Your resource box is very important. It may be small, or it may take up a little space, but if you are able to make best use of your resource box, it will actually help bring traffic to your site. Usual information that is included in a good resource box includes your name, your plan of action, your unique selling proposition and possibly your contact details or information.

More: continued here

MSN adCenter clients should see a new tool to handle their analytics needs once Microsoft rolls out its product this summer.

Microsoft Gatineau Plots Against Google Analytics

A beta version of Microsoft’s analytics product, dubbed ‘Gatineau’, has gained some attention as a few leaked details about it led to some online confirmation from a Microsoft staffer.

Dave Naylor plugged some screenshots from the in-alpha Gatineau on his blog. He’s projecting a positive response for Gatineau once Microsoft loosens the chains a bit:

Google Analytics is pretty darn good and the interface is rocking, But Microsoft is going to give you reports and visualisations that you haven’t seen before and data about you visitors like age and gender, seriously you just can’t get that data in any other service.

Ian Thomas works with Microsoft’s Digital Advertising Solutions group. He’s at the helm of Gatineau, and has previous experience with analytics as co-founder of WebAbacus.

Thomas posted in the wake of Naylor’s disclosure about Gatineau. He gave some additional details along with confirming a late summer beta test:

One of the reasons we wanted to wait for our own announcement around the beta functionality is because we wanted to explain where we get our demographic data from. Beta 1 will include the ability to segment data by both age and gender buckets, so you can get more of an idea of what kind of visitors you have.

Questions are already being asked on Dave’s blog about where we get this data from; the answer is that we do get this information from users’ Live ID (formerly known as Microsoft Passport) profiles, but I would stress that we get this information anonymously, and there is no use of PII (Personally Identifiable Information, such as name or e-mail address) in the product.

Unless Microsoft’s legal eagles put up a roadblock, Thomas should be able to post more about Gatineau soon.

Microsoft, Gatineau, Analytics, Google

More: continued here

Advertising and marketing should be a top priority for any business and with the age of the internet comes the best ever way of marketing and attracting new clients, customers and internet traffic, based on targeted online marketing. Using an internet marketing agency or SEO consultants for your campaign is both cost-effective and fully-measurable via online statistics software so you can track every aspect of your marketing campaign.

More: continued here

Every company should think carefully when choosing an internet marketing agency. Making a mistake early on, could prove disastrous and may get your site banned or de-listed on the major search engines.Good seo consultants will only use “white hat” seo strategies and techniques, and with hard work and a little patience, your results will be more than worth the wait.

More: continued here

Internet Marketing Store | Search Engine Optimization | Website Promotion Software

More: continued here

If you have done the triple S and sucessfully sharply segmenting your sublist, then another triple treat would be most appropriate as a followup to your triple S strategy.

More: continued here

Looking for a business partner can be quite a challenging aspect of building your business. Especially when you are concocting major business deals, you need to be able to have the scrutiny in looking for a business partner as you would a lifetime partner.

More: continued here

With youre website on the Internet you have two goals: the first is to get good-targeted traffic and to obtain sales. In order to be successful in any of these areas, prospective clients must be able to find you, and this is where link exchange programs come into play.You will have more chances to receive higher traffic if your website is on the first page of every search engine results, ranked one to ten. You can achieve the rank you desired and link popularity is an excellent way for that.

More: continued here

Setting up joint ventures with your niche market’s top marketers is a method that will explode your profits. In this article I will explain to you a number of different methods and strategies to finding joint venture partners.

More: continued here

Now is the perfect time to increase your income through paid internet surveys. Take advantage of this great opportunity. Survey companies need you and they will pay you for your opinion.

More: continued here

Many of us share the dream of working from home. Working from home is easier said than done and it is not for the unorganized. To make a full-time income working from home, you will need to work full-time hours.

More: continued here

Online you are up against the Barnes & Noble’s, the Amazon’s, the Wal-Mart’s… the list is endless. Will your little website scarf the business away from these biggies? Of course not. Don’t even dream. So what can you do? Here are five ideas to get your web site designed in the right direction…

More: continued here

Researchers at IBM Almaden have been developing a semantic search process that can delve into unstructured text to retrieve structured information.

Avatar Seeks Semantic Search

While a lot of attention has been heaped upon Powerset and its almost-here natural language search, IBM has been working on a similar technology that may or may not be as close to public debut.

IBM calls their effort Avatar Semantic Search. Right now it doesn’t even have the nice minimalist home page Powerset has for early peek signups, but since everyone’s done reading ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows’, a little text to read is a good thing.

