Google Reports Third Quarter Earnings

Yesturday Google announced their Q3 2009 earnings. Revenues were up 7% over Q3 last year, and total revenues were nearly 6 billion dollars.

So why am I mentioning this on a blog about earning money on the web? Well, this means that internet advertising revenue overall is likely on the increase. This is great news for publishers. Adsense revenues are on the rise.

Additionally, this means that as more people spend money advertising on Google, more companies will also be spending money elsewhere. As pay-per-click bids increase, some companies will find it too expensive to use for branding. Pay-per-click is ideal when trying to track conversions and ROI, but when trying to boost brand recognition, it can be expensive.

Hopefully your Adsense check will be a little larger each month, but take this opportunity to encourage more direct advertising on your websites. My company has seen significant growth in direct advertising and sponsorship so far this year.

Company Internet Policies: When Social Networking Goes Wrong

Many business people know that social networking and social media can be a powerful addition to your marketing toolbox.

 

But what happens when social media goes wrong?

 

Your marketing team is trying to figure out how to best capitalize on the benefits of social interaction on the web, but your human resources team could be sweating.

 

Every member of your staff has access to social websites such as Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and Twitter among the hundreds of others. This can benefit your company by extending your reach into these communities. However, your company can also be potentially damaged by negative spin or distribution of confidential information.

 

In healthcare and financial sectors we are also seeing issues surrounding privacy violations.

 

So how do you benefit from employee participation in social networks, without putting your company, and potentially your customers at risk?

 

One of the keys is to create and disseminate a very precise written policy regarding conduct on social networking sites. These policies should include both work and personal activities of your employees.

 

Your company Internet policies will vary, but here are some topics to consider as you're creating these policies.

• Do you allow your employees to identify themselves as employees in their personal communications?
• What is your policy surrounding derogatory comments regarding your organization or their position within the organization?
• What information do your employees possess that should be considered confidential, proprietary, or private?
• How should clients or customers be identified in these communications?
• What are the consequences of policy violation? Repeat offenses?
• Where can employees go if they have a question about a policy?
• To what extent does your company have the right to censor employees?
• What is your policy on using social media sites for job hunting or career change?
• What personal conduct policies do you have in place, and how do they extend to the Internet?
• How can your employees promote your brand without damaging it?
• How does use of social media affect employee productivity?
• Does employee social media participation for your company at legal risk?
• How will you police violations of your social media policies?
• How will you disseminate the policies to your employees?
• What reaction will your customers have if they learn of your social media policies?
• Do these communication policies extend beyond the Internet to telephone and other communication methods?

Turning your employees into a marketing engine by permitting online social interaction can be valuable, particularly if they are doing it on their own time. Make sure however that your employees know clearly the do's and don'ts.

Super Cheap, Super Green Marketing Technique

We live in the information age.  Information is currency.  Information is value.  Information demonstrates importance.  Create informational one-sheets in PDF format.  Have them easily accessible from your website.  Send them as e-mail attachments.  Print them and hand them out to people you meet.  Next time small business is investing $3000, $5,000, or $10,000 in brochure printing, ask yourself how many pages of high-quality information that marketing money could produce, and how you could distribute that information.

What is a One-Sheet?

Put simply it's a single sheet of information printed one side on 8.5 x 11 paper.  The goal is a One-Sheet is to promote one product or one idea.  It can be a list, "Top 10 Ways to...".  It can be persuasive, "25 Reasons You Should...".  It can even be directly promoting a product, "Frequently Asked Questions about XYZ-Company.com."

The benefits of a One-Sheet:

Super cheap!  Run them off on your inkjet printer.  Get color photocopies printed on heavier or colored paper.  Even four color printing on high gloss paper is inexpensive in this format.

Super focused!  Because it's so inexpensive to do small runs, you can create custom one sheets for tiny audiences.  You can even produce a custom One-Sheet for an individual customer.

Super green!  A One-Sheet doesn't have to be a sheet at all.  Create it as a PDF file and distribute it via e-mail, on your website, or tweet it over Twitter.

Super freebie!  One-Sheets can be terrific giveaways and list building items.  If your information is unique and has value to your audience, they will desire it enough to trade it for their contact information.

