According to various reports online - Apple is planning iPhone 5 and iPad Mini launch event on September 12. No official confirmation yet.
Read full article here > iPhone 5 & iPad Mini launch event on Spetember 12, 2012 (Report) written by Tushar Tajane
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Source: http://pluperfecter.blogspot.com/2012/05/facebook-scams-investigate-before-you.html
Posted by Fryed7
“Know your enemy, know yourself, and you can fight a hundred battles without disaster...”
The Art of War, Sun Tzu
I wouldn’t say Google is the “enemy”, but all too often they’re far being from a friend. Understanding Google and understanding yourself will set you up to avoid catastrophe.
Here on SEOmoz, we love reading about tactics. Smart, repeatable, step-by-step processes you can implement and see results from right away. Everything else is a frustration, right? So, if you'll kindly bear with me... we're going to talk strategy rather than tactics. How to future-proof your marketing from Google. Deep breaths.
First, let me paint you a picture…
(Image Credit: One Billion Dollar (Most Expensive Artwork Ever)
You have thousands of super-talented software engineers. You also have thousands of super-savvy marketers. (Image Credit: Joel on Software)
You derive almost all your revenues currently from selling adverts.
Oh, and you also have thousands of shareholders and analysts breathing down your back.
What do you do?
Some ideas that come to mind...
It begins to get very evil, very quickly...
This is a new world we could be entering into. Basic rules of SEO may begin to go out of the window. Building anchor text links to “hotels in New York” is meaningless when Google has rolled out their own solution straight into the search results.
It sort of feels like this.
So what to do about the 600lb gorilla in the cage? Here are five strategies to get you thinking.
This isn’t experimenting into influencing Google suggest, running Superbowl ads, or other similar short-term wins. You need to build something that, once someone knows about you, they’d be crazy not to come back to each time they need to buy. Brands, as companies and as products will perform better against Google. Building a brand stops both people and Google treating your products as commodities. They'll come to you first.
Zappos, for instance, strives to delight customers. Whether it’s the fast, free delivery and free returns for up to a year, or the huge resources pumped into phone calls to build relationships with customers, Zappos has built a truly great platform for customers. ~75% of their sales are from repeat customers.
Being remarkable is important. Instead of relying on unbranded search terms for shoes, it's better to use word of mouth marketing by your delighted customers. They might start at Google, but search instead for your brand rather than the product they want. Google, outranked!
Similarly, invent your own search demand. Apple didn’t make a “tablet PC”. They made an iPad. The ensuing onslaught of consumer searches was for the “iPad” - a branded term. Since users love brands, and Google says it will continue to serve its users interests first, Google will steer out the way.
You don’t even have to be a massive company conquering a massive industry to do this. The brand new startup Dollar Shave Club pulled off a one-hit video stunt, but the long term marketing win that delivers lasting value is people talking about their brand.
Branding isn’t just a name. It’s what other people call it and why they identify with it. (Fast Company has an excellent primer on brand building). How do people identify with your company and products? You need to spend time mapping this out and defining a brand for current and future customers. The community on Inbound.org has some great links on branding too.
Of course, you have to make sure your all set up to win your branded SERPs. Here are two Whiteboard Friday refreshers for you on Dominating Your Brand SERPs and the Renewed Value of Branding.
If customers really care about you, they don't need Google to find you. You need to build a customer base who want to hear from you, and who can buy from you in the future. These customers will be people who will come straight to you because they know and trust you.
I bet you’ve read countless articles and guides on growing larger email lists, getting more twitter followers, and earning more likes on your Facebook page. That information is great, but the trouble with this scoreboard mentality is that it focuses you on building sheer numbers rather than real engagement. A list of 100,000 subscribers isn’t really a list of 100,000 loyal fans. 50,000 Twitter followers aren’t really 50,000 people who will go out their way for you. 1,000 Facebook Likes isn’t really a list of 1000 people who will passionately defend the webpage and content if it’s ever criticized. The bar in and out is set too low.
You have to gain genuine permission assets from your audience by their loyalty rather than numbers. What have your followers done for you lately?
Look at some of these examples...
รข€‹If your business closed down, website disappeared and employees disbanded today, would your customers, audience, and community miss you tomorrow? Or the next time they need to buy?
You need to build a loyal audience and community or customers that will go out of there way for you, even if that means just skipping Google search results. Find the people who will miss you dearly when you’re gone. Those loyal few are your strongest asset. Don’t measure your audience by numbers, but measure their responses instead. How much revenue do they generate? How often do they send enquiries? What kind of email do they send to you?
Build an community. Connect your followers together, and build a stickier brand. Jen Lopez put together an excellent, pithy post on using community as an Inbound marketing channel.
