Blogger is a free blog publishing tool from Google. It has been around since the dawn of time (ten years) and is still rocking it!
The Blogger team has tried to give it some advantages/updates, though the amount of control blogs offer users. The recent introduction of the Blogger Template Designer is a good example of this. This really empowers the users to express themselves not only through their words, but through how they present themselves in their blog, as well. Something the old Blogger design choices lacked!
To that end, the new template designer allows users to separate attributes so that they can choose designs, layouts, background images, and colors independently of each other. Yet at the same time, there are user-friendly shortcuts, like the option to shift all colors at once.
As for the future of Blogger, more advances are on the way according to Siobhan Quinn, the product manager for Blogger @ Google. These include upgrades related to presentation and monetization opportunities will also play a key role.
What It Does
A set of reports describing the Google.com search ad click and impression behavior leading up to a conversion. These reports can provide you with data on how your “upper-funnel” keywords assist conversions beyond just the last click.
Why You’d Use It
The data you see in Search Funnels can help you understand how users search for your products before converting so that you can optimize these conversion paths. Increase the efficiency of your AdWords accounts by discovering and prioritizing assisting keywords, ad groups, and campaigns, in addition to those that convert.
Remarketing
What It Does
Remarketing allows you to show ads to users who’ve previously visited your website as they browse the Web.
When you use remarketing, you’ll tag pages of your site that correspond to certain categories you want to promote. For example, you could add a “TV” tag on all of the pages where you sell televisions. You can then create an AdWords campaign to show highly relevant messages (such as ads displaying a special offer on TVs) to people who’ve visted these pages as they browse sites across the Google Content Network.
Why You’d Use It
Remarketing allows you to communicate with people who’ve previously visited key pages on your website, giving you a powerful new way to match the right people with the right message.
When you combine your keyword campaigns with remarketing, you might see higher conversions for your campaigns overall. For example, if you have keywords that you don’t use because you haven’t seen conversions in the past, you can use these keywords to drive traffic to your site, then use remarketing on the Google Content Network to capture incremental conversions from a more qualified set of potential customers.
What Is Domaining?
Domaining is on of the oldest practices in the Internet spaceand is not obsolete. Domaining is when marketers buy domain names that can draw traffic to their main site. In addition, it involves consumer use of those domains. When a consumer types a common domain into a browser box, marketers have the ability to drive consumer engagement with their brand by building up content on the other domains.
The practice is somewhat forgotten due to all the hype around social and search marketing, but it is still can be very effective.
Customer satisfaction is quite important. Unfortunately, it’s also hard to quantify, but to help with that, Greg Links, a regional manager at ForeSee Results, provided some insight.
Email marketing is one of the oldest forms of marketing and is still very effective. Social media marketing is a relatively new form of marketing and can also be very effective.
What happens when you combine old school Email Marketing and the new kid on the block, Social Media?
You just created a new super hero!
When people integrate social into their email marketing programs, they have the opportunity to not only expand the reach of their existing offers, but also to encourage existing customers to evangelize on their behalf. As a result, companies could grow their database through acquisition, which is not usually common in email marketing.
Here are three primary ways that people use to implement social into their email marketing efforts. They are:
Sharing with your network
Leveraging as a medium to incentivize current customer base
Business model: acquiring customers through referrals
Approximately 86 percent of email subscribers share their email via email when they are asked to evangelize on the behalf of a company. Other social sharing methods include Facebook, Twitter, and blogging.
Of that 86 percent that share via email, 19 percent of the receivers convert. That said, it seems safe to say that social media and email marketing work pretty well together.
SEMPO’s State of Search Engine Marketing Report is a very important document in the search industry, providing a good look at its growth (or lack thereof). Fortunately, as SEMPO’s outgoing president explained in an interview with Abby Johnson, the news is pretty much all positive this year.
Interesting Fact
97 percent of the worldwide respondents are advertising on Google
It looks like the search marketing industry – along with Google’s bank account balance – is in great shape, then, regardless of the recent recession. Indeed, a record number of people (about 1,500 individuals in 16 countries) responded to SEMPO’s survey, making the results hard to dismiss.
People who are Facebook fans and Twitter followers of a brand are more likely to buy the brand’s product or recommend it to a friend, according to a new study by Chadwick Martin Bailey and iModerate Research Technologies.
The study of 1,500 consumers found that 60 percent of Facebook fans and 79 percent of Twitter followers are more likely to recommend those brands since becoming a fan or follower.
