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Every Cloud… Search Industry Opportunities Caused By Credit Crunch

by on Aug 14, 2008 (0) Comments

At the moment doom and gloom seems to surround the economy, whether or not search marketing budgets are going to fall remains to be seen though.

We’ve had a few clients get more pragmatic with their spend; but generally it doesn’t seem as bad as everyone feared. Though that could easily change.

But with every negative situation there comes opportunities. And in the search sphere there are few you’d be mad not to take advantage of.

Buy up failed businesses Domains

When there’s a downturn it’s inevitable a few businesses will hit the wall. In the past if your competitor went bust you might by up their stock at discount, nowadays top of an insolvency sale shopping list should be the company’s domain.

At the very least you could 301 redirect the domain to your client’s website. Eventually the link equity should transfer over and you should see a corresponding uplift in the rankings.

Alternatively you could keep the site as a going concern and differentiate the sites with slightly different marketing messages. Or maybe you could remove all commercial content and develop a semi-independent community; it would teach a lot about your clients customers and build a strong relationship.

PPC Costs Should Fall

One of the biggest problems facing the PPC management sector in the last few years has been bid inflation. If people are blindly throwing money at PPC it’s harder to create a campaign that creates great ROI while still doing good volume.

If belts tighten; then those spending more than they makes sense will either have to switch their campaigns off or become more realistic. Those who were bidding based on their margins should make more as their volume increases.

Performance Billing Will Become Even More Popular

As an agency, taking a client purely on performance billing is always a risky business, do they have a secret cachet of bought links from MFA in the casino sector which has set of a filter? Or has the marketing department promised complete freedom over the site only for the web developers to have completely different ideas?

However when you get performance billing right and you are confident in your abilities it can create great revenue for your agency. Some of our most rewarding relationships aren’t with our best known clients, it’s with businesses who know the value of a lead and are willing to reward us based on those leads.

The clear KPIs motivate our team and when the performance billing is uncapped it pleases the accounts people too!

If You Love Your Data, Set It Free

by on Aug 14, 2008 (0) Comments


In the past, data was structured, secure and tightly controlled. The bad news is that the data was limited by the firewall of personnel, technologies and process rigidity. Today, however, the demand is for just-in-time and inclusive data, moving away from a monolithic data system mentality to multiple sources of data that provide real-time inferences on consumers, activities, events and transactions. The move is in the ownership of data value to the very people who really need it, who help define its analysis, and who can best use it for business and consumption advantage.

The move is in the ownership of data value to the very people who really need it, who help define its analysis, and who can best use it for business and consumption advantage. Analysis and productivity values rule the future of data as services.

But how to jibe the best of the old with the needs of the new? How to use data services as onramps to SOA? How to bring data together for federated analysis? And how to use the power of open source licenses and community to encourage the further federation of data as standardized consumable services?

Looking for the Human Element in Enterprise Search

by on Aug 14, 2008 (0) Comments


George Orwell didn’t specifically mention enterprise search in his visionary book 1984, but he made a statement that still resonates today. When it comes to relevant search query results, “it’s not about the statistics.” Sanity comes from the human element. Until recently, this concept was mostly ignored by enterprise search solutions. Instead, search was based on text-matching algorithms and models that methodically sifted through link structures or categorization schemes.

Too Many Choices

The question became, “Is it possible to produce a set of meaningful search results that will help people, rather than inundate them?”

In response, enterprise search technologies introduced tools that allowed “experts” to tune the search algorithm for their specific content, and introduced meta-tagging best practices to structure content and produce more meaningful results. More recently, explicit user actions such as click-throughs, ratings and feedback were introduced to solve the issue of search relevancy. Today, advanced techniques including “social search” have evolved to take into account how humans search for, find, and consume information and products in the physical world.

Contest: Win Web Hosting for LIFE!!!!

by on Aug 14, 2008 (0) Comments

Win Free Web hosting for Life for one site.

How to Enter: Leave a comment on this post with a link to the site which needs hosting (either leave a URL to the actual site or to a design of the site).

Here is the link to view the hosting features. Click Here

Rules

  • Contest starts on August 14th 2008 at 7:00AM and ends on August 22nd 2008 11:59PM. A winner will be announced on August 26th 2008.
  • By September 4th 2008 the winner will receive an email with the new hosting account information.
  • The blog that had most visitors with their blog added on fav20 by 31 August 2008 wins. Top added sites will be shown on this page.
  • The winner is picked based on the look of the site being submitted.
  • Participant’s site can be a blog, designer website or a company website
  • One blog per domain/subdomain can enter the contest
  • The site being submitted can never host any adult content, adult images, adult videos or links to adult websites.
  • We WebDatamation – Akshay Sura LLC, reserve the right in our sole discretion to cancel the hosting package being awarded, if the site does not represent our family friendly values. The site will be monitored periodically.

