facilitate attracting sales leads, so I thought I would share 9 Website Must Have’s that every website should have.
Here are 9 Website Must Have’s that you should have on your website:

Social Share Widget – Did you know that only 34% of websites have a social

6 Ways Social Media Marketing Is Changing (For the Better)

We’ve been at this social game for a while now, you and me. We saw it grow up from a minor phenomenon to a mainstream communication channel. And we were there for the emergence of “pinning” (no longer just a wrestling term), the broad use of Twitter in crisis reporting, and seemingly countless redesigns of the Facebook Wall, err ... Timeline.
In such a rapidly changing space, it’s hard not to get pulled into an ongoing analysis of where we are, where we’ve been, and where we’re

Social Media Marketing Fatal Attraction: When Content Earns Your Brand the Wrong Type of Attention

You’re probably familiar with at least a few social media horror stories; those epic hate-bombing situations, where companies commit social suicide in one way or another and pay for it very publicly. One such company was Boners BBQ, who posted on their Facebook page a picture of a customer who had written an unfavorable Yelp review… and captioned it with a rant which included calling her horrible names and accusing her of not tipping the staff (see the full story by Scott Stratten at

Atari U.S. Files for Chapter 11

When a company as iconic as Atari files for Chapter 11, it could be game over, but any business big or small can find itself in legal trouble from time to time. Knowing how to avoid the pitfalls in the first place is the best way to dodge difficulties. We’ll look at the Atari case, then go on to some other tips for keeping your business on the straight and narrow.
Penny Arcade
Two player. Actually, the filing for bankruptcy protection by Atari’s U.S. operations is simply an attempt

How to Determine the Potential Size of Your Content Marketing Opportunity

In my last Copyblogger article, I talked about how to build an agile content marketing team. This time around, I’m going to focus on how to determine the potential size and reach of your content marketing opportunity.
One way to accomplish this is to see if readers are already displaying a passion for your space. Are they looking for the type of content you’re producing, or want to produce? Are they sharing it? If you create the right content, is there evidence that they would be

6 Essential Questions & Answers About Content Marketing for 2013

For every social media, SEO or content marketing “expert” there are hundreds, if not thousands of smart business people that do not possess advanced knowledge in those areas. That’s not unreasonable, since running a business involves more than keeping up with the latest internet marketing best practices.
On this blog we often include the basics of search, social and content marketing because that’s where a lot of people need confidence and affirmation that they’re

Tuesday, 22 January 2013

It’s Never Too Late…

The tech revolution brought along its changes a feeling that one must be young, really young, to become successful. You either hit it big before you reach the age of 30, or you must accept that you are destined for a modest life of modest achievements.
The argument is straight forward: younger people tend to think outside the box and challenge the status quo, so it’s easier for them to come up with revolutionary ideas. Second, younger people have more energy and stamina, so it’s

4 Blogging Basics For Online Retailers

Retail websites are flush with product information, specs, and images of items available for purchase. However, it may be difficult to find a way to provide detailed and engaging content for customers visiting a website when they’re just looking to purchase.
Starting a company blog provides a good opportunity to attract new customers and engage current customers with content about your products and other topics that are of importance to them. It doesn’t matter if the items being sold

Twitter Struggled to Keep Up with Inauguration Traffic

Share on Twitter Share on Google+ Share on Facebook Share on LinkedIn Users of real-time communication giant, Twitter, experienced connectivity and access issues yesterday. Although there were no “fail whales” to be seen, page load errors for Twitter.com were common for a good portion of the afternoon yesterday. The issues started around 4:00 p.m. Eastern The post Twitter Struggled to Keep Up with Inauguration Traffic appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
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21 Minute Traffic: Direct Mail Tearsheets

21 Minute Traffic: Direct Mail TearsheetsHow Tearsheets Work
It can be difficult to get a return on your investment through direct mail marketing simply because consumers tend to throw away anything that smacks of advertising. Often, ads go in the trash before the envelope is ever opened – which turns into wasted advertising dollars for business owners. Tearsheets use some unique elements to get the envelope opened and keep prospects’ eyes on the ad. In fact, they may not even realize

Daily Search Forum Recap: January 22, 2013

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web...

Search Engine Roundtable
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Managing Your Plugins: Less is More

Less is more when it comes to managing your plugins on WordPress, although it doesn’t seem that way when you have a catalog of tens of thousands of plugins to choose from. It’s easy to go plugin-happy and start installing each and every plugin that looks like it might be slightly useful or entertaining. First you have your social media plugins, then your contact forms, then your CAPTCHA forms and before you know it, you have a plugin list as long as Santa’s naughty list.
But managing your

Engaging Your Audience in Social Media

Audience engagement is crucial in your social media. And that’s not just on your Facebook and Twitter profiles – it’s everywhere you have an internet presence where customers or clients can rate you, comment on your profile, “like” you or pass on what you have to say. Things like Google Plus and Google Plus Pages are beginning to take more precedence in the online marketplace, even though not too many people actually like using these entities in place of Facebook as Google originally

