Make Money Online

It’s time again for our annual wrap-up of blogging at Google. You may have noticed 2009 marked our fifth year here on the Official Google Blog — our first post was in April 2004 — and it was our busiest year yet. This is our 423rd post of 2009 — a 15 percent increase over last year. We’re also pleased to note that a total of 14,493,472 readers stopped by this year, a 21 percent increase. You hail from all over: more than half of visitors are outside of the U.S. The other top countries are (in order) U.K., India, Canada, Germany and France.

What captured your attention this year? Here are the top 10 posts of 2009, by unique pageviews:

1. Introducing the Google Chrome OS – 2,591,794 unique pageviews (more than 12 percent of the year’s total). The announcement of our open source operating system received more than 4x the views of any other post.
2. Went Walkabout. Brought back Google Wave – 639,225. Wave-mania struck after we introduced a new product for collaboration and communication at our Google I/O conference.
3. Here comes Google Voice – 357,084. We released a preview of this application to help you better manage your voice communications.
4. “This site may harm your computer” on every search result?!?! – 320,435. A short-lived error affecting Google search results led to confusion and concern; this post cleared it up.
5. Email in Indian languages – 224,052. A transliteration feature in Gmail that makes it easier to type in Indian languages was a hit. More than one million readers of the blog in 2009 were from India — a 53 percent increase over 2008.
6. Releasing the Chromium OS open source project – 217,424. A few months after announcing our operating system project, we open-sourced it as Chromium OS.
7. Now you see it, now you don’t – 165,329. We introduced a new, clean version of our classic homepage.
8. Google Apps is out of beta (yes, really) – 164,319. Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Talk all lost their beta tags (in Gmail’s case, after five years!).
9. Now S-U-P-E-R-sized! – 155,196. A “small” change increasing the size of the Google search box got a lot of attention.
10. Introducing Google Public DNS – 143,122. We launched our public DNS resolver, which converts domain names into unique Internet Protocol (IP) numbers.

We also developed a few different series of posts this year: one on the power of measurement, for people who want to improve the performance of their websites; a weekly series focused on search; and another on the latest in the world of Google Apps.

As always, we had some fun in 2009, with grass-mowing goats and a panda-obsessed Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity (CADIE) on April Fools’ Day. Our curiosity was piqued by Atlantis (or not) under the sea, constellations in Google Sky Map and a fresnel lens somewhere in between.

Finally, the Google Blog network continues to grow. This year, we welcomed blogs dedicated to Google Wave, Google New Zealand, Data Liberation, Google Voice, Google Arabia, Google Thailand, European Public Policy and Google Chrome — among others — to our blogging family.

Beyond the blogs, in February we jumped head-first into the Twitterverse, starting our @google account with a geeky tweet. Since then, we’ve tweeted more than 1,000 times, and are grateful to have gathered two million or so followers. That puts us in the company of @algore and @ashsimpsonwentz, and (today, at least) just 65,000 or so followers behind a certain @ladygaga (although we’re pretty sure that gap is only going to grow — no way we can compete with her outfits). Around 75 other Google entities and teams have gotten into the Twitter act this year as well, so we built a directory to help you keep up with all the action. Twitter also was our biggest non-Google referrer to the blog in 2009, a clear sign of its rapid growth in popularity.

Thanks for sticking with us through all of our goings-on over the past 12 months. We look forward to having you back for more in 2010. In the meantime, happy New Year!

Posted by Emily Wood and Jordan Newman, Editors, Google Blog Team

Go here to read the rest:
Five years of Google blogging

When was the last time you corresponded via a personalized letter? Remember when you actually had to pick up the phone and call someone? With texting, Twitter, Facebook and e-mail replacing everyday communication, the New Year may be a time to take a step back from all of today’s technology and remember that you can’t always express yourself in 140 characters.

Yesterday, John Mayer urged his Twitter followers to take part in a New Year’s Digital Cleanse in an effort to “defrag” our technologically overloaded minds. Mayer suggests a one-week cleanse, beginning January 1st and ending on January 8th, which doesn’t require you to completely remove technology from your life, only take a step back. Here’s the recipe:

• email only from laptop or desktop computers.

• cell phones can only be used to make calls, and no text messages or e-mails are allowed – if you receive a text, you must reply in voice over the phone.

• no use of Twitter or any other social networking site – including reading as well as posting.

• no visiting of any entertainment or gossip sites.

Following these guidelines should be manageable for even the most connected individuals. Work commitments may prevent you from participating in the cleanse, but it is still refreshing to think about how far communication has come, even just over the last year.

