Make Money Online: 100 + Tools and Resources

(by: Mashable)

Making money online is a dream for many, but the simple fact is that it’s often just as tough as making money offline. Due to requests, we’ve put together a list of the most popular money making methods today, many of them focused on blogging and peer production.
A word of caution: for the sake of completeness, we’ve included a small number of sites that have been criticized for their ethics. If it sounds too good to be true, it generally is. Commenters are welcome to share their experiences of the various sites.
Get Paid To Write

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Weblogs, Inc. – Apply to blog for one of their ninety plus blogs or submit your own topic idea. They will pay you per post that you write and you must meet their minimum post requirements.
PayPerPost – Get paid as much as $500 or more a month writing articles and reviews of their sponsors on your blog.
Blogsvertise – Their advertisers pay you to mention and talk about their websites, products and services in your own blog.
Review Me – After your blog has been accepted in their network, they will pay you $20 to $200 per post that you write.
Smorty – Earn $6 to $100 dollars per post you write on your blog. Amount paid for each post depends on the overall popularity and page rank of your blog.
SponsoredReviews – Write reviews for their advertisers’ products and services on your own blog. They charge a 35% transaction fee for their services.
LoudLaunchBlog (blog) about the advertisers campaign releases that meet your interests. They pay once a month.
Blogitive – Get paid weekly via PayPal for posting stories that interest you.
BloggerWave – Select the advertiser opportunities that best suit your blog and write reviews on their products and services.
InBlogAds – Write about websites, products, services and companies on your blog and get paid for it.
BlogToProfit – Make $250 dollars or more by writing new posts on your blog.
Creative Weblogging – Write 7 to 10 posts per week for their network and they will pay you $225 per month.
WordFirm – Make money publishing books as a freelance writer from home.
451 Press – Write for a blog within their network and receive forty percent of all generated revenue.
Digital Journal – Network of bloggers that get paid to report on newsworthy articles through their blogs.
BlogBurner – Sign up for a free blog and get paid for writing new posts. Your commissions are generated through Adsense clicks.
Squidoo – Earn money by writing your new blog, or choose to donate your earnings to charity.
About.com – Become a paid guide writing articles for About.com. Compensation depends on the growth of your page views.
DayTipper – Earn $3 for every short tip you write and get published.
Helium – Earn a share of their advertising revenue by writing articles in their channels.
Dewitts Media – Get paid to write your own blog. This site requires you have a minimum page rank of 3 to sign up.
BOTW Media – Make money writing a blog for their blogging network.
CreamAid – Get paid to submit blog posts in their directory.
BlogFeast – Generate revenue from pre-installed Google Adsense ads when you blog in their network.
Mashable (Mashable) – Mashable hires freelancers and new staff, offering one of the largest platforms for tech bloggers.
Advertising Programs

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Google Adsense – Most popular pay-per-click advertising provider. Make anywhere from $0.01 to $5.00 plus per click on site relevant ads.
Text-Link-Ads – Approve or deny the advertiser links that appear on your site. They pay you 50% of the sale price for each text link sold on your website.
BlogAds – The average blogger makes anywhere from $50 to $5000 dollars a month selling blog ads. To participate in this program you will need to get sponsored by someone in their network.
LinkWorth – Here you will find eleven different options to fit your advertising needs. Choose from text based advertisements, sponsored ads and paid blog reviews to name a few.
CrispAds – Access to over six thousand advertisers in their pay-per-click program. You choose the advertisers that suit you best.
Chitika – Offers six types of advertising to fit your needs.
AzoogleAds – Delivers targeted advertisers to their network of publishers to bring you the most profitable solutions.
Vibrant Media – Offers in-text contextual based advertisements.
MediaFed – Place advertisements in your blog’s RSS feed to generate additional revenue.
Qumana – Embeds ads directly into your posts. Ads are generated from keywords that you select. Not particularly popular with readers.
PeakClick – Austria based pay-per-click provider. Provides automatic insertion of site targeted ads.
DoubleClick – Offers a full suite of products for publishers that enable you to forecast, sell inventory, serve ads and analyze campaigns online and through other digital channels.
Tribal Fusion – They offer reliable payments, free ad-serving technology, a dedicated account manager and up-to-date, real-time reporting, with a 55% payout. Must go through an approval process.
AdBrite – Approve or reject any ads purchased for your sites. Also gives you the ability to sell ads direct with “Your Ad Here” links.
ThankYouPages – Shows ads based on demographics and relevancy. Majority of traffic must originate from U.S.
Clicksor – Inline text link advertising, underlines words directly in your posts making them clickable advertisements. Once more, we’d say that inline ads are not popular with regular blog readers.
TargetPoint – Contextually and search targeted pay-per-click ads.
IndustryBrains – Place relevant contextual text listings and graphical ads on your site.
BloggingAds – Post one-time ads on your site. Pays via PayPal.
BulletAds – Performance based online advertising network.
AdsMarket – Match your traffic to handpicked advertisers with top-converting products and services.
ROIRocket – Targeted campaigns specific to your marketing needs.
AdKnowledge – Offers complete outsourcing of your advertising management. Runs ads in websites, email and search engine inventory.
Yes Advertising – Payouts for running ads from their sponsors. Also offers a referral program that pays 20% of the referred webmasters earnings.
RevenuePilot – Offers pay-for-performance and pay-per-click advertising for your sites.
SearchFeed – Integrates paid advertisements into your site’s search feature.
Bidvertiser – Display text ads on your site and advertisers bid for placement.
Pheedo – Monetize your RSS feeds with this program.
ValueClick media – Generate revenue by displaying ads through banners, pop-unders and rich media. Be warned that pop-unders are unpopular these days.
OneMonkey – Another text based advertising program.
Yahoo Publisher Network – Use the internet giant, Yahoo, to display targeted ads on your site.
Q Ads – Monetize your site by placing ads anywhere you can add a picture.
Affiliate Networks and Programs

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Amazon Associates – Link to Amazon’s products and services and earn up to 10% of the sale price. Converts well for product-focused sites.
ClickBank – Over 10,000 products to promote with commissions as high as 75%.
Commission Junction – Promote the advertiser’s products and services in exchange for a commission on leads or sales.
LinkShare – Pay-for-performance affiliate marketing network. Gives you the ability to use individual product links on your site and generate revenue from sales.
Affiliate Fuel – Serves as a middle man to bring publishers and advertisers together to promote products and services.
LinkConnector – Affiliate marketing network that offers a zero tolerance fraud policy to keep you safe while conducting business.
LeadPile – Affiliate network that allows you to generate and sell trade leads to the highest bidder.
Forex-Affiliate – Affiliate program that allows you to earn commissions from trading Forex (currency exchange) online.
incentAclick – CPA (cost-per-action) affiliate program that guarantees the fastest ROI in the industry.
AdPlosion – Earn revenue by selling leads, clicks and products from their advertisers. Also runs an incentive points program in addition to your commissions.
AffiliateFuture – Another affiliate program that pays you for generating leads, sales and clicks.
ClixGalore – Affiliate network consisting of 7500+ advertisers for you to choose from.
ThinkAction – Affiliate network that claims to have the top payouts and the possibility of earning over $100,000 dollars per month.
RocketProfit – Affiliate network, pays via check after your commissions reach $25 dollars.
CafePress – Earn affiliate commissions by selling your personally branded merchandise.
Avangate – Make money selling popular computer software titles through your site.
Paid Social Media Programs

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Dada.net – Social site with a revenue sharing program that pays you for referring friends and driving traffic.
Jyve – Pays you to provide answers, advice and peer support to people in need of some help.
Cruxy – Specializes in social video, but serves as a venue to sell your digital media.
BitWine – Get paid to give advice and answer questions for people, on subjects of your interests and choice.
Ether – Make money answering questions for your peers over the phone. You set your rates and call availability.
UpBlogger – Social network site that pays you based on the amount of visits you receive to your uploaded content.
JustAnswer – Help others solve their problems and earn money for your knowledge.
MetaCafe – Upload your videos and earn money based on the number of views you receive.
ChaCha – Get paid to offer support to members of their community.
AssociatedContent – Earn money by uploading your videos, text, audio and images to their site. Earnings are determined by the exposure you receive from your content.
myLot – Pays you for posting, commenting and using their social network.
KnowBrainers – Another site that pays you to get involved with the community and answer questions. Optionally you can answer questions through the RSS feeds on your own blog.
Everything Else That Pays

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Google User Research – Google Pays you money to participate in their user research studies online.
Microsoft Research Panel – Get paid from Microsoft for providing feedback on their products.
Amazon Mechanical Turk – Amazon pays you to complete simple tasks that their computers can’t understand. Payments are a matter of cents.
eJury – Earn $5 to $10 dollars per verdict rendered as a mock juror for practice trials.
WorkingSOL – This company pays you to handle technical support for many large companies. You can work from home on the computer or by phone and decide what times you are available.
Appingo – Always looking for experienced copy editors and proof readers. Must submit a resume.
IntelliShop – Pays you to shop at stores in your area and write a review of your experience.
Mahalo Greenhouse – They pay $10 to $15 dollars per site you submit to their directory.
Focus Pointe Global – Get paid to join their focus groups and voice your opinion. Available to teens and adults.
Agloco – Sign up, download their toolbar and get paid to surf the internet. This site has been criticized as a “pyramid scheme”, although the founders deny the allegation.
Arise – Make money providing phone, web and email support and sales for 40 plus companies in their network.
CraZoo – Earn money for starting new threads and posting in online forums.
Tutor.com – Get paid to tutor people online.
ForumBoosting.com – Make money posting in forums across the internet.
Share-A-Pic – Earn money by uploading and sharing your pictures on their website.
Opuzz Voice – Earn money by doing voice overs for their clients online.
SlashMySearch – Get paid to search the internet with their search engine.

