Just read the following article from MediaPost.com on Kumo and the Microsoft Search initiative.  Check it out at:  http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=101335

I like the whole concept, and think they will impress us.  How can this Marketing book, (yes, we sell it on Amazon occassionally that is for $9.95) and blogging expert, “Moi” be so confident?  If you know your Microsoft history, you would realize that they are the masters on evolutionary innovation.  What is evolutionary innovation, they keep making things better and better until they dominate.  Windows, Office, Internet Explorer, SQL Server, Outlook etc. are just a few examples where Microsoft initially did not have a leading solution.  But, they kept on pushing and pushing for innovation and now dominate all those markets. 

So if you want to listen to this marketing guy, Kumo.com and Microsoft search will come on Google’s tale at some point.  It might take them a few years, but never ever count the Redmond Giant out of any game.  Here is an excerpt from the article:  Microsoft is conducting an internal test of Kumo, the rebranded version of Live Search, and is looking to its employees for feedback, according to an email sent late Monday afternoon.   Here is the lengthy excerpt: 

“Microsoft is conducting an internal test of Kumo, the rebranded version of Live Search, and is looking to its employees for feedback, according to an email sent late Monday afternoon.

Satya Nadella, senior vice president of research and development for Microsoft’s online services division, invited company staffers to begin testing the new search engine. “Kumo.com exists only inside the corporate network, and in order to get enough feedback we will be redirecting internal live.com traffic over to the test site in the coming days,” Nadella wrote.

Kumo, which means “cloud” or “spider” in Japanese, is the codename for the internal test and it’s not clear from the email whether the name will be retained. The service is not yet available outside the company and the email did not detail when it will go live externally.

“In spite of the progress made by search engines, 40% of queries go unanswered; half of queries are about searchers returning to previous tasks; and 46% of search sessions are longer than 20 minutes,” Nadella wrote. “These and many other learnings suggest that customers often don’t find what they need from search today. We believe we can provide a better and more useful search experience that helps you not just search but accomplish tasks.”

Features of Kumo vary by country, but results are organized in a way that saves time, according to the email. An explorer pane on the left side of results pages gives access to tools that help with tasks. Other features like single session history and hover preview help accomplish more in search sessions.

Yahoo just made a bold move to add video and image ads in their search advertising results.  I think it’s a brilliant and bold move for them to stay fresh.  I also believe that Carol Bartz, the new CEO of Yahoo, is an interesting and confident woman who is wonderful choice for Yahoo.  Here is the link to article from NY Times:  http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/19/technology/companies/19yahoo.html?_r=2&ref=technology

As we all know that for marketing to effective, marketers have to stand out.  And video and image ads are a wonderful way for the big national advertisers to do so.  You can learn this and other smart and free Internet marketing advice in our marketing book.  We not only cover how you should be blogging on a free blogs platform, but do smart SEM and internet marketing including Social Networking and social media marketing.  Enjoy!

We write a lot here about SEO, Search, and Social marketing.  And, this is all in the field of Internet marketing, and our marketing book always focuses from a perspective of blogs and how they help businesses promote themselves on line.  We all know that if you can get your self ranked high via SEO, that is the best thing you can do, but if not you have to advertise.  And if you can figure out a positive ROAS return on ad spend, you should do more of it.  So if you selling a product and make $10 net profit on each product, there is nothing wrong with you spending $0-$5 in my mind or in my marketing book to increase your sales, in fact, I don’t talk as much about internet Advertising in my marketing book as I should, but Advertising is essentially how most companies market their products.  My focus is Blogs and social marketing for internet marketing. 

There are many different forms of advertising and Search Marketing or buying keywords is the best by most people’s standards.  I also write in my marketing book that MSN  Ad Center is a great way to have lower cost for clicks, so all SEM experts usually utilize that avenue, obviously Google as a ton more traffic.  But don’t forget about AdCenter.  SEO, and blogs are free and can be great, but in Internet Marketing Content Ads or Contextual Ads are a great way to market your products and have lower cost of clicks.  Most people (newbies) don’t understand what they are.  So here is a quick overview and why they can be better than Search Keyword advertising.