See if these people would be interested in forming a community that aligns with your brand values by seeding a relevant conversation. This ties in closely with the actions in Strategy #1, building a brand.
This could be online (Twitter chat, LinkedIn group, webinar, G+ hangout) or offline (drinks, meetup, conference, breakfast).
BONUS! Buy Tribes book by Seth Godin and/or watch Seth’s TED Talk on The Tribes We Lead (It's 20 minutes. You can watch it in your lunch break.).
If Google shopping and Google flights are any indicator of the future, it's likely Google will put you on a diet of some kind of Adwords-type service you must adopt in order to keep you in the SERPs. That means you must be getting ready to master online advertising in your niche, which doesn't work without knowing your lifetime customer value, costs per customer acquisition and conversion rates. Who’s to say you can’t thrive under Google?
In search advertising in particular, where Adword’s quality score appears to tie more closely with SEO (relevant pages, strong social signals, passing “the panda questionnaire”), continuing with traditional SEO appears to be the future for staying in the SERPs. SEOs and Adwords folks appear to be getting closer anyway, and there's more and more relevant information we can learn from one another.
In the long run for both, in competitive niches especially, knowing your numbers and driving down costs to acquire customers will only help win, be that for increasing PPC budget or SEO spend on content, outreach, acquiring data or anything else. Conversion rate optimization is the key to unlocking a prosperous future with Google. You need to get your team on top of this.
In order to truly win at SEM and the Adwords game, you must conquer conversion rate optimization. Thankfully there are many great resources on CRO here on SEOmoz; my favourite so far is by Stephen Pavlovich. Send this to your team.
I’ve always loved Conversion Rate Expert's case studies for insights to processes as well as for reinforcing the case for CRO. Here’s an example of a case study where they doubled a companies conversion rate, making them £14 million extra that year, and another slightly older case study, but with a familiar face.
SEM is process driven. CRO is process driven, too. The asset you need to build is a process for testing and winning at CRO. You need to bring your developers, designers, other marketers, and C-level execs on board with the idea of incremental benefits to CRO, and get them onboard with a continual process of testing new ideas. Incidentally, the same skills will be needed for mastering Adwords, when the time comes.
Consider a rolling contest for people to suggest things to test, and if they move the needle by a significant percentage, a significant reward be dealt out. Keeping that in mind...
Read through the guides above, and pinpoint one small test you can implement. The first test might be painful as there are no processes in place to make it all happen easily, but once you’re setup you can run more and more experiments.
But start with one. Today. You could have tangible results at the end of the week. More money, please!
Our search comrades in Russia, China, South Korea, Japan, and many other countries will still benefit from lack of Google dominance... for the time being, at least. Focus on targeting places where Google is not inherently strong and is unlikely to invade within the medium term. There will still be good money to be made here, and often these are high-growth, emerging markets. Who in travel doesn’t want to be selling holidays to the emerging middle class in China?
That said, “understand your enemy." How long until Google, Microsoft, or even Facebook makes a move for Yandex, Baidu, Naver, and all the foreign incumbent search engines?
First, take care of the essential technical SEO to target foreign countries. Rand put together a Whiteboard Friday on international SEO a while back, and Matt Cutts also has some suggestions for using unique domains to target specific countries. Take a look at this detailed list of country domain extensions.
Yandex, Baidu, and others all have broadly similar interests algorithmically, so you’re not going wrong following Western SEO advice you get from SEOmoz or Google’s user guidelines. A few links worth following and bookmarking:.
If you've got any additional helpful links to add, please post them in the comments :)
Although it’s horrible, overwhelming advice... you’ll need to have language skills on your SEO team. Bring bilingual SEOs onboard by recruiting internally and externally. Foreign language skills are going to become invaluable for tapping lucrative emerging markets. Like having talented designers, developers, and marketing processes, you either have them or you don’t. Put yourself ahead of the competition.
Search within your organization, on LinkedIn, Facebook, maybe via local universities and colleges for people who have an interest in online marketing and language skills in emerging markets. It needn’t be something full time and permanent, but at least someone you can turn to and ask about their local market. Just one person who can speak Russian or Chinese or something significant.
BONUS! Buy your .cn, .ru, .kr etc. domains
Search is only one step in the chain. You can construct your business to force people and/or Google to come through you before or after visiting Google. There are two ways to do this: you can either win the context war (pre-commercial search) or you can win the fulfillment war (post-commercial search).
Google can’t create contextual information surrounding a search without degrading their search quality. If Google starts inserting flight and hotel search results whenever you search for “Maui,” maybe looking for pictures for a project or something, it’s going to frustrate users. This is where you can win.
