Freelance Consultant's Diary

Myles Felsing, director of online marketing at gift Retailer RedEnvelope , says, "For us as an upscale gift retailer, there's just not a lot of general articles out there talking about gifts." In fact what we have found in our research studying the marriage of content and ebusiness is that there is no incentive to create content for many nano-publishers when there are no advertisers. (Related article: Advertisers need to be part of both AdSense and AdWords if they want publishers to mention their products ) There is another reason why Felsing is wrong. There are Adsense advertisers for all kinds of high-end products. Some examples are private jets , online trading , online banking , retirement planning , asset management , spas for men , etc. Yes, while our readers love such insightful articles, they were on a high priority list of content when we knew that there were excellent advertisers available. A word of advice to advertisers: those advertisers that have embraced co

As is becoming quite obvious, the four hottest market for growth are nicknamed BRIC (pronounced as brick) and they are: Brazil (Lula, while a Leftist leader has done things that would delight any free-market supporter), Russia (Not sure if Putin is a great leader but the growth potential in Russia is huge), India (with a middle class as big as the United States that is fairly comfortable with English language and western culture, and now that markets have opened up, the pent-up demand for foreign goods cannot be satisfied fast enough), and of course, China (so much so that they had to raise interest rates to cool down the economy). In this article, though, we will discuss some of the latest trends insofar as direct marketing is concerned in the Indian market. Here are a series of factors that make India an attractive market for western companies to market in India: Fascination with anything "foreign" (particularly American, European, or Japanese) No language problem Well-info

We have been arguing all along that affiliate programs are one-sided and do not create as much value for a publisher as they do for the merchant. Over a 10-month period, through an aggressive program of working with a range of affiliate programs on our eCreativa network of websites , we have concluded that publishers would be much better off either dumping affiliate programs altogether or minimizing their role in their business (and embrace PPC advertising instead). We have published our findings in the following two articles as well as in the eBusiness blog : Building a business with affiliate programs Business model transformation (from affiliate programs to PPC) While we had suspected it all along, the current strategy in the merchant community with regards to affiliate programs is to use it solely as a vehicle for generating quality traffic and getting a higher PageRank. If they do get some orders, well that is great and they will split the profits with the affiliate but there is n

Let us review some of the economic indicators as we close the month of October 2004. Good news The Chicago Purchasing Managers Index rose to 68.5 from 61.9 Consumer spending, which accounts for more than two-thirds of economic activity, grew at a 4.6% annual rate Few signs of inflationary pressures Business investment growth at strong 11.7% GDP growth, while not robust, is fairly strong Bad news Continued loss in manufacturing jobs Almost anemic private sector-job growth Falling incomes (but as consumer spending stays high, it is very clear that credit levels are rising and savings levels are down) Three straight months of declining consumer confidence Out-of-control oil prices (Related article: Will oil shock cause a recession in 2005 ?) iProceed's analysis of economic data We are tempted to think that US economy may be becoming more like those in England, France, Germany, Japan, Switzerland, and other similar developed countries (moderate growth, relatively high unemployment, ove

David Birch points out that just one in three Inc. 500 companies is able to keep growing fast enough to make the list for two years running. Like many other statistics of failure of small and mid-size companies, this is another scary one. The problems are known to all: growth pains, lack of access to capital to fund growth, competition from 800-pound gorillas who want to see them dead, and management's capability to grow from a startup to sustenance phase (Related article: From a startup to sustenance phase - Ed Zander's views ). iProceed's recommendations on what can firms do to balance growth with their capability for long-term survival If possible (particularly if you are privately owned or have a smart group of investors), agree on an optimum level of growth and stick to it. Yes, you may miss some opportunities for value creation but it is best to grow at a pace that you can keep your customers, employees, and shareholders happy in the long run rather than increase the

