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Happy New Year!
As 2009 begins, you may start thinking about the changes you'd like to make.
To help you get started, Amazon.com is featuring a New Year's Resolutions event, filled with hundreds of products and great savings. Losing weight, getting in shape, and curbing bad habits are just a few of the resolutions Amazon.com can help you with.
You can also cast a vote for your top New Year’s Resolutions and see which ones are the most popular.
Thursday, Google announced through their blog, that they are about to introduce a major change on all inactive keywords.
By activating all inactive keywords, they seem to be letting the customer pay for tweaking minimum bids, and by doing this, Google will further punish less conscious advertisers and reward those who are aware of their system. Google is likely to see a spike in their income in the coming and following weeks.
Google says: "The new per-query evaluation of Quality Score affects you in that keywords will no longer appear as 'inactive for search' in your account. Instead, all keywords will have the chance to show ads on Google web search and the search network (unless you've paused or deleted them). Keep in mind, however, that keywords previously marked 'inactive for search' are not likely to accrue a great deal of traffic following this change. This is because their combined per-query Quality Score and bid probably isn't high enough to gain competitive placement."
'First page bid' will replace 'minimum bid'
"As a result of migrating to per-query Quality Score, we are no longer showing minimum bids in your account. Instead, we're replacing minimum bids with a new, more meaningful metric: first page bids. First page bids are an estimate of the bid it would take for your ad to reach the first page of search results on Google web search. They're based on the exact match version of the keyword, the ad's Quality Score, and current advertiser competition on that keyword. Based on your feedback, we learned that knowing your minimum bid wasn't always helpful in getting the ad placement you wanted, so we hope that first page bids will give you better guidance on how to achieve your advertising goals."
"It's worth mentioning that the impact of these changes will vary from advertiser to advertiser; some might see no changes to their ad serving, while others may see a noticeable difference. As always, we recommend optimizing ads to prevent them from receiving a low Quality Score."
I joined Ping.fm back in April but never got around to using it. Ping.fm is a simple service that makes updating all your social networks easy peasy.
What happened was that I changed my Twitter user profile name from @ebizmom to @AngelWickenberg and the Twiiter app that updated my Facebook profile, as well as the app that I could post to Twitter and Friendfeed from didn't work for me.
The problem was that I had also created a new profile called @ebizmom, just in case people didn't know how to find me, but also in case I didn't feel comfortable with my new user name, so I turned to Ping.fm to solve the problem.
With Ping, you can update from just about anywhere. Use AIM, GTalk, iGoogle, WAP, iPhone/iPod Touch, SMS or E-mail and let Ping.fm relay your message to a multitude of social networking sites.
Ping has a "trigger system" and have broken down the services into three groups; blogging, micro-blogging and status updates.
You can control how your messages are posted as well as where. If you don't include a trigger from below in your message, your message will be delivered as your default method.
Examples:
@s message - Posts a status update
@b title^body - Posts a blog
@m message - Posts a micro-blog
Beta is still in session. To update your Facebook profile, an application key must be received from Ping.fm.
This is a progress report on my participation in the Thirty-Day-Challenge (30 DC):
I just wanted to let others know that even if your main site disappears from the SERPS, you can still have a presence representing your main website.
This is what happened to me.
My main URL disappeared from the SERPS and I was fretting something awful.
I checked with the Google diagnostic tool to see what could be wrong, but there is and was nothing wrong with the site in that respect. (It could do with some good conversion work, among other things.)
I continued working on the social networking aspects and lo and behold my URL can be found in the SERPS due to a COMMENT I made in a group!
The DIGG position never disappeared.
In fact, when the part of my site that was in position one disappeared, the Digg position became #1.
Now part of the site is in #1 again, the Digg link is in # 2, and in both the broad phrase match, and in the exact phrase match, there are 3 positions, including the comment.
Mind you, I am still very irked about my site disappearing from the SERPS.
I will certainly continue to follow the conversation, make those comments and build relationships.
In this way, it doesn't really matter if the main URL is in the SERPS or not because I will have many more positions there due to other links from social networking sites.