Global Marketing (emphasizing technical specifications)

(by: SEOpedia)

  1. Don’t use site-wide links. They are highly deprecated in the latest algorithm changes, and may even lead you to a penalization of your website’s SERPs. As a measure of precaution, I recommend a maximum of one site-wide (no matter the number of pages) for every 40 to 50 unique links from 40 to 50 unique domains.
  2. Use the title and meta description tags as wise as possible. They are your best choice of avoiding supplemental pages. Try to make each page with it’s own unique title and description, and never repeat more than 20-25% of the title and description tags content on different pages. Use a limited number of characters (8-10) in the title tag, and put the most important of them, relevant to each page, at the beginning.
  3. Read my previous post on 14 search marketing questions, asked by Digitalpoint members.
  4. Try to use H tags (1,2,3 etc) at the top-most possible location in the pages of your website, in the source order, and NOT visual order.
  5. Don’t be a Copycat. Don’t write news or posts just to have something for the big Google. Nowadays, duplicate-content filters are continuously evolving and even if you gain something on the short term you will loose it later. Try to be innovative.
  6. Use a pen and paper. Always have an agenda and a pen around. Note down every crazy idea you think of … Most of us have truly great subjects to write about, but during the day we forget, busy with other issues. I always note my ideas. At the end of a day, I am amazed to see a 20 subjects list to write about, versus 1 or two that I can come up with at writing time.
  7. Suggest “related websites” in your website’s Alexa information page. That will bring some traffic.
  8. If you want that early search engine boost, don’t just buy a new domain and invest $10K on the website design and development. You are better off buying a 5 year domain and investing $5K on the website. Age matters a lot and it will matter good years from now on.
  9. If you own a website that contains 80% Google and you are always on the lookout for new content/news to write about, please and I mean PLEASE read Ionut’s Google System. He’s still a student at a University in Bucharest (I live in Bucharest, so I have to meet him soon) and he can write all those stuff about it. Imagine him 10 years from now. He’s great on finding every bit of information, bug, unreleased service or any other thing about Google.
  10. Try to build other websites that revolve around your primary niche. Use them to better market and infuse brand and traffic into your primary website. I’m not talking about building scraper websites. Build quality content ones, and invest money and time and work hours in them. But in the end, just make them a vehicle that you will use to better market your primary website.
  11. Use Google’s, Yahoo’s and MSN’s(that’s the Moreover ping server which will ping MSN) sitemap services. Not only that it will provide you with invaluable server and website data, but it will get your pages in their index faster.
  12. If your website is in DMOZ, and Google and MSN (Live.com) show the DMOZ title and description, and that doesn’t work for you (most of the time, the DMOZ information for your website sucks) just bypass it and use your own ones. MSN and Google both support this function.
  13. Don’t ignore Google’s, Yahoo’s, Live’s and Ask’s image search functions. Most of the times, you can get a higher traffic from the image search engines then from the usual search, especially if you have a content rich website. Just a reminder for you: use the title attribute on links that surround the images, and use the ALT attribute on the image tags themselves. Also, always remember to rename your images with relevant descriptive words (a maximum of 4 words works best).
  14. Have a look at the websites I read (Bloglines), and subscribe to their feeds. Read them regularly.
  15. Advertising and Affiliate Marketing

  16. If you use the Adsense, YPN! or adCenter contextual ads on your website, try to optimize them. Don’t just insert them in your website and leave them. Work with them, change the position, the ad layout, the colors, the content around them. And remember, that at least for Adsense, the ad that’s placed in the highest position possible in the source’s order, will yield the highest income per click.
  17. Use affiliate programs once your website has started to receive some quality traffic. Depending on your niche, affiliate programs are a much better way to convert your traffic, then all the other advertising methods like contextual networks, banners, links etc. Commision Junction is a good way to start your research.
  18. Effectively lead your readers to your MDA (Most Desired Action). That may be a newsletter box, a banner, an Adsense etc. Place your MDA right below comments, or in the left/right sidebars, or in the header. Experiment. Analyze. React.
  19. Build an affiliate system for the services products you are offering. Let others do the PR and sales job for you.
  20. RSS & Newsletter Marketing

  21. Don’t trust yourself only in RSS feeds. A lot of users are “old-school” and prefer e-mail newsletters. Always offer this option.
  22. Another good newsletter tactic is to offer a periodical e-mail digest with the top stories in a certain period. A week, a month etc. Maybe some of your visitors missed a few interesting posts/articles.
  23. Research Robin Good’s Best Blog Directory And RSS Submission Sites (Part 2 and Part 3 available too) and market your RSS feed in all those websites. Don’t know what an RSS feed is ? (if you don’t, you’re either a moron, or you should fire someone).
  24. Not only submit your RSS feed to different RSS aggregators, but learn to market it.
  25. Analytics Marketing Techniques

  26. Pay attention to your website’s statistics. Install a good analytics tool like IndexTools or Google Analytics. Not only the absolute numbers and statistics (like total users/total visits) count. Try to go deeper and analyze the navigation patterns, entry/exit rates and pages, the new /returning visitors ratio etc.
  27. Continuously monitor your server stats, referrers and logs, and try to respond to links and articles that reference your website. That shows dedication and it’s another way to market your website indirectly.
  28. Survey your visitors (you need a free user account to read this article). Learn what your audience and demographics are. Strive to improve your readership towards your website’s business goal. Constantly re-survey.
  29. Research your market and always be up to date with your competitors. What their prices are, where do visitors go, is the site designed for success ? Look for things like quality code and content, internal/external linking, keyword density in content and links, pages indexed, Google Pagerank, quality titles, headers, site layout and design, conversion process, site load time, dedicated host, what new services they develop and announce etc.
  30. Learn to increase your leads
  31. Trial and error Trial and measure: raise awareness of your products and services, convert a visitor into a registered user and/or paying customer, persuade exiting customers to make further business, developing loyalty.
  32. Brand and Visibility Marketing

  33. When commenting a post or story in another website don’t spam: “OMG that’s uber cool”, “Nice post” or something like that. Instead, try to make your comments in a professional way, show what you liked/disliked/agreed/etc, cite other sources, give examples, bring pertinent arguments etc. Remember, comments are an important part of a post/article. Over 60% of the readers will also read the comments.
  34. Try to associate your name or your website’s name/brand with the big boys on your niche. Regularly comment their articles (don’t spam) and from time to time make reviews of their post on your blog/website.
  35. Starting your website from scratch, always sucks. Seek out other websites/companies in your industry and try to establish a relationship with them. Try a mutual partnership and/or services recommendations. Don’t try to e-mail/fax your direct competitors.
  36. Brand and paint your employee’s uniforms and your company’s cars with your logo and website address. This is especially useful if you have a lot of cars. It’s mass-branding and it will get people, thus future clients in your local area accustomed and comfortable with your logo, website and business.
  37. Put your website address, on every possible internal piece of paper or communication device, including, but being limited to business cards, letterheads, invoices, newspaper and/or other print ads, yellow pages advertisements, receipts etc.
  38. Always identify yourself with your visitors, especially if you own a publishing website/weblog. Always have your editor name written for articles and it’s best to have a profile too. A picture, a contact method.
  39. Social Media Marketing

  40. If you ever want to write something that will end up on any of Digg’s, Reddit’s, Netscape’s, Newsvine’s (etc) frontpage, write about how to get on their frontpage, about Firefox, WordPress or Apple/Mac. No matter what you write about those, people love them and you WILL get on the frontpage, unless it’s un utterly stupid article.
  41. Pay close attention to Stumbleupon. It’s a great alternative social network. Install their toolbar, and if you write a good post, submit it in their system. Be faithful and fairplay with the other members, help each other, and add friends to your account. Ask other members to review you if they liked what you stumbled upon. StumbleUpon traffic had the highest converting ratio (at least for me), in comparison to Delicious, Digg or Reddit users, which seem to be RSS and AD blind.
  42. Whenever you have the belief that digging your articles will yield you an increased CTR on your Adsense ads, RSS subscriptions, comments or any other kind of added benefit to your website, you are wrong. I can sustain Davak’s post 80%, except the Alexa part. Digg users do use the Alexa toolbar or plugins that count as the Alexa toolbar. But you won’t notice any increased CTR’s, comments or clicks, no matter the traffic gained from a Digg.
  43. Reward helpful and valuable users by promoting their work on your homepage, or develop a rating system. Invest 5 minutes of your time to send a quick email or note telling them you appreciate their help.
  44. At least once per year, ask your visitors what do they think about your website’s content. What would they want to read more ? What new facilities should you offer them ? 10 reasons to survey your visitors.
  45. Be humble. Don’t forget where you started from, even if you are a professional in your field. No one can be an authority in a certain category if others don’t link to/recommend/interview/blog about.
  46. Link Baiting, Link Building and Research

