Devour The Web

Dear friends,

Google, the most populated search engine on the Internet, offers a great advertising tool called AdWords.

AdWords was launched in March 2002 with a purpose of providing highly targeted advertising solutions to marketers and over a few years it has shows remarkable growth as far as the popularity is concerned.

How does the entire system work?

There is a simple 5 step process to carry out.

1)Select the geographical location, where you want your ad to get displayed.

2)Write the ad with Title, 2 lines of description and the display and destination URL’s.

3)Select keywords that will trigger the ad .

4)Select the amount you wish to pay when and only when someone click on your ad.

5)Select the daily budget.

That’s it and your ad starts running immediately.

I have seen traffic coming in less than 15 minutes. Since your ads get triggered because of the keywords you select, the traffic you are getting is highly targeted.

I have been using AdWords for almost 8 months and has seen a conversion rate of as good as 13%. This is not because I have good copywriting skills, but because of the excellent keyword selection facilities inside the AdWords system.

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Oops! I meant "web content management system for windows." Do search engines understand consumer search engine typos? Typing something so close to what you are looking for, like typing "web content management system fr window" instead of "web content management system for windows" may not seem like a big deal, but search engine bloopers alter consumer searches more than we know.

The phrase used in the title, "web content management system fr window" is a real-life example of a common search engine typo. In fact, within that phrase, the "o" and the "s" are missed so often that search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN have recorded the phrase "web content management system fr window" as searched about 481 times on a monthly average.

You might ask how this affects your search engine searches. Well, let us use the same phrase for an example. Typing the phrase you are looking for, "web content management system for windows," yields about 29.6 million indexed pages in Google, 14.7 million in Yahoo, and 2.3 million in MSN. However, the typo "web content management system fr window," only slightly different from what you really meant to type, yields drastically different results: 654 thousand indexed pages in Google, 131 thousand in Yahoo, and 56.5 thousand in MSN.

In a report titled “The End of Advertising as We Know It”, IBM has predicted significant changes for online advertising, forecasting “greater disruption for the advertising industry in the next five years than occurred in the previous 50.”

Of the 80 “advertising experts” surveyed, more than half expect open advertising exchanges to take 30 percent of current revenues commanded by traditional media in the next five years.

In addition, two thirds expect 20 percent of ad revenue to move away from impression-based sales, in favor of action-based within three years, says the report.

The report goes on to imply that the balance of power in the ad market may move away from the provider, and towards the consumer, with individuals gaining increased control of how and where they view advertising.

As the report states, “Traditional advertising players - broadcasters, distributors and advertising agencies - may get squeezed unless they can successfully implement consumer, business model and business design innovation.”

“Consumers are forcing marketers to experiment and make advertising more compelling, or risk being ignored.”

There were a couple noteworthy overseas agency acquisitions yesterday. Aegis has acquired Germany-based rmsarcar.com and will merge it with its iProspect search marketing unit. The firm’s clients include Scout24, Skyeurope and TUI.com. It’ll be rebranded iProspect Germany.

Meanwhile McCann Worldgroup-owned MRM Worldwide swallowed Sweden-based Starsky, merging the smaller firm with its operation in Stockholm. The new entity will be called MRM Starsky Worldwide and have clients including Scandinavian Airlines, Vattenfall, SEB, TeliaSonera and Scania. Starsky founder Anders Nyström becomes deputy managing director of MRM Starsky. Starsky’s 18 employees brings the MRM Stockholm staff total to 65.

“Isn’t advertising on the most pre-viral videos on YouTube (and using that as your inventory pool) sucking all of the demographic and contextual targeting out of it? It just feels to me like such a blatant attempt to lure advertisers into the ‘flavor of the minute’ [is] setting the effort up for failure in terms of ad performance.

Here’s the question I’m left asking: Is this going to be an effort that can command and justify higher CPMs? Or is this just another shortcut to associating ads with ‘cool’ content? We all know the ‘coolest’ videos on YouTube are created by non-professionals…”

-Ian Schafer, writing in his blog about YouTub’es new Buzz Targeting feature.

There are lots of people weighing in on Google Friend Connect. Early reviews are mixed, to be sure, but Google is always able to create a firestorm of attention when it announces new services.

Since I haven’t gotten invited yet, I will withhold my reaction until I have a chance to see what it will do for us first hand.

