Article Categories

• Advertising
• Affiliate Marketing
• Article Marketing
• Blogs & Podcasts
• Branding
• Business
• Cloud Technology
• Ecommerce
• Email Marketing
• Facebook
• Google
• Keywords
• LinkedIn
• Linking Strategies
• List Building
• Local Search
• Marketing
• Miscellaneous
• Mobile Applications
• Page Rank
• Pay Per Click
• RSS
• Sales Copy
• SE Optimization
• SE Positioning
• SE Submission
• SE Tactics
• Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
• Security
• Social Media Marketing
• Social Networking
• SPAM
• SPN Featured Articles
• Technology
• Video Marketing
• Virtual Office/Telecommuting
• Web 2.0
• Web Design
• Web Development
• Webmasters
• Website Promotion
• Website Traffic
• WordPress
• Writing

SiteProNews Blogs

• Editor's Corner
• Darren Dunner
• Jerry Bader
• John Sylvester
• Kalena Jordan
• Mel Strocen
• Titus Hoskins

Google+ Reviewed

By Jacob S Strandlien in Featured

Social networking has grown steadily in scope and importance over the last decade, and over the past few years, Facebook’s position as the top dog of social networking services has been solid and unquestioned. Enter Google+. Google’s attempts to step into the realm of social networking have been plentiful and almost undeniable failures, but Google+ is undoubtedly their strongest showing yet, and has the best chance of success. It is growing steadily in popularity, but how well does it work and what sets it apart from its competitors? Read on.

Social Networking, Google Style

Google has a long, tumultuous, and mostly unknown and ignored history with social networking. The following is a rundown of their previous attempts.

Orkut: As far as I am aware, this is Google’s earliest and (until now) most successful attempt at a social networking platform. It never gained much popularity in the United States, but it is huge in Brazil to this day, and it also has a following in India and other various countries.

Open Social: Launched in 2007, it’s not technically a social network in and of itself. Open Social is Google and MySpace’s attempt to create a common programming interface that can be applied across several social networks, allowing programmers to easily integrate these networks into websites and other applications. This has largely been drowned out by Facebook.

The Buzz about Buzz

By Frank Breinling in Featured

If you haven’t treated yourself to a lovely shiny new g-mail account, then you are missing out. Not only does it have endless memory, quick processing of large attachments, and a lovely search function of deleted e-mail; it also has a super cool new function called Buzz.

Buzz functions like many other popular networking sites, but it has a few new perks. Instead of friend-ing someone, like on Facebook, with Google’s new Buzz you follow them. So you want to get as many people following you as possible. Start with friends, family, and people you network with regularly on other social web-sites. Now for the cool part: any website that you have attached to your Buzz account generates posts via Buzz. Websites that you can attach to Buzz include Google Chat Status, Picassa, Flickr, posted via Buzz@gmail, Google reader, and Twitter.

Once you have connected any of these websites to Buzz, anything you post on the other website automatically appears as a post on Buzz. Anyone who is following you will be able to see these posts. You get twice as much exposure with half of the effort. You can post information about events, a sale your business is having, or a gig your band is playing. Buzz will get the information out.

Buzz also has some other nifty features, similar to other networking sites. You can comment on someone else’s post or a post of your own. You can like a post. You can re-share a post, e-mail a post to anyone (whether they have Buzz as well or not), and finally, and probably the most cool, is one of your contacts is online and has their G-mail account open you can reply to the post by chat, which is conveniently built into G-mail’s website.

How Does This Affect Pay Per Click Marketing?

Buzz taps into Google’s AdSense program with a more refined algorithm. If someone clicks on an add while on a Buzz screen, then the logic states that their friends might also like similar ads, articles, and websites. This adds a powerhouse punch to pay per click advertising. Much like harnessing the power of Facebook, PPC advertisers now have new avenues opened before them. Unlike fishing on particular keywords, potential customers are assisting in the event. Using this analogy it is like having fish help teach you how to fish.

This sort of advertising momentum can take your marketing campaign to the next level. Couple this with analytics tools and your PPC approach will be unstoppable. All PPC Google ads permits companies to set their advertising budget down to an exact dollar amount. In fact, the minimum required daily budget to advertise with Google through PPC Ads is one dollar. As always, the advertiser only pays when an ad is clicked, and Buzz doesn’t change that, it only helps to harness the power of social media for the purpose of ad refinement and dissemination.

---

Frank Breinling is a recognized expert in Affiliate Marketing. Here you can grab a FREE chapter about bestcommissionsystem.com, his newest Project about Networking Strategies you can find here, bestnetworkstrategies.com.

Your Business, Google and Social Media ROI

By Tinu AbayomiPaul in Featured

There’s a lot of confusion around the issue of social media and getting a return on one’s time and social investment, to the point that some people think social media for business is ineffective.

If you’ve been thinking that lately, think about how happy you’d be if social media helped you get into your target market’s path through Google.

According to a recent announcement by Google, social media may now be able to help you in ways you hadn’t ever dared to dream. The ROI, or return on investment, from your social media efforts can be measurable and meaningful in a new way.

