Our New Marketing Newsletter

April 26, 2007

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Afro Articles - Article & Internet Marketing Directory is offering a free Internet Marketing E-Newsletter designed to help authors/marketers improve their Internet marketing strategies and results.

You will receive relevant marketing information that we dig up from the Internet Marketing World, informative marketing articles plus many other marketing related info.

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Written by James Opiko · Filed Under Newsletter Archives | Leave a Comment

Landing Page Optimization - Marketing Experiments Conversion Formula and Course

April 18, 2007

MEC(Marketing Experiments Conversion) Labs has identified five essential elements to website conversion, which are brought together in the MEC Conversion Formula.

In their seven session on-demand course their experts will share the MEC Conversion Formula that they have developed over the past five years conducting tests with partners such as The New York Times, Reuters, and Insurance.com.

The next course will focus on eCommerce based websites and will begin May 24th, and will encompass the following:

How to develop a value proposition to motivate your page visitors
How to reduce friction and motivate page visitors to move forward and take action
How to increase page relevance and reduce visitor anxiety
How to design landing pages to hold and engage the attention of your readers
How to test and track metrics and analyze results to make further improvements
The process and taxonomy of testing

Click here to learn more details, and how the course works.

Featured Article: How to Build Landing Pages that Convert — Driving traffic from PPC (pay-per-click) or email campaigns to your home page is a mistake. You must deliver on the promise in your lead ad copy if you hope to convert traffic. Dumping people on a home page and forcing them to navigate their way to what they want is a strategy for failure. Click here to read full article.

Written by James Opiko · Filed Under Marketing, Web-Dev-Design | Leave a Comment

7 Reasons Google’s Paid Link Snitch Plan Sucks

April 18, 2007

By: Rich Ord

Matt Cutts blogged that Google would like you, the average search engine user, to report on sites you feel are displaying links for cash. This created a firestorm of negative responses from the SEO, webmaster, and free speech crowd. Below, I put together what I feel are the top 7 reasons Google’s paid link snitch plan sucks. I linked to my inspirations (No payment requested!).

1. Links are valuable because of the Page Rank display in the Google Toolbar. Matt, if Google doesn’t like the way paid links influence search results, then eliminate the scoreboard. It’s hard to take your call-to-action seriously when you have the power to grind serious link buying to a halt all by yourself.

If people had to guess a page rank, most of their motivation for buying links would go away. Of course, Google won’t eliminate the green bar because that is the number one reason the Google search engine is at the top of most web browsers.

2. Most people that post on Digg, or add articles to Wikipedia, or work as editors at DMOZ also send paid link reports to Google to benefit themselves in some way. My point: Anyone taking the time to send complaints to Google about a paid link that hurts no one and may even be relevant, probably has unseen motivations.

One of the problems is that there is no other motivation I can see to report a paid link than to help Google out. It’s not like paid links irritate the end user like poor search results do. Therefore, the detection these reports offer will be of no value to Google.

3. It’s impossible to define a paid link exactly. Paying cash is obviously what you meant, but is that any different than a link to a client or to a buddy who helped you submit your site to 1,000 free web directories?

If I’m right with that assumption, then it’s really about determining motivation. Humans cannot determine motivations any better than the Google algorithm. It’s a virtual coin toss!

4. Payment can be proven only by following the money trail. Otherwise, it is simply a case of ‘he said, she said.’ This creates a heavy burden on Google to be correct in their assumptions.

5. Marketing Pilgrim’s Andy Beal asks: “What business does Google have in dictating the disclosure of any business relationships on others?”

Google, you are just a search engine. You should be reacting to the internet world, not trying to recreate it in your own image. Links are not evil and payment for links is not evil. The Web is based on links, link-trading and advertising, which of course is payment for links.

6. The hypocrisy of being in the business of selling links and then asking others not to sell them is a bit much for many webmasters.

7. Is this just a way to cre ate more spending for Google AdWords? Stopping the selling of links will make AdWords one of the last ways to generate traffic from Google. If the link police can slow this to a crawl, then what will businesses do?

Related blog entries:

Google Tells You How to Run Your Website - SEO Class
Paid Links Are Spam? - Google Blogoscoped
Revisiting Paid Links - SEO Buzz Box

About the Author: Rich Ord is the CEO of iEntry, Inc. which includes WebProNews and 100 other sites.

Written by James Opiko · Filed Under Marketing, Search Engines | Leave a Comment

iProspect Social Networking User Behavior Study — (April 2007)

April 10, 2007

In January 2007, iProspect partnered with independent research firm JupiterResearch to develop a series of survey questions focused on how the U.S. online population utilizes several of the most popular social networking websites (or social search engines).

For purposes of this study iProspect defines a “social networking website” as one that allows Internet users have the ability to add user-generated content such as: comments, reviews, feedback, ratings, or their own dedicated pages. All of the sites examined within this study allow posting of user-generated content.

…continued

References:

Featured Article: Scratching a Niche in Social Networking

Social Networking Articles

Web 2.0 Articles