These terms refer to the next generation of what online marketing will become. It is online promotion in the Web 2.0 world.

Knowing that, we must decide how to market within the confines of this new medium.

Therefore, in this article we will take a look at some of the sites that are springing out of Web 2.0 and how, as an online marketer, we must take advantage of these sites.

In our previous article we introduced you to SMM. In it, we explained what it is and gave a couple quick examples of sites exhibiting SMM attributes.

In this article we will go a little deeper into SMM and give some more examples of sites which are able to harness the power of user generated media.

Case Study #1 – Digg

One of the more well known sites in the early adopter circles is Digg. This is a news aggregation site which relies on its users to find and share newsworthy articles online.

Originally started as a means of sharing technology news, Digg has expanded into other news areas including world news, entertainment and business.

So why has Digg become so successful? After all, it’s only been around for a relatively short time online (Since the winter of 2004), yet it has become one of the top 1000 websites on the web, and has an Alexa ranking of 95.

But why is Digg so popular? What has driven it to such heights online?

The answer has to do with how Digg operates. Digg doesn’t act like a typical news aggregator. It offers something unique that, prior to Digg, was not available to the general public: A way to provide input into the stories presented online.

You see, the site has a built in voting system which allows visitors to vote up, or down, a particular story they find on the site. If they found the article or story newsworthy or entertaining, they would vote it up (called a “Digg”) while if they found the story lacking or otherwise non-important they could vote it down (or “bury” it). The more votes a story got, the higher up the listings it would climb.

By now you can see how such a simple system can have such an influence. Not only on it’s users, news media in general, but also on those sites linked to from Digg.

For example, It is quite common now to see new products being promoted through Digg and other similar sites. If the company can craft a compelling enough press release or article, and get enough people to read it and “Digg” it, then the article/story will move up the Digg ladder. The higher up the ladder the more exposure it gets which ultimately translates into greater traffic for the site.

But Digg is just one example of these types of sites. While it is generally considered to be the first such site other’s have entered the field lately including Reddit, and a recently relaunched Netscape. These sites also use a community based voting system whereby “good” stories rise to the top while not-so-good ones get buried.

Case Study #2 – YouTube

Our second site today is an example of an SMM site that is also user driven, however it takes advantage of improved Internet speeds to offer something new to the Internet masses – video on demand via YouTube

Before YouTube it was next to impossible to share video online with friends and family. Usually one had to transfer the video to their computer and then run it through some software to compress it before posting it on their own website.

Once that was done they usually had to pay extra money to their hosting provider because of the bandwidth requirements the video caused.

Today, however, YouTube and others have taken these problems out of the mix. Not only that, but they’ve created a video delivery platform that works on almost every computer out there including Windows, Mac or Unix based.

They’ve also improved video delivery. No longer do you have to wait for the entire video to download. Instead, YouTube streams the video to you.

So why is YouTube so important?

Well for one, it is built on user submitted videos. Average people create video content and share it with the rest of the world. From there, YouTube has built in a ratings system, as well as allowing for viewer comments.

And while Internet video such as this is still relatively new we see how other important websites are taking notice.

Google and Yahoo! have both either released or relaunched video services similar to YouTube where users can share and rate video. But it’s not just the bigger players which have gotten into the video space. Others such as Flurl, ZippyVideos and even Download.com have gotten into the video sharing business.

It’s grown so much that hybrids are being offered by the major television networks. NBC, ABC and CBS all offer some form of video download whereby site users can download and/or watch their favorite TV shows online.

Overall, the video revolution is just in its infancy. We are beginning to see business attempting to monetize video on demand by providing web only content, web advertising and more using services such as YouTube. Over time we expect such services to find a niche in web only video advertising or video production/promotion.

Case Study #3 – MySpace

The concept of MySpace isn’t new. There have been many other social networking sites similar to MySpace which preceded the popular site.

The idea is that one can post a public or private page about themselves, as well as blog about themselves, share their favorite music and even share photos of themselves or things which interest them.

Through a system of “invites” one can build up a substantial “friends” base whereby they authorize who their friends are (and aren’t). In some cases only invited friends can see parts or all of a persons space.

Now you might be thinking to yourself “but there’s nothing new here” and you’d be right. In fact many other sites have tried similar models, and while some have succeeded in most cases they haven’t. This then leads to the question: If MySpace has already been preceded by other community sites using the same model, how has MySpace become the success it is?

Just so you understand how successful this site is, we have recently found out that MySpace is the 3rd most visited website, and 7th largest web property on the Internet according to reputable online measurement firm ComScore.

MySpace received almost 51.5 million visitors in the month of May placing it’s total traffic ahead of well known networks such as Amazon, Real.com and Expedia.

In fact, in terms of web properties (that is all websites, not just a single entity) search engines and Ebay ruled the top 6 spots.

These are some pretty impressive stats, considering companies like Yahoo, Google and Ebay are comprised of dozens of websites while Myspace is a single website.