2013 CES Recap –Video Interview

Image from: Kobby Dagan / Shutterstock.com
Though CES 2013 is officially behind us, the buzz will linger for weeks to come (especially as all the exciting stuff that was announced at the show starts hitting the shelves). After coming back to our home base in Boston, Chris Collins and I had a great opportunity to talk to RCR’s Dan Meyer about what we saw this year at CES, including:

Samsung’s undisputed dominance: Despite CES 2013 being dubbed the “Year of the Little Guy” Samsung was

Creating an Online Brand

Share on Twitter Share on Google+ Share on Facebook Share on LinkedIn What is the single most powerful tool a business can possess? There may be conflicting answers. I admit it is a wide open topic, but in this humble consumers opinion, nothing is more powerful than a great brand. I see the silhouette of The post Creating an Online Brand appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
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How to Multiply Your Article Marketing With Human Spinner

How to Multiply Your Article Marketing With Human SpinnerWritten by Russell Brunson, the Overnight Success Maker
Over the past few months we have become more heavily involved with creating content, spinning it and then submitting it to different blogs and other directories to get unique links to our sites. I wrote a full article about the process called “The One Man Formula for Ranking Fast” in the June 2011 issue. You can find it inside the Illuminati members’ area.
We’ve spent a lot

Are Search Engines Driving Libraries To Extinction? Not Quite Yet

With today’s instant anywhere-anytime access to Google, Bing and Wolfram Alpha, where searching for information takes scant heartbeats via an internet-connected device, some people regard physical libraries as a quaint relic of a forgotten age. But new research from Pew Research...

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
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Online Marketing Jobs from Marketing Pilgrim’s Job Board

If you are looking for a new job in the new year then you should check out the Marketing Pilgrim Internet Marketing Job Board.
If you are looking for that perfect hire you would be hard pressed to find a better audience than ours for just $ 27 / per month per listing as well.
Here is a quick sampling of some of the jobs listed currently.
Sr. Paid Search Analyst – Shoplet.com – New York City
Senior Marketing Analyst, Paid Search – Target – Minneapolis, MN
Social Media

Content Marketing Optimisation > How to Avoid Future Penalties

Share on Twitter Share on Google+ Share on Facebook Share on LinkedIn Don’t be a Content Marketing Ostrich > How to Avoid Future Penalties. 2013 is going to be a BIG year for content marketing. The rise of Google penalties, social and semantic understanding has forced even the most technical SEO into considering content strategy, The post Content Marketing Optimisation > How to Avoid Future Penalties appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
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Study Shows Students Don’t Spend As Much Time on Facebook as They Think

How much time do you spend on Facebook every day?
Students in a study by Harvard’s Berkman Center Professor Reynol Junco came back with an average of 149 minutes. Almost two and a half hours a day! But that’s not the crazy part.
Junco suspected that the number was off because they usually are when you ask people to report on their own behavior. So he installed a tracking device (with permission) in the computers of his students then added up the time for them.
Self-reported time:

Selling Space

Selling SpaceWritten by Russell Brunson, the Overnight Success Maker
Last week I had a chance to go to New York for seven days while attending two events. The events were awesome, but one of the things I really saw in action while there was how much money you can make “selling space.”
The first time I noticed it I was walking around Times Square and I saw all of the huge billboards on the sides of all the buildings (covering up the tenants’ windows) selling everything from movies to

Clay Collins Founder Of Startup Leadbrite, Pioneer Of The Prelaunch, And Serial Entrepreneur Shares His Story

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Clay Collins is the founder of Leadbrite, the company behind LeadPages and LeadPlayer, two tools that are fast becoming the go-to-standards when it comes to collecting leads online with video and landing pages.

This interview is epic in terms of how many things Clay talks about. He was a home schooled child, a founder of a software company at 15, a college grad and PhD student with published papers,

Monday, 21 January 2013

The Ultimate Guide to Advanced Guest Blogging

Posted by Pratik DholakiyaThis post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.
With “content marketing” being the indisputable SEO buzzword of 2012, we can expect 2013 to see an onslaught of marketers trying to build links with guest posts. The growth in this market will cause some sites to lower their guest

How To Take Inventory of Your Digital Marketing

At the beginning of the year, we have inventory season. It’s the time when we stop what we’re doing long enough to familiarize ourselves with what we have. Often we talk about inventory in terms of a retailer’s merchandise or a manufacturer’s raw materials supply.
The more accurate an understanding of what a company’s resources are, the easier it becomes for business owners to make smart, strategic decisions about their operations.
What Is A Digital Marketing Inventory?
A digital

As Google Evolves To Satisfy User Demands, Others Are Necessarily Marginalized

While it might not get off quite as easily in Europe Google definitely “dodged a bullet” at the FTC, which recently concluded its antitrust investigation and didn’t ask the company to make any changes in the way it presents search results. That was a major disappointment to Google...

