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.