Content Ads or Contextual Advertising is advertising on non-search result pages.  It is using keywords to target advertisement on everything but search results; such as blogs, emagazines, news articles, basically anything that is a content page.  And, almost always they are matched contextually by keywords.  So you can advertise on 200,000 sites in the Google ad sense network or on all MSN pages or Yahoo pages via the content ads feature of their SEM ad buying tools. 

Content Ads or Contextual ads are usually not as good for conversion, and therefore usually have lower CPC (cost per click), this is not always the case but usually.  And, this is because most advertisers who advertise on Search engines tend to not advertise on Content Ads part of those SEM tools.  So less the competition the lower your bids and more your ads can have a high ROAS (Return On Ad Spend).  Search engines also know this, and the impression volume is usually much higher, so if you are trying to build and use your brand name, this is a great way to build a brand too. 

It’s a much cheaper way to build a brand and get some conversions so in my humble opinon, Content Ads if done right are a better tool for your internet marketing.  Don’t be afraid to buy our marketing book on Amazon if you like what I am writing.  I am also giving away the marketing book for free so you will do that.  But, I do work as a consultant full time at one of the top Internet companies in the world.  Yes, you can guess it if you read my blogs enough or know where we live.  Best of all, this article was incepted with the smart content from a panel at SES from SEOMoz.  Enjoy here is the link to the great article on Content Ads;  http://www.seomoz.org/blog/getting-traffic-from-contextual-ads-ses-san-jose

For those of you wonderting why we don’t blog as much as before.  We are simply too busy with our full time jobs and raising our family.  Thanks and best wishes!

If you wish to learn about the Net Neutrality rules and regulations, it protectst the smaller players.  If you have to pay to play in the fast lane.  Who looses?  The smaller players, the startups.  Who will win, the big companies that will pay for the faster access to their own products and services.  So this is one to write to your congressman about.  But first, read this great article from the Wall Street Journal.  Ouch, this hurts and Obama will fall in the hands of the mighty, watch and see (and I use to like him, and kind of still do).

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122929270127905065.html

What is the sure fire way to promote your business? Well, easy answer is to buy our marketing book, or to read our free blogs as often as you can, or to create a blog and blog often with a proper keyword strategy.

But on a more serious point, I say it’s to link up with strategic businesses that can help you get targeted traffic. I have always said SEO is slow, SEM is fast but expensive and strategic partnerships can pay off huge, if they benefit both partis. So go do a business development deal, share a revenue stream, and help each other promote your blog or business. What you thought, i was going to talk about link building for SEO and getting you to rank high? Sorry, already done that a few times, see the links to our previous blog posts on SEO and power of link aggregation for link popularity.

Here are our previous blog posts on and link building to promote your business, yes we have more strategies in our marketing book, do you think we are promoting it too much, well not really, just here this blog, and on all of our blogging pages.   It is the greatest Internet Marketing book of all time:-), well may be not, but a good one.

Demystifing SEO link building, from iMediaConnection.com

Posted by: admin on Saturday, 6th Sep, 2008

Ethical SEO way of getting thousands of Link in a week, PressReleases but how?