  47. Write controversial content that will self-generate links and discussions/comments. Pick on well-known people, criticize loved websites or brands.
  48. When starting your website, try to gather a few links from already established and trustworthy websites. Stop trying to get your link on websites that are 2 months old like yours. Pay a directory submission in Yahoo!, BOTW, Webxperience!, Skaffe or other well known directories. Paying for a directory submission almost guarantees you a faster response time. DMOZ is an excellent way to start but you can’t get your way in fast and with money, so it’s best to “submit-and-forget-about-it”.
  49. Build links slowly, to avoid the sandbox. Slowly can mean 5-10 gained backlinks per month.
  50. When you research websites for IBL’s possibilities, don’t be fooled about high PR pages. What you need is Trust, not a high Pagerank. How can you tell if a website is an authority website or not ? Just find 5 titles of 5 articles on that website and search those phrases in Google. If the website appears on the first page, then it’s a quality website. After that inspect some of it’s backlinks, and try to see if the website is involved in dubious link schemes or has IBLs from irrelevant and spam websites. If it doesn’t, you’re OK to go. Remember, what you need is Trust, and traffic. Not Pagerank.
  51. A good link building strategy is to comment or participate in discussions or content on other websites in your industry. It’s not enough to have good articles/content. The world has to know about them. Make connections/relations with other jounalists/bloggers/entreprenours in your niche, comment their articles, and links will come by themselves, with time.
  52. Create posts/articles that help your visitors and attract natural links. “5 tips to …”, “25 easy ways to make …. better” type of articles are the best you can write.
  53. Write stories/articles in the most highly-ranked websites of your industry and link to your website from the article. I am not talking about article directories, but industry websites that accept content contributions from members. (like ThreadWatch or WebproNews, for example)
  54. Are you in any good relations with an US faculty/university ? Kindly ask them if you can contribute with something, and request a link from their websites. .edu and .gov links are supposed to carry a little more weight and authority then regular links. An excellent post in SEOmoz on ten ways to earn an .edu link
  55. Do you write in forums ? Always put your link in your signature, and try to write a few attractive words too, to increase the likelihood of clicks on your links. Many forums like Digitalpoint or V7N, have a latest blog post function. If you have a feed, always use that functions (tip: it works with any feed, not just blogs).
  56. My best advice for gathering a LOT of easy links is to create and release free templates for any wide-spread, free CMS system out there. WordPress, PHP Link Directory, Joomla, Mambo, Typo66, Drupal, etc. You are not a designer ? Hire one to build you some templates. What’s the benefit ? That small “template by X” in the footer of the template, that will reside in all the websites that use it. The more functional and beautiful the template is, the more people will use it. Colleen, from Kalina Web Designs as well as Chris from Pearsonified come highly recommended by me and others. It’s not worthwhile to tell you that I too have a design company. We’re too expensive for your ass 😉
  57. If you are interested about Pagerank rather then relevancy, whenever you submit to directories or other websites that accept links, try to search the most relevant page with the highest PR, and submit to that. Keep the relevancy pretty high on your list though, otherwise they will reject your website for sure. I would and will.
  58. Viral marketing, word of mouth, tell a friend schemes can get your server on fire in hours. Viral marketing describes any strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others, creating the potential for exponential growth in the message’s exposure and influence. I guess this Threadwatch article about a Mini-Cooper AD will tell you more.
  59. Ask friends or colleagues in your industry, to review your business website. If you have high profile friends, then you are sure to bring a high traffic and increased authority impact to your website.
  60. Build a funny 404 page that will make your visitors laugh a bit and maybe will attract some links.
  61. Don’t overlook linkbaiting: Organize a contest, adding a competitive element to it and offering a prize, post a very cool and funny post (usually a video or a cartoon or something that everyone would understand visually), ideally related to your industry etc.
  62. Take a 6 months/1 year college class and get a personal page on the university’s .edu domain. Prices are usually cheap
  63. Corporate & e-Commerce Marketing

  64. Issue press releases for your website. No matter the field, a well written press release can not only improve your marketing strategy and gain a few inbound links and link bait from other websites, but can lead to journalists that will cite your company in their offline/online magazine as well as in online news websites like Google News and Yahoo! News.
  65. If you have a company or product presentation website, try to provide multilingual pages. Helps for ranking in different localized search engines and user experience …
  66. If you have local conferences or shows, that relate to your industry attend to them. Go yourself, or send an employee. Make business connections, friends, discuss daily issues, socialize. You wouldn’t imagine how much that will help you on the long run.
  67. If you sell products or services on your website, regularly offer discounts or promotional coupons. That will not only increase sales and visibility but will attract links and stories, especially if you are a well known company. Issue a press release each and every time you offer that discount. Journalists and news search engines like Google News usually pick up the press release if it’s written correctly.
  68. Offer a Privacy Policy (think about how much information is on the Internet; your credit card, your home addresses, your personal letters by email. etc.), a FAQ section, a Help section or any other functionality that will bring your website closer to your visitors, increasing authority, trust and re-visit rates.
  69. No matter your writing skill, read a few pointers about how to write a professional press release (excellent 21 pages e-book on the new rules of PRlocal mirror) and try releasing a free press release at PressBox, Free Press Release, PrLeap, i-Newswire, 24/7 Press Release, PR.com, PR Free or ClickPress. After you’ll see the benefits, hire a professional press release writing service and do it by the book at PrWeb, PrNewsWire and/ore other global, more authoritative PR distribution services.
  70. Read the PccPolo 101 marketing tips (local mirror) and the United States Small Business Administration 100+ Marketing Ideas.
  71. Your customers are always right!
  72. Thou shalt remember that not only Google has a Bible: The 10 Commandments of Marketing (you need a free user account to read this article).
  73. Personalize your company’s cars license plates
  74. Optimize your website’s shopping cart and watch how your average order size increase and your cart abandonment rate decrease.
  75. Blog Marketing

  76. Do you have a company or corporate website ? Build a blog for yourself. Blogs are a common way of internal company communication as well as a good source of PR. Clients and possible clients feel close and can interact with your team, online.
  77. Do you blog ? Pimp your blog with social bookmarking tools, a Feedburner account with the FeedCount option activated to show your RSS subscribers.
  78. If you have a blog (but not only a blog) take full advantage of Technorati. Technorati offers you the chance to submit 20 tags relevant to your blog, when you create your account, and start to claim each blog/website. Don’t let that stop you. Use Technorati tags, tailored for each post individually. Technorati pages rank extremely well, and it’s a great source of traffic, so it’s best to use it to your advantage. Watch how PrWeb uses Technorati tags in every press release, to it’s advantage. The advantage is that your specific article will show up in searches of each of those tags.
  79. Whenever you write a post on your blog, or an article in your publishing website, or a press release, try to think search too. Research with Overture and Wordtracker (if you have an account), what are the best words to use in your title. They tend to help a lot, because the title usually is used in the meta description and URL too. That will boost your page a little in the SERPs.
  80. Plan your blog’s start. When starting a new blog, it’s important to realize that every detail counts. Don’t start with a default theme and ‘hello world’ – like posts and then ask for links. Try to start with 2-3 good written subjects. Always plan ahead and write today, tomorrow’s post.
  81. Always link from your blog. Link to as many quality websites as possible. Don’t be afraid to “spread your PR thin” or some other BS like that. Link to good posts of people, link to good newspaper articles, and most importantly, link to relatively unknown blogs/websites that feature a good original story. In most cases that will yield you some free PR. Most other websites (like PrWeb or blogs etc) have trackback plugins so they’ll feature your story in their comments.
  82. Read Quadzilla’s 9 rules about blogging (disregard rule #10) and Seth Godin’s how to get traffic for your blog post.
  83. Have a blog ? Always ping update services. Here are the Update services I use for this blog (For WordPress, they are located in Options/Writing/Update Services):

    http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
    http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2/
    http://pingqueue.com/rpc/
    http://ping.feedburner.com
    http://www.bloglines.com/ping
    http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2

    I use the Bloglines, Technorati and Google Blogs pings to update those services immediately and not wait for services like Pingomatic to notify them hourly.