As many of you who have been reading our ebusiness blog know that we have concluded that a pay-per-click (PPC) program generates far more revenue than affiliate programs for most nano-publishing companies. We believe that affiliate programs benefit the merchant a lot more than the publisher. On the other hand, a PPC program is more of a win-win situation for all parties involved. That does nto mean, however, that we have given up on affiliate programs altogether. We still are affiliates of over a dozen merchants through LinkShare, Commission Junction, Amazon.com, and ClickBank. The following are some of the secrets of our success with affiliate programs (mind you, the affiliate programs generate a very small percentage of our revenue at this time but we want to get whatever we can out of them): Use affiliate programs when AdSense does not seem to have any ads (you can generally get a good idea by doing a Google search and see if any ads show on the right sidebar.). For instance, if no

At some point your business will need a merchant account though our experience has shown that you may not need a merchant account: If your sales are still small You do not like the hassle of having a merchant account You do not mind paying slightly higher commission We started off with Paypal and it worked fine for us. In fact, many of our customers liked Paypal since it allowed them to pay either with a credit card or a bank account. Many customers outside the United States could only pay us through a Paypal account since their credit cards did not work for overseas transactions. We are so pleased with Paypal that we continue to have an account that we use to collect payments for goods that we sell, mostly e-books , some personal care products , and exercise yoga videos . We don't have to deal with a lot of the hassles of providing secure online shopping and making sure that no one hacks into our servers and steals valuable information. Why having a merchant account is good? You p

Interestingly enough, apart from the drug companies and the current administration (which has very strong alliances with drug companies), there are many others who are opposed to drug re-importation from Canada. For instance, many biotech companies and special interest groups (venture capitalists, industry associations, etc.) in Massachusetts are strongly opposed to the idea simply because it threatens the very survival of the biotech industry in the area which is starting to emerge nicely after the tech burst literally wiped out most companies. It was, therefore interesting to read Geoffrey Colvin argue that drug reimportation was a bad idea because of the free-rider problem. The reason we at iProceed do not think this is a valid argument is because the free-rider problem should not be an issue in a world where talent and capital flow across borders. For the same reasons, products and services should flow without restrictions if we truly believe in free markets and free trade. The rea

It is very rare that a government does something that delights the average Joe, so it was a big surprise when the Federal Trade Commission implemented the DO NOT CALL registry. Americans simply loved it and approximately 60 million phone numbers have been listed. In the opinion of iProceed , the reason that all numbers have not been registered yet is not because that people love to receive telemarketing calls; it is just that these folks are either clueless or careless. It is important to note the response of the telemarketing industry, which was never very popular among consumers in the first place, (despite the fact that Americans did buy stuff over the phone - either it was a great deal or the telemarketer happened to call exactly at the time you were thinking of buying something): they decided to sue citing all kinds of reasons, but in particular, that it was their First Amendment right to bug their potential and existing customers whenever they wanted. Not the most positive way to

As we have been suggesting in our previous article, blogs can be extremely profitable ventures (primarily through advertising, endorsements, mentions, etc.) provided you write the blogs the right way. Here are some important points to remember if you want to leverage blogging as a revenue-generating activity: If you read a couple of blogs at random (and some of them are fairly popular because they were the first ones to be launched), most of them essentially keep linking to other blogs/websites with a casual comment added (though not even that). So all these bloggers do is keep reading stuff on other websites and then just put a link. Well, you have created some value for your readers by doing the hard work of finding something interesting, but the next thing that a visitor does is to click on the link and leave your blog. So if you complain that your advertising revenue is closer to zero then it is your fault. Blogs are still evolving and our analysis shows that they could become esse

As Google's AdSense/AdWords program continues to succeed (producing record profits for Google as well as publishers and advertisers), there is a new trend emerging. Many publications simply do not bother with keywords or products for which there are no advertisers. From time to time, we do write articles in our network of websites ( MYNIPPON , Lindisima , LuvCube , iProceed , and eCreativa ) that will benefit our readership but it is generally a lower priority. As a business, it is important that we allocate resources only to value-creating activities. Why every ebusiness company needs AdSense/AdWords? When you are an advertiser on Google, particularly if you rely on recommendations and mentions by publishers (which by the way is a great way to get free publicity), you are accessing a large pool of publishers. While conducting research prior to writing an article we rely heavily on search results through a simple Google search . Of course, we also take a look at the advertisers in

