How To Avoid The Google.com Duplicate Content Filter?

by Christoph Puetz

More and more webmasters are building websites with publicly available content (data feeds, news feeds, articles). This results in websites with duplicate content on the Internet. In cases of websites build on news feeds or data feeds you can even find websites that match each other 100% (except for the design). Several copies of the same content in a search engine does not really do any good and so Google apparently decided to weed out some of this duplicate content to be able to deliver cleaner and better search results.

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The Age of Egocasting
By Shelly Palmer

About 20 years ago, I attended a benefit for the Bat-Dor Dance Company. The founder, Baroness Batsheva de Rothschild, was in a particularly jovial mood that evening. She was dressed impeccably and, as one could imagine, was wearing some exquisite jewelry. Of note, was her necklace, which was made up of pearls that started at about 7mm and graduated up to a 25mm monster in the middle. It was so extreme, it almost looked fake. I simply could not resist the malapert query, "... those aren't real, are they?" The Baroness gave me a wry smile and replied, "I'll never tell."
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Do Marketers Really Need RSS?

by Rok Hrastnik

The recent Forrester Research study, which claims that only 2% of online households in North America use RSS, took the internet marketing world by storm. Does this data really mean that marketers can still afford to ignore this channel?

Soon after the Forrrester study became public, I received a press enquiery asking whether marketers should be interested in RSS now that so few online adults use it.

Is this the correct question to ask? Let’s take a look at the bigger picture …

1. THE FORRESTER STUDY VALIDITY
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Brand Democratization
By Cory Treffiletti

As the landscape changes and business moves to being based on consumer-generated content, one thing becomes more and more apparent: The consumer is in charge of your brand. I read an article recently from BusinessWeek and I heard them coin the term brand democratization. This is a very powerful term and one I think will stick.

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Using Independent Conversations as Brand Assets
By Tom Hespos

In the realm of highly-considered purchases, the expectation of a click-to-buy online advertising model can be quite unrealistic. While big-ticket items can sometimes be sold successfully online, such purchases usually require a combination of both compelling persuasion and consumer confidence to succeed. Things like travel packages, jewelry, and consumer electronics are usually not bought online without careful consideration.

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RSS Advertising on Blogs
by Scott Rafer

AT CHICAGO'S AD:TECH CONFERENCE, IT was reported that marketers indicated a deep ambivalence towards blogs, saying that their companies urgently want a blog presence but, at the same time, fear the consequences of letting consumers freely express their opinions.

This is not an unreasonable reaction. What right-thinking company wants their message running on a Web site where they can't know with certainty that the content won't be offensive or may even attack the advertiser's own brand?

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Short Term vs Long Term Marketing

by S. Housley

In order to create consistent sales cycles and a positive growth trend businesses usually engage in both short and long term marketing efforts.

Short-term marketing efforts tend to cause sudden sales spikes which rarely last. These sharp sales increases are usually the result of a targeted marketing campaign or time limited offer. While short-term marketing produces sales, long-term marketing efforts must be mixed in to sustain sales.

Short Term Online Marketing

Mentions
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Writing Articles - Two Aspects Of The Surge

by Elaine Currie

Writing articles for publication on the Internet is, at the time I write this, every Internet marketer's favourite way to get free publicity for his website. If you are an Internet marketer and haven't heard the buzz that's going around about writing articles, where have you been? No, forget I asked, there can't be a single Internet marketer hasn't heard that writing articles is an essential part of website promotion.

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Google Website And Web Page Indexing For Dummies

by Michael Turner

You may have heard how important it is to have your website optimized for search engines, especially Google, which is currently the most popular worldwide. The reason for this is so your website will be ranked high in the search engines and people will see your site first, click on it, and increase your traffic and ultimately your sales. You might think this all sounds like a wonderful idea and want to get your web site optimized for Google, but you may have no idea how to go about it.

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RSS Advertising
by Scott Rafer

IN THIS NEW AGE OF advertising accountability, ad agencies are in a difficult spot. They have reams of data showing how various traditional and offline media perform for advertisers. And so, with some degree of accuracy media buyers can predict how a campaign will perform (though they acknowledge that the quality of the creative can have a profound and unknowable impact on the performance).
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Why Niche Marketing Yields Good Profits

by Evelyn Lim

Have you ever been told to find your niche? In business, finding your niche can prove both profitable and personally rewarding.