So what is it that made MySpace so successful?

Well many people have many opinions. Perhaps it is because MySpace offers a free way for people to interact. Perhaps it is in the ability to find others of similar interests and connect with them.

Or maybe their success has to do with the demographic which seems ideally suited to the “Web 2.0”. That is, those between 15 and 25 who have actively embraced SMM sites and, in some cases, have also figured out a way to begin monetizing such sites.

In any case, MySpace doesn’t appear to be slowing down at all. In fact, it continues to grow, both in terms of user base and popularity. So much so that we are seeing many events unique to the world. For example, movie studios have taken advantage of MySpace almost exclusively to promote upcoming movies while performers are using MySpace to highlight their works.

In any case one of the strengths of MySpace lies in it’s ability to be many things to many people. Whether they want to share information, promote a new CD or link up with old friends, MySpace is another example of the types of SMM sites which are making a splash.

Conclusion – Why are these sites important?

There are, of course, many other examples of SMM sites out there that have taken new and unique ideas and turned them into social sites. Websites such as del.ico.us, Flickr, BoingBoing, and more all have tapped into a new market.

So now the question becomes, how should online marketers take advantage of these spaces. Is it even possible to integrate SMM into online promotion? Should we do this?

These are all interesting questions. Questions which we will begin to answer in the final article of this series. We will also pose a hypothesis to you. One which you may or may not agree with. It has to do with links and how important they become in the new SMM age.

Should we take advantage of these? I think we have to. If you consider the demographic of most of these sites, these are users who don’t typically use search engines the way their parents do. Therefore a new way must be developed to reach them.

In the last article of this series we will take a look at how to take advantage of these and other social sites to help achieve your online goals.

The subject is SMM (Social Media Marketing) and its a new form of online marketing that has some people in the industry scared, some unsure how to proceed, and others wondering how to monetize it.

So what is SMM? In this article (and the next few) we look at the roots of this new phenomenon to see where the idea came from. We will also be providing a few case studies on SMM, showing how effective it has been, and give our opinion on how “big” it is going to be, as well as how important link building is to SMM.

We’ve known about Social Marketing for some time now. Ever since the advent of sites like Myspace.com and Youtube.com search marketers have been wondering just what the heck to do about it.

These sites and many others are part of what some people are referring to as “Web 2.0”. It is considered to be the evolution of the Internet. The Internet, as many believe, is beginning to move from a passive system where browsers merely view web pages, to an active one, where they become the content creators.

In fact we’ve been watching this evolution for some time now. Ever since we first heard of weblogs early in this millennium (now commonly referred to as blogs) we knew things were changing.

But in the past 12 to 18 months we’ve seen a literal explosion in the number of social sites out there. Some have survived, others have not, and many continue to struggle. But one thing is for sure, social media is here to stay. Therefore we MUST find a way to market within it.

Rohit Bhargava, Vice President of Interactive Marketing for Ogilvy Public Relations, is one of the first people to put his finger on how to “do” social search marketing. In his recent article titled 5 Rules of Social Media Optimization (SMO) he explains what social marketing is, and how to perform it.

While his article only touches on one small aspect of social media marketing, it does give us a place to start to begin to understand what is involved.

His article explains that social media optimization is mostly an extension or addition to one’s SEM campaign. The idea is that, rather than improving your site to perform better in the search engines, one must make changes in your site to make it more “likable” to other websites and users.

Here’s how it works:

Essentially you want to make your site more appealing. In a way it’s like link baiting only rather than creating content specifically for encouraging links, you structure your entire site to help encourage “link love.”

Not only that, but you enlist the technology of other current social sites, such as Digg and Technorati to help further your linkability.

His five rules are as follows:

1) Increase your Linkability. In other words, create content that others want to link to. Try and take link baiting to a whole new level.

2) Make Tagging and Bookmarking Easy. Give people the option to easily share your content with the rest of the world. Sites like Technorati allow you to tag your content, and Del.ico.us allows you to create links which your readers can easily bookmark. But don’t stop there, there are dozens of tagging and bookmarking sites out there, so make it easy for their users to share your work.

3) Reward Inbound Links. By rewarding links you are encouraging others to link to you. Blog software is ideally suited to this as it can keep track of inbound links and even refer to them in individual posts. Some sites also keep track of top linking sites and/or recently linked sites in a prominent place on their site, usually the home page.

4) Help Your Content Travel. Don’t just make all your content into HTML pages. PDF’s, audio files and video files are portable. They can build your brand even away from your site. But the only way to do that is to ensure you submit them to other sites. For example, if you have video content, don’t just let it languish on your site, submit it to Google Video, Yahoo! Video, Youtube and the dozen other video sites out there.

5) Encourage the Mashup. Try and think of new and innovative ways to bring something fresh to the web. Whether it’s a mashup of maps with churches, geo-tagging images or simply embedding video in your site. When done properly mashups can be a HUGE brand builder.