We had highlighted a business opportunity for overseas firms to target the uninsured Americans by providing them with affordable healthcare services (Related article: Providing medical services to uninsured Americans ) particularly in form of surgeries and other ailments that require extended hospital stays. Since we are not in a position to provide any medical services to our own citizens, it makes perfect sense for corporations overseas to do so. After all one can fly to India for less than the price of a ticket to the west coast. The International Health Summit (USA) is scheduled to organize a health summit in India to highlight that hospitals and nursing homes in India can be attractive options for those Americans who simply cannot afford to be treated in the United States. As we know from the experience with IT outsourcing, costs in India are much lower. United States with a population of just 300 million people spent approximately $1.5 trillion on healthcare. On the other hand, I

In the opinion of iProceed , the chances of another recession in 2005 are much higher than they have been in the whole of 2004. The main reason: steady increase in oil prices and no signs of a significant drop in prices anytime soon. Let us first look at the evidence. Since 1971, every time there has been an unusual oil price increase, there has been a recession as shown in the chart below. The pink bands indicate the duration of the recession. Also note that this chart analyzes data only up to March 2003. As of publication of this article, oil prices was closer to $55. How can an oil price spike now cause a recession? As price of oil derivatives goes up, it makes everything else expensive even though it may not be a direct user of oil. While prices of fuel, plastics, chemicals, etc. go up roughly in direct proportion, prices of food go up due to the shipping costs. In the colder regions of the country, heating costs go up. All these increases means lower disposable incomes for America

First of all, here a few reasons why you should worry about page views and why more is better particularly if you are interested in leveraging content to drive ebusiness: More page views means visitors spend more time on your website. It means that they like what you have. Thus, they are more likely to come back, tell others about you, and also trust you more. All the indicators that they are likely to perform a positive action (a sale, a signup or a click on an advertisement) While there are several metrics used to measure the popularity of a website, page views is one of them. While many websites (e.g. Yahoo ) can claim to have a large number of page views because every time a visitor goes to the website they check their emails or weather or read the news. All of these count as multiple page views and such portal type websites typically tend to have 10-15 page views per visitor. If you run a website like MYNIPPON , however, then none of these things happen. That is why, even a page v

You must have heard this refrain from all technical experts and companies that run search engines, particularly Google . However, you continue to come across crooks who will try to cheat the system. It is easy to find the cheats. One simple example is to do a search on the term MYNIPPON and see how many crooks pop up - people who want to steal our traffic. Our advice to you if you want to build a solid nano-publishing business: Don't do anything unethical and devious. You will not go anywhere and may even be penalized by search engines, or even worse, blacklisted. And if you have hired a search engine optimization firm to give you all kinds of unbelievable rankings, be very careful and watch carefully what they do. It is one thing to make your website spider-friendly; it is totally another thing to promise a ranking in first one or two pages in search results. Anyone who promises that to you is definitely going to use unethical techniques. The reason we say this is that in our port

One of the issues that all businesses have to deal with is the geography. Being an ebusinesses allows you to literally serve the whole world as long as you ship the product (which may not even be necessary if you sell a digital product) and receive payment. Unfortunately, it is not always so easy to go beyond the borders. One issue that we have struggled with over the years is how much business we want from non-US users. Since over 90% of our revenues are derived from advertising and digital products, we can serve customers almost anywhere but there are downsides to targeting visitors from countries other than those in US, Canada, European Union, Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Australia. The advertising rates for the rest of the world are incredibly low. We have seen this in particular with our website Lindisima which gets a lot of its traffic from Latin America. Finally, we realized that we had to target the English-speaking Latinas in the United States and Canada and we launched th

