Predictably Irrational which is about human psychology and how we interact with things like price points on goods, packaging and general behavioural stuff that marketeers need to understand. ? ? http://www.predictablyirrational.com/)? ? ? 

Incidentally, ? thought I’d share this book outline site…i.e. you can get the summarised version on a single page of the book Ive been raving about. ? Really useful ! http://bookoutlines.pbwiki.com/Predictably-Irrational

There is an excelent SEO Moz blog post about how these ideas can be tranlated into internet marketing.? 

Andy Beal

I read Andy Beal’s ? RSS and often he comes up with really useful tools and insights for reputation management. With the necessary toolkit you can see where people mention you.

From this you can work out the context from which they are talking. The reputation bit is where you can manage those conversaitons by responding to them and hopfully enhancing your brand online, or saving it…dependent on what’s being said of course.

So for SEO these tools are great for seeing where youre getting links naturally. Knowing the context of those links, it can help you understand how to get more links through sources like this who are naturally disposed to giving you a citation

26 tools for monitoring buzz

reputation management beginners ‘how to’

Roughly 300 online marketing sites categorised for your reading pleasure

Lifehacker as ever has a great post on backing up your google docs, email, notes calendar. As more and more of my digital life is in the custody o the big G, I have felt the need to get backed up, just in case.

I have always redirected my mail, so i have a local copy on my PC and also on my backup drive. Its a simple idea. Just set up a forwarder on your domain i.e. nick at nickgarner.co.uk and forward a copy to Googlemail. easy.

http://lifehacker.com/software/hack-attack/back-up-your-google-apps-data-281635.php

and for google notebook, there is an export option in tools thats sends data to google docs and from there you can locally back it up, alternatively, you can take out a step, by saving the notebook as a html page, and then save the page locally.

(usual excuses) I’ve been busy hence my dead looking blog, but I?  have been bookmarking and here is about a months worth of links to things I really value.

Free word of mouth marketing PDF eBook Written by Dave Balter
(Recommended by Seth Godin) I’m a great fan of ‘word of mouth marketing’ – because I believe this is the real driver behind consumers making most of their important buying decisions. Of course ‘WOM’ isnt just asking your friend for advice, its also asking a search engine or looking at a website for information to help make a good decision. Its a good read.

Follwing on from above: The Ontology of Social Media
1st, whats ontology? It is a description of a Subject, Object and the Relationship that exists between the Subject and the Object…. Uh? There is an idea “markets are conversations”, where users confer to make discriminating decisions about something related to commercial intent (buying something). The Ontology of social media, is a way of making some sense of this set of ‘conversations’. Heavy article, but well worth a thorough read.

Facebook to be No1 UK site
My line about facebook is “I think it’s cool, I just don’t know how to make money directly fom it”. But you know, its not he direct monetization, its your engagement with this community and others like it, so when they are ready and trust you, they know where to go.

Google quality score algo (landing pages) added to
Page download time is now a factor on the Google adwords quality score…incidentally I was at SMX advanced recently and the subject of quality score came up. During the ‘give it up’ session, some very interesting stuff came to light about how erroneous the scoring mechanism is. Whilst I’m under a promise not to give the whole story away, I can say that there is some amazing mis-represetaiton going on here by the big G. I’ll add to this in a later post. G’s comments on the landing page score - the big clue ? You can’t really define quality algorithmically…

Google trends for websites
Old news now, but still very important. Why? Well its a means of finding ‘super relevant’ links. Site trends shows you relative traffic volumes over time, where users have been in your site neighbourhood (which is cool) andit shows you sites also visited by that user base. Click on a relevant visited site and it shows you more relevant visited sites and so on. If G. is looking for a relevance indicator, this is going to be a great one! – so happy link hunting!

Google trust rank wierdness (webmaster world)
If you have heard of the idea of profiling, then this is what G is doing with your site. If it sees something out of the ordinary i.e. a super high page rank link or whatever, then it can react and penalise you as your site is behaving outsite of its ‘normal range’ of behaviour. I guess the moral here is not to go out and buy a 7 or 8 page rank link, if you have a crappy site that would never normally receive such links!

Bloging from your iPhone (movable type)
Yes, I do live my iPhone, despite the lack of copy, paste & file saving and the need to crack it to get it to behave a bit more normally. Anyway, I do a lot of wok with movabletype and it seems they have come out with a new app (iPhone 3g) that allow you to picture blog and blog straight from our little friend. Cool. ….WordPress app anyone ?

