Last night, Google launched their new Apps Marketplace, which gives Google users the opportunity to shop for various different software applications and professional services. Most of the applications are already integrated with Google’s most popular Apps. With so many complementary applications, Google is trying to both increase their user base and their customer retention. Most of the Apps are strategic B2B tools.
Developers can offer up their applications for only $100, plus they must pay a 20% commission back to Google on most business they receive. When compared to other application market places, this seems like a very sweet deal for the developers. For example, the Andriod Marketplace demands a 30% commission. Google also boasts 25 million users 2 million of which are business of all sizes.
Your website’s Page Rank is a numerical value between 0 and 10 assigned by Google. It is essentially representation of how important Google thinks your website is. At its core, Page Rank represents how well your website is connected to the rest of the internet.
Without getting highly technical, its is safe to say that the Page Rank scoreis based on the number and quality of the incoming links that your website has. A website with more, high quality incoming links is going to receive a better Page Rank score. The link’s quality is based on the referring website’s own page rank score. Thus, an incoming link from a site with a Page rank of 3 is more important than an incoming link from a site with a page rank of 2.
It is important to understand that Page Rank is not the only thing that Google uses to determine a website’s rank in search engine results. An outdated search engine optimization technique of building incoming links can even get you penalized by Google. When building a website’s connectivity to the rest of the internet, you need to make sure that you’re only attracting links from other website’s within your own industry.
Autoresponders, also known as drip campaigns, can be powerful web marketing tools. They work by automatically sending out a precisely timed string of email communications. Whenever a person is added to an autoresponder, they receive these email messages in order. The autoresponder campaign starts the moment a person is added to the list, so they are truly automated. As the administrator of an autoresponder campaign, you have the ability to control the number of messages, their content, and their schedule.
Autoresponders are frequently used as the means to distribute educational programs. For example, a student can be sent a chapter to review each week. Unlike a traditional class, students aren’t required to sign up for the educational campaign at the same time. The frequency of the messages can help prevent students from reading ahead.
You can also use autoresponders to help convert leads during the sales process. By adding leads to an autoresponder, you can ensure that they will receive regular messages. As the administrator of the campaign, you can adjust the timing and content of these messages in order to optimize your conversion rate.
Your autoresponder recipients typically have the opportunity to remove themselves from your list; just like with a traditional email marketing campaign.
So, last week, I wrote a post about the motivations that drive spammers. In that post, I revealed the basic principles behind establishing a zombie network of computers, which is commonly referred to as a botnet. The word botnet, is derived from the combination of two apprevaiations; bot and net……meaning…. a robot network. These bots are simply computer programs designed to perform automated tasks.
Today, I learned some exciting news! Yes, the pun was totally intended….but I doubt anyone will get it!
As it turns out, the Spanish government just busted a truly massive botnet that was being controlled by three young Spaniards. The network controlled nearly 13 million computers! These computers were found to be operating on computers in over half of the Fortune 1,000 companies, and in more than 40 major banks.
Unfortunately, the suspects that were apprehended are not the evil geniuses who wrote the botnet. They actually purchased the botnet software over the black market! I find it highly unlikely that our team of international investigators will be able to bring down the true mastermind behind this particular zombie network’s design. My guess is that the mastermind his hiding out in his parents basement.
We all know that Adwords gives you considerable control over your CPC marketing campaigns. One interesting feature allows you to set the pace for the rate at which your daily budget can get spent.
If you have your account set to “Standard”, Adwords tries to spend your daily budget evenly throughout the day. If you change your account to “Accelerated,” then Google will try to spend your ad budget for that day as quickly as possible.
Setting your account to “Accelerated” has a greater chance of spending your daily budget as your ad will get displayed more often. So, if you’re experiencing a low click volume, you may want to switch your account over to accelerated in order to increase the number of times your ad is shown. This may, in turn, increase your click rate.
I think spam is a fascinating subject….in fact, I have an email folder where I collect my favorite spam emails. I particularly enjoy collecting ones that have lost their true intention through poorly written English.
Truly malicious spams are sent to your inbox for two main reasons:
- To gain control of your computer
- To get your credit card number
So, most spams that have a computer virus associated with them are sent to you with the intention of taking control of your computer, and turning it into a zombie. As a zombie, your computer become the unwilling participant in a much grander scheme. Once a spammer has secured a substantial network of zombie computers (known as a botnet), they can use their collective power to attack specific web targets. By bombarding a web server with requests from each computer within a zombie network, a spammer can bring down significant websites. This type of activity is known as a distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attack.
The other common intention behind a spam email is fraud: the spammer simply wants your credit card. There are two basic types of emails designed to steal your credit card number; phishing and spoofing. A phishing scam can take many forms, but the most common are “Nigerian-style” messages and product messages. “Nigerian-style” scam messages offer the recipient an opportunity to make money in exchange for their credit card or banking information. The phishing scams might look like a legitimate service provider or store. The service provider phishing scams are the ones that might ask you to reset your banking password, or update your Ebay account. On the other hand, product phishing messages typically appear to sell pharmaceuticals, watches, hand bags, foreign brides, and adult items. In reality, nothing is for sale; the sites are just designed to capture your payment information.