From the book "Confronting Reality: Doing what matters to get things right" (Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan; Crown Publishing Group; available on Amazon.com), let's talk about the reasons for business failures highlighted by the authors: Filtered information Selective hearing Wishful thinking Fear Emotional over-investment Unrealistic expectations of the capital markets There are more that we can think of: incompetence, lack of vision, being out-of-touch with reality, denial, arrogance, greed, etc. that destroy businesses. As a business leader, here are a few things that you can do avoid, or at least, minimize failures. We call them the iProceed's Essentials of Leadership: Don't get married to an idea or ideology or product or business. When in doubt, look at the numbers. Fortunately, numbers don't lie but people do. Don't punish the bearer of bad news. Get off your ass and walk the hallways; not only of your company but also those of your customers. Learn

There is no argument that VOIP is an excellent substitute for traditional phone lines for both businesses and consumers. If the technology is there, no matter how hard anyone tries to stop the growth of VOIP, it is going to happen. Fortunately, the traditional phone companies have decided to embrace VOIP rather than fight it (Interestingly enough, AT&T now calls itself the "networking company". Not a bad repositioning strategy considering that traditional phone service is no longer an attractive business to be in.). iProceed still skeptical about the future of VOIP companies Remember the days when consumers paid by the hour to access the Internet? Some Internet cafes and phone companies in many countries actually charged by the minute. Generally speaking that is history. In fact, if we look at countries like South Korea the broadband penetration is so pervasive that it literally costs nothing to access the Internet. So how long can these companies charge for phone calls w

iProceed has supported drug reimportation from Canada (or from wherever else it can be done efficiently) on one basic principle of good business: free markets. Thus, we have been telling the pharmaceutical CEOs to stop whining and asking the government to help them through regulation. However, Americans who strongly favor lower drug prices, have to understand that there is a price to pay: Job losses as drug companies find ways to cut costs (R&D offshoring is already happening) Move manufacturing to cheaper locations (MedImmune, VaxGen , Lilly, Pfizer and Wyeth, etc. all manufacture outside the US and are increasing their offshore manufacturing) and that would have two implications (1) loss of even more jobs (2) lack of domestic suppliers of drugs, as the case with the latest shortfall in flu vaccine has shown Once again, the response of the policymakers should not be to make it difficult for drugmakers to move manufacturing offshore. Let the market forces work. If there is demand i

As we have been saying all along, you may need both a blog and website to fully exploit your content while operating a nano-publishing business. Since we started in 1999 with zero web design experience and HTML knowledge, we embraced Microsoft FrontPage (can be bought separately or combined with Microsoft Office System). Believe it or not, we still do not code in HTML though we know the basics to make minor changes in the code when we need to. Advantages of Microsoft FrontPage Almost any one who knows the basics of using a personal computer can actually design a website. The manual is pretty good and we encourage you to religiously follow the manual as you try to learn the program. It will make your life easy in the long run. It is also easy to add functionalities on your website and make it search-engine friendly by adding keywords, description, and title by using a popup window. Disadvantages You still will need to learn a few technical things to publish the website to your server si

We at iProceed are so convinced of the value of portfolio management that we encourage all business executives to understand the basics. The application of portfolio management are many and some areas that we have helped our clients implement them are: (Related article: Principles of portfolio management ) Businesses (sometimes referred to groups or divisions) within a company Product portfolio Portfolio of customers (slightly different from customer segmentation) R&D portfolio Project portfolio Risk management (Related article: Basics of risk management ) How does portfolio management approach help? No two things are alike in the business world. No two businesses or product lines or customer groups produce identical growth or profitability (or whatever other metrics you use to compare performances). Thus, you cannot treat them alike. Portfolio management approach allows you to allocate resources more efficiently. Or in other words, highest potential opportunities get the most res