The pitfall of a One-Sheet:

Even very well done One-Sheets can look cheap.  It isn't ideal for all products and services.  It's a terrific supplement to your other marketing materials when it comes to high-end products.  It's a great way to highlight extremely specialized products with small audiences.  It's a great way to provide value to your customers at a low cost.  With this said, don't make the mistake of swapping out your high-quality marketing pieces with a One-Sheet.  Your customers recognize the time and energy and money you invest in marketing.  They recognize that that investment is an investment in them.

Recently I did a little bit of window shopping at a Porsche dealership.  I called just to learn about pricing and using my telephone to kick the tires.  Even though I wasn't a hot prospect, the salesperson sent me three high-quality color books describing minutia every detail of three models of Porsche.  I didn't buy, but had I had the money and needed a sports car I would have certainly looked into the automobiles further.

The point is that had the dealer sent me three sheets of paper, even on high-quality glossy stock, they would not have represented well the automobile I was considering.  One sheets would not have sold me a Porsche.

Had I purchased a Porsche and needed a roof rack for my surfboard (okay, this story is getting ridiculous) a One-Sheet definitely could have described the roof rack in plenty of detail to encourage me to buy.

One sheets can be a valuable asset to your marketing mix if used appropriately.

Search Engine Optimization for Microsoft Bing

It's still fairly early, but were starting to learn a little bit about SEO for Bing.

I've been playing with Microsoft's search engine, and so far I like what I see.  Search results have been pretty high-quality, although honestly I haven't really put it to the test.  Most of my websites are ranked roughly the same as they were using Google organically.

I've also been reading about the experiences of other top-level SEOs that I respect.

Generally, here's what we have discovered.

Content Continues to Be King -- You must have great content.  This is critical with any search engine.  High quality content and lots of it, and having that content well-organized, is critical to your success.

Keyword Placement -- Keep your keywords in all the right places.  Page titles, headline tags and linked text are most important.  It seems to me that bold print and italicized text don't earn you the respect they do in Google.

Inbound Links -- One significant difference seems to be inbound linking.  It seems to be critically important that authoritative sites link to you.  Google seems to favor quantity, while Bing looks for a nice mix of quality and quantity.  Google has been trending this way gradually, and Bing seems to have taken it further.

Validation -- The value of validation of your code is undetermined however Microsoft explicitly recommends it.  Ironically, Microsoft was dragged kicking and screaming into the W3C.  For years the biggest frustration with Web developers was the IE 6 didn't use standard protocols.  IE 7 finally embraced website standards, and now it seems Bing may actually prefer sites that are validated.  Try to get rid of broken links and redirects whenever possible.

Standard HTML -- Microsoft recommends static HTML pages rather than dynamic URLs.  This could be a big hurt to companies that use a CMS to manage their websites and generate PHP or ASP pages.  This doesn't surprise me considering Microsoft's failure to embrace PHP in general.

I'm still a huge fan of Google as a company, and I still am wary of anything Microsoft.  However, I do think that competition is good in the realm of search engines.  It's going to force Google to continue to develop their product.  I would like to see two or three major companies and a handful of smaller companies with real competition for search engine users.  It's going to give website developers more opportunities, and marketers more choices in advertising.

Furthermore having strong search engine results means that it will stave off Web 2.0 as the dominant factor in quality traffic.  It's important to have a nice mix of social networks, advertising, social media and search engines each contributing traffic to your website.

Seven Reasons I'm Not Following Your Twitter Feed

I have a few hundred followers on Twitter now.  Every day I get eight or 10 people who decide to follow me.  I take a look at each and every account of someone who follows me and here's how I decide whom to follow.

Basically, I'll Twitter follow anyone except people who...

Don't upload a picture -- it doesn't even have to be a photo of you.  I just want to see something there to trigger my brain when your post wanders by.  Get rid of the default avatar on the first day you sign up for Twitter.

Don't update their feed -- To the voyeurs among you who follow bunches but don't post, I'm not going to follow you in hopes that you will pick up the pace later.