“Ongoing research in Avatar is at the cusp of a number of disciplines ranging from search and information retrieval to machine learning, information extraction, and probabilistic databases,” IBM announced on the project’s page.

We’ve looked at earlier IBM efforts to pull information out of unstructured resources. Their UIMA developments now occupy a place in the freely available IBM Omnifind Yahoo Edition enterprise search product, for example.

But UIMA is so 2005. While Powerset has drawn upon research performed by the Palo Alto Research Center, aka PARC, IBM reached out to the academic community to complement Avatar’s internal team.

They have approached the semantic search issue in three ways. Developing an information extraction system will allow Avatar to plunge into mounds of raw text, and emerge with structured data based on rules-based annotators.

IBM claimed this extraction system will permit unsophisticated users to build an annotator with Avatar and pull out the desired information from email, web pages, business reports, etc.

Through semantic search, the researchers think they can interpret queries people make, and model the real intent behind a query.

The real challenge comes from an effort they refer to as managing uncertainty and probabilistic databases. They’ve stepped deeply into theory here, well beyond any help Douglas Adams can provide for me.

IBM built momentum with UIMA starting well before I’d interviewed Marc Andrews about it in December 2005. It led to the co-branded, freely available Omnifind product I mentioned earlier, and I have to think Avatar may be on a similar track today.

IBM, Avatar, Semantic, Search Engine

More: continued here

Video marketing is here to stay. Learn why video marketing will never die and why you should incorporate video marketing strategy into your Internet marketing arsenal.

More: continued here

Google doesn’t want to pay what could end up a $10 billion price tag for the 700MHz wireless spectrum. They just want to include conditions that benefit them for free.

Cringely Calls Google 700MHz Bid A Feint

As kids, there was always someone willing to suggest the group go do something that could get everyone in trouble. When everyone else is being punished, the big idea kid always seemed to be somewhere else.

Google wants to be the big idea kid, as Robert X. Cringely suggested in his breakdown of Google’s assault on the wireless spectrum. The search company has offered to bid the minimum price the FCC wants for the 700MHz spectrum, $4.6 billion, if the FCC will force all bidders to adhere to four principles of openness.

Cringely thinks words may be all Google has to offer in this deal:

This could be a fake, a head feint on Google’s part. By attempting to set these conditions on any eventual auction winner, Google is tacitly telling the mobile carriers that it really doesn’t intend to bid or doesn’t intend to bid above the $4.6 billion threshold. Emboldened by this the telcos, who are also arrogant and have a kind of reptilian craftiness, may decide to save their resources and only bid, say, $10 billion.

Personally I would be disappointed by this, since I’ve suggested Google has passionate aspirations toward upsetting the wireless industry’s apple cart by launching its own network. Cringely allowed for the possibility that Google could push the bidding well above $10 billion, which could induce projectile vomiting in the boardrooms of the big four wireless companies.

That would make a great YouTube video. But Cringely thinks Google wouldn’t have tried setting the conditions it proposed in the first place if they actually intended to win the bidding. If they win they can do whatever they like as far as open access goes on 700MHz.

Google, 700MHz, Wireless, Spectrum

More: continued here

Why build a list? Nothing gets done in your business without a list of interested prospects, and nothing gets done with your list of prospects without regular contact.

More: continued here

No one debates the existence of those who would perpetrate click fraud on advertisers for financial gain. Gaining a better idea of the scope of the problem has been harder than pinning sand to a wall.

The Shifting Sands Of Click Fraud

In an ideal world, I could spread some glue on a board, dump some sand on it, and hang it up when it dries. It would be something to look at, just not real pretty to see.

Click fraud isn’t pretty, either. Criminals attempts to generate advertising clicks to ads on web pages and sites they control. Each click that eludes the detection efforts of the advertising provider results in a real money gain for the scammers.

The debate starts there. How much click fraud takes place? It’s too simple a question, and unfair to those who combat it.

Let’s look at it from the angle Click Forensics has on the issue. The company, helmed by CEO Tom Cuthbert, looks at click fraud each quarter.

They recently found the overall click fraud rate, and the percentage of click fraud within content networks like Google’s AdSense and Yahoo’s Publisher Network, increased again. Cuthbert told WebProNews a big disparity exists between what they see, versus what the search engines report.

It’s a big number on the content network side: 25.6 percent of clicks deemed fraudulent for the second quarter of 2007. Such data has a real impact. Cuthbert said he’s seen clients moving away from the content networks.

But even as they pull back from networks, they stay in search. I asked if this meant search engines were just seeing a shift of budgets from network to paid search spending, but he claimed clients are also reducing their spending, due to the revenue risk.

