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If you are looking for telecommuting jobs, this software is for you.

It enables you finding potential employers who have posted job openings in some popular online classified adv resources.

You can instantly look for relevant ones by using keywords. For example, if you are looking for ghost writing jobs, just type in keywords “ghost writing” in the software and you are done.

With this software, you can immediately email the potential employers about your background and capabilities. You’ll soon find out that finding good customers is not that difficult!

It dramatically cuts down your time of looking for potential employers. It thus let you focus more on providing quality services to your existing customers.

Ready? Click Instant Customer Generator to watch the video and you’ll understand how it works!

Best Selling!

Google beat the analysts’ expectations again last week, releasing higher-than-expected earnings per share results.

This confirms once again that during a period of economic turmoil, people resort more to the online advertising medium because it provides more flexibility and more control over advertising programs. This is favorable to Google, with the majority of its business revenue coming from online advertisement.

And for credit crunch periods like the one we are in now, we have to note that this is especially favorable for companies with a large cash reserve, like the one in Google’s balance sheet. Google had $14.4 billion in cash at the end of September 2008.

But this acts not only in Google’s favor, but also in Microsoft’s. This is the time for these two companies to exercise their buying power to acquire companies with distressed cash flow.

I consider now to be an especially favorable time for Microsoft to raise again their proposal to acquire Yahoo! due to their distressed stock prices, and that a new offer no longer needs to be near to its original US$31 per share quoted at the beginning of this year. Just 10 months later, Microsoft could probably reach a deal for a much lower purchasing price. Although, many people believe that Microsoft is now interested primarily in the search technology of Yahoo! rather than the whole Yahoo! that includes many of its successful content sites. Perhaps Microsoft will only continue the discussion after the rumor regarding a merger between Yahoo! and AOL becomes reality.

Google cannot exercise the same tactic due to the anti-trust concerns of various governing bodies. The combined search market share could easily exceed 90% if Google merges with Yahoo. So this time Microsoft has an advantage over Google with the possibility of buying the whole or part of Yahoo!

Perhaps Yahoo! merging with AOL and selling its search technology to Microsoft is a better way out for Yahoo! shareholders. This frees them from the unfavorable market condition they have been enduring for the past few years. Considering their search technology is facing an uphill battle against Google, it is better for Yahoo! to remain focused on building content sites and leave the search business to the financially stronger Microsoft to continue developing (and hence battling with Google).

Do you any comments? Leave me message here.

Tags: Google’s quarter results, Microsoft’s acquisition of Yahoo!

I have been using the new Google browser for almost two weeks. You might have heard a lot of discussion about this new browser all over the world. People are looking to Google to deliver a new browser to combat Microsoft’s dominant Internet Explorer (IE), especially as IE Version 8 is on the way to official release soon.

I perceive this differently. What I have in my view is Google actually delivering its own OS (Operating Systems) to drive its applications - the applications that are now being delivered to its customers in the form of online applications like Google Apps.

Some people call this idea “cloud computing”. The concept is of future networked computer users having all their applications installed on networked servers, serving needs everywhere, so that users will never need to install the applications on their own computers and/or on their own office network.

There are two features that enforce my conclusion that Google is using to pave the way to use Chrome as a cloud computing OS.

The first feature is its own task manager. If you press the “Control” tab at the right hand corner of the Chrome Browser’s window, then select Developer → Task Manager, you can bring up Chrome’s own task manager to manage the opened tabs or windows of Chrome pages. This is an exciting feature. While it allows you to easily manage all opened pages under Chrome, I can also envision it as a real “task manager” to use Chrome to open and manage many online applications in the future using the Chrome windows.

The second feature is Chrome’s surprising capability to be installed on a computer by a user without administrative rights. Many Chrome users are not even aware of this. I can see this is a strategic tactic of Google, allowing you to install and use this browser on any public computer, even if you do not have administrative rights on that computer. This brings you a fast browser that has the possible future extensions of incorporating many of Google’s or its partners’ online applications with a single click of the button within the Chrome browser. With Chrome, you can use any of Google’s applications without hassle in any computer in the world, as long as it is connected to Internet.