    Design, Content, Accessibility and Usability Marketing

  84. The quality of the layout and design matters. Don’t release an ugly, badly design website. I would rather wait to do a much better design and release the website afterwards. The same situation for websites that are already online. Got an ugly design ? Redesign the website. It’s proven that a new, more beautiful and accessible design for a website strongly increases the likelihood of bookmarking, re-visiting, and subscribes to the feed and newsletters.
  85. Write with the user in mind. A BAD post example is like writing a long citation of another blog-post/authority site, and actually writing no opinion of your own. Try to add your own analysis and views of the subject. No matter how many other websites blogged or wrote about a story, they will never write the same post as yours, with the same pro’s and con’s.
  86. Spell check your content. There’s no other big mistake for a publishing site than users criticizing the misspells. Take those extra 2 minutes to check the spelling errors in Word or even Google.
  87. Try to get your readers to comment and to involve themselves with the subject at hand. Uses phrases like “I’d like to know what you think?” / “I’m waiting your suggestions about …” etc.
  88. If you can’t write good stories, don’t. Hire an experienced publisher to do the writing for you. John Scott hired Peter Da Vanzo to blog for V7N’s blog. Not because John can’t, but because he’s not the writing geek and because he wanted a professional blog. That does the job well for him and that can do the job well for you too.
  89. If you have a website where people can pay online for products, make the job easy. Put a BIG button or text, use multiple processors like 2CO, Paypal etc. Don’t hide the payment link in some footer or sidebar space. Make it visible. If you don’t have your own shopping cart, then let the visitor know that he will be redirected to a 3rd party website, to complete the payment process.
  90. Make sure the website is consistent in look, feel and design. Nothing is more disturbing to a visitor/customer than feeling as if they have just gone to another website. Keep colors and themes constant throughout the site. And yes, this is a marketing tool too. You DO want your visitors to come back right ?
  91. If you have a content website, try to keep your posting frequency regular. If you decide to post 1 post per day, then post 1 post per day, every day, every week, 365 days/year. So what if it’s Christmas ? Just don’t make your posting habit irregular. Today 1 post, tomorrow 5 posts, 1 week no posts etc. That disturbs visitors and that will hurt your RSS subscribers and newsletter subscribers numbers.
  92. If you just invested a lot of cash for a beautiful Web 2.0 design and layout (Web 2.0 hotties and how to design Web 2.0 style), why not make the best of it ? Make sure that it’s a valid XHTML and CSS layout and submit it to the hottest CSS galleries around the world like CSS Beauty, CSS Import, CSS Remix or CSS Vault.
  93. Always personalize your e-mail responses, newsletters, invitations and any other material that ends up at your existing or possible future clients. Never send a bulk message. Most of the current clients get offended by such messages and the future possible clients will just ignore them.
  94. Send out a “thank you” email to all existing customers and alert them about your plans for the next year.
  95. Add interactivity to your website. Visitors need to have a communication highway one way or another. If you still haven’t included a commenting system, a forum, a blog or other interactivity systems to your website, do it now. Always ask questions from your readers and try to involve them in your world.
  96. Create an (extensive) glossary of terms in your industry, like Aaron did for his industry: search engine marketing. That will set you apart and will make you an authority website in your niche.
  97. Create powerful anti-spam blocks for your website. No-one will trust your authority if your website is full of spam. Use a Captcha module, or a math module, asking visitors to identify a string or to do a mathematical calculation before their comment gets approved. According to Akismet, 93% of (blog) comments are spam. Loren Baker’s Search Engine Journal got hit with 850.000 spam comments since he installed Akismet (thanks for the info Loren).
  98. Put the accent on visitor experience not traffic. Traffic is useless if you can’t convert it into paying customers. A visitor experience optimized website with 500 visits/day can bring you twice the income then an un-optimized one with 10.000 visits/day.

El doctor Elmer Huerta explica lo que le ocurrió a Gustavo Cerati

(By: Elcomercio.pe)

 El doctor Elmer Huerta explicó en el blog Cuida tu Salud el significado de algunos términos médicos relacionados a la enfermedad de Gustavo Cerati.
Existen dos tipos de derrames cerebrales, tan diferentes como el día y la noche: los infartos cerebrales y las hemorragias cerebrales. El que ha tenido Cerati es una hemorragia cerebral.
“En el infarto cerebral –indica Huerta- la sangre fresca deja de circular por la arteria porque esta se ha obstruido, se ha taponado. Al obstruirse el flujo de sangre fresca, el cerebro se queda sin oxígeno y alimentos y “se muere” (en términos médicos, eso se llama necrosis). Esa muerte del tejido cerebral origina entonces los síntomas de derrame cerebral, los cuales obviamente dependerán de la localización de los tejidos afectados. En algunos casos serán parálisis de la mitad del cuerpo o de trastornos del lenguaje o de la vista, etc”.
“En tanto, las hemorragias cerebrales son brutales, son agudas y ocurren de un momento a otro como un terremoto. Esto debido a que su causa es la súbita ruptura de una arteria cerebral, con lo que la sangre se derrama dentro del cerebro y debido a que cráneo es como un cuarto cerrado que no tiene espacio para expandirse, la sangre comprime el cerebro y eso puede matar al paciente si no se opera de emergencia”, agrega el especialista.
Lea el post completo acerca de la salud de Gustavo Cerati en el blog Cuida tu salud.

Google’s “smart TV” platform to debut tomorrow

(by: MediaBeat.com)

 
We recently reported that Google and Intel will debut their web-enabled “smart TV” platform sometime this week during Google’s I/O developer conference, with Sony as a customer. Now we have a firmer date; It appears that Google is set to debut the platform tomorrow, thanks to some intrepid sleuthing by TechCrunch’s Jason Kincaid.

Some fiddling with Google’s I/O press site URL revealed a page that was clearly not ready for public consumption, except for a telling few words: ““Insert Android press release / TV press release.” The site was quickly taken down after TechCrunch reported on it.

There’s no new information otherwise, but we already know the gist of what will be announced tomorrow. Intel wants to get its Atom CPUs (currently popularized by netbooks) into TVs, and Google wants Android to be the software on top of that. Intel CEO Paul Otellini spoke at length about the company’s vision for web-connected televisions at an analyst meeting a few weeks ago, and word on Google’s television plans have been swirling for months. Google is also already testing a TV search product on Dish Network.

We can expect Google not to be shy about getting web content on televisions. The platform can potentially support streaming video sites like Netflix and Hulu, social networking integration, and even games.

As I wrote previously, it’s telling that Google may be introducing the platform at an event aimed at developers. Since Google TV is based on Android, the company’s mobile operating system, it will likely have a large focus on extending its functionality via applications. Some television makers, like Sony and Samsung, are already offering applications on their televisions — but Google TV would open up the TV app market to third party developers as well.

9 ways to incorporate video into your ad plan

(By: imedia connection)

Video marketing has become one of the best promotional tools on the web. Well-executed videos can grab attention faster than any other advertising medium as videos continue to draw internet users in droves. Research by eMarketer shows 66.7 percent of the 147.5 million U.S. internet users watch video online monthly. By 2014, eMarketer estimates that number will rise to 77 percent of internet users (193.1 million people).

Online video has surged in popularity due to the rapid proliferation of broadband and video technology advances. This has resulted in the production of cost-effective, premium videos, a dramatic increase in traffic to video-sharing sites, and online video’s acceptance into the mainstream. 
Consumers are receptive to video on websites, landing pages, search results pages, emails, and video-sharing sites because it is so engaging and self-explanatory. Video conveys information quickly and accurately, making it an excellent tool for marketers because consumers want to know more about the companies they deal with and the products/services they buy. Video is a very memorable medium. A study by The Wharton School of Business revealed that video improves comprehension and retention by 50 percent over a live presentation. Other studies have indicated that video speeds up buying decisions by 72 percent when compared to print. Therefore, company and product information communicated in videos can generate more leads and ecommerce sales.
The effectiveness of video advertising
It’s well-known that video ads increase traffic and conversions. This has been documented by both online research firms as well as video solution providers. Here are a few key findings from some studies:
.Fox Networks and comScore (January 2010)

  • Americans watched 32.4 billion videos during January 2010, according to comScore Video Metrix.
  • Americans conducted 15.2 billion core searches that month, according to comScore qSearch.
  • Americans watched more than twice as many videos as they conducted searches.
  • While video and display advertising were both effective in driving site visits and advertiser search queries, when video and display ads were evaluated side by side, consumers exposed to video ads were 28 percent more likely to visit the brand site and nearly twice as likely to conduct a trademark search.
  • Video was able to generate a more immediate impact in the first five exposures than display ads in terms of increased site visits and search queries.

In March of this year, comScore found video generates higher lift than display ads in a study directly comparing the effectiveness of video and display.

When comparing the ad effectiveness of video vs. Flash companion banners, Dynamic Logic (2010) found that video is more effective than display when measuring brand lift.

Dynamic Logic (2004), in a classic brand awareness study based on more than 1,500 online ad campaigns from more than 1.7 million respondents, found that online video ads achieved greater branding with fewer impressions than all types of banner ads.    

Time and again, studies indicate video is an effective marketing tool that can be shared easier than any type of media. It’s no wonder online video advertising has experienced robust growth since 2006.

Growth of video ad dollars
The 2009 IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report (PDF) indicated digital video ad spending increased 39 percent to $1 billion in Q4 2009. In 2007, Forrester predicted U.S. online video advertising spending would reach $7.1 billion in 2012, with the retail/wholesale and travel/hospitality industries spending the most on video advertising.