Cuthbert blamed the latest figures, representing increases from the first quarter of the year, on automated activity. Botnets, a scourge of inboxes with spam and websites with DDoS attacks, have made a much bigger impact on click fraud.

I asked Shuman Ghosemajumder, Google’s business product manager of Trust & Safety and a respected participant in the click fraud debate, about botnets and click fraud. He isn’t ready to accept Cuthbert’s observation on the topic.

“Click Forensics, has offered no research on the topic, no potential solutions, nor any evidence to support their assertions related to botnets,” said Ghosemajumder.

Information represents the shifting sand in the discussion, the details we can’t nail down effectively. Search engines dismiss third party assessments because efforts at detecting and not charging for illicit clicks continually catch that fraud.

Third parties think more fraud gets through the process than the search engines want to concede. In either case, without truly knowing the scope of click fraud to begin with, how can either side really make a definitive claim about it?

More information, made available to an independent third party from the search engines and their advertisers, would be helpful. Cuthbert said overall click fraud hit 15.8 percent for the second quarter. Ghosemajumder has said in response to Fair Isaac’s peek into click fraud the rate Google sees is around 10 percent, of which they catch all but around 0.02 percent without charging an advertiser.

Cuthbert said, flatly, advertisers want more sharing of data. Search engines have claimed this will aid criminals; for Google’s part, they are working, albeit slowly, in concert with the IAB Click Measurement Working Group and the Media Ratings Council to make more information available as well as better defining illicit clicks.

“Auditing Google will further verify for our advertisers that we are doing what we’ve said for a long time to protect them; we’re doing much more than the minimum standards the audit will check against of course,” said Ghosemajumder.

Click Fraud, Google, Click Forensics

More: continued here

If you are serious about learning how to start an online business, while having many sources of information from everywhere can be helpful, it can become a problem too. When you visit a site that offers good tutorials about it and looks just fine, you may decide to subscribe to their newsletter and start to read all the information they provide.

More: continued here

5 key components to successfull product promotion online.

More: continued here

If you have managed to build a huge list and finally elicited the much-needed site traffic in your internet marketing business, that’s great. But beyond that, you must do something with that big list of yours to make it more efficient. This is what I call the sharply segmented sublist.

More: continued here

For those new to website optimization, finding the right keywords can seem like the hunt for a proverbial needle in a haystack. In reality, the process isn’t all that terribly difficult. As long as a few basic steps are taken and common sense is employed, even a beginner can come up with a good starting game plan for locating the right keywords.

More: continued here

Crying about Google ignoring your keyword stuffed web pages just gives Matt Cutts and the rest of the SEO world something to gleefully mock.

Cutts Pokes Fun At Keyword Stuffer

It’s a conspiracy, man. The Google hierarchy doesn’t want you to know how to become immortal. It’s totally true, you can read it on the Internet, you just can’t find it through Google, see?

Yeah, we see what you did there, or at least Matt did. Some people will still try old tricks to get noticed by the search engine. Matt highlighted one website whose owner offers the key to immortality (magnetic rings) and one of the more entertaining keyword stuffing examples you’ll see today.

“‘Internal vaginal aphrodisia doping hardware?’ Huh? And what does a ‘plasma tv advanced chart’ have to do with immortality?” he asked upon reviewing the source of a page from the site. That page had a small textarea at the bottom, and viewing the page source revealed its bizarre contents.

It’s one of the oldest games in the questionable tactics book, one that Google prefers webmasters to avoid. Keyword stuffing brings searchers to a page that has no benefit for them.

Such disappointment tends to be vented at the search engine for bringing up a non-relevant page. The typical Internet user has no idea what keyword stuffing is or where to find it on a web page.

If you must indulge in stuffing, stick to the tasty side dish variety. Bread cubes, chicken broth, country sausage, slivered almonds, chopped apple, diced sweet onion, sage, and poultry seasoning will make you a happier person without risking a banning from Google.

Google, Matt Cutts, Keyword Stuffing, SEO

More: continued here

As AT&T resorts to playground taunts, Google pushes up its glasses and resorts to economic theory. But it’s still not certain yet which side the FCC will take: the bully’s or the Poindexter’s.

Google Won’t Put Up Or Shut Up

After Google CEO Eric Schmidt wrote a letter to FCC chairman Kevin Martin committing to bid on a slice of the 700 MHz wireless spectrum as long as the regulatory agency required the auction winner to ensure true competition in the marketplace, AT&T hissed back at the search engine company to "put up or shut up."