As wi-fi becomes a way of life not just for techies but even an average consumer, it is increasingly difficult to imagine oneself without a network connection (cell phone or internet) for too long. However, the transition to "seamless mobility with connectivity" is not going to be easy. The same set of companies that bring us all these goodies also slow things down because they get married to their technologies (a case in point is the CDMA/GSM conflict in the US). iProceed's vision for "seamless mobility with connectivity" is a world in which the user does not need to know what is happening in the external environment. The device is smart enough to figure it all out. I think I heard Ed Zander, the CEO of Motorola, allude to this when I attended one of his presentations on where the company is headed. But what we need for this vision to become a reality is perfect synchronization of infrastructure, devices, software, network, regulation, public policy, etc. That

It seems that advertisers and media buyers simply don't get it yet. Or is it that they are afraid to take risks as the world changes right in front of their eyes while they continue to pump money into television advertising when the viewers either use Tivo to get rid of ads altogether or simply engage in something more exciting like sipping a beer. (Related link: Disturbing trends emerge for advertisers targeting 18-34 males ) Most research points to decline in interest in TV ads among the 18-34 year old men. iProceed has been discussing how advertisers and media buyers can be more forward-looking and start looking at other emerging channels like blogs. So it was encouraging to hear from Nick Denton that "A lot of advertisers want to participate in blogs, but they don't know how." Despite that he points out that even 2.5 million unique advertisers a month don't get the attention media buyers. We wonder in what world do the media buyers live! Tips for media buyers

As the global economy continues to undergo structural transformation, it has affected the developed world as much as it has the underdeveloped world. Folks in China and India who could not ever dream of finding any employment at all are now being wooed by employers from the developed world. (Related article: Evolution of knowledge economy ) Everyone who is being affected by this monumental change needs to rethink what needs to be redesigned. The responsibility is even greater on politicians, business leaders, and educators. (Related article: Structural changes in the American job market ). It was, therefore, good to hear from the dean of my alma-mater (International University of Japan Business School) who is reaching out to the alumni to find out what can they do to prepare the business leaders of tomorrow. Here is a small part of my response to him. 1. In your opinion, what should IUJ stand for? That is, if IUJ were to develop a reputation for being very good or excellent for somethi

In the final presidential debate, let us review parts of the exchange (edited to highlight key points): SCHIEFFER : Mr. President, what do you say to someone in this country who has lost his job to someone overseas who's being paid a fraction of what that job paid here in the United States? BUSH : Policies to continue to grow our economy and create the jobs of the 21st century. Some help to go get an education. Here's some help for you to go to a community college. The best way to keep jobs here in America and to keep this economy growing is to make sure our education system (the president was referring to the public schools) works. Education is how to help the person who's lost a job. Education is how to make sure we've got a workforce that's productive and competitive. KERRY : I want you to notice how the president switched away from jobs and started talking about education principally. iProceed's analysis of the answers Economic growth is key but economy can

Many readers have written to us asking us about our recommendations on how to register a domain name. Despite the fact that a blog on Blogger.com or any other large hosting company will be less of a hassle and probably get indexed faster, we still strongly recommend that you get on your own domain name for branding purposes. Plus, when you have your own domain name and website hosting company, you are in possession of all your files (and intellectual property). (Recommended article: How to choose a web hosting service ) How to register a domain name? First thing to do is, of course, to pick a name. If you already have one or several names in mind, you can simply go to one of the registrars and check availability. We have registered our domain names with Register but there are many other good ones like Hostway, GoDaddy, UpDaddy, Network Solutions, Yahoo, etc. If your domain is available, then simply go ahead and register it right away. The question is should you register your domain thr

This article aims to discuss what an inexact science forecasting is but still how can business leaders exploit the value in forecasting. While many business leaders tend to fall in love with forecasts (it has something to do with human tendency to believe something more when it has a number attached to it), they must also remember that a forecast is at best a wild guess. No matter the amount of data used or the sophistication of models employed, a forecast is literally meaningless in most cases except to give you a very high-level understanding of a trend. Therefore, if you are arguing about the growth rate being 5.3% or 3.9%, or the market size being 189.33 vs. 165.48, you are essentially wasting your time and focusing on the wrong stuff. It is in this context that the comments of Stephen Chazen, CFO of Occidental Petroleum, are very insightful. In a recent interview by CFO magazine, take a look at his answers. We are so glad to hear that he does not live in a dream world of forecasts

