Make Money Online

Ever since we assembled a 1.6 MW solar panel installation at our headquarters in Mountain View in 2007, we’ve been wondering, “Does cleaning the solar panels make them more effective?” We thought it might, but we needed to be sure. So we analyzed the mountains of data that we collect about the energy that these panels produce — after rain, after cleaning and at different times of the year.

We have two different sets of solar panels on our campus — completely flat ones installed on carports, and rooftop ones that are tilted.

Since the carport solar panels have no tilt, rain doesn’t do a good job of rinsing off the dirt they collect. (Also, our carports are situated across from a sand field, which doesn’t help the situation.) We cleaned these panels for the first time after they had been in operation for 15 months, and their energy output doubled overnight. When we cleaned them again eight months later, their output instantly increased by 36 percent. In fact, we found that cleaning these panels is the #1 way to maximize the energy they produce. As a result, we’ve added the carport solar panels to our spring cleaning checklist.

The rooftop solar panels are a different story. Our data indicates that rain does a sufficient job of cleaning the tilted solar panels. Some dirt does accumulate in the corners, but the resulting reduction in energy output is fairly small — and cleaning tilted panels does not significantly increase their energy production. So for now, we’ll let Mother Nature take care of cleaning our rooftop panels.

We’ve also been crunching numbers on dollars-and-cents; the more energy our panels produce, the sooner we’ll be paid back by our solar investment. Our analysis now predicts that Google’s system will pay for itself in about six and a half years, which is even better than we initially expected.

If you want to learn more about our solar study, check out these slides showing the effects that seasonality, tilt, dirt, particulate matter, rain and cleaning have on Google’s solar energy output. We hope you solar panel owners out there can tailor our analysis to the specifics of your own installation to produce some extra energy of your own!

Posted by Winnie Lam, Senior Product Manager

Original post:
Should you spring clean your solar panels?

A few months ago when we announced the Search Options panel, we promised that you would soon see similar functionality across our other search properties. Today we are rolling out Search Options for Google Images.

This new feature offers quick access to existing tools, including search by color and image type. Color search will find images that are only in color or only in black and white, or even images that contain a specific color, such as red, pink, or green. Type search is a great way to narrow down your results if you are looking for a specific kind of image, such as a photo, clip art, line drawing or face.

We’ve also revamped our size search. In addition to choosing from commonly searched-for sizes, now you can search for an exact image size or any image larger than a certain size. You can find images of practically any size, including 70 megapixels or more.

The new layout makes it faster and easier to combine and toggle between options. It also makes it easier for us to add additional image search options in the future, so keep your eyes peeled. Just click “Show options…” in the blue bar on the search results page to try out any of these tools.

Posted by Ken Dauber, Software Engineer, and Nate Smith, Associate Product Manager

Read the rest here:
Search Options now on Google Images

With more and more people watching videos, think about including video’s into your press release. According to a new study that was published by Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, “the share of online adults who watch videos on video-sharing sites has nearly doubled since 2006. Fully 62% of adult internet users have watched video on these sites, up from just 33% who reported this in December 2006.” Many press release service allow you to embed the video into the release. You can upload the video file itself or embed a link from a YouTube channel. With today’s press releases, you should be offering your reader the news they want, how they want to read or watch it.

Read the rest here:
Video In Press Release

We want to get you paid by the fastest means possible. As many of you know, we offer Western Union in 23 countries and courier service in many other countries.

We’d like to take a minute to remind our North American publishers that the fastest way for you to receive your payments is via Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT). EFT is quick and easy to set up. When payments are issued, there’s no need to wait for the delivery in the mail — the funds appear in your bank account shortly after they’re issued. That means if we processed a payment for you this month, your earnings would be in your bank account already.

Also, EFT is good for the environment, since a check doesn’t need to take a ride by sea, plane, or land to reach you. In available locations, it’s the Google-recommended form of payment, so we hope you won’t hesitate to sign up. You can learn more in our Help Center.