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
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Results of Our 1st Annual Moz Chili Cook-off

Posted by Justin_Vanning
A little over a week ago, we were flying high here at the Mozplex. Our beloved Seahawks were in the 2nd round of the playoffs, and we were basking in the aromas and tastes of over 20 different chili's during our 1st annual Moz Chili Cook-off.

Fast forward a week. Our eyes are still red from the tears we shed during that heartbreaking Seahawks loss, but our bellies are still warm from all the chili we ate.

Because all of the chili entries were so

Experts Predict 14 Billion Dollar Increase in Mobile Commerce in 2013

Mobile has been very, very good to beauty product retailer Sephora. Speaking at Mobile Marketer’s Mobile FirstLook: Strategy 2013 conference, exec Johnna Marcus noted that the company saw a 167% increase in mobile orders last year, a 75% rise in mobile traffic and more than 50% of their email opens are now coming in from mobile devices.
Their goal is to develop mobile as a consumer’s personal shopper delivering reviews, keeping track of preferred brands and highlighting hot, new items

Compare iPad Mini and iPad: 7 Key Differences

How is iPad different from iPad Mini? Is the iPad Mini just a small iPad? While Apple would like you to believe that the iPad Mini is just a smaller version of the iPad with Retina display, there are some key differences which you need to know before you buy iPad Mini. Is it every inch an iPad?

The iPad Mini is not every inch an iPad. But it is an amazing gadget to own at a much lower price! While the Wifi model of iPad starts at $ 499, the iPad mini costs much cheaper at $ 329

Mold Your Engaged Employees Into Brand Advocates

Matt Ridings & Michael Brito Advocating For Employee Advocacy
Employee engagement is key in improving productivity in any industry. A happy employee is much more likely to be more productive than their counterparts.
A recent study from the National Business Research Institute (NBRI) shares just how important it is to keep employees engaged. Findings include:

Engaged employees product twice as much work product in the time as unengaged employees
The average adult spends a quarter to a

Graph Search Presents Opportunties to Reach More Facebook Users

Facebook recently unveiled a highly anticipated new feature, Graph Search, which is similar to a traditional search engine but is intended to provide users with direct answers to specific queries rather than a list of links that include some matching keywords.
Graph Search is currently focused on helping users find information about people, photos, places and interests that can be found on Facebook.
This update isn’t specifically related to businesses, but users could use Graph Search to look

Scaling Social Media Selling – 7 Steps to Building Trust & Credibility

Interest in scaling social media sales has increased significantly over the past year and in 2013 it be even more so. Organizations of all types and sizes are coming to terms with the need to better monetize their investments and one of the most compelling opportunities to do so is through helping sales leadership develop their personal brands online.
It’s understandable why: A recent study reported on by eMarketer indicates that 67% of BtoC marketers and 44% of B2B marketers saw leads

Googler Defends Google & Facebook On HackerNews

Reginald Braithwaite went on a rant on his blog about how Google and Facebook don't do enough to work on serious issues, such as health issues like diabets...

Search Engine Roundtable
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Why Marketers Need to Rise Above the Deluge of Crappy Content

When we at Velocity Partners published our latest SlideShare rant, “Crap: The content marketing deluge,” we got a big, big response.
The rant is all about how the rush to content marketing in every industry will make it harder and harder for your content to rise above the noise -- and how the only defense is to build a Great Content Brand.
If you didn't see the slideshow, take a quick look. It's light on copy, you should be able to breeze through it quite quickly.

Crap. The Content

Google Maps Displaying "Relocated" For Businesses That Move

One of the largest issues for businesses on Google Maps is what to do when you move your business to a new office or location. Google has and continues to tell people to mark the old business address as closed but the issue with that is two fold...

Search Engine Roundtable
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Wired: Google's Page On Apple & Facebook

Larry Page, Google's CEO and co-founder, was interviewed by Wired under the title Google's Larry Page on Why Moon Shots Matter.
In the interview he had a bunch of great responses that talked about Google's motivatio

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SEO Top Trumps: Know Who To Follow

With the vast amount of SEO content available on the Internet, how do you know what is valuable, what is relevant, who is knowledgeable, and ultimately in learning from others, who to follow? Let's face facts: there is a lot of information out there and sadly, some of it is not good. That's why it is vitally important to make sure you are listening to those who know their stuff, those who have years of experience, those who have been in the trenches.The post SEO Top Trumps: Know Who To Follow

The Great Chef and The Failing Restaurant

When the Head Chef dramatically walked out in the middle of Friday night service, a Sous Chef found herself in charge of the well-known and respected Manhattan restaurant.
In the following months, though she was very competent, and was working day and night, the restaurant’s reputation began to decline.
Fearing for her position, she made drastic changes to the menu. Then, a week later, she did so again. She reconsidered her seafood supplier. She negotiated with the General Manager for

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