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By Elyse Tager in Featured

Web-2.0Most business professionals are on LinkedIn at this point.

LinkedIn tells us that:

  • LinkedIn has over 70 million members in over 200 countries.
  • A new member joins LinkedIn approximately every second, and about half of our members are outside the U.S.
  • Executives from all Fortune 500 companies are LinkedIn members.

To me that states clearly that if you have almost ANY kind of business and are prospecting, LI will be a good resource for you. But just setting up a profile and dabbling once a week or so is not going to do much for your prospecting efforts. Below are a few tips that not many folks know about, but are powerful techniques for increasing your visibility and maximizing that “inbound marketing” that Social Media is known for.

1. Create 3 saved searches. If you are doing a search on a company, person, industry or whatever, save your searches. At the top where you see the number of records in your search you’ll see a “save this search” button – you get 3 if you are at the basic level. LI will send you a weekly email, if you want, to get updates to your search.

By John Sylvester in Featured

Google said it was “very pleased” that the Chinese government has renewed its ICP licence, thereby resolving a six-month stand-off. Had it not done so, it would not have had the platform to develop and market Android on the mainland.

Google’s ICP licence now runs to 2012, subject to annual renewals. On the strength of this agreement, Google rose in Nasdaq trading as the company avoided being expelled from the world’s largest internet market. “We look forward to continuing to provide web search and local products to our users in China,” the company said on its blog last Friday.

Google’s stance has been rigid since January this year, when it announced it was no longer willing to censor results on Google.cn. The company previously announced: “We currently automatically redirect everyone using Google.cn to Google.com.hk, our Hong Kong search engine. This redirect, which offers unfiltered search in simplified Chinese, has been working well for our users and for Google.”

Now, they have changed their tune and this time it not solely because of its entry into China’s search market. This time its decisions seem more to be based on the mobile market. As Credit Suisse analyst Wallace Cheung said, he expected Android to become the most popular mobile operating system in China, beating out Apple’s popular iPhone. From evidence uncovered by Reuters, it seems mobile was its key motivation in its mission statement reversal.

While Google has struggled to build market share in online search in China, its Android device has a real opportunity to capture a significant share of the mobile market. According to a report by Chinaknowledge, there are an estimated 786.5 million mobile users in the country, and the first quarter of 2010 saw 39.12 million new mobile phone users delivered.

Google’s statement goes some way in explaining the decision: “…It is clear from conversations we have had with Chinese government officials that they find the redirect unacceptable — and that if we continue redirecting users our Internet Content Provider license will not be renewed (it’s up for renewal on June 30). Without an ICP license, we can’t operate a commercial website like Google.cn — so Google would effectively go dark in China.”

The dispute began in January this year, when Google said it was no longer willing to comply with Chinese regulations to self-censor content. But the strategic importance Google places on its involvement in China — from the candlelight vigils outside of its headquarters to the sheer number of users in China — Google is deemed important enough to the Chinese people that the government went back to the negotiating table.

Google chief executive Eric Schmidt said last Thursday that he expected China to renew the company’s revised application to deliver web services in the country after defying the government in March by ending self-censorship of the Chinese search engine and redirecting users to their Hong Kong site.

Following the announcement, Reuters chimed in with: “Google’s current search business in China accounts for a tiny slice of its $24 billion in annual revenue, with analysts putting its annual China revenue at $300-$400 million. But the long-term growth prospects are key. For one, Google is keen to provide non-search functions on the Google.cn site, such as music search and text translation.”

As China is the world’s largest internet market with nearly 400 million users, the potential is huge. But with an internet penetration rate of 25 percent, China’s online sector is still developing, compared to Japan and South Korea that have penetration rates between 70 to 80 percent.

But it wasn’t just a story about corporate intransigence, cyber attacks on the company’s infrastructure and the data mining of Gmail accounts of China-based activists, together with the attempts to further impede free speech on the web, that led Google to conclude that they would have to review the feasibility of their business operations in China.

A veteran former telecom engineer and analyst, Ed Snyder, argues that the momentum belongs to Google’s Android system, suggesting that music is the application that could provide Google’s open-source Android OS the chance to leap over Apple. He also predicts that the next-generation music platform, which is likely to be cloud-based, will be the major battlefield in the smartphone war.

Google recently revealed that it is activating about 160,000 Android devices a day — more than 14 million a quarter. This statistic demonstrates Android’s power to attract users. And with Apple’s reluctance to upgrade iTunes to a radically different concept, there is a golden opportunity for Google to undercut Apple, offering free premium features to users, like streaming services.