Posted by: admin on Wednesday, 27th Feb, 2008

How To Beat Blogger’s Block #5: Folksonomy Is Your Friend

Posted by: Blogging Coach on Monday, 13th Aug, 2007

Rome Wasn’t Built In A Day, And Neither Is A Fantastic Blog

Posted by: Blogging Coach on Tuesday, 31st Jul, 2007

Don’t Blog In A Vacuum

Posted by: Blogging Coach on Tuesday, 24th Jul, 2007

Three Things to Do Before You Click Publish (and One Thing to Do After)

Posted by: Blogging Coach on Tuesday, 3rd Jul, 2007

SEO for Bloggers: Off-Site SEO and the Social Media (Part 5 of 6)

Posted by: Blogging Coach on Wednesday, 27th Jun, 2007

SEO For Bloggers: Link Baiting For Fun and Profit (Part 3 of 6)

Posted by: Blogging Coach on Tuesday, 26th Jun, 2007

SEO For Bloggers: Link Building and Link Popularity (Part 2 of 6)

**this free blog is possible due to our clients such as blogging at MyTypes.com, Free blog and Internet Marketing book, and web design St. Louis at ArtWorksdesign.com and VRBO by RentExpert.com, and Infrared Heaters the best heaters at Greenisbetter.org.

The report of so many executives leaving Yahoo is staggering, I have never seen anything like it. It’s like the folks at the top of Yahoo, Jerry Yang and Sue Decker, were delusional when they walked away from MS, but did we think that people at Yahoo really thinks so too. What’s worse, having no company to run or staying indepandant?

This whole thing has to be significantly embarrassing for the two love birds, Sue and Jerry. Yahoo had so many great properties, and it simply had all the traffic in the world, but it could not monetize it. We all know that Google is dominating search, but the other competitors are never too far away, and Advertisers want a choice. They learned their lesson from the one shop show of the 90′s. They won’t let that happen again. We didn’t want to cover Internet Advertising in our SEO blog, as we are focused on SEO, but our clients do ask us for the advertising advice. So all we can say is same rules for optimizing apply, pick your keywords carefully. And, read as many blogs on SEO, SEM, and Internet Advertising. Don’t be afraid to pick up our Marketing book, it’s worth it’s weight in gold. Cathca later aligator!

Precious commodities, world is running out of resources at Bill Gross.com

The link above will take you to Bill Gross’s blog, here is his picture:   I used the Press-It function of WordPress to blog about him, as I just saw him advertise on Google for keywords “Business Blog“, therefore I went to his blog a few minutes ago. It made me wonder, if most SEO Services providers or anyone in the SEO world even knows who Bill Gross is? The more important question you maybe asking yourself is, why do i care? I am sure you have heard of Google, the great search engine, and we have talked a lot about Google’s Adwords and keyword searches to target specific traffic. SEO services are more dependent on Adwords than they realize, that is the secret for smart SEO Service providers. So the main engine at Google that helps you and I in SEO is really Google Ad words. What, I know what you are thinking, we are all organic man, we don’t do Pay Per Click. Here is the deal, because if Google couldn’t tell us which keywords to target, we would not be very good at our SEO Services.

So back to the subject Who is Bill Gross? Bill is visionary, an entrepreneur, high tech investor, he founded a Venture Fund, an idea factory, an internet hub for investments and a few internet companies that are very popular today. He is also one of the most important people in the technology business. I have always looked up to him, and admired him from afar. I have never met the man, just read But, why I am writing is that he is probably, more important in Internet Marketing than most SEO service providers would acknowledge or even be aware of. He founded Overture, which got sold to Yahoo. They had built a patent on pay per click type adwords, which Google used and paid big time for. I was told by my friend that Google actually used the pay per click ad words and ad sense technology of Overture, and paid millions of dollars for it. I am going to classify this in the rumor category for now, as I have not validated the research on Google’s direct use of the technology. 

Regardless, the Overture impact on Internet Marketing, advertising and keyword searches is very important to acknowledge. And, is probably the most important factor in Internet Marketing and SEO especially of this industry that Google has been credited for. We as senior level technologist, OK simpleton SEO services experts, have known that affiliate marketing is also big for driving traffic. But did you know that link exchanges and link partnerships were the original affiliate marketing sites? And guess what, Bill Gross also founded one of the internet’s biggest affiliate marketing companies too.