To our publishers in regions where we don’t offer EFT yet, please know that we’re always working towards expand our payment options, so stay tuned to Inside AdSense to learn when new forms of payments launch in your location.

Posted by Elizabeth Ferdon – AdSense Payments Team

Excerpt from:
In North America? We recommend EFT for your next payment

Blogs, ning, myspace, wikis, facebook, twitter, youtube. web-based CRM, google docs…What the heck is a website nowadays? Just about anyone can have a web presence. The options are endless: personalize a twitter account, edit wikipedia, create an event on facebook, and on and on. At Affiliate Summit East, a panel of marketing experts will explore the traditional website model, with a focus on their evolving role in a business plan. For details on the session, check out the agenda (where this session is listed about a quarter down the page).

Two participants on the panel have blogs that delve into these issues. (We’re adding the to the BAMroll because if they’re at Affiliate Summit, they must be into affiliate marketing.)  Take a sneak peak at their positions to get a sense of how the discussion might go.

• The moderator of the panel is Shashi Bellamkonda whose personal blog is happenings, advice, and other technology thoughts ! He works for an online marketing company, and uses real-life examples in his posts to prove his point: social media is invaluable to business growth!
• Ramon Ray is a technology evangelist, and together with colleague Laura Leites, posts on Small Biz Technology with the same purpose that drives their eponymous business. They serve small and medium-sized businesses who want to reach their potential with the help of technology. This includes keeping a finger on the pulse of affiliate marketing, as well as suggesting smart business practices, reviewing products, and well, offering insight on what websites are for!

Let us know if you’re going to the Affiliate Summit, which begins August 9 in New York. If you’d like to speak with Nicky Senyard (CEO), or Maranda Moses (Affiliate Manager) about how Share Results could serve your website-related needs, they would be happy to set up an appointment. Like the panelists above, we have lots to say about what websites are! Of course, what we say will depend on your needs. Even if you’re not going to Affiliate Summit, email us anyway to have our own ’session’ to discuss what websites are for. Get the conversation started by emailing us at info@shareresults.com.

See you next Thursday, with our final Affiliate Summit focused BAMroll update!

Credit:
BAMroll Update: July 30, 2009

(Cross-posted from the YouTube Biz Blog)

Last week the world watched in wonder as Jill Peterson and Kevin Heinz’s wedding party transformed a familiar and predictable tradition into something spontaneous and just flat-out fun. The video, set to R&B star Chris Brown’s hypnotic dance jam “Forever,” became an overnight sensation, accumulating more than 10 million views on YouTube in less than one week. But as with all great YouTube videos, there’s more to this story than simple view counts.

At YouTube, we have sophisticated content management tools in place to help rights holders control their content on our site. The rights holders for “Forever” used these tools to claim and monetize the song, as well as to start running Click-to-Buy links over the video, giving viewers the opportunity to purchase the music track on Amazon and iTunes. As a result, the rights holders were able to capitalize on the massive wave of popularity generated by “JK Wedding Entrance Dance” — in the last week, searches for “Chris Brown Forever” on YouTube have skyrocketed, making it one of the most popular queries on the site:

This traffic is also very engaged — the click-through rate (CTR) on the “JK Wedding Entrance” video is 2x the average of other Click-to-Buy overlays on the site. And this newfound interest in downloading “Forever” goes beyond the viral video itself: “JK Wedding Entrance” also appears to have influenced the official “Forever” music video, which saw its Click-to-Buy CTR increase by 2.5x in the last week.

So, what does all of this mean? Despite compelling data and studies around consumer purchasing habits, many still question the promotional and bottom-line business value sites like YouTube provide artists. But in the last week, over a year after its release, Chris Brown’s “Forever” has again rocketed up the charts, reaching as high as #4 on the iTunes singles chart and #3 on Amazon’s best selling MP3 list. We’ve seen similar successes in the past with partners like Monty Python.