The 2010 eMarketer study mentioned earlier states that spending on online video advertising will increase from $1.4 billion to $5.2 billion between 2008 and 2014. While video advertising is still a fraction of the total internet advertising spend (4 percent in 2009), video is on the rise as a web marketing medium.
Video marketing on the web
Online video has come a long way since the user-generated videos on YouTube. Video is being used in many new and different ways, such as professional video resumes and personal videos for dating. The use of marketing videos online is on the rise due to the interactive, mnemonic, and storytelling features of video. Let’s review a sampling of the marketing uses of video.
Short corporate videos are a hot new format that can be used to promote your business with a little online branding. Research shows that people prefer to watch a video rather than read about your company online. This type of video is displayed on your site to capture the essence of your business, and it gives connecting with your customers, prospects, and stakeholders a personal touch.
These short videos are easy and economical to create and can increase your website response as much as four-fold. One source of excellent online video production is CorpShorts, which produces customized corporate videos. Another source is Spotzer, which offers affordable videos that can be tagged with a business name.
Video interactive banner ads can be used to extend TV campaigns onto the web. Television advertisers can transform their commercials into interactive ads through video advertising technologies like Veeple, Innovid iRolls, or Mixpo.
Veeple makes anything in a video clickable by adding clickable elements to static videos through overlays that make the ads interactive. Innovid iRolls add post-production interactive objects to pre-roll video ads, providing rollover functionality for special offers and sales info. Mixpo transforms a TV spot into an interactive «Xspot» ad by adding overlays that make the video interactive with clickable objects, a call-to-action, or links to the end of the conversion funnel.
Video hot spots allow consumers to scroll over a product in the video to view an ad, click a link with product detail information, or purchase the product directly. A caption with details about the item appears over the product when the user scrolls over the hot spot. This is an unobtrusive way for marketers to reach consumers watching videos of their own choosing. However, this requires product placement efforts.
Videos with buy buttons can be created with Adobe’s new Creative Suite 5, which provides a user-friendly way to build these Flash-enabled applications and deploy them across multiple ecommerce and m-commerce platforms without having to work with software code. This product builds on the omnipresence of Flash across the web. 

Read more at: http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/26656.asp

El cromo de tus sueños

El cromo de tus sueños

Como todas las semanas, FIFA.com abre el espacio para la expresión de sus lectores. Sin embargo, en esta oportunidad, queremos consultarte sobre un tópico distinto y particular: el Álbum Virtual de cromos de la Copa Mundial de la FIFA Sudáfrica 2010. ¿Ya lo estás coleccionando? ¿Cuál es la pegatina más complicada de conseguir?

Hicieron falta apenas un par de días para que el Álbum Virtual de Cromos de la Copa Mundial de la FIFA se convirtiera en una verdadera obsesión. La novedad, esperada por los fanáticos de todo el mundo, corrió como el agua y ya es todo un éxito entre nuestros usuarios. Ahora ha llegado el tiempo de tu opinión: ¿cuál es la pegatina más deseada? Esa que, en cuanto llegue, te hará más feliz que el resto… No seas tímido y comparte tu deseo, ¡otro podría leerlo aquí y ofrecerte un intercambio! ¿Se trata de tu jugador favorito? ¿Tal vez te emocione el logo de tu selección? ¿Te obsesiona el Trofeo de la Copa Mundial de la FIFA?

El espacio, como de costumbre, está abierto para que los internautas intercambien impresiones. Ya sabes lo que tienes que hacer: ¡haz clic en “Añade tu comentario” y cuéntanos cuál es la pegatina que no puedes sacar de tu cabeza!

Si todavía no estás coleccionando el Álbum de cromos Virtual de la Copa Mundial de la FIFA, todavía estás a tiempo. ¡Haz clic en el enlace de la derecha y comienza a abrir paquetes!

lee más en: http://es.fifa.com/worldcup/news/newsid=1204494/index.html#el+cromo+suenos

Did man really walk on the Moon ???

(By: Krishna.org) 

Did man really walk on the Moon or was it the ultimate camera trick, asks David Milne? The greater lunar lie. feetIn the early hours of May 16, 1990, after a week spent watching old video footage of man on the Moon, a thought was turning into an obsession in the mind of Ralph Rene.

Did  man really walk on the Moon ???

“How can the flag be fluttering,” the 47 year old American kept asking himself, “when there’s no wind on the atmosphere free Moon?” That moment was to be the beginning of an incredible Space odyssey for the self-taught engineer from New Jersey. He started investigating the Apollo Moon landings, scouring every NASA film, photo and report with a growing sense of wonder, until finally reaching an awesome conclusion: America had never put a man on the Moon. The giant leap for mankind was fake.
It is of course the conspiracy theory to end all conspiracy theories. But Rene has now put all his findings into a startling book entitled NASA Mooned America. Published by himself, it’s being sold by mail order – and is a compelling read.
The story lifts off in 1961 with Russia firing Yuri Gagarin into space, leaving a panicked America trailing in the space race.
At an emergency meeting of Congress, President Kennedy proposed the ultimate face saver, put a man on the Moon. With an impassioned speech he secured the plan an unbelievable 40 billion dollars. And so, says Rene (and a growing number of astro-physicists are beginning to agree with him), the great Moon hoax was born.
Between 1969 and 1972, seven Apollo ships headed to the Moon. Six claim to have made it, with the ill fated Apollo 13–whose oxygen tanks apparently exploded halfway–being the only casualties.
But with the exception of the known rocks, which could have been easily mocked up in a lab, the photographs and film footage are the only proof that the Eagle ever landed. And Rene believes they’re fake. For a start, he says, the TV footage was hopeless. The world tuned in to watch what looked like two blurred white ghosts gambol threw rocks and dust. Part of the reason for the low quality was that, strangely, NASA provided no direct link up. So networks actually had to film “man’s greatest achievement” from a TV screen in Houston–a deliberate ploy, says Rene, so that nobody could properly examine it.
By contrast, the still photos were stunning. Yet that’s just the problem. The astronauts took thousands of pictures, each one perfectly exposed and sharply focused. Not one was badly composed or even blurred. As Rene points out, that’s not all:

  • The cameras had no white meters or view finders. So the astronauts achieved this feat without being able to see what they were doing.
  • Their film stock was unaffected by the intense peaks and powerful cosmic radiation on the Moon, conditions that should have made it useless.
  • They managed to adjust their cameras, change film and swap filters in pressurized clubs. It should have been almost impossible to bend their fingers. .

Award winning British photographer David Persey is convinced the pictures are fake. His astonishing findings are explained alongside the pictures on these pages, but the basic points are as follows:

  • The shadows could only have been created with multiple light sources and, in particular, powerful spotlights. But the only light source on the Moon was the sun.
  • The American flag and the words “United States” are always brightly lit, even when everything around is in shadow.
  • Not one still picture matches the film footage, yet NASA claims both were shot at the same time.
  • The pictures are so perfect, each one would have taken a slick advertising agency hours to put them together. But the astronauts managed it repeatedly.

David Persey believes the mistakes were deliberate, left there by “whistle blowers”, who were keen for the truth to one day get out. If Persey is right and the pictures are fake, then we’ve only NASA’s word that man ever went to the Moon. And, asks Rene, why would anyone fake pictures of an event that actually happened?
The questions don’t stop there. Outer space is awash with deadly radiation that emanates from solar flares firing out from the sun. Standard astronauts orbiting earth in near space, like those who recently fixed the Hubble telescope, are protected by the earth’s Van Allen belt. But the Moon is 240,000 miles distant, way outside this safe band. And, during the Apollo flights, astronomical data shows there were no less than 1,485 such flares.
John Mauldin, a physicist who works for NASA, once said shielding at least two meters thick would be needed. Yet the walls of the Lunar Landers which took astronauts from the spaceship to the moons surface were, said NASA, “about the thickness of heavy duty aluminum foil”. How could that stop this deadly radiation? And if the astronauts were protected by their space suits, why didn’t rescue workers use such protective gear at the Chernobyl meltdown, which released only a fraction of the dose astronauts would encounter? Not one Apollo astronaut ever contracted cancer–not even the Apollo 16 crew who were on their way to the Moon when a big flare started.
“They should have been fried,” says Rene. Furthermore, every Apollo mission before number 11 (the first to the Moon) was plagued with around 20,000 defects a-piece. Yet, with the exception of Apollo 13, NASA claims there wasn’t one major technical problem on any of their Moon missions. Just one defect could have blown the whole thing. “The odds against this are so unlikely that God must have been the co-pilot,” says Rene.
Several years after NASA claimed its first Moon landing, Buzz Aldrin “the second man on the Moon”–was asked at a banquet what it felt like to step on to the lunar surface.
Aldrin staggered to his feet and left the room crying uncontrollably. It would not be the last time he did this. “It strikes me he’s suffering from trying to live out a very big lie,” says Rene. Aldrin may also fear for his life. Virgil Grissom, a NASA astronaut, was due to pilot Apollo 1. In January 1967, he baited the Apollo program by hanging a lemon on his Apollo capsule (in the US, unroadworthy cars are called lemons) and told his wife Betty: “if there is ever a serious accident in the space program, it’s likely to be me.”
Nobody knows what fuelled his fears, but by the end of the month he and his two co-pilots were dead, burnt to death during a test run when their capsule, pumped full of high pressure pure oxygen, exploded. Scientists couldn’t believe NASA’s carelessness–even a chemistry student in high school knows high pressure oxygen is extremely explosive. In fact, before the first manned Apollo fight even cleared the launch pad, a total of 11 would be astronauts were dead. Apart from the three who were incinerated, seven died in plane crashes and one in a car smash. Now this is a spectacular accident rate.
“One wonders if these ‘accidents’ weren’t NASA’s way of correcting mistakes,” says Rene. “Of saying that some of these men didn’t have the sort of ‘right stuff’ they were looking for.”
NASA won’t respond to any of these claims, their press office will only say that the Moon landings happened and the pictures are real. But a NASA public affairs officer called Julian Scheer once delighted 200 guests at a private party with footage of astronauts apparently on a lunar landscape. It had been made on a mission film set and was identical to what NASA claimed was they real lunar landscape.
“The purpose of this film,” Scheer told the enthralled group, “is to indicate that you really can fake things on the ground, almost to the point of deception.” He then invited his audience to “come to your own decision about whether or not man actually did walk on the Moon”. A sudden attack of honesty? You bet, says Rene, who claims the only real thing about the Apollo missions were the lift offs. The astronauts simply have to be on board, he says, in case the rocket exploded. “It was the easiest way to ensure NASA wasn’t left with three astronauts who ought to be dead,” he claims, adding that they came down a day or so later, out of the public eye (global surveillance wasn’t what it is now) and into the safe hands of NASA officials, who whisked them off to prepare for the big day a week later.
And now NASA is planning another giant step–project Outreach, a one trillion dollar manned mission to Mars. “Think what they’ll be able to mock up with today’s computer graphics,” says Rene chillingly. “Special effects was in its infancy in the 60’s. This time round will have no way of determining the truth.”
Space oddities:

