Twitter Promotion Tips

Twitter is a social media platform that helps you drive your website and establishes a connection between you and your audience in a way you’ve never been able to before. Twitter should be a very important part of your online branding and marketing strategy.

The key concept of Twitter is the real-time search. Search engines generally work with old material while Twitter gives you real-time information on different topics. This can be used to increase your website traffic and exposure by finding, getting in touch and providing value to people interested in the services and products that you provide.

People come to Twitter when researching, when they have questions and when they wish to learn something about different subjects. “What are you doing?” field is used for lots of different remarks and questions. By scanning what people are talking about on Twitter, you can assume the role of a search engine by answering questions from your target audience in real-time.

1. Track down and follow your target audience

Track down people that are interested in your products and services by using tools like http://search.twitter.com, http://tweetdeck.com or http://monitter.com. Search for targeted keywords and start following people from your target group. When you follow someone, you will be listed in their profile in the “Followers” list so they will have a chance to take a look at your profile, see what you tweet about and what you stand for.

2. Think of your Twitter profile as your website homepage

Because of this it is important to have a great Twitter profile. Think of it as the front page of your website. You must provide value in your tweets for the visitors to subscribe to you and to visit your website. Do that by pointing to interesting articles you’ve found online, and build credibility and influence that way. Sharing information, sharing knowledge and helping people is the best way to build credibility and influence. Add some commentary and insights into some popular topics related to your field. Ask good questions and talk with those who answer you.

3. Brand yourself as an expert in your field

Keep following what is happening within your field and make sure that you become known for twittering on a subject related to your product or service. By linking to different quality resources, people will look at you as an expert on the topic, an expert who likes to share knowledge with his followers.

The overall effect of you only writing relevant messages will be cumulative in the long run as branding is a subtle process that occurs over time. You will become branded as an expert who provides regular insight into your topic and this will expose you to other people who are interested in your subject.

To have a good brand means to create good, value experiences for your customers. People trust good brands, and will therefore be more inclined to purchase your product or hire you based on your brand and what they hear about you. So having clear and consistent branding will help you stand out from the crowd.

4. Be active and get in touch with your target audience

When you have discovered people in your target group, do not just follow them. Be more proactive. Show your knowledge and the value you can provide to the potential customer by connecting, answering to questions, helping them out with their problems, and providing them what they are looking for. This way you can help out a potential customer directly when they need the help and in that way show your knowledge and expertise and hopefully turn that person into a paying customer.

This is a very simple and instant way of connecting to your target group and showing them why you are the expert and why you deserve their custom. You will be the authority in their eyes and you will be differentiated from your competitors that do not use Twitter and that do not connect with their target group directly.

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Marko Saric is a blog consultant blogging about WordPress and blog optimization at How To Make My Blog. Marko has just published an e-book on all things about Twitter marketing.

Powerful Ways to Use Google Analytics

First of all - what is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a free analysis tool which gives you information on where your website visitors are coming from, which pages they visit, how long they stay, and a lot more. There are plenty of paid stat counters available which present data in different ways, but Google Analytics is one of the best, and it’s free.

One can over-analyze or under-analyze any website. Some people spend too much time checking stats, analyzing, and planning, and don’t spend enough time writing good content and getting new readers to their blogs.

On the other side of the pendulum, you could go on week after week, blindly publishing content and flailing along with offsite promotíon, without seeing what results your campaigns are getting, which type of content is the most popular for your visitors, and which traffic-generation techniques are getting the best results.

The first is like tuning your car’s engine every day without ever turning on the ignition, the second is like driving in the dark.

In between, we have a happy balance.

I find that the best times to check stats are when I don’t have a lot of time to do a more intense project, or when I am a bit too tired to do anything more “heavy.” Sometimes just before I go to bed at night is a good time to check into what has been happening between my visitors and my websites’ pages. I can browse and poke around in my Analytics account and learn quite a lot - even with minimal energy.

Here are five simple and powerful ways to use Google Analytics:

1. Find out which of your website’s pages are getting the most traffic, and optimize those pages.

If you are running ads on the pages, make sure they are properly placed and updated. If you are linking to affiliate products, make sure your links are up-to-date and that you aren’t missing any links, or new products which should be there. If you are using that page for some other purpose, such as to generate subscriptions or whatever the case may be, make sure that the page is laid out as well as possible. This can be helpful if you have a large website which has a long “to do” list and many things to optimize or tweak. By just starting with the most heavily-trafficked pages, you will get the maximum results from your efforts and also know where to start.

2. Find out which referrers are generating the most traffic, and continue any actions you have been taking to generate traffic from those referrers.

For example, if you see that Twitter is generating a large amount of targeted traffíc, you can expand your activity on Twitter. If you see that your article submissions are getting new visitors from article directories, you can make a note not to drop those out - or possibly step them up. Conversely, if you see that you have been spending time/money on a traffic-generation method which is not getting very far, you can stop wasting your time on it (presuming you have given it time to take effect).

