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Are Paid Links are More Justifiable Than Paid Friends?

September 3rd, 2009

There’s a well-known fact that paid links are a widely used SEO technique that may bring immediate results. However, as search engines obviously don’t welcome paid links, this SEO technique (not sure that it can be described as “White Hat” one) may lead to risks for those who buy them: Google is penalizing those who buy paid links. Moreover, paid links don’t guarantee long-term results. However, still many dot.com entrepreneurs buy links to manipulate rankings for their websites. Paid links remain the subject of intensive Software Discussion at Beta Release  being a very huge and controversial subject.

no-easy-money

But lets’ turn to such a relatively new technique in the digital world called “paid friends”. Social media optimization is continuously becoming an imperative for businesses of any size looking forward to extracting benefits from their online presence. However, social media optimization is not an easy task and network building demands engagement and time. And unsurprisingly lots of businesses want to get results at once without working hard to establish a large network of potential customers. The same as with paid links, “paid friends” buyers should also stay cautious because, for instance, Facebook’s terms of service prohibit using personal profiles for commercial purposes. So the risk of being banned is feasible.

On one of my favorite blogs I read the information about the agency that offers the “paid friends” service. You are in need of 5000 friends on Facebook? They will be yours for nearly $650. For roughly $1,200 you’ll get 10,000 friends. The follower on Twitter will cost you 11 cents. Nice, isn’t it? But I still really doubt that this social media marketing option will work out. Yes, paid links are not good but still they can bring results. Can paid friends bring results? I really doubt. The ROI in buying friends is not easily quantifiable. Every effective social media optimization campaign demands engagement and, what is more important, interactions. The trust and reputation are the milestones for every effective SMO campaign. Will a business gain trust through buying friends or build reputation without interacting with them? Sounds dubious.

Now let’s turn to the title of this post: so are paid links are more justifiable than paid links? Probably they both should be treated as no-nos. At least the first one is risky and the second one is very doubtful.

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admin SEO , , ,

Search Engines Market Shares. Google Dominates, Yandex is on the Rise

September 1st, 2009

As roughly 90-95% of Internet users start their surfing over the web with search engines, this is always interesting to know (at least for me :) ) the latest market shares of the most popular search engines. Happily, analytic company comScore, well-known for its unbiased researches of the digital world, is regularly issuing reports dedicated to this topic. Normally, the results of such studies don’t differ much from the previous ones and don’t make a real surprise. However, the latest research (as on 31st August,2009) may be treated as more catching because of the fact that the Russian search engine giant Yandex is on the remarkable rise showing the most impressive growth rates.

Google’s domination is still indisputable and the competition remains only for the second place. Google’s share of online searches makes up 67,5% having processed 77 billion queries in July - 58% growth comparing to the last year results. Google’s secret ingredient is believed to be high customer satisfaction. To the point, Google scored an 86 out of 100 on the latest American Customer Satisfaction Index (ASCI), University of Michigan.

Yahoo! is unsurprisingly the second with control over 7,8% of the searches. However, web concepts state its growth is not that outstanding: 8,9 billion queries against 8,7 for the similar period in 2008. The Chinese Baidu is closing the list of leaders with the piece of the pie of 7,0% of the world’s online searches. In total, Internet users produced 113,7 billion online queries in the search engines, which is 41% higher comparing to the July of 2008.

Here is the chart of online searches’ share in the US as on July of 2009.

search-engines-pic1Now toYandex. ComScore points out that Yandex is showing distinguished growth rates and now is the fastest growing search engine. In July of 2008 Yandex processed 660 million queries and this index reached 1,3 billion in July of 2009. This means the growth of almost twice as many queries! Yandex market share has increased from 0,8% to 1,13% and now Yandex is on the eighth position in the list of the main world’s search engines.

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admin SEO , ,

Email Survey Software

May 29th, 2009

Email survey software is one of the various ways of getting valuable feedback from customers. In this age where internet access is easy to get, this is indeed an effective method of connecting to customers.

