The First Rule of Marketing

Some people hype transparency as the only effective solution for long-term sustainable marketing success. After they are already successful they can hype such false ideals and get praised for them, which only adds to their misguided notion of marketing. The truth is everyone wants to be influenced, but nobody wants to feel like they were influenced.

Filed under: Internet, Web services, Social Software, web 2.0

Ping.fm is a new service that lets you update a bunch of social network/messaging sites all at once. Instead of logging into Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, Facebook, and Tumblr and manually posting updates, you can just visit Ping.fm and write a single message which will be sent to each site. So far, it sounds a lot like HelloTXT, right? Well, it is, but Ping.fm has a few features that make it a lot more useful than HelloTXT.

Search marketing is the ultimate seductress. It lures you in with the promise of an interesting, exciting career that can actually pay the bills, but soon you're regularly pulling 12 hour days with no vacations. There's intense pressure to achieve high search rankings and triple digit ROIs to keep clients happy in a dynamic industry where the rules change frequently and the competition is growing in leaps and bounds. It's no wonder search marketers feel stressed. Stress is running rampant in the search marketing industry and failing to address its effects on you and your client relations can destroy your SEM business faster than a low Google ranking.

The philosophy behind much advertising is based on the old observation that every man is really two men — the man he is and the man he wants to be. - William Feather

Behind every recommendation or online purchase is a human being. One with emotions and personal likes or dislikes. This person pays more attention to certain things more than others because of his/her creed, feelings and belief-systems.

Filed under: Internet, Windows Mobile, Google, Mobile Minute, SearchGoogle is taking steps to speed up the mobile version of its search engine. And while the company's at it, it's released a Today Screen plugin for Windows Mobile users. The plugin essentially lets you start a search from your home screen without even bothering to open up your web browser first. Of course, as you can see in our screenshot, Microsoft has been bundling a Windows Live Search plugin with Windows Mobile for a while, but we found that Google returned our search results much faster than Windows Live.

Conferences can be a prime space for bloggers to recruit new readers. Last week at SXSWi it was fascinating to watch hundreds of bloggers attempt to standout from the crowd, network and develop fruitful relationships with others there. In this video I point out 5 of the better strategies that I saw:

Google, the dominant search engine for business searchers, made a dramatic change to its search results starting in 2007.  And that change has the effect of making it harder — and at the same time easier — for small businesses to be found in Google.

That change is called "universal search."

Posted by randfish

Let's try a little excercise...

Common features of spam domains include:



Long domain names



.info, .cc, .us and other cheap, easy to grab TLDs



Short registration period (1 year, maybe 2)



High ratio of ad blocks to content

Google, the dominant search engine for business searchers, made a dramatic change to its search results starting in 2007.  And that change has the effect of making it harder — and at the same time easier — for small businesses to be found in Google.

That change is called "universal search."

Google has long held that it is not a portal. Concerns of publishers wary of giving away their content to Google for free have always been met with the response that Google is simply making it easier for people to find the publisher's content.

So what happens if Google stops sending searchers to other publishers' sites? What if Google starts sending people to its own content? Apparently they already have.