October is a critical month for retailers, particularly those that rely on ebusiness alone. Since buying gifts online is so much better, most ebusiness retailers generate a major portion of their sales during the last quarter of the year. This article offers some tips for ebusiness retailers to increase their sales by getting some free advertising: If you have not yet realized the power of bloggers on the Internet, you are probably living under a stone. So do some research on the surge in blogs and the influence that bloggers have on consumer trends. Do a search for your product/service along with the word "blog" and then pick those blogs that talk about you. Find out what are they saying. Develop a list of all the bloggers that are talking about you and contact them. They have more power than you think. Approach the bloggers and provide them with more information about your holiday sales plan. Ship samples of your products to them or let them try your services. If they like

Many of the readers of iProceed blog are quite aware of our advice against hiring search engine optimization (or 'optimisation') firms that promise all kinds of ranking in search engines. Here is why we think that these promises do not make long-term strategic sense: Search engines, particularly the larger ones like Google, Yahoo, etc., are always refining their algorithms so that optimization for one algorithm may not work as soon as it is changed. In any case, search engines do not disclose their algorithms and almost all of the models of the algorithms out there are purely speculative. New search engines are always emerging (e.g. Clusty) and they can take a totally new approach to serving search results. While some SEO firms might actually get you a ranking that they promise (sometimes through rather dishonest means), do not forget that the same firms or their competitors are working to reach that same first or the second page of search results. Thus, no rankings are ever pe

If you objectively assess the approach taken by the pharmaceutical companies in responding to drug reimportation, you really start to wonder the foundation of their strategy and how self-destructive their approach is. Since iProceed.com has always emphasized the importance of customers to high-value companies and how you don't exist without a whole bunch of happy customers cheering you, we wonder how can the drug companies employ such a poor strategy and antagonize their customers. Let us briefly analyze the current situation in the pharma sector with regards to drug reimportation: Almost all companies are scared (despite the fact that the impact is still next to negligible in terms of dollar value). While proclaiming that no matter where drugs are manufactured or sold, the quality is consistent, they are also saying that they can not guarantee safety because it is coming from Canada. It is such a difficult argument to understand because we are a nation that relies on imports (and

We did not have a very pretty employment report (see the chart below since January 2001) this morning and it did not surprise us here at iProceed.com . The reasons are simple and, in our opinion, the following: While offshoring is still a very small component of the overall job market, it continues and there is no way to stop it. The market forces in its favor are just too powerful. Globalization is here insofar as the job market is concerned. Since physical location is less important to get things done, Americans now have to compete with Chinese and Indians and anyone else. What companies want is a specific skill at the lowest wage and that does present a problem to a lot of people in the developed world, particularly if they do not have any unique skills. New jobs are not being created here in America and numbers clearly indicate that just waiting and hoping is not going to help. What can we do? Americans, and in particular, the politicians, have to stop being in denial. Simply hopin

Sometime on October 6/7, 2004, a major Google update happened, or at least that is what the news is. We had, however, started to see some changes a couple of days ahead on all of our websites. The good news is that we have come out to be in pretty good shape in this update. Lindisima.com Latinas on the Internet : Maintained its overall rank at 5 and was able to get new ranks on recently added pages. Lindisima blog climbed to 4. Traffic on this website is exploding and for the month of September 2004, we had an average of 10,000 visitors a day . Wow! MYNIPPON Love & life, guilt free : Maintained its overall rank at 5 and was able to get new ranks on recently added pages, particularly on our Guilt-free lifestyle channel that we are very excited about. We were hoping that our Find a man (after 30) channel will also get some rank but probably we were too close to the update. The MYNIPPON blog climbed to 5 while this ebusiness blog achieved a pagerank of 3 in a matter of weeks. Not bad