Amazon jumps early on the e-commerce chain by becoming the canonical source of reviews and product research information. What’s stopping you from listing products on Amazon? Similarly, TripAdvisor drives huge volumes of traffic by becoming the canonical source of information for hotel reviews.
Win the fulfillment war by becoming the one and only way of fulfilling a certain good. This might mean proprietary products, proprietary software or complete monopoly over a certain, specific market. Apple owns the supply chain for sales of their goods, but you don’t have to be a pan-global company to have a similar effect.
Travelocity earns commissions from selling tickets. They launched a Travelocity rewards program for regular customers and offered various ways to earn points redeemable on more travel through booking tickets through them and using Travelocity-branded credit cards. This encourages people to keep returning to book through Travelocity, while still maintaining other loyalties and benefits such as frequent flier miles with the airlines they actual travel with.
What content would be so incredibly useful that users would have to go through it? Take a look at Rand’s Whiteboard Friday from a few years back on The Path to Conversion, and use it to work out where you can add incredible value in your market.
Alternatively, what value-add could you build into the chain that Google can’t touch? Could you add a loyalty program with unique rewards?
… then brainstorm ideas around each one where you might be able to add value that can’t be copied easily.
Google has a ridiculous amount of resources and motivation to disrupt your market. They’re going to take your cake and eat it too, unless you can fight for your turf.
Use these five strategies to fend off their advance:
Build a Brand - Start by identifying your brand positioning
Build Genuine Permission Assets - Connect a dozen people together + Buy book/watch Tribes talk by Seth Godin
Prepare for Long-Term SEM - Start a small CRO test
Conquer Emerging Markets - Find one bilingual helper + buy your foreign domains
Build an Essential Step in the Chain - Start by mapping out the buying process, from research to fulfillment
PRO Tip: Do all of them!
... but if none of these hit the spot, consider this ...
Image Credit: This Green Machine
Of course, if you can’t find a way of outranking Google in the long run, consider giving in. Expect Google+ to encircle your industry. Embrace G+ now, and win in the long run.
Alternatively, consider selling out to Google.
Or you could give up completely. Google is hiring. ;)
I think it’s time to end! See you in the comments for more serious strategy talk, and also more “If I was CEO of Google I would _______________________” :)
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
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Source: http://www.legalsearchmarketing.com/google-search-engine/getting-top-listings-at-google-adwords/
Source: http://jaysonlinereviews.com/review-chad-hamzehs-traffic-blackbook/
Posted by RuthBurr
Howdy Mozzers!
We're excited to announce the new SEOmoz YouTube channel! Check it out at http://www.youtube.com/moz. We'll be adding a bunch of our video content from the last couple of years, including Whiteboard Friday and our just-for-fun videos like Aaron's First Day. Going forward, you'll be able to view SEOmoz videos on the YouTube channel a few days after they debut here on the site. We'll also be doing special YouTube-only content, presentations, and contests - like this one!
A few words from Rand on the contest:
Here's the rundown:
Create a 2-minute video on your favorite inbound marketing tool or tactic. You've got 2 minutes to tell the SEOmoz community why this one thing is awesome and how to use it to get real marketing results. Your video can be as simple as you talking into your webcam ZeFrank-style, or as complicated and special-effects-y as you care to make it, but it can't be longer than 2 minutes! We'll be selecting winning videos in the following categories:
The winning videos will be selected based on how informative, entertaining, and actionable they are (infotainable?). Winners will get their videos featured on our YouTube channel (along with a link and shoutout in the video description) and will also win an SEOmoz swag bag!
Entries are subject to the SEOmoz Community Etiquette & Disclaimer. Videos must be original content that are not previously posted anywhere else.
To enter:
Make sure the file name has the your SEOmoz username, or we won't know it's from you. When you click the button below, you'll be prompted to upload your video - simply select the file you want and click "Open." You'll see a progress bar letting you know how long you've got left for the video to upload, and when it's complete you'll see a message saying your upload is completed. The uploader may run a bit slow depending on your connection speeds, so please be patient. Ready to upload? Let us have it:
Submit your video by Wednesday, August 15th. We'll start announcing the winners on Tuesday, August 21st and will release a new winning video on our YouTube channel every weekday until all the winners have been announced.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
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Hey guys! Soo sorry for my super long absense. Life is very hectic at the moment. But I felt I should at least let you all know what I’ve been up to and why I haven’t posted. My readers are loyal and I love you all so I felt I should offer an explanation. [...]Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/JCulture/~3/Vm8Ryqy75V4/update-what-ive-been-up-to.html
e-cigarettes have become increasingly popular among people who want to quit smoking. These are battery-powered devices which are far less punitive than cold turkey or nicotine patches.