3. Find out which keywords you are ranking the best for, and see which ones you can “push to the top.”

If you had a website on dogs, for example, and found that you were ranking at #30-#40 on Google for many keywords, but ranking #11 for, lets say, “dog chew toys,” you might want to work on increasing your rankings on dog chew toys and focus more of your SEO efforts on this term (of course there are other factors you would consider as well, such as the searches and competition for this term). Climbing from position #31 to #20 will generally not get you a huge improvement in traffic. But climbing from position #11 to position #3 almost certainly will. Focus first on keywords or key phrases that have the best chance of ranking high in the near future, and then move on to the others.

4. Find out which pages keep your visitors’ attention for the longest.

If the average visitor on Page A stays for 5 seconds, while the average visitor to Page B stays for 150 seconds, the likelihood is that your visitors find Page B’s content more interesting than Page A’s.

5. Look at the graph of your bounce rate.

This tells you how many people left your site without visiting a second page. Depending on the website and the page, this may be a good or bad thing. But if you have a blog or a content site, it is usually a good sign when people stick around to view more of your posts and content before they leave. If your bounce rate increased or decreased after you made a certain change, you can opt to revert that change (if bounce rate increased) or keep it (if bounce rate decreased). For example, if I changed the theme of my Wordpress blog and then noticed a date-co-incident jump in my bounce rate, I might consider changing it back This statistic can be used in many ways - it will depend on the nature of your blog.

There are many, many other ways to use Google Analytics. The above are great ways to start, if you aren’t familiar with or used to using this tracking system. Google Analytics can give you a far greater understanding of what’s happening on your site and can guide you to continue on successful actions and drop the unsuccessful.

About The Author
For more information on how to use Google Analytics, including video tutorials, and links to free information including a free eBook download on this subject, visit Anna’s blog, at BuildingFromNothing.com.

Online Video Marketing Tips

Knowing how to make money with online videos gives you a massive edge over the regular marketer. If you know how to create videos using some of the tools readily (and oftentimes cheaply) available at your disposal, you should be able to outdo many of your competitors using video marketing.

Videos are just an excellent way for you to create immediate traffic and build credibility. Thousands of visitors may go to your site if your video becomes viral. By just creating an interesting 3-minute clip, and uploading it to video-sharing sites, you could get instant exposure and make money with online videos.

How do you make money with online videos the right way?

First of all, know that marketing videos isn’t one of the loved practices by marketers because it involves more effort, video know-how, and perhaps a likeable personality.

All of these qualities can be learned and developed, but some marketers are too lazy. Video creation can be outsourced to freelancers, but it may cost a lot, and it won’t have the same personal touch as when you’re the one talking.

Nonetheless, the advantages of using video presentation are good from the side of building credibility and gaining trust from your viewers. With that as a fact, don’t be afraid to make videos from scratch in order to gain market territory, even if it’s your first time. You’ll find it exciting to do once you’ve got the momentum going.

One of the steps for effective video creation so you can make money with online videos is to make a script. A video script is nothing else than a piece of paper that has everything written from start to finish of your video.

You start the video and put your written script either below or on top of the camera, you read the script and you speak every word that you wrote on it.

The key when taking such action is reading the script very closely to the camera, so your eyes are glued in front of the camcorder lens. Usually the great majority of those who see you on video won’t even notice you are actually reading a script.

The ultimate key for the successful creation and finish of your video depends on having a clear voice and tone, and the way you communicate the message. Make sure you impart your message in an interesting, curiosity-arousing, or controversial way.

If the tone and the way you say things on your video are effective to your targeted audience, you should have a video that creates great credibility and opens trust from the recipient’s end.

So could you make money with online videos immediately? Most likely yes, if you already have an established website with a powerful marketing system in place!

Should you use video marketing as part of your promotional efforts to look for more clients? Definitely! If your purpose is to build your credibility, earn more trust, and connect with your audience, then video marketing is an excellent option.

Is there an easy way to upload your videos to a variety of video-sharing sites? Fortunately, there is. It’s called Tubemogul. Simply sign up for an account at tubemogul.com. At first, you have to register for each video sites if you haven’t done yet. But after you’ve signed up, you can save their login details in tubemogul, so you can easily upload them simultaneously from then on.

Another important tip to make money with online videos is to put them on your own site or blog. Video makes you more “real” to people. Use the embed code provided by youtube on your site, because every visitor that watches your video (using the embed code) would add to your view counts. You’re probably already aware of the law of social proof – The more views your video has, the more people will watch it because they tend to follow the crowd.