One of our main goals at YouTube is to help content creators effectively make money from the distribution of their content online. That they can do so in a way that brings artists and our community together to create fun, spontaneous and inspiring works, is one of the best and most exciting things about YouTube.

Posted by Chris LaRosa, Technical Account Manager, and Ali Sandler, Music Partner Manager

The rest is here:
I now pronounce you monetized: a YouTube video case study

Share Results is excited to announce that the SnagAJob.com affiliate program is now live in the network.

SnagAJob.com is the number one source and the nation’s largest job site for part-time and full-time hourly employment. Since 2000 they have been connecting businesses needing part-time or full-time hourly employees with the most qualified hourly job seekers at a lower cost per hire.

Employers post hourly jobs on SnagAJob.com and get access to over 17 million registered job seekers across the nation.

Placements permitted in this program include:

• Banner Creative
• Text Ads
• PPC/Search Marketing (please see program details for more info on restrictions)
• Email traffic not permitted
• 45-day Cookie
• US traffic
• Superior partner support

Commission Offer:

As a new affiliate to the SnagAJob.com program, you will earn $1.00 CPL commission on valid US registrations.

Publishers that promote within the education, career or job search categories are ideal for this affiliate program. To learn more about this merchant, please visit their co-branded page.

Original post:
SnagAJob.com Launches program on Share Results

Recently, a Chicago based realty group sued a Twitter user for $50,000 for a single tweet, a tweet about her opinion about their apartments. Now to me, I think this kind of action is pretty serious yet the Twitter user, @abonnen (who’s account is no longer up) only had 20 followers. The message probably didn’t go too far. With this whole lawsuit emerging, the company now has an even more damaging reputation – being a company who are a “sue first, ask questions later kind of an organization. (as quoted by Jeffrey Michael from Horizon Realty Group in the Chicago Sun Times)

The tweet read as follows –

This whole situation had gotten me thinking about the countless tweets I’ve made complaining about companies. I’ve seen other people do it, and gotten responses from the company personally asking if there was something they could help them with to make their experience with the company better. Horizon could have simply told the Twitter user to remove the tweet before going off and suing her, but they didn’t.

I’m all about good reputation management, but I think this situation has gone a bit too far. When it comes to apartments there is always going to be someone saying something bad, so I think the only thing that could be done is to handle the situation on a one on one basis.

See the original post:
A Lawsuit for an Opinionated Tweet

You had to be under a rock yesterday to miss the big news: Yahoo took a dose of poison to speed up its death. Rumor has it Steve Ballmer put on a Jack Kevorkian mask to trick Carol Bartz into the deal.

In all seriousness, search has been a confusing place from the beginning and it continues as such. I joined GoTo.com when it was entering the throes of the second phase of search. I have decided to write a different perspective on this with a little long forgotten history. It’s written from my perspective in the industry so if it comes across as self-serving or you want things more clean, just hit the Back button or go read what Danny Sullivan and Jason Calacanis wrote about the deal.

Phase 1: Netscape Built Yahoo, Excite, Lycos and Infoseek

Netscape was THE browser back in the day (I have to put it that way or my Old Internet Guy will be revoked card). It didn’t have its own search engine but it had a button you could press to get to one of the 4 main search engines. The best part was, it gave them traffic for the price of… FREE!

Mind you, Yahoo wasn’t a search engine. It was a directory that David Filo and Jerry Yang (oh, he commits infanticide later in this story) started as grad students at Stanford.

Not that many readers remember the other early players like:  Excite (bought by ISP @Home and destroyed), Lycos (is that German for search?) or Infoseek (bought by Disney, renamed Go and successfully sued by GoTo over the logo before being shutdown… is Disney even on the Web anymore?), and Altavista (which was a project by Digital to prove the value of its servers. It was at altavista.digital.com. Catchy and user-friendly, huh?)