With email survey free software, you can not only design your survey from the scratch, but also send it to as many customers you like through email. The important part here is to escape spam filters. To ensure this, a unique email should be created for each client. Good email survey software will also give you a record of the number of people who have taken part in the survey, their occupation, and other such details. The email survey software can also keep track of any email that failed in reaching the client or bounced back.

Designing your survey form is too easy with email survey software. try outlook duplicate items remover. The software has a collection of survey form templates which you can go through and select one that is most relevant to your survey. You can then customize the survey form in whichever way you want. You also get sample questions for various kinds of business surveys. You can use it too. So that is how you save valuable time on creating the email survey. Once you are ready with the survey form, you can choose the email addresses of clients you want to get feedback from. Once you have done that, you can just click “enter” and your survey form reaches thousands of customers in a jiffy.

After giving enough time for the recipients to respond, you can go through the response from the clients. The software automatically generates graphical representation of the survey data. Using the graphs you will be able to analyze your survey results that much easier. You may find more info at Computlive Computer blog provides technology reviews.

Overall, email survey software is an essential tool for gathering and analyzing customer feedback the easy way. The software can be easily integrated with iPod Touch Games

Software Development Company

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admin IT , ,

Facebook’s Main Face

April 10th, 2009

Envy is bad. But I envy Mark Zuckerberg. He’s much younger than me but already in Forbes with a billion! I envy Zuckerberg but I admire him a bit too. He’s a smart guy, I should say. Not every Harvard alumnus can boast of being CEO of one of the most influential social networks on the planet. What is more amazing is that he could start the career just after graduating from school:  Microsoft and AOL tried to recruit him.

This curly red head owns 200 million mindszuckerman-again

It’s unbelievable but Mark and his roommates started Facebook in 2004 from their dormitory and on the 8th of April 2009 it was announced about a 200 millionth user. After spreading their social network to other schools including Yale and Stanford, Zuckerberg moved to California not to ever come back to Harvard as a student.  In California the future owner of the most influential social online community met Peter Thiel who invested money in the promising project.

The current situation is: Mark Zuckerberg is the youngest person ever appeared in Forbes 400, the 321st richest person in the US as on 2008, his enterprise is $15 billion worth with 200million users all over the world. Not bad for a guy of 24.

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admin People , ,

Bad Guys and Nice Guys

April 8th, 2009

The cold war is still on. Or at least some people think it is. People in the USA, France, Great Britain, Germany, Italy and Spain can name the personalities that rise hostility in them.

dr-evil-02According to the latest study Fidel Castro is regarded as the main villain for the entire civilized world. Vladimir Putin can’t boast of being a favorite of NATO countries residents either. The Chinese leader Hu Jintao, Dmitry Medvedev and Pope Benedict XVI are equally unpopular among Europeans. The only European leader who will not be praised with a friendly smile by 50% of the interviewed is Silvio Berlusconi.

The main Mr Nice Guy is Dalai Lama. Only 7% of the people interviewed claim to dislike him.

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admin People

STUPID = Smart Talented Unique Person In Demand

April 7th, 2009

There are some great funny sayings of people who don’t feel shy to express their opinions.
Some of these quotations are stupid, some of them are wise, some of them are too stupid and that’s why they seem wise…

Brook Shields is a philosopher. I mean it. Only a person with philosophical thinking may appreciate a human’s life the way she does:

smoking-kills“Smoking kills. If you’re killed, you’ve lost a very important part of life”. It’s a genius saying, I think.

tinas-legs1Tina Turner obviously distinguishes from other people of seventy. The legs are still the main priority for this experienced singer:

“When people think of Tina Turner, they think of the voice, the hair, but mainly the legs. If I don’t get them out, people are disappointed. My legs are still in good shape. They’re still holding me up, they’re still working.” Elderly people know the worth of steady legs. Especially when you have to move like hurricane.