The license renewal allows Google to continue to operate Google.cn in the mainland market, in which the search engine can offer up products and services that do not require censorship, as well as continue to sell advertising on the site in a country with some 400 million Internet users.

It also removes a cloud over other Google business interests, in particular the licensing of its Android mobile phone operating system that in the future could be a strong source of advertising revenue in a nation of nearly 800 million mobile phone subscribers.

V9 Design and Build http://www.v9designbuild.com 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. As Flash web designers we create interactive animated websites and, as back-end developers, we provide content management

By Kalena Jordan in Featured

smiling-buddhaSite analytics have always freaked me out a little.

I mean, the sheer amount of data you are presented with about your web site can be overwhelming if you don’t know what to look for. Or even if you DO know what to look for.

That’s why I’m a big fan of Avinash Kaushik, the Analytics Evangelist for Google and author of the Occam’s Razor blog.

I have been avidly reading Avinash’s book Web Analytics: 2.0 for a couple of weeks now and I’m so impressed by Avinash’s writing style and the knack he has of simplifying concepts.

Take for example his definition of a Single Page Visit:

“I came. I puked. I left”

Exactly. If a visitor to your site doesn’t like or find what they’re looking for the first page they look at, it’s highly likely they’ll simply take off. So you’d better look carefully at those pages with high bounce rates and work out what the heck is turning people away.

Avinash knows that webmasters and marketers often need to present a SWOT analysis or at least a summary of key site analytics to a range of stakeholders. He explains explicitly how to pull the crucial data out of your site analytics and present it in such a way that even the most non-tech of people can make sense of it.

I was reading his feature article in the latest Search Marketing Standard magazine yesterday and something in particular he said really stood out for me:

“Less is more. Focus on the critical few metrics rather than the insignificant many”

Often, we are so obsessed with understanding ALL the data presented by our analytics program that we forget to take a step back and think about WHY we are studying analytics in the first place. Avinash reminds us that we need to use our time wisely and look at just the few critical metrics that impact our business.

These will be different for everyone, depending on the goals of their web sites. For example, for my business, the key metrics are probably bounce rate, keywords, referrers and exit pages. As long as I review these four metrics regularly, I can be confident that I’m measuring the most important data that is influencing my online business. For a lead-generation based site, the critical metrics might be conversions, entry pages, page views and referrers.

So don’t be afraid of your analytics. Think about the main goals you’ve set for your web site, dive in to your analytics and pull out a few metrics that will help you understand why visitors are meeting/missing those goals. Then you can tweak the site based on what you’ve learned.

By Tinu AbayomiPaul in Featured

Optimizing FacebookThere are about ten common Facebook marketing tactics. (You can probably think of more, but most are a derivative of one of these ten.) It may surprise you to learn that five of these tactics don’t even work — that’s fully half! Now, no Fire God will suddenly appear to smite you if you happen to have done one of the following things. They are definitely mistakes, but they aren’t irreversible. In fact, they’re really only mistakes in one sense of the word.

My perception of these as “mistakes” isn’t about breaches of the unwritten Facebook etiquette either – I dance on those lines myself from time to time.

Rather, I’m calling them mistakes from a perspective of effectiveness, versus the alternative behavior. Whether they’re wrong in terms of just coming across as rude or politically incorrect is another matter altogether.

Having said that, off we go.

By Brad James in Featured

Online businesses require traffic to carry on, and many business people constantly seek out hassle-free and also productive ways to make folks take note of them and also what they have to publicize. Making inlinks would let you multiply the amount of traffic coming to your webpage or weblog and improve your profits. This short article will reveal more regarding how you could build incoming links.

One approach is to market and bookmark your content through the use of services like OnlyWire. You need to position those ‘Share and ‘Bookmark’ buttons in places where your consumers could easily see it. If they love your website content, they will click on these buttons and publish your content on the leading social networking websites on the web. For you to get these buttons, you need to set up individual user accounts with these social networking websites. As for your target market, all they have to do is type in a captcha code to start sharing your content with other interested customers.

One more strategy to obtain inbound links quickly is to utilize content promotion, which means the publicizing of write-ups and also video clips. This particular strategy would allow you to put backlinks to your site or blog at the conclusion of every write-up or video and in each description box. End users can then click on your one-way links to go to your website or weblog for more details. This is a really efficient way of building inward links, and if you make use of the appropriate resources, you could even send several versions of your content pieces to as much as 300 article directory sites in 1 hour or so.