And of course there are many other forms of social media to be exploited. In fact, soon after Bhargava published this list of rules others jumped on board to help extend it. That in itself is a classic example of social media marketing (and link baiting). In fact, there are now 16 rules of social media optimization and they’ve even been translated into other languages!

In reality one of the best ways to learn about the potential of social media marketing is to study the field.

Start with the bloggers. And I don’t mean the SEO bloggers, I mean other sites. Sites like BoingBoing and Slashdot. These are typical of the types of sites which allow others to contribute.

Take BoingBoing, for example, they easily allow the general public to share stories on a variety of topics from the latest weird Ebay sales to how New Orleans is coping 1 year after Katrina.

Also, take a look at their pages. Remember Bhargava’s rule 2? Well look down the right side of their page. They have over a dozen links for various services to make it easier for users to help spread their word through bookmarking and tagging.

Plus they are open about everything they do. You can go online and view their stats.

So what’s all this worth to BoingBoing? Well if you look at the home page, over to the left and down a bit you’ll see what their feed readership is. When I checked as I was researching this article it’s over 2.2 million. And that’s just the people who read the feeds. Imagine how many more visit the site on a daily basis, sometimes many times per day?

Well, let’s find out – go back to that stats page (the link is above). Check out their visits and page views. Over 9.6 million visits and almost 25 million page views for the month of August.

So if you were wondering what all the fuss about this social media marketing thing is, now you know.

Just imagine what you could do if you have 2.2 million feed readers subscribed and almost 10 million visitors a month viewing almost 25 million pages. Would that be something you’d want to tap into?

In the next article we will delve deeper into other sites and present some case studies on how effective some social sites are. We’ll follow up with showing you how important link building is going to be in this “new age web.”

I was at SES as a speaker last year in New York and I have to say, there is a wealth of information there even if some of it is contradictory. Not only that ,but you get to meet some amazing people and can even have one on one access with some of the search engine reps. Overall, I found it to be a worthwhile experience.

This year, like many people, I wasn’t able to attend. However, I wanted to keep up with the news, so I found a great source of reports and updates. I will summarize the most important sessions to the best of my ability.

In my opinion, one of the most crucial topics is Vertical Creep.

Vertical creep is when non-organic and non-paid results start occupying top spots in search results. Verticals started showing up in search results back when Altavista was popular, and since then have grown into a much more sophisticated part of the overall search engine results page. Greg Jarboe was the first to speak of vertical creep and introduced everyone to verticals.

All the engines have verticals in some form or another nowadays. Google has its famous “OneBox” which is generally the place immediately below the top sponsored ads but immediately above the organic results. This is where you will find news, Froogle, and image results which may match a query.

For example, I wrote a few weeks ago about how, when you searched for Olympics on Google, you were presented with video results at the top of the page. But it doesn’t stop there. Do a search for New Orleans, for example, and in Google you are presented with not only news results but also map results, pushing the organic results down so that only the top 2 or 3 results are showing. Much less than the typical 4 or 5 we are used to seeing.

One of the biggest impacts of Verticals is the “stretching” of the search results page. It is becoming ever clearer that everything but the top 1 or 2 organic is worth less because it could be pushed below the fold, whereas sponsored’s value is increasing because there are less organic results visible.

According to Gord Hotchkiss, however, the impact on verticals, at least on Yahoo! And MSN, isn’t as great. His firm has recently completed research on how users interact with search engines. The Yahoo! MSN research performed by Hotchkiss’ firm is a follow up to Google research the firm completed last year at this time.

According to Hotchkiss, Google does a better job of incorporating Verticals into results. Google users are more accepting of them while Yahoo! and MSN users tend to scan more of the results on a page, thereby negating the impact verticals have on organic results.

This could mean a couple of things. First, as Hotchkiss suggests, Google may have “trained” its users. We are used to seeing the verticals (and hit bolding and inconsistently displayed sponsored results) and are therefore more accepting to the varying page changes, while Yahoo! and MSN users are less forgiving, perhaps because they feel the results displayed are less relevant. This isn’t too hard to believe considering he gave an example of searching for New York Pizza on MSN and NOT getting pizza places but getting news about pizza in New York.

Personally, I too have experienced this, especially with MSN. It seems to have more of a problem determining what types of verticals are relevant to the searcher.

Bob Carilli was up next and presented a case study on how effective verticals have been for one of his clients.

Through some analysis they found that Froogle shopping results were showing up a lot for his clients’ competitive keyword terms, yet the Froogle listings were unoptimized.

They responded by creating a data feed for Froogle which was optimized to target these great phrases which had poor Froogle listings. As a result, his client’s site quickly moved to the top of the Froogle listings for those phrases. While it is unclear, I would assume this would have translated into similar top rankings in the Google area where Froogle is displayed.

This also shows that, as search marketers, we shouldn’t rely solely on SEO or PPC. There are dozens of verticals out there we could tap into if we had an open mind.