If you’re already using social media, you’re likely aware of how it can help you get traffic to your site. For example, popular entries often get more exposure, and the links they often generate. Now, social media may be able to help you get more exposure through the networks of the people you interact with the most.

In October 2009, Google started an experiment called Google Social Search, which you could opt in to, in order to see information from what Google is calling your social circle, in your search results. On the day of the iPad launch, they quietly rolled out Google Social Search Results to anyone who is logged into a Google account when they search.

What could that mean to you?

Well, if you’ve been cultivating a social presence in Twitter, for example, and become connected to 1000 people, if they have Google accounts they and their connections, will be added to your social circle, from which Google will pull extra search listings to be integrated into the current set when a user is logged in.

Of course, when you start to think that even though Google has a dominant market share, even if a full 25% of them have a Google account and are logged in, you might think that doesn’t give you much of a boost.

That’s not necessarily true. You have to look at three factors: first, are you the only person in your niche that the person searching is connected to?

If you’ve been building your social network for quality from potential clients and customers rather than only quantity, where you just follow peers, auto-follow friends and existing friends so they’ll follow you back, the answer is, probably.

Second, personal suggestions are stronger than what any search engine says. Being found in search helps dramatically. But when it comes down to the tie-breaker, folks buy from folks they know.

Third, it’s not just the people you’re connected to, it’s the people THEY are connected to as well. If you look at the video below, it says towards the end that the people your friends are connected to are included in your extended social circle.

Well, that means you’re included in the friends of your friends as well. So not only will you get them in your search results, you’ll be in theirs.

That could end up being a lot of people.

Add in the recent changes to Google Reader, the move to Google Caffeine, the debut of Google Buzz in Gmail. Gmail alone has a reported 220 million accounts in use.

Of course, this can be blown out of proportion – social media is important, as is search, to traffic generation. But they are each one tool in a well rounded strategy. It’s folly to lean on any singular method to get traffic to a site to the exclusion of all others, because if your strategy fails or its effectiveness changes over time, you’re putting your entire business at risk.

So keep in mind as you strategize that you still have regular search engine optimization to contend with – your primary Google traffic focus ought to be the people who are not logged into Google, as they are the majority.

Remember also though that even they have live updates from social sites like Twitter, are now streamed into results. So, like it or not, ignoring social media or denying its influence is to do so at the peril of your own business. And hyper-targeted traffic to a smaller audience is still more money in your pocket at the end of the day. Keep it all in perspective is my only warning.

If you’re not already seeing a return on your investment in social media through better links, higher traffic, and viral spread of your messages, now is the time to fix whatever is wrong with your social media traffic strategy.

A sound social media strategy is already critical for you to gain or keep your edge over your competition. From local coffeeshops broadcasting specials to Mayors on Foursquare to becoming a favorite place in Google Maps, social commerce is the way of the day. Now it’s factoring into search strategy more than ever before. Search is now social.

Are you ready?

---

Google Social Search may only provide a modest boost in traffic today, but what about tomorrow? How could Google Buzz help you get more traffic to your site? Find out how much Google Social Search can impact your business today.

Google Takes a “Buzz” Saw to Twitter

By Kalena Jordan in Featured

We’ve all been expecting it, but today was the day Google decided to roll out their answer to Twitter: Google Buzz.

I haven’t had much of a play with it yet, but the fact that it’s integrated with Gmail will probably make it very popular, very quickly.

From the official Google Blog post:

“Google Buzz is a new way to start conversations about the things you find interesting. It’s built right into Gmail, so you don’t have to peck out an entirely new set of friends from scratch – it just works. If you think about it, there’s always been a big social network underlying Gmail. Buzz brings this network to the surface by automatically setting you up to follow the people you email and chat with the most.

We focused on building an easy-to-use sharing experience that richly integrates photos, videos and links, and makes it easy to share publicly or privately (so you don’t have to use different tools to share with different audiences). Plus, Buzz integrates tightly with your existing Gmail inbox, so you’re sure to see the stuff that matters most as it happens in real time.”

I plan to write a detailed article about Google Buzz, but here’s a quick run down of the main features:

• Runs within Gmail
• Embeds images
• Embeds inline video
• Emails status updates
• Automatically works on mobiles without 3rd party applications
• Connects to Picasa, Flickr & Twitter
• No 140 character limit

It’s interesting that it integrates with Twitter. That suggests a deal has been done behind closed doors to ensure both products don’t compete head to head, but Twitter may still lose some audience now that Gmail offers both chat and a link sharing tool.

In some ways, it’s more like Stumble Upon in that it’s a more powerful tool for sharing links, videos and images than Twitter is. But because it operates within Gmail, I’m concerned that much of the conversation will be lost between email threads. We’ll have to wait and see.

I for one won’t be abandoning Twitter in a hurry.

© Copyright 2012 All rights reserved. Jayde Online, Inc.

Home Newsletter Archives SEO Forums Webmaster Tools Webmaster Resources Link to SPN Top SEO Tools Website Templates SPN Partners Contact Us Privacy Advertise

ExactSeek SiteProNews MetaWebSearch SPN Videos EzineHub ISEDN DropJack NewWebDirectory.com SEO-News SEO-News Forums Blog Search FreeWebSubmission SmartWebGadgets