Until then, check out the buzz over Google Friend Connect from different parts of the sphere today…

Google Confirms Friend Connect

With Google Friend Connect (see http://www.google.com/friendconnect following this evening’s Campfire One), any website owner can add a snippet of code to his or her site and get social features up and running immediately without …

Google Friend Connect Tries to Strangle the Social

Later tonight Google will launch a new service called Friend Connect, aiming to “bring the social” to any page around the web. Unfortunately the service takes a bunch of open technical standards yearning to see the light of day through …

Google Friend Connect Launched

[Thanks Miss Universe and all who commented in the thread! Hat tip to TechCrunch for breaking the news on this early a couple of days ago.] [By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Google Friend Connect Launched | Comments] …

SEO Services Arrive in the Caribbean
 by: Simon Skinner

Caribbean businesses tend to suffer a little on the world stage and on the internet, unless they happen to be hotels and resorts, marketed by Expedia, Tripadvisor and similar businesses. Search Engine Optimization has not been an industry to be reckoned with in the Caribbean until now.

U.S and European businesses have been actively marketing their websites for a long while leaving smaller countries behind and picking up the vast majority of web based business amounting to billions upon billions of dollars. Webpositionexpert - www.webpositionexpert.com - is a new and growing company, providing a wide selection of affordable SEO business solutions to companies within the Caribbean.

The owner and founder, Simon Skinner, is a 36 year old web site performance analyst and Search Engine Optimizer. He has lived in the Caribbean for almost 5 years and has extensive experience with Technical and Website support as well as experience in developing niche markets in a number of industries. Simon can, when not working, be found climbing rocks, occasionally jumping out of perfectly good airplanes or scuba diving with sharks.

By Sonia Simone

One of the cornerstones of powerful writing is the use of concrete details that can tell your story for you. I don’t care if you’re writing a sales letter, a blog post or a short story for The New Yorker, you need details.

They have to be vivid.

They have to be compelling.

And they have to matter to your reader.

“Show, don’t tell” is one of the most important rules of effective writing. Instead of telling readers “the car chase was exciting,” the writer finds the perfect details to put the reader right into the action, with the gear shift vibrating under her hand and muddy grit splattering the windshield.

Learn the art of using concrete detail and you’ll learn how to put your readers into any emotional state you want. Make them hurt, make them hope, make them crazy with curiosity to find out more.

Create credibility with incidental details

Which of the following two do you find more convincing?

“A local business used my marketing services and attracted significantly more customers.”

vs.

Actually I love the techniques I will explain below. These methods made me an authority in my market. A lot of people know me, personally or from doing business, and they refer new customers to me.

The funny thing is that I don’t have much time, and my clients are fighting for a minute of my valuable time. And that’s the way I like it! Yes, my clients want me and only me to do their jobs. They will pay huge amounts of money to get advice or help from me.

Of course, you want that too, don’t you?

Well here is what I did to claim my authority position in my market. These are just some simple strategies you could use, but when you’re creative you can make an even bigger impact on your market. The more special and radical your techniques are, the more effect they have on the people you are aiming at. The people that are interested in your knowledge, and are ready to give you their money!

A group of top tech entrepreneurs paneled in New York tonight. Talk was lively, if not deep, given the audience ofINSEAD alums hailed mainly from the relatively distant shores of Wall Street.

Discussion encompassed online media and marketing. Some highlights:

Start-up vet Kevin Ryan was anything but bullish on mobile. “Not one single company in mobile is valued at $1 billion. The carriers are blocking all the innovation.”

Moderator Henry Blodgett asked the panel how to fix newspapers. Bain Capital Group’s Daniel Allen thinks they ought to capitalize on their relationships with local advertisers and teach them the ropes of online marketing.

What’s hot that should be not? The Ladders co-founder Alexandre Douzet thinks Ning’s value lies primarily in co-founder Marc Andressen’s name. Indeed’s Paul Forster votes for Twitter’s lack of a business model.

And while there was general agreement things are about to get a little grim, none of these entrepreneurs believe online is on the verge of a recession that even approaches the severity of the last bubble, or dot-bomb. Ryan laughingly reminisced about a week in 2000 when he went skiing and DoubleClick’s market cap soared $1 billion while his out-of-the-office e-mail auto-responder was, essentially, running the company.