If you look at Google alone, there are opportunities in Google News (with properly optimized press releases), Froogle, as mentioned above, Google Local, Google Base, Google Video and more. Similarly, with Yahoo! and MSN there are verticals to research. Both engines also have a shopping portal, as well as news, video and local results.

In the end, verticals could become the “poor man’s” SEO tactic. If you can’t compete organically and can’t pay for top sponsored, perhaps you can optimize your product feed to appear ahead of all your competitors?

Rob Sullivan is a SEO Consultant and Writer for Textlinkbrokers.com. Textlinkbrokers is the trusted leader in building long term rankings through safe and effective link building. Please provide a link directly to Textlinkbrokers when syndicating this article.

Not only do they use “black hat” or at least “questionable” tactics on the site, but the messaging is inconsistent.

In this article I look at the new MSN promotion and ask the question: Why bother?

By now you’ve probably heard about the new MSN promotion where you can win prizes simply by using MSN search.

They did do something right by registering a domain name that implies that message. If you go to msnsearchandwin.com you will see the familiar MSN search box.

Wait a minute…Why is this search box blue? Didn’t MSN just rebrand with a nicer, cleaner silver grey look?

That, my friends, is mistake number one. It’s as if the technical team and the marketing team didn’t get together to discuss this program.

I mean, when you go through something as complex and massive as a rebranding, you should make sure the messaging is consistent across the various media. Especially when the promotion and the rebranding launch within days of each other.

This is eerily similar to the article I wrote about Superbowl Ads. In that article I talked about how advertisers spend millions on a 30 second or 1 minute TV commercial yet they fail to carry that messaging over onto their website effectively if at all.

And here we have MSN – probably one of the most recognized brands on the web and subsidiary to the company with one of the most effective and ruthless marketing arms in the world – and it can’t seem to communicate it’s message that MSN is rebranding.

I mean, how hard would it have been for someone in Tech to phone up someone in Marketing and say, “By the way, you know that search and win promotion you are doing? Be sure that the colors match the new look of MSN that’s launching in a few days.”

But wait, it gets better.

First spotted by Kerry Dean, if you view source of the msnsearchandwin home page what do you see?

That’s right, about a million keywords stuffed into the keywords tag. (OK maybe not a million but there are 256 keywords in the meta keywords tag).

It gets worse. Immediately below the overstuffed keywords tag you will see a bunch of keywords stuffed into a comments tag. Again the same 256 words used in the meta keywords tag.

So tell me, is it OK for a search engine to spam itself?

Perhaps we could all learn a little something from MSN’s marketing mistake: Keep it Consistent!

Rob Sullivan is a SEO Consultant and Writer for Textlinkbrokers.com. Textlinkbrokers is the trusted leader in building long term rankings through safe and effective link building. Please provide a link directly to Textlinkbrokers when syndicating this article.

With so much interest in how social networks work, one begins to wonder if there is marketing potential within these social networks?

I’ve been watching social networking for some time now. In fact I’m a member of various social networking sites including MySpace and LinkedIn just to name two.

I joined partly because I wanted to see what they were, but more importantly to see what impact social networking would have on SEM in the coming years.

I’ve been a member of various services for some time and the reach these sites have is incredible.

For example, from my LinkedIn network of seven people I have an expanded network of over 12,600 people.

Imagine that – I’m only a click or two away from close to 13,000 other people who share my similar interests ranging from what I like to watch on TV to work I could provide to them.

Through my connections and their connections, I’m connected to people ranging from the American Cancer Society, to Sun Microsystems to the University of Texas to Google.

But what marketing opportunities are there for Social Networking?

Well, let’s look at MySpace.

MySpace is one of the top sites on the Web today. It racked up 9.4 billion page-views in August 2005 (more than Google) and new users are signing up at a mind-boggling rate of 3.5 million a month.

MySpace is typical of where today’s 18-30 year old goes to manage their digital life. It allows users to post photos of themselves and their friends, create a blog, list their favorite bands, view and share videos, suggest things to do and lists a set of people they consider friends. It is on this “Friends List” where most of the opportunities lie.

All thirty million plus users of MySpace have a friend’s page that lists people that person considers their friend. This is a list of people that they are interested in talking to and about, as well as hearing from on a regular basis. Once you add someone as your friend they can send you emails, comment on your photos, read your blogs, as well as leave messages that you can then share with others. This is an opportunity for instant feedback about you.

The ability to add friends to your page is key for marketing to MySpace users. According to Courtney Holt, head of new media and strategic marketing at Interscope Records, “This generation is growing up without having ever watched programmed media.” “They don’t think in terms of the album, and they don’t think in terms of a TV schedule. They think in terms of TiVo, P2P, AOL, and of course MySpace.”

You can see how this could grow.

Let’s say you create a MySpace account to talk about your product or service. You blog about it and search for others that may share your interests.

You then invite them to be your friend. When they become a friend you start your “soft sell” pitching your product to them.