Is video necessary for your business? No, there are many other methods you can use to promote your sites. However, video marketing is one of the most effective tools to use. So if you want to get the upper hand on this competitive marketplace, you should consider video marketing. It’s time to make money with online videos!
Want a powerful and easy-to-use video management software to make the most money out of your videos? No programming, no need to FTP and completely configurable to suit your needs! See all the hot features at: http://www.memberspeed.com/Video_Content_Management/Software.html

Top 10 SEO Questions

Owning any type of online business will strongly benefit from a few SEO techniques. However, everyone and their brother has advice on how to do it. All this ‘expert’ advice can make the simple task of optimizing your site incredibly confusing. Here are some straightforward answers to the most common SEO questions.

1. What is SEO?

SEO stands for search engine optimization. A search engine is a tool many internet users use to find sites that are relevant to their needs. The three biggies when it comes to search engines are Google, Yahoo and MSN. There are however, hundreds of search engines available to internet users. Search engines work by sending out spiders to crawl through the World Wide Web and gather information. If you have the information they’re looking for, in the places they are looking, they’ll find you and place you in their results when a person is looking for your information.

The task of understanding what search engines are looking for and putting it in the right places on your website and in your content, is the essence of search engine optimization. So now you might be asking…what do search engines look for and where do they look for it? The answer is keywords and links. Keywords in your html coding, keywords on your webpage content, keywords in your content, and the number of incoming links you have to your website.

2. How important is SEO?

Let’s just put it this way. What’s better a few visitors who stumble upon your website or hundreds of visitors that go to your website with the direct intention of learning more or making a purchase?

With more and more people searching and shopping online, getting on the first page or two of the search engine results can mean the difference between keeping your day job and becoming an internet millionaire.

3. What are text links?

Links are just one of the tools you can use to increase your search engine optimization. The more quality links you have, the better your search engine ranking will be. Text links are links that contain only text. Wikipedia is a great place to examine internal text links. The links are contained within a sentence and when a reader clicks on them they are taken to a different page on the same website. The kind of text links you’re looking for will be text links that will take readers from your article, ebook, or web copy to your website.

An excellent tool to generate incoming links is to write copy for online audiences like article directories, blogs, and ezines and insert text links in the copy. Webmasters will link to the content and thus to your site. Additionally, when you allow free reprints of your copy provided the links are maintained, you’re encouraging links to your website.

4. What are link farms and link exchanges?

Search engines don’t accept just any old link. The link has to be from a relevant and quality company. This means you don’t want to participate in link farming. If a search engine suspects your links to be lacking, they’ll actually penalize you. Link farming or link exchanging is essentially the process of exchanging reciprocal links with Web sites in order to increase your search engine ranking. A link farm is a Web page that is nothing more than a page of links to other sites. Stay away from link farms. When you generate a link from another site, it had better be relevant and coming from a real web site.

5. What is duplicate content?

The definition of duplicate content is web pages that contain substantially the same content. Search engines will penalize you for this. How do you avoid duplicate content? Don’t publish the same article in several locations. There are many tools available online to help you re-write your content so that it is 30%, 40%, and even 50% different. However, the best way to avoid duplicate content is to simply write new content.

6. How do I find the right keywords?

There are several steps to finding the most profitable keywords. The first step is to generally do a bit of brainstorming and come up with a list of keywords you think people will use to find your products. The next step is to research supply and demand for those particular keywords. Supply means how many other websites are using those same keywords and demand is how many people are looking for those particular keywords.

The key is to find keywords with high demand and relatively low supply. There are many effective and useful keyword tools to help you find this information and to generate keyword ideas. Once you decide on a few keywords, it may be useful to do a bit of testing before you commit to them.

7. How do I optimize my web pages?

Placing your keywords in the right location is a good start to optimizing your web pages. Search engines look to the headings, subheadings, domain name, and title of your website. They also look in the content on your page and primarily focus on the first paragraph.

Try to get a domain name with your primary keyword included. When you include your keyword in your URL it tells the search engine spiders immediately what your site is about.

Title Tag. Your title tag is the line of text that appears on search engine results pages that acts as a link to your site. This is a crucial element of your webpage as it describes to your visitors what your page is about.

If you view your source code, your title tag will look something like this: <TITLE>Search Engine Optimization Tips</TITLE>

Keep your title tags brief, descriptive, up to date, and keyword rich will help to increase the relevance of your site in the eyes of the search engines, as well as giving your potential visitors a good idea of what they can expect from your site.

Meta Tags have lost their importance to the search engines however it is still helpful to place your keywords in your meta tags. In your source code they look something like this: <META NAME=”description”

8. Do I need to submit my site to the search engines?

The simple answer is - no. Search engine spiders are always out there doing their job and collecting information. Every time you update your website, add content, or change your keywords, the search engines capture the information and record it. However, if you want to be listed on a directory, like the DMOZ Open directory project, then you will need to submit to those.