Continued here:
John Mayer Calls for a Digital Cleanse to Bring in the New Year

It has been a tradition since the early 1900s to celebrate the famous “New Year’s Eve Ball Drop of Times Square.” But do you ever wonder how others around the world bring in the big day? There was a neat posting in the Bing Community today referencing just this. Did you know that the Japanese culture typically brings in the New Year by more calming activities such as cleaning the house? Check out Bing’s “New Year’s Around the World” for some amazing images.

So from New York to Australia [and everyone in between] and however you prefer to bring in the New Year — may it be a prosperous one for all!

Read more:
Counting Down Around the World

Well, here in Australia it is New Year’s Eve – with 2010
fast approaching.

It’s the time for New Year Resolutions to cover all aspects
of your life (so that you can achieve some balance).

However, I just want to focus here on improving personal
productivity in your online business.

I’ve been reading some great resources lately to help
me overcome information overload and to

View original post here:
What Are You Going To Do To Improve Your Productivity in 2010?

A great resource on Facebook that surfaced this week is brought to you by Mashable.com. The Facebook Guide Book is a great resource to bookmark for anything Facebook related. Whether it is learning the basics, to learning how to use Facebook for business, this guide will help you get started.

Towards the bottom of the guide, feature Facebook posts by the Mashable team, such as popular Facebook lists and most recent Facebook news. If you want to start the new year learning about Facebook, I think this is a great place to start.

Read the original here:
Start Off the New Year By Getting Better Acquainted with Facebook

The New Year is a time to reflect upon the year behind us, and to look forward to the prospect and the opportunity of the future.

As 2010 begins, we see a bright future for the online marketing industry.  With a strengthened economy and new possibilities, we see the potential to bring growth to the affiliate marketing community, and the online businesses it has partnered with.

Our goal this year, as it is every year, is to continue to develop new partnerships, as we build upon the ones that we have begun.  We’re excited about 2010, and we are eager about moving forward and gaining momentum, together.

Very best wishes to you and yours for 2010.

The Team at Share Results

Read more from the original source:
Happy New Year!

The Adwords “Bulls Eye” Profit Report by Alex Goad is one
of the most comprehensive and valuable free reports that
I have accessed in some time.

It’s not only relevant for people engaged in PPC campaigns,
but also for anyone involved in any form of Internet Marketing
for affiliate products or their own small business.    

Alex’s central premise is that if you define your

Read the original:
Adwords “Bulls Eye” Profit Report – define your best customer

When setting up a pay per click advertising campaign, a very important key to success is to break your campaigns into tight, granular ad groups. One way to carefully segment campaigns is to identify customer personas.

As internet users, we don’t all search for the same products and services the same way. Different demographic groups may use slightly different search phrases and respond differently to offers. For this reason, it is important to understand what groups would be interested in your product or service and how to speak to them through your advertising.

Identify your customer subsets and give them names (i.e. high school students, soccer moms, etc). Think about the words each segment would search that would result in a sale/lead. Set up a different ad group for each customer segment and focus on the phrases that specific group would likely search. This will also allow you to present different ad copy/creative and landing pages to each segment.

Read the rest here:
Pay Per Click Advertising Tip – Define Customer Personas

The images are grainy, often jerky and hard to follow (like most footage shot using hand-held cameras and cellphones), but the message is unmistakable: in the months since the disputed Iranian presidential election in June, the people of Iran have become fluent in the new language of citizen video reporting. What might have seemed an isolated moment immediately following the election, when we watched videos of Iranians marching, battling and even dying on the streets of Tehran, appears to have become an essential part of their struggle.

At YouTube, we have been watching week after week as new videos have appeared on the site within hours of every single protest or similar event reported from Iran in the past six months. Thousands of uploads have brought the fear and tension of these protests to YouTube, inviting millions of views around the world. It is as if the revolts that are taking place could not do so outside the eye of the camera.

Unlike traditional news footage from foreign correspondents (currently prohibited in Iran), these videos are the voice of the people — unfiltered, unedited and with a single, sometimes disturbing point of view. No professional film could capture the one-to-one feeling of watching an ordinary citizen’s images of unrest in his or her own country.

We are constantly amazed by the videos our community uploads, whether from their own backyards or the streets of a faraway land. Armed with only a camera and a means to reach the Internet, anyone can ask another to bear witness to their lives. Given the nature of the YouTube videos from Iran, we may want to turn away from some of the images we see, but we keep watching, knowing that we are seeing through the eyes of a people who have discovered the power of information — despite the often extreme measures their government is using to try to stop them.

We will continue to provide the platform for you to see what they see, hear their voices and learn about their struggles. And we encourage you to join the global conversation. Leave a comment, upload your own response video or share a moving moment with someone else.

