Have You Seen Dubli.com?

If you like to bid on online items, you may really be interested in this new website called www.Dubli.com. This new site is a reverse auction site.

Reverse auction means instead of multiple bidders bidding up a price, when you bid you are bidding down a price. That’s an interesting model isn’t it? In fact this is how it works. You search on Dubli for items you are interested in buying. You buy credits online at $.80 a pop. To see the current price of an item you are interested in, you click view price and Dubli takes one of your $.80 credits away to view the price. For each person that views the price the price of the product drops by $.25. If you like what you see, you can choose to buy the item at the Dubli bidded down price or you can choose to wait and see if the price will go lower.

For hot property items, the price on Dubli can drop rapidly and you can snatch up a bargain, if you are watching. This is a winning combination for online auction buying in Europe and is just now appearing in the United States.

Check out www.Dubli.com yourself and see what you think!

Hot AdWords Tip on Title Character Count and Keyword Insertion

This just in from a chat conversation with a Googler at AdWords! (This note was also posted at the Webmaster World forum for professionals.)

I challenged AdWords customer support about a competitors ad that showed 26 characters in the title of the AdWords ad and was told by a specific Googler with the initials P. A. that “If you use keyword insertion in your ad text, the ad title may show more than 25 characters.” He verified this with a supervisor when I stated that I would post this on my blog and at Webmaster World.

This is news to me and I have been managing AdWords for over six years and this use of additional characters is not reflected in any of their training information.

To clarify even further the Googler stated that there is no guarantee that AdWords will show beyond the limit for the title but they may choose to show a keyword with 26 or 27 characters automatically. The he stated, “The keyword insertion issue is just a by product of our automated systems. In no way are we giving some advertisers more ad text characters.” Hmm, but they are!

In my case the title I wanted was Virtual Assistant Training which is 26 characters. Entering a title in the AdWords control panel allowed Virtual Assistant Trainin – which makes no sense. I am now setting up dynamic ad groups for keywords that fit these parameters for my clients.

Interesting that the Google rules state 25 characters max or less if you use double byte, but never state that they will show more. You can do a search on Google.com to see the 26 word title for two of my client’s competitors using the query Virtual Assistant Training. You will see two competitors showing the 26 character title.

I just wanted to pass this on to you so that you could leverage this new information for your benefit too.

Are Blogger and Google Locking Down Your Blog?

This is a very good reason to be using WordPress, Blogger and Google have just started to lock down Blogger.com blogs. Here’s the situation… We’ve been blogging for an e-commerce store for more than three years. Posts are newsy and then usually point back to his website where people can buy the product we blog about.

Just this past week, Blogger/Google locked the blog. They called it a “spam blog”. Their criteria was that as all links pointed to one website, it was most likely a spam blog – NOT! We have had to request a personal review of our blog and our blog is locked for publishing until this review is performed. There is no information on how long the review will take and when this will happen.

Now the notes from Blogger/Google were nice, but the blog is locked down until Blogger/Google decides to turn us back on again. This is a great reason to be using WordPress on your own server. You will never be locked down, shut out, or unable to post to your blog when you control your own platform. Or for that matter explain that your blog is not a spam blog.

There are some good reasons why you would want to use www.Blogger.com for your blog platform.  However if you choose Blogger when you have a viable WordPress alternative, you may be letting Blogger and Google dictate what you can post and where you can link.

Are You Using Facebook to Win Clients?

You know sometimes promoting your business is not all about you, sometimes its about having fun and becoming a “real person” to people who are looking to connect and not a “corporate profile”.

I got one of my large web design projects from an exchange on Facebook. It was a random thing. I invited a whole bunch of people to join me on Facebook from my e-newsletter mailing list. One of the people who I invited joined and we interacted online for a few days. When her boss told her to find a web designer, I got the job. You know why? Because I invited her (the office manager and gal Friday to the boss) to join me on Facebook and she loves using it.

If you totally sanitize your message on Facebook and other social networking sites to match your “corporate face” you may have on your website, you are missing the power of connecting with others. People want to know and interact with the real you, not some cardboard cutout or marketing message! They want to see YOU warts and all. People want to see your family, your kids, know what you are doing, and what you like. This is the real world view that I have received from prospects who have interacted with me and become clients from social networking platforms.

For business owners who say they want a separate corporate site from their personal Facebook site, I say be careful there. If you are a big corporation this may make sense, but if you are a small to medium sized business and a business owner with “personality”, you are better served showing your full profile and letting people into your “circle of trust” to experience who you really are. I think you will find, as I have, that you can win business doing just that.

Are You a Quitter on Twitter?

Okay are you? Let’s be honest, a lot of people use Twitter like they use a blog, set up an account and then tweet the first few days and then stop. They just can’t seem to make sense of the application and so drop out becoming a Twitter Quitter.

Well I am here to say that you can make sense of Twitter by using TweetDeck. In fact I don’t recommend any other way to do Twitter now. Don’t waste your time trying to do Tweets from Twitter.com or waste time reading your Twitter page using a browser, it is too much content in one spot.

Although it would be great if TweetDeck instituted some security and completed the security certificates on the application to encourage more people to feel comfortable installing it, I swear by it. I too could not make sense of the volume of information on Twitter until I started to create groups within TweetDeck. Now I see the real power of Twitter and have totally increased my use of the application and am having way more fun using it.

In fact, I am in the process of writing a new white paper on demystifying Twitter for business owners and TweetDeck was the first thing I installed as part of my own research. I even use TweetDeck to update my Facebook profile at the same time. (@LinkedIn – you need to get with the program, you are falling out of the popularity mix on social networking.)

I’ve been watching Ashton Kutcher this last week on Twitter gaining 200,000 new followers in a matter of days to a total of about 1 million. In fact Ashton Kutcher has been so hot using Twitter on the Web that he even has Oprah doing Tweets as of Friday the 17th. Her first tweets were lame, so she totally needs to get with the program, but as with all Twitter newbies, you’ll get the hang of it if you watch and try it all out.

If you like the idea of using Twitter but don’t know what to do or where to start, you will want to subscribe to my monthly e-newsletter so you can read my Twitter article in the May 1st issue.

Two New Websites Launched

The Taoist InstituteMan, this has been a busy year so far for my firm. I have moved from one large project to another with another already in the queue. In fact just this past week I have launched two custom SEO web design projects – The Taoist Institute and The Core System Store.

Both sites are owned by the same client and are set up as sister sites to each other, using the general design and feel for branding and recognition. The first www.TaoistInstitute.com is the main site and showcases Dr. Carl Totton’s services and classes in martial arts. The second site www.OneCoreSystem.com is the store site for the main site. It showcases all of his Tai Chi and Kung Fu training videos and supplies. The second site utilizes PayPal add to cart shopping buttons and facilitates credit card transactions through PayPal for an easy start into e-commerce.

The main site is a huge change from the original website which was done with a template in Network Solutions. The new site contains custom content written by the owner and resident martial arts expert and is built to grow. The site is already getting great feedback from visitors and clients.

Isn’t it time for you to consider updating your website too? Check out our custom SEO web design services today.