100 SEO videos
There is bound to be some good stuff. ive linked to this because it is an epic piece of research….

Google adwords and freeing up competition on trademarks
The intersting part about this is not so much the allowing of competitors to advertise on competing brand phrases, its the slow march of Google on the monetization trail. here is another thing about their interest in the travel sector. Please comfort yourself in knowing it THEIR SITE AND THEY CAN DO AS THEY LIKE. If you you are making a profit from Google natural search, then at some point they want some of it….If its PPC, then bad luck as well!

200,000 – yes 200,000 servers to run the google data infrastructure.
if you like your teccie stuff then this will interest you. A long Cnet article about Google’s data infrastructure. I am always amazed by their cleverness.

Google Factory Tour
2 hour video of Google and its various operations. It won’t give you SEO insight per-se, but it gives you a sense of the scale of events there.

Need free images? Article about it
There is a new well organsied search engine, listing free images with no copyright hassles…hooray!

Multiple Gmail account access
This is a hassle for me, since I have loads of accounts i need to drop into to get info. But there are some nice workarounds, however none are 100% solid.

Advanced Yahoo search query strings
A really helpful guide to doing some cleaver link hunting query strings on Yahoo

Deep stuff on how spammers are tracked
Edel Garcia of IR thoughts has put together a useful summary of papers related to spam clean up on search indexes. Hardcore as ever and worth reading through.

Landing Pages: all you ever wanted to know about building them!
Copyblogger has amassed a really usful list of sites and articles to help you refine your landing pages. Bear in mind if it costs $100 dollars per conversion and you for instance go from a conversion rate of 1% to 1.2%, then thats $16 dollars saved per conversion and an extra 20% in the acquisition numbers.

“Both videos together offer one of the most simple marketing lessons that you can imagine … that sometimes it doesn’t matter what you’re selling, just that you speak the right language.”

The SEO Playbook – Welcome to the Rabbit Hole Alice
Stunt dubl does a mega post on all things seo and content focused. He is very good on linkbait / Social media content and this post digs right into the subject.

Google was a links-driven search engine
10-12,000 human reviewers working for google must make a difference. This post digs into the obvious arguements about why googlers are shaping the internet.

My Definition Of SEO and How The Death Will Play Out
Following on from the idea that things are changing for the SEO world, Shoemoney puts together a cohesive argument as to why SEO in its traditional sense is dying. In essence you can’t really game Google like you used to, so to get seen you have to align yourself towards online PR to succeed.

Yes Shoemoney SEO Does Have a Future
In response Greywolf has argued that the market for SEO’ers is buoyant (whicih is very true) and that for as long as site designers and corporates ignore the core mechanics of a well constructed promotional site, which aligns itself with being indexed efficiently by search engines, there will always be a demand for SEO.
Of course they are both right – from thier respective standpoints. Shoemoney has just not factored in the incapability of so many in the web building industry and his standpoint is that of gaming, not fixing.

OECD stats on broadband penetration
Useful stuff for some marketing work im doing. I’m doing a big international pust and extent of broadband access s a good ndicator as to market opportunity in these respective countries.

The future trends in blogging – problogger gives us his take
The main trends:
* Multiple Author Blogs
* Multi-Topic Blogs
* Blogs Converging with Other Types of Sites
* Portal-Like Design
* Indirect Monetization

In other words there is a convergence between traditional online newspapers being more personality driven and more aligned to the ‘i have an opinion’ culture of the internet.

Semantic SEO: Your Website is a Goldmine with On-Site SEO 2.0
Semantic web is something you will hear more and more about in the forthcoming years. In essence its the comprehension of text as opposed to simply the identification of text patterns.
Right now Google use something called ‘keyword ontology’ (read the gorank article for more understanding) but its problem is that fundamentally its just a way to look at patterns of words and their relative placement i.e. keywords ‘seo’ usually go with ‘google’, therefore when google look at the relevance of a page for a search like ‘seo’ they will give a greater weighting to a page about ‘seo’ and ‘google’ than for ‘seo’ and ‘bird watching’

A semantic search engine however, looks at the meaning of phrases. I would love to give you a fuller explanation, but i don’t really understand the full mechanisms behind this…but i will in time. Suffice to say, its where the internet is going and in the end you will be able to explore the internet with an ‘understanding’ guide who knows what YOU mean when you say ‘stuff on blogs and seo’ i.e. articles on ‘how to rank on google using blogs’. exciting stuff.