Posted by Olivia Ma, YouTube News and Politics

Read the original here:
Ordinary citizens, extraordinary videos

In recent weeks there’s been talk on the blogsphere, especially from a recent ReadWriteWeb post, about the imminent closure of the popular MyBlogLog blogging widget/social network. With the charge being led by bloggers irate that their beloved blog widget might be soon a footnote in Wikipedia’s logs, are they missing the bigger picture?

Looking at Yahoo’s (NasdaqGS:YHOO) financial report for the three months ending 30 September, it’s clear that the troubled search engine is starting to see a ray of light at the end of the tunnel, reporting net income of $186 million on revenue of $1.575 billion, a sharp contrast from last December’s quarterly loss of $303 million.

It would appear that this past July’s tie-up with Microsoft is starting to bear fruit. With Microsoft focused on the technology elements of algorithmic and paid search services,  Yahoo is free to focus on its role as exclusive worldwide sales force for both companies’ premium search advertisers (i.e.: adCenter and Yahoo Search Marketing). This is going to consume much of Yahoo’s “system resources” if it’s going to work out.

With a long way to go to catch up to Google’s coattails, especially with its dominant position in both organic and paid search, the top guns at Yahoo appear to be making a smart move  to focus on search engine and its associated pay-per-click income stream. This also means that “side projects” like Yahoo’s integrated communications portal 360 and social network Mash have been canned before they made it out the Beta stage gates. Next on the cards, possibly MyBlogLog.

Having bought the then-startup for a steal at $10 million, it would be  a waste to close it down now, as it had done earlier  with its “Auctions” portal site.

If there’s any doubt where Yahoo’s priorities lie, I’ve known several experienced Yahoo managers internally transferred from their social media positions to the search engine’s core operations or its developer network over the last two years. The resulting voids in the social media business units have been filled by second stringers or new hires. The consequence? The rollout of new features has slowed significantly, or chugged along with decrepit (by internet standards) features. This has ironically resulted in the archetypal “poor user experience” so despised by the search engines themselves. Every iTom, iDick and iHarry has fired up their blogspot or wordpress blogs to post a rant or two, or three.

But if it’s a matter of the internet’s third largest website survive the current state of economic uncertainty, what’s losing a couple of popular websites among friends? If Yahoo management decides to focus on the company’s core business of providing search engine results and bringing in cash flow to keep the business going, what’s a few rants on a couple of popular blogs, right?

Still, it is a pity to see some key features, like MyBlogLog’s Pro Stats, which provided idiot-proof analytics for bloggers with a simple yet detailed framework, listing referring urls, on-site urls and, outgoing urls that the most technophobic and neophyte blogger could comprehend.

Maybe the MyBlogLog development team could have incorporated Yahoo Search Marketing text or image results within its community site or even within the widget itself. But it appears the MBL might’ve been a branding play, hampered by the lack of a viable business model and difficulty with integration into Yahoo’s core search model. As time will shortly tell, MBL might have overstayed its welcome.

A decade from now, historians will gaze back and determine if it was prescience or foolishness for Yahoo to have dropped the MBL ball, even while Google started incorporating real-time social network updates into its search results. I might even look back at my blog logs to see if they are right.

Disclosure Note: Andrew Wee is a member of MyBlogLog’s advisory board

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Learn techniques used in affiliate and online marketing to boost your profits.

Excerpted from:
Techniques Of Internet Marketing Used In Affiliate Promotional Campaigns Posted By : Trevor McHaffie

Just wanted to say congrats to Jeremy on rolling out The ShoeMoney Sytem. As much hate as he gets (which the hate has died down tremendously because a) people realized that fat jokes are only funny for so long and b) plenty of legitimate trolls have entered the industry that are actually worth the negative attention), the man knows how to launch and run a successful web-based business.

Can you believe all the self-hype about it? I’m sure many people read “how to make money step by step” and are a bit skeptical, after all that’s what every shittyscammy bizopp promises. Will it lead you step by step to making money? Probably, if you actually digest the information properly. You can check out one of the free videos to kind of get a feel for it (I just watched about half of one of them). You can also read about it on his blog. If you’re just getting started into the industry or have some O.K. businesses running online, Shoe is a guy that’s worth listening too. If you’re just a shady aff raking it in on rebills trying to stay cloaked, you’ll probably find this boring.

I don’t want to plug it too hard because I don’t know the full system and I don’t know how much it’s going to cost, but it looks like Shoemoney put a lot of work into this and so far it looks like he did a pretty good job. So, nice one dude.

P.S. This isn’t a paid review.

P.P.S. Like the category I put this in whoop whoop :p

Excerpted from:
ShoeMoney System, Cool Beans

In October I wrote a post about the fact that the majority of newspaper and magazine publishers were entertaining the idea of charging for online content. The biggest problem for all publishers of online content is finding a magic bullet, not yet identified, to get consumers to pay for access to that content. The latest reports by the New York Times, in what ironically are subscription required articles, indicate that 2010 may be the year of big change.