9. What are spiders?

Search engine spiders are also called web crawlers or bot. They’re basically automated programs which scan websites to provide information to search engines often for the purpose of indexing or ranking them.

10. How does content help my SEO?

Content is one of the best tools to improve your search engine ranking. It is a great place to emphasize keywords, encourage linking to your site, and increase traffic. The key to content is to make sure you’re offering quality content and you’re updating your website and your content frequently. Content can be provided in many forms including:

• Blogs

• Forums and chat rooms

• Articles

• Reviews

• Case studies

• Reports

• How to guides

• Tutorials

• e-books and much more.

Categorizing Your Twitter Followers

Twitter is one of the fastest growing social network sites on the internet today. This particular social platform requires users to keep their post to fewer than 140 characters. Messages are intended to be nothing more than brief social exchanges however the online marketing community has still found a way to thrive on this site.

Members are generally ‘drawn’ to conversations that focus on topics in which they have an interest. In fact this is how you develop your list followers by attracting people to the comments you make or the information you may supply.

Social sites such as this are perfect for those who want to connect to others with similar interests but without a lot of effort. It is not all that unusual for a consistent user of this social networking site to develop quite a large list of followers. The issue now turns to the quality of the followers you actually attract.

Let’s briefly examine the 5 types of followers that you may accumulate within your own social network on this site.

Shared Interest

These are the BEST types of followers to have. The point of any social networking site is to share comments, interests, and ideas with like minded people. By having followers who are genuinely attracted to your interests or ideas will only make any interactions more meaningful

Spam

These are marketers who literally troll social sites in search of people that can promote to. Their unsolicited advertising can be very annoying since once they found you they are usually relentless with their product pitches.

They are the junk mail of the online world.

It is recommended to report them to the help desk so that the site administrators can take the necessary corrective actions.

Phishers

Similar to spammers these people represent themselves as legitimate organizations. Their motives are to capture sensitive or personal information about you which obviously will be put to use in a detrimental way.

It is recommended to ignore their solicitations and by no means click on any link they may send you. Once again report them to the site administrators.

Bots

These followers are really malicious programs that by and large are up to no good. Their intent is to take control of your computer in a way that is usually undetectable to you. Their intent is to use your computer as a tool for them to commit certain undesirable acts that could affect others while implicating you as the source.

Retweets

These types of followers are people who have been referred to a single tweet of yours that they may have found as interesting. Whether they have a genuine interest in you for what you represent is undetermined since a single tweet can’t reflect that.

It is nice to get followers this way but as to whether there is a mutual interest in your basics interests or ideas can only be determined over time.

Having a large following on Twitter may be somewhat misleading once you realize the intent of some of those who follow you. This social platform is not immune to the shenanigans common to the rest of the internet. Online marketing companies are known to target anyone at social sites and this can result in spam. Even more of a concern are those whose intentions are more sinister in nature as they prey upon the innocent members of various social network sites. It is therefore wise to take notice of the types of followers you may have within your own social network of followers. Once they’ve been identified you have virtually neutralized them. At this point you can either block them or report them to site administrators.

TJ Philpott is an author and Internet entrepreneur based out of North Carolina.
For additional Money Making Tips and a free guide that demonstrates how to find both profitable markets and products visit http://blogbrawn.com

Top 10 Don’ts for SEO Copywriting

Following in the footsteps of Rand Fishkin and Guy Kawasaki, I decided to come up with my own list of don’ts.

There is no shortage of don’ts when it comes to SEO copywriting. It seems this niche got off to a rough start many years ago when early comers somehow misconstrued the core principles of the trade. Allow me to elaborate on how not to write SEO copy.

1. Don’t shove as many keyphrases into the copy as humanly possible. It’s not about the sheer volume of search terms you include. Yes, Google and other engines should be able to follow what the page is about. Yes, engines are looking to match a searcher’s query with search engine optimized content on your web pages, but which pages land at the top is decided through a series of calculations far more complex than any simple ratio. When you overload copy with keyphrases you sacrifice quality and user experience.

2. Don’t lose site of balance. If SEO copywriting isn’t about the percentage of keywords within the copy, then what is it about? Balance. You have two audiences with SEO copywriting: the search engines and your site visitors. But surprisingly, the balance doesn’t come with serving both masters well. The balance comes in how much you cater to the engines. You see, your site visitors always come first. However, if you write with too little focus on the engines, you won’t see good rankings. If you put too much focus on the engines, you’ll start to lose your target audience. Balance. Always balance.

3. Don’t let someone else choose the keywords. If keyword research isn’t a service you offer, an SEO firm, keyword specialist or some other professional that your client hires will have to conduct the research. Don’t just accept keyphrases these folks toss your way. Ask to see the entire list with recommendations as to which terms would be best strategically. Then you, as the professional writer, can decide which will also work best within the copy.

