SEO 2.1: Speak clearly, rank higher on google’s SERPs

According to the Red herring blog, Google’s Marissa Mayer said at a silicon valley conference yesterday that the search giant is using google’s automated free 411 service - 1-800-GOOG-411 - to strengthen their software’s voice recognition capabilities and eventually use speech in videos to enhance video search results.

Eventually, google aims to further improve video search by adding visual search to the mix - in which google’s indexing software “searches through the images in the video for patterns, matching faces to another image, etc.”.

History repeating itself? Google was the first search engine to ignore author generated meta-tags in “Web 1.0″ pages and rely heavily on pagerank instead. In video, Google seems to not want to rely on user-generated tags to index video as soon as they have the capability for a more advanced method, which they are already developing.

More on the Red herring blog

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Nuvy.com: Social Shopping + Video Reviews + Affiliate Marketing:

There is a very interesting new social shopping / video reviews website that Jamie Birch just posted about on the revenews blog.

Nuvy - is a youtube clone plus a comparison shopping engine, that - pays - users to upload videos, that are product reviews.

The idea is this: Anyone, can review any product on video, and upload it on the website, the community votes on how good the video is, and based on that, the reviewer is paid a anything between $1-$10.

Video pages are very similar to youtube - but also a little more - there are three tabs below each video - “Product Description” , “Comments” and ” Where to buy” (so that covers the social part in a simple but elegant way)

There are two reasons why I like this:

First, Nuvy is making really fantastic use of the social media/web 2.0 as an affiliate marketing platform.

Secondly, they are actually paying “consumers who are also content creators” - you don’t see that a lot on web 2.0, but that’s what web 2.1 is for - if users create content that helps make a social media platform money, then the users should be treated partners in the business, the best way, IMO is to reward users according to their contribution - in cash.

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Update: I was reading costpernews a while ago, and read Sam’s 600th post there where he is upset at the pace at which affiliate marketers are adopting the new media. So … To cheer Sam up, who is a fellow believer in the salvation of Affiliate Marketing through Web 2.0, I send this Trackback.

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Speaking of Google, Why are they buying doubleclick?

The official google blog has detailed why exactly they are buying the internet advertising company Doubleclick.

We believe DoubleClick can help Google deliver better, more relevant display ads, which improves the online experience of consumers. From a technical perspective, Google will also be able to get web pages to load faster by reducing latency from ad servers. Publishers will benefit by making more money from remnant inventory and – as has been the case with other technologies we’ve acquired – we hope to make ad serving more accessible. Smaller publishers would get access to DoubleClick’s ad serving technology, enabling them to better compete in the global marketplace.

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Google (AdSense) does the Apple thing

Q: Why is every product made by Apple stylish and sexy?
A: Because they have rounded corners!

Google wants to make adsense ad units look sexy, and whether or not they give credit to apple for inspiring this new design of their ads, I’m sure google wants adsense to eventually be as cool as apple - which is why, they have come up with this -

To get started with these new ad shapes, visit the ‘AdSense Setup’ tab in your account. As with all format options like sizes and colors, different corner styles will perform better for different publishers. We recommend that you choose the corner style that best matches the look and feel of your sites. Please keep in mind that if your page background color, ad background color, and ad border color are all the same, these new corners won’t be visible.

We go round and round — (Inside Adsense blog)

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I, too can now advertise on Google Adwords PPA

Well, not quite - I don’t advertise on Adwords CPC and one of the requirements to be eligible for beta-testing the PPA ads is that an advertiser must have generated atleast 500 conversions from their click campaigns in the past 30 days.

Nevertheless, Google has taken the PPA advertising platform global and is now allowing advertisers and publishers from around the world to participate in the CPA ad platform - which was limited to only US advertisers and publishers since first beta was announced three months ago. This would make google the primary and largest performance-based lead generation platform in many parts of the world.

This, once again, brings many affiliate marketers back to the question that was raised when the beta was first announced. “Will Google eat CJ and Linkshare alive?” Most affiliate marketers who have been in the industry long enough don’t think so. Google is on to something, but it isn’t quite affiliate marketing. they are an advertising company and adwords (CPC and CPA) is an advertising network - these are two different ballgames.

