On April 29th, by virtue of this interview with a local hero, the whole country has read an official endorsement by the national newspaper that Internet Marketing is no longer considered a ‘rogue’ profession, muahaha…

Read how Ewen Chia manages financial planning for his family.

J.P. Schoeffel of Niches-In-A-Box just got a great piece of news concerning AdWords/AdSense: Google is beta-testing CPA ads and text link ads on the US market currently. There will be new implications to working in both programs.

For AdWords advertisers, they will be able to bid for an action, and not only for a click! This is a HUGE difference, meaning you won’t have to fear paying for all this useless clicks. In addition it will lower the “click fraud” syndrome which is a real pain with AdWords.

An action could be :

1) a lead: you will pay when the visitor has completed the form, thus becoming a ‘real’ prospect you can follow-up. The value of your bid is now connected with the potential lifetime value of your lead instead of the nanosecond value of the visitor’s click to your website. I think this spells a positive sign for opt-in pages. Is Google doing a turnaround in its perspective towards opt-in sites?

2) a sale: it’s a disguised affiliate program. But imagine the profits it could generate (especially in non-IM related niches). You will offer $5 or $10 for each sale generated. Don’t you think you will find publishers for your program?

For publishers, Google is trying out a new type of text link ad. It will be a few words of text that will be inline with your own content. It will be transparent, and your visitors will not be able to know it until they click on the ad.

For example, you will have an article. Inside a sentence, you will have a ‘natural’ sequence leading to the “action form” the advertiser bids on. If the visitor completes the action (lead, sale), you will be paid for this.

It’s kind of what some scripts do by embedding ClickBank products inside your content…the main difference is it will be much more relevant than most of the products that are presented as not so related to the content.

We keep you posted as new development arises.

Yahoo! is entering a suddenly crowded field, offering Skype-like capabilities through its instant-messaging service that will let people dial regular phone numbers using their computers or receive calls from conventional phones.

The company has not set a firm date for the availability of the new paid features to the mostly free Yahoo! messenger service, but indicated the launch was imminent.

Yahoo!’s addition of computer-to-phone capabilities follows a similar retooling of the rival AOL Instant Messenger service from Time Warner in October. It also comes just as Skype is revamping its popular service with video calling, a feature that has been available through Yahoo! Messenger for several years, though only for computer-to-computer calls.

In a similar vein, Sony introduced a free Internet-based phone service last month with an emphasis on visual calling that the company hopes will fulfill sales of its video equipment.

Yahoo!’s new “Phone Out” option enables users to call regular and mobile phones for 1 US cent per minute in the States and 2 US cents per minute to 30 other countries including Argentina, Australia, China, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Korea.

On the flip side, users can sign up for a traditional phone number to receive unlimited calls to their computers from anywhere for a monthly fee of US$3 or an annual payment of about US$30.

The same services at Skype, which was acquired by eBay for US$2.6 billion in October, are 2.3 US cents per minute for computer-to-phone calls to about 25 countries and about US$35 a year for a SkypeIn phone number to receive calls.

Yahoo!’s upgrade also includes a contact search bar for its instant messenger window to make it easier to find people in buddy lists by typing parts of a name or phone number. – AP

Google is preparing to release its own wireless Internet service, Google WiFi, according to several pages found on the company’s website.

The Internet search leader refers to a product called “Google Secure Access” which is designed to establish a more secure connection while using Google WiFi”, according to a page of FAQs at http://wifi.google.com/faq.html. A separate page at http://wifi.google.com/download.html offers a free download of Google Secure Access.

Google declined to comment on the issue.

The start of a WiFi service would move Google away from its core Internet search service and into the competitive world of Internet service providers and telecommunications giants.

Speculation about a coming Google WiFi service has been rife since August, when an article appeared in Business 2.0 magazine, but the company has refused to discuss its plans.

WiFi is an increasingly popular technology that is used to provide high-speed wireless Internet access in homes, business and public spaces like airports and cafes.

Google opened a sponsored WiFi hotspot in San Francisco’s Union Square district in April with a start-up called Feeva.

The FAQ page says the Google Secure Access service is in ‘beta’ stage, meaning the company does not consider it a fully finished product.

Google, which is rapidly expanding beyond its core Internet search service, introduced an instant messaging service called GoogleTalk in August. – International Herald Tribune

From radio came television—sound with pictures. Now from TV comes the podcast—audio with pictures subtracted. These listen-only downloads for computers and MP3 players let you keep up with your favourite programs any time, even on the go. The networks are suddenly rushing to ramp up their online offerings of both shows and the inside scoops on them. Among the early adopters:

1) CBS: All of Guiding Light’s dramatic doings can be heard daily, complete with scene-setting narration. CBS Soapbox interviews daytime stars. Online chats spotlight night-timers such as Jeff Probst, Charles Dutton and Stockard Channing. News downloads include audio clips from 60 Minutes and Face The Nation.