Perhaps you can also see what I mean by looking at the actual design of the browser. The Chrome designers try very hard to get rid of the space consuming and cluttered tool bars that you commonly find in IE and Firefox. Chrome tries to give you as much space as possible for your “browsing” (or “application”) use. This also contributes to the feeling of using an OS instead of a browser window under Chrome.

These are the reasons why I think the release of Chrome is more strategic in nature. It is not merely a browser, but a future cloud computing platform. It is a platform that aims at attacking the lucrative application business of Microsoft, especially the Microsoft Office Package.

It will be interesting to keep our eyes on how Google will use this new OS platform in the coving future.

Tags: Google Chrome, Microsoft IE, IE 8, Chrome Task Manager, Google New OS

I have many ghostwriters helping me write website articles. I have always believed that building good content for your online presence is the lifeblood of successful Internet Marketing.

One of the key items on my training agenda for these ghostwriters is to teach them how to research online keywords correctly. I have noted that even some of the more experienced ghostwriters still confuse the concepts of “most searched” keywords and “highest CPC keywords” (CPC refers to Cost Per Click).

Indeed, looking for these two types of keywords applies to two different situations. Let’s discuss each, one by one.

When you look for “most searched“ keywords, actually you are looking for keywords that most visitors are interested in. From the standpoint of Search Engine Optimization, you are looking for the related topics that people mostly seek. You increase the chance of being exposed to more online visitors if you are able to find the most searched keywords and at the same time rank your website in the first few positions of the chosen keywords.

However, usually the most searched keywords are also the most competitive, and are targeted by many webmasters at the same time. So the number of competitive websites for these keywords is also great, making it difficult to rank highly among those targeted keywords. We need to consider the Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI) before choosing the best keywords to be used.

For details of KEI, refer to the post

http://www.imarketings.net/internetmarketing/52

Keywords with highest CPC (Cost Per Click) refers to keywords for which online advertisers will be most willing to spend advertising dollars. Take one of my recent works as illustration. I asked one of my ghostwriters to write an article on pursuing an online degree. Having done thorough research using this Keyword Research Toolbar, I realized that the highest CPC of the related keywords are “online accounting degree,” “master degree in psychology online,” “masters degree psychology online,” etc. (If you are interested , refer to this excel-table for the results of this research completed using this tool.)

Those keywords are with a CPC of at least US $20 or higher. Targeting these keywords in your articles can potentially bring you more revenue per click by visitors visiting your website with pay-per-click advertisements such as Google AdSense. So I asked my ghostwriter to write an article targeting these keywords, and the resulting article is shown here.

This article is actually targeted for earning Google AdSense dollars, and that’s the reason it was written aiming at high a CPC.

So when you do the keyword research for website copywriting, keep the objective of your writing in mind. Are you targeting SEO, or are you aiming for Pay-Per-Click Advertising dollars like what is offered by Google AdSense program? (There are other popular Pay-Per-Click Advertising Networks such as Bidvertiser and Chitika. Search for the phrase “alternatives to Google AdSense” for those programs.)

The best situation is to have both goals in mind, as these two objectives are not mutually exclusive. However, it does involve more effort and time to figure out keywords that suit both objectives, so sometimes you need to make a choice before you proceed with your keyword research.

I hope this article helps as you research the best keywords to use in your content building. Just keep in mind that you need to do careful keyword research before writing website articles. Feel free to leave me comments if you have further questions.

Tags: Keywords Research, EverProfits Toolbar, Search Engine Optimization

The social bookmarking phenomenon emerged several years ago as the trendy habit of people using free social bookmarking sites to categorize and manage their favorite webpages.

Traditionally, we resorted to the search engine’s internal classification system to handle your website’s themes. Search engines use the keywords on each webpage together with the keyword density to classify webpages by topic types. However, since search engines do not really understand webpages and keywords, they rely on statistical methods to classify your webpage according to their existing database of webpages with similar keywords.