Once a spammer has acquired your personal information, there are three things they’ll do with it:
- Steal your identity
- Take your money
- Sell your information to someone else
Ok, so identity theft doesn’t mean there is someone out there with a wig on, literally pretending to be you. When your identity is stolen, the thief uses your good credit score to secure loans for goods, and leave you hanging with the bill. In really bad cases, your credit can be permanently damaged.
When spammers take your money, they do so very cleverly. They’ll charge your credit card a little bit each month, under an unassuming name, with the hopes that you won’t notice a random, small purchase. These guys are clever! Not only will they vary the name of the charge, they’ll vary the amount too. This makes it harder to catch them or dispute the charges. Think about it. If a spammer has 1,000 credit card numbers on file, they can charge them each an average of $10 per month and walk away with $120,000 per year!
Finally, spammers can sell your personal information on the black market for a quick profit. This option is often the most attractive because it requires little or no technical expertise, and is typically he most difficult for prosecutors to bust.
I don’t know about you, but I really enjoy watching the Winter Olympics. Each athlete is out there competing for honor and country at the highest level. What makes these games so intriguing, is their severity. The athletes are the best in world, the courses are the most challenging, the judges are hyper critical, and the slightest miscalculation can send a competitor home without a medal.
I find it a little unfortunate that only the three best athletes are celebrated for each event. In most cases, all of the participants have given their event everything they have, and truly delivered a world class performance.
What’s also unfortunate is the coincidental correlation between the Olympic awards and the click-through trends for organic search. A recent eMarketer article pointed out that roughly 95% of click-throughs for non-branded searches come from the first page of results. This trend was supported through data provided by Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
Apparently, the first page of search results is just like the Olympic podium….in most cases, its all anyone cares about.
When reviewing website traffic, here are the four most misunderstood pieces of data:
- Unique Visitors
- Visitors
- Pageviews
- Hits
So, lets take a moment to get to know each of these data points. Unique visitors are measured by tracking the number of times a computer using an IP address has visited a website. In some home and office networks, many computers can share a single IP address, which can result in a miscalculated number of unique visitors.
The number visitors your website receives refers to the total number of visits your website gets. One unique visitor can visit your website several times. Each time they visit, they are counted as a visitor.
Pageviews describes the number of times your website’s pages have been viewed by your visitors. In most cases, a visitor will view several pages before leaving your site. If a visitor only views one page, and then leaves, they are considered to be a “bounce.”
Your hits can be the most misleading piece of data. A hit is counted each time your website displays an image to a visitor. Your website’s design alone could have several images embedded into it. Therefore, each pageview your website receives could several hits. In the early days of internet advertising, many companies would tout the high number of hits their websites received in order to exaggerate their traffic volumes. Even today, some people incorrectly refer to visitors or pageviews as hits.
Web app review site AppVita has reviewed the Eden and calls Eden great with a rating of 4 out of 5 stars. Stephanie Miles from AppVita mentioned the following in her review:
- “Preation allows you to set up a site in just a few easy steps”
- “One of the best things Preation offers for small business owners is its automated search engine optimization tool”
- “Preation’s templates are well-designed, stylish, and targeted for businesses”
- “Preation is an excellent tool that’s worth checking out.”
The single point mentioned under “what we didn’t like” points out the large number of features in Eden. We certainly don’t mind taking that sort of feedback.
Ease-of-use is one of our primary goals with Eden because we want to empower small business owners to build more traffic to their websites without the need for them to have any prior technical experience. Check out Eden for yourself with a free 15 day website CMS and SEO trial.
Bass Ackwards is the best way to write content for your website. No, really, I’m being completely serious.
So, basically, your website is an excellent example of persuasive writing. If it isn’t, you and I both know that it should be, and that you’ve got some work to do. Back in grade school, we’re all taught to follow the academic formula:
- Start with a hypothesis
- Support it with details
- Express a compelling conclusion
That process probably works fine in school…you’ve got a captive audience, your teacher, who’s required to read your work and evaluate it. In the real world, we’ve got lots more challenges. We’re not dealing with a captive audience…its our responsibility to hold our readers’ attention and persuade them.
Since your website’s visitors have very little patience, we need reverse the order of the old academic model. Therefore, we start with our conclusion. Make your point quickly and succinctly. If you’re website’s visitors are interested, they’ll continue reading or they’ll move to take action (become a lead or a customer).
Once you’ve made your point, then you can go on to support it with facts, data, tables, testimonials, and basically anything else you can think of. In most cases, you’ll want to spread these supporting points out across multiple sub-pages of your website. Trust me, pages like these are just waiting for you to optimize them for your target keywords. By building your content from the top down, you’re ensuring that your visitors will see your main offering, and that they can selectively navigate through the further reading that’s available.
In the academic model, your hypothesis is a statement that conveys the point that you intend to prove. At the end of each supporting page you create for your web content, you’ll want to reiterate your conclusion and provide your visitors with another opportunity to take action.
See how simple this is? If you use this method, you’ll avoid the pitfalls of burying your most compelling content while still having the ability to build a very large, robust website.
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