2) Fox: Recaps of a dozen-plus series, including House, Family Guy, The OC, The Simpsons, with interviews and other backstage content.

3) SciFi: Full Battlestar Galactica episode commentary from re-creator Ronald D. Moore. Podcast planned for December mini-series The Triangle.

4) Showtime: Cast chats from Barbershop and Weeds.

5) PBS: Entire episodes of NOW and Religion & Ethics weekly. – LAT-WP News Service

Started by 2 Stanford Ph.D students, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, in the proverbial garage in Silicon Valley, it changed the world withs its search function and out out of business 2 earlier search engines, Alta Vista and Excite.

It gets all its revenue from keyword search advertising.

The biggest player in the global Internet advertising market, it has about US$8 billion in annual sales.

While many of its competitors like Yahoo! and AOL have introduced their e-mail, instant messaging and other similar services earlier, Google has had to play catch-up.

Without doubt it is ambitious. Google is everywhere on the computer desktop to ensure that it will be used by everyone in communications, entertainment and information handling. Hence its product pipeline is continually turning out new services which are better than its competitors, say reports in global newspapers and IT magazines.

USA Today in its online edition last week said, “To its credit, Google is often getting there by coming out with products that are better than those from competitors. Google Maps can just flat-out do more than Yahoo! Maps. GMail trumps Hotmail.”

By extending its real estate space, it is attracting visitors who uses its search service to stay longer within its space rather than simply completing the search and then clicking away. In this manner, it can monetize the eyeballs and hence, increase its advertising dollar.

Of late, Skype has announced it will make its software more widely available and easier to use, in an effort and race against the portal giants to draw more people away from traditional land-lines and mobile networks.

2 up-&-coming ones, SkypeWeb and SkypeNet, enables creators of websites and computer software to build Skype voice and instant messaging communications into their own products or web pages.

Much as an e-mail address embedded in web text and messages can provide one-click creation of a new message, incorporating SkypeWeb and SkypeNet code would make contacting Skype users possible in a single click without the users having Skype’s software loaded in their computers.

Skype will provide all these tools and more free of charge. Watch this space for later news.

Aug. 15 2005 (Bloomberg)—China is partying like it’s 1999.

The reference here isn’t to pop star Prince or the Y2K bug, but the height of the dot-com stock bubble. In the last year of the 1990s, hysteria over Internet companies that later disappointed investors reached a fever pitch. Are we seeing the beginnings of a similar phenomenon in China?

China’s dot-com boom is in its infancy, whereas 1999 marked the beginning of the end of the U.S.’s. Yet with Yahoo! Inc. agreeing to pay $1 billion in cash for a 40 percent stake in Alibaba.com, it’s hard not to wonder if Internet mania is underway in Asia’s No. 2 economy.
China’s biggest online retailer isn’t considered a corporate basket case. The question is whether Yahoo, seduced by a potential market of 1.3 billion people, is overpaying for a piece of the Hong Kong-based company.

The $1 billion figure seems like a huge amount for less than half of an e-commerce outfit with 2,300 employees that reported sales of $46 million last year. The investment is easily the biggest by an overseas company in China’s Internet industry. It certainly won’t be the last.

China’s Allure

The deal came after shares of Baidu.com Inc. soared almost fivefold in its Aug. 5 initial public offering, the biggest IPO debut in more than five years. The Beijing-based owner of a popular Web search engine instantly became the most valuable technology company in China, with a market capitalization of almost $5 billion. The IPO caught the attention of investors the world over.

It’s easy to understand the allure. China holds tremendous promise, considering that less than 10 percent of the nation has Internet access. At the moment, China has 100 million Web users, half the number of the U.S.

That’s why Amazon.com Inc., EBay Inc., Google Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo are clamoring for Chinese partners. But should investors be so quick to own shares in Chinese dot-coms? Haven’t we seen that such IPOs can be the financial world’s equivalent of fool’s gold?

Maybe China will prove the skeptics wrong. Executives and investors searching for the next big thing are mesmerized by the nation’s growth. The Chinese economy expanded 9.5 percent in the second quarter and retail sales rose 12.7 percent to a four-month high in July. Retail sales increased 12.9 in June.

Eye On Consumers

China’s Premier Wen Jiabao is counting on consumer spending and exports to sustain growth at the 8.6 percent annual rate of the last decade as he steers the economy away from its dependence on investment. The focus is on developing a thriving domestic market driven by household consumption.

Profiting from that growth is what Yahoo has in mind with its Alibaba.com investment.

All this is contributing to an environment where investors are ignoring Alibaba.com’s tiny revenue and eyeing its 14 million users. This is what got so many investors in trouble in the 1990s: ignoring concrete measures such as revenue in favor of squishy numbers like “clicks” or “unique visitors” to a website. Old- economy business realities took a back seat to hype.