4. Don’t sacrifice flow for numbers. This is a follow-up to number three and is a major issue with bad SEO copywriting. SEOs or clients sometimes insist on using hacked-up search phrases that simply don’t work in a normal sentence. An example? “Candies samples free.” Many copywriters will just grin and bear it, sacrificing quality and flow for the sake of competitive values or other numbers. The result is often some obnoxious sentence like, “If you’re looking for candies samples free, you’ve come to the right place!” Forcing a phrase into the copy at all costs never turns out well.

5. Don’t use keyphrases that don’t apply to the page. If you operate a site about wedding receptions, don’t try to force a search term about wedding dresses into the copy just because it pulls a lot of traffic. (A) Unless you sell, alter or design wedding dresses, it won’t be applicable. (B) Even if you manage to get the page ranked well for the phrase [wedding dresses], once the visitor clicks to your site and realizes you have nothing to do with wedding dresses, they will leave. It’s a waste of time and effort and it creates a poor user experience.

6. Don’t use misspellings and correct spellings on the same page. I fully understand that the misspellings of keyphrases can be valuable search terms. However, to mix correct spellings and misspellings within the same page of copy looks like you’ve got a bunch of typos in the content. It’s just not professional. Some writers will go for the old, “We rent limousines (sometimes spelled limosenes) for the most affordable prices in town.” I don’t care for that approach. It’s just not natural. Would you ever see brochure or newspaper copy that reads that way? I think not.

7. Don’t use keyphrases the exact same way every time. This is how we end up with horrible SEO copy that sounds like a 4th grader wrote it. (See #4.) There are lots of ways to use keywords in copy, not just one. In order to sound natural, you have to get creative with your keyphrase use. One way is to break up phrases using punctuation. Since search engines don’t pay attention to basic punctuation marks, you can easily write something using the search term [real estate Hawaii] that reads like this: “Currently there is an impressive selection of available real estate. Hawaii listings can be.” See? “Real estate” is at the end of the first sentence and “Hawaii” is at the beginning of the second sentence. The engines ignore the period so there’s no problem.

8. Don’t use all types of search phrases for every situation. There are many ways in which this “don’t” applies. One quick example is that of an ecommerce site. It wouldn’t be advisable to use specific, long-tail keyphrases on the home page of your site. They are much too specific in most cases and are better suited for individual product pages. Broader terms are typically best for an ecommerce home page. If you don’t understand the best applications for the various types of keywords, you’re likely to have lackluster results.

9. Don’t neglect ALT tags/image attributes. These tags are the ones associated with images on your pages and they carry a good deal of weight especially if the image is used as a link. The ALT text counts the same as anchor text in a text-based link. Depending on a few different factors, ALT text may be a good place for those misspellings mentioned in #6.

10. Don’t forget the chain of protocol. There’s a method to the SEO copywriting madness. The idea is not to get as many different keyphrases onto a page as possible. Just the opposite, in fact. Rather than having 12 different search terms used only one time each, you need to use two to four keyphrases (depending on the length of your copy) per page. The title, META tags, ALT tags, other coding elements and on-page copy need to support each other as far as keyphrase use goes. Your goal is to let the engines know that you have original, relevant content about a narrow topic.

Unless you have an exceptional number of back links built up, just mentioning [dark chocolate], [chocolate strawberries], [chocolate chip cookies], [chocolate cake], [chocolate desserts], [organic chocolate] and [chocolate cheesecake] once each on a web page isn’t likely to do a lot of good. Instead, pick two or three terms which are closely related and use them several times each along with mentioning them in your tags.

When you avoid making common mistakes, you’ll find your SEO copywriting flows much better, is more natural-sounding and ranks higher, too.

About The Author
Need help with SEO copywriting? Karon Thackston has written 3 excellent books to help you learn keyword optimization techniques. Visit CopywritingCourse.com today and click to the Order page for details.

Google vs MS Bing

It didn’t look too promising at the launch but Bing has been constantly in the news ever since. Some say the results are better than Google, even going as far as suggesting Google is all but finished. I don’t agree.

On one of the search engine forums I often comment on, one of the moderators had this to say on the subject: “But overall this confirms my sense that Google, having abandoned the business model that got it to the top, viz. fast no frills search, in favour of added features and buying up other companies, is becoming increasingly fat and complacent, and along the way their search results are becoming less relevant.”

Now, I have to say that I had a small run-in with this guy as he supports everything Microsoft does, from its browser to its operating system and now to its new “decision engine”. So when he writes - “I’ve been using Bing lately and I’m finding a lot of advantages over Google. These are early days yet but this is the first emerging search engine that may provide a real threat to Google’s dominance - something I for one welcome,” - I’m a little suspicious.

