netParticles

Google Valentine's Day Card Received with $100 AdWords Coupon Code!

Richard Tea — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 04:20:28 +0000

Today, we received a Valentine's Day card from Google! With a $100 AdWords Coupon and a QR Code!

It seemed to have been sent to Canadian AdSense Publishers judging from the generic salutation on the envelope and a quick search on Twitter. Google has decided to show some love with this little card which includes a CAD$100 AdWords coupon code which will depreciate into a CAD$75 one the 5th of March to finally expire on March 31st 2010. To get started, the card and the QR Code leads us to www.google.ca/ads/abondance ("abondance" for abundance in English)

Think of the Big Picture with a Website Promotion Strategy

Richard Tea — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 11:45:00 +0000

When promoting your website, you may lose yourself in the details, such as advanced search engine optimization techniques or detailed statistics. In such case, you need a high-level strategy for your website promotion if you have not created one yet.

Google Unveils Google "Caffeine": Improves Search Indexing, Speed and Accurary

Richard Tea — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 07:00:00 +0000

In response to the new threats in the search industry from Facebook's real-time search, Twitter Search and Bing, Google has unveiled a secret project they worked on for some time: A next-generation search engine.

For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google's web search. It's the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits "under the hood" of Google's search engine, which means that most users won't notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences, so we're opening up a web developer preview to collect feedback.

Although some sites such as Mashable claim to test several aspects of this Google 2.0 (if we can call it this way) but only received criticism for over-analysis. As Matt Cutts, Principal Engineer at Google mentioned on his blog, the main focus is the back-end code:

How-to Use: Bing Webmaster Center Tools

Richard Tea — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 11:40:00 +0000

Previously, we showed you how-to submit your sitemap to Bing without giving you much detail about the full range of features from Bing Webmaster Center Tools. This web application from Bing (Microsoft) was designed to address important questions from webmasters, such as whether your website has been indexed or blocked by Bing or if there are website crawling issues.

In other words, Bing Webmaster Center Tools gives a look to make sure that your website is working well with Bing's MSNBot (The Bing web crawler, a program that scans websites and indexes their content, such as text, documents, images, and links, for searching).

Facebook Acquires FriendFeed

Richard Tea — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 19:27:53 +0000

TechCrunch has a preliminary report that Facebook has acquired FriendFeed:

Facebook has acquired FriendFeed, we’ve learned. We’re gathering details now. At this point details on the acquisition are still very sparse, but it’s clearly a good match. Over the last year or so, Facebook has “borrowed” quite a few of features that FriendFeed popularized, including the ‘Like’ feature and an emphasis on real-time news updates.

This is a very strategic move for Facebook since it will complement their current set of features and take a step towards the "real-time web". Facebook just issued the following press release:

How to: Submit your Sitemap to the Top 5 Places Where They Need to Be

Richard Tea — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 11:45:00 +0000

If you are looking to submit your URL because you just launched a new site, you might have a bit more work to do today than in the past. Search engines have evolved and even collaborated on some standards to facilitate their job of indexing the web.

You now have to do more than to submit a single URL and have the crawler do the rest (you can do that but it does not guarantee your important pages will be found. There are five places where you need to submit your Sitemap (no time and know how to ping? jump to the summary):

Google - The top search engine with roughly 65% market share
Bing - From Microsoft, formerly MSN and Live, will soon own 25% of the search market share
Yahoo! - Still an important player while it is being replaced by Bing
Ask.com - With 2.5% market share, still an important search engine
Moreover - a premier provider of real-time news and business information on the Web (serves many Fortune 500 companies)

We assume you have already created your sitemap using your content management system or a Sitemap generator and that you are ready to send it out to lead the web crawlers to your page.

How-to: Stop Wasting Your Time Checking Your Website Stats

Richard Tea — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 10:00:00 +0000

I do it too, and I am sure many of you reading this are starting to realize the problem (as highlighted by DailyBlogTips). If you know someone that wastes hours of his or her time checking stats instead of being productive, send them to this page.

Now, you must tell yourself, it just takes 2 seconds to check that number, it does not hurt right? Wrong! There are two main problems with checking your stats all the time:

It interrupts whatever you are working on right now
It wastes time, and that time cumulates quickly

Let's try some calculations, let's say you check your stats 10 times a day and it takes 5 min every time (could be a conservative estimate for some of you), and that you are up for work 8 hours a day. You are effectively wasting about 10% of day looking at stats numbers.

HOW-TO: Use Six Essential SEO Techniques to be Search Engine Friendly

Richard Tea — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 10:00:00 +0000

Previously, we have seen how you can removed unwanted pages from Google, now we will hit the main topic of this website (promotion) and show you six essential SEO Techniques that will put you in good terms with search engines and get listed! Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a gray area for webmasters since there are many conflicting information and unproven methods. Thankfully, there are a set of SEO Techniques that do not fall in this gray zone since they have repeatedly been proven to create significant improvements to your search engine visibility.

