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miercuri, 16 noiembrie 2011

We Can’t Wait: Driving Forward with New Fuel Economy Standards

Your Daily Snapshot for
Wednesday Nov.16, 2011

We Can’t Wait: Driving Forward with New Fuel Economy Standards

Today marks a major step forward in the Obama administration’s efforts to save American families money at the pump, reduce our country’s dependence on oil, and boost domestic manufacturing.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Department of Transportation (DOT) have formally announced their joint proposal to set stronger fuel economy and greenhouse gas pollution standards. This announcement will save Americans $1.7 trillion, reduce oil consumption by 2.2 million barrels per day by 2025, and slash greenhouse gas emissions by 6 billion metric tons, when combined with other Administration actions on transportation efficiency.

Find out how these new standards will save you more money at the pump.

White House Photos: Behind the Scenes

Interested in seeing behind-the-scenes photos from the White House? Check out our Flickr photostream.

First Lady Michelle Obama greets USO honorees and their families in the Vermeil Room of the White House, Oct. 5, 2011. (Official White House Photo by Samantha Appleton)

How To Brand Your SEO Agency

Posted: 15 Nov 2011 12:29 PM PST

Posted by neilpatel

This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

Last month I talked about 7 lessons I learned from running an SEO agency. One of the things I’ve learned over the years is that you can command clients to pay you 6 and even 7 figures a year if your agency has brand recognition.

Brand recognition also gets you more inbound inquires from companies who need SEO, which will help your revenue become more stable.

If you are ready to take your agency to the next level, here’s how you can build a big brand:

Start a blog

Not only can a blog help build your brand, it can also drive thousands of extra visitors to your website each month. Before you start a SEO blog, you need to know 1 important fact… it needs to be on the same domain as your agency website.

Early on I made the mistake of calling my SEO blog “Pronet Advertising”, when my SEO agency was in fact called “ACS”. The blog was hosted at pronetadvertising.com while the agency site was hosted at acsseo.com. Once the blog became popular people didn’t know whether we were called ACS or Pronet Advertising… even though on the blog it clearly stated that it was owned by ACS.

Once you have a blog up and running, there are a few things that you have to do if you want it to become popular. These days there are hundreds of SEO blogs and if you aren’t unique, there is no point in starting one.

Write detailed blog posts – if you write how to type of posts you’ll typically gain more traction than if you just blog about SEO news.
Use stats – blog posts that contain facts and percentages also tend to do better. If you look at the SEOmoz blog, you’ll notice that posts like this are popular because they contain stats.
Dumb things down – SEO is a complicated topic, so if you can dumb down your blog posts you’re better off than if you only use technical jargon. At the end of the day the person who is most likely to hire and pay you won’t understand this jargon, if they did they’d just optimize their own site. By using images and even whiteboards, you’ll be able to dumb down your blog posts, yet still keep them somewhat technical.

If you blog on a weekly basis and push out good content every week, you’ll start to get more traffic and see an increase in brand recognition in the SEO space.

Become a guest author

Blogging on your own site isn’t enough. You need to start blogging on other blogs. By becoming a guest author on popular SEO and marketing blogs you’ll brand yourself as an SEO expert, which will also help your agency.

In addition to blogging on marketing blogs you also want to start blogging in places that your ideal customer may be looking. For example if your typical customer is a business owner, you could guest post on Entrepreneur.com. If they are an up and coming startup, TechCrunch would be great place for you to blog.

Every week you should be guest posting on at least 2 blogs. The first should be a marketing/SEO blog and the second should be a blog that your ideal customer is reading. To achieve this goal you should email at least 10 people every Sunday night that you are interested in guest posting for.

The reason you want to email 10 people is that most bloggers will say “no”. However, if you let them know the specific topic you want to blog on and you do the research to make sure these blogs accept guest posts, you should get at least 20% of them saying “yes”.

When you submit your guest post make sure you include an image of yourself as well as a bio that includes a link to your company. If you forget the bio you won’t be building up your agency’s brand.

Attend conferences

Conferences are a great place to brand your agency and pick up new customers. When I first started out I attended all of the major SEO conferences, and boy did I make a lot of money doing so. People got to know me, I met potential customers and I even gained more knowledge.

Over time SEO conferences became competitive, which caused my brand to be mixed in with hundreds of others SEOs. After a while I rarely was able to pick up new clients from them… even if I was speaking.

I started to look for new conferences to brand my agency. I quickly realized that industry specific conferences and regional based events aren’t crowded with a ton of SEOs. Which makes it easier to pick up new clients.

If you want pick up new clients start attending industry specific events that aren’t SEO related and also focus on attending regional based events.

If you want to start building your brand through conferences you have to attend dozens of them each year as some conferences will work out while others won’t. In most cases the events that cost a lot tend to provide a better ROI because if someone can afford to pay $3000 to attend a conference, they can probably afford to hire your firm.

Create white papers and beginner’s guides

Everyone these days is releasing free information because it really helps with branding. Just look at SEOmoz’s guide to SEO. It’s become the default guide if you want to learn about the subject.

It’s so popular that when people ask other SEOs about learning SEO, they just point them to SEOmoz’s guide.

By no means is this a short-term branding strategy, but if you can produce really good white papers and beginner’s guides you should start seeing them passed around. The trick is to just make them downloadable so that people can pass them around within their organization.