Sportsmen can surprise not only by outstanding results in sport, sometimes they can stagger you with the knowledge of the science facts and names you’ve never heard before. Its evident that quarterback and sports analyst Joe Theisman didn’t waste his efforts for PE during his physics classes: “The word ‘genius’ isn’t applicable in football. A genius is a guy like Norman Einstein.”

einsteinAlbert Einstein could reply to Theisman with his very well-known quote: “With fame I become more and more stupid, which of course is a very common phenomenon.”

There is one more someone’s saying I adore: “I owe to my parents a lot, especially to my mother and father”.

Charles De Gaulle had a strong interest in China. And it seems to me he knew everything about this country, its history, culture, traditions and people: “China is a big country with a lot of Chinese people living there”. Who can argue against?

When former US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was asked to estimate the number of Iraqi insurgents he answered honestly: “I am not going to give you a number for it because it’s not my business to do intelligent work from home”.

So, if you are afraid to say something frustrating in unsuitable moment, the following saying will help you to keep looking smart:

“It’s so simple to be wise. Just think of something stupid and say the opposite.” – Samuel Levenson

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admin Quotations

The 100 Trillion Dollar Poster

April 6th, 2009

There have been so diverse distinguishing ad campaigns that creating an original ad is indeed a challenging task. If there’s no inspiration coming from the inside, many ideas may arise surprisingly from the current catastrophic situation in some countries. South African advertising agency TBWAHuntLascaris developed an outstanding ad campaign for the Zimbabwean opposition newspaper “The Zimbabwean”. The billboards, posters and flyers created within this acute social campaign consist of real Zimbabwean dollars. The campaign is running in Great Britain and South Africa, but surprisingly there are no mass riots on stripping off the posters from the walls or dismounting huge billboards full of money. The thing is that even one hundred trillion Zimbabwean dollar bill costs nothing. Not even a loaf of bread. These ads are intended to attract global attention to the ghastly economic situation in this African country.

billboard-image trillion-dollar-ad-zimbabwe1
Let’s hope that we will never get around similar billboards consisted of the US dollars…

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admin Politics ,

Walking House - Urban Nomads’ Dream

April 6th, 2009

Global infrastructure is destroyed, natural cataclysms caused by peoples’ total carelessness are changing the face of the Earth, mutated ghastly creatures are lounging about the deserted cities searching for poor nourishment…The world’s population has decreased considerably and the survived have to lead a nomadic life-style seeking for the resort from cruel reality of the world’s collapse… That is what we often can see in many Hollywood movies where future is described too gloomy and even hostile. Whatever, if we will ever have to lead a nomadic life, some solutions as Walking House are already found.

walking-houseBuying your own apartments or paying for the rent is always troublesome. Moreover, it’s not ecologically conscious. The Danish designer community N55 has created a solution for those urban nomads who don’t suffer from sea sickness. The Walking house developed by Danish designers is a modular dwelling system able to move carrying its owner to the desired spot with full speed at 60 meters per hour. Four persons can enjoy peaceful nomadic life with all basic facilities we are used to: living-room, kitchen, toilet and even wood stove. So you can lead quite tolerable and convenient life but with no harmful impact on nature. The house is built of safe wooden materials and generates all needed energy from the surroundings through solar cells and small windmills. The construction’s weight is only1200kg and the “device” moves on all kinds of terrains.

The Danes, the people know everything about floods and the following consequences, may be attracted by the Walking House solution to the problem of rising water: the house can just walk away from the flood at ease.

Russian folkloreThose who are passionate about the Russian folklore will be fascinated by the appealing resemblance between N55 Walking Hose and the hut on chicken legs from the Russian fairy tales. This hut on chicken legs is also made of wood, has all needed facilities and works at the same concept as the walking house: its legs can take the owner to any place he or she wishes. But the thing is that hut’s on chicken legs host is an old evil witch who steals, cooks and eats children…

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admin Science , ,