The SEO Guide to Information Architecture
Superb article on how to structure a site for SEO. I will be using this to explain how it should really be done !

See a webpage like a SEO
Dave Naylor give us a nice post to follow on from the seo guide above. There is also a link to the tool use mentions in the article.

What is a #1 Google Ranking Worth?
If I were to go on a blog starvation diet – the only blog I would keep is Aaron Wall’ SEO Book. And thi article demonstrates why. It is a comprehensive analysis of all the factors you would need to build a comprehensive business case as to what ranking for a given phrase is worth to your business.

5 Tools for Keyword Brainstorming

But how to brainstorm for new unique keywords in your and neighboring niches? Recently there appeared a number of useful tools that can help you find more key terms to focus on:

The 25 Most Popular Pages on Facebook
One of my projects is to understand what makes a facebook application or a facebook’er popular. know understanding these mechanisms will allow me to build better content sites and of course get into the facebook ring with intent. So I guess by understanding the common traits between these 25 on th list is a good start. Th bit I’ve picked up on is how each of these groups orbit around a strong sense of self image/tribal identity i.e. i’m a petrol head – ‘top gear’ or ‘im a lad’ – Chris moyles.

What?€™s the ROI on SEO? (Hint: SEO Experts Are Underpaid, Opportunity Abounds !)
Yes I know im underpaid compared to other sectors, but its because what I do is extremely speculative. When a mature business puts together a financial plan, it generally up weights channels where more money will equal more return. ROI is not that critically important since there is loads of budget, so more money = more overall numbers. The problem with SEO of course is that its not linear. i.e. you cant say this spend = that return, simply because there are too many factors you cannot put down onto a spreadsheet. Oh well – more life in penury.

34 Incredibly Strong Calls To Action To Make Your Visitors Click, Phone Or Buy
I love this kind of thing, especially because good calls to action do work. How about :
# See examples of our widget work with widget lovers.
# Buy this widget and start saving tomorrow.
# Contact us today for a free report on widget management.

111 of the Most Important Spinns on Sphinn

The importance of Sphinn can?€™t be stressed enough. Knowing how to successfully use Sphinn, whats going on in the Sphinn community and whats the hottest Sphinn news is can be the difference between success and failure in the internet marketing community today. To ensure that my colleagues are in the know I compiled the most important articles as judged by Sphinn about Sphinn.

Social proof: The key to success
I agree. Its another version of ‘my friend says…’ and when you can use this effectively, you will convert into $$$.

How to Get in Google News (And Receive 8,000 visitors for One Article)
Yes, don’t forget to put your site onto the news aggregators…

Why Consumer Data Isn?€™t Telling You What You Need
The catch with consumer intent i that you can’t turn it into simple analytical footprints. All you can do is look at users in aggregate and somehow make some sense of it. So often it is non-sense and conversion rates remain unoptimised. This is where the psychology of user intent becomes so important. And that is a whole treatise in iteself.

The 3 Philosophies of Word of Mouth Marketing
I love viral / word of mouth of marketing,but understanding the complexities of this area is like trying to understand the specifics of a whole eco system. I have found that its more about applying certain ingredients in good measure and letting the reaction take place. I think its why so few businesses really understand and use this powerful mechanism.

Mozilla Stealth Data Project Could Be Just What The Internet Needs

Why word of mouth doesn’t happen

The Writing Process: Creating An Outline
“Outlining an article is one of the most productive things you can do to improve your workflow while blogging. Creating the outline for this article required only about two minutes to complete, and it will have saved me at least 15 minutes worth of editing time in the end on a typical article like this.”

SEO Plugins for WordPress Part II
“Ever since my initial SEO plugins for wordpress post almost two years ago, I get asked for an updated list a few times a month. Well since we?€™re up to wordpress 2.5 I thought the time has come. I?€™ll also put some of my other favorite plugins at the end, they either enhance wordpress features or just make things easier.”