Niche marketing is the key to many successful organizations. From the small company that focuses on their niche, putting all their efforts towards it, to large companies with countless product lines, niche marketing is extremely important. For example, if you are a company that produces fishing products, you may have several different product lines and market segments or niches that you sell to. You have fresh water fishing, deep sea fishing, fly fishing, etc. You don't want to market your Fly Fishing gear in a publication whose niche is deep sea fishing or vise versa. Therefore, it is important to focus your marketing dollars in each individual niche. There are certainly larger publications that cater to a much general audience rather than a niche one. However, are you going to capture your niche market as well as if you practiced niche marketing?
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Defining the Relations Between Blogs, E-zines, RSS and E-mail

by Rok Hrastnik

Although RSS and blogs are slowly reaching mainstream, they are still missuderstood by most marketers in relation to eachother and in relation to their relatives, e-zines and e-mail. How do these four really relate and what does this mean for your internet marketing strategy?

The most common missconception is comparing blogs and e-mail, with many bloggers actually touting blogs as a replacement for e-mail. The truth is, there’s no comparison at all, just like comparing apples and oranges.
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Something new from Forbes.com. The ingenious folks at the online magazine, not the print magazine (they want you to know that), came up with a listing of the best blogs as part of the Forbes.com Best of The Web.

Forbes.com-ers came up with their picks for the best blogs in 20 different categories including art, autos, blog tools, careers, marketing, media, music, technology, and video games. Of course they had to winnow their picks down from a mountain of well-known and lesser-known titles. We think this special online report will be a great resource for readers and marketers looking to focus on quality content in the blogosphere.

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Does Your Marketing Have "Skanky Scrunchie Syndrome"?
by Alexandria K. Brown, "The E-zine Queen"

Last year I spoke at a large marketing conference in Atlanta, Georgia. One woman approached my display table to ask a few questions. Honestly she was so attractive it was intimidating. Tall with a pretty face, understated jewelry, a blue designer suit with beautiful shoes and a high-end bag. She looked like she'd just stepped out of a catalog. I thought to myself, "How polished! This woman really puts out a winning image. She must do very well with her business."

Then, as she turned to walk away, I spotted it...

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How to Get a Website Indexed Fast

by Russell Savige

Get Indexed Fast. What does getting indexed mean?

The search engines keep a cache of every web page in their index.

In English, this means: The search engines make a copy of every web page they visit and put in their records… ummm, I think that’s what I mean.

When you use a search engine the results list relevant pages to your search, usually ten results per page.
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Why You Should Be Podcasting, Two Reasons: Choice and Convenience

by Jeff Mills

Interested in a new, cutting-edge tool that can reach millions of potential customers? Then you are looking for podcasting!

A podcast is an audio file stored on the Internet that customers candownload to their computers or MP3 players and listen to whenever theywant. Now, you may be thinking, 'So what - MP3 files have been available for download from the internet for years!¨

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RSS: What Is It And Why You Should Care Part I
by Scott Rafer

IN THE RELATIVELY SHORT LIFE span of online advertising, a lot of new technologies ladened with over-promises have been left on the doorstep of advertising and media agencies in hopes of a quick and loving adoption.

Think what we have asked! We have asked agencies built on the notion that "you can't get fired for buying network TV" to embrace a totally new medium at a time when audiences are disbursing to a multitude of other new media unimagined even 10 years ago: digital video recorders, pay-per-view, podcasting, handhelds, mobile phones, 300 channels of cable, and yes, the Internet.

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RSS - The Intelligent Marketing Medium

by Brendon Turner

Are you new to RSS? If so here is a introduction to what RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is and how your website will benefit from offering an RSS feed to your visitor's.

RSS is a smooth channel of communication between publishers and visitor's. Since RSS has grown in recent popularity, more website owners are beginning to experiment with and use RSS feeds to deliver content in new and exciting ways. Usually RSS feeds contain news headlines and small content summaries. The summaries have just enough information to allow the visitor to decide whether he or she would be interested in reading the entire contents without overwhelming the visitor with excessive details. If the visitor is interested they can click on the headline in the RSS feed and access the website which has additional details.