As they grow to appreciate it, they start blogging and sharing it. Soon hundreds or even thousand of people are talking about you and your product or service.

Don’t think this will work?

Let me give you some examples. There are many bands who have gotten their start on MySpace. Simply by hosting some of their music online and blogging about themselves they developed a following. Soon they had record deals and contracts lined up.

Of course to use services like MySpace you need to have something this target market needs. If you don’t then you probably shouldn’t put too much effort into MySpace.

But that doesn’t mean other social networking opportunities should be overlooked. As I mentioned above, LinkedIn is more of a professional introduction service. If your product or service fits here then by all means explore it further.

And there are others as well. Services such as Yahoo!s MyWeb, Flickr, del.icio.us and more.

So if you’ve ever wondered what other online opportunities could be out there, consider social networking. It could be the next great online marketing channel.

Rob Sullivan is a SEO Consultant and Writer for Textlinkbrokers.com. Textlinkbrokers is the trusted leader in building long term rankings through safe and effective link building. Please provide a link directly to Textlinkbrokers when syndicating this article.

He’s part of a new breed of content creator. One who prefers to try to promote his vision of things without the help of “traditional” services like agents and studios.

In fact, the whole area of self publishing and promoting your own content is one that is rapidly expanding. But what I found in helping him is that there are other areas of the web which could also be commercialized to a certain extent.

Technology is amazing. I mean, here’s this guy I’ve never met before, yet who I would consider a friend (but that’s a whole other story), asking my advice on promoting his videos.

Videos which he has produced with others which they want to distribute at a grassroots level.

You see, these guys were able to scrape together enough money to get together decent editing equipment and good video cameras but that’s about all they have. They all have regular jobs, so this is a hobby that they hope they can also turn into a career.

Their first thoughts were “well lets throw up a website and promote them through there.” And this is what you’d typically do, except that the engines today (Google in particular) are notoriously bad for letting a new site show up in search results.

Upon explaining this to my friend he then asked what else there was to do. Immediately I thought of Google Video. After all, it’s movies you create, not websites, so why not use other areas of Google to promote it?

So we did some checking and sure enough, submitting to Google Video was quite easy, so we began looking for other places to submit the videos to.

Within a matter of minutes my friend came up with other great sources as well: Ifilm, Youtube and Vmix to name just a few.

Of course, my first thought was “hey this is an entire market that’s not being tapped well for commercial purposes.”

Now before you go saying “but I can’t film all my products” let me qualify by saying this tactic will only work for certain types of online businesses.

For example, video promotion might work excellent for introduction services, automobile sales, real estate and other big ticket items, and those sorts of businesses. Something where a video will work better than a picture.

Let’s look at the introduction site as an example.

Rather than merely posting photos of the people using your services, why not also allow them to post short videos of themselves talking?. Then the videos can be submitted to the services listed above.

Most of the services allow for instant uploading and viewing of the videos – the only exception is Google where the video has to be screened for content first, but that only takes 3 or 4 days and then the video is live and searchable.

And the best part of this is that the videos can take advantage of some optimization. Well, not so much the videos themselves, but the services which host the videos allow you to provide searchable descriptions and even tag them in some cases.

Imagine that – for a small fee, your introduction company could submit your clients videos online to reach even more audience.

Another great thing is that, using these services, you don’t need to host the videos on your own site. Therefore there’s no real cost involved with either the space required to hold the videos or the bandwidth required to stream them. All you would have to do is post the link to the videos on one of the sites.

In fact, with Google you can embed the Google player right on your site if you want your visitors to view the video from there. Also, if you desire, Google Video allows you to download the video – even to an iPod.

And like I said, while I’m using an introduction service as an example, why couldn’t you do it for an auto dealer, or realtor? Imagine being able to showcase a vehicle or better yet a home for sale on a video? Any good salesman knows that a video will sell better than a picture.

The best part of all this is the video hosting is free – all you need to do is take the video, write a good description for it and upload it.

So, do you want to know how powerful this could be for you?

My friend uploaded a short film to Youtube 2 weeks ago. It’s already had well over 200 views. And I know the Google video has had tons of exposure as well – getting over 500 views in the past 2 weeks.

So if your products are those which could benefit from such exposure, consider other sites, like video sites, to help promote them.

Rob Sullivan is a SEO Consultant and Writer for Textlinkbrokers.com

In this article I look at the study to show you what you need to do to monetize your feed.

Feeds allow us to syndicate content in an entirely different way than regular search engines. Using a feed one can “push” new content to users, rather than having them search and find it on their own. Using blogs and feeds we can also inform web services of an update rather than waiting for the engine to find and crawl the new content on its own.

Up until now these have been the main reasons for using blogs and feeds as marketing tools.

But now a new aspect of feed management is emerging. One that allows you to not only push your content to readers, but also serve up ads and make money from your feed.

