A little background for you: When you develop as many websites and work on as many SEO or PPC Campaigns each month as we do, you start to document trends. Quickly determining which designs convert, which ones do not — and why that is.

Each and every client has his or her idea about what they believe may best work for their brand or in their niche — and in all fairness, most of our clients have a much better understanding of their own market than we ever will.

What we do have, however, is experience and insight on what an end user responds to.

So here’s a short, quick and straight-to-the point rule on how to get your message across & convert more visitors in to leads or sales:

The #1 Rule — Throw one ball at a time.

Picture this:

You’re standing on a football field, and there’s a group of 10 NFL footballers standing about 20 yards away from you. At the exact same moment, all 10 throw a football toward you. You have 10 footballs hurling your way.

How many do you think you will catch? Chances are, with that many footballs heading toward you at the same time: None.

Now let’s change the scenario:

I’m standing in front of you. Just you and I, and I have 10 footballs in a basket next to me. One after another, I throw a football toward you. Consecutively, one at a time. How many do you expect to catch now? Five? Seven? All of them?

The same can be said about sending a message when a visitor hits your website.

If you attempt to throw dozens of messages, Calls To Action and general bits of information to the end user, chances are; they won’t catch anything.

On average, you have about 3.6 seconds (yes we track these metrics) to capture an end users attention & get them to do what it is you want them to do, if they are bombarded with messages, calls to action & a myriad of different attention grabbing page elements – they’re not going to catch anything, nor do what it is you’re hoping they may do.

Need a real world example? Let’s take a look at our own website.

Less than 30% of all visitors will ever use the scroll bar down the side of your website. If you clutter the top half of your website (considered above the fold) with non actionable content, your chance of a conversion has just decreased by 70%.

Again, you have approximately 3.6 seconds to deliver your message and ask for the sale/lead/action.

Many would argue that the web is interactive, and that the “Fold” doesn’t exist in an interactive medium. We beg to differ, and did the research to prove just that. We’re not alone, either — check out the Browsersize Application published by Google Labs:

1. Visit: http://browsersize.googlelabs.com
2. Type in your website URL in the ‘Enter URL here’ field.
3. Click Go.

The page should refresh, and display a colored overlay. The percentages represent how many users will actually ever see your website. Now ask yourself — what % of users are actually seeing your Call To Action?

Repeat the process, and this time put in our website: www.loveclients.com in the ‘Enter URL here’ field.

Notice where our Value Proposition is positioned? And our Call to Action? That’s above the fold, first thing.

The botton line is, the more visitors that actually get to see what it is that you want them to do, and the less clutter you’re pushing out to them, the more those visitors will actually act.
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To learn more about how the team at LoveClients can assist your business in generating more targeted visitors, and more leads or sales visit www.loveclients.com & initiate a Live Chat with a Search Marketing Expert, 24×7 – 365. We never close.

The consensus is that it’s time for a new kind of search, one that finally brings the internet in-line with the sort of ‘breaking news’ we might see on TV, or that ubiquitous, useless ticker at the most of most 24-hour news channels.

Writing in Seattle’s The Stranger, Paul Constant recently explained why real-time is important:

The thing most people will probably, eventually use Twitter for is its clean and efficient search engine.

The search function on Twitter is an amazing thing: It’s a focused laser beam into what people are thinking about right now.

And it’s permanently set to “now”: It doesn’t have anything to do with the past or with archiving. That is an innovation in and of itself.

An inordinate amount of the internet is devoted to archiving and filing all the world that existed before the internet.

Twitter is reflexive, instinct driven, present. It doesn’t care about the past. It’s hard to find a post older than a week old. It’s work.

Twitter’s own search has been covered to death online, and the consensus is that it needs competition and improvement. As a result, an almost comical number of competitors have stepped up to sort and catalogue what’s happening in real-time on the internet right now.

Below, we look at 5 of the most interesting ones and let you know how they work, what they do for you, and whether you’ll want to use them every day.