Our SaleHoo Research Lab finally shows promising data for them, too!
Sell-through Rate: Did you really find a hot niche?
For the month of June 2012, e-cigarettes had a sell-through rate of 55.25%, not bad! Let's keep looking at what else the SaleHoo Research Lab has to say about e-cigarettes.
Median End Price: Is there enough room for profit?
As of last month, e-cigarettes had a median end price of $11.61. Please note that the median end price on eBay can be ambiguous because the median end price is for all listings of e-cigarettes. This can include bulk listings that sell two or more e-cigarettes in a single listing. This can skew data.
So just how much are eBay sellers selling e-cigarettes for? To give us a more accurate idea of how much e-cigarettes are selling for on eBay, we can refer to the Research Lab’s snapshot. The snapshot below shows that the average price of an e-cigarette is $17.00.
Total Listings, Total Bids and Total Sellers: How viable is your market?
As of June the total number of bids recorded for e-cigarettes was 1,776 while there are only 362 listings which means there was almost 5 times as many bids as there listings!
You can definitely take this as a good sign to start listing - demand is certainly exceeding supply!
Data Trends: Are sellers hitting their target?
The highest recorded revenue was $942.35 last June 17th while the lowest recorded revenue was $351.58 which was recorded just the day before.
Based on the graph majority of the sales are well within $500 so sellers are certainly making money selling e-cigarettes.
Going beyond eBay: How popular is an e-Cigarette online?
Using our very own free SEO software, Traffic Travis, I usually perform a quick and easy keyword research to check just how popular our featured niches are. Now let’s take a closer look at how popular e-cigarette are outside of eBay.
You can take Traffic Travis for a spin today by downloading your own copy. Simply visit www.traffictravis.com.
What do these numbers mean?
Our keyword research shows us that there are currently 135,000 searches globally and 60,500 searches in the US for 'e-cigarette'! Optimizing your product listings by using the correct keywords will help you bring potential customers to your online store and/or eBay listings giving you a higher chance to actually land a sale.
Trusted e-Cigarette wholesale suppliers
e-Cigarette supplier #1
One of the pioneers to manufacture and market electronic cigarette products, they accept major international credit cards and PayPal, as well as bank transfers and Western Union. They ship worldwide.
View their SaleHoo listing (requires SaleHoo account)
e-Cigarette supplier #2
One of the biggest existing wholesale drop ship suppliers of hi-tech gadgets and consumer electronics products from China, they accept credit card payments and bank transfers via PayPal. They can ship worldwide.
View their SaleHoo listing (requires SaleHoo account)
e-Cigarette supplier #3
They are your one stop cheap electronics store. They accept credit cards, PayPal, and bank transfers as forms of payment. They can ship worldwide.
View their SaleHoo listing (requires SaleHoo account)
To access our list of e-cigarette wholesale suppliers and take advantage of SaleHoo’s Research Lab mentioned above, sign up as a SaleHoo member now.
Inside you will get access to over 8000 suppliers, comprehensive training to help you find the best products to sell online and access to our members only forum full of tips and secrets from other members (including eBay Powersellers) to help you make money online. Join SaleHoo today
See you next Monday!
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Disclaimer: The information published here is strictly for informational purposes. All above product items are only suggestions for possible products which will sell favorably, and should be used as a guide only. At the time of writing, all above products were researched using methods recommend by SaleHoo and found to be potentially profitable for sellers. All sellers are encouraged to conduct their own market and product research.
Source: http://pluperfecter.blogspot.com/2012/04/misinterpretation-as-anti-troll-weapon.html
Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
The 10 Rules of Social Media Engagement
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Worstream recently put out an infographic where they suggested that 64.6% of search result clicks on highly commercial keywords are clicks on AdWords ads. Shortly before Google's quarterly announcement RKG put out their digital marketing report. In it they highlight how search ad CTR differs by device.
What causes a higher CTR on cell phones & tablets? A smaller search interface, which allows ads to dominate a larger portion of the screen real estate.
Vertical iPhone = 1/3 of an organic listing above the fold.
Horizontal iPhone = all ads above the fold.
Vertical iPad is about 2/3 ads above the fold.
Horizontal iPad has about half of a single organic listing above the fold.
Vertical Kindle is about 2/3 ads.
Horizontal Kindle is 100% ads above the fold.
And the above interfaces are not going to look any less ad heavy as Google adds paid inclusion shopping results.
Google offers sitelinks when they think a search query is navigational in nature. In spite of that, for some brands they will still show 3 AdWords ads above the organic search results, in an attempt to force the brand to re-buy their own brand equity.
If you control what is above the fold (and can get away with serving nothing but ads above the fold) you can make a lot of money.