10 AdSense Alternatives to Make Money Online through Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising in 2009

Richard Tea — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 10:00:00 +0000

One of my friends never got accepted to Google AdSense. This prompted me to write an up-to-date List of AdSense Alternatives, here we are limiting ourselves to Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising Networks since Cost Per Mile ones often have higher requirements.

These alternatives to Google AdSense are being listed from a publisher's perspective. Advertisers will always have an option to display advertising on several ad networks as opposed to publishers with limited ad space.

Why another List?

There may be many lists available but many are outdated or try too hard by giving anecdotal evidence as review. There are a wide array of industries and niches and judging the performance of an ad network based on a single view would be flawed. Therefore, we made a list based on popularity as we can logically assume that the more an ad network is being visited, the more advertisers they have and the higher the payout can be due to the increased competition.

Open for Website Review or Critique!

Richard Tea — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 10:00:00 +0000

As some may have seen (or are coming) from our post on SitePoint Forums, we are asking you for your feedback on netParticles!

So, please open up and post your uncensored thoughts! But if you are speechless, here are a few questions we have categorized by website dimensions.

Do not limit yourself to these questions, they are only ideas to get you started. Also, be sure to visit several types of pages such as the front page, the archives, the about page and the sitemap.

100,000 Invitations to Google Wave on September 30th

Richard Tea — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 11:30:34 +0000

On Monday morning, Google has announced that 100,000 invitations to Google Wave will be sent on September 30th. Announced on May 28th at the Google I/O Conference, Google Wave will be a game-changer or that might replace email over time. But as Mashable reports:

"While it looks and feels like email in many ways, its unique hybrid of realtime and message-based communication takes some getting used to. Using applications in-wave, editing other people’s messages, and integrating robots into your conversations are going to confuse and even scare people."

So signup to be notified when it is ready before it is too late.

TweetLater Review: A Twitter Productivity Tool

Richard Tea — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 10:00:00 +0000

TweetLater (TweetLater.com) sounds like any other Twitter automated or scheduled tweeting web applications but do not let the name fool you. It could be considered as one of the most valuable tool for any Twitter Power User. We could even go as far as to say it is an essential Twitter timesaver.

This review is on TweetLater's free version, we will blog about the professional version in other posts not to divert from the main objective.

Making Twitter Marketing Easier

Social Network Marketing requires a much higher investment in time than other marketing initiatives. The cost of the tools and ads are minimal compared to online advertising campaigns but building the relationships on social networks like Facebook, Twitter and FriendFeed could go up as to require a dedicated resource for monitoring and responding.

HOW TO: Quickly Remove Your Unwanted Links from Google's Search Results

Richard Tea — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 10:00:00 +0000

In the past, requesting a page to be removed from Google was a long and untracked process where you had to send a request by using a feedback form. Since 2007, Google has rolled out an new set of tools to speed up the URL removal process on domain names you control through Google Webmaster Tools. As not many people know about this process, here is a quick how-to to avoid your website promotion efforts to result in a 404 from Google.

Why Proactive Link Checking of Google Search?

Links is the technology that makes web as we know it, but as the Internet, your site may evolve fast. Through this, there may be human-errors or required changes that may cause unwanted or broken links to be displayed in a Google Search of your site's content.

Dead links can negatively impact your website's promotion and brand in several ways:

Twitter's Strategy Leaked, Could They Crowdsource their Strategy 2.0?

Richard Tea — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 21:53:35 +0000

On Tuesday evening, TechCrunch received over 300 confidential Twitter documents and screenshots. Today they claim they have come to an agreement with Twitter to publish their internal strategy. I will not rehash the Twitter Internal Strategy here and I have already tweeted about this the moment it happened. From the Twitter's blog, they are now really more open than they (ever) wanted to.

Google Reader Social Update, A Step Towards Google Wave?

Richard Tea — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 06:24:02 +0000

Over the last year, Google has been receiving increased pressure to become a real-time search engine, something like Technorati and Twitter. They certainly have the lead in public content search (and advertising) over the Internet but a threatening amount of private and user information have started to surface behind the great wall of Facebook. Research publications strongly people often rely on word of mouth or recommendations from other people to make their decisions. Although, Google's core strength is search (and lots of math), there is a lot of progress to be done on the social front.

A few hours ago and as reported by TechCrunch and Mashable, Google Reader received a significant upgrade which allowed following, liking and people searching. You are not the only one to automatically see the link to Twitter and Facebook. However, they seem to have set the default sharing method to public while offering the option of sharing only between friends. In the past they have enabled a feature that allowed sharing but was unfortunately set to share by default to selected groups which may not have granted the best success.