Friendfeed

Friendfeed was the first search I tried. To me, it ended up looking more like a blog search—most of the stories were people posting major newspaper articles pulled by Google News, or from the New York Times directly, or from other major international sources like Spain’s El Mundo. I saw a few results pulled from delicious.com and also some posts by the New York Times’ own friendfeed stream as well. The real-time updating was nicely done, but for the subject I chose, there simply isn’t enough at-the-moment information coming out to make a search like this worthwhile.

After about 30 seconds of waiting for someone else to make a comment, tweet, or social-bookmark another article, I moved on. As it stands, I could get a nice idea of how a story is developing through conversation online, but a quick Google News search would get me more relevant information a whole lot faster, considering almost everything in the feed is just links to old-fashioned journalism anyway. Perhaps with a still-rapidly-developing story things might be different, but again, a huge amount of conversation (even about ultra-fresh breaking news) comes through as links to newspaper websites.

The Verdict:

A nice but very simple interface that pulls from a wide range of sources (tumblr, twitter, delicious, digg, facebook, youtube) to get its information. Whether that information is any good is another story. If you use it just to search your own friends’ streams (and have a lot of friends online) it might be great—otherwise it’s search away and hope for the best.

Scoopler

I liked Scoopler’s approach, as it shows real-time results updating in the center column, while displaying various ‘popular’ results (sorted into videos, links, and images) on the right. I tried following a few other ‘hot topics’ as suggested on the left, and most of the twitter results that showed up were near-unreadale, full of 6 or 7 #hashtags each and several links to spam sites.

The spam isn’t surprising—any new communication format online gets abused by spam, but usually we’re able to block it out, either by not following spammers on twitter, or relying on Google’s algorithms to block it for us. Scoopler, although I’m sure they’re trying valiantly to do so, hasn’t done it yet, although they are a brand new search engine.

The Verdict:

An OK mix of the real-time flow and a filtered, more popular resulsts list, but ultimately not very satisfying in helping me find anything. If you like studying the online zeitgeist, this is better than Google Trends, in most respects.

Topsy

Topsy is actually quite fantastic. Want to see how many people are talking about a particular article or several articles on a specific subject? Topsy does it beautifully, because it ranks the results using some specific algorithms. Certain tweeters get an ‘influential’ rating, based on a series of criteria that surely includes the number of followers, the amount of re-tweets they garner, and so on. So as something new and trending pops up online, you can get an immediate sense of ‘authoritative’ search that some of the other real-time engines lack. I’d like to know more about how Topsy evaluates its ‘influential’ criteria, but they’ve definitely hit on a good idea.

The other thing I’m enjoying about their site is the following: it gives me the satisfaction of google’s indexed, archived, older searches, only applied to Twitter. I can go through Topsy and immediately find my own profile, and then get a sense of how many other people tweeted the same links I did. Authors can also use this to find articles and blog posts of theirs that other people have been talking about—while Twitter’s main search lets you do this too, Topsy makes it more elegant and far better organized.

In the end, when it came to my breaking news search (Xinjiang), Topsy was much like the others, giving me general links to big newspaper stories with lots of authority, and little else. Perhaps I picked one that didn’t have much original content outside of news agencies—it was coming from China, after all, where there’s still plenty of censorship. Breaking stories elsewhere have a much different feel to them—faster links to amateur video on youtube, and so on.

The Verdict:

Out of all of these, Topsy is the one search engine I can see myself going back to, and using it to supplement a google search. I’ve already used it about five times today, which is the only thing that matters, in the end.

Collecta

Collecta is another startup (all of these are startups, of course) searching twitter, this time with an interface that lets you put into larger focus individual tweets, and lets you run several searches concurrently.

I liked both of those features, and the fact that it pulls comments from blogs, as well as blog posts and flickr photos. There was no smooth interface action where the newest tweets cause the old ones to elegantly slide down (something that FriendFeed does, which gives it a more ‘real time’ feeling, at least aesthetically), and there was still, as is inevitable, a ton of spam when it came to any ‘hot topic’.

Also, leaving the site gave me a message about disconnection, and going back to the site left me with a big wait before all my searches started again.

The Verdict:

Again, a nice interface, but nothing I’d use on a daily basis. I’m starting to notice a trend here—slight variations on the main twitter search engine—and I think a large part of this is because all of these search engines are just so damn new.

