I’ve been working at StomperNet for about six months now and during that time I’ve seen some cool marketing stuff, but nothing like is coming up with StomperMobile. We have been talking about it for a while and its going to change the way people marketing their businesses. Whether they are marketing online or offline, this will be the standard for how to sell products in a mobile world.

Smart Phones have been taking over everything. Texting has become the main communication method for younger people and older demographics are starting to use text messages more too. There are some stats that say there are more text messages everyday, than there are voice messages. There are over 2 billion mobile devices in the world. That is almost a third of the entire population of the world. And marketing is really taking off in this area. I for one am going to be a part of this. The possibilities are endless with this technology.

Well back to the webinar, Dan Hollings the premier Social Marketing expert is going to be teaching how to do Mobile Marketing the right way with Stomper Mobile. He shared a lot of tips on how to do this and what products to use to promote to a mobile market. How to get them and how to make them want to purchase from you. At first I thought that Mobile Marketing would only be good for brick and mortal types businesses, but Dan showed me in his webinar, that its just not true. This can even be used to increase your search engines rankings. The webinar will be posted at StomperMobile.com and its worth your time to watch. Imagine if you had been one of the first people to start using email for marketing purposes. Where would you be today. You can take Mobile Marketing and a little knowledge you can get in something like StomperNet and you can make a killing.

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Well its a new year in Internet land. The past year has produced a lot of items that IMers need to be thinking about especially in the area of how Google ranks websites. There has been a lot of talk about Google Caffeine and many people are already seeing the results of the combined search results, that Google has been introducing to their results. There are several blogs that I read regularly that have seen some drops in their rankings and it seems that Google is ranking blog posts slower than it was just six months ago. This slower ranking of posts has been something I’m keeping my eye on as it would hint that there is something new going on behind the scenes when Google analyzes a page and puts it in the index.

I posted before about how I will watch and write about current hot trends on some of my blogs and this slower indexing has affected how effective this practice is. Of course over the past year many people have released information in the forms of ebooks or tools to capitalize on hot trends. This has increased the competition with more people chasing hot trends in Google. It also brought out all the sploggers and many auto spam blogs have jumped up. Well a few months ago Google seemed to be catching on to the spammers. At first they reduce the Google trends index to 40 of the top searches and now its down to 20.

I can only assume that this is in response to all the spam blogs, but its also hurting the people who where not creating spam, but actually writing good relevant content on the topics that appeared in the Trends list. I thought of writing one of these books as I was able to do some pretty good things utilizing the information in Google Hot Trends in 2009, but now I’m glad I did not because I have not seen all my tricks mentioned in the books I’ve read. I’m going to keep those to myself for now.

But this does raise the question whether Hot Trends will even exist in the coming year. Will Google kill it off totally? I hope not as its very useful for webmasters. Perhaps they will just introduce some new features to help combat the autoblogs. One area that could be done in this area is in the speed of a website. Since most spammers have 100s of autoblogs on a shared or reseller hosting account then speed could be a way to cut down on this spam. Of course the downside of this is it would also give people who have dedicated boxes and advantage over the people who host good websites on shared hosting plans.

Of course people who have dedicated servers should be given preference just because their investment is higher. Its been long rumored that the number of years a domain is registered is a factor in ranking. The reason given for this is because of the investment a person puts in the domain name, but if you look at pure dollars someone who hosts a site on a dedicated box puts a lot more investment into their website in a single month than if they just registered the domain name for 10 years or so.

So perhaps Google is going to start giving a little boost to the people who invest in their websites with a dedicated box as it appears the speed of a website is going to come into play very soon.

Google’s Matt Cutts hinted that site speed is important to Google, and it may be considered a factor when ranking websites in 2010.

Here is an excerpt from the interview: "Historically, we haven’t had to use it(site load speed) in our search rankings, but a lot of people within Google think that the web should be fast. It should be a good experience, and so it’s sort of fair to say that if you’re a fast site, maybe you should get a little bit of a bonus. If you really have an awfully slow site, then maybe users don’t want that as much".

Last year Google had already introduced Page Load Time as a ranking element in Google Adwords ads.