More than half (51%) of Facebook fans and 67 percent of Twitter followers are more likely to buy the brands they follow or are a fan of.
Many businesses have build Facebook groups, fan pages or profiles around their business, products and brand. But besides from driving traffic to your site how can you extract more value from your Facebook Contacts. The simple (and perfectly legal) answer is download their contact details, such as email address and phone numbers and add them to your email marketing or telemarketing database so you can contact them and make them offers.
Social Media Marketing is a very complex medium to promote your business, products and or brand. I always have friends and clients asking me questions like:
Will Facebook help me drive traffic to my website or should I use Twitter, YouTube or MySpace?
Do links from Digg have more value for boosting search engine results than from YouTube or Flickr?
What is the best social site for us to engage with people that already have knowledge of our brand?
Take a look at the guide below created by CMO for some guidance.
Getting to the top of Google is becoming more and more difficult everyday. One way to help you get to that first page is by using video, in this case YouTube and optimising your videos for search results.
Here Is How To Get Started
Upload your video to YouTube. – The advantage of this is that you are 100% certain to be indexed into Google’s search engine. This does not guarantee you’ll get a first-page result, but at least it ensures that Google knows your content exists. The drawback, of course, is that anyone who clicks on a YouTube result will be taken to YouTube, which may be fine if your goal is branding (i.e., you only care that people watch your video). If your goal is driving traffic, as is typically the case with SEO, this won’t be a successful strategy.
Your other alternative is Video SEO Video SEO is a set of techniques designed to make sure that:
Google finds your video content
Google successfully indexes your video content
Google will display your video content when specific keywords are entered as search terms
Here’s how to make it work:
You Need Video Content – Google is fairly flexible in what it considers to be video content. You can use actual video footage, but screen captures, slide shows, animated PowerPoint slides, and other content will work just as well. Google can’t actually “see” what’s inside the video content, so it relies on title and other meta-data to determine what content your video actually contains.
Submission, Not Discovery – With traditional web pages, Google utilizes crawlers to discover and index web content. Unfortunately, Google can’t read Flash very well (although it is trying), and as a result, most video content is invisible to Google’s search crawlers. Therefore, the best way to appear in Google’s blended search results is to submit your video to Google using a Video Sitemap. This is similar to an XML sitemap, but is formatted specifically for video, and only contains information about your video content. It is submitted using Google’s Webmaster Tools. The most common error in Video SEO is to assume that because you have submitted the web page on which a video resides, that the video content itself is being indexed. You’ll also need to make sure that you have a robots.txt file on all video pages, to ensure that Google can easily verify that the locations on the Web you’ve submitted do in fact exist, and that they contain embed codes which indicate the presence of a video.
Title and Title Tags – When ranking videos, Google primarily considers the match between search keywords and the video title. Although Google allows you to submit other meta-data such as description and keywords, these currently don’t have much influence on your search ranking. Google likes it when the title tag of the page matches the title of the video, and will give a higher weighting for results where this is the case.
Video SEO is Long Tail – Like traditional SEO, you’re much more likely to see results with Video SEO if you target more specific, or longer tail, search terms. A video titled “Dog” is unlikely to produce a first-page ranking, while a video titled “German Shepherd Police Dog” will be more likely to score well in Google’s algorithm. Since Google can’t determine the actual content of the video, you might consider submitting the same video multiple times with different titles that match potential search terms.
New and Small Don’t Matter – With traditional SEO, the age of a website is an important consideration for Google in deciding its ranking. Google also considers things like the number of pages on the site, and the number of links to the site, along with the importance of the places those links originate. In Video SEO, none of this matters. This means that even new sites and small sites can compete on equal footing with larger and more established players. Publishers who are too small or too new to even consider traditional SEO can still be taking advantage of Video SEO opportunities.
For the Foreseeable Future, Video SEO is a Winning Strategy – As time goes by, Google’s discovery and indexing of video content will no doubt become more sophisticated, and as competition for video results increases, it will become harder for sites to achieve these first-page rankings. However, the number of web pages still massively outnumbers indexed video assets, and for as long as that continues, publishers will have an opportunity to jump to the top of Google’s search results through Video SEO.
Many businesses have build 
Getting to the top of Google is becoming more and more difficult everyday. One way to help you get to that first page is by using video, in this case YouTube and optimising your videos for search results.