Phase 2: Netscape wants to charge

Imagine that, people realized there was money in search. The big four weren’t so keen on paying (well, the ones that were not Yahoo stuck around for a small amount). There was a group of upstarts with deep VC pockets and were willing to pay to play. GoTo.com was in there as were AskJeeves (IAC later committed “butlercide”), Looksmart (it was our goal that it didn’t look smart… sorry Claudine and Sean), Go2Net / Infospace and a few others. It was fun even if many portal execs (OK, most portal execs) thought we were doing the work of the devil.

GoTo had one thing going for it (this is the self serving part). Todd Tappin, our CFO, wouldn’t let us sign an unprofitable deal. He did let us bid them up to hurt the others, especially Looksmart. There was one deal Jeffrey Brewer, our fearless CEO, insisted that we sign and pray. It was a bet your business deal. It was, of course, Netscape.

Netscape had an annual bidding process for its search traffic. Minimum $30 CPM and maximum 15% of the traffic. I lobbied to have our offer go in at 25% and 35%. We sent in both with different CPMs and (HOLY SEARCH, BATMAN!) they said yes (after asking if we meant it). Panic. Jeffrey remained calm and said he could get the money if the deal went south. Well, the day it was announced the stock we up 40% (we went public 2 weeks prior) and, much to our surprise, it was profitable due to having 20 keywords listed whenever users saw it. That was an important point in the development of paid search. We briefly messed up the marketplace by driving traffic to specific keywords (at least when we let distribution partners do so).

Needless to say, Ask.com is the only survivor of this class (”We’re #3!!!”). GoTo and Altavista (along with FAST and Inktomi) were bought by Yahoo along with Tim Cadogan (who headed up Yahoo Search for a few years before leaving to found OpenX).

Phase 3: Yahoo Builds Google

Did I really write that Yahoo built Google? Yep. Sure Larry Page and Sergey Brin built the technology but Yahoo marketed the hell out of that thing. From 2000-2004 Yahoo continued to provide only the Yahoo Directory and had its search engine “powered by Google”. This legitimized Google by giving it credibility with Yahoo’s users who soon figured out they could go directly to Google.

Google didn’t have to pay for traffic and Yahoo’s former users didn’t have to search via navigating through 6 clicks to find a site in a directory.

Trip to Mountain View to pitch Google on paid search. Yes, we heard that paid search was not relevant and would never be on Google’s SERPs. And they meant it. It wasn’t a trick. Google’s investors later talked to Larry and Sergey and said that the fractions of a cent for Yahoo search was nice to fund development but was nothing compared to what Google could make with GoTo-like paid search. The VCs won and Larry and Sergei became billionaires.

Google figured out to sign a deal that was great for AOL (rumored to be as high as 100% of revenue plus pre-IPO warrants in Google). What did it get from that? It went from 0 to 100 (that’s in 1,000’s of advertisers) overnight as every GoTo advertiser wanted to keep the gravy train that was newbie AOL users.

Oh, MSN launched a search engine too. To its credit, Microsoft wouldn’t poach employees from its partners so Yahoo (which did) got Tim Cadogan.

Over at Yahoo, Terry Semel stepped in and asked why in hell did Yahoo not have a deal with GoTo to monetize search through text ads. Good question. My first call for GoTo (the week before I started) was to Ben Padnos at Yahoo. We spent a year and a half on a deal that got mucked with a handshake (it’s a long story about two people who used to work together and had the relationship turned upside down on this one… oh, and they didn’t like each other). Terry signed the deal and like it so much he bought the company. He didn’t like the idea that Yahoo didn’t have control of its advertiser base (Carol, are you listening? You really should be.)

Phase 4: The Death of Yahoo and the Rise of MicroLiveBing

You’ve all been following what happened to Yahoo when Jerry Yang turned down Microsoft’s $33 a share offer (Oops). You heard that Microsoft just stole Yahoo’s search business with the original Netscape-sized down payment of FREE.

Yahoo hasn’t done much to improve its search engine since Tim left a couple of years ago. Microsoft (as much as we like to knock it for its poor name choices) has been gobbling up every interesting search company it can find and has been trying to build a better search engine. Microsoft even admitted Google was better by using the exact format of Google’s search results (paid and natural). Now it’s buying marketshare.