Detecting when words are “similar” is easy for human beings. However, this is not an easy job for search engines, which are powered by computers. Computers do not understand synonyms that are different in spelling but similar in meaning. As I discussed in a previous post, several years ago Google acquired a company called Applied Semantics that attempts to handle this problem with its own invention, semantic technology.

Now the practice of “tagging” comes along to solve this problem. The best entity to determine a particular webpage’s classification is the webpage’s author, who is human being, fully understanding what the webpage s/he has written is about. Thus s/he “tags” it, using different words or sets of words to summarize the content of his/her website pages.

For example, since I am the author of this webpage, I can tag this it with keywords such as “social bookmarking”, “tag”, “tagging”, “Applied Semantics” or even some other related topics (such as social marketing sites “Technorati”, “de.licio.us”) that I think are the most important keywords related to this page. On the other hand, as viewed by a search engine, this webpage might be classified as “webpage” as this word appears most frequently in the article. Do you see the differences of machine versus human being?

At the same time, websites like Technorati and de.licio.us emerge as the mainstreams of so-called social bookmarking services as they allow users to register an account and bookmark their favorite websites with appropriate tags they themselves assigned to the webpages. They can even share their database with others (hence the term “social”). These bookmarking websites steadily emerge as a good source of “commentaries” and “classifications” of webpages in cyberspace. Some people further comment that the goal of tagging is not to classify, but to memorize.

It’s very logical that search engines will also consider the information from these bookmarking websites as a source of authoritative sites and webpages for particular popular keywords. This leads to the practice by some people of manipulating the social bookmarking websites (e.g., creating multiple user accounts to bookmark their own webpages with the carefully chosen tags as keywords) to artificially generate their own “popular” webpages within social bookmarking websites. Such people hope this will increase the search engines’ positioning of their webpages in search results.

An interesting book on this topic can be found here. This book teaches you how to use this tactic when blogging using popular website software like Wordpress, and actually reveals the drawback of referencing a webpage by tagging from the search engines’ perspective. This is because they are able to be manipulated by human beings, and so can create bias for a webpage.

The use of different variations of a keyword, such as “programme”, “program”, “programmes”, “programs” for the same concept can create a lot of confusion as well, creating additional problems with tagging.

One way to take advantage of this growing trend is to add a user-friendly component in your webpage to allow users to easily add your webpage to their favorite social bookmarking websites. If you take a look at the end of each post in my blog, you will see some lines of popular bookmarking websites like Del.icio.us, Spurl, Furl, Simpy, Blink, Digg, and those specializing in blogs like Technorati. Those lines allow my visitors to easily bookmark my webpage in their social bookmarking accounts. Someone coined the term “Social Media Optimization” (SMO), parallel to what we commonly referred to “Search Engine Optimization” (SEO). But note that SMO also extends to Web 2.0 sites’ optimization such as Facebook.com, Myspace.com, etc. We’ll talk about this in a later post.

Tags: Social Media Optimisation, Web 2.0 Optimization, Social Bookmarking

Cuil.com, a new search engine launched two days ago, is set to be another competitor for Google in the web search industry.

What makes this search engine different from others is the profile of its founders. Most of them are ex-employees of Google, Inc.  In particular, one of the main architects of this new search engine, Anna Patterson, was an important contributor of Google’s present search algorithm.

Attracting a lot of curious traffic, Cuil.com’s launch experienced such high traffic that the site was periodically out of service the first day.

According to some news sources, Patterson left Google because of its refusal to try innovative changes to their search algorithm. Anderson’s own search technology was acquired by Google in 2004, when her search algorithm was incorporated into Google’s search engine. She left Google for a new venture, creating another search engine with the debut of its self-proclaimed innovative search algorithm.

Unlike Powerset, the natural-language search engine recently acquired by Microsoft, Cuil focuses its full effort on improving the cost and speed of indexing web pages (with its search algorithms remaining a mystery to us), hoping to return more relevant and powerful search results to web surfers than Google.

