General News

Google has always had Beta projects and this week, Google opened another one to the public.

Known as knol – which they say stands for ‘a unit of knowledge’ – a neat concept. Superficially, knol would look much like a squidoo lens or a hub page. Google’s blog states ‘A knol on a particular topic is meant to be the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read’ – which sounds ominously like a knol ought to be at the top of the organic SERPs.

They go on to say that knols can contain ads from which the author will receive a substantial share! They won’t be moderated, only ranked so there is no censoring and marketers will flock to get their affiliate links in this new format.

It certainly seems like it would be worth trying to get in early and write some definitive knols about your pet subjects.

Perhaps this is why squidoo lens fell from favour!

Here is an example knol from the big G – they have a more serious and business-like feel to them than lenses.

While there will no doubt be plenty of rubbish appearing, community tools like ranking will help to make sure the genuinely good ones get to the top.

So go forth and nab your knols.

You can find the service at http://knol.google.com

Coolest plugin I’ve seen in quite a while. I post to my blog and I tweet without moving my lips (methaphorically speaking).

See that ‘My Twitter Feed’ on the right? That’s part of it.

The coolest things is when I post and my automatic tweet is generated. Twitter users following me or somehow seeing my tweet see an automatically shortened url to my blog post. When they click on the URL, they see my blog post but in a frame with a prominent ‘advert’ for TweetMyBlog at the top – which is of course my referral link for TweetMyBlog.

And if they join TweetMyBlog, I get their email address (via the TweetMyBlog back office) so I can always send them a welcome email with an invite to follow me or some other kind of link.

Sweet!

You can get it for yourself here

Comment here if you like/dislike it  

If you’ve tried Google Adwords then you may have come across the frustration of having one or more of your keywords getting a poor quality score. All Google will tell you is that your landing page should be related to your keywords and your advert.

Well there is a way to make sure that your landing page matches your keywords in Google’s eyes – use the keywords Google thinks are right for your landing page!

After all, if they suggest the keywords for your landing page, they can hardly give those a low quality score, can they? This works really well. Of course the keywords might not include the ones you wanted. So instead of trying to add the keyword you want, try editing the landing page so that Google suggests that keyword. Bingo!

This is not a great secret but a lot of people haven’t been made aware of this really simple and cool way to keep your Adwords campaigns in great shape.

Having used the excellent free service for generating sitemaps (xml-sitemaps.com) I decided to but their full product today for just $20.

I am used to installing scripts but their documentation looked pretty good even if you’re not so experienced.

The bought version has several advantages over the free one notably no restriction on sitemap size and the ability to have your sitemaps updated automatically. It even has the facility to ping Google when your sitemap is updated, though if you genuinely do update your site frequently then I would not use this option – I think it’s always better to let Google decide when to crawl.

The license gives me unlimited use on my own personal sites too so all in all I’m very pleased and give this a thumbs up.

By the way – as with any script, do follow the security steps. Failure to do so could leave a security hole for your site.

VitalViral now offers a premium account option offering additional features over a free account.

One of these features is designed to do something that you probably know you should do but hate doing and probably rarely bother to do – tracking.

With the new autosplash feature, you can put a single link on any of the traffic exchanges and VitalViral will automatically collect detailed tracking statistics for you. The easiest way to demonstrate this is to show you a screenshot.

To collect this amount of detail would be difficult and tedious using 3rd party tracking services and even then might not give all the information you get with VitalViral. Each time you promote your link on a traffic exchange, a hit is counted against that traffic exchange for that month. A new tracker is created every time a new traffic exchange is encountered in a given month.

Now you can see for yourself which traffic exchanges are sending you visitors, what percentage of those visitors are clicking through to your web page and, in certain circumstances, how many signups you’re getting.

This information is like gold dust to anyone serious about using traffic exchanges.

Get your VitalViral account now.

Wow, do I wish I’d started my online ‘career’ with a plan!

I seem to have so many projects now that I can’t keep track of them, let alone expect anyone interested to be able to make sense of it all.

So I’m going to try to rectify that over the coming months by evolving this blog to become the place you should go if you want to discover what I’m about and what my various projects are.

I suspect it’s going to a fairly exposed diary of my haphazard, sprawling online activities while I search for my unique place on this world wide web thingy.

But having said it’s haphazard, there are (or will be if you’re reading this too soon) a lot of links to useful resources, some of mine and many from other people. So if you’re new to online marketing and you know less then me, use it as a stepping stone to find the topics you might want to explore and the people that know much more than me!

I have goals to make money online but I have certain guiding principles that you’ll become familiar with if you hang around my blog enough.

In the next few posts, I’ll introduce you to some of my projects and we can take it from there.

Troy