Almost.at

Here we’ve got a site that isn’t really a search engine, as much as a way to follow a series of ongoing events through real-time chatter online. You can choose major events from the left toolbar, and you get a series of twitter updates, flickr photos and youtube videos, and various links displayed.

What’s nice is that the timing is broken down minute-by-minute, so you get a nice clean view of the traffic for a specific event. You can also head back in the timeline to see what the chatter was at a previous time. Once I did this, though, I found it tough to get back to the ‘present moment’ and started forgetting today’s date.

The timestamping for the youtube and flick results also seemed to be non-existent.

The Verdict:

A cool idea for following live events, and the actual event choices (at least during the beta) are moderated, so the selection is small and relevant. The execution isn’t anywhere close to perfect, but the concept is one of the most interesting. Following protests using only #hashtags or twitter’s main search can become a spam-fest or a messy confusion, and almost.at’s concept of choosing specific ‘events’ and following just those is a nice way of organizing the information.

To Sum Up….

Pretty much all of these services are in beta, and they all show it. In the rush to capitalize on the new flood of twitter data that’s out there, it’s inevitable there are going to be a ton of real-time search engines popping up this year, and if the rumours are any guide, Google will surely launch their own effort soon enough.

Lots of chatter about real-time search tends to paint Google as an old-fashioned search engine relying on caches and ‘yesterday’s internet’. Be weary about such claims—determining relevance when it comes to search results takes time, and for now, the best algorithms are ones that can’t get the job done instantaneously.

And What About Google?

Another cliche in the chatter surrouding these sites is Google’s lack of a real-time offering as of yet, and the fact that they’ve admitted they’re somewhat ‘behind’ on the issue. While it is surprising that so many competitors have moved into the field while Google has released nothing so far (but goes ahead and announces stuff like the Chrome OS months and months in advance, without any previews or substantial details), it’s all just a matter of tracking and indexing data, something we all know Google is very good at.

And most of the data being analyzed is simply coming from Twitter streams, combined with reading the timestamp of various other postings. None of this is exceedingly difficult when it comes to search, so what’s really going to matter is getting relevant real-time results, blocking spam, and creating an interface that’s easy to use but robust underneath.

So far, a site like that doesn’t exist (although I’d vote for topsy as the best one so far). Might Google jump into the market with the best implementation of real-time search yet seen? Although the field seems insanely crowded already, even just a cursory glance like we’ve done here shows that there’s massive room for improvement. Real-time search is still in its ‘alpha’ phase, and needs a big player to pull it out. One is probably going to arrive any day now.

Of course this isn’t web or blog content, but rather just business or personal emails we send back and forth. But can we ever use any of it as content for our sites?

Indeed we can.

The Value of Author’s Letters.

I’ve been reading Norman Mailer’s letters recently, and it occured to me that he made dozens of great points, observations, and arguments while writing to friends and editors. This is normal–we often say great stuff in our emails, too (probably not as great as his, but hey).

But it’s not really publishable, per se—it’s generally only great authors who get that privledge, and thank god, because reading through people’s random emails would be an atrocious task.

But what about the few times we do write something truly memorable in an email? An anecdote, a product review, a recounted experience—we send a lot of these things to each other. I tell various stories in a ton of different contexts: flickr captions, google reader shared item comments, my photoblog, and in emails, too.

Many of the best things I’ve ever written are likely buried somewhere inside emails. If I were running a business, surely I’d have sent many good thoughts and observations on my business out to various friends and associates. Keep that part in mind while I tell you a story.

My Friend and his Duplicate Emails (He’s Proud of Them).

I’ve got a friend who admitted to a strange practice: when he tells an anecdote that takes more than a few lines in an email, he’ll often copy and paste the whole thing into other emails when someone asks about it.

After a few seconds of personalization, that second (or third, or fourth) recipient gets the great anecdote too.

Why not just make it into a blog, you might ask? Well, a blog changes things: it’s automatically more public, and it has a frontend that requires more work than just firing off an email. This is changing, of course, but updating a blog still isn’t really as easy—for most of us—as sending an email.

How to Keep Track of Your Finest Email Moments.