Upon my first few attempts, the only thing that impresses me so far is the format of its output pages. The magazine-styled output page tries to provide pictures together with the search pages’ content to enrich the user’s search experience. Though from what I can tell, the pictures provided by its search result pages are mostly extractions from the returned web pages, and some of those (as you can probably imagine) are really silly extractions that hardly accurately represent the web sites recommended.

Most importantly, Cuil.com fails to return web pages that I know are important for a particular search term. I conducted an interesting test using this search engine to search its own name, “cuil”, but none of the returned web pages even show the web site’s own link, http://www.curl.com!

Interestingly, if I use Google to search for the same term, it returns the related news about curl.com, and indeed the first search result is the search engine’s own hyperlink http://www.curl.com (Quite ridiculous, eh?)

Whether this search engine can establish a foothold in the search engine industry remains unknown. But what can be sure is that the emergence of a new search engine provides us with more search choices in quality web surfing, and that is truly beneficial to all of us.

To Google, perhaps this is also another push to improve its search algorithm to handle the new competition. That could be good. In fact, this view is shared by Google itself. An official of Google said they welcome the new search engine to the competition, since it drives them to provide even more superior service to its customers.

I have set up a new Google Alert to track the term “cuil.com” for any updated news about this search engine. Have you?

Tags: Curl, curl.com, Google, Anna Patterson, Powerset

Finally, Google’s keyword search tool has changed – for the better! It now supplies the actual search volume of keywords you are researching.

In the past, the WordTracker service outperformed Google’s service because it supplied the search volume information while Google’s did not (and even hinted that it never would).

But now it appears that Google has changed its mind, and this could be a threat to WordTracker’s business.

WordTracker has long been criticized for their search volume data not being accurate. According to some sources, only 2 to 3% of actual search activities are used to estimate the actual search volume information. Now, comparing with the service with the actual data source of Google, I am quite sure that Google’s information should be much more accurate than WordTracker’s.

And what’s more important to non-English keywords research is that Google’s keyword search supports multiple languages. I have my doubts as to whether WordTracker can provide equally accurate information.

You can access Google’s service here:

http://hopurl.com/46444

Please note that there is actually still one drawback to using Google’s service. Google does not provide the actual number of competing websites for the keywords being researched, so there is no way to know the KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Index) of a keyword. (KEI is provided by WordTracker as one of the research results. For information about KEI, refer to my post here). However, since the Google service allows you to directly download the data to MS Excel (or another compatible spreadsheet program), you can estimate the KEI by using the AdWords information about Advertiser Competition. Divide the search volume by this figure to yield an estimate similar to the KEI.

Here is an Excel file (Keywords-Examples.xls) to demonstrate this. I used the keyword “shoes” in this example. Please note that I added the last two columns to calculate the KEI-similar metrics using my unique formula.

Look for keywords with Advertiser Competition less than one, but with a KEI metric in relatively greater values. This Excel file is not as sophisticated as what you can get from WordTracker. This is partly because of the limited information about the advertisers’ competition from Google’s AdWords tool.

But please note the following: The Advertisers’ competition column refers to the Google AdWords’ competition from its advertisers. This is NOT the actual webmasters’ websites that have been using those keywords in their web contents as provided by WordTracker.

So in a strict sense, the KEI metric in my Excel file cannot be considered a true KEI-like metric because the original KEI was not defined using AdWords’ competition.

I am still looking for ways to improve this. If you have any suggestions, leave me message in this post.

I hope this helps you better understand how to use the free keyword research service from Google.

Tags: WordTrackers, Keyword Research Tool, Google AdWords Research Tool

Using Google Alert to Boost your Online Marketing Effectiveness.

Google offers a free service called Google Alert that you should not miss. You can access this service here: http://www.google.com/alert

This service constantly searches for a particular search term that you provide, and returns to you any new updates it finds in cyberspace with this search term. You don’t have to keep going back and searching over and over yourself to find new items… the service does it for you!

