Don’t have the time to read all the marketing news, blog posts, announcements, and other content related to SEO/social media/online marketing published each week?
I’ve got you covered.
I sift through trillions (well, hundreds) of online publications to stay on top of marketing news that might affect your online business.
SEO
New Matt Cutts’ Video: How can small sites become popular?
Google Penalizes PostJoint Over Guest Blog Links
Help Test & Validate Web Marketing Hypotheses
[share]By the way, you should share this post right now before you forget - much appreciated![/share]
Social Media
‘Is Google+ Walking Dead’ Mass Hysteria
Facebook has launched a newswire service… on Twitter?
Pinterest Updates
New Twitter Profile is Now Available to Everyone
In case you are having hard time figuring out the new Twitter header, here’s a helpful PSD template:
On a Side Note…
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WordPress
Upgrade to WordPress 3.9
And a WordPress feature I found extremely helpful when writing a new blog post:
Distraction Free Writing on WordPress
Marketing Tools
I thought it might be a good idea to start sharing marketing/productivity tools that make my blogging life easier.
Most of them are free; some are not.
Here’s my (free) pick of the week:
Project Naptha - highlight, copy, and translate text from any image
You can see the few paid tools I currently use at Traffic Generation Café here:
Ana Loves: My Internet Marketing Rolodex
Contrary to a popular belief, you don’t need much to run a successful blog; a handful of top-notch tools will do.
Thank You
To all of you who mentioned Traffic Generation Café in any share or form in the past week, my whole-hearted THANK YOU.
Traffic Generation Café would NOT be what it is today without you.
Here are just some of the mentions I came across in the past week:
17 Advanced Methods for Promoting Your New Piece of Content - Aaron Agius at kissmetrics.com
25+ Phenomenal Resources to Help You Market Your Blog Better - Jonathan John at business2community.com
7 Ways To Use Lip-Smacking Visual Content To Build A Blog Audience - Vinay Koshy at bloggingwizard.com
Top 10 SEO Bloggers to Follow for SEO, Traffic, and Conversion Tips - Kumar Gauraw at gauraw.com
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To an even better next week,
Hi Ana, I’m between Australia and New Zealand quite a lot. The ‘anchor text’ test went against conventional expectations with exact match (to search) racing up 19 positions to #1 and that is a big surprise. Maybe they need that data. Interesting! Matt Cutts’ video summarized neatly for us: A small website can be: 1. agile, rolling out innovations fast, 2. offer a better user experience, 3. add value that’s more insightful, 4. can cover a small niche well, be authoritative and reputable. Thanks for such condensed value. You rock.
Safe travels, Geoff, and always happy to bring the best of news as concisely as I can.
“Don’t stop trying to produce superior content, because over time that’s the very thing that will lead you to better rankings.”
Yeah, right. There is a preponderance of evidence that the playing field is *NOT* level, and Google has rules for *you* that it does not need to follow itself. And that Matt Cutts lies. Who knows, maybe he even believes what he is saying in those videos, but they simply don’t match reality.
Right now Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Wolfram Alpha (in its own niche) all get better results for nearly any search query (other than price information or how to buy something). But because of the nature of the Internet, there can only be one top dog, and Google will use tactics that are basically dishonest to thwart the competition from other search engines.
Google is rapidly becoming useless as a search engine — but they are dominant, and will continue to be dominant, because they have the power, and they are willing to abuse that power (“Do no evil, unless we think we can get away with it”). If you want to get information on something you might want to buy, the only things you will ever see “above the fold” in a Google search are paid ads (which used to be fairly obviously denoted as paid, but that distinction is now fading*). If you are checking for negative information on a product, you will not find it.
At least not easily — unless you use a different search engine.
Many of my searches are for technical questions on programming languages. For programming language information, Google is very close to useless, so my default search engine is Bing.
(*) Yes, I still occasionally use Google, but I make an effort never to buy anything through a Google link. Whenever I see most of page one taken up by paid ads, I click on ALL of them. I would encourage everyone to do so. Once the page is open in a new tab, just close the tab. If, as a group, we can cost the advertisers who have the cozy relationships with Google enough money, maybe we can discourage them enough to hit Google in the *only* place that hurts.
That’s certainly one opinion, Howard.