So let’s say we want to keep track of our greatest e-mails, those moments of prosodic excellence where we’ve written something truly great and might want to see it again in the future, or perhaps even use it. Is there a way we can keep track of this stuff, and quickly and easily turn it into published content?

Tracking isn’t much of an issue with something like GMail: just create a tag called “content” or whatever you’d like, and any time you notice you’ve written something that might be useful elsewhere, give it that tag. Every once in a while, go through your ‘content’ tag and see what you can find.

Getting All That Good Writing Online, Somehow.

So how do we get it online? Obviously we could just copy and paste it to our blog, but there’s a new service that makes this even better: it’s called Posterous. It’s been catching on recently among a few high-profile bloggers, and its mission statement is simple: blogging through e-mail.

It’s microblogging, much like tumblr offers (they too offer e-mail postings), but with a real focus on posting from your inbox as the primary way of getting content online.

A Practical Way to Make This Work for You.

Let’s pretend you’re running a blog and company website that promotes your independent printing shop.

Every once in a while, you write a great email to a friend, extolling the glories of letterpress, or talking about a new printer you just brought in, or talking about what a pleasure it was to finish a particular job.

As you know, getting interesting content (you don’t send deadly-boring emails, do you?) like that online is invaluable for several reasons:

• it keeps potential customers on your site,
• makes your business far easier to optimize for search engines,
• and increases the chances that other people around the web might enjoy something you write and link to it, thereby greatly increasing your traffic—and potential sales.

So try this out: setup a quick blog on Posterous. They’ve just taken the extra step of not requiring even a sign-up in order to create an account—you can just email their post@posterous.com address directly and within a few seconds you’ll have a subdomain and an account.

Then, every time you write something good in an email, take a few extra seconds to forward that to the posterous email address. You’ll already be in your e-mail client, so there won’t be much of a time commitment to speak of.

Then, just feed the posterous RSS into your main blog (you can do this through posterous or—likely—through your blogging platform too), and you’ve instantly got another way to add content to your site directly from your inbox.

If this Posterous Idea Makes Things Too Complicated, Not to Worry.

I didn’t want this article to sound like an ad for Posterous—we’re not affiliated in any way. But I like the site.

And I was just using it as an example of how simplified blogging tools are getting. What’s really important to take away from this article is this: if you are at all a writer, if your emails occasionally contain great bits of information about your business, life, or anything that might serve you well if published online, take advantage of it! Don’t just let that content be for one person—edit it a bit and put it to work for you.

Famous link-aggregration and voting site digg.com recently launched a new feature, called the diggbar. It’s a type of frame that appears above the browser window when you follow a digg.com link, and serves to keep the web user “inside the digg universe” instead of immediately leaving it.

It also functions as a URL shortener. In fact, if you enter any website URL after digg.com (for example: http://digg.com/www.loveclients.com) you’ll get that page, with the DiggBar displayed on top.

What’s the Point of It?

How does Digg describe the new feature? According to their site’s blurb, it allows you to do the following:

The DiggBar enables you to Digg, read comments, find related content, and share stuff from any page on the Web. And it’s presented in a short URL format, making it easy to share in emails, on Twitter, and via other services. In addition to finding it on all outbound links from Digg, you can generate the DiggBar using any of the following solutions.

What this really means is the bar above your page works like those popular browser toolbars that google, yahoo, stumbleupon and countless others want you to install. Functioning as a filter, helper, and advertising assistant all at once, they deal with your browsing and, depending on whose bar you’ve installed, respond to it in various ways.

The google toolbar might find relevant sites depending on what sites you’re visiting, allow you to search google quickly (largely redundant with most browsers’ built-in search boxes now), while the yahoo toolbar contains a mail widget and various other yahoo-related connections.

Web-based Toolbars are Different Than Browser Addons

Where Digg’s new offering difffers is that, like stumbleupon.com, there’s no software to install. This means that the diggbar is essentially just a frame running at the top of your webbrowser, continuously connected to digg and pulling information from the browsing you’re doing below.

Offering comments from digg.com, the ability to share page content, and offers of related ‘dugg’ sites, the Diggbar is somewhat like an advanced bookmarklet (the little pieces of javascript you can drag to your browser toolbar and then use to share content on a variety of sites: see Google Reader’s or Tumblr’s for an example).