A third strategy to create inward links quickly is to submit comments on other webpages and weblogs, preferably the ones that belong to fellow business people who are in the same niche as you are. Whenever you give feedback, you have to leave your e-mail address, name as well as the link to your website. Whenever you submit your comments, a hyperlink will appear together with the previous blog entry that you published, which gives other folks the opportunity to click on it and look at your content. Be careful not to carry out spamming; this would only irritate your peers and target market and also give you a lousy reputation.

You may also talk to the bloggers in your circle and make arrangements to trade backlinks with them. Do not forget that search engines like Google, Yahoo! and Bing will learn of your webpage or weblog if you have loads of inward as well as outbound links. When these search engines determine that your webpage or weblog is gaining lots of back-links, you will be in a much better position to obtain more viewers.

Furthermore, if you have a Facebook account, you should look into using it to publicise your webpage or blog. Publish links to your write-ups as well as videos on your profile so your relatives, close friends and viewers would see what you are up to. This would make them click on the hyperlinks that you provide, and they could also distribute your content by posting your inward links on their own profiles. This specific technique would get you even more one-way links and page views, as well as make it possible for those who have no idea of your products and services to take note of you.

The same principle can be utilized for microblogging sites like Twitter and Plurk. Most folks now depend on these types of sites to get the information and facts they need, and you will greatly benefit if you utilise them to put together a wide network. Given that there is a 140-character limit, you’ll need to be imaginative with the way you show your links as well as copy. You need to get their interest with snappy copy as well as relevant links.

By carrying out these tasks regularly, you will not only do well in making incoming links quickly, but you could also expect a lot more traffic and also improved conversations. However, everything boils down to the calibre of your content; you must make sure that your material is useful and also of a great standard. If this is the case, more and more consumers would want to peruse your material and exchange incoming links with you.

The search engines thrive on content and backlinks. Without building automatic backlinks your site is dead! Learn how you can promote your website and increase your backlinks fast by getting your FREE Marketing Report at UniqueArticleWizard.com

By Reesa Marchetti in Featured

The new .CO domain name extension is being hyped as a must-have for all business websites. But is it worth the inflated price?

It’s the latest domain name extension to be opened to the public worldwide. Domain name registrars have been hyping the “.CO Landrush” and have even extended this “pre-registration” period an additional three days, to July 16.

In the days of the 1849 California Gold Rush, more miners went bust than boom when seeking that elusive gem stone. Will .CO turn out to be another case of Fool’s Gold?

The fee to reserve a .co name during the Landrush ranges from about $230 to $300 for the first year. I wonder what all the fuss is about. Do business owners who already have their .COM name really need to add a .CO version? And if you really do, can you wait for the general availability period and grab it at a less excessive price ($30 after July 20)?

Or better yet, should you ignore the hype and wait a year or two for the price to settle down to a more reasonable rate like $15 a year?

Let’s look at the hype and the history behind .CO. The .CO domain name extension is the country code of Columbia and this year for the first time, registration has opened to anyone in the world. A partnership between a Columbian and an American company called .CO Internet SAS administers the name. The company  is not under the jurisdiction of ICANN (the organization that manages the assignment of domain names) but they have agreed to follow ICANN guidelines.

Domain name registrars are calling .CO a “secure, sought-after domain.” They say it’s “poised to become the world’s next premier web address.” Hmmm. Didn’t I hear that about the .BIZ domain name a few years ago?

.CO’s offering to the world was phased in starting with existing registrants and Colombian trademark owners. We’re now in the soon-to-end Landrush phase, where anyone who doesn’t mind paying the aforementioned high price can reserve a .CO name. But if more than one person applies for the same name, ownership will be decided through an auction. In this case, the loser’s money (minus an application charge) will be refunded.

Ay-yi-yi, is it worth all the fuss? Reminds me of a similar hype when .BIZ was created in 2001 as the first of a group of new  ICANN- approved domain names. It was touted as the ultimate name for business websites and predicted to become widely adopted as a recognizable domain name extension. It was also expensive.

Now we see the price of a .BIZ name has decreased to the same level as .COMs — but its popularity and recognition is nowhere near the universally accepted.COM.

So rush if you must. But if you can wait until July 20, you’ll face a lot less buyer’s remorse should .CO turn out to be a gold miner’s curse — just another flash in the pan.

Reesa Marchetti  is the Founder and President of Sheer Domain Names,  a division of Sheer Web LLC providing web design and hosting solutions since 1998.

