Anointed CEO

Choosing the domain name for you business is not difficult if only there’s not much pollution in search engine marketing industry.

There’s a little debate if domain name is a factor in search engine ranking.

The very reason domain name exist, is for people to remember.

It’s easier to remember “yahoo.com” than “69.46.103.131″ isn’t?

With that in mind, here are my advices in choosing the right domain name for your business:

• The domain name must be easily to remember.

• The domain name must be easily to spell.

• Avoid using dash (-) if possible. Use it only once if necessary.

• If your customers are local or national market, use country code top-level domains (ccTLD). Examples are “.us” for United States and “.ca” for Canada. This way, search engines can automatically know your target visitors are.

• Use your business name us domain name.

As you see, those advices are mostly common sense and not complicated. Go ahead and register your domain name to registrar like GoDaddy.

Good news for web publishers utilizing Google Adsense as advertising platform. Google has rolled out the Simplified Ad Management. Through this system, whenever you change the colors, channels, or styles of your ads, you just need to modify it once at your Adsense ad management page and it will take effect after couple of minutes to your website.

This will come in handy particularly if you are doing some testing on which ad style or color is more effective. No more cut and paste of the code.

There are few things you can’t do though. You can’t change the size of ad unit and you can’t delete ads through the management page.

Google has posted some answers to frequently asked questions here.

In attempt to get a chunk of online music sales, Nokia opened up its own store but critics has nothing to say but it sucks.

Big players in the market like iTunes and Amazon.com has unique selling proposition but Nokia has nothing new to offer. Currently, download is limited to UK Internet users, supports only Internet Explorer browser and Windows Operating System, and it is DRM protected. Browser compatibility alone can be a headache from people using Firefox, Netscape, and others.

So why did they opened up? In 2005, UK music download sales reached 10 Million and are rising steadily. While Amazon Music Store is available only to United States customers, Nokia is trying to build its market on UK.

After couple of blogs received a lashed from Google by reducing their toolbar pagerank, many are now believers that PR toolbar does not matter.

When I started to study SEO, I searched for some Internet Marketing Professionals that I think are credible and offer free advice. One thing I learned from them is, “Ignore PR toolbar”, and instead focuses on building a useful site for the users. So glad I did follow their advice. Here are some more that may help you:

1. Your site should have a Unique Selling Proposition (USP).
2. Content is King
3. Think of the users first, search engine second.
4. After launching the site, resist the temptation of checking the site regularly on Search Engine Results Page (SERP).
5. No link farming.
6. Link exchanges are not necessary. In some instances, it is beneficial but in terms of SEO, it has no value.
7. Domain name does not matter in SEO.

I do not guarantee success by doing the listed advice. It’s just, those advice make sense to me.

Lastly, it is worth to invest some time to search on some knowledgeable people in the field you would like dive in to advance your skills. Be wary though to those who appears expert.

I have seen a lot lately that businesses create a profile for their business on social network websites like Friendster and Multiply for marketing purposes. I personally know a friend who market himself quite good through those sites. This is not a bad idea. People on your network will receive email updates whenever you update your profile, add friends, post a shoutout, etc, without you being perceive as spammer.

But how do you do it effectively?

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I really think that having this Local Ad Network will eventually awaken advertisers that online advertising is a good option to promote a product or branding. People criticizing the Mad Crowd Media (MCM) basically have the same question.

“Who will advertise to these local sites?”

That is really tough question to answer, but my bet that there will be enough. It will not come easy and may take a while, but it can be a breakthrough for all local publishers and Netrepreneurs out there where advertising is their business model.

For undecided publishers out there, I will say, let’s give this a try. I haven’t seen MCM’s contract but I feel that publishers has nothing to lose on this deal. Go give it a shot.

For MCM, I am pretty sure they are aware on the hurdles that they need overcome to influence advertisers to spend a chunk of their advertising budget on this new medium (well, for them, online advertising is still considerably new.)

In the mind of advertisers, these are some questions that may arise and MCM must have clear answers:

• Is this effective? How can you persuade advertisers that advertising to these local sites are effective. We are aware of ad blindness particularly on blogs and forums.
• Pay-per-click is usually a better option for advertisers. The question is are you prepared to deal with click fraud?
• Can I safely associate my brand to a particular blog? I noticed that most, if not all, publishers in MCM Network are blogs. Blog normally has no editors and the author will simply say what he/she feel saying. A blog post may affect the brand that my business is pushing. What if the author will write about my competitor or something that may indirectly hurt my brand?

There will be lots of brainstorming need to be done if these questions have no answers yet. Still, I believe that this effort of MCM will bring fruits and may open more opportunities to publishers and advertisers.

Ok, I know the title is an overstatement but I just recently discover the Philosophy of Google in building a website and company that will change the world. No wonder why Google is now more than a search engine but becoming a behemoth technology company.

Here is the summary of Ten Things Google Has Found To Be True.

1. Focus on the user and all else will follow.
2. It’s best to do one thing really, really well.
3. Fast is better than slow.
4. Democracy on the web works.
5. You don’t need to be at your desk to need an answer
6. You can make money without doing evil.
7. There’s always more information out there.
8. The need of information crosses all borders.
9. You can be serious without a suit.
10. Great just isn’t good enough.

For Netrepreneursout there, consider that 10 things as a check list in launching your next website and as Google has said it, “All Else Will Follow”.