Do you know the name of this Internet Marketing giant? Ok, you may not think of Commission Junction as a big deal, they were more powerful in the past, Valueclick, Inc. I think bought them years ago, but still runs about 50% of the worlds largest e-retailers affiliate marketing sites. I would like to thank him for creating the SEO Services and being an Internet Marketing pioneer. Now Bill would you only please invest in my company, well just kidding, we have given up on investments, we are trying to grow through SEO Services, hence the focus on that.

Now back to Bill Gross, Not only did he start one of the biggest companies in Affiliate marketing, guess what else he started or impacted? I think Cars.com or many other companies were started by Bill Gross and his Idealab. So do visit his business blog, by Clicking on BillGross.com.

I wanted to write a blog post on the best marketing books of all time, I typed in Google and came up with this list, attached link. Some of you know, I rip on Amazon a little, but I mean no harm buy it, gosh, they are a good company. But this blogging/SEO expert, Moi have to give them some credit for their amazing SEO skills or it could be their smart book content?    Honestly Amazon is known to be an amazing company run by an amazing CEO, but the internal structure has stopped it’s employees (my friends–many of them work there) of following through on some interesting initiatives. The company is known for it ruthless corporate culture, it’s been said that the cut throat corporate culture at Microsoft never reached this height. This is coming from good people who work there folks. But, maybe that is what is required to be the world’s largest ecommerce, and online marketplace. I do have to say that I love eBay, but they have their issues and their Online Marketplace had a revolt from it’s sellers last few week with a boycott too. Finally here is the list of the books by Amazon and my list below:

Amazon.com: “Top 17 Marketing Books Of All Time”

So what are my favorite Marketing Books of all time, and why? I have to do some research on this, but I have to tell you, I may not have read enough to make a difference. And, mine are now becoming outdated, and tend to focus on high tech marketing.  I will compile a bigger list and add to this blog. This starts to complete this wholistic view I want to present about SEO, Blogging, Search Engine Marketing, Internet Marketing and Marketing as a whole. Because our goal here is to work in the real world to help all businesses succeed, that is why it makes sense as a series of blogs?

1. The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. Why? Because it explains human behavior and how trends are started and created, a must read marketing book of all time!

2. “Crossing the Chasm” by Geoffrey Moore

3. “Inside the Tornado” by Geoffrey Moore

4. “Innovators Dilemma” Clayton Christensen

5. “SEO for Dummies” by Peter Kent

6. “Marketing to the Social Web” Larry Weber

7. “Purple Cow” Seth Godin

8. “The Big Moo” Seth Godin and 33 other experts such as Tom Peters

9. Everything by Peter Drucker

10. “Watch This Listen Up Click Here” by David Verklin

There are honorable mentions of a couple of Internet Marketing books, the SEO Book is good, and there are countless others, want to add to this list, let me/us know. “The Long Tail” is a great concept and book, I have not fully read this book, just skimmed it. I do want to mention it. Also, you may have heard about us launching our Internet Marketing book, which covers blogging and it’s benefit for SEO, which I have always said is the most important part of SEM (Search Engine Marketing), and is ultimately part of Internet Marketing.

Best Small Business Marketing Strategies

For the longest time, I wanted to grow one of my small businesses to be a large company. I never really was satisfied with being small, I think a lot of people and businesses are not. But millions of small business owners are laughing being content and making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. How do they do it, and what is wrong with being small anyway? Nothing at all, and they are small because they choose be best, rather than big.So what does being a small business have to do with best marketing strategies. A ton, I feel that to be competitive, small business marketing is what makes the difference. If you can’t compete on size, you compete with creativity, and creativity is the hidden secret edge of all small business marketing. Creativity just means thinking out of the box, and Small Business Marketing is most often the place I see it. And, the companies that make it, do that well, well some times they Barter too:-). All seriousness aside, companies that are successful from small business to big, usually have creative marketing ideas.