For example, I can use the service to constantly search for the term “Damen Choy” to seek any webpages that come up with my name. The results are interesting. Sometimes I locate webmasters who have placed my articles in their directories. Sometimes I discover someone who has commented on my e-book (accessed here: http://www-a-better-job-interview.com). And I can follow up with these writers on those subjects related to me or my product/services to offer a joint-venture proposal, or explore other possible opportunities.

You can also use Google Alert to “spy” on your competitors’ ongoing activities by using their names as the search terms.

What is particularly exciting is that you can use Google Alert to grow your online business by using it to gain publicity. Here’s how.

Let’s say you’re a fitness trainer with a website for fitness-related resources. It’s a headache to get more people to learn about your website. With Google Alert, you can track newly posted news or stories about what is happening in the world of fitness. If something interesting is brought up by Google Alert, you can immediately contact the journalist who wrote the article and offer him your comments (usually a compliment to their story) along with your own website identity. Your compliment or comments may appear in the next story by the journalist. You can take it a step further by offering your e-book or articles to the journalist to demonstrate your skills in your particular field. Offer them the chance to interview you on the subject, or refer to your web resources in your next story. What’s important is to start a relationship with the journalists writing in your field. Relationship is actually the magic word behind the Public Relations industry. Did you know that?

Another way to use Google Alert to your benefit is to use it to search for particular headlines about your area of expertise. Once those headlines come up, you can write articles commenting on the subject from different angles, and then send them to your local media (both online and offline) for possible publication. Since your comments are related to breaking news hot off the press, the media will be more likely to respond to your comments and hopefully publish them.

I constantly use the Google Alert service to generate ideas for my blog writings. You know, it is not an easy job to find contemporary topics every day without this “tool” to help!

I even use it to track down anyone who has published my articles that I submitted to article directories (such as http://ezinearticles.com) by tracking the specially crafted article titles I submitted.

There is a paid service with similar functionality to Google Alert’s free service, but with more powerful deep crawling capability. It can return up to the top 750 searches related to your search term in the Google Search Engine. This service is not affiliated with Google, but it does help with more in-depth daily research for your search terms. If you’re interested, visit this link: http://www.GoogleAlert.com. They offer a free service with limited functionality so you can try it before joining the paid service.

Getting more publicity means getting more traffic and hence more revenue for your business. I hope this article helps. As always, feel free to write me with comments or questions!

Tags: online publicity, article tracking, online public relationship, PR, online PR building, GoogleAlert.com

Last Thursday, Yahoo announced the halt of discussions of a possible strategic partnership with Microsoft. The fallout of a Yahoo/Microsoft deal might be a piece of good news for Google. Right after ending talks with Microsoft, Yahoo announced a strategic advertisement pact with Google.

What makes me worry is that this new partnership may signify a possible monopoly of these two giants in online advertising, with Google controlling almost 70% of US search market and Yahoo, who comes in second place, controlling 17.4%¹. I fear that online advertisers may suffer from higher prices because of this near monopolistic partnership.

As I have said in the other posts, the average online ad rate of Google AdWords has increased significantly in the past few years. Take my experience as an example: my AdWords budget to achieve the same number of impressions for my advertisement has risen more than 400% in the past three years. The reason I keep using Google AdWords is there is no better alternative, unless you negotiate ad placements with other webmasters individually. However, this would require a lot of time and effort, and I’m quite sure the results would not be as satisfactory as what you can do with AdWords.

But it seems that in the short run, we have no alternative to this problem.

Microsoft will certainly oppose to the deal by escalating their objection to governing bodies such as the Federal Trade Commission and the Directorate General for Competition of European Commission, asking them to deal with it on an anti-competitive behavior basis. But that process takes time and the results are uncertain.

The only one solution I can think of is buying Google stock (NASDAQ:GOOG) to “hedge” my financial pain of using Google AdWords.
¹http://searchengineland.com/071228-164103.php

Tags: Yahoo!, anti-competitive behavior of Google