But what kind of change will it be? It seems less likely that it will be a year of paid content, and more likely to be a year of moving in a different technological direction.

Newspaper and magazine closings in 2009 continued to shrink the traditional print category. The double whammy for such publications has been the simultaneous loss of print subscribers and advertising revenue. Book publishers are starting to panic, too, as they saw the beginnings of a stronger movement to e-books, fueled by Amazon’s Kindle and Barnes & Noble’s Nook e-book readers.

That’s why it is likely that some kind of significant change for print publications will occur in 2010. They simply cannot survive current business conditions much longer.

Interestingly, magazines, newspapers and books are only representative of a larger media revolution that all of us have been living for quite some time. Look what digital media has done to the music business. First records and now CDs are becoming obsolete as digital downloads spread. We have become the iTunes generation.

Movies and television are not far behind. The entertainment industry is currently looking at ways to prevent itself from a similar digital death. Ben Weinberger’s recent Video Insider blog gives us a taste of things to come in 2010:

• Disney’s “Keychest” will enable consumers to “unlock” digital content across media formats
• Best Buy in partnership with CinemaNow will provide customers with the ability to download premium content and watch it on multiple screens
• Time Warner, Comcast, and other cable providers will offer “TV Everywhere” multi-platform access to their cable programming.

Will 2010 be the year of paid content – or will it be the year we see magazines and newspapers producing interactive digital editions? Magazines like Esquire and GQ already offer iPhone versions of their magazines. Esquire’s iPhone version, available next month for a $2.99 monthly subscription, offers scrollable articles and video.

Will 2010 be the year of the Apple tablet, rumored to be named “iSlate”? Essentially a touchscreen that’s standard page size, a tablet computer may offer print publications a new lease on life. Publication executives have supposedly met with Apple, and the result is that several magazines are creating tablet versions that allow readers to interact with articles, rearrange content, and access content unavailable in print versions. The tablet could provide a hybrid platform that brings together the best of computer and online technology. And publishers swoon to think that tablets can also provide data capture that makes ads measurable.

Whatever 2010 will bring for print publishers, it will be a year in which they will undoubtedly begin to reinvent themselves.

See more here:
What will 2010 Bring for Print Publishers?

There will soon be more mobile phones than there are people on the planet. If you are like most people, that phone in your pocket has dramatically changed your behavior and the way you think about and access your information, communications and entertainment. For the younger generations, the mobile phone truly is the center of their universe and the hub for their social interactions. What better place for advertisers and marketers to reach a captive and attentive audience?

In this discussion we will review:

• Why Mobile? Another device vs. a personal accessory…
• Mobile Advertising vs. Mobile Marketing
• If Content is King, is mobile content Master of the Universe?
• Is there really an App for that? How should marketers leverage the current “app” craze

Jeff Sass is the VP of Business Development for leading Mobile Entertainment site, Myxer. With more than 28 million users, Myxer delivers over 70 million mobile downloads per month and is a pioneer in ad-supported mobile content. A former entertainment and game industry exec, Jeff Sass has more than 10 years experience in Mobile and was co-founder and CEO of early mobile commerce player, BarPoint.com.

This webinar will take place on Wednesday, December 30, 2009 12:30pmEST – 1:30pmEST. To register please visit: Why The Small Screen Gets BIG Results!

Here is the original:
InternetMarketingClub.org Presents Why The Small Screen Gets BIG Results!

Sarah Evans – the face of PR Newswire – had one of my favorite posts this weekend:

As an Internet marketer, I have to agree. Not everyone, and everything, needs a Facebook fan page, or a Twitter account, for that matter. Let’s face it – it can get annoying. However, social media does have its place in the Web marketing toolbox. And especially for small businesses on a limited budget, social media can be effective – if it’s used properly.

According to a recent article in eMarketer, lead generation is the biggest benefit social media brings to small businesses. Other benefits as listed in the “Small Business Marketing Forecast 2010” from Ad-ology include:

Like any marketing or advertising campaign, social media efforts need to focused, with a clear strategy and measurable goals. Unfortunately, most small businesses face several challenges when it comes to using social media effectively, including a lack of education and/or the necessary resources to use the channel effectively.

So, before you build that Facebook page or create your Twitter account, think about what you want to accomplish… If you aren’t sure what, how or where to begin, get some help from an expert. As we’ve seen in many instances, a misstep in the social media world can cause more harm than good. By engaging someone familiar with the channel to help you get started, you’ll reduce the risk of a foux paux, as well as the learning curve, and see results faster.

Read the original:
Social Media for Small Businesses