Have a link in every Tweet -- Some of you love to repost stuff you find on the Internet.  That's great, I love finding a new link, but if that's all you have I probably won't follow you.  If every link is selling something, I definitely won't follow you.  Give me some variety please.

Have no profile -- Take 10 seconds to update your profile and tell me a little bit about yourself. 

Have an Uber profile -- So, you're the world's greatest social network marketing guru ever, huh?  Then why do you only have 132 followers and no blog.  Don't try to impress me, just tell me what you do or how you do it.

Are boring -- You followed all the rules.  You have a picture, and honest profile and you don't spam tweet for a living.  So far, so good.  Unfortunately, your profile shows heavy interest in Renaissance era French literature and macramé.  Your tweets are mostly about your large collection of ceramic frogs.  While these things are fascinating to you, I find you very boring and won't follow you.  No offense, best wishes.

Twitter is a great tool for quick communication with lots of people.  People can get to know your personality, and you can sometimes persuade them to make a purchase.  I'm convinced that Twitter has a significant place in every online marketers repertoire.

Cheap Blog Hosting for multiple blogs

I'm expanding my repertoire of blogs. I'll post the links here as soon as they're ready, but I wanted to share two ideas for extremely cheap blog hosting when you use multiple blogs.

Here's what you need... a GoDaddy account and a Google account

The first form of cheap blog hosting is through Blogger, owned by Google. It's actually free, and you can use your own domain if you wish. Your only expense will be about $10 a year for your domain name. I used to find it far preferable to use a hosted domain, even with blogger. I would purchase through GoDaddy the statistics package, cheap monthly hosting, and get a discount on the first year for the domain. But now with Google analytics you no longer need the statistics package, and the newest version of blogger works better when hosted remotely.

The second form of cheap blog hosting comes from GoDaddy. Don't buy their economy hosting unless you only have one blog. Economy hosting only works with one domain. It's less than $5 a month, or with discounts about $58 a year including your domain. This may not seem like much but what if your hosting 100 blogs? Not only are you going to be paying $5,800 per year, but you're also going to have to take the time to analyze each blog and make sure it is earning at least $58.

Instead, look at one of the deluxe plans on GoDaddy. The benefit here is that you are purchasing space rather than hosting for one website. These deluxe plans are far more inexpensive ways to host your blogs.

I actually recommend purchasing two plans if you carry many blogs. Some of your blogs won't be worth your time to constantly update, but will get some traffic from search engines. Put all of the blogs that are getting updated into one account, that way you always have a good idea of how much bandwidth and space you're using. Put your regular blogs into the other account.

Their midrange blog hosting accounts are less than $80 annually, but you'll save money even if you only have two blogs.

Another advantage to GoDaddy hosting is that you can install WordPress automatically. Some people, with good reason, prefer WordPress. While not as inexpensive as blogger, it is cheap WordPress hosting.

You can still use Google analytics to check statistics, so you don't need to purchase the statistics package through GoDaddy.

Ultimately, your goal is to make your blogging highly profitable, then getting your Web hosting for free or on the cheap is not necessary, but if you're hosting many blogs the savings are large enough to really matter.

Google AdSense Pays Off

The gods of Google have bestowed upon me a new check for $113.13. The checks are comming more frequently from my pay-per-click ads published on this site. Officially, I'm not allowed to encourage readers to click the ads when they visit, but I can say a big thank you to those of you who did.

This website has a very good click through rate, because the ads are well tailored to the content. Staying niched will help increase your click through rate because the ads will remain focused on your current content.

Many bloggers make the mistake of talking about thier daily lives and straying off topic frequently. When you do this realize that you will need to get far more visitors for the same revenue.

Additionally, many of your topics won't have high rates of pay for each click. Certain subjects have lots of competition for keyword bidding. Because of this, the amount paid per click can be very high, some over $1.00 per click. Other subjects will pay little or nothing for a click.

I don't encourage people to specifically write for the highest bidded keywords, because so many other bloggers do the same thing. They end up diluting the keywords by creating more and more sites focused on high profile keywords.

Write what you like, and find an audience for what you write. The secret to making money with Google is to produce lots of unique content, then generate as much quality traffic as possible.