  • Apollo 14 astronaut Allen Shepard played golf on the Moon. In front of a worldwide TV audience, Mission Control teased him about slicing the ball to the right. Yet a slice is caused by uneven air flow over the ball. The Moon has no atmosphere and no air.
  • A camera panned upwards to catch Apollo 16’s Lunar Lander lifting off the Moon. Who did the filming?
  • One NASA picture from Apollo 11 is looking up at Neil Armstrong about to take his giant step for mankind. The photographer must have been lying on the planet surface. If Armstrong was the first man on the Moon, then who took the shot?
  • The pressure inside a space suit was greater than inside a football. The astronauts should have been puffed out like the Michelin Man, but were seen freely bending their joints.
  • The Moon landings took place during the Cold War. Why didn’t America make a signal on the Moon that could be seen from Earth? The PR would have been phenomenal and it could have been easily done with magnesium flares.
  • Text from pictures in the article show only two men walked on the Moon during the Apollo 12 mission. Yet the astronaut reflected in the visor has no camera. Who took the shot?
  • The flags shadow goes behind the rock so doesn’t match the dark line in the foreground, which looks like a line cord. So the shadow to the lower right of the spaceman must be the flag. Where is his shadow? And why is the flag fluttering?
  • How can the flag be brightly lit when its not facing any light ?
  • And where, in all of these shots, are the stars?
  • The Lander weighed 17 tons yet the astronauts feet seem to have made a bigger dent in the dust.
  • The powerful booster rocket at the base of the Lunar Lander was fired to slow descent to the moons service. Yet it has left no traces of blasting on the dust underneath. It should have created a small crater, yet the booster looks like it’s never been fired…

Secret of Googlenomics: Data-Fueled Recipe Brews Profitability

As the amount of data at Google’s disposal grows, the opportunities to exploit it multiply.

In the midst of financial apocalypse, the gadflies and gurus of the global marketplace are gathered at the San Francisco Hilton for the annual meeting of the American Economics Association. The mood is similar to a seismologist convention in the wake of the Big One. Yet surprisingly, one of the most popular sessions has nothing to do with toxic assets, derivatives, or unemployment curves.
«I’m going to talk about online auctions,» says Hal Varian, the session’s first speaker. Varian is a lanky 62-year-old professor at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and School of Information, but these days he’s best known as Google’s chief economist. This morning’s crowd hasn’t come for predictions about the credit market; they want to hear about Google’s secret sauce.

Varian is an expert on what may be the most successful business idea in history: AdWords, Google’s unique method for selling online advertising. AdWords analyzes every Google search to determine which advertisers get each of up to 11 «sponsored links» on every results page. It’s the world’s biggest, fastest auction, a never-ending, automated, self-service version of Tokyo’s boisterous Tsukiji fish market, and it takes place, Varian says, «every time you search.» He never mentions how much revenue advertising brings in. But Google is a public company, so anyone can find the number: It was $21 billion last year.
His talk quickly becomes technical. There’s the difference between the Generalized Second Price auction model and the Vickrey-Clark-Groves alternative. Game theory takes a turn; so does the Nash Equilibrium.

Terms involving the c-word—as in clicks—get tossed around like beach balls at a summer rock festival. Clickthrough rate. Cost per click. Supply curve of clicks. The audience is enthralled.
During the question-and-answer period, a man wearing a camel-colored corduroy blazer raises his hand. «Let me understand this,» he begins, half skeptical, half unsure. «You say that an auction happens every time a search takes place? That would mean millions of times a day!»
Varian smiles. «Millions,» he says, «is actually quite an understatement.»

Why does Google even need a chief economist? The simplest reason is that the company is an economy unto itself. The ad auction, marinated in that special sauce, is a seething laboratory of fiduciary forensics, with customers ranging from giant multinationals to dorm-room entrepreneurs, all billed by the world’s largest micropayment system.

Google depends on economic principles to hone what has become the search engine of choice for more than 60 percent of all Internet surfers, and the company uses auction theory to grease the skids of its own operations. All these calculations require an army of math geeks, algorithms of Ramanujanian complexity, and a sales force more comfortable with whiteboard markers than fairway irons.
Varian, an upbeat, avuncular presence at the Googleplex in Mountain View, California, serves as the Adam Smith of the new discipline of Googlenomics. His job is to provide a theoretical framework for Google’s business practices while leading a team of quants to enforce bottom-line discipline, reining in the more propellerhead propensities of the company’s dominant engineering culture.
Googlenomics actually comes in two flavors: macro and micro. The macroeconomic side involves some of the company’s seemingly altruistic behavior, which often baffles observers. Why does Google give away products like its browser, its apps, and the Android operating system for mobile phones? Anything that increases Internet use ultimately enriches Google, Varian says. And since using the Web without using Google is like dining at In-N-Out without ordering a hamburger, more eyeballs on the Web lead inexorably to more ad sales for Google.

The microeconomics of Google is more complicated. Selling ads doesn’t generate only profits; it also generates torrents of data about users’ tastes and habits, data that Google then sifts and processes in order to predict future consumer behavior, find ways to improve its products, and sell more ads. This is the heart and soul of Googlenomics. It’s a system of constant self-analysis: a data-fueled feedback loop that defines not only Google’s future but the future of anyone who does business online.
When the American Economics Association meets next year, the financial crisis may still be topic A. But one of the keynote speakers has already been chosen: Googlenomist Hal Varian.
Ironically, economics was a distant focus in the first days of Google. After Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded the company in 1998, they channeled their energy into its free search product and left much of the business planning to a 22-year-old Stanford graduate named Salar Kamangar, Google’s ninth employee. The early assumption was that although ads would be an important source of revenue, licensing search technology and selling servers would be just as lucrative. Page and Brin also believed that ads should be useful and welcome—not annoying intrusions. Kamangar and another early Googler, Eric Veach, set out to implement that ideal. Neither had a background in business or economics. Kamangar had been a biology major, and Veach’s field of study was computer science.

Hal Varian, high priest of Googlenomics.
Photo: Joe Pugliese

Google’s ads were always plain blocks of text relevant to the search query. But at first, there were two kinds. Ads at the top of the page were sold the old-fashioned way, by a crew of human beings headquartered largely in New York City. Salespeople wooed big customers over dinner, explaining what keywords meant and what the prices were. Advertisers were then billed by the number of user views, or impressions, regardless of whether anyone clicked on the ad. Down the right side were other ads that smaller businesses could buy directly online. The first of these, for live mail-order lobsters, was sold in 2000, just minutes after Google deployed a link reading see your ad here.
But as the business grew, Kamangar and Veach decided to price the slots on the side of the page by means of an auction. Not an eBay-style auction that unfolds over days or minutes as bids are raised or abandoned, but a huge marketplace of virtual auctions in which sealed bids are submitted in advance and winners are determined algorithmically in fractions of a second. Google hoped that millions of small and medium companies would take part in the market, so it was essential that the process be self-service. Advertisers bid on search terms, or keywords, but instead of bidding on the price per impression, they were bidding on a price they were willing to pay each time a user clicked on the ad. (The bid would be accompanied by a budget of how many clicks the advertiser was willing to pay for.) The new system was called AdWords Select, while the ads at the top of the page, with prices still set by humans, was renamed AdWords Premium.
One key innovation was that all the sidebar slots on the results page were sold off in a single auction. (Compare that to an early pioneer of auction-driven search ads, Overture, which held a separate auction for each slot.) The problem with an all-at-once auction, however, was that advertisers might be inclined to lowball their bids to avoid the sucker’s trap of paying a huge amount more than the guy just below them on the page. So the Googlers decided that the winner of each auction would pay the amount (plus a penny) of the bid from the advertiser with the next-highest offer. (If Joe bids $10, Alice bids $9, and Sue bids $6, Joe gets the top slot and pays $9.01. Alice gets the next slot for $6.01, and so on.) Since competitors didn’t have to worry about costly overbidding errors, the paradoxical result was that it encouraged higher bids.
«Eric Veach did the math independently,» Kamangar says. «We found out along the way that second-price auctions had existed in other forms in the past and were used at one time in Treasury auctions.» (Another crucial innovation had to do with ad quality, but more on that later.)