Several executives have written to us asking if business opportunities in Iraq have made to the list of iProceed growth opportunities . Here are the reasons why we think that Iraq presents an attractive growth opportunity: The demand for all kinds of consumer and industrial products is exploding. In fact, we have barely scratched the surface. The real boom will happen when the security situation improves. Unlike many other countries with large number of consumers hungry for all kinds of products, Iraq has rich friends. US taxpayers will continue to spend billions of dollars in Iraq since success of Iraq is in America's strategic interest. Other countries with similarly large number of 'hungry' consumers have no such resources. When American taxpayers pay, the work has to be done by American companies. But why are we advising our clients to stay away from Iraq for now? The security situation in Iraq is still unstable and there are no indications that it will improve anytime

It is important in business not to make assumptions that you are not willing to change over time. Our sister website, Lindisima.com , was launched in 1999/2000 with a very narrow focus: Spanish-speaking women committed to having a better life through focus on health, fitness, beauty, wellness, and spirituality. And as they say the rest is history. As many of you know, the Spanish version of Lindisima.com attracts over 10,000 visitors a day, from many countries, particularly Mexico, United States, Spain, and other countries in Latin America. What we did not think about was the English speaking Latina - a woman who is proud of her roots but prefers English. So we listened to her voice, which was presented to us mainly through the word-of-mouth from our Spanish readers, who were telling us that they wanted their friends to visit Lindisima.com but could not recommend because it was only in English. They wanted a bilingual website. We are pleased to announce the launch of the English versio

Help Make Blogs More Visible! NOTE: Be sure you paste live links for the Path List below. There are by some estimates more than a million weblogs. But most of them get no visibility in search engines. Only a few "A-List" blogs get into the top search engine results for a given topic, while the majority of blogs just don't get noticed. The reason is that the smaller blogs don't have enough links pointing to them. But this posting could solve that. Let's help the smaller blogs get more visibility! This posting is GoMeme 4.0 . It is part of an experiment to see if we can create a blog posting that helps 1000's of blogs get higher rankings in Google. So far we have tried 3 earlier variations. Our first test, GoMeme 1.0 , spread to nearly 740 blogs in 2.5 days. This new version 4.0 is shorter, simpler, and fits more easily into your blog. Why are we doing this? We want to help thousands of blogs get more visibility in Google and other search engines. How does it wo

Help Make Blogs More Visible! NOTE: Be sure you paste live links for the Path List below. There are by some estimates more than a million weblogs. But most of them get no visibility in search engines. Only a few "A-List" blogs get into the top search engine results for a given topic, while the majority of blogs just don't get noticed. The reason is that the smaller blogs don't have enough links pointing to them. But this posting could solve that. Let's help the smaller blogs get more visibility! This posting is GoMeme 4.0 . It is part of an experiment to see if we can create a blog posting that helps 1000's of blogs get higher rankings in Google. So far we have tried 3 earlier variations. Our first test, GoMeme 1.0 , spread to nearly 740 blogs in 2.5 days. This new version 4.0 is shorter, simpler, and fits more easily into your blog. Why are we doing this? We want to help thousands of blogs get more visibility in Google and other search engines. How does it wo

If you are in any way involved with ebusiness or nanopublishing, one of the things that might be making you lose sleep is PageRank (trademark; applicable to all further mention of PageRank in this article). If not, good for you. You are doing the right thing and there is nothing for you to do but just go enjoy your life . Those of you who may be losing sleep, please read about our experience with PageRank. What is PageRank? As Google describes it, it is the heart of their search technology. It is based on the simple principle that if a page has more links to it, it is more popular and hence should have a higher PageRank. Or in other words, it will show up higher in search results. But as most people know, it is not perfect. In fact, PageRank is heavily biased in favor of already popular web pages by making them even more popular (since they get found more often, they get linked more often). So what happens is that some websites continue to have low PageRank even if they have better con