That leaves us with Google just shy of 70% of the market (including it’s $1 billion dollar deals with AOL and MySpace), MicroHoo at around 28.5%, Ask.com with a few percent (and lots of Google AdWords results) and a few others.

Phase 5: Can there be new search engines?

I really want to say yes but I don’t see how. Back in the day (again, it’s required along with at the end of the day) search engines could start and they could buy traffic. The deals are sealed with BIG money now. They could also get press and get users. The biggest suck in this vacuum is that Google and Microsoft buy them up when they show any promise. And who amongst the giants wants to compete with Microsoft and Google? I’m hiding behind the handball backstop for this playground brawl. These guys are going at it everywhere!

Google has done a few things well.

• Google is a technology company. Yahoo was not, is not and will not be. GoTo wasn’t either. Microsoft isn’t really. By that I mean that Google produces excellent services. They are fast. They are what users want. They aren’t clunky and relying on old technology.
• Google innovates. Who cares if Orkut is only big in Brazil. Look at everything else that Google gives the world… for FREE!
• Google gives it away for free. Half of Microsoft is Windows and Office. If you wanted to hurt Microsoft, what would you do? Give away an operating system (Chrome OS) and a productivity suite (Google Docs). First Round Capital says that “if your company can take $5 of revenue from a competitor for every $1 you earn – let’s talk!” Google uses its significant revenue from search to give everything else away… for FREE! Why? People keep coming back. As much as I want to hate Google, I now have a G1, I use Gmail, etc., etc., etc.

Google isn’t great at marketing, Apple is. Google just builds great technology. It’s winning. If it keeps innovating, it has a good chance of becoming really scary (or even scarier). Think about how many entities’ livelihoods are based on changes to Google’s natural search algorithms and paid search rules. A couple of years ago I read an article on the half-life of tech leaders (I think it was by Josh Kopelman but I can’t find it). IBM’s dominance lasted for 30 years. Microsoft’s for 15 years. Google is past 7 1/2 years. Hmmmm….

I hope that Microsoft succeeds on this one. It hasn’t used its near-monopoly power well in the past. I hope that we can see the market stabilize at 60/40 or to have a real third player (kind of like how I’d like a centrist political party in this country).

My only prediction on this is that there will be a new battle for distribution. Microsoft needs more search traffic. It needs to provide a big base for advertisers to get the CPCs up and to make it worthwhile for us all to spend money there. And it needs the traffic to prove the credibility to the end users and the experts who make the noise that the general public hears. Steve Ballmer has stated that he is willing to spend BILLIONS a year on search for the next 5 years. The man is the world’s first employee billionaire. He seems to know a thing or two.

My only question is this: Microsoft is paying for the search traffic on Facebook. How is it that Facebook still provides 19% of Google’s traffic?

Excerpt from:

I recently used a Twitter Application called TweetStats to diagnose my Twitter habits (addiction?).

This first chart shows my Twitter history, I started on Twitter in March 2007, I really started Tweeting in March 2009. I think this likely coincides with using TweetDeck, a great application for managing who you follow and easily ReTweeting great tweets by others.

These charts show the day of the week (Wednesday) and the hour I tweet the most (11PM). I’m not sure what this tells us, except that I should probably get to bed earlier.

This final chart shows the Twitter personalities that I have ‘ReTweeted’ the most. Iconic88 is my favorite ReTweet, he is is an amazing, positive uplifting twitterer. I love to spread his positive messages. I even interviewed him on a recent Ten Golden Rules Internet Marketing Podcast . Some other great folks to follow include Mashable (from the leading blog), Facebook Goddess Mari Smith and Help A Reporter founder Peter Shankman’s @Skydiver handle.

Excerpted from:
Who, When and How often do you Twitter?