Google’s homemade solution to its ad problem impressed even Paul Milgrom, the Stanford economist who is to auction theory what Letitia Baldridge is to etiquette. «I’ve begun to realize that Google somehow stumbled on a level of simplification in ad auctions that was not included before,» he says. And applying a variation on second-price auctions wasn’t just a theoretical advance. «Google immediately started getting higher prices for advertising than Overture was getting.»
Google hired Varian in May 2002, a few months after implementing the auction- based version of AdWords. The offer came about when Google’s then-new CEO, Eric Schmidt, ran into Varian at the Aspen Institute and they struck up a conversation about Internet issues. Schmidt was with Larry Page, who was pushing his own notions about how some of the big problems in business and science could be solved by using computation and analysis on an unprecedented scale. Varian remembers thinking, «Why did Eric bring his high-school nephew?»

Schmidt, whose father was an economist, invited Varian to spend a day or two a week at Google. On his first visit, Varian asked Schmidt what he should do. «Why don’t you take a look at the ad auction?» Schmidt said.
Google had already developed the basics of AdWords, but there was still plenty of tweaking to do, and Varian was uniquely qualified to «take a look.» As head of the information school at UC Berkeley and coauthor (with Carl Shapiro) of a popular book called Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy, he was already the go-to economist on ecommerce.
At the time, most online companies were still selling advertising the way it was done in the days of Mad Men. But Varian saw immediately that Google’s ad business was less like buying traditional spots and more like computer dating. «The theory was Google as yenta—matchmaker,» he says. He also realized there was another old idea underlying the new approach: A 1983 paper by Harvard economist Herman Leonard described using marketplace mechanisms to assign job candidates to slots in a corporation, or students to dorm rooms. It was called a two-sided matching market. «The mathematical structure of the Google auction,» Varian says, «is the same as those two-sided matching markets.»
Varian tried to understand the process better by applying game theory. «I think I was the first person to do that,» he says. After just a few weeks at Google, he went back to Schmidt. «It’s amazing!» Varian said. «You’ve managed to design an auction perfectly.»
To Schmidt, who had been at Google barely a year, this was an incredible relief. «Remember, this was when the company had 200 employees and no cash,» he says. «All of a sudden we realized we were in the auction business.»

It wasn’t long before the success of AdWords Select began to dwarf that of its sister system, the more traditional AdWords Premium. Inevitably, Veach and Kamangar argued that all the ad slots should be auctioned off. In search, Google had already used scale, power, and clever algorithms to change the way people accessed information. By turning over its sales process entirely to an auction-based system, the company could similarly upend the world of advertising, removing human guesswork from the equation.
The move was risky. Going ahead with the phaseout—nicknamed Premium Sunset—meant giving up campaigns that were selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars, for the unproven possibility that the auction process would generate even bigger sums. «We were going to erase a huge part of the company’s revenue,» says Tim Armstrong, then head of direct sales in the US. (This March, Armstrong left Google to become AOL’s new chair and CEO.) «Ninety-nine percent of companies would have said, ‘Hold on, don’t make that change.’ But we had Larry, Sergey, and Eric saying, ‘Let’s go for it.'»

News of the switch jacked up the Maalox consumption among Google’s salespeople. Instead of selling to corporate giants, their job would now be to get them to place bids in an auction? «We thought it was a little half-cocked,» says Jeff Levick, an early leader of the Google sales team. The young company wasn’t getting rid of its sales force (though the system certainly helped Google run with far fewer salespeople than a traditional media company) but was asking them to get geekier, helping big customers shape online strategies as opposed to simply selling ad space.

Levick tells a story of visiting three big customers to inform them of the new system: «The guy in California almost threw us out of his office and told us to fuck ourselves. The guy in Chicago said, ‘This is going to be the worst business move you ever made.’ But the guy in Massachusetts said, ‘I trust you.'»
That client knew math, says Levick, whose secret weapon was the numbers. When the data was crunched—and Google worked hard to give clients the tools needed to run the numbers themselves—advertisers saw that the new system paid off for them, too.

AdWords was such a hit that Google went auction-crazy. The company used auctions to place ads on other Web sites (that program was dubbed AdSense). «But the really gutsy move,» Varian says, «was using it in the IPO.» In 2004, Google used a variation of a Dutch auction for its IPO; Brin and Page loved that the process leveled the playing field between small investors and powerful brokerage houses. And in 2008, the company couldn’t resist participating in the FCC’s auction to reallocate portions of the radio spectrum.
Google even uses auctions for internal operations, like allocating servers among its various business units. Since moving a product’s storage and computation to a new data center is disruptive, engineers often put it off. «I suggested we run an auction similar to what the airlines do when they oversell a flight. They keep offering bigger vouchers until enough customers give up their seats,» Varian says. «In our case, we offer more machines in exchange for moving to new servers. One group might do it for 50 new ones, another for 100, and another won’t move unless we give them 300. So we give them to the lowest bidder—they get their extra capacity, and we get computation shifted to the new data center.»

The transition to an all-auction sales model was a milestone for Google, ensuring that its entire revenue engine would run with the same computer-science fervor as its search operation. Now, when Google recruits alpha geeks, it is just as likely to have them focus on AdWords as on search or apps.

The across-the-board emphasis on engineering, mathematical formulas, and data-mining has made Google a new kind of company. But to fully understand why, you have to go back and look under AdWords’ hood.
Most people think of the Google ad auction as a straightforward affair. In fact, there’s a key component that few users know about and even sophisticated advertisers don’t fully understand. The bids themselves are only a part of what ultimately determines the auction winners. The other major determinant is something called the quality score. This metric strives to ensure that the ads Google shows on its results page are true, high-caliber matches for what users are querying. If they aren’t, the whole system suffers and Google makes less money.
Google determines quality scores by calculating multiple factors, including the relevance of the ad to the specific keyword or keywords, the quality of the landing page the ad is linked to, and, above all, the percentage of times users actually click on a given ad when it appears on a results page. (Other factors, Google won’t even discuss.) There’s also a penalty invoked when the ad quality is too low—in such cases, the company slaps a minimum bid on the advertiser. Google explains that this practice—reviled by many companies affected by it—protects users from being exposed to irrelevant or annoying ads that would sour people on sponsored links in general. Several lawsuits have been filed by would-be advertisers who claim that they are victims of an arbitrary process by a quasi monopoly.

You can argue about fairness, but arbitrary it ain’t. To figure out the quality score, Google needs to estimate in advance how many users will click on an ad. That’s very tricky, especially since we’re talking about billions of auctions. But since the ad model depends on predicting clickthroughs as perfectly as possible, the company must quantify and analyze every twist and turn of the data. Susan Wojcicki, who oversees Google’s advertising, refers to it as «the physics of clicks.»

During Varian’s second summer in Mountain View, when he was still coming in only a day or two a week, he asked a recently hired computer scientist from Stanford named Diane Tang to create the Google equivalent of the Consumer Price Index, called the Keyword Pricing Index. «Instead of a basket of goods like diapers and beer and doughnuts, we have keywords,» says Tang, who is known internally as the Queen of Clicks.
The Keyword Pricing Index is a reality check. It alerts Google to any anomalous price bubbles, a sure sign that an auction isn’t working properly. Categories are ranked by the cost per click that advertisers generally have to pay, weighted by distribution, and then separated into three bundles: high cap, mid cap, and low cap. «The high caps are very competitive keywords, like ‘flowers’ and ‘hotels,'» Tang says. In the mid-cap realm you have keywords that may vary seasonally—the price to place ads alongside results for «snowboarding» skyrockets during the winter. Low caps like «Massachusetts buggy whips» are the stuff of long tails.
Tang’s index is just one example of a much broader effort. As the amount of data at the company’s disposal grows, the opportunities to exploit it multiply, which ends up further extending the range and scope of the Google economy. So it’s utterly essential to calculate correctly the quality scores that prop up AdWords.
«The people working for me are generally econometricians—sort of a cross between statisticians and economists,» says Varian, who moved to Google full-time in 2007 (he’s on leave from Berkeley) and leads two teams, one of them focused on analysis.

«Google needs mathematical types that have a rich tool set for looking for signals in noise,» says statistician Daryl Pregibon, who joined Google in 2003 after 23 years as a top scientist at Bell Labs and AT&T Labs. «The rough rule of thumb is one statistician for every 100 computer scientists.»

Keywords and click rates are their bread and butter. «We are trying to understand the mechanisms behind the metrics,» says Qing Wu, one of Varian’s minions. His specialty is forecasting, so now he predicts patterns of queries based on the season, the climate, international holidays, even the time of day. «We have temperature data, weather data, and queries data, so we can do correlation and statistical modeling,» Wu says. The results all feed into Google’s backend system, helping advertisers devise more-efficient campaigns.

To track and test their predictions, Wu and his colleagues use dozens of onscreen dashboards that continuously stream information, a sort of Bloomberg terminal for the Googlesphere. Wu checks obsessively to see whether reality is matching the forecasts: «With a dashboard, you can monitor the queries, the amount of money you make, how many advertisers you have, how many keywords they’re bidding on, what the rate of return is for each advertiser.»

Wu calls Google «the barometer of the world.» Indeed, studying the clicks is like looking through a window with a panoramic view of everything. You can see the change of seasons—clicks gravitating toward skiing and heavy clothes in winter, bikinis and sunscreen in summer—and you can track who’s up and down in pop culture. Most of us remember news events from television or newspapers; Googlers recall them as spikes in their graphs. «One of the big things a few years ago was the SARS epidemic,» Tang says. Wu didn’t even have to read the papers to know about the financial meltdown—he saw the jump in people Googling for gold. And since prediction and analysis are so crucial to AdWords, every bit of data, no matter how seemingly trivial, has potential value.