As mentioned before, think of a unique name for your brand, your product or better yet do all of the above and help your customers in a unique and memorable way, and they will come searching for you! How and why? When your brand becomes a house hold name, such as MySpace, people search for you on Google and other places. And, that is the goal of any brand development of small business marketing.

*As mentioned this Free blog is brought to you courtesy of our sponsors: ITEX the Barter Network, and Silver Cross Jewelry by Jill Brahms, and infrared heaters by Greenisbetter.org, better than Edenpure Heaters.  In case you wanted to read my main blog often more personal than just business, but I do cover my various Small Business blogs there @ Mytypes.com/Vipin

I am surprised that most people don’t know about search marketing, but they should. They all know about Google, Yahoo, and MSN, right? That is why. I want to use the word “Secret” to your eSuccess.

The word Secret is over used a little lately, we do love the movie and didn’t want to play on it’s message. But the people in the Search Marketing world and SEO world are too secretive. The hidden secret is simple, but they want you to think it’s too technical, but it’s not, and it should be unveiled. It’s as easy as blogging with the right keywords every day.

Traditional marketing is not dead, but the new media of the Internet is not a pipe dream any more either. The biggest most powerful world of Internet marketing is not email, it’s not the web 2.0 social media marketing. If we were to keep it simple and stupid, it would be the Google effect. But, wait Live Search from Microsoft got a big leg up this week. Live signed deals with Digg.com and Facebook.com two of the top 5 leaders in the Social media giants of the internet.

The world of marketing has changed dramatically due to Google and other search engines.  Search engine optimization or Search Engine Marketing or Internet Marketing in that order are subset of each other. Because Google is the first to give the small business a chance by it’s adwords product. What adwords does is makes it easier for small business to buy keywords to market it’s products. And contextual ads being mapped to search results makes everyone happy.

Why? When a consumer is looking for information, and a search engine provides the info.  Regardless if it is an Ad or not, they help by providing the right information at the right time. People don’t want to be pushed advertisements down their throat. People prefer to look for information, we are all treasure hunters and want to find stuff. And this is where Google made the search results better and created this huge world of Search Marketing. In fact, according to SEMPO.org the industry size is suppose to be a $7.8Billion dollars. We are not a member of Sempo, but we support it’s mission. SEMPO Mission: SEMPO is a global non-profit organization serving the search engine marketing industry and marketing professionals engaged in it.

So how do you have eSuccess in search marketing results?  Search Engines want to provide the best contextual related results to consumers, so should you.  They target news related websites first, and blogs are considered news.  Blogs are considered news because, well you already know this, right? Each blog post has a time stamp on it. So for a blog to be found as a search result, it has to be written with the proper keywords that is searched for. But, how do you write unless you know the targeted keywords. Well, that is easy you have to go back to the Search engines and start with Search Marketing. So it’s a full circle, search engines provide that information in their keyword analysis tools. Which is the most important, but one of the many tools required for your eSuccess via Search marketing. The tool sets as a whole are referred to SEO and SEM tools. This is what the professionals use, and you as a small business can learn these too, especially for free SEO tools site called LinkMint.com

We are a commercial site, and actually built our own SEO Tools last year. I have been studying search marketing and SEO since 2003, and have been blogging since the same time. Why did I continue to blog, even though I had nothing to write.  Because I knew the secret that is easy to get over looked.  Blogging is the best way to SEO and search market for your products and services.  So this makes Blogging the best SEO tool on the market. And to do it right, you have to blog often and with the proper keywords.

That’s search marketing in a nut shell, but we will go a step further.  I will do a series starting next week.  I will cover many of the unknown secrets to SEO, SEM, and search marketing.  You notice, how I took out the word Internet out of it, I am changing the words because the word Internet is so passe.  Search, social, eSuccess, inspiration, empower, human element, and new media is, what it is all about:-). You like the Pic above, I want to pay for it and buy the rights to it for my hard copy book, what do you think?  Is it too unprofessional, too provocative, indicative of uncovering secrets and beautiful for marketing?