From some perspectives, this might sound OK, except that the Diggbar is generating a fair share of controversy. As URL shorteners are already becoming slightly problematic (their prevalence on Twitter means that if any of the sites, such as bit.ly, ping.ws, or tinyURL ever disappear, all tweets using those services will suddenly be full of broken links).

And now digg has jumped on the bandwagon, offering its own bar as a way to shorten URLs for use on twitter.

Everyone’s Doing It: Why Digg Wants to Keep You on Their Site

The controversy comes because, unlike the traditional shorteners, the diggbar takes you to a version of the website presented through digg’s bar feature, which means you aren’t seeing the website in its original form, but intsead in a framed edition.

The web-development site daringfireball talks about how framing a website harkens back to the mid-1990s, when netscape introduced its ‘frameset’ tag and temporarily made the web a very difficult place to navigate. Frame-based sites were everywhere, and made browsing terribly annoying for nearly everybody:

It did not take long for a broad consensus to develop that framing someone else’s site was wrong. URLs are the building block of the Web. They tell the user where they are. They give you something to bookmark to go back or to share with others. The DiggBar breaks that, and I’ve seen no argument that makes it any more sense to support this than it does to support 1996-style site embedding.

According to this argument, the diggbar is the exact same concept, only dressed up to look like something else. Instead of being a special ‘helper’ at the top of the site, it’s just an old-fashioned frame that keeps you on a site and confuses your sense of where you actually reside on the web.

Engadget is Having None of This

One of the biggest sites on the internet, Engadget, has blocked the diggbar entirely. In a statement, they explained why they have a fundamental problem with the way digg is implementing this new feature:

Ultimately, this is both a technical and philosophical decision. We believe that the work of content creators should be protected and treated as the unique product that it is, and that an end-user’s experience shouldn’t be tainted with a “catch-all” tool which diminishes context.

It’s all about context in the end, and the DiggBar simply removes too much of it. It’s great for Digg and its advertisers, but as an new method of keeping users “within the Digg ecosystem,” it’s not so great for the web at large. Engadget continues:

In Digg’s efforts to keep you swimming in their stream, they completely obscure the original URL you’re supposed to be looking at. And no, not just the URL you follow from a particular Digg on their site — all the URLs you visit (via clicks) until you kill the bar. Additionally, if you’re browsing around a site under the bar itself and you kill it, it transports you back to the original URL you landed on, thus completely breaking continuity and making it almost impossible to know where you’ve actually browsed to.

Other Reactions Haven’t Been So Kind, Either

Other not-so-happy reactions came from 3dogmedia, WebMonkey, and SearchEngineLand, none of which were very complimentary. Digg’s Kevin Rose has explained that they are looking into changing the way the diggbar functions to make it less intrusive and cumbersome, and to address some of these fundamental complaints.

Whether they can do that without changing the business plan that is surely behind the new bar’s introduction is going to be an interesting question in the future.

Digg is one of the web’s biggest sites, and their further attempts to monetize and become a profit-generating business mean that some of the best aspects of the social web will inevitably suffer, or at least undergo some serious changes. It’s something we’re all going to watch very closely.

Back in September news started leaking out that Google may throw out its deal with Yahoo!. The two companies combined currently handle 80% of internet searches all over the world. It’s understandable then why the US Justice Department was bringing up issues of possible antitrust violations.

Although the US Justice Department had already hired an antitrust litigator, Yahoo! was steadfast in calling the deal lawful, stating that “We have been informed that the Justice Department… is seeking advice from an outside consultant, but we should read nothing into that fact. We remain confident that the deal is lawful.”

Google may have seemed hopeful at first too. However, early this morning Google’s Senior VP and Chief Legal Officer, David Drummond announced that Google would not move forward on the deal.

“…after four months of review, including discussions of various possible changes to the agreement, it’s clear that government regulators and some advertisers continue to have concerns about the agreement. Pressing ahead risked not only a protracted legal battle but also damage to relationships with valued partners.” Stated Drummond in his blog.

Drummond also expressed his regret for having to pull out of the deal since the company felt that I would have been a win-win situation not only for Google and Yahoo!, but for publishers, advertisers and users as well.