Official Google: Introduction to Google Search Quality
There seems to be a little bit of glasnost going on here in Google. Udi Manber, VP Engineering, Search Quality has written a post giving a small look into how Google works when it comes to its search work. Apart from the sheer scale of things, it is the frequency in which they are amending the algo that is so remarkable. Like the link above, its well worth a read.

Bridging the Designer-User Gap (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)
“If you thought it’s easy to get to Google, think again. In our current round of usability research, only 76% of users who expressed a desire to run a Google search were successful. In other words, 1/4 of users who wanted to use Google couldn’t do so. (Instead, they either completely failed to get to any search engine or ended up running their query on a different search engine ?€” usually whatever type-in field happened to be at hand.) “
The point? Never over estimate intelligence!

Study Says Get In Top 5 Not Top 10 & Search Engines May Need To Highlight Official Sites:
Get into the top 5 or you’re in the wilderness

Public Relations: The Other Important PR In Link Development
Yes for those of you who in the link building business, who have been hiding under a rock… its about PR these days (mixed in with good SEO) and link begging doesn’t work anymore. So this article goes into some basic ideas on PR’ing your link building

The ultimate open source SEO tool
Its good – perhaps not ultimate. I’ve asked my SEO crew to check it out and they didn’t go crazy. However for me the interesting bit is how they leverage the Yahoo API. I wantto initiate a project where we use the API to do help usget related pages ‘from a search engine perspective’

Microsoft Discovers You Are Six Degrees From Kevin Bacon
If you have read ’6 degrees of separation’ then you will be into the whole social interconnectivity thing on the internet. In essence, the world is a small place and sites like linked in, facebook, bebo and so on demonstrate this well. Its use? probably in hiring well connected online PR guys to dig into their networks to get links !

15 Free Social Media White Papers and Ebooks
Some good stuff here. I just go around in circles on this stuff. I don’t know how to make money out of it.The core issue is the lack of commercial intent with the vast majority of this traffic. I guess the relevant part for me is keeing in touch with the cultural shift this has initiated. Its all a little like cluretrain V2 playing out

12 Reputations Every Company Should Monitor Online
Reputation management is a growing tide on the internet. If you’re in a sector where online matters, then keeping your ear to the internet wire make sense. The problen with reputation management online is that there are very few filters between an idiot with a grudge and a well informed opinion. its easy for the idiot to make noise in the right place and BANG – you have a problem. And I haven’t touched on negative PR using SEO!

Study: 80-Percent Of Searches Are Informational, 10% Are Navigational
What does this mean commercially? well 80% of the time users are building a background picture of you. 10% of the time they want to transact once they are confidant about you. (the other 10% is where they know where they are going i.e. looking for a regularly visited site/brand search)

This is why a strategy I employ for my lovely employers works soooooo well. have a really good informational site, where there is no pressure to ‘CLICK HERE NOW, JOIN NOW, FREE MONEY NOW’ – you read, understand we care about what we do and when you’re ready, join and we will give you some free money. It works beautifully and this article endorses this principle.

Psychographically Targeted Web Advertising – ClickZ
Whats ‘psychographic’? (from wikipedia) psycho graphic variables are any attributes relating to personality, values, attitudes, interests, or lifestyles. They are also called IAO variables (for Interests, Attitudes, and Opinions). They can be contrasted with demographic variables (such as age and gender), and behavioral variables (such as usage rate or loyalty).
I’m sure youve heard about demographic targeting? i.e. pick a social group and assume certain behavioral tendencies. its a nice idea for broadcast media, however for online its really difficult to do demographic targeting. hence this behavioral stuff. By building pathways around user behaviours, you are morelikly to get better conversion rates. Its a huge subject which I won’t get into here, but suffice to say this article gives a small insight into it.

Yahoo’s Quality Score Change Effective Next Week
So Yahoo are stepping in line with Google on PPC quality scoring on ads. Nice idea but I always wonder how you define the ‘quality’ in the scoring. I hate this subjectivity.

Your turn: Readers choose their 10 favorite Windows programs | Ed Bott’s Microsoft Report | ZDNet.com
Some old classics like winrar!

11 Tips For Recognizing A Bad SEO Firm | WebProNews
I get asked a lot about microsites…i.e. building them up and getting them to rank. For some reason the idea that they can work persists. So this article just goes through some of the idiocy people actually believe.

Six Explosive Organic & Paid Link Building Tips
I agree – they are good. Written by a pro in the game, these tips are useful. I particularly like the nofollow comment!

