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While Facebook may be a hot marketing tool right now, there is danger in putting too much effort into making it the center of your marketing efforts.

In a recent post I spoke about publishing paths and tailoring your content and selectively publishing it to different websites. It can be dangerous, though, if you take it too far and focus only on building your content on one website (particularly one you don’t have absolute control over) because you leave yourself and your business open to whims and decisions of others. I see this happening withTwitter to a certain extent and now, with increasing frequency, with Facebook.

Now don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with websites like Twitter or Facebook–as long they are part of an overall strategy. However, when Facebook represents all of your marketing activity, you are taking a huge risk. I’ve seen this done with small brands, but I think that, by picking a well-known, national brand, I can drive the point home much more effectively. Let’s take a look at the website for Vitamin Water at VitaminWater.com.

At the time this post was written, VitaminWater.com 301 redirects to a Facebook page for Vitamin Water. I’m all for trying new things, thinking out of the box, and experimenting. After all, I was one of the few people who liked the skittles redirect stunt. But it was temporary. When you redirect your website to a twitter page, facebook page, wikipedia page or any other page not under your absolute complete control, you are no longer your own master. A lot of web 2.0 companies have a spotty track record and have been known to make some really bad decisions in the past, and I’d put Facebook near the top of the bad decision makers list. Anyone remember the beacon fiasco,  holocaust denial incident, or recent privacy kerfufle? When you put all your marketing eggs in the Facebook basket you put the fate of your company under the guidance, regulations, and terms of service of a company that has shown increasingly poor decision making with alarming regularity.

Let’s be clear: Facebook wants to rule the web. If you don’t think the deactivation of several high profile Google engineers facebook accounts wasn’t a warning shot across the bow, you really need to open your eyes. Facebook and Google will be at war for the web very soon, and you don’t want to be collateral damage in that war.

Facebook should be a tool in your marketing toolbox … just not the only tool.

In the coming year, expect Facebook to make a concerted effort to bring business onto Facebook. In fact I would expect them to do everything they could to incentivize people to make Facebook their main or only web presence. If I was Facebook, I’d have a team of developers and programmers working on making Facebook pages easier for less technical people to use and update. Don’t fall for the trap.

If you are looking for information on how to get more out of Facebook, check out this presentation from Brian Carter at Pubcon 2010. It’s really good.

Advertisement: Want to see your message here, find out how. #2

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis WordPress Theme review.

Don’t Put All Your Eggs in the Facebook Basket

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from Michael Gray – Graywolf SEO Blog

One of the mistakes many SEOs are making, is putting Bing to one side and concentrating solely on Google. Is this the way to move forward? I don’t think so.

I agree that Google has the largest market share and searches in the industry, and that getting to the top of page one will greatly increase your traffic. Now, is this a good reason to ignore Bing?

Lets look at some recent stats from comScore (March 2010):

Bing are increasing in their share of the market month after month and this trend has been going on for the last 12 months. This is only one reason to consider Bing. Here are some more:

• Most SEOs will agree it’s less competitive to gain page 1 for Bing
• It’s likely Bing will continue to increase its market share.
• Some will argue that top of Page 1 in Bing will get you more users than the bottom of page 1 on Google.

Some further stats from comScore (March 2010):

Yes, Google had a lot more searched in Feb 2010, but by exactly how many more?

Google – 9.5 Billion Searches
Bing – 1.7 Billion Searches

Big Difference? It may seem like it but let’s look at it from another angle:

Google gets 5.59 times more searches than Bing.

Is 5.59 a very big difference? I don’t think so.

Ahmed Bhula
Natural SEO Programmer

This SEO news has been brought to you by Just Search; Experts in internet marketing and PPC

from Just Search | Search Engine Optimisation & Internet Marketing Journal

Although you must have begun blogging for business after carefully selecting a good theme for your blog, you still need to be very sure of knowing your target audiences before you actually come up with your blog. It is important to understand the kind of people you want to address in your blog before you go ahead and start posting content on it. You need to do proper research else you will fail in your goal of creating the blog.

The people who surf the web have diverse backgrounds and liking so it is important that you understand what segment of the market you want to target. Which is your target market and this largely depends on the kind of service or product you offer. Once you identify the target market, it becomes easy for you to devise your blog in way that caters to the needs and interests of the customers. The nature of the product decides the demography of your customer. Before coming up with a theme for your blog you need to draft a kind of profile of your prospective customer whom you want to address in your blog. The target market segment comes with the basic demographic profile that can be segregated on basis of age, gender, and social or economic status.

• Age: what does your target market actually covers, does it comprise of children, teenagers, adults, or senior citizens?
• Gender. Are your target clients male, female, or transgender?

When considering the theme of your blog you should make sure that the theme of your blog or profile should match the target audiences. The above mentioned classification can be really broad but they certainly cover all the probable categories of the clients. These profile or sets of traits should match the characteristics or features of the products or services that you are offering. Remember, however, that these classifications are still relatively broad and apply only to basic commodities where product differentiation by consumers is still not so distinct. Examples are medicines or medical services, foods, educational services, and others.

For stricter market segmentation, you can differentiate your target markets or narrow them further according to customer temperaments, needs, goals, and fears. Specifically, you can distinguish them according to:

• Needs – sense of accomplishments, sense of belonging, self actualization
• Goals – productivity, efficiency, savings, safety
• Temperaments – serious, happy go lucky, complacent
• Fears – old age, poverty, ill health, rejection

There are still more categories to further narrow your market segment such as educational attainment, life style, mindset, family size, political views, etc. These are relevant if the products or services that you are offering are highly specialized or customized such as travel or vacation packages, luxury cars, high tech gadgets, and other.

