FEED MIXER ONE

Thoughts on Google Instant

The blogosphere is absorbing today’s announcement of Google Instant. I wanted to give some context and some thoughts.

Google’s web search (and web search infrastructure) team tries to do several things well:
- We want the most comprehensive index of the web. We explore ways to crawl the web deeper, faster, and better, from increasing our index size or indexing speed to crawling web forms to discovering links in JavaScript.
- We try to return relevant, useful results. Hundreds of people work on lots of improvements to our ranking algorithms.
- We try to return your search results really fast.
- We try to improve our search user interface (UI).

The first three things aren’t highly visible. Average users might not notice changes like Caffeine (improved indexing) or a better algorithm to detect hacked sites–although we have seen effects like users searching more when we deploy a fresher index. A bunch of people at Google have come up with amazing ways to make your search results faster. We’ve shared many of those insights to help make the web faster as a whole.

A key insight behind Google Instant is that if we want to get people answers and solve their problems faster, we can help with that by improving our UI to help you formulate queries more quickly (and then doing a bunch of hard work under the hood to answer that query too). Google typically returns search results in milliseconds, but it takes several seconds for you to type a query. In other words, the limiting factor on a typical search is you. With predictive search and instant results, you can often get the answer you want much faster.

Here’s some additional questions, along with my personal take:
Q: Does Google Instant kill search engine optimization (SEO)?
A: No! Almost every new change at Google generates the question “Will X kill SEO?” Here’s an video I did last year, but it still applies:

Q: Will Google Instant change search engine optimization?
A: I think over time it might. The search results will remain the same for a query, but it’s possible that people will learn to search differently over time. For example, I was recently researching a congressperson. With Google Instant, it was more visible to me that this congressperson had proposed an energy plan, so I refined my search to learn more, and quickly found myself reading a post on the congressperson’s blog that had been on page 2 of the search results.

Ben Gomes mentioned this during the Q&A, but with Google Instant I find myself digging into a query more. Take a query like [roth ira v]. That brings up Autocomplete suggestions like [roth ira vs traditional ira], [roth ira vanguard], and [roth ira vs 401k]. Suddenly I’m able to explore those queries more just by pressing the up/down arrow key. I can get a preview of what the results will be, add or subtract words to modify my query, and hit enter at any time. The ability to explore the query space and find out new things will inevitably lead to changes for SEO. When I was in grad school, I had a professor who mentioned that peoples’ information need often change over the course of a search session. Google Instant makes that process even easier: people can dig into a topic and find out new areas to explore with very little work.

Finally, Steve Rubel’s headline on Google Instant Makes SEO Irrelevant is too big of a claim to be correct, but the point he makes is that Google Instant includes personalization, and personalization changes SEO. Well, that’s common sense in some regard (see this interview from 2007 where I make that point). But that doesn’t mean that SEO will die. I’ve said it before, but SEO is in many ways about change. The best SEOs recognize, adapt, and even flourish when changes happen.

Q: I don’t like Instant! I’m turning it off!
A: We provide that option right next to the search box, but I’d encourage you to spend some time with it first before you have a knee jerk reaction. Instant is a great way to learn more about things you’re not an expert on, and it can save you time. As the Google Instant page mentions, “If everyone uses Google Instant globally, we estimate this will save more than 3.5 billion seconds a day. That’s 11 hours saved every second.” With over a billion searches a day and over a billion users searching each week, that adds up to 350 million hours of user time saved a year. That’s 500+ human lifespans saved a year by this feature if everyone used it.

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Successful Niche Marketing

[Editor's note: I chose today's article because the author mentioned an often ignored element of niche marketing: providing a valuable product or service. In other words, to be successful in niche marketing, you have to provide value to the customer. Enjoy today's post!]

By Nick Walsh

I’m going to break the hard news to you right off the bat. Make sure that you are sitting down. Internet surfers are not looking for you or your business. They are searching for one of two things: Information or Solutions. Failure to understand this rule is the reason that at least 98% of all Internet businesses fail. If you are reading this article, there is a good chance that you are one of the 2% who succeeds.

If you plan to sell anything online, then your primary task is to provide the information and/or the solutions that people are searching for. But it doesn’t stop there. You must do it in a way that the Search Engines like. The most proven model to achieve this is what we call a “Theme-Based Content Site” or “Niche Site”.

Once you understand the concepts discussed here, you will make the critical offline-to-online mind shift and you will join the 2% of small business owners who succeed at Internet marketing.

An effective niche website will be searched, and found, by prospective customers in ever growing numbers. Over time your sale will continue to rise as well. Simply put, you will be building a site that works for you, not the other way around! One caution here, however. You cannot be impatient at this phase. You cannot create the perfect page and expect there to be sales within a day or two. You must consider this to be a long term project. At the same time, you should be happy to know that once you have the engine running, you almost can’t stop it. The only way to stop it is to take the page down, and even then customers will still find you!

So how do you build a site that works? It all boils down to this workable process.

1) Develop a valuable product or service — your own creation or someone else’s.

2) Develop your own site in the niche that you know and love.

3) Fill that site with high-value content.

4) Use that content to attract your own niche-targeted traffic.

5) Build trust and credibility with your visitors.

6) Use content to Soften your targeted visitors.

7) Convert that Softened, warm, willing-to-buy traffic into sales…and

Diversify your minimization to include several options that are all related to your site’s niche.

The critical thing here is that you must succeed at all steps to end up in that 2% group. The good news is that anyone can succeed if they combine motivation with the right process and tools.

We really can’t just talk about how to be successful without pointing out the paths that you want to avoid. These would be the paths that 98% of newbie marketers mistakenly take!

