Featuring marketing tips, tech news, digital wonders, some personal things and everything in between . . .
Friday March 28, 2008
Adobe announces Photoshop Express. An online based photo editing software similar to Adobe Photoshop (used by professionals).
Photoshop Express will not be as advanced but will allow the general public to edit photos.
Whats the greatest thing about it? ITS FREE!
Whether your YouTube video has 10 views or 10,000,000, people always want to know the same thing: who’s watching this? Where do viewers come from? How did they find my video?
Finally, Youtube has some answers. Today there are releasing YouTube Insight, a free tool that enables anyone with a YouTube account to view detailed statistics about the videos that they have uploaded. For example, uploaders can see how often their videos are viewed in different geographic regions, as well as how popular they are relative to all videos in that market over a given period of time. You can also delve deeper into the lifecycle of your videos, like how long it takes for a video to become popular, and what happens to video views as popularity peaks.
How does this help you? Well, using these metrics, you can increase your videos’ view counts and improve your popularity on the site. For instance, you might learn that your videos are most popular on Wednesdays, that you have a huge following in Spain, or that new videos that play off previous content become more popular more quickly. With this information, you can concentrate on creating compelling new content that appeals to your target audiences, and post these videos on days you know these viewers are on the site. (Maybe even post your next video in Spanish?) And for those of you who are also partners, the more popular a video is, the more advertising revenue it can generate.
Youtube will be making new features and additional information available fairly quickly — like a specific breakdown of how viewers discovered the video — so keep an eye out as they roll out new features. As for now, you can find currently available metrics by clicking under the “About this Video” button under “My account > Videos, Favorites, Playlists > Manage my Videos.”
The YouTube Team
In a perfect world your website is available on the internet 24 hours a day, 7 days a week …
but things can happen.
All of these can bring your site down. You may not find out as immediately as you would like and in the meantime opportunities are lost and leads move on.
Here is an easy way to check in on your website throughout your day.
Set the home page of the your internet browser to your website. Every time you open your browser your website will appear. This montoring can help catch problems that may arise as soon as possible.
Setting your browser to open to your website (Click on screen shots to enlarge.):
Internet Explorer
Tools > Internet Options > General Tab > type in your website into the “To create home page tabs”
If you type in more than one address your browser will open all the websites each in a different tab.
Firefox
Tools > Options >
Safari
Edit > Preferences >
The following linked article from The Register accuses Google’s AdWords, namely the ‘automatic matching’ feature to be untargeted and an outright waste of funds in most instances.
In short, automatic matching weakens the parameters and rules of defining ‘targeted’ in PPC terms. If I sell Adidas shoes, the articles explains, I don’t want to come up for a search on slippers. That would simply be a waste of money. I would go as far to add that in today’s world of short attention spans, anything not directly or literally an Adidas shoe is not targeted enough- let alone slippers.
Pay per click is too reliant on the ‘conversions to dollars spent’ ratio to allow for any more leniency than exactly what I typed in. Again, attentions spans generally don’t allow for it. Additionally, if the search term in question is on the general side where this rule may not directly apply, then the traffic itself will be of the browsing type not the converting (purchasing, buying, targeted lead) type. So in this case my clients probably aren’t interested in the 1st place.
But that is a whole different argument in itself.
The following linked article from The Register accuses Google’s AdWords, namely the ‘automatic matching’ feature to be untargeted and an outright waste of funds in most instances.
In short, automatic matching weakens the parameters and rules of defining ‘targeted’ in PPC terms. If I sell Adidas shoes, the articles explains, I don’t want to come up for a search on slippers. That would simply be a waste of money. I would go as far to add that in today’s world of short attention spans, anything not directly or literally an Adidas shoe is not targeted enough- let alone slippers.
Pay per click is too reliant on the ‘conversions to dollars spent’ ratio to allow for any more leniency than exactly what I typed in. Again, attentions spans generally don’t allow for it. Additionally, if the search term in question is on the general side where this rule may not directly apply, then the traffic itself will be of the browsing type not the converting (purchasing, buying, targeted lead) type. So in this case my clients probably aren’t interested in the 1st place.
But that is a whole different argument in itself.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/03/18/when_google_does_evil/page2.html
Google realizes that you know your neighborhood best. So to provide the most accurate maps possible, Google Maps is open to user edits. People have moved markers of their homes and businesses all around the U.S. and Australia, making Maps work even better.
And so they thought: Why stop there? Moving placemarks is just scratching the surface. After all, when a new place opens in your neighborhood or an old favorite changes its location, wouldn’t be nice to have that change reflected on Maps immediately?
Now in the U.S., Australia, and New Zealand, you can log into your Google account to edit a place on the map. You can even mark that a business has closed to save someone an extra trip. Of course, we’ve taken steps to help protect accuracy, for example, you’ll still be able to see the original listing information along with the history of changes made. This video shows you how to get started:
click here for more from the Google Lat Long blog
Why should you upload a Sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools, if you site is crawled just fine?
Besides, you will have access to more information about your site, for example the number of pages from your Sitemaps that are indexed by Google, any errors Google found with your Sitemap, as well as warnings about potential problems. Also, you can submit specialized Sitemaps for certain types of content including Video, Mobile, News and Code.
More information about the benefits of submitting a Sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools can be found here.
GWC blogged about our position on paid links and the use of nofollow a few months ago. You may also find it interesting to read this thread in our Help Group about appropriate uses of the nofollow attribute.
How do I associate my site with a particular country/region using Google Webmaster Tools? Can I do this for a dynamic website?
The instructions in the Help Center explain that you can associate a country or region to an entire domain, individual subdomains or subdirectories. A quick tip: if, for instance, you are targeting the UK market, better ways of structuring your site would be example.co.uk, uk.example.com, or example.com/uk/. Google can geolocate all of those patterns.
If your domain name has no regional significance, such as www.example.com, you can still associate your website with a country or region. To do that you will need to verify the domain, or the subdomains and/or subdirectories one by one in your Webmaster Tools account and then associate each of them with a country/region. However, for the moment Google does not support setting a geographical target for patterns that can’t be verified such as, for example, www.example.com/?region=countrycode.
I have a news site and it is not entirely crawled. Why? Other crawlers had no problem crawling us…
First off, make sure that nothing prevents us from crawling your news site – the architecture of your site or the robots.txt file. Also, we suggest you sign up for Webmaster Tools and submit your content. We specifically have the News Sitemap protocol for sites offering this type of content. If you take advantage of this feature, Google can give you more information on which URLs we had trouble with and why. It really rocks!
For all you visual learners who want to add features to your blog, but don’t have the patience to browse bloggers help articles, we’ve created the new Blogger Help YouTube Channel. There you can find videos that show you step by step how to use Blogger features.
There are only a few videos at the moment, and we’ve decided to start with the basics:
* How to Create a Blog with Blogger
* Purchasing and Setting Up a Custom Domain through Blogger
* Adjusting Your Blogger Privacy Settings
In the coming months they will be adding more videos. If you have a suggestion for a video you’d like to see, let them know by posting in the Help Group. In addition, you can give feedback on each video’s comment form. They are always trying to find new and better ways to help us use Blogger and they appreciate our feedback – thanks!
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