PUBLIC MARKS from bluelinerindia

Myspace is a great place for teenagers to gossip about MTV shows and share YouTube videos of Jon Stewart but does it help you, the young professional, generate strong business contacts? Learn about health? Hell– did Myspace even help you find a date to your company holiday party?

I don’t think it comes to any real surprise - Google makes their money from running ads. Let me repeat, Google makes a LOT of money running ads on their search results. Now that Google is a public corporation they have a responsibility to their shareholders to increase profits - without coming up with a new purple cow (which Google, sadly, has had trouble doing). I want to stress that this not the death of search engine optimization. It simply presents new challenges and new opportunities for businesses.

Over the week of Thanksgiving in the US we noticed that Google had made an update to their system. After countless hours of examination it now appears the focus on this move was to push the “Top 10” (the first 10 sites to appear for competitive terms) to more information based resources. This is a good example of the information bias Google is showing right now. “Buy Stocks” is, in our opinion, a term someone would type into a search engine when they are ready to make an actual purchase. As you can see from the results all the organic listings are primarily information sources (wikis, encyclopedias, media sites, and how to articles) while the options to actually purchase stocks are relegated to the paid listings.

6 Pillars is a methodology for evaluating, developing and implementing best practices in Internet Marketing. It is budget-agnostic, so whether you are a Fortune 500, a start-up, or an SEM (Search Engine Marketing) company, this approach is relevant to your web properties.

Building websites can be a harrowing organizational task. For many people this is resolved in complex filing systems that create multiple subdirectories in the web address once the site launches.

Over the week of Thanksgiving in the US we noticed that Google had made an update to their system. After countless hours of examination it now appears the focus on this move was to push the “Top 10” (the first 10 sites to appear for competitive terms) to more information based resources.

Andy Beal over at Marketing Pilgrim wrote a January 5th piece on using scripts to create large numbers of PageFlake (a free RSS reader website) accounts to subscribe to a Feedburner RSS feed.

Whenever, we are speaking with a client one of the most difficult things we have to explain to them is the necessity and the importance of building links for ranking.

So far, from our experience, Google has proven to be far and away, the best PPC advertising engine. There are a number of reasons why I feel this way, not the least of which is that Google seems to consistently deliver a better ROI on client’s online ad dollars spent.

The damage estimates are debatable, but there is an undeniable industry consensus : click fraud is a serious problem. For all its media attention, it is still a definite ache for advertisers with no clear short term solution.

Advertisers spent $2.5 million for 30 second spots during this year’s Super Bowl XL. Was it worth it? Well, let’s reserve judgment on the million dollar question for the moment, but there is no arguing that this night truly is the super bowl of advertising, with over 130 million viewers tuning in across the world.

Last week our partner David Houle published a great piece on High Touch Media that was featured in Mediapost. As many of our readers know, MediaPost is the numer one on-line daily resource for advertising professionals, with a massive circulation and authority in the field

Blueliner’s partners bring a unique mix of traditional and new media experience together. With years of entrepreneurial experience and several notable successes under their belts, David, Arman and Dali hope to share with business leaders, marketing executives, agency peers and students some nuggets of wisdom, as well as new lessons that we are learning through ongoing, real world learning every day!”

By combining high-level digital strategy services locally with offshore implementation and support, Blueliner leverages a cost effective servicing model to lower development costs for client campaigns.

With offices in New York, Chicago, India and China, Blueliner follows “The World is Flat business model of efficient, 24/7 implementation and ROI-centric development and marketing methodologies. Blueliner’s management combines IT industry veterans with tech-savvy entrepreneurs.

Blueliner is a leading provider of traditional and interactive marketing services including Corporate Branding, Public Relations, Search Marketing, E-Commerce, and Web Analytics solutions to start-ups, emerging and established companies.

Building websites can be a harrowing organizational task. For many people this is resolved in complex filing systems that create multiple subdirectories in the web address once the site launches.

Unique Visitors is one the most difficult common metrics to cheat on, but it too can easily be done by an unscrupulous webmaster with basic hacking skills and knowledge of certain Windows XP flaw (or access to a Trojan horse). By utilizing a group of “zombie computers” (computers that have been hijacked for malicious purposes) to all hit your websites—this could be hundreds or thousands of computers, depending on the resources you have at hand – and dramatically increase the number of overall unique visitors a site appears to have.

Feedburner creates an RSS feed which can be read by RSS subscribers— Feedburner gives you detailed information on the number of people reading the particular data feed. You could easily create a script that creates accounts on Google RSS Feeder, PageFlakes, and many other programs to bolster the number of “unique readers” your site has.

We’ll start with the datapoint most prone to manipulation: Alexa. Take a number of computers—your mom’s, brother’s, your best friend’s, your own – and install the Alexa toolbar on each respective computer’s copy of Internet Explorer. Then create a script that refreshes and clicks on each page of your site at least 10-15 minutes a day.

When you are looking to advertise on a blog, or any website for that matter, do you simply look at one metric? Alexa Data, Feedburner Subscribers, Page Views, Unique Visitors? If so you could potentially be throwing valuable marketing dollars down the drain.

It is just a good reminder that those of us who use open-source software need to make sure we are upgrading when security updates come along. You never know when some bored attention seeker will come along and use those available exploits

Whenever, we are speaking with a client one of the most difficult things we have to explain to them is the necessity and the importance of building links for ranking. Matt McGee over at Small Business SEM has written a great article explaining the importance of link building, and the difficulties that are inherent to the link building process.