How It works

Using a service like Pheedo or some other similar service, one can set up a free account that allows you to insert ads into your feeds when they are published.

Similar to Google’s Adsense program, that inserts ads into your pages, Pheedo will insert ads which complement the content of the feeds.

From the Pheedo site: “provides the tools and control you need to create an instant revenue stream from your weblog and feeds by leveraging our advertising partners.”

But it doesn’t stop there. This particular service, like most, offer complete reporting solutions so you know which links are clicked on as well as which ads generate the most money. You can also control which advertisers are (or are not) allowed to display their ads in your feeds.

Much like Google AdWords, payments are monthly and you can be paid by check or (unlike Google) PayPal.

What is required

Generally, as with any ad program, all you need to do is modify your feed templates to insert the ad code.

If you use a program like Movable Type to manage your feeds, then all you need to do is modify the template which generates the feed.

Once your account has been approved (usually takes between 24 and 48 hours) and you have modified your feed template to include ads, you should start seeing ads appear.

How to Maximize Feed Revenue

This is where it can get interesting.

Many feed services allow you to display the ads how you like. And in some cases publishers opt for the easy way – that is displaying the ads in their posts.

And not all publishers will display an ad in every post. Sometimes it’s every 2 or 3 posts.

But a recent study indicates that ads in posts is not the most effective way to generate revenue.

In fact the study suggests that “RSS ads appearing as individual feed items generate a 7 percent click-through rate (CTR), over nine times higher than ads displayed within content posts.”

That means that while ads within posts are effective, they are more effective if they appear as their own entry in the feed.

The study also found that for those publishers who do prefer ads in posts there can still be improvements. “When publishers placed an ad in every feed post, the click-through rate came in at 1.04 percent, whereas limiting ads to every other post resulted in a 3.24 percent CTR.”

In other words, placing ads in every second post actually results in an increased click through rate than if the ads appear in every post.

What if you don’t like Pheedo?

You don’t have to use Pheedo, other services are available from RssCache and Feedburner, or you could wait until Yahoo! Search Marketing or Google AdWords for Feeds become publicly available.

And as time goes on, more and more companies like MSN and other smaller companies will be turning to monetization of feeds.

In fact, I think feed monetization will be the advertising model for 2006. While rich media continues to grow, I think we’ll see the most growth in feed ads. Particularly when Google and Yahoo! Unleash their products to the rest of the web.

So if you’re wondering what to do next to monetize your site may I suggest you start researching feed ads? I know I’ll be implementing feed ads shortly in my blogs.

Rob Sullivan is a SEO Consultant and Writer for Textlinkbrokers.com

There are certain things that some businesses seem to neglect however. And they usually have the biggest impact on your bottom line.

In this article I look at the most important tactic to increasing your sales from your website.

Recent studies show that more and more people are changing their buying habits. They are feeling more comfortable with online security and are therefore spending more time online shopping and buying.

In fact, a recent study suggests that online sales over the holidays will grow by 16% this year over the same time last year – up to almost $28 billion.

It is clear that more and more businesses are moving online as they realize that compared to other forms of marketing, online is still much cheaper than TV, radio and even print.

Yet with this massive growth in online sales there is still one key concept which some businesses just can’t grasp.

They could be the best content optimizers or link builders in their industry but there could still be one area they don’t get.

That is Customer Service.

Yup, that’s right. This is the most important aspect of any online campaign. Because if you don’t have it, you aren’t going to sell to your potential.

Here’s a good example: A friend of mine recently found a domain registrar who sells domains for $2.99 per year.

That’s cheap – cheaper than any place else I’ve seen. So of course he went and registered a couple domains that he wanted. After all, he’s basically getting 2 domains for the price of one.

You’d think this vendor of registrations would be the most popular one on the web. But in fact, like many online retailers it doesn’t get the whole picture.

You see, my friend used his credit card to register the domains online yet he received no confirmation from the company that they were paid, even though the website said he would.

Normally you get such a confirmation so that you can then set up hosting, but he received no such confirmation.

No problem, he thought. He’ll get a hold of them to see what’s going on. They offered live online help via chat after all, so they must care about their customers.

So my friend initiated a conversation with one of their support staff, he got to “here’s my problem” when the person at the other end seemed to disappear.

There was no response from them even after waiting 15 minutes.

So he thought he’d try to call them, as they also have a toll free number. He called them up and the phone was promptly answered. Guess what? It was the same guy he was talking to via the online support.

“Oh yeah, I remember you,” he said “hold on, I’ll put you through to customer support.”

So my friend sat on hold and waited. And waited. And waited some more.

Finally, after another 15 minutes of waiting he gave up.

Overall my friend spent ½ hour trying to solve this issue and didn’t even get close.

As you can guess, the customer service here was horrendous. What type of business makes their customer wait ½ hour and still doesn’t help them? Sure the domain was cheap, but that’s not excuse for poor customer service.

It seems that some online businesses suffer from the same malady as brick and mortar retailers. They think that if the price is cheap enough they can sacrifice customer service.

