Recently Google’s Kevin Marks was interviewed by cNet, where he said:

OK, stop and think about your application. Do you really need to be a standalone site? Do you really want to write user registration code, or would you be better off taking your application and bringing these other sites where there are lots of users already and where they have already expressed both their personal information and their connections to other people?

The answer to that is of course you want to be your own destination. Writing registration code once means you can re-use it over and over again on various projects. If you can program a successful widget or application then you are not the type who thinks registration code is a roadblock.

Some of the most successful viral applications (like Paypal and YouTube) leveraged other platforms for growth, but a large part of their success was that they also chose to be destinations.

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Here is a great post from SEO Blackhat titled Don’t Buy Links - Buy the Whole Site. It offers some good and practical advice about paid links. Here is a great summary quote from the post:

Generally, the sites you can still buy links from that can pass link juice (help you site rank in the SERPs) will be small to medium sites with a single owner or decision maker.

This confirms what I have been saying for a long time - that getting paid links from authoritative sites that will pass you PageRank (i.e. bigger sites with a big reputation) is not something you should expect that you are going to be able to do.

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We all want to be part of the next viral world of mouth success story. We want our product to be at the epicenter of a “buzz” storm that spreads like wildfire across the internet. But the conditions that lead to true word of mouth viral outbreaks dictate that these outbreaks are few and far between.

Jumping the Weak Ties

First of all, let’s look at what’s required for word of mouth to spread. The trick to a true viral outbreak is finding something that will jump the “weak ties”. Mark Granovetter identified weak ties in a social network back in the 70’s. Basically, social networks are not uniform and even. They are “clumpy”. They have dense clusters, comprised of people who tend to spend a lot of time together. These are family members, co workers, close friends, members of the same church or organization. Word spreads quickly throughout these clusters, because of the frequency of communication and the nature of the relationships between the members of the cluster. There’s an inherent trust there and people talk to each other a lot. This makes the social ties within the cluster strong ties. Given this, once one person in the cluster knows something, there’s a pretty good bet that everyone in the cluster will know it in a relatively short period of time.

But the challenge comes in getting a message to make the jump from cluster to cluster. How does word of mouth spread from one group of co workers to a church group in another town? To do this, we’re relying on social ties that are much weaker than strong ties. We’re counting on an acquaintance to pass word along. And for that to happen, some conditions have to be met first.

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Behavioral Targeting (BT) provides a great opportunity for Affiliate Marketers and Networks to reach the right customers and increase the conversion.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate Marketing is way for advertisers to reach potential customers and only pay when a visitor takes some predefined action. Predefined actions range from a sale to registration. Recently Pay Per Click has also been added to affiliate programs. Generally, the website (publisher) places an advertisement on their site and when a predefined action results by a visitors referred (clicked) by that ad, the advertiser pays the publisher a % or a fixed amount. I won’t go into further details of affiliate marketing but you get the idea.

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Google AdWords have today released a new feature which allows My Client Centre account managers to create campaign templates and share them with managed accounts.

The Google help centre has some information about the campaign templates, I’ve only created a very basic template but this does look like a very useful feature to speed up the setup process for new client accounts or similar campaigns.

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Think of all the ways that companies use branding to build awareness of themselves or to promote their social awareness and customer service values. A few things come to mind such as greeters at the entrance of my favorite store, go-green awareness issues, charity drives that “give back” to the community for every purchase made, TV screens playing music videos or news as you wait in line, and the list goes on.None of these things lead directly to conversions but they do lead to higher company awareness and the good old fashioned fuzzy-feelings we get when we know that that we are valued as a customer. Most times we are probably not even be aware of these things on a conscious level. But the effect shows as we have a tendency to patron these companies more frequently than the other alternatives.

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Posing a Monday Question, Sandy asks:

“Like you, I’m a writer by training and since become a SAHM (stay at home mum), I’ve mastered the basics of blogging and writing articles and am starting to get into simple product creation.

Some of this other stuff like SEO is beyond me. I bought a couple of dummies books and know some basic HTML and can do a simple page. But the PHP and MySQL programming stuff is way beyond me. Help! I am feeling overwhelmed and although I’m doing ok now, I can’t help feeling that I won’t be able to master it all.

Please advise what I can do about this.”

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Is it possible to steal customers looking for your competition in Google Maps? It not only appears as if you can, but it might be trivially easy and somewhat troubling that it’s possible.

It’s also a good reason why it’s important to register your business with Google Maps and other local search services and have at the very least a single page website listing your company info.

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