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To Blog or Not to Blog?
By Seana Mulcahy

No matter where you look, people are talking about blogging. What are they? Who writes them? Are they credible? Did you hear about the employees that were canned for writing about their fellow employees and the company?

Like much of the Web, many companies don't have rules in place for blogging. In fact, blogging took them by surprise. As of recent, many big companies have put rules in place for employee blogging.

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Top 5 tips for Marketing Your Real Products in Our Virtual World

By Kim Bloomer & Dee Kreidel

It can be a challenge to market real/tangible products in the virtual world. And, it’s certainly much different than marketing services or virtual products. We have put together a quick tip list that every tangible product based business needs to consider when selling in a virtual market.

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How to Keep your Marketing Strategy and Sales on Course

by Charlie Cook

When a company announces that they’ve lost a billion dollars in the first three months of the year, as General Motors did two months ago, it is a good indication that they are way, way off course. While Ford and Daimler/Chrysler weren't in the hole for a billion dollars, their profits were down by 50% or more for the quarter. Their cars just aren't selling.

Why are these companies having such a hard time selling their products and what does it have to do with your marketing?

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SEO Content Distribution Linking For Newbies

by Joel Walsh

The new buzz on the internet is all about getting one-way links by distributing content to other sites in exchange for backlinks. As with every other SEO or website promotion technique ever devised, there are plenty of newbie myths about it that can ruin your chance for success before you even start.

Newbie Myth 1: The 'Duplicate content penalty.'

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RSS, XML And Feed Readers? Huh? Help!

by Reba Collins

Have you seen them yet? The little orange graphics that say XML or RSS? Have you ever wondered what the heck they are? Yeah, me to. And, being as curious as a cat, I had to find out!

It wasn't hard to get most of the info I needed. All I did was search for RSS at Google and a ton of resources came up. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. Hmmm...really simple? Yeah, it really is pretty simple and it makes keeping up with news, sports, entertainment and business, well...really simple.

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Increase New Customer Traffic To Your Business

by Joy Gendusa

One person tells another, who tells another, who tells another and so on. You get the idea. Let’s see how to make that an actuality.

You have a great company and you provide the highest level of customer service. But as the old cliché says: 'A happy customer tells a friend, an unhappy customer tells 10 friends.' You don’t have to worry about the unhappy customer telling 10 friends because you always do a great job and keep your customers happy. But how do you increase the number of friends that your happy customers are sending your way?

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SEO Web Content: Good Writing, Good Business

by Joel Walsh

There's a deadly myth about search engine optimization and writing for the web: that good SEO and good writing don't go together.

As a website copywriter, I hear this myth repeated back to me all the time by new clients and prospects. 'Don't bother search-engine-optimizing the content,' they say. 'Just make sure it is well written and the keywords will flow naturally into the content.' Or, they repeat the words of so many self-styled gurus: 'don’t write for the search engines, write for the people who will be reading what you write.'

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Upscale Men Dominate Adult iPod Ownership

A national phone survey of adults over the age of 18 by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, found that more than 22 million American adults own iPods or MP3 players. 29% of them have downloaded podcasts from the Web so that they could listen to audio files at a time of their choosing.

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RSS as a Change Agent

by Rok Hrastnik

To better understand how RSS is changing the way companies and individuals deliver and consume content on the macro scale, let us first remember how content is traditionally delivered and consumed.

People subscribe to e-mail newsletters or e-mail update services to get content delivered directly to their inboxes. It's (or better yet, was) convenient, easy and simple.

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Competition is Good, Copying is Bad

by Sharon Housley

I've always been of the opinion that competition is a good thing. It encourages all of us to be better and make better products. While it might be true that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, copying someone else's work is simply wrong.

We recently came across a competitor using our sales copy. The competitor was using a web graph showing the traffic on one of our sites, along with our sales copy to promote their competing application. Digging a little further, I realized that their competing application was, in both form and function, identical to our application. The competing program contained identical screenshots, custom program icons and our help documentation. While the code of the program was, in fact, different, it was clear that our copyright had been violated.

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