These days, user-generated content is everywhere, from the comments below newspaper articles, to the photos and videos shared on social networks. So it’s no surprise that many publishers are monetizing this type of content with AdSense ads. But, while you’re familiar with types of content which are compliant with the AdSense program policies, your users might not be. We understand that it’s not always easy to monitor hundreds of new comments, posts, user profiles, videos, or photos every day, so here are a few ideas on how to maintain an advertiser-friendly environment on your pages.

As a quick note before we head into the tips, remember that inappropriate content can come in many forms — images, forum posts, comments, links, and so on. For example, adult content isn’t only limited to pornographic images; it can also be sexually explicit forum posts or spam bot comments with links to adult sites, which aren’t permitted by our policies. We recommend reviewing our previous Inside AdSense post on this topic for further clarification and a few tests you can try on your content.

Now for the tips, which we’ve divided in two sections – ‘Prevention’ and ‘Monitoring’.

Prevention

Here are some recommendations for ways to prevent your ads from appearing alongside user-generated content that isn’t compliant with our policies:

1. Publish clear content guidelines and policies that your users will have to accept and adhere to in order to sign up and use your site’s services.

2. If you own a photo or video sharing site where users are permitted to upload adult or other non-compliant content, clearly structure your content to avoid placing your ad code in sections/categories containing this type of content. The same idea could also be easily applied to online stores with adult sections or to classifieds sites which offer adult dating classifieds.
3. Ask users to tag their inappropriate content (e.g. sexually suggestive pictures or videos) as being non family-safe. This can help you perform human evaluations of potentially inappropriate content for AdSense ads. You can also try installing keyword filters for content related to adult topics, violence, or drugs, for instance. While we’re unable to provide you with details about setting up these filters for your site, we recommend searching for terms such as “keyword filtering” or “content filtering” on Google.com.
4. Implement spambot protection for your comment forms, forums, and guest books. If you need more information on this topic, try a Google search for “spambot protection”.

Monitoring

We suggest these tips to ensure that your existing user-generated content pages remain compliant with our policies:

1. Set up ways for your community to monitor itself. For example, try adding a “Report inappropriate content” link to your pages, to allow users to flag content for you to review.

2. Proactively review pages, videos, photos, etc. with high pageviews on a regular basis.
3. Spot-check content based on keywords, content search, or related user accounts. For example, try entering keywords related to inappropriate content in your own search engine and checking the results. Alternatively, you can search on Google.com using the following parameter, replacing ‘example.com’ with your own site’s URL and ‘keyword’ with a specific word or phrase: “site:example.com keyword”.
4. Create editorial policies and exercise moderator control in your comments, forums, and guestbook sections.

We hope you find these tips helpful. You can also read related information and suggestions from our Search Quality Team in a recent post on the Webmaster Central Blog. If you have any other ideas, or if you’ve already implemented similar measures on your sites with user-generated content, please feel free to leave a comment below and share your experience.

Posted by Gergana Marinova – AdSense Publisher Support

Read more from the original source:
Tips for maintaining an AdSense-friendly site with user-generated content

The nofollow tag was created to help fight spam, but then SEOs found a way to exploit it to their advantage. Until about a year ago, it was actually being used to sculpt Page Rank (PR). Even though you can’t use it to outright sculpt PR anymore, it still plays a role in your on-page SEO. Not only can it help you avoid being penalized by Google for a violation of their Webmaster Guidelines, it can also be used to kind of “shore up” the PR you’ve already managed to build.

How NoFollow Has Changed

The way that webmasters used the nofollow tag to actually sculpt PR was by putting it on links to pages that they weren’t trying to rank for — such as their “terms and conditions” and “privacy policy” pages. This kept the “link juice” of their higher profile pages (such as their index page) from flowing to less important pages. This way, they could strategically redistribute what pages their “link juice” flowed to.

Then, at a recent Search Marketing Expo, Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Webspam Team, announced that nofollow tags can no longer be used to sculpt Page Rank (PR) anymore. Although this change has been in effect for over a year, this announcement was the first clear indication that the nofollow tag could no longer be used this way.