Yahoo! had no comment on their Search Blog as of this posting. I’m sure there’s more to come though.

Sounds great, and it was. Unfortunately Google failed to get permission from the authors and publishers before scanning and posting their work. As a result, Google.com was sued (almost exactly three years ago to the day) in 2005 by the Author’s Guild, The Association of American Publishers and several other copyright holders for profiting from their work without properly compensating them for it.

Well on Tuesday, the two sides finally reached a settlement.

So what does this mean for Google, readers, publishers and authors? David Drummond, Google’s Chief Legal Officer stated in his Official Google Blog on Tuesday that

“This agreement is truly groundbreaking in three ways. First, it will give readers digital access to millions of in-copyright books; second, it will create a new market for authors and publishers to sell their works; and third, it will further the efforts of our library partners to preserve and maintain their collections while making books more accessible to students, readers and academic researchers.”

David Drummond, Google

Not only was Drummond pleased, but Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin expressed their excitement over the deal as well. All in all it was a very fair and beneficial ruling. Let’s do a more detailed breakdown of the settlement to see what Google, the copyright Holders and Readers can expect to happen next…

GOOGLE
The internet giant will be allowed to scan books that have a valid copyright which are also out of print. They can sell online access to individual books within digests and volumes, offer subscriptions to university databases. In the near future they should be allowed to let subscribers print the books that they search for and find on Google.com.

Google is also expected to fund and help to establish a new Book Rights Registry which will be managed by copyright holders. The purpose of this new registry is to “address the orphan works problem” by locating and representing copyright holders, make old and out of copy books more available to the public, and to distribute all royalties that Google pays out.

Of course there’s always the matter of money. Under the settlement Google will be paying out a total f $125 million as an upfront payment and an additional $34.5 million to fund the new registry.

Google Hands Over $125+ million in Settlement

PUBLISHERS AND AUTHORS
Obviously the new Book Rights Registry will be beneficial to all copyright holders since it allows them to be paid fairly for the use of their work. Aside from cashing in on 63% of Google’s book search profits, publishers and authors are getting about $45 million up front – or about sixty bucks per book.

Copyright holders will be able to have more control of how their work will be used. Google will be allowed to give non-subscribers a look at about 20% of the content in each out of print book. Subscribers will have full access to Google’s scanned out of print tomes. In order to offer the same access to in print books, Google will need permission from copyright holders.

Drummond notes in his blog that although the settlement only covers United States users and copyright holders, Google will do it’s best to respect everyone. International authors and publisher will be able to register themselves in the new Book Rights Registry so they can be paid fairly. International users will be able to search and view the full content of out of print texts, “but will not be able to preview or purchase access to books online unless these services are authorized by the rights-holder of a book.”

READERS
Under the agreement, readers will need to subscribe to services in order to view the full text of these books. They will also have greater access to more texts that they wouldn’t have other wise, which was Google’s and the copyright holders’ ultimate goal.

Thanks to a part of the agreement that allows Google and participating libraries to develop new technology and services, users and subscribers with disabilities will also have full access to these books.

For more information on the deal, you can go to Google’s press release.

Yahoo! has once again proven why they are Google’s top competitor. For small businesses, Yahoo! will provide real time “enterprise level data” on their e-store including products and marketing. The Custom Microsite service provides tools to track and analyze how visitors spend their time on a merchant’s website and give owners a better idea of how to plan online branding and make their website more user friendly. The third part of Yahoo! Web Analytics, called “Yahoo! Open Strategy” (YOS) is for the developers. It was designed to provide API users with “analytics-enhanced reporting” in order to better understand user engagement and habits. These will be custom made reports and allows developers and e-biz manager follow the latest trends and visitor behaviors.

Yahoo! Web Analytics boasts ten specific services and benefits:

An Executive Dashboard which allows managers to customize the metrics, benchmarks and gauges in order to track progress, identify issues and set achievable goals. What I like about this feature is that every employee can have their own dashboard if you want them to. Personally I would stick with strictly management access, but the point is that you have a choice.

Custom Reporting Wizard allows managers to organize reports and include/exclude data according to what your business needs are.