Good Luck!!!

Make Your Content Work for You: Creating and Promoting Viral Content

by on Aug 14, 2008 (0) Comments

Viral Content:  The only kind of virus people actively seek.  Google’s paying millions for it, making a huge purchase of the king of viral content, YouTube over the past few years.  And if Google sees viral content as the wave of the future, who am I to disagree.  If you haven’t heard the term “Viral Content” you have at least been exposed to the idea…  Creating content that spreads rapidly around the internet through word of… mouse.

With the cost of quality traffic rising and reaching and maintaining top search engine position becoming more and more difficult as EVERYONE is moving to the net, viral content blows up one of the most spouted off cliche of all time… “NOTHING IS FREE”.  The exposure and added traffic that an amazing piece of content can generate is free.  That’s the beauty… with a truly viral piece of content, everyone else does your promotion for you, letting you sit back and enjoy the ride.

While some viral content has much more “exposure power” than others, every type of site in nearly every niche can produce some type of viral content. Different sites offer different ceilings, with humor, video, entertainment, and gaming sites offering huge platforms for amazing amounts of viralness.  But even if you own something more, umm, boring, you can still reap the benifits of everyone else promoting your site.

Here’s a few tips for creating viral content and an example of each:

1. Give your visitors tools to download or use that relates to your content.  If you own a financial blog you might use a microsoft access spreadsheet that you keep your budget with.  It would make sense to brand that spreadsheet with your logo, create a link or two on the sheet, clean it up really nice, and release it with your post on balancing your budget.  If your visitors download and use that, they’ll see your logo and have many opportunities to continue visiting your site.

2. Consider what tools you use daily in your niche and/or are asked for by your visitors and offer them to your visitors. Say you have a baseball blog and everyday write articles using tons of numbers and stats… from OPS to OBP to ERA to WHIP.  Why not create a feature that shows what those numbers are, how to figure them out, and give a calculator that they can add to their site that will do the work.

3.  Think like a chain letter! I’m sure you get them still.  Those stupid letters that say “if you don’t pass it on, you will die or have bad luck or lose your hair… And if you do, you’ll find your love, millions of dollars, and happiness.”  Now, everyone in the world knows these are fake and stupid… Yet people still pass them on because, well, maybe they aren’t fake.  And it can’t hurt right?  The power of suggestion is a VERY powerful thing indeed.  Use it to your advantage!

4. Use Guides, Lists, and Humor! People love top 10 lists, they love bullets, and they ADORE humor!

Google Now Allows You To Pick Your Friends in Reader

by on Aug 13, 2008 (0) Comments

Last year, Google caused a bit of a furor when it expanded the sharing capabilities of Google Reader, the company’s service for viewing blogs. The main complaint was that Google assumed that anyone you had exchanged messages with using Google Talk was your friend. If those people were Google Reader users, they would be able to see any item you marked as “shared.”

The feature surprised even tech-savvy users of Reader, who said they had no idea who had access to the blog items they marked as shared.

Now Google has acknowledged its faux pas and has given users more control over the people they share blog items with in Reader.

Facebook Stands Atop Social Networking World

by on Aug 13, 2008 (0) Comments


Facebook has overtaken MySpace as the top global social network with 132 million unique visitors for a staggering 153 percent growth rate, according to comScore. MySpace is second at 113 million visitors, and Hi5 grew its global audience 100 percent to land at 56 million unique visitors. A new report from the online tracking company shows global usage of social networking sites growing 25 percent since June 2007. The U.S., however, saw the phenomenon cool off somewhat to 9 percent growth year-over-year.

Think of social networking’s worldwide growth as a variation of performance artist Laurie Anderson’s song, “Language is a Virus.” Language/translation efforts by the likes of Facebook, Hi5, Friendster, Orkut and Bebo have helped the contagion of social networking spread worldwide, with comScore reporting growth rates of 66 percent in the Middle East/Africa, 35 percent in Europe, 33 percent in Latin America and 23 percent in Asia.

“I think the scalability of some of these U.S. brands into international markets has been a big factor,” Andrew Lipman, comScore senior analyst told TechNewsWorld. “Specifically, if you look at Facebook and Hi5, what they’re doing in terms of foreign language interface translation and their emphasis on cultural relevance in each of the markets they’re expanding to has helped them grow pretty dramatically across all global regions.”