Briefly, the failing sequence looks like this. Newbie marketers create a product or service. They then create sites to sell that product or service. Next, they add a payment and possibly fulfillment solutions. And finally, they die due to lack of traffic. Does this sound familiar to anyone?

Most small businesses fail because they skip several important steps. They prepare to sell and collect money, before they have provided what their visitors are searching for – information and/or solutions. This can be so devastating to newbies, most of whom are doing this business off the side of their desks and against the better judgment of their wild-eyed wives who are lurking in the background waiting to say, “I told you that was a dumb idea…”

Editors Note: Before the reader starts berating me and calling me a misogynist, I just want to point out that statistically, women don’t make the same mistakes. They normally think it all of the way through before doing what us “problem solving” Neanderthals do. We are much more likely to just run out and do it.

That said, the 2% of us that do succeed in Internet marketing build targeted, interested traffic by providing the type of high value content that their visitors are searching for. These intelligent marketers warm up their visitors with excellent content related to the concept of their product or service.

Always remember that in truth the typical visitor to your website is just going to skim over your sales copy, reading only small bits of information (in the F-Pattern that I talked about in another article). The site visitor will only get enough of the site to understand the overall sense of what the letter is about. In reality, this takes place in about 7 seconds.

If you want prospective customers to slow down and take in more information, you have to have outstanding ad copy that will attract them and hold them. We will talk more about that part in another article.

For now, the “rule of thumb” is that you want your paragraphs to be no more than four lines long. But you want the focus to be squarely on the copy and not on the noise that surrounds it. Attract customer attention with a very good graphic at the beginning and avoid the use of flash. For marketing sites, flash is one of those cases where “just because we can – it doesn’t mean that we should!”

Nick Walsh is a professional researcher and information technology analyst with 30 years experience in alternative health care, strategic information technology, and entrepreneurial development. Nick maintains several blogs on alternative health care, anti-aging, green energy systems, technology, and internet marketing in general.

Nick has been a successful internet marketer since 1996. Consistently reviewing the internet marketing industry, Nick is always up to date with the latest successful internet marketing tools and resources.

Nick works from his home in Vancouver, BC
http://www.siliconcentral.net

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Nick_Walsh

http://EzineArticles.com/?Successful-Niche-Marketing&id=4589718

Avoid Some Basic Niche Marketing Mistakes (encourageblogging.com)
Pointers For Finding Your Niche Product (encourageblogging.com)
The 6 Things All Great Marketers Do! (socialmediadudes.com)

Technorati Tags: niche marketing

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Positioning Your Business For Success

As the plane lifts off, imagine yourself reclining comfortably in your first class seat. You’re headed for San Francisco where you’ll be met by a driver and whisked to a luxury hotel with views of the bay. The tab is being picked up by a company looking to buy your firm, and your biggest concern is how much cash and stock to ask for when you meet with the president of the company and the senior officers. Sound like a fantasy?

Actually, I was the person being whisked across country, a few years back, to negotiate the sale of a web site I had built. With a lot of hard work and a carefully executed positioning I created the opportunity to make more than I thought possible from what had started as a just for fun web site marketing project.

Whether you are a builder, accountant, realtor, market researcher, or manufacture loudspeakers or baseball bats, the way you position your firm can determine your success.

Do you want prospects to seek you out?

Do you want people to pay you more?

Do you want to stand head and shoulders above your competition?

With a simple positioning strategy you can get more attention than you imagined and bring in those high-margin projects and the profits you want. Here’s how I positioned one of my ideas for success.

1. IDENTIFY A NEED
In 1999, a new search engine was appearing on the Internet almost every week. Some were much better than others. Knowing which search tool to use was confusing. Through my own interest in finding better tools to navigate the web, I’d discovered a common need.

2. EDUCATE PPROSPECTS TO DEMONSTRATE YOUR KNOWLEDGE
Based on four years of study of search engines and a book I’d written previously on marketing to the search engines, I’d become an expert on how they did and didn’t work. To help my own online research and to help others, I built a web site that provided a directory of search engines and reviewed their usefulness and functionality.

What are your areas of expertise?

The objective of my site was simple. At a time when most people were just discovering the web, I wanted to help them find the best possible search tools for their particular task. My mission was to educate people about how to find what they were looking for online. The site primarily focused on the growing number of reviews I authored. Instead of leading with information about my credentials, I used the content on the site to demonstrate my knowledge.

What can you do to educate your prospects?

How can you demonstrate your expertise?

3. IDENTIFY AND REACH YOUR TARGET MARKET
Now I needed a way to get people to the site. While my target market was almost infinite – anyone searching the Internet – my advertising budget was zero. (Remember I was doing this as a back pocket project while maintaining my small business marketing consulting practice.) How could I attract attention and get people to come back to the web site again and again?

I identified online editors and reference librarians as identifiable, approachable groups with a high level of interest and influence. I started an ezine directing readers to current search engine reviews and updates on the site and published approximately once a month.

What is your stay-in-touch strategy?

RESULTS
After just three issues of my ezine reporters started calling me for radio interviews and magazine articles. I received an offer to buy the web site with the price tied to the number of monthly visitors and page views. Three months later I had grown traffic to the site from thirty thousand to three hundred thousand page views per month and closed the deal.

POSITIONING YOUR COMPANY
To position your product or service for success:
A. Identify a Common Need
B. Identify a Market
C. Demonstrate Your Expertise to that Market
D. Continue to Stay in Touch

If you’ve been in business for three years or more you’ve accumulated a wealth of experience and knowledge. The more you share your ideas, the more people will view you as an expert and seek you out. Give your prospects examples of your expertise and they will think of you when they need your products or services.

You can use an ezine, your web site, a book, workshops or public speaking to demonstrate your knowledge and put your firm ahead of the competition. Using the strategy outlined above and a little effort you can position your business for success and put yourself in front.

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