What AT&T Senior VP Jim Cicconi meant by that was that Google should be willing to bid head-to-head with incumbent telecommunications providers, no holds barred, no special considerations given.

CTIA-The Wireless Association president and CEO Steve Largent wasn’t thrilled about Google’s proposal either, accusing them of trying to rig the auction in their favor.

"The competitive wireless industry welcomes all new entrants, but no company should be able to buy a custom-fit government regulation that suits their particular business plan. Consumers should decide if they’re right, not the federal government," said Largent.

Coincidentally, Largent’s name means "money" in French, which is what is at stake for telecom incumbents. Lots and lots of it.

And while Largent’s argument is well crafted enough (at least, it’s better than Cicconi’s "put up or shut up" shove) to convince surface-level free market defenders – I say "surface level" because there’s nothing free about the market we are discussing – Google Washington Telecom and Media Counsel Richard Whitt argues that the spectrum auction is already rigged in favor of incumbents.

In essence, if so, then customers won’t be able to decide because, as only a few (or two) companies control the spectrum, then those companies will control the decisions made. Already that should make intuitive sense to you, given the telecom industry’s monopolistic or duopolistic histories. But also, if new entrants are prevented, AT&T has a clear path to ownership, and thus, to market control.

Whitt begins with the burning question: Why doesn’t Google bid in the auction outright, head-to-head with AT&T and Verizon? He argues that traditional auctions benefit from open entry, but the FCC is auction is "a different animal" where only well-capitalized corporations can afford to bid, thus barring new entrants.

"As we have seriously considered entering the 700 MHz auction," he says, "we have been consulting with auction experts and game theorists to help us better understand the dynamics of a typical spectrum auction. What they have been telling us is that in a head-to-head bidding war between an incumbent wireless carrier and a potential new entrant, the incumbent almost invariably will prevail."

Not only do new entrants not have the cash to compete with incumbents, they don’t have the infrastructure, either. In addition to whatever price they would have pay, which will be artificially driven up by incumbents willing to pay whatever necessary, new entrants would also have to build and operate a network, an expense incumbents will not have to endure.

Thus, new entrants will not (cannot) enter the spectrum auction, structured as it is currently.

But there is also incumbent incentive to block new entrants altogether. "Given their investment in all the necessary business inputs, and the relatively high prices and low bandwidth characteristics of their existing service offerings, the incumbents must prevent the entry of potential competitors to the market. In a spectrum auction, this means paying whatever it takes to block new entry."

And this is where it gets shady: once new entrants are effectively barred from the auction, prices go down as incumbents are only bidding against each other, something Google calls the "incumbent dilution discount."

Whitt doesn’t fail to note the irony of incumbents accusing Google of trying skew the auction in its favor.   

"Regardless of who wins the bidding, however, the end result is an auction that yields a fair market price, with the added bonus of a new broadband network that is open to all comers," he said. "The American people get full value for their spectrum, plus open broadband platforms — and even the possibility of a real third pipe competitor."

GoogleAT&TFCCWirelessSpectrum700 MHzBroadbandPut up or shut up

More: continued here

Achieving your internet marketing dream is not impossible, but it is also not as easy as most people would like to think. It still takes a lot of hard work, among many other things. If you really want a list of steps or check list of things that will help contribute to your internet marketing success, here it is.

More: continued here

When you are looking to start an online business, or if you already have one, you know just how important information can be. If you cannot find any information on your business venture you may want to consider a different route; this is not necessarily a bad thing, but it can definitely slow down your development. When you are searching for internet business info there is a few different places that you can look.

More: continued here

The internet is huge no arguing that. And its just going to get bigger as more and more people join the World Wide Web. But can internet marketing really help you get rich quick? Or is it all a scam? Join me as I look at the pros and cons of internet marketing and show you how you really CAN get that 1,000% increase in sales, almost overnight.

More: continued here

The $7.5 million price tag for Business.com paid by two businessmen in 1999 looks like a fantastic bargain now that R.H. Donnelley has purchased it for roughly $350 million.

Business.com Sells For $350 Million

That $100 million for Dictionary.com may have been a bargain for Answers.com. If they had wanted Business.com, they would have paid three and a half times the price.

PaidContent said yellow page and local search firm R.H. Donnelley elbowed aside several competitors at auction for the domain and its connected search and directory services:

The auction was heated, and initially included IAC, New York Times, DJ and News Corp. IAC didn’t end up bidding, News Corp dropped out as the price went above $300 million, Dow Jones couldn’t pull it together in the wake of all the turmoil with News Corp bid, and New York Times was in there until late in the game.