There’s plenty of supporters out there giving online commentaries on Bing’s progress. TechCrunch.com, for example, analyses its early success by saying: “Microsoft sites’ average daily penetration among US searchers reached 16.7 percent during the work week of June 8-12, up 3 percentage points from the May 25-29 period (which was prior to Bing’s introduction) and up over 1 percentage point from its first week.”

However, on webpronews.com following its launch, Matt Cutts, Google’s spokesman and soothsayer, was reported, rather scathingly I thought, to have tweeted: “Matt Cutts: Congrats to @bing on the launch! Sad to see this not-so-relevant result at #4 for [matt cutts] though.” And then: “The #5 Bing result for [matt cutts] is spammy too.” Interesting that one should search one’s own name to find out if the results were “spammy”, but nevermind.

So, I did a little research on the subject of my own and tested my web turf to find on “web design bangkok” Bing returned very poor results, spammy even, with “Luxor Bangkok the Egyptian Design Hotel” and “Bangkok Metropolitan Administration” being placed in the top ten.

However, there is a site that offers users the opportuníty for us to choose for ourselves. Just go to bingdevelop.com and type in any search term you are unfamiliar with and see which search engine results you would choose. Select say ten of them. You are presented with randomised results from Bing, Google, and Yahoo placed in a three-column set. You don’t know which one is which at this stage until you make your choice. As a test, take a look and select the one you think delivers the best results.

I tried 10 searches for terms I’m not at all familiar with and Google came out on top in all but one. It did surprise me after my original test on my own search terms that Bing was very close on all of them.

For Matt Cutts to comment as he did in the wake of Bing’s launch, indicates Google is not too comfortable with Microsoft’s re-emergence into the search engine marketplace. For me, though, I am much happier to accept Google’s results as the test bore out. Others may be switching to Bing already, but I am not.

I then looked for commentary - they’re ubiquitous these days - and found money.cnn.com had run the headline: “Bing vs. Google: Consumers Can’t Tell a Difference”. Oh, but I think they can, I thought. While it’s true that on wider, more unfamiliar search terms the two are very close indeed (my own findings were “seo consultant” - Google, but Bing very close; “manchester city t-shirt” - Google because it returned MCFC official site; “polar ice caps melting” - Google again but Bing almost identical; “bank bonuses uk” - Google, as it had reports from BBC, Guardian, etc. but Bing again very close), Bing still has its teething problems.

So as I read the plethora of reports and opinions being spun as to whether Bing is better than Google, I wonder what drove them to that conclusion. Like that of the forum moderator, perhaps? But I’m sure he was being honest with himself about his choices. It’s just a matter of why he would choose a different set of listings to me. It can’t be just because he’s a closet fan of Microsoft; the three engines are hidden until one is selected and I can vouch for his integrity.

However, Bing’s campaign, or spin, however you look at it, seems to me to be communicating that in order to get “relevant” information, you should choose Bing over Google, with its grandiose promise of being a “decision engine”. Which is what, exactly? Another one of Microsoft’s tricks to decide matters for me? As if Word wasn’t frustrating enough at doing that already.

Maybe the differences are far too subtle for me to notice. Or just maybe the Luxor Bangkok the Egyptian Design Hotel is not the place I would go to find a web designer in Bangkok. But the moderator, of course, had the final say: “I was a big Google fan for a long time, but increasingly I find myself going to Bing first and only to Google if Bing doesn’t deliver the goods. There’s no question that Google still has more web pages indexed than anyone else. But if they can’t find better ways of sorting through them they are going to crash. They can’t count on brand loyalty forever. For those of you old enough to remember Alta Vista, I am reminded of their rapid and total fall from grace when Google launched. Nothing is forever on the net.”

My findings are that they are very similar and certainly not enough to make “Google crash” just yet. Personally, I don’t believe this is yet Bing’s time until they tighten up their results. I agree with Mr Cutts that right now Bing is just too, how do you say again, “spammy”.

About The Author
V9 Design and Build produce tasteful web design in Bangkok, Thailand, including ecommerce shopping cart solutions, with functionality that allows owners to set up and maintain their online stores.

Presenting your Website

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you had the power to convince people that your product or service was exactly what they needed, and as a consequence your in-box was filled with inquiries and your e-commerce site was stuffed with orders. Wouldn’t that be great? And isn’t that exactly what you want to achieve with your website?

The problem is you are part of a giant online bazaar called The Web; and just like your local weekend flea market The Web is filled with crap, conmen, and contraband. Without understanding some of the underlying psychological principles involved in shaping audience preference you are in danger of being regarded as just another mangy flea market hustler, even if what you offer is the greatest thing since

The subject of shaping public perception, or in our case Web audience preference, is complex and convoluted but there are basic principles that if followed will help you achieve your business objectives, no matter how you define them.