But that just isn’t the case. Look at how many big box stores opened up in the 90’s. Now look at how many are still around. Sure there was a down turn in the economy but there are hundreds of other businesses that didn’t close up. Do you think customer service had anything to do with it? I do.

This is why, when you go into some stores, you are almost pounced on by customer service staff. Because these businesses realize the value of good customer service. I know many people who would rather pay extra to have their groceries bagged for them. This is an example of customer service.

Sure there are those who like to shop anonymously and don’t want or need help but most of us do.

Here’s another example of bad customer service. How many times have you gone into a store and seen every cash register open, yet there is no one at the refund counter? You would think that the store would want to try and impress on those returning items how important their business is to them, even if they are returning something.

Online retailing has the same issues. Have you ever tried to return something you’ve purchased online, or otherwise try to get some or all of your money back. It can be incredibly stressful. There are forms to fill out and sometimes you have to wait weeks for a refund, yet they can process your credit card for the purchase transaction and withdraw money instantly. To me that just isn’t right.

Back to my friend.

He finally did get to talk to someone and get his issue resolved, after 4 phone calls – two of which they cut him off.

Will he buy from them again? He says “maybe. The price was good after all but the customer service sucks.”

And what did they say was the reason that he didn’t get his confirmation:

“We had lots of emails to send last night.”

What does that mean? Are you personally writing them?

Rob Sullivan is a SEO Consultant and Writer for Textlinkbrokers.com

For one thing, AOL owns Netscape which maintains the rights to the ODP.

In this article I look at some of the implications for the ODP in relation to this AOL deal.

What happens to the ODP if AOL or Netscape (or both) disappear or are bought by another company?

“Copyright © 1998-2005 Netscape”. That’s what you see at the bottom of every page of the Open Directory Project website. So what happens if (and likely when) Netscape ceases to be part of the internet landscape either through its own inability to maintain its presence or through it’s sale as part of a larger deal?

We already know that AOL owns Netscape and should (therefore) also own DMOZ. But will AOL maintain it or sell it?

And what if AOL and Netscape both disappear? Does that then mean that the ODP, one of the most influential directories in the web, will disappear as well?

Just think about that for a second – a web without the ODP. Many large sites, including Google, count on the ODP for their directory results. In fact, there are hundreds of sites which use the ODP directory data for primary or secondary results.

Personally, I don’t think the ODP will “disappear” per se. But it may change form.

It will still be a directory, and it could still be one of the most influential directories on the web, but who owns it may change.

If Netscape and the ODP are on the table during the Google and MSN talks, as it is quite likely to be, imagine the implications.

Imagine if Google were to “win” the AOL deal and DMOZ was part of it. Would the human part of the directory – the editors – remain, or would Google build algorithms to replace them?

And what of the directory itself. Would it regain the importance it once had with Google, moving from a “link to other services” back to the all important homepage link?

Now what happens if MSN gets the deal with AOL. Would the Open Directory be a part of that deal?

And what of the directory then?

For example, would Google remove it from its own directory? Or would MSN retain it and merge it with it’s algorithmic results?

As a side note, what of all the “Microsoft haters” who happen to use ODP data feeds to help support their website? Would they quit using these feeds because of their dislike of Microsoft?

So many questions, yet so few answers.

Perhaps the ODP and Netscape aren’t part of the deal, although I would think they are.

After all, Google could use the browser technology found in Netscape. Granted they have the lead Firefox developers working for them, but perhaps they could go after Microsoft’s Internet Explorer on two fronts – the Firefox one and the Netscape one.

Any way you look at it, whether they only get parts of AOL or the whole thing, a partnership deal would dramatically change the search landscape.

Such a deal would place MSN firmly in the second spot in terms of search. Not to mention that Google would lose that search traffic, and Adwords revenue (AOL accounts for about 10% of Google’s Ad revenue).

Conversely, a win by Google would mean it’s #1 spot in search would remain, and would likely improve as AOL became Googlelized. Imagine merged AOL/Gmail accounts, Google Video/AOL Video merged and virtually every other area there is overlap.

Plus, AOL users would have access to the Google products which seem to spring up daily, while Google would have access to the most used web communications tools out there – AIM.

Imagine Google’s ability to distribute software via Sun’s Java AND AIM.

Any way you look at it AOL is in the Catbird Seat because it really does hold all the cards. Both Google and MSN will see either huge gains or potentially huge losses depending on how the deal goes down.

And to think that we’d already all but counted AOL out of the search game.

Rob Sullivan is a SEO Consultant and Writer for Textlinkbrokers.com

As you may have read in the last Daily Roundup, I had set aside some time this weekend to take on a new project involving setting up a little search engine indexer in my home.

I do this because in this industry – the search marketing industry – you either lead or you follow. Even to just maintain your abilities you must always be learning and experimenting. I can not tell you how many new techniques I’ve developed over the past years through “what if” ideas.