What changed was that Google stopped indexing internally tagged nofollow links as “link juice dams.” In other words, trying to use it as internal SEO tactic to sculpt your PR isn’t going to work. As SEO expert, Danny Sullivan put it:

Imagine authority is money, and a particular page has $10 in “authority” to spend. It links out to 10 pages, so each of those pages gets $1 ($10 divided by 10). If it links to 20 pages, each gets 50 cents ($10 divided by 20). If it links to 5 pages, each page gets $2 (you get the math by now).
[…]
[Now] if you have $10 in authority to spend on those ten links, and you block 5 of them, the other 5 aren’t going to get $2 each. They’re still getting $1. It’s just that the other $5 you thought you were saving is now going to waste.

So as far as PR sculpting goes, you should now let your link juice flow freely throughout your site. This means removing the nofollow tag from your internal links. If you don’t, you’ll run the risk that some of PR that you can share among your pages will just end up going to waste.

Where to Put the NoFollow

Despite this, there are still two places you might want to still include the nofollow tag. The first (and more obvious) is on paid links. Google frowns on letting links juice flow out through paid links, and if they catch you, they’ll penalize your site.

The other place you might want to consider using the nofollow tag is when linking to outsides sites in general. The reason that a link from another site boosts your own PR is because when that site links to you, some its PR gets passed on to you. So if you’re linking out to another site, you might choose to hoard your PR all to yourself.

This last option, of course, isn’t exactly a “social” or “bloggy” thing to do. It’s just a way to cover all your bases. But if you’re really that caught up in hoarding all of your traffic, you might want to ask why you’re linking out at all in the first place.

Read more here:
Sculpting Page Rank with the NoFollow Tag

When building links for search engine optimization purposes, the best thing you can do is to make your links look natural. Especially if you are buying links, you want to make these links look like people just decided to link to your website because it has good content. Since search engines increase your rankings for having natural links while they can penalize you if you are buying/selling links, it is important to cover your tracks.

One of the most common mistakes when building links unnaturally is to use exactly the same anchor text, for example a keyword phrase you are targeting, for a large number of links. If your links are natural, there is a very slim chance that everyone that links to you will use identical anchor text, and the search engines know this. If you use variations in your anchor text, your links will look more natural. For example, if you are targeting the phrase “internet marketing consultant”, when choosing anchor text for new links, sometimes use “internet marketing consulting” or “consulting for internet marketing” and other variations.

Another issue is your link growth. If your site has never generated more than five links in a month, then all of a sudden it generates 200 links in a month, this can look very unnatural to the search engines. If you are starting a linkbuilding campaign, start slow. Each month, try to get a few more backlinks than the previous month.

The key to a successful linkbuilding campaign is making the links appear to be natural. If you can accomplish this, you will see much better ranking results.

See the original post:
Building Natural Looking Links

Which infamous book thief got caught stealing from the Chicago Public Library and was later acquitted on grounds of insanity? How many European cities are mentioned in Karen Fowler’s “The Jane Austen Book Club?” And can you figure out what curious objects Dorothy is picking from a tree in this illustration from Frank Baum’s “Ozma of Oz?”

http://books.google.com/game. (Please note: Some books may not be available in full view to those outside the United States.) The first 20,000 people to play the game will also receive commemorative Google Books laptop stickers. So all you bookworms out there, start playing now!

Posted by Hicham Alaoui, Associate Product Marketing Manager, Google Books

Excerpted from:
Announcing the 10 Days in Google Books game

Nearly every affiliate has considered making the leap from being a part-time affiliate marketer to being a full-time one. Well, in the latest episode of Coffee with Nicky, our CEO, Nicky Senyard, explores what’s involved in taking that step. From the experience it takes, to how it’s a leap of faith that be based on your what you’re passionate about, Nicky goes over some considerations that every affiliate should make when taking their affiliate marketing activities to the next level.

Read the original post:
Becoming a Full-Time Affiliate