The Four E-Essentials of Website Presentation

All the Google ads, search engine optimization, linking strategies, social networking, and Twitter twirping will be for naught if you don’t implement four essential marketing communication techniques: engage, enlighten, embed, and re-enforce.

These four website presentation elements are easy to grasp but not always easy to implement. If you’ve read any of our other articles you will know that we think Web-video is the most effective way to implement these elements on your website and in your Web marketing. But just because you use video on your website, doesn’t mean it’s going to be effective unless you understand the psychology behind the e-essentials.

Perhaps the best way to illustrate how these elements work is to rent or find on YouTube a clip from the 1947 movie “The Hucksters” starring Clark Gable and Sydney Greenstreet. Now I haven’t seen this movie in twenty years and I remember almost nothing about it except for one scene, a scene that illustrates better than anything, the four e-essentials of marketing and branding communication.

Engage, Enlighten, Embed, and Re-Enforce

Picture an old style boardroom, you know the ones with wood paneling, high-backed deeply padded chairs all filled with a bunch of executive flunkies and sycophants. At one end is Clark Gable, and his dapper boss Adolphe Menjou, and at the other end is an empty, ornate leather chair, almost like a throne.

An older heavy-set gentlemen, played by Sydney Greenstreet, walks in wearing a dark suit, light colored vest, and a matching pork-pie hat. He is the client, the owner of a large soap manufacturing company, ‘Beauty Soap,’ that has hired Gable’s agency to help sell his product.

He proceeds to sit down at the head of the table, throws back his head, and expectorates (spits) onto the middle of the table. He then dramatically takes out a handkerchief from his breast pocket, wipes up the mess, and carelessly tosses the hankie on the floor, after which he tells the assembled ad men…

“You’ve just seen me do a disgusting thing, but you’ll always remember what I just did. You see if nobody remembers your brand, you aren’t going to sell any soap. …I’ll tell you a secret about the soap business. There’s absolutely no difference between soaps, absolutely none, except for perfume and color… soap is soap… oh… maybe we have a few manufacturing tricks, but the public don’t give a hoot about that…“

Embed The Brand

You may not like to hear it, but the truth is, most products and services are pretty much the same as their competitors. Sure some have a little more this, and others have a little more that, but for all intensive purposes, they’re the same, the same except for one major thing, The Brand!

This sixty second clip from “The Hucksters” illustrates the need to engage your audience with a dramatic gesture, enlighten them with what they need to know, and do it all in a entertaining manner that embeds the brand, and what it stands for, in the audience’s mind.

The Repetition Caveat

The last twenty seconds of the scene are a bit more controversial in my mind and if taken at face value can lead to a misunderstanding of the re-enforcing principle.

Greenstreet continues his rant by banging his fist on the table over-and-over again while saying,

“Beauty Soap, Beauty Soap, Beauty Soap, repeat it until it comes out of their ears, repeat it until they say it in their sleep, irritate them Mr. Norman [a reference to Gable], irritate, irritate, irritate them, never forget, knock them dead, until they never forget.”

All the while Greenstreet emphatically bangs his fist on the table to emphasize his point. When he finally finishes his rant, he sweeps his hand dramatically across the table knocking a glass of water halfway across the room. He finishes by saying calmly, “See what I mean?”

Web Videos Shouldn’t Be TV Commercials

Television advertisers seem to have taken the “irritation” part to heart, but I think the basic principle is dramatic repetition not irritation. Irritation may generate name recognition but with the wrong mental and emotional associations, while dramatic repetition shapes audience opinion and establishes brand preference. Not understanding the psychology behind the four e-essentials can lead to unsatisfactory results.

This scene from “The Hucksters” was satire and commentary on the nature of advertising, and its point-of-view was decidedly cynical, and with good cause. Television commercials drive the public up a wall with irritating repeated interruptions of the same hackneyed commercials over and over again, until the viewing audience goes numb.

As well, pointless user-generated videos may bemuse but without any targeted psychological influence or directed commercial purpose beyond attracting a lot of viewers.

Even expensive commercially produced viral videos that are clever, entertaining, and technically superb often forget to enlighten the audience and embed the brand. The recent viral Evian baby video maybe a brilliant technical achievement and superb filmmaking but does it sell more bottled water, or even distinguish Evian from its competitors. The problem is the brand gets lost in the technique, and the baby images over-power the product.

Gaining Competitive Advantage

It is human nature to want easy answers to complex questions, but people are frustratingly complex, and cannot be “pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered” like Patrick McGoohan’s ‘The Prisoner’.

Search engine optimization, social networking, user-generated videos, and viral-for-viral’s sake are nothing more then marketing ‘Pablum’ that takes advantage of naive marketing newbies; they are trendy technical answers with the appearance of sophistication but with only the slightest understanding of subconscious human desire.