By Derek J in Featured

Link building is the most dreaded task of all serious SEO’s. Here are five quick and easy backlink building tips that you can apply today!

Link Building Tip #1 – Get Active in Your Community

I’m not talking about joining the local country club here (although that would be fun…), but rather about joining forums that are relevant to your niche. You want to find a forum (or forums) that is active and well ranked, and place your link in your “signature” section. This way, whenever you contribute to the forum (i.e. say something), you’ll be building backlinks. It is vital that your posts are of informational and educational use, and that you don’t just abuse the system in order to gain links. You’ll get banned quicker than you can say “backlink” if you do this. Contributing to the community is of the essence here.

Link Building Tip #2 – Suss Out Your Competition

Write down the website addresses of the top five results for your desired keyword. Then, using Google, type in “link:website” (replace website with the actual website address). This will show you where each site is getting their links from (well, most of them in any case) and hopefully spark some ideas for your site.

Link Building Tip #3 – Get Writing…

Writing and submitting articles is definately one of the most popular link building tactics around. You simply write a short article (400 – 600 words) and publish it on as many article directories as possible. Each directory will allow you to place your link in the “resource box”, thus growing your number of backlinks. You might be wondering “But what do I write about?”. The answer is simple – write about your area of expertise. So if you’re a handyman, write about some basic DIY tasks that people can carry out. Write how-to’s, 101′s and the like – Just give it some thought, it’s well worth it…

Link Building Tip #4 – Submit To Directories

Wherever there is an industry, you’ll find directories, especially on the internet. Do a search for your keyword and the word “directory”. Sign up to as many of them as possible – it’s a free link every time, and you might even find organic traffic (people) finding you on these directories (that’s what they’re there for, after all).

Link Building Tip #5 – Get Blogging

My final tip is to get blogging, or at least commenting on other people’s blogs. Have a look for relevant blogs and post some useful comments where suitable. Each comment will earn you a free link, plus potential direct traffic if the blog is popular and well followed. A word of warning though – make sure that the blogs don’t use “nofollow” tags, as this will render your link null and void in the eyes of the search engines.

And there you have it! Five easy link building tips that you can apply today. Best off all – they’re all absolutely free… Remember, link building is an ongoing exercise, and the more you make it a habit, the easier it will become. The only cost is your time and effort.

By Derek Jansen, author of The SEO Basics Course. – Sign up for your free seo course and learn the SEO basics today!

By Steve Shaw in Featured

Marketing with articles is one of the most user-friendly, cost-effective and reliable ways to increase targeted traffic to a website. Every day thousands of small business owners write and submit articles and have them published all over the internet, effectively building links to their site, bringing attention to their business, and dramatically increasing their search engine ranking over the long term.

Marketing with articles is very doable, but that is not to say that it doesn’t require work. Each article that you submit should be high quality and free of spelling and grammar issues.

The reason for this is that publishers have guidelines and, if you violate their guidelines, then your article that you worked so hard on can be declined. For this reason, you must learn to proofread your articles to be sure that you are submitting high quality content that publishers will love and that you will be proud of.

Proofreading is simply searching your article for grammar, spelling and punctuation errors and making corrections.

Need some help proofreading your articles? Follow these professional proofreading techniques to create high quality content that publishers will welcome:

1 – Give your article a cool off period.

After you’ve finished writing your article, step away from it for a day or so before reading back over it. When you have been looking at your article for an extended period of time, reading it over and over, it becomes more difficult to see glaring errors. Your mind starts to automatically fill in what it expects to see, not what is actually on the page.

By giving your eyes and your mind a rest period of at least 24 hours, you can look at your article objectively. Your mind will be less likely to gloss over errors, and you will be able to correctly perceive your mistakes and fix them.

2 – Read your article backwards.

Have you ever read your article so many times that you could almost recite it without looking at the screen? The more familiar you are with your writing, the harder it is to proofread. Here’s a way to get around this:

Read the last sentence of your article, then the second to last sentence, then the third to last sentence, and so on. Reading your article out of sequence takes away that familiarity and helps you see any grammar or spelling errors.

3 – Print your article, stand up, and read your article out loud.

Hearing your article spoken can be extremely effective at highlighting grammar errors and awkward phrasing. Your ears are sometimes more perceptive than your eyes!

Here’s something to try: Combine tips 2 and 3. Stand up and read your article aloud backwards!

4 – For a writer, a friend with excellent editing skills is a lifesaver!

If you happen to have someone in your life who is great with grammar and spelling, then see if you can enlist his or her help in looking over your article.

