The Beginning of the End for News Print

This is a short unplanned post, because I simply couldn’t resist bringing this to your attention – To me this mark’s a moment in time; a moment that I have been waiting to see.

The newspapers are having a ‘winge’, because in this electronic age we no longer have to pay to get the news. Rupert Murdoch is featured looking like a bit like a stunned mullet, accusing Google of stealing all the news. “News aggregators are thieves” he says.

In the past, the newspapers have retained the exclusive rights to deliver the news. With the internet, now everybody has that right. …and here is a live example – Just this second I received an email from news.com advising me that they have published my comment to this story….so today I too am adding to the front page news, and exercising that right. You can see this news story and my addition to it here.

“GOOGLE, under fire from Rupert Murdoch and some other newspaper owners, says it will let publishers set a limit on the number of articles people can read for free through its search engine.”

I think it is unbelievable that Google is obliging the ‘winging’ newspapers by restricting the amount of free articles they will display. My bet is they are laughing on the other side of their face, knowing news-printers are ‘flogging a dead horse’….as statistics show.

I am prepared to make a bet with anybody, that asking people pay for internet news stories will FAIL!

Murdoch said that “Newspapers need to do a better job of persuading consumers that high quality reliable news and information does not come free” and “Good journalism is an expensive commodity,” He repeated his intention to begin charging readers of News Corp newspapers on the web.

I thought this guy was smarter than that. Today, news is free. It is free because it attracts an internet traffic audience; an audience that then clicks on electronic advertisements. So today’s business are no longer paying for advertising that doesn’t work. Like newspaper advertising…but that just my opinion.

I think that popular print media, including the yellow pages have failed to move quickly enough to become electronic before losing their captive audience that they had for so long. Why didn’t Murdoch just turn his newspapers electronic, while he still had the majority of the captive audience?

‘Get Link Juice’ – How Blogging can make You Money

Many of us ‘down under’ still don’t even really know what a blog is for. It seems like Americans are all expert bloggers and we are still asking what a blog is, and what purpose one could possibly serve? It all seems so complex and without reason. So I am going to explain this in very simple terms, and then explain some of the awesome rewards your blog can deliver you. Don’t worry about being so far behind the Yankees, because you are now reading this…. so you will soon be ahead of the rest!

When you are introduced to someone, it’s not long before the good old conversation starter question comes up – “What do you do?” Every one of us has a specialty, something we do that we are good at and we like to talk about it. It is often our business activity, career and form of income; or something else you may do whenever you are not busy working….like a sport or a hobby. Whatever it is, now I am going to explain how you can use this personal knowledge to your advantage, and it will eventually make you money.

Basically, the difference between a website and a blog-site is ‘honesty’. A website is normally commercial (money making), and talks only about all the things the publisher wants you to believe. A blog is often an open forum, therefore open to comment, criticism and scrutiny; making it subject to honesty. In short – websites tell lies, and a blog-site tells the truth. Google loves blogs, warts and all. Spelling mistakes is another way Google recognizes a blog and ranks them highly, striving to publish truthful and useful information in the search results. More so, Google loves to rank fresh new, relevant content. Your blog will grow its own content as people post comments and questions for you; while your website content can sit idle and get stale.

As you know, these day’s people use search engines like Google to source the stuff they want, or find out more about something or how it works. If you have a business that sells lawn seed, you can start a money making website and optimize it for people querying Google for ‘Lawn seed, grass seed, turf’ etc. What about the people that would ask Google – ‘How do I grow grass? There are different ways people search, and this produces quite different results. This kind of search will generate a page of articles and blog sites rather than websites.

So what your website needs, is a blog site supporting it. You need to post all of that specialist information that you keep in your head, onto your blog site. Offer tips, advice and handy hints to increase your blogs content. If a customer ever asks you a question via email, rather than writing an email back, ask the customer to pitch that question to you on your blog site. Write a good detailed answer and publish it.

Once your blog becomes popular, when anyone else asks Google that same question, it is possible Google will feature your answer in its search results, and you will then receive traffic to your blog. The visitor may find your answer useful and informative, and click on the RSS feed button to bookmark your blog site, or even subscribe by email to get more ideas sent out. Google knows about all these subscriptions that make your blog more and more popular, and your blog will then rank even better in the search results. Your blog site will also link the customer to your money making website.

This brings me to the main point of the article – There are three main ‘income streams’ you will attract by creating a blog.

1. You will attract humans querying your specialty subject to your blog site; then you can link them through to your money making website.

2. Once your blog becomes popular with subscribers and traffic, you can sell advertisements to other affiliate businesses. Even Google splits click profits when featuring other peoples paid Adwords on your blog site. (This is called Google Adsence; I will explain this a few blogs later.)

3. Link Juice – This is the one great benefit that personally drives me to blog. The real reason many people blog….to generate Link Juice to send from your blog to your website.