Technical answers to human questions ultimately won’t work, or will only work with limited success because they ignore the need to understand the human condition, what makes you and everybody else want, what they want.

Gerald Zaltman, Professor Emeritus of Harvard Business School calls it understanding the “mind of the market.” To quote Professor Zaltman from his book ‘How Customers Think: Essential Insights into the Mind of the Market,’

“…the ability to grasp or understand the mind of the market and creatively leverage this understanding represents the next source of competitive advantage for marketers.”

The Choice Is Yours

The average website business will continue to follow whatever trendy technical solution shows up on the blogs. But your competitor’s willingness to follow the herd leaves the way wide open for you to take advantage of their failure; their misreading of what works.

Recognize the best way to communicate your offering to your Web audience is with a presentation delivered by a real human being, a presentation that engages, enlightens, and embeds in that audience’s collective memory.

And when you’re done, do it all over again in an even more memorable, dramatically entertaining manner.

About The Author
Jerry Bader is Senior Partner at MRPwebmedia, a website design firm that specializes in Web-audio and Web-video. Visit www.mrpwebmedia.com, www.136words.com, and www.sonicpersonality.com. Contact at info@mrpwebmedia.com or telephone (905) 764-1246.

Search engine news and articles of the week

Google passes 74% market share

“Google accounted for 74.04 percent of all U.S. searches conducted in the four weeks ending June 27, 2009. Yahoo! Search, Bing and Ask.com received 16.19 percent, 5.25 percent and 3.15 percent, respectively. The remaining 48 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 1.36 percent of U.S. searches.”

Introducing the Google Chrome OS

“Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010.”

Google’s Microsoft moment

“This is the point when the difference between their internal conception of the company starts to diverge just a bit too far from the public perception of the company, and even starts to diverge from reality. […]

There are some notable trends going on across Google today that could cause the company to compromise its stated values and that will certainly cause people to think Google is being evil, if not corrected.”

June search market share: Bing shines in a rough June for search

“Bing has raised Microsoft?s search market share by 0.3pts to 6.5%. Bing yielded 80% more ‘paid clicks’ last month than MSN/Live did in May. Given this fact, it?s highly likely that Bing will raise Microsoft?s overall search revenue, even though revenue per paid click may go down. […] The overall search market fell by 1.7% and Google lost 0.9% query volume.”

Bing leapfrogs Yahoo Search? again

“According to the new data, Bing took 12.9% of the US market like comScore had earlier measured. With the strong jump, Bing comes out ahead of Yahoo Search (10.15%), while Mountain View remains the undisputed king of the mountain with a US market share of 75%.”

How to outrank websites that have more backlinks than your website

If you want to get high rankings on Google, it is necessary that many other websites link to your website. This is something that most webmasters know. What many webmasters still don’t know is that a website that has only a few inbound links can outrank a website that has many inbound links.

Why many backlinks alone are not enough

If a website has a high number of inbound links, it does not automatically rank highly for any keyword.

Google specifies the position of a website in its search results by on-page factors and off-page factors. On-page factors are all factors that can be found on your web pages:

• Did you optimize the web page for the targeted keyword?
• Can search engines find all pages of your website through the links on your website?
• Is the HTML code of your web pages error free so that search engine spiders can easily parse your pages?
• Does your robots.txt file allow search engine spiders to visit your web pages?
• Are your web pages free of all spam elements (no hidden text, no sneaky redirects, no keyword stuffing, cloaking, etc.?

Off-page factors are the factors that cannot be found on your web pages:

• How many websites link to your site?
• Are these links from related high quality pages?
• Do social bookmark websites link to your site?
• Do the links to your website include the keywords for which you want to be ranked highly?

All of these factors are important if you want to get high rankings on Google, Yahoo and Bing.

How to meet Google’s requirements

If you want to get high rankings for a special keyword, you must optimize one of your web pages for that keyword. If one of your web pages has been optimized for a keyword, then Google will return it in the search results.

Unfortunately, there are many websites that target the same keywords as your website. If more than one website has been optimized for a keyword then Google will list the web pages with the best inbound links in the top 10 results.

For example, if 20 websites have been optimized for the keyword “green widgets” then the website that has the most inbound links that use the text “green widgets” as the link text will get the best position on Google.

If your website meets all on-page requirements and has the right kind of links (which does not mean that it must have the most links) then Google will list your website on the first result page.

There are many ranking elements that influence the position of your website in Google’s search results. The more elements meet Google’s requirements, the more likely it is that your website will be listed on Google’s first result page.

To get an overview over all factors that are relevant to the position of your website in Google, analyze your website with IBP’s top 10 optimizer. The optimizer will show you in detail, which elements of your web page you have to change and it will tell you how to change your web pages exactly so that your website will be listed on Google’s first result page.

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