Over the past few years I’ve studied search engines like Google (and Altavista when it was big, and Inktomi before it became Yahoo!) in order to learn how they have leveraged technology to become world leaders.

Understanding these engines means not only looking at results to figure out how they got there, but also understanding the technology that got it there. That is why I set up the small indexer on my computer – to get a better idea how crawlers work. The LAMP project that I installed also has a simple search engine that does rank pages by relevance.

I am also interested in installing software that is easy because I’m still relatively new to Linux. I’ve been using it as my primary system at home for just over a year now, but I’ve used Windows since 3.11. I am even a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer, and have been for some time, so am very familiar with how Windows operates.

So, as I am still technically a “newbie” when it comes to Linux I like stuff that’s relatively easy. I have moved away (somewhat) from the automated package installers and can manually install packages if I need to, but I wasn’t too interested in doing all that for this project and since the install did seem pretty simple as I had most of the prerequisites already I decided to give it a go.

Of course, it didn’t go as smoothly as it was supposed to (they never do for me) so I found myself launching a browser and searching for the errors that I was getting.

I remember doing something similar about 8 months ago. I don’t remember what I was playing with then, and I was generating a fair number of errors, however I was becoming extremely frustrated with Google at the time because I wasn’t finding answers to my questions. Instead I found myself using Ask Jeeves increasingly more during that time because of my perception of lack of Google quality.

Flash forward to yesterday and for every error I searched for I found an answer usually in the top spot and in every case in the top 3. It never really clued in for me until this morning how much Google has improved their results in just 8 months. In fact, as I think about it, the more research I find myself doing online, the more relevant Google results have been getting.

I doubt that there has been any time in our history when there was so much information available to users at their fingertips like now. The web has become much more than an e-commerce generator. It is also a very powerful research tool.

And I think this is the message that is missing in some websites – the whole research aspect of the web.

How many times have you been in research mode searching for product information or even a decent picture of a product, only to find yourself on a site which is the same as the last 5 sites that you have visited that has a grainy picture, no information yet offer free shipping and handling?

This is a real frustration to me because as you may have guessed, outside of my job I do lots of personal research. Yet too often the websites I visit aren’t geared towards the typical researcher.

Here’s a good example: My wife and I are looking for a new TV. Ours is about 12 years old, so we’re thinking with the new wide screen technology, and the new types like DLP and LCD that it’s time to upgrade.

My first question is: What’s better? LCD or DLP?

It took me close to an hour to find this information and it wasn’t on a vendors site or an e-commerce site (although I must have seen a couple dozen of them by then) it was on About.com. I got a great article explaining the benefits and disadvantages of each format.

So then, upon deciding on one, I wanted to get an idea of the different models and features. Again, after browsing many consumer sites I was becoming frustrated because I wasn’t able to find out much about any of the systems. Most of the sites simply re-generated the manufacturers promotional brochures giving me very little concrete information such as screen resolution, the number of inputs and anything else that would help me make up my mind. Remember, I’m still in research mode, so not interested in pricing at the moment.

In the end it was a consumer opinion site that I finally found the information I wanted on the different brands and features. Another missed opportunity from the retailers.

Finally I had determined which one I wanted, now it was a matter of getting a little more information in order to make up my mind. Keep in mind that I’m close to making a purchase (or at least in the coming months) so now is the time I go price shopping. I already know which one I want, I just want to know how much it’s going to set me back.

And again I must say, most retailers dropped the ball.

With many retail sites that I saw, there was no way for me to check stock in the stores in my area, nor did they provide the extras I would have expected such as online coupons or other promotional material. Yet when I look in many of their printed fliers they offer free satellite systems, or free DVD players, or coupons for free movie purchases, yet none of that was online.

In fact some of the largest retailers in my area didn’t even have that online. Many websites were nothing more than online brochures. There was no way for me to browse products or perform any other type of shopping online.

Overall, through this whole procedure, I would give most online retailers a failing grade. Simply because they lost me before I even became a potential customer because I couldn’t find that information at that crucial research stage.

I guess the morale of this story is this: In order to become a true online retailer, you need to be able to capture the browsers as well as the buyers. By focusing on one target (the buyers) you are alienating a much larger potential customer base – the browser.

And as an online retailer I can give you another reason for bulking up your site. Not only is it great for helping convert browsers into buyers, but it’s also great spider food!

That’s right – the more content you have, the more authoritative your site becomes on the search engines. Why do you think sites like the Wikipedia, or About.com appear at the top of the search results so often? Because they are packed with content.

So, online retailers, my message to you is this – become everything to everyone. Remember that the conversion may have started 3 or 4 visits ago, and continues beyond the purchase. Don’t just focus on the person who comes to your site, fills their cart, purchases and leaves. Also pay attention to that customer who comes along, looks in your window and kicks some tires. These are the ones you may have to spend more time winning, but could end up making you the winner through repeat sales and referrals.