Any number of risks might complicate Yahoo’s plans.

For one thing, Internet censorship regulations by the Chinese government can be unpredictable. For another, China’s market for online advertising is immature at best. And there is the question of the Chinese consumers’ willingness to pay for Web services.

Dot-com Mania?

Do China’s already shaky stock markets really want to attract the same breed of investor who bet on Boo.com, Globe.com and Pets.com, companies that went bust once the frenzy passed?

For years now, a gold-rush mentality has pervaded boardrooms of multinational companies. So excited are executives about cheap labor that they’re willing to look past the warts. China’s banking system is awash in hundreds of billions of dollars of bad loans and social unrest could boil over as the gap between rich and poor widens. Analysts also worry that China’s economy may overheat.

China itself almost seems like the economic equivalent of the dot-com boom of the 1990s. It’s thought to be run by omnipotent geniuses who can do little wrong. It’s Asia’s New Economy, its potential is boundless and anyone who doesn’t see that is either a fool or a dinosaur.

Lessons Of The 1990s

All this leaves the Communist Party with the burden of achieving goals that are both unprecedented and seemingly at odds with one another: Creating hundreds of millions of jobs to maintain social stability while cooling growth to avoid inflation. It needs to accomplish both feats without traditional tools like short-term interest rates, which have little influence over China’s economy.

None of this means Yahoo’s Alibaba.com investment won’t pay off. The company already has proven its mettle in Japan, where it established itself as an important Internet power. And given China’s vast potential, not investing there would be a risk in itself.

It’s imperative that investors remember the lessons of the U.S. dot-com boom and bust and apply them to China. At the moment, it’s not clear that they are.

William Pesek Jr. is a columnist for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own. To contact the writer of this column: William Pesek Jr. in Wellington, New Zealand at wpesek@bloomberg.net.

The patent which Google recently filed details many points that Google uses to rank web pages. The title of the patent is “Information retrieval based on historical data” and it confirms the existence of the Google sandbox and that it can apply to all web pages.

How your web page changes influence your rankings on Google

The patent specification revealed a lot of information about possible ways Google might use your web page changes to determine the ranking of your site.

In addition to web page content, the ranking of web pages is influenced by the frequency of page or site updates. Google measures content changes to determine how fresh or how stale a web page is. Google tries to distinguish between real and superfluous content changes.

This doesn’t mean that it is always advisable to regularly change the content of your web pages. Google says that stale results might be desirable for information that doesn’t need updating while fresh content is good for results that require it.

For example, seasonal results might go up and down in the result pages based on the time of the year.

Google possibly records the following web page changes:

1) the frequency of changes
2) the amount of changes (substantial or shallow changes)
3) the change in keyword density
4) the number of new web pages that link to a web page
5) the changes in anchor texts (the text that is used to link to a web page)
6) the number of links to low-trust websites (for example too many affiliate links on one web page)

Google may use the results of this analysis to specify the ranking of a web page in addition to its content.

Section 0128 in the patent filing reveals that you shouldn’t change the focus of too many documents at once:

“A significant change over time in the set of topics associated with a document may indicate that the document has changed owners and previous document indicators, such as score, anchor text, etc., are no longer reliable.

Similarly, a spike in the number of topics could indicate spam. For example, if a particular document is associated with a set of one or more topics over what may be considered a ‘stable’ period of time and then a (sudden) spike occurs in the number of topics associated with the document, this may be an indication that the document has been taken over as a ‘doorway’ document.

Another indication may include the disappearance of the original topics associated with the document. If one or more of these situations are detected, then [Google] may reduce the relative score of such documents and/or the links, anchor text, or other data associated the document.”

This means that the Google sandbox phenomenon may apply to your website if you change your web pages.

What does this meant to your website?

First of all, you should make sure that your web page content is optimized for Google. If your web page content is not optimized, all other ranking factors won’t help you much.

Try to find out if the keywords you target on search engines require static or fresh search results and update your website content accordingly. Make sure that you don’t change too much at once so that your website won’t be put in the sandbox.

Sure, it sounds a little bit like “Big Brother”, but the truth is that Google is indeed watching you. Many have long suspected that getting embedded on Google’s search results involved the human element. It has now been confirmed.

Google is paying people, both in the U.S. and offshore, an hourly fee to preview web sites to see if they are worthy of inclusion in the search engine. It has been discovered that they are using a URL called eval.google.com for independent contractors that Google has hired to eyeball websites and check them for quality.

What does this mean to you?

If your website features quality content and is updated regularly, you will benefit from this. The odds are that your site will survive the next Google Dance.

But if you are using automated page building scripts (such as Traffic Equalizer), you may be shocked to find your page views dropping like a brick falling from the Empire State Building.

My recommendation? Build quality sites that people find valuable. If visitors like it, it is likely that Google will like it as well.