Author: Jas

Jas Dhaliwal is a highly experienced International Social Media Strategist. Currently working as AVG Technologies, Director of Communities and Online Engagement, he specialises in building and engaging with social communities across the web. Born and bred in London, he is passionate about technology and social anthropology. Prior to AVG, Jas launched the social media program for Microsoft’s MVP Award program. Jas holds a BSc (Hons) in Information Systems and has an MBA from Brunel University in London, England. You can follow Jas as @Jas on Twitter or on Google+

Search Engine Marketing Blogs

Wow! The sheer number of marketing blogs on this topic is staggering. Marketeers are milking the hell out of this. Below is a link that will link you to over 380 blogs covering search engine marketing with a few that venture into blogging, social media and new media public relations. Search engines HAVE truly been hijacked by marketeers.

http://www.toprankblog.com/search-marketing-blogs/

http://www.toprankblog.com/2007/03/search-marketing-blogs-update-030207/

Here’s how to improve your Google web site rankings!

Sssssshhh! Can you keep a secret?

Internet marketing expert Derek Gehl lays out 5 simple steps for finding the keywords that can make or break an online business. Keyword research is fundamental to starting and growing an online business according to Derek Gehl, CEO of the Internet Marketing Center

“Keyword application goes way beyond search engine optimization,” Gehl says. “It’s also critical to finding viable niche markets and researching new products. Yet it’s an area that many of my customers have questions about.”

To address these questions, Gehl has released a report that breaks the process down into five easy-to-follow steps:

Step 1: Create a list of 200 to 300 keywords. “It’s essential to think like a customer in this step,” Gehl says. “What words would you plug into the search engine to find something you don’t know a lot about?”

Step 2: Perform a “competition search” in Wordtracker. Wordtracker is an Internet marketing research tool that shows you exactly how many people are searching for a keyword compared to how many sites are already ranking under it.

Step 3: Size up the competition in the search engines. “Find out whether the sites ranking under these keywords really are competition,” says Gehl. “Are they selling competing products? Do they look professional?”

Step 4: Use pay-per-click ads to test the best keywords. Pay-per-click advertising gives online marketers a quick method for testing which keywords attract the most traffic and which convert best into sales.

Step 5: Include the top-performing keywords in website “hotspots.” Gehl recommends that his clients put their top-performing keywords in key areas on their website, including “title” tags, headlines, and in the first and last paragraphs of text. “The keywords in these areas are given more weight by the search engines when deciding how to rank a site,” Gehl says.

The full report on how to use Internet marketing research tools to find viable keywords is available at http://www.MarketingTips.com/newsletters.

Web 2.0 – A lucid explanation

What is Web 2.0? This is the question many are asking. So let’s answer it.

Web 2.0 concerns four different paradigms converging:

1. Community. This is the most obvious one. Community is basically interaction between members, between websites, and between the website admins and its members. The best example is Wikipedia: no one claims copyright control over it, and so we are breaking the traditional authorship rights. When we contribute to Wikipedia, anyone can read our contribution, anyone can copy it, anyone can edit, and dang it, anyone can delete it. This is very new.

The other new thing is voting. Now we have popularity contests of our contributions. Digg.com becoming the ultimate voting system. If you think hard, you can also convince yourself that, Google’s PageRank system is essentially an algorithm that measures social popularity (link = vote).

2. Technology. XML, AJAX, RSS, APIs and other BLAH! I’m not going to bore you with the in depth technology. However, take this away. The technologies mentioned above and more importantly, allow a standard agreed method for websites, blogs, My Space, YouTube to work. This, in my opinion is the biggest “technological” breakthrough.

3. Architecture. This is best described by the Cluetrain Manifesto as:

Quote:
The Web has become the new corporate infrastructure, in the form of intranets, turning massive corporate hierarchical systems into collections of many small pieces loosely joining themselves unpredictably.

4. Look. Every movement has a look: the 80s, 90s and now Web 2.0. Long gone are square boxes with plain boring color. No man, bring on bright, vibrant colours. Give me some jive. Don’t be square. Lively and fresh is what we are. Why be something else? And yes, white space is the new “black”

So this is Web 2.0 in a nutshell. Web 2.5 is in beta now and will be released shortly.

25 Startups to watch for in 2007

Business 2.0 magazine has listed 25 Web 2.0 startups to watch for in 2007

1. www.stumbleupon.com [Social Media]
2. www.slide.com [Social Media]
3. www.bebo.com [Social Media]
4. www.meebo.com [Social Media]
5. www.wikia.com [Social Media]
6. www.joost.com [Video]
7. www.dabble.com [Video] (Using a weird “loser” logo??
8. www.metacafe.com [Video]
9. www.revision3.com [Video]
10. www.blip.tv [Video]
11. www.fon.com [Mobile]
12. www.loopt.com [Mobile]
13. www.getmobio.com [Mobile]
14. www.tinypictures.us [Mobile]
15. www.soonr.com [Mobile]
16. www.turn.com [Advertising]
17. www.adify.com [Advertising]
18. www.admob.com [Advertising]
19. www.spotrunner.com [Advertising]
20. www.vitrue.com [Advertising]
21. www.successfactors.com [Enterprise]
22. www.janrain.com [Enterprise]
23. www.logoworks.com [Enterprise]
24. www.reardencommerce.com [Enterprise]
25. www.simulscribe.com [Enterprise]

1 word, 28 actors and one phone to rule them all?

The 2007 Oscar award night teaser trailer of the iPhone cost Apple $1.7 million, possibly the most expensive “hello” in history!

Apple’s iPhone should be termed the Web 2.0 phone really. The iPhone has not even been launched yet, with Apple already working on a new version with added 3G functionality. The Apple, web pitch builds momentum. http://www.apple.com/iphone/

Its interesting to see Apple using “Hello” again to promote the iPhone, a strategy first applied to the 1st generation iMac.

Come on Apple, where is the support for Office apps and “push” email.

Startupping.com launches

Startupping is a one-of-a-kind community resource created for Internet entrepreneurs by Internet entrepreneurs. It is a place to share information, ask questions, and tap into the experience of others who have built and are building web businesses. Read blog posts about startup issues and participate in discussion forums.

Mashups made easy – Teqlo Promo

Teqlo is at the forefront of a new type of application, including Yahoo Pipes and others, where end users can put together their own applications and mashups without any knowledge of programming. Every organisation, no matter what size, has processes and ad hoc systems to track and do things in between the major operational systems that they use. In the past, these would have been manual, or maybe based on some sort of Excel spreadsheet with some macros. Anybody who can use Excel, will have absolutely no problem with Teqlo.

The product allows you to put together web deployed, light weight applications from a collection of components and widgets in a drag and drop environment. It’s very easy to drive. Eventually there will be an inventory of ready made application for you to use, or copy as the starting point for your own thing. This opens up a whole host of customer service or customer relationship type applications that a small business might use, but there is nothing to stop you using Teqlo for any part of the business process. As their business and installed base grows, so will their library of widgets and applications, and the product will become even more useful.

They have just moved to “open beta” status, which means you can create an account and try it out. They are taking a bit of a risk with this approach, so bear in mind you are seeing the product at an early stage. They are hoping they get constructive feedback from early users, and build up a useful library of user generated applications that will help the whole community.

To get a feel for how it works, take a look at the 2 minute Intro Teqlo promo.