If you haven’t seen the Google Chrome OS Video below, please watch it before reading my response.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QRO3gKj3qw]

Google is right – most young people I know spend 90% of their time on their home computers on the Internet.

But what about the other 10% of the time?

Most likely people are writing a paper, editing a video, cropping some photos, putting together a power point presentation.

Even though I am still required to use them at work, does Google expect me to do away with Microsoft Word and Powerpoint?

And even though uploading files could take a considerable amount of time, does Google expect me to rely on free internet software to edit video?

I’m not trying to say that Google doesn’t have a pretty cool idea, but they definitely have some questions to answer. And until they do, don’t expect any changes from me.

We as consumers are not used to losing anything. Getting on the internet 35 seconds faster doesn’t make up for lost features and functionality like video editing.

Search the internet for SEO rules, tips, secrets and guides and you’ll certainly find enough information to start optimizing your site.

From there after you do all of your keyword research and incorporate your key words into your meta tags, headers, text and anchor text, chances are you’ll get some new visitors to your website.

Overtime, chances are good that your rankings will eventually drop. Early in my experience, I attributed this to timing and the creation of new pages with similar content. While I was partly correct, I definitely underestimated the importance of user behavior and the minimization of my bounce rate. 

What can you do to minimize your bounce rate?

1. If you are a local service company, get local. If you are in Kansas offering cleaning services, attracting a visitor from California does you no good. Chances are the visitor will leave the site without looking at any further pages. Include your geography in a lot your keywords and pages.
2. Get specific. A potential customer looking for something specific has a higher chance of sticking around on your site if you offer specifically what they are looking for. The searcher may also be closer to making their purchase decision if they are searching for something specific.
3. Make sure you have a clean design. Nothing can ruin your credibility as a good company if your site looks like it was designed in 1997 on Geocities.
4. Administer some A/B testing  prior to launching a redesign. Show a few people a couple of designs and test how easy it is for them to find the types of information they are most likely searching for.

RSS feeds deliver content to millions of people everyday. I recently rediscovered alltop.com, an aggregate of thousands of rss feeds on a variety of subjects.

The site boasts itself as an online magazine rack, offering the headlines from the most popular sources online.

In March when the site first launched, it was greeted with bad reviews. I remember being unsure about the purpose or utility. However, upon revisiting the site, I discovered some useful rss feeds that I had no idea existed.

I am not sure I will visit the alltop.com on a daily or weekly basis, however when I am looking for great sources of information on a particular subject, I think I would definitely check out the site to see if there are any feeds worth added to my Google Reader.

About Alltop.com

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_c7knYqGwVo&fmt=18]

I went to a Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association (MIMA) event this morning. The topic was writing for the web.

I’ll admit that at first I wasn’t terribly excited about the topic. It seemed so basic, I was worried the subject matter would be a review of things I already knew.

And while I did understand most of the information, the presentation was a good reminder of how we as professionals can effectively present information to clients.

Writing Press Releases for the Internet
I was most impressed this morning with Ginny Redish’s (the presenter and author of the best-selling book Letting Go of the Words – Writing Web Content that Works) explanation of how the Internet has effected writing press releases. She showed a great diagram depicting the differences between writing press releases for an online audience vs. an offline audience. I recreated the diagram below.

As you can see from the diagram above, before the Internet, press release writers were focused on writing releases that attracted the interests of journalists. The release had to be sent directly to the journalist and followed up with a phone call. In addition, if the release wasn’t timely, journalists didn’t care.

Today, when a press release is written it should be posted online and optimized for Google search engines. The release will last as long as you post it and the general public reads it when they are interested in the information you have.

In the ideal world, press releases would be pitched to the media and posted to your site. If you are really interested in the next generation of press releases, check out the social media press release pictured below. Click on the image below to enlarge it.

The Social Media Press Release

Image courtesy of Shift Communications.

Your website should be considered the most important piece of your online marketing puzzle, but if it is the puzzle, you might be in trouble.