Having a clear picture of the common characteristics of your target market when blogging for business will help you decide what theme or blog design to use, the appropriate mode or tone of your article, and the right web graphics that you need to employ.

These details may overwhelm you at first. But, you should realize that your purpose for blogging is to attract web users who are more likely to use your products or services and to influence them to buy and patronize what you offer. Bear in mind as well that customers now are more discriminating, especially if the products are quite expensive. They scrutinize details and compare them with competing brands.

So to make your blog more effective, know your products well and create a profile of your target market based on your products’ characteristics and features. Then, post blog content that will appeal to your target market. Remember, your business blog is created to generate sales. Keep your focus so you will not waste time and effort when blogging for business.

from Make Money Online

LinkShare released a WordPress plugin called Link Lookup last year, and today they updated it with the inclusion of coupon link retrieval and some usability enhancements.

In order to access coupon links, affiliate accounts need to be approved for the Coupon Web Service (apply for approval).

Download the latest version of the plugin from the WordPress plugin directory or install it directly from the WordPress interface by selecting “Plugins” and then “Add New”.

Search for LinkShare and Link Lookup will come up in the results.

LinkShare offers two other WordPress plugins: RSS DealFeed and AdMix.

More details at http://blog.linkshare.com/2010/04/28/adding-coupon-finding-to-link-lookup-wordpress-plug-in/.

from Affiliate Marketing Blog by Shawn Collins

Image by svilen001

Last week, I talked about step one for improving as a problogger. I argued that it was a foundational step to believe that you could improve in any skill and natural talent was mostly a myth. If you are poor at a skill right now, you can become competent at it through practice and effort.

Today, let’s look at the next steps for improving as a problogger. These steps provide a blueprint for shoring up your weaknesses and becoming even better at your strengths.

Step 2: Learn.

As you seek to improve, you need a starting point. In this step, look for sources of expertise to guide you in your journey.

For example, let’s pretend you want to grow the search traffic of your blog. You could do several things to start the process of learning about SEO. You could buy an ebook, read blogs, watch a video course, or pick the brain of friend who’s good at SEO.

It’s not enough to learn from the initial information you come across. You need to find trustworthy sources. With all the misinformation on the web, you should do enough research to vet the credibility of your sources.

Avoid the sources who offer empty promises and guarantee quick results since improvement usually takes time. Don’t be like the bloggers who are always looking for the latest shortcut to online riches. While they are being scammed by the latest “guru”, you should be learning on a deep level from the real experts. The most credible sources will be realistic with the speed of improvement. They will place a premium on hard work because they know that becoming competent in the skill takes effort.

Once you’ve found some credible sources, start learning but don’t get stuck on this step. There are too many bloggers that do a lot of reading but barely put any of their knowledge into action. I used to be one of them. I used to spend most of my time reading about problogging instead of actually working on my blog. I learned a lot but I didn’t have time to implement my knowledge since I was spending so much time reading. Therefore, I removed all the problogging blogs from my RSS reader to encourage me to move from learning to doing. I made a list of useful things I learned and set out to apply them to my blog.

Step 3: Take action.

Once you have a solid grasp on a new concept, it’s time to try it out.

Let’s go back to the SEO example. You do some reading and discover that building links on authority sites is very effective. You find some suggestions on how to build these links and try them out.

At this point, it’s important not to expect too much from your efforts since you’re just starting out. You will probably fail a lot in the early stages but with each attempt, you’ll gain valuable experience and knowledge as long as you heed the next step.

Step 4: Evaluate.

In this step, take a look back at your efforts and evaluate them.

You will need some metrics to help you determine if your efforts are succeeding or not. It can also be helpful to set some realistic goals to motivate you.

There are many metrics you can look at depending on the skill you’re trying to improve. Here are some common metrics to consider:

• traffic
• links
• published guest posts
• comments
• retweets
• search engine ranking

During the evaluation process, examine your successes and figure out why you were able to do well. Your aim should be to recreate your successes until the skill becomes second nature. That’s when you know you’ve achieved competency.

Of course, you will also learn from your failures but your successes will be much more informative. Within your successful efforts, you can find a blueprint for further success whereas failures just show you what not to do.

If you want a more accurate evaluation process, I recommended joining a reputable paid forum and getting personal feedback on your efforts from people who have more ability than you. It’s great to have access to experts that can tell you what you’re doing right and what you’re doing wrong. Also, they can give you valuable ideas to consider that you may not think of.

You can try free forums if you don’t have money but this method has some risks. Free forums tend to have a much lower signal to noise ratio than paid forums. Also, the quality of information is usually much higher at paid forums.

Performancing offers blog management services.

from Performancing.com – Helping Bloggers Succeed

Google has released Chrome 4.1.249.1064 for Windows to address multiple vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities may allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code or bypass the same origin policy in the browser.

According to Google in a blog post:

This release fixes the following issues:

* Google Chrome was not using the correct path for the Java plugin for Java Version 6 Update 20.
* 4.1.249.1059 was much slower on JavaScript benchmarks than 4.1.249.1045. (Issue 42158)

This release also fixes the following security issues:
Please see the Chromium security page for more detail. Note that the referenced bugs may be kept private until a majority of our users are up to date with the fix.

* [$1000] [40445] High Cross-origin bypass in Google URL (GURL). Credit: Jordi Chancel.
* [40487] High Memory corruption in HTML5 Media handling. Credit: David Bloom of Google Security Team.
* [$500] [42294] High Memory corruption in font handling. Credit: wushi of team509.

If you find issues, please let us know: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/entry

We encourage users and administrators to review the Google Chrome Releases blog entry and update to Chrome 4.1.249.1064 for Windows to help mitigate the risks.

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from Malaysia Technology Blog