Sky Dayton, current CEO of Helio, is best known for founding the EarthLink ISP. He and Jake Winebaum picked up the Business.com domain in 1999, a few months before the dot-com industry’s fortunes cratered on Wall Street.

The big bucks they spent eight years ago seemed nonsensical, but their decision proved profitable eight years later. Now we have to wonder if another domain name sale will ever top the price tag for Business.com.

Business.com, Sky Dayton, R.H. Donnelley

More: continued here

Local search India has made life much easier for people who need any information related to anything and any place in India. The local search India provides all information including local directories of any place in India.

More: continued here

Sparks fly as Scott Cleland, president of Precursor Group and chairman of anti-net neutrality organization Netcompetition.org, receives the criticism he fully expected in assessing the likelihood of the Google offer for DoubleClick being blocked.

Google, DoubleClick Cast As Net Neutrality Fight

Cleland’s assessment of the merger, freely available from his Googleopoly website, contends the Federal Trade Commission likely has enough reasons to block Google’s DoubleClick purchase.

Citing his experience criticizing a proposed Worldcom/Sprint merger, Cleland said he expected pushback from those in favor of a deal that in his analysis won’t pass an evidence-driven antitrust test.

To illustrate, Cleland showed what a potential Google/DoubleClick rival would need to own in order to compete effectively:

To equal Google-DoubleClick’s level of market concentration in the intermediary online advertising market, one single financial services company would have to own:

•  The top 15 Wall Street banks/asset managers;

•  ~60% of the hedge fund and private equity industries;

•  The New York and London Stock Exchanges;

•  The two leading providers of financial analytical tools: Bloomberg and Factset;

•  Two of the three national providers of credit profiles: Experian and Equifax; and

•  ~60% of the Federal Reserve’s and U.S. Census Bureau’s raw market and consumer data.

The overall impact of the deal lessens competition in the online advertising market, Cleland said in the white paper. His position found little favor with the Computer and Communications Industry Association, whose CEO, Ed Black, penned a press release slamming the Googleopoly report.

Black and CCIA painted Cleland’s analysis as coming from "a coalition of incumbent telecom and cable companies that want to smear Google and its vigorous support for neutral broadband access."

CCIA’s comparison of the Google review by the FTC to past antitrust cases involving IBM, AT&T, and Microsoft differs from the DoubleClick deal, Cleland said in response. "The flaw in their logic is that IBM, AT&T and Microsoft were not merger review cases like Google-DoubleClick," he said.

All three of those companies were attacked for their established monopolies, as those who have followed the tech industry will recall. Google isn’t being hauled before the FTC on those grounds, but the potential for the DoubleClick merger to put the search company into a monopoly position.

Google is on the path to becoming an "enduring monopoly" today, Cleland said in his report. No startup can possibly match the resources required to compete. Google’s closest competitors, Yahoo and Microsoft, can’t offer the same return to a third-party website when it comes to making a search and advertising deal:

Why this matters is that Google’s economics (and market power) directly derive from its overwhelming relative audience size. When Google/Yahoo/Microsoft approach a third party content provider to be the wholesale provider of search and ad-serving services for a high traffic website, they bid on how much revenue they will provide to the third party.

Because Google has 2-3 times the size audience as Yahoo it can afford to bid a dollar amount 2-3 times more than Yahoo can.

Because Google has 5-6 times the size audience as Microsoft, it can afford to bid 5-6 times higher than Microsoft to win that third-party search/ad-serving business.

It’s going to be easy for net neutrality proponents to dismiss Cleland’s message because he is the messenger. But the report merits reading by anyone with an interest in the online advertising market.

His assessment of Yahoo’s failures to make inroads against Google in search - Yahoo is a retailer of content, Google is a wholesaler of technology - said Yahoo’s Panama search ad system will continue to disappoint the marketplace.

Evidence of that came from Yahoo, where profits dropped despite revenue rising. In Cleland’s analysis, Panama’s struggles will be "an excellent case study for antitrust authorities" in weighing the Google/DoubleClick merger.

Indirectly, Yahoo could have a bigger impact on Google in antitrust than it does in search advertising, simply by operating normally. Antitrust considerations just aren’t a net neutrality fight.

Google, DoubleClick, Scott Cleland, Ed Black, Precursor, CCIA

More: continued here

Wouldn’t it be better if you can have a steady stream of hot leads, leads that not only include contact information but give you an idea of what the prospect needs, the problem they want solved? Most importantly, they want what you have to offer and are ready to buy.

More: continued here