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/results-of-google-experimentation-only-the-first-anchor-text-counts
Another day and another interesting post from Rand. some good pointers on what really counts when it comes to anchor text

http://sphinn.com/story/36595
Yup DaveN keeping the internet clean! He picked up on a campaign by Dell I happen to have been following. I kind of figured it there would be tears in the end – an there were !

http://www.247wallst.com/2008/03/the-twenty-five.html

Does blogging pay? it seems so for a few. I hang out with a couple of big’ish bloggers and they are always moaning about how they can monetize their sites. Usually they default to advertising, which is ok, but inherently does not align well with users about 99.4% of the time. (the click through rate on an ad is about 0.06% typically) I’ve been trying to persuade them to look carefully at affiliate marketing, since in thory it pays better ten ads.

Logo Can Make You ‘Think Different’
evil laugh – HA HA HA HA HA
I’ve always felt that subliminal advertising was very powerful and shrouded in misinformation, so its great to see a useful report on the subject. Does it work? yes but not in the way you think.

YouTube Insight: View Your YouTube Video Statistics
More stats to help you feel like you know whats going on.

Link Buying Replaced With Bartering
As this article points out, when you otlaw something and there is a desire to carry on the practice (alcoloh prohibition in the 30′s) all sorts of unforseen things happen. In this case Google’s PR assault on link buying as caused all sorts of interesting activities to emerge, amongst them is impersonating google ad sense ads !
The root of this is that if the liks are placed in the right part of a page (not in header / footer / sidebar) and in ‘context’ then the ‘Algo’ cant see them – so tis down to human judgement, hence this trick with adsense. Personally, I think there are better ways of doing linkbuilding.

18 Or Older To Use Google?
What do gambling porn and horror movies have in common with google? you guessed it – you have to be 18 and over. or in other words to use google, you have to be of an age where you can enter into a legally binding contract!

Hackers and Spammers, How will the industry survive
I have had the pleasure of dealing personally with DaveN and I found him charming and knowledgeable. However i do feel his skills at gaming the engines are becoming less and less effective as the engines get more capable at dealing with spammers. Still he has done well out of it and I hope he continues with his successes in this arena.

DigitalPoint Co-op, spammers heaven. Use these links to build the base for your spam network, but don’t get busted by the BOG G Blogstorm

Google releases benchmarking on analytics. Apart from the coolness of being able to match yourself against the industry norm, it also gives you an idea as to how Google are able to effectively segment the internet into specific verticals. (they also do this on their adwords console when you define which type of sites you want to advertise on when advertising banners etc)

When you mix this with the leaked google reviewers document you end up with a sense that they really do have a very solid handle on what sites are good for what subject and wether they are genuinely worthwhile to the user. It all comes back to the idea that content is king and if you make like easier for search engines through sensible optimisation, you will be rewarded.

Make those landing pages faster! If you are running a Google PPC campaign, then remember to keep an eye on your landing pages, since you will be penalised for slooooowww loading, iframe, interstitial riddled pages. Yes the BIG G is more interested than ever in making sure you work to their guidelines, as opposed to letting your profit/loss determine how you should deal with teh traffic you have paid for. Affiliates4U

As a result, I’ve been sending friends various links, so I figured you might like to see some of them too. I expect I’ll doing a fair bit of this link finding on an ongoing basis.

Online reputaiton management : 10 ways to protect yourself online
http://mashable.com/2008/03/11/online-reputation/

Black hat spamming how to
I have copied this to my blog since i don;t know how ling its gogin to remain up for. if you ever wondered how genuine black hat spammers do their thing…. then this is the ‘tell all’ guide to a small piece of the dark arts of spamming. My version

The growing power of google – the moral: absolute power corrupts!

Google will own your banner ad distribution soon

Don’t mess with the BIG G
Interesting article about a company buying old domains and loading the up with spam content and then running adsense (yahoo version) – then getting busted by google because someone from Cambridge Uni worked out that it was a network of 329 spam sites.
Lesson here …. if you build networks of sites, be very careful to really, really hide your tracks

GoCompare gets busted for spamming! Google search for their brand / an interesting article on the case showing the dive in overall traffic to the gocompare site , again its a case of if you excessively pollute the internet – expect BIG G to whack you!

Great beginners chart for learning how to linkbuild (PDF)