Since Google hired Varian, other companies, like Yahoo, have decided that they, too, must have a chief economist heading a division that scrutinizes auctions, dashboards, and econometric models to fine-tune their business plan. In 2007, Harvard economist Susan Athey was surprised to get a summons to Redmond to meet with Steve Ballmer. «That’s a call you take,» she says. Athey spent last year working in Microsoft’s Cambridge, Massachusetts, office.

Can the rest of the world be far behind? Although Eric Schmidt doesn’t think it will happen as quickly as some believe, he does think that Google-style auctions are applicable to all sorts of transactions. The solution to the glut in auto inventory? Put the entire supply of unsold cars up for bid. That’ll clear out the lot. Housing, too: «People use auctions now in cases of distress, like auctioning a house when there are no buyers,» Schmidt says. «But you can imagine a situation in which it was a normal and routine way of doing things.»
Varian believes that a new era is dawning for what you might call the datarati—and it’s all about harnessing supply and demand. «What’s ubiquitous and cheap?» Varian asks. «Data.» And what is scarce? The analytic ability to utilize that data. As a result, he believes that the kind of technical person who once would have wound up working for a hedge fund on Wall Street will now work at a firm whose business hinges on making smart, daring choices—decisions based on surprising results gleaned from algorithmic spelunking and executed with the confidence that comes from really doing the math.

It’s a satisfying development for Varian, a guy whose career as an economist was inspired by a sci-fi novel he read in junior high. «In Isaac Asimov’s first Foundation Trilogy, there was a character who basically constructed mathematical models of society, and I thought this was a really exciting idea. When I went to college, I looked around for that subject. It turned out to be economics.» Varian is telling this story from his pied-è0-Plex, where he sometimes stays during the week to avoid driving the 40-some miles from Google headquarters to his home in the East Bay. It happens to be the ranch-style house, which Google now owns, where Brin and Page started the company.

There’s a wild contrast between this sparsely furnished residence and what it has spawned—dozens of millionaire geeks, billions of auctions, and new ground rules for businesses in a data-driven society that is far weirder than the one Asimov envisioned nearly 60 years ago. What could be more baffling than a capitalist corporation that gives away its best services, doesn’t set the prices for the ads that support it, and turns away customers because their ads don’t measure up to its complex formulas? Varian, of course, knows that his employer’s success is not the result of inspired craziness but of an early recognition that the Internet rewards fanatical focus on scale, speed, data analysis, and customer satisfaction. (A bit of auction theory doesn’t hurt, either.) Today we have a name for those rules: Googlenomics. Learn them, or pay the price.

Read More http://www.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/magazine/17-06/nep_googlenomics?currentPage=all#ixzz0nMW5X2Q2

Facebook’s Gone Rogue; It’s Time for an Open Alternative

(By: Wired.com)

Facebook has gone rogue, drunk on founder Mark Zuckerberg’s dreams of world domination. It’s time the rest of the web ecosystem recognizes this and works to replace it with something open and distributed.

Facebook used to be a place to share photos and thoughts with friends and family and maybe play a few stupid games that let you pretend you were a mafia don or a homesteader. It became a very useful way to connect with your friends, long-lost friends and family members. Even if you didn’t really want to keep up with them.

Soon everybody — including your uncle Louie and that guy you hated from your last job — had a profile.

And Facebook realized it owned the network.

Then Facebook decided to turn “your” profile page into your identity online — figuring, rightly, that there’s money and power in being the place where people define themselves. But to do that, the folks at Facebook had to make sure that the information you give it was public.

So in December, with the help of newly hired Beltway privacy experts, it reneged on its privacy promises and made much of your profile information public by default. That includes the city that you live in, your name, your photo, the names of your friends and the causes you’ve signed onto.

This spring Facebook took that even further. All the items you list as things you like must become public and linked to public profile pages. If you don’t want them linked and made public, then you don’t get them — though Facebook nicely hangs onto them in its database in order to let advertisers target you.

This includes your music preferences, employment information, reading preferences, schools, etc. All the things that make up your profile. They all must be public — and linked to public pages for each of those bits of info — or you don’t get them at all. That’s hardly a choice, and the whole system is maddeningly complex.

Simultaneously, the company began shipping your profile information off pre-emptively to Yelp, Pandora and Microsoft — so that if you show up there while already logged into Facebook, the sites can “personalize” your experience when you show up. You can try to opt out after the fact, but you’ll need a master’s in Facebook bureaucracy to stop it permanently.

Care to write a status update to your friends? Facebook sets the default for those messages to be published to the entire internet through direct funnels to the net’s top search engines. You can use a dropdown field to restrict your publishing, but it’s seemingly too hard for Facebook to actually remember that’s what you do. (Google Buzz, for all the criticism it has taken, remembers your setting from your last post and uses that as the new default.)

Now, say you you write a public update, saying, “My boss had a crazy great idea for a new product!” Now, you might not know it, but there is a Facebook page for “My Crazy Boss” and because your post had all the right words, your post now shows up on that page. Include the words “FBI” or “CIA,” and you show up on the FBI or CIA page.

Then there’s the new Facebook “Like” button littering the internet. It’s a great idea, in theory — but it’s completely tied to your Facebook account, and you have no control over how it is used. (No, you can’t like something and not have it be totally public.)

Then there’s Facebook’s campaign against outside services. There was the Web 2.0 suicide machine that let you delete your profile by giving it your password. Facebook shut it down.

Another company has an application that will collect all your updates from services around the web into a central portal — including from Facebook — after you give the site your password to log in to Facebook. Facebook is suing the company and alleging it is breaking criminal law by not complying with its terms of service.

No wonder 14 privacy groups filed a unfair-trade complaint with the FTC against Facebook on Wednesday.

Mathew Ingram at GigaOm wrote a post entitled “The Relationship Between Facebook and Privacy: It’s Really Complicated.”

No, that’s just wrong. The relationship is simple: Facebook thinks that your notions of privacy — meaning your ability to control information about yourself — are just plain old-fashioned. Head honcho Zuckerberg told a live audience in January that Facebook is simply responding to changes in privacy mores, not changing them — a convenient, but frankly untrue, statement.

In Facebook’s view, everything (save perhaps your e-mail address) should be public. Funny too about that e-mail address, for Facebook would prefer you to use its e-mail–like system that censors the messages sent between users.

Ingram goes onto say, “And perhaps Facebook doesn’t make it as clear as it could what is involved, or how to fine-tune its privacy controls — but at the same time, some of the onus for doing these things has to fall to users.”

What? How can it fall to users when most of the choices don’t’ actually exist? I’d like to make my friend list private. Cannot.

I’d like to have my profile visible only to my friends, not my boss. Cannot.

I’d like to support an anti-abortion group without my mother or the world knowing. Cannot.

Setting up a decent system for controlling your privacy on a web service shouldn’t be hard. And if multiple blogs are writing posts explaining how to use your privacy system, you can take that as a sign you aren’t treating your users with respect, It means you are coercing them into choices they don’t want using design principles. That’s creepy.

Facebook could start with a very simple page of choices: I’m a private person, I like sharing some things, I like living my life in public. Each of those would have different settings for the myriad of choices, and all of those users could then later dive into the control panel to tweak their choices. That would be respectful design – but Facebook isn’t about respect — it’s about re-configuring the world’s notion of what’s public and private.

So what that you might be a teenager and don’t get that college-admissions offices will use your e-mail address to find possibly embarrassing information about you. Just because Facebook got to be the world’s platform for identity by promising you privacy and then later ripping it out from under you, that’s your problem. At least, according to the bevy of privacy hired guns the company brought in at high salaries to provide cover for its shenanigans.

Clearly Facebook has taught us some lessons. We want easier ways to share photos, links and short updates with friends, family, co-workers and even, sometimes, the world.

But that doesn’t mean the company has earned the right to own and define our identities.

It’s time for the best of the tech community to find a way to let people control what and how they’d like to share. Facebook’s basic functions can be turned into protocols, and a whole set of interoperating software and services can flourish.

Think of being able to buy your own domain name and use simple software such as Posterous to build a profile page in the style of your liking. You’d get to control what unknown people get to see, while the people you befriend see a different, more intimate page. They could be using a free service that’s ad-supported, which could be offered by Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, a bevy of startups or web-hosting services like Dreamhost.

“Like” buttons around the web could be configured to do exactly what you want them to — add them to a protected profile or get added to a wish list on your site or broadcast by your micro-blogging service of choice. You’d be able to control your presentation of self — and as in the real world, compartmentalize your life.

People who just don’t want to leave Facebook could play along as well — so long as Facebook doesn’t continue creepy data practices like turning your info over to third parties, just because one of your contacts takes the “Which Gilligan Island character are you?” quiz? (Yes, that currently happens)

Now, it might not be likely that a loose confederation of software companies and engineers can turn Facebook’s core services into shared protocols, nor would it be easy for that loose coupling of various online services to compete with Facebook, given that it has 500 million users. Many of them may be fine having Facebook redefine their cultural norms, or just be too busy or lazy to leave.

But in the internet I’d like to live in, we’d have that option, instead of being left with the choice of letting Facebook use us, or being left out of the conversation altogether.

Read More http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/05/facebook-rogue/#ixzz0nMFT5zOM