What is Link Juice I hear you ask? Link Juice is the power and value that is being passed around the internet through links between sites. A link to your website from a popular blog-site that is an authority in the same industry bears a great amount of Link Juice.

This invisible currency is being traded around the internet continually. The trade is – ‘Links for Knowledge’. If you post original knowledge on your blog or website, then people will link to it. Your link popularity drives your search rankings up.

The more relevant the blog is to your website, the more link juice you generate. So a link from a gardening blog to a medical website, would not serve as much of a reference or authority; therefore neither would Google see it as a valuable link.

Link Juice is the Internet Marketing buzz word for Page Rank. Page Rank is a 1 to 10 score that your website page’s each get, and this Page Rank has a major influence on your ranking in the search results. Page Rank score is based on the volume of original organised content you provide, as well as the age of the site, the domain name, and other smaller contributing factors. The main one is the amount of inbound links you have coming into your site. This very important factor we internet marketers call your Link Data Profile. After page optimization and content building, links are the number one contributing factor that will drive your website up in search rankings.

So back to blogging, now that you understand why you need to do it.

A few more tips to consider -
The greatest bit is a blog-site is that it is free! The pages are free, and you don’t have to host it either.

Blogging is a great way to handle your customer questions while building your content. You can refer someone else to your blog each time you face that frequently asked question, and a score a new subscription each time.

Once you have started your blog, make sure you post some interesting content first. Then you then need to do just what I did to attract you to this blog…..email your customers, family and friends and get your first subscriptions. If you have a big customer list of emails, then you need to focus on developing some really captivating content before asking them to come see the blog. Otherwise they will never subscribe or return!

PS – Don’t copy other peoples content. Google will know straight away and penalize you.

If you are ready to start your blog then you are in the right place. Welcome to WordPress free blogging and hosting platform! Just go to www.wordpress.com to get started.

In a follow up part of this article, I will give basic step by step instructions and explanations to some tricky bits.

Happy blogging!

PS – Don’t forget to add your text links in descriptive words! Internet Marketing

Pick me Google – How Google chose me!

My interest in how search engines choose websites to display them began in 1989, the year after Google was born.  I was working for Ericsson as the general manager of Sony videoconferencing.

I knew the internet was destined to become more popular and easier to use.  I spend $25,000 of those companies’ money building a beautiful looking website called virtual-travel.  That is what websites cost back then, and it looked just great.

It had some information and our products were available…however after I finished putting the site together, I wasn’t sure how people were going to find it.  After we publicized the launch we had a surge in traffic, but then it dropped off to nothing.  I knew what a search engine was, and Google was (we thought) just another smaller one we sometimes used.

People back then still were not regularly going to the internet to find stuff they need…..along side of being creatures of habit, we just found it hard to use.  In hindsight, websites back then were not so great and not so informative either.

It was just easier to grab the yellow pages or newspaper and call the business that was buying the biggest advertisement.

There wasn’t a search engine popular or successful enough to govern how websites should be; and reward them by showing them at the top of the search results.  So the problem was at both ends…the users found it hard to get what they wanted, because it was actually very hard!

I remember wondering how to get the search engine to recognize my new website and rank it.  I phoned the company we had spent all the money with, and they didn’t know….or wouldn’t tell me.  So somehow I found out who were the biggest ‘website technical houses’ in Brisbane and asked them.  Two more of these companies couldn’t, or wouldn’t tell me.

Until one smart chap said to me “yes I know, with Meta Tags”….I remember saying “ahhhhh…Meta Tags….. I love it!”  He was quite right back then….that and a keyword stuffed domain name and Meta information, was about all there was to search algorithms.  My fascination began!

What has changed for the consumer with the success of the internet….it is that it is no longer the company with a big print advertising budget that gets all the phone calls.  The Google search algorithm delivers the company that has done the ‘hard road’…..the one that has been around the longest, provides the most organized information, and the one that other websites links to for information.  Search delivers the company who has been developing and organizing their content to provide relative original information…..the authority in that industry or topic.

So what do internet marketers do?  We replicate the natural process a website would normally take years, and do it in just a few months….or in a year or so.  So to really understand how internet-search marketing works, you have to understand how it is naturally intended to work.

Of course Google is well aware of marketers and knows Search Engine Optimizers (known as SEO’s) are not going to go away….so they have to accommodate us and we have to oblige them.  It is important when doing SEO to remember to make the process look natural.  This is called ‘White Hat SEO….obliging Google.  Then there is ‘Black Hat’ SEO; those that try to trick Google, and quite simply they will always eventually fail.

Google only employs geniuses to contribute to the algorithm, and they have plenty of them, all over the world.  They are all continually revising and contributing to this algorithm; the world greatest and longest equation.  It is updated about 10 times a week. So it is pointless to try to outsmart them.

So it comes down to the question – What can an internet marketer do to make my website look mature, informative, organized, and an authority in my industry in order to rank on Google front page?….follow me to search engine marketing to find out more!

Try this link if you would like to read some internet marketing success stories.