Sure, google could add to existing affiliate-marketing revenues, but the possibility of Adwords eating up a share of the existing affiliate-network pie is highly unlikely. The one way that google can really affect the affiliate networks of today, is if they do something about the newly acquired doubleclick and performics, like bringing the performics platform to all adsense publishers and adwords advertisers, making opening an affiliate program on performics as cost-effective as advertising on adwords. Such a thing, as of now, can’t be seen for quite some time in the future. Google seems to see Doubleclick as mostly a CPM based banner advertising platform. CJ and Linkshare are safe.

More on:

5 Star Blog, Cost Per News, Search Engine Journal, Inside adwords, Clickz

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How about an Ebay/Yahoo merger?

Few weeks ago, there was a mega-rumor started by the NY post that Microsoft is all set to buy Yahoo (this was later rubbished by Yahoo and many publications as what it was, a rumor). Then, yesterday, Jerry Yang, yahoo’s founder took over as it’s CEO and although he denied any plans for the sale of the internet giant, this has once again sparked the debate of yahoo’s potential sale or merger and many are speculating this would happen sooner than later.

eBay, however is rarely talked about as a company that could potentially buy or merge with yahoo — The weblog ebay strategies has posted some interesting reasons on why an eBay/Yahoo merger would make a lot of sense.

This fits in so many ways it really is a perfect match. This gets eBay back into Asia with ecommerce, it gives eBay/Y!/PayPal a Google Checkout option. The Y! toolbar+skype are a great desktop combo. Skype and YIM go well together. Y!’s graphical ads would come onto eBay and eBay sellers could buy them. Y!’s graphic ads could monetize Skype. Yahoo Stores is a great fit for eBay.

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The Crazy, Messed Up World of eCommerce

Just got an email from Blogger and “Head Geek” of the Web 2.0 marketing company Capulet, Darren Barefoot about a video project he did with Elastic Path - which is a an e-commerce company that also hosts a fantastic blog about e-retail (that I am a long time subscriber of and have linked to often from here).

“The Crazy, Messed Up World of eCommerce” is a series of totally hilarious videos. “In a nutshell, the videos ask “what if real-world shopping was as cruel and difficult as buying online?” writes Darren in the email.

Here’s one of my favorite videos:

There are also three more equally funny episodes here and one new video is being posted each week. Enjoy!

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New social shopping network: ShoppingWords.com

On the 18th of June, which is today to most readers of this blog, a new social shopping network has been announced - Shoppingwords.com.

Don’t mind the overly dramatic introduction to this - the shopping network isn’t all that great. Just another social shopping network with a slightly unique approach to things in that unlike wists or thisnext, this isn’t quite a social bookmarking or comparison shopping service. it’s more like a 2.0 criaglist, a huge, free, discussion forum around ‘keywords’ related to shopping (the founders of this must be SEOs or something, hehe) that could be, by some miracles - that usually happen in social networks, turned into an actual marketplace.

For example, let’s check out the Thinkpad tablet page. 4 people with profiles want to buy it. one person already has bought the computer. and one person has changed her mind about the product. there are also two comments on the product page with people suggesting other, similar products. That means, for now atleast, this isn’t quite an online shopping aid, more of a shopping research platform that plans to use the wisdom of crowds in helping people make buying decisions.

IMO, the website could start using a better design and get rid of the google adsense clutter if they would like to be considered as a worthy application by shoppers worldwide.

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I’m back! (and the hookah cafe idea)

It’s been a busy last week, I was spending most of my days this last week travelling all over Bombay looking for a shop that Amit Lewis (an old friend and co-founder of a company we started back in 2000 “General Exports” that was to be an export company but eventually became yet another internet marketing company) and I can rent to start a “Hookah” cafe that will be in business sometime next month. Hopefully, I’ll be blogging again a lot more this week, and unlike this post, mostly about “e-Business 2.1″.

Smoking “Hookahs” or water pipes, has become the latest fad here in Bombay - Very famous with kids 15-25. especially those in the age group of 15-18. Because cigarettes aren’t sold to those under 18 in India, kids try out Hookahs, that contain what is called flavoured tobacco - which isn’t any tobaco, but an array of what is really various scents - ranging from cola and red bull to more fruity flavours like strawberry and apple, that one can smoke with the steam from water in the hookah pipe. A hookah in one of these cafes is sold for anything between $4-$10 on a smoke as much as you want in an hour basis.