5 – Try using the grammar and spell checker on your word processing program.

The spell checker on my computer has pointed out many errors that I would have missed otherwise. The grammar checker is perhaps less useful, but it never hurts to try it. Automated grammar and spelling checkers can help pick up a few errors, but they do not take the place of proofreading the article yourself or asking a friend to proofread for you. You might turn the grammar/spell checker on as a first line of proofreading, but then also employ the other proofreading techniques in this article.

Proofreading is important! It pays to take the extra time on the front end before submitting your article to ensure that your article is accepted by publishers.

And remember, your name will be attached to each one of your articles, so you want your articles to appear professional!

For more info on how you can use article marketing to reach thousands of potential prospects for your website, go now to http://www.submityourarticle.com/report . Steve Shaw is an article marketing expert and founder of the popular article submitter SubmitYOURArticle.com used by thousands of business owners.

By Titus Hoskins in Featured

sem - search engine marketingSo just what do you know about SEO? When it comes to SEO are you a Novice, Intermediate or Expert? Regardless of your level, this article from a 10 year SEO war veteran may prove helpful.

One of my biggest problems in trying to help other webmasters – I naturally and wrongly assume they know all about SEO. I forget these webmasters have not spent the last 10 years battling it out with other online webmasters and marketers for some very popular and lucrative keywords, in the process, honing their SEO skills with other like-minded individuals.

I forget that many beginning webmasters may not be familiar with all the SEO lingo and SEO techniques which I mention in my articles.

By John Beaumont in Featured

What is an autoresponder? As the name suggests it is an automatic response email which is a very important internet tool.

You may have heard many people recommend them to you, but why use an autoresponder? To be honest the question really should be why? But rather how can you not use an autoresponder? In fact it is difficult to see in this day and age how you could build an active list without one.

Basically an autoresponder is a system for sending out emails on a regular pre-determined basis to people who have opted in to receiving your information. Sure you could type out an individual email every time someone contacted you but, hey, would you have the time or more importantly the inclination to do that?

By writing an email once you are able to send it automatically to numerous enquirers quickly and efficiently.

The disadvantage, of course, is that it is a general information email rather than a personal one. However in most cases this does not matter as most people require the same type of information initially.

You should of course word the email to sound as friendly and personal as possible. Your potential customer will hopefully contact you if they have further questions and you can then send them the requested answer via a personal email, phone or whatever.

So what should you put in your autoresponder email? Obviously pertinent information regarding the offer you are making and why they should buy from YOU but more importantly a “call to action”. You are building a business after all and you need to build up trust and a good relationship but you also need your potential customer to take ACTION.

Always remember that people buy from others whom they trust. Other things to put in your emails should be:

  • A thank you for requesting information
  • A brief explanation about using the internet for sales
  • How you can help them
  • How to contact you
  • Testimonials Etc.

The art is to spread out your information over several emails stressing different advantages in each one.

So how many emails should you send? It is a rough “rule of thumb” that, in general, people do not buy until approached around seven times. There is of course no limit to the number of emails you can send assuming that your reader does not request to be removed from your mailing list. This is an important point. If they do request removal then ensure that you carry this out immediately. There is automatic software available to take care of this situation.

The frequency of your autoresponder campaign is another important consideration. Personally I do not like receiving emails too often. To me this is counterproductive in as much as you can “over egg the custard” and put people off. However I know that other internet marketers disagree with me on this point and some even inundate their potential clients. So the choice is yours. Why not experiment with different timing of submissions?

My recommendation would be to send your emails at 2/3 day intervals initially. Long term you could also send reminders after 3/6 months and maybe again after a year. Often people’s circumstances change and whilst your offer may not be appreciated initially after a while it may become more of interest to them especially if their financial situation changes.

Bear in mind also that if you have several products you can automatically make different offers through your autoresponders. If they are not interested in product A then you can offer product B in the same niche. This might be just what they are looking for. Also you can use a few of the autoresponder emails to give free pertinent information to your contacts thus building up trust. Not every email needs to be promoting your offer(s) of course.

So where do you get your vital autoresponder? There are a number of companies offering their services on the internet so the choice is yours.

I like more Internet Marketers have found my preferred autoresponder through a matter of trial and error. The Most important thing is to find the autoresponder that works for you. So do a search and with due diligence, you’ll soon find yours.

To YOUR success

John Beaumont Internet Marketer

Get your FREE! “6 Pages To 6 Figures Special Report which Reveals EXACTLY How to Build a long lasting and Passive $100,000/yr Online Business here

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