Networking, affliate summit east

Networking


How important is networking? Ask the 3,073 attendees at the latest affliate summit conference in New York city in the second week of August. Many today mistakenly think that face to face meeting has become passe in the era of the internet . Are they ever wrong! Nothing will ever be invented that can take the place of a personnel meeting. After that meeting takes place then the ability to continue that connection through the web has increased tremendously .
Some people a while back thought that e-books or even e-newspapers would replace hard copy newspapers which obviously did not happen. Networking and meeting real live people is still the best way to start cutting deals and building business relationships.
Some tid bits from the summit that I picked that stuck in my mind.
Viral videos- make sure they are funny and interesting, aboring monologue of a video will get nowhere fast
Social media- don’t just push information at friends in all the groups that you start, let them communicate back with you .
Social media- be a nice guy. Try to help out others and that will eventually make your name and brand that much better.
And most importantly, Network network and network some more.

The Affliate Summit East

The Affliate Summit- the Place to be

Everyone will be there as the Affliate Summit East kicks off at the Hilton New York on the 9th 10th and 11th of August. Affiliate Marketing many talk about but do not do or understand how important and lucrative an affiliate marketing campaign can be. But this summit is just not about affiliate marketing, its about internet marketing. That includes SEO and adwords advice and Social media. The truth is that the networking may be the most important part of this summit with so many people getting together to try to cut deals.

Some of the big names at this event include Chris Brogan of new Marketing Labs, Jay Berkowitz Ceo of Ten Golden rules. Many varied topics will be discussed at this conference. I will be both writing sand tweeting interesting new things that I see and hear.

Google's newest challenge

They did it, Bing is Yahoo or Yahoo is Bing or whatever.

In the latest attempt to challenge Google the two other biggest names in search have merged. Is Google worried, probably not. Bing claims its engine is better than Google but hat may be irrelevant. What is relevant is how many people will use the Google search engine as opposed to how many will use the new combo for search. It’s all a question on how much money advertisers will spend to advertise their products on Google or Bing. It is ultimately who will provide a better experience for the user and attract more people who will in turn see more ads.

If Bing/ Yahoo has better results than Google and search market share shifts somewhat then advertisers will reassess their relationship to Google. No one really believes this can happen in the short run and is unlikely even in the long run. If Bing/ Yahoo ( bahoo ) can tackle click fraud better than Google then there is a possibility that some advertisers will attempt to try something new. This is also highly unlikely unless some kind of price war ensues. This may be in the works. If Bing/ Yahoo can convince advertisers that they will pay less per click or impressions and publishers that they will make more on serving ads then this new challenge may make some inroads.

Google all along has been preparing for all eventualities by those that want to challenge its supremacy in search. It has developed many tools that do not make direct money for Google but give a Google user many advantages. G-mail and Google maps are just some of the apps that will keep Google number 1.

It’s just not about search its more about the internet experience. Google is second to none in this area and all the Bing in the world will not change that fact.

Google page rank

Well Google has done it again. It has surprised very many people with its page rank update. Some are happy many are not. Google's page rank for a very long time has been an indication for many on the strength and relevance of a site. The higher the rank the better and more relevant a site is, or that’s at least what most people think. Google lately has been updating more frequently its page rank and nobody is completely sure why. Many suspect that Google is trying to punish sites with paid links. Google has been saying for years that it will catch up with paid link schemes. The truth is that very many sites have high page rank because of paid links. In fact the very sites that sell paid links are still being given high page rank by Google itself. Some have surmised that Google will now update everything faster as Twitters immediate update system has taken the internet by storm. Some overly obsess on the page rank of their site thinking that is the most important gauge of success for a site. A site can have very high traffic and still have a low page rank. A site can be very informative and still have a low page rank. Lastly many sites who have none of these but manage to buy well placed links end up tricking Google to reward them with high page rank.

So go figure.

Google Voice.

The time has come


Google seems to always surprise so it should not really be a surprise anyone that Google is entering the phone business. The real question is why? This doesn’t seem to be even marginally connected with Googles core business model. Why is Google going into the Phone business?

The overall reason that Google seems to go into new businesses that don’t seem to make it more money has to do with customer satisfaction. Google wants people to stay on its site knowing full well that the programs that do make it money will be used. But beyond its macro strategy there is some direct money making tools that Google Voice will activate.

Management in one word is what Google voice is all about. No one needs to juggle many phone numbers anymore. One number on every business card and website. The user decides which of his phones will ring when Google voice is accessed. The user decides that a number from a business associate will ring on his business phone and the call from his mother will ring on his home phone. He can decide that cold calls hear a prerecorded message so spam calls will never bother him again. He can direct people he does not want to talk to a voice mail that he can choose not to ever return. All these conversations will be recorded on a g-mail like page that any messages ( or even spoken conversations) can be accessed at a later point . These pages Google will leverage with its core product Google adsense that brings Google in billions. Google will be preparing millions of new pages where ads can appear based on page content.

Google is very likely going to integrate all this very seamlessly into its g-mail system and mobile capabilities.

This is a brilliant stroke by Google once again.

New Linkedin Feature

Linkedin subgroups


Those who use linkedin may also use the very valuable tool of groups on the site. Creating your own group or even joining a preexisting group gives enormous marketing power to the users of the group. You can belong to up 50 groups at a time with the ability to start discussions and get the word out to focused groups. It is a very powerful tool for those that know how to use it properly. The problem with this tool of linkedin is its popularity. This means that a very good group will have hundreds if not thousands of members making more focused discussions difficult. Linkedin has addressed this problem with creating a subgroup option that will focus discussions much better. Let me try to make this more clear by using an example. I have a SMO professionals group that has 80 members but I would like to start a subgroup that focuses just on news on internet developments. I can choose ( or they can choose depending on your setting) which members of my group would most benefit from my subgroup. This will focus marketing needs to members who will need them the most. Only the manager of the group can start a subgroup making his power over the group stronger than ever. Many up till now saw not a great difference between the manager and members (there are major differences) but this feature will encourage new groups to be formed to utilize the subgroup feature.
It’s a feature that will help the Groups section in linkedin provide much better marketing capabilities to its users.

Search in Real Time

Collecta.com is a new search engine that already is making serious waves. This is all for a good reason. The concept of searches that list breaking results will be at the forefront of all web search activity in the future. This is all the vision that Twitter is based on, immediate relevant information. That’s what people want and are looking for. Collecta takes all the real time comments and remarks from everywhere and provides results. Anything put up on facebook or twitter or any other social network will be automatically cached and given priority on Collecta. Its almost as if Twitter launched this for Collecta as this is an identical idea. How will the big boys integrate real time search into there mammoth search engines, no one knows that yet.

If you really want to test this new service go to Collecta and look for this article. It should be at the top of the list