You can watch the video interview of Matt Cutts here :
http://videos.webpronews.com/2009/11/13/matt-cutts-interview/

How to optimize site for better loading and performance :
http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ has added a new section in the “Labs” menu titled “Site Performance”. This new feature provides statistics about how fast your web pages load, how that speed compares to other websites, and tips and suggestions for speeding up your page loads.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/introducing-google-public-dns.html is yet another tool Google has released for webmasters to increase their site performance.

Google recently released http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/, an add-on for Firefox browsers which can diagnose a number of elements which impact page load times (such as Javascript and CSS files, image file sizes, etc).

Additionally Google has released http://analytics.blogspot.com/2009/12/google-analytics-launches-asynchronous.html that allows the GA tracking code to be loaded asynchronously, which also helps reduce the load time of your webpages.
http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2009/11/introducing-closure-tools.html is yet another tool launched by Google to optimize scripts and remove un-necessary whitespaces thereby helping the site to load faster.

All this is in addition to http://code.google.com/speed/ where you can find many more tips & tricks to make sure your site loads as fast as possible. This isn’t just important to protect your search engine rankings, it’s also a vital part of conversion rate optimization – users don’t like to wait, and a slow site will lose customers.

So get to optimizing your site as it may become very important very soon. If you look at all these resources that Google has released the past few months all designed to help the speed of a site’s loading then it stands to reason that speed is definitely on their mind. I’ve been watching Google for years and they always have a purpose for money they spend.

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I was just over at DatMoney where my good friend Jay posted about making money during the holidays. Its actually a pretty good post, but I’m going to have to disagree with Jay on one point.

Now Jay recommends using sites such as shopping.com to find a hot niche or product that people are searching for and then building a blog around the product. Now at the surface this is a good idea, but building a new site for each of these keywords can not only get expensive in terms of purchasing domain names, but since its a new site then its unlikely you will even start to get the traffic needed to make sales.

I’ve seen a lot of people say to build out a small site for each long tail keyword you want to target. I’ve even seen this mention for doing Trend blogging, but I never have really gotten the reason. It just does not make good business sense.

1. If you purchase a domain name, then for a .com you will spend about 10 bucks or maybe a little less per year. Now with a trend, you may not even earn that amount back. Perhaps you could with an affiliate product depending on how many sales you can convert and whether the product continues to be searched for.
2. Even if you don’t purchase a domain name, but instead use something like blogger.com to create your site, then you still have the time it takes to build out the site. Now this may not be much, but if you build out a lot of them then this time can really add up.
3. Now you have either invested money or time or both and you still are not indexed in the SEs, so you are not going to get much traffic if any. So now you have to spend time building links, etc.. to get your new site indexed. I’m not sure if anyone has noticed, but its taking Google a little longer to index items lately.

Now we have another option to accomplish the same thing. Build a single site with a generic domain name. Then optimize individual posts for your SEO efforts. Really after all its not the domain that shows up in the Search Engines, but the individual page is indexed.

Then you can cut out all the additional overhead for each keyword as you only need to build a single page. Also any link building you do will help all your products not just a single product.

This strategy is one where you can also utilize some plugins to help you out. I like a wordpress plugin named ReviewAZON, which allows you to easily add Amazon products to your blog. This plugin not only posts the product, but also the comments left on the product page at Amazon. This allows you to appear that your blog is a lot more popular.

Now you may think that this is duplicate content, but that does not matter, plus if you spend a few minutes writing some keyword rich content at the start of the product post, then a lot of times you will out rank Amazon for the long tail. It may take a little time before you build up enough authority on the domain name to rank easily, but if you give it a little time you will have a domain that you can post almost anything to and it will rank on the first page.

I don’t care what anyone says, the bigger a domain is, they easier it is to rank for individual pages. Look at Wikipedia or Ezine Article. I’m sure you won’t disagree that these two sites seem to show up on the front page for just about any keyword phrase. People will say its because they are authoritive, but I say they are authorities because of the number of pages they have indexed. That is why new pages get ranked so quickly on these domains. Now don’t say that blogger is the same, because someKeyword.blogger.com is not the same as blogger.com/SomeKeyword in Google’s eyes. These are considered different domains.

You may not have the resources or time to build a site of the same size as these sites, but what you can do is to build bigger sites and that will help you. Whether its making money during the holidays or any other time of the year.

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