Now, most Hookah cafes in bombay do it the traditional way - since they are a coffee shop and it would be a outright silly to not serve anything to eat or drink with the hookahs, they have their own kitchens, and chefs and cooks and all that. It’s a lot of cost to run a hookah cafe and if you’re new in the business, building up a brand may take a while and the salaries are a large part of the cost to run the place meanwhile.

We have thought of a slightly different concept with our hookah shop.  What we are doing here, is that we are making the place an “open platform” kinda like facebook. When looking for the shops, the places we short-listed had to meet one criteria: there has to be at least: one coffee shop, one ice cream shop, one restaurant and one bakery nearby. The menu of our coffee shop will contain of everything these shops sell - and will be co-branded. Unlike other restaurants, we will not only allow but encourage guests to bring “outside food” to the table - and they may order anything from one of these restaurants right from where they’re smoking their hookah - all we do is call up the restaurant(s) and have the food or beverage delivered to our cafe, track what we ordered from where, and collect a commission on each sale we send to any of these restaurants. Later on, if the place gets any popular, we plan to give access to local retailers of non eat-or-drinkables to the cafe and sell their stuff right there. Whether this concept works or not is to be seen - but it feels kinda cool to take what one learns doing business on the internet and put those ideas to use in, of all things, a suburban Bombay hookah cafe.

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Customer Support 2.1 - ClixConnect.com

Mitch Cohen, entrepreneur and undergrad student at McGill University in Montreal, Canada sent me an email last week.

Mitch writes:

I’m a long-time reader and subscriber of Final Tag. I wanted to shoot an e-mail over to you to let you know what I’m up to - I thought you may be interested because I’ve leveraged many of the teachings from your blog in my new “Web 2.1″ endeavor

(LOL @ “teachings” hehe … I just talk here, never thought these posts would be perceived as teachings, hehe. But thanks for the ego-boost.) Cool! :D. It’s awesome to know ideas are being extracted out of the what is posted here!

That’s the first email of it’s kind I have seen in my mailbox since starting the blog a few months ago.

Anyway, Mitch and his friend - also an undergrad students at the McGill university have started a “customer support 2.1″ web company called ClixConnect.

Here’s why it’s cool:

The thing about online shopping is that there is no time constraint. Stores are open when you want to shop. The live chat feature that many sites offer is a great way to make online shoppers feel they are interacting with real people and persuades them to make their buying decisions quickly. In most cases, however, the live chat feature is only available when a store employee is online. If one wants to shop at say 2 AM in the morning, smaller shops will have no live chat, and probably, the sale will happen ultimately at a larger shop where instant customer support is available at that time.

Clicxconnect enables small to mid sized internet companies, specifically e-retailers, to offer 24/7/365 customer support on their websites. The idea behind how this is done is pretty simple and unique - You take care of the customer support while you are online. When you are offline, someone from the clixconnect call center will take over and offer customer support on your behalf. Pricing, apart from a monthly fee is based on the number of customer support minutes provided by the clixconnect call center. Plans (with a certain number of minutes included with each) start from $79/ month - which most smaller e-retailers can easily afford to spend in order to attract much better conversion ratios and very satisfied customers.

That was only customer support 2.0. Here’s the 2.1 part:

In Mitch’s own words:

hat’s half the innovation. The hugely innovative component of ClixConnect (and the part that for which we were truly inspired by your blog) is that we also have a new technology in our software which enables automated chat recommendations for customers, based upon the product they are viewing. So say someone is looking at a red t-shirt on a website, an automated chat window can appear recommending a blue pair of pants to them.

That’s the “if you like this, you may also like…” feature as seen on amazon.com, but done by a human - well, at least it will seem to the shopper that a human is making the product recommendations. if the customer replies back, a real human takes over over. Cool, eh? the only problem here may be a scenario where a shopper wants to quietly browse the store and “people” keep interrupting her by recommending stuff - because of which the shopper gets irritated and leaves the store. That’d be too much customer support and that’s equally bad as too little customer support.

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