While your messages may be strong; Are they strong enough to rank highly in Google, as well as help bring you closer to making a deal?

Balancing building your pages for search engine rankings, as well as closing a deal is a tough. That is why it is important to expand your marketing efforts beyond your website. Consider the following tools for pushing your key messages online.

Google Adwords: There’s no easier way to attract visitors, then to pay for them. With Google Adwords, you create a simple text ad that shows up when people search on Google use one of your keywords during a search. You’re basically advertising to an audience that’s already interested in you. In addition, ads can be placed regionally. Businesses in competitive spaces like laptops and watches, should be aware that ad placement is done through a bidding process and can get relatively expensive.

Blog: A blog is a critical piece of the online marketing puzzle. Not only do they attract visitors through search engines better than a static web pages, but they also bring a real voice to a company. A blog is a great area to make announcements. In the online world, a blog posting can have easily as much impact as a traditional press release.

YouTube Video Channel: YouTube channels have the potential to reach millions. A recent article on TechCrunch [http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/11/07/the-internet-as-a-force-in-politics-obama-would-not-have-won-without-the-internet/] reported that Barack Obama received 14.5 million hours in free exposure during the last election.

If you are having doubts, YouTube videos channels can be customized to reflect your brand. And in terms of quality, you don’t have to worry about creating HD quality video, since the web is not set up to display that.

Twitter: Twitter is a free microblogging service, which asks people to report on what they are doing. The service is unique in that users can microblog by texting from their cell phones. The craze hasn’t entirely taken off, but once you try it, you’ll probably get hooked.

Facebook/MySpace: Social networking, blah, blah, blah. I’ll save this explanation for later, but if you haven’t explored the possibilities, social networks like Facebook and MySpace are great places for spreading your key messages.

New tools for pushing your key messages come out everyday. If you think I missed one, please share by leaving a comment.

Social Media Marketing Application Visual

Marketers who explain to other marketers that they specialize in social media marketing are often times met with smirks and rolling eyes. Social media marketing by most marketers is still seen as a waste of time as in most cases the campaigns fail to reach mass audiences.

It must be understood that social media marketing is focused on allowing brand evangelists to be the spokespersons for a product in hopes that their enthusiasm will influence others.

In order to achieve success social media marketers need to focus on building relationships and starting authentic conversations. The question then becomes where to host these conversations.

Ideally the platform would be on a social platform that is all about the brand that the marketer is trying to promote, although utilizing an existing popular social network like Facebook, MySpace or YouTube will allow for greater reach.

The key to connecting on an existing social network is bringing something of value to the users and allowing them to easily share it with their friends. This can be done by building a unique and useful application. Unless you are a developer, this should be done by contracting with a digital advertising agency. When contracting out, make sure to see examples of applications they have already built.

Facebook Application Information
Open Social (Myspace, LinkedIn, Ning, Friendster) Application Information

The topic of social media marketing is huge. I hoped this helped your basic understanding. Look for more posts about this subject including case studies in the future.

Cuil.com wanted to be a Google killer. Unfortunately they shot themselves in the foot yesterday when their site crashed after nerds from all around world rushed to review the new search engine that claimed to index more pages than Google.

More unfortunate for cuil.com was the fact that the results were just not that good. I did a quick search for pages I knew ranked will because I did some SEO work on them and found nothing. Numerous bloggers have also commented on the quality, as well.

Additionally perplexing to me was the way that webmasters could submit a website crawling on their search engines. Apparently webmasters are supposed to send an email saying, “Please crawl my site, http://www.marketingbreakdown.com.” That doesn’t seem to efficient to me.

On the positive side of things – the site still has some big potential. Key stake holders include former Google engineers, Anna Patterson, Russell Power and Louis Monier. The site also promises to respect privacy by not to retaining users’ search histories or surfing patterns.

