SEMRush Adds a Powerful New Feature
I’m preempting our Thursday video for some breaking news that I know will benefit SEOs all over the Web. A few months back, I wrote and told you about SEMRush, from the folks who brought you SEOQuake, my favorite Firefox Add-on. Well… The folks over there have just made SEMRush better.
And you wonder how that’s possible, right?
Well, they did, and it will be available to all pro users beginning on February 1, 2012, and for all users free for a limited time.
What is this amazing new addition?
SEMRush partnered with MixRank to bring you AdSense data! From a pubisher’s point of view, you can see who’s publishing your ads, how many unique visitors your ads have gotten, when they were last seen, how many days they’ve been seen, and the ads’ average positions.
You can’t control the sites that show your AdWords ads, of course, but when seeing these results, you may want to contact your best AdSense sites for permanent advertising, right? I mean, if AdSense is doing well for you on those sites, it’s pretty simple to figure out that a permanent ad might do better.
What I also find to be useful about SEMRush’s new feature Read More…
Google’s Income for 2011
This a very interesting infographic from WordStream.com, a pay-per-click management tools company. Granted, these are estimated figures, but it’s pretty interesting to see where all of Google’s income accumulates. ‘Course you have to have such giant figures to run a company such as Google, eh? Oh, and the employee perks. Who wouldn’t want to work for them, right?
Check this out:
![What Industries Contributed to Google's Billion in Revenues? [INFOGRAPHIC]](http://www.wordstream.com/images/google-earnings.png)
Pretty interesting to see from the opposite point of view, too, right? Notice how “Business and Industrial” are near the bottom, while “Finance and Insurance” are at the top. Lots of spending; lots of income.
Will Google +1s Become the New Backlink?
Last week, I told you about Google’s +1 results showing up in your organic search pages. Called “Search Plus Your World” or SPEW, you have probably seen these results showing up already in some of your searches.
As you may know, I live in Florida, so I just did a quick search for “beaches,” for the heck of it, and look what came up at the bottom of my page:
And look at the number of the listings — 11 and 12. I did other searches for “pizza restaurants” and got a tons of local listings at the top of my page, a few organic listings, and a couple of social listings near the bottom, including one from my old friend Tim Linden, talking about list building and how it relates to pizza. Not at all a pizza restaurant, but you see that these local and SPEW results are starting to dominate in some searches.
So, what’s that mean to your business in search? Read More…
Google Ending Five Services in April
Google has given us a lot — Analytics, Google Talk, Google Maps, and on and on — and all of it is free. This is good for us, and good for the Web.
But sometimes, Google starts projects, figures that a) they don’t work well or b) that they do and not many people are using them, and they get shut down. This is what’s happening in April of 2012:
- Picnik: The amzing free photo editing site is going away. All photos can be downloaded to your desktop in a .zip file. Plus, if you’re a premium member, you no longer have to pay. Your premium fee is being refunded. And, the good news is that premium features are being released to everyone for free. If you haven’t checked out this site, it’s pretty amazing. I’m sorry that it’s going away.
- Google Messaging Continuity (GMC): Unless you’re using Microsoft Exchange in your mega business, this probably won’t affect you. GMC is Read More…
Email Marketing: How to Make Money 24/7
Yeah, I know… That title seems a little spammy. People online promise you that you’ll be a millionaire overnight! Do you have any idea how that infuriates me?
Probably not.
But what those unscrupulous people do is just disillusion folks who want to make money online. They hear all these wild claims and promises, and then expect NOT to do any work and that money will just fall out of the sky for them.
NEVER, EVER, EVER Happens! Ever!
The best way to make money is to settle on a niche that you want to market in, and to build a list of people who are interested in that niche. Then, you sell things regarding that niche to them.
See?
It is simple. BUT, it doesn’t happen overnight, and you do have to do some work. You have to build a squeeze page, to drive traffic to it, and to write emails that will go out 24/7 in a killer follow-up series that teaches the people on your list stuff about your niche. Talk about their problems, offer them a solution for which you have an affiliate relationship, and make money, too.
Email marketing is so step-by-step easy, and so lucrative that anyone who says that list building or email marketing is dead is well… Read More…
Blackout for SOPA/PIPA
Last week, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) was given a smackdown, at least for a while. Congress delayed making SOPA law until “outstanding concerns” have been ironed out. In fact, the vote has been taken off the floor. Many folks are happy about this delay, and Darrell Issa (R-CA) has remarked that there has been so much blowback that legislators may want to leave it alone.
But hang on… We still have PIPA (the Protect Intellectual Property Act) to worry about next.
PIPA, twin legislation to SOPA, which covers much of the same ground but in a different way, threatens to change the Internet as we know it. A vote is scheduled for January 24, and if that bill passes, we could be open for censorship the like the Internet has never seen. Our free and open society, built by millions of users could come crashing down in legislation that wants to make sites like Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr into police squads, monitoring what we put up online. Internet providers will have to shut down sites where they feel illegal file sharing is happening, and hold Google, Yahoo, Bing and other search engines responsible for disallowing those results in their indexes. Either legislation will limit the open creativity and threaten our First Amendment rights. We can’t let this happen!
To protest SOPA and PIPA, a blackout is scheduled for tomorrow, Wednesday, January 18. Some of the biggest sites online are planning to blackout, too, like Wikipedia, reddit, Mozilla, Boing Boing, and even the Fail Blog of the “Cheezeburger” network. More sites are climbing on the bandwagon as I type.
Matt McGee of Search Engine Land even wrote a post yesterday about blacking out your website, if you want to participate, without screwing up your SEO. Read More…