Advanced Campaign Management measures CPC, CPM, CPA and ROI of each form of advertising. Because it’s real-time information, managers can adjust their budget, and organize reports as needed.

Real Time Segmentation analyzes each customer demographic and segment individually. This will permit managers to view how website visitors are responding to landing pages, campaigns, layouts and calls to action. It also enables managers to identify target groups of visitors so that they can better utilize their marketing budget.

The Live Cost Analysis compares search engine prices from Google, Yahoo! and MSN and integrates the data from revenue on your website, measures your paid search ROI and analyzes keyword effectiveness.

Managers can also analyze purchasing patterns, track product and product combination sales as well as preview their carts and suggest additional items they may be interested in with Yahoo!’s Merchandise Reporting feature. Reports can be created to track cancelled or changed orders and calculate your campaign’s profitability.

Scenario Analysis actually allows mangers to track visitor paths, behavior, and task completions allowing managers to redefine processes for the future as well as how those would have worked well in the past. This goes hand in had with the Advanced Path Analysis feature which allows managers to view popular user paths as a branched map.

Yahoo! Web Analytics allows managers to view and compare multiple reports side by side with their Comparative Reporting feature. Managers can bookmark reports and analyze their history to improve future processes and campaigns.

Marketing Workflow Management allows internet marketing managers to monitor the website and manage reports. This feature allows you to see how random and planned events (such as power failures, website changes or holidays) can affect website traffic. It will also send out an email alert to bring any changes to the manager’s attention. Colleagues can communicate, share notes and reports on their dashboard as well.

But that’s not all. I don’t know about the rest of the world, but here in the USA teenagers have astronomical amounts of buying power. Not only do they hold their own part time jobs, but they also have tremendous influence over their parent’s purchases. According to the US National Center for Education (2008), there are approximately 15 million high school students and 8% of them (or 1.2 million) own an iPhone. In spring of 2008 about 9% of teens who did not already own an iPhone wanted to buy one. In six months that number jumped to 22%. Out of all the students who planned on purchasing a new phone in the next six months, 33% of them specifically said they wanted an iPhone.

Anyone in the marketing field knows that technology such as smart phones and the internet have become important parts of teenage life. They are incredibly dependent on these as an intricate part of their lives in school as a learning tool, socially outside of school and for recreational browsing. Granted they aren’t the only customers that businesses should cater to, but they are the immediate future of internet browsing and purchasing. Their habits are the future habits of America.

So the question remains: Do you have an iPhone friendly website?

With phones being so much more than just phones, it’s important that websites and bloggers ensure they are iPhone compatible. By either making your current website iPhone compatible or setting up an additional iPhone compatible website, you are making yourself more accessible to customers. Not only that, but your original site will collect more quality links for it.

There are two problems that iPhone users face when using their mobile browser. The first is a download speed that is slightly slower than their desktop counterparts. The second is the small screen resolution of only 320×480. Website managers need to develop a site that loads quickly and doesn’t force users to scroll through the page as much. They can do this by reducing (or eliminating) any unnecessarily large pictures, Flash or “heavy” content from the new/updated website. Also, many websites are optimizing, coding and configuring themselves to work with iPhones accelerometer so that different content can be displayed by holding the iPhone different ways.

It’s also a good idea to start developing some relevant iPhone apps. Applications for the iPod are relatively inexpensive and they are a huge market right now. In economically hard times, the iPhone apps can be considered a small, affordable luxury and provide the user with news, games, weather, music or whatever. Creating your own application not only helps to drive traffic to your website, but can make you a little extra on the side as well.

There are websites that can help you build apps and configure your website for use on the iPhone as well as other smart phone brands. However, you may at some point reach a point of difficulty that a professional becomes necessary. Whatever you decide keep in mind that the iPhones have been and will most likely to remain the most popular mobile browser in the world. But after the iPod phenomenon, did we really expect anything less from them?

“These highly relevant news stories and videos are being posted to the hackers’ fake blogs to increase the site’s Google search rankings.”

Webroot went on to state that “These fraudulent blogs contain several video links about the news story for which the users were originally searching. Once a user clicks on one of the video links, they are prompted to download a video codec that downloads a rogue antispyware program designed to goad the user into purchasing an illegitimate program that may put their personal information and data at even greater risk.”