[digg=http://digg.com/business_finance/Don_t_Buy_the_Media_Be_the_Media/blog]Gone are the days when all advertising exposure must be purchased. Many progressive marketers have found great success spreading their message across new mediums.

And I am not necessarily talking about creating a viral video. Success can be had by reaching 1,000 targeted customers, as opposed to 1,000,000 random web surfers.

Here are a few examples of how reaching a targeted audience has evolved:

OLD IDEA: Buy a magazine ad.
NEW IDEA: Write your own magazine that your existing and potential customers will find interesting.

OLD IDEA: Take out a series of radio ads.
NEW IDEA: Start a podcast on subjects related to your business and make it interesting enough that people will find value in paying attention.

OLD IDEA: Take out a series of television ads.
NEW IDEA: Start your own television channel on YouTube and connect with other users who will help you promote your channel.

OLD IDEA: Purchase banner ads online.
NEW IDEA: Create a Facebook application that brings value to your potential customer base.

Later, I’ll discuss the factors that I believe determine whether an online media campaign will be successful or not.

Google Trends is a simple tool. It tells you the highest search engine keywords and shows the stories related to them.

A couple days ago, I did a test. On another blog, I wrote about a topic with a keyword that ranked high on Google Trends.

As it turned out, the results were nothing spectacular. They also weren’t bad, but it’s clear to see, if you want to get good results it is much better to anticipate than to react.

How to Anticipate Google Trends:

1. Blog about upcoming events. Immediately following a big event or big show, people go looking for information based on conversations had at the water cooler.
2. A slight extension of the last point, but weighing in on a reality television show is a sure fire way to attract an audience.
3. Don’t shy away from people who are controversial. People and celebrities who are train wrecks (Amy Winehouse, Britney Spears) will continue to hit the news, although following A-listers is extremely competitive and not recommended. Surprisingly politicians are an easy target because of their loyal following both for and against. Just be careful you say though.

Search engine optimization firms and freelance professionals are usually hired with the expectation that they can wave a magic wand and build website traffic fast. And while many of us have proven methods to help increase traffic as fast as possible, unfortunately it is not quite that easy. Listening to Joseph Jaffe speak earlier this year, his advice was to be in it for the long haul, but let’s face it, that answer doesn’t always fly with clients who like to see numbers.

Based on my own experience, I couldn’t agree more Jaffe. With each month of blogging, a quality blogger can expect to gain a quality link here and there and after a while it seems as though each post attracts just a little more traffic than the last.

Not to skirt around the subject, but if you need to build website traffic fast – Start a blog. And with that I have put together a few tips that should be able to build traffic fast.

1. Choose a quality blog host. I recommend using blogger or wordpress. It is amazing how many links you’ll recieve internally from blogger or wordpress. In addition, each of these hosts will submit your sitemap for free.
2. Pick a topic or series of topics and keep it at least semi-focused on your core subject area. This is especially true, if you are hosting a company blog. It will be easier to attract new links if you are offering up bits of information that is new and timely.
3. Customize your look & feel. This will help your credibility with other bloggers and help you attract links.
4. Keep at it. If at first you don’t succeed in building your blog traffic, keep at it. It is unlikely that other bloggers will link to your blog, if it is brand new because of the high likelihood that your blog could be abandoned.
5. Mention your blog in as many other social networks that you are a part of. Some good ones to participate in are Facebook, MySpace, mybloglog.com, blogcatalog.com and Technorati.
6. Submit your content to social bookmarking sites like Digg.
7. Within those social networks, interact with other bloggers by leaving comments and adding to their discussion. This will help them find your blog and build your credibility.\
8. Make it easy to subscribe to your blog feed. This will help build repeat readers.
9. Write quality content. Quality is a key for gaining traffic and aquiring new links.
10. Around big events throw some content up covering it and to your suprise, I think you’ll get some new visitors.

Good luck building website traffic fast. I hope that these ten tips can help you out. If you any additional tips for building traffic fast, please leave a comment.