A few points of criticism can already be made:

How to Research Two Strategic Marketing Essentials with Google Ad Planner

Richard Tea — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 10:30:00 +0000

Google Ad Planner is one of my favorite free media planning tool that can help Advertisers find which websites their target audience visits to make better-informed advertising decisions. Since the Google AdWords team recently redesigned the user-interface to facilitates research, it prompted us to write this article for you. Unlike other 3rd party non-Google tools, you can display data using a combination of demographics, geography, Google Search keywords and commonly visited sites.

This is one of the first full articles I will write on promotion strategies, make sure to bookmark this site for further reference!

Using Google Ad Planner as Publishers and Bloggers

Google Ad Planner is rather limited for publishers (website owners, webmaster, bloggers, etc.), there is a variety of other tools for their purpose but here we will show you that you should not completely ignore this tool.

You can use this advertiser tool to can gain some valuable information which can help you better position your website, frame your target audience and know who your competitors are. Therefore, we will split this article in two sections:

Audience Targeting and Profiling: Who is your audience? I mean, really, their age, gender, income, etc...
Competitive Analysis: Who are your competitors? We like to call them related sites.

As example to guide you through this, we will be using Digg.com since it is a very popular platform aimed at technology geeks. Disclaimer: The following is not intended to be a full or professional analysis of Digg's marketing position. The data represented are estimates and may change by the time you read this article.

New Social Media Study: Majority Cannot Live Without Social Networks

Richard Tea — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 09:00:00 +0000

Could you survive without your social networks? (Facebook? Twitter? LinkedIn? MySpace!?)

Tom H. C. Anderson, managing partner at Anderson Analytics, shared the result of their May survey of 5,000 U.S. social media users which attempts to answer this (the answer is: mainly no). Without reposting the entire article, here is a summarized outline:

Percentage of respondents could probably do without:
- Facebook (29%)
- MySpace (35%)
- Twitter (43%)
On the most valuable network (the report is not clear on how it was calculated since the sum is over 100%)
- Facebook (75%)
- MySpace (65%)
- LinkedIn (30%)
- Twitter (12%)
Usage and reliance on social networks
- Under 35, for "fun" and contacting friends
- Older, indispensable for staying in touch with family and close friends

Regulate Search Engine Marketing And SEO Due to Google's Dominance?

Richard Tea — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 13:06:58 +0000

An anonymous guest author at TechCrunch wrote a long but interesting article on the increasing reliance on the Google algorithm. The article goes by giving an analogy as the sole gatekeeper of the traffic each website seeks and his proposed solution is to regulate this by forcing some transparency in the algorithms.

It was a right decision for him to stay anonymous, since the spur of comments give strong counter-arguments to his thesis, e.g.: social media marketing, other search engines, SEO industry business and most importantly, not revealing what made Google: it's algorithm.

What are you thoughts on this, what would happen if all search engine become "open"?

A Five Phased Approach to Successful Blogging

Richard Tea — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 23:00:00 +0000

No, we are not "launching" yet. Today is a milestone as netParticles our web design and development phase is complete and we will start writing and publishing content as opposed to tinkering and finalizing its design and code.

Over the last two months, we have carefully planned and designed this site as a platform to effectively keep you up to date on the latest development in website promotion and marketing. You might wonder how a brand new blog provide website promotion tips for established sites. The answer lies within our experienced professional who will put their writing skills by materializing their knowledge and insights.

Only the Web Design and Development phase is complete? Why don't we simply "launch" as a first post? In our opinion, a successful blog launch and establishment can be broken down into five distinct phases:

Business Plan: Define the purpose of your site, its main audience, its content scope.
Web Design and Development: Design the user interface, code the page and customize your content management system.
Pillar Content Writing: Create a few outstanding articles that will draw new visitors to your website.
Official Launch and Promotion: Launch a promotion and marketing campaign to let the world know about your blog.
Continuous Growth: Feed your reader base by writing at a regular schedule and act on the comments you receive.

This is a rough model on which we will expand on in one of our upcoming posts.

On writing this we have consulted from our own experience but we would also like to highlight these external links which could be useful to you.

Pre-Launch Re-Post

Richard Tea — Fri, 01 May 2009 05:05:13 +0000

After over three five years of setbacks, we are glad to finally (re)launch the development of netParticles! This website will be providing a wide range of articles, tutorials and resources on website promotion and internet marketing. We will be focusing on how to make the most of the web from a perspective mixed from a bloggers, web publishers, site owners, marketing professional. Since it is mainly web related, we will touching on a vast array of topics ranging from web design to content development.