The motivation behind all this is not surprising. There’s a lot of money to be made and according to Dancho Danchev, an independent security consultant and cyber threat analyst, ten or more malware blogs can start to appear in the top ten result pages in less than an hour. “Upon clicking the link, the user is exposed to the typical ActiveX Object Error message that is attempting to trick them into installing TrojanDownloader:Win32/Zlob.AMV with 10 out of 36 AV scanners currently detecting it (27.78%).” stated Danchev.

Granted, black hat is nothing new. What is unique is the fact that by using this ongoing research technique cyber criminals actually have a better chance of increasing their traffic and getting users to purchase their malware-ridden products.

How can you protect yourself? Webroot gives these five tips:

1. Always have a current version of antispyware, antivirus and firewall product;

2. Never download free product or purchase them from unknown Web sites and vendors, or peer
to peer networks;

3. Download videos and other multimedia files only from known and trusted Web sites or blogs;

4. Make sure the computer is up-to-date by always installing the latest Microsoft or Apple
security updates; and,

5. Use a credit card that has sufficient fraud protection when shopping and never use a debit
card online.

You are a part of one or have seen heaps of buzz about them. Social networks are here to stay and are only going to get bigger.

From an advertiser’s perspective it’s pretty hard to grab someone’s attention and keep them focused on your adverts. So many times have I seen companies pour millions of dollars down the drain on social network advertising, in the hope that people will buy their products or services?

So why doesn’t advertising work on social networks?

All the online marketing gurus say it’s about building brand awareness, and it is to some extent. But if you have been in the business long enough, you’ll know that measuring brand effectiveness can be very expensive and time consuming. There are a lot of companies out there that provide these services such as Nielson Buzz Metrics, but be warned – only if you’re willing to spend the big bucks.
Don’t get me wrong, BRAND is important, but like any sales or marketing person will say “Show me the money!”

So how can we leverage off social networks and actually take some ROI?

I have a theory and as cliché as it might sound, it’s about getting personal and understanding the “4 core elements” of personality groups and targeting them based on their characteristics.

If you are a marketer or not, most companies target their databases into areas that are functional, beneficial and emotionally appealing – which is mostly known as the value proposition. But before that is concluded they break their databases down into segments which are usually based on primary and secondary research.

Online segmentation is however measured differently as other elements come into play such as time spent, bounce rates, etc. This can be very difficult to do and is also extremely time consuming.
But what if there were another way to segment and target a core set of consumers online based on your value proposition? I believe you can – through social networks.

I strongly believe that the future of online targeting will be based on a person’s characteristics.

Here are some advantages:

• Personalised communication strategies for campaigns
• Greater understanding of behavioural patterns
• Making each experience relevant, personal and engaging

Now here comes the cliché part, based on astrology (I know, for all you men out here banging your heads against the wall, there is some logic behind this) you can “assume” all people share common characteristics based on their element sign.

These are broken down into 4 elements:

• Fire = Leo, Aries & Sagittarius
Are known to be; irresponsible, impatient, boastful, positive, extraverted, active, creative, ingenious, dynamic, highly energetic, outspoken, fiery temper, passionate, emotionally intense

• Water = Scorpio, Cancer, Pisces
Are known to be; deeply intuitive, imaginative, emotional, reserved, not gregarious, exceedingly passionate, self pity, sensitive, pessimistic, overly vague, secretive

• Earth = Capricorn, Virgo, Taurus
As known to be; stable, practical, realistic, cautious, hard-working, dependable, highly materialistic, inhibited, introverted, down to earth, calm

• Air = Gemini, Libra, Aquarius
Are known to be; free spirited, philosophical, intellectual, open minded, idealistic, adventurous, restless, unpredictable, interactive, extraverted, emotionally aloof, opinionated

Even if you don’t believe in astrology – it’s about finding the right set of ‘people characteristics’ for your product or service. Understanding the personality that wants or needs your products or services is important and knowing how to leverage on that.

Because at the end of the day, they will be your distribution channel when it comes to word of mouth or recommending your product or service to other people online and offline.

So having the right personality representing your brand will be just as important as the way you communicate across all channels.