If you are going to create content, make sure you don’t just publish the same information that others have already released. For example it would be a waste of your time to reproduce the Beginner’s Guide to SEO.

Buy banner ads

Banner ads? They are a waste of money, right? Well if you buy them on other SEO sites they aren’t. When I ran my agency we would spend up to $15,000 a month buying banner ads on other SEO sites...these sites weren’t just news related like Sphinn.

We would actually buy ads on our competitors’ site. As weird as that may sound, other SEO bloggers, who are also service providers, sell ads. From the Wolf Howl blog to Search Engine Roundtable, you can buy ads on some of the most popular SEO sites on the web.

When I bought ads I found that most of them didn’t convert when I sent them to my homepage, but when I sent them to a landing page that gave away a free white paper, it was very effective. As your sales team can take those leads and close them.

Participate in the community

The cool part about the SEO industry is that SEOs have a tendency to work together. They play nice with each other and they are willing to share customers. For this reason it’s important to build up your brand amongst other SEOs.

Other than going to SEO networking events, you can do this through 2 simple ways:

Comment on 5 different SEO blogs each day. Don’t leave generic comments; instead leave very detailed comments that are adding to the conversation.
Join popular SEO forums like SEO Chat and respond to 5 different questions each day. Similar to leaving comments on blogs, make sure your responses on forums are detailed.

If you do these two things for a year, you’ll end up building a large Rolodex of SEOs.

Help people out for free

The most effective branding strategy I used with my firm was to help out popular bloggers for free with their SEO. In exchange for helping them, they would add an image link with my company logo that stated “SEO by ACS”. When you do this for 30 of the Technorati 100 blogs like I did, you’ll quickly build up your brand as these blogs get millions of visitors each month.

You don’t have to know these blogs to do their SEO, just shoot them an emailing offering free SEO services in exchange for an image link. Trust me, it works.

And think of it this way, if someone has that popular of a blog, the chances are they know at least 1 company who can afford to pay you at least $10,000 a month for your consulting services. If you help these bloggers increase their traffic you should be able to get a few introductions to companies that can pay you.

Help people out for free

Another effective tactic that I used to build up my agency’s brand was to just help out people for free. You’ll notice that over time a lot of people and companies who can’t afford your services will hit you up. Instead of turning them down, give them some free advice every once in a while. You’ll be shocked on what that will do for your brand.

My first million-dollar customer came from someone who had no money. I helped him out for free for 30 minutes at a conference and he continually told everyone at the event how I was a great SEO. Within hours I had businesses hitting me up and a few of them were interested in engaging with my firm for 1.2 million dollars a year. Out of those few that were interested 1 agreed.

So the next time someone emails you asking for free advice, don’t push them away. Offer some free help, as they’ll constantly tell other people good things about you and your agency.

Create case studies

If you are good at what you do, you should be able to create some awesome case studies. All you have to do is breakdown what you specifically did for that company, how long it took, and the exact results they saw.

When you breakdown the results be sure to include numbers such as traffic stats, revenue increases or anything else the client will let you include. And when wrapping up the case study, make sure you get a good testimonial or video interview from the client.

One agency that does this very well (they aren’t an SEO agency) is Conversion Rate Experts. I found out about them through their SEOmoz case study. The video Rand did with them broke down how they made SEOmoz over a million dollars, and convinced me to hire them.

Showcase these case studies all over your website as they will help get your agency out there in front of bigger companies. Without them it’s going to be tough to gain interest from Fortune 500 companies.

Conclusion

If you do everything I mentioned above, you’ll brand your agency as one of the best shops around. I know it’s a lot work, but in the end the revenue will make up for the hard work.

Give it a shot; try out just a few of the tactics above for the next 6 months and I guarantee that you’ll see results. You have to make sure you keep at it, as you can’t expect miracles in the first few months of doing this.

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SEOptimise

Why is (not provided) My Most Popular Keyword in Google Analytics and How Can I Fix it?

Posted: 15 Nov 2011 05:08 AM PST

While the search industry has been all abuzz with the bad news of Google SSL search, most average people might not even understand what happened. They may wonder “why is (not provided) my most popular keyword in Google Analytics?” (Other analytics solutions might not even show up this data at all). Also: how can you fix it?

First off, I want to explain in simple terms what happened. I tried to explain it to my wife recently and she didn’t understand at once. So this is the version she could fathom easily: Google hides the keywords people use to find your site from now on, or at least a significant part of them. All these hidden keywords are tagged as ‘(not provided)’ in Google Analytics.

On SEOptimise currently (the first week of November) 14,7% of Google search visitors had no keyword sent with its referrer.

The referrer is the page address where they came from. On my own blog, SEO 2.0, the number was even higher, with 16,27% of Google visitors. Also, (not provided) is the most popular “keyword” on both blogs.

Whose referral data gets hidden? All users logged in to Google services get redirected to SSL search now by default.

So all these people hide the keywords they use from the sites they visit. Google and thus the CIA, MI5 or any other secret service can still access these data for at least 18 months.

SSL search isn’t bad – it might be secure for some purposes. As a privacy advocate I can understand that someone would want to use SSL search. I don’t see why Google would force everyone logged in to one of the multiple Google services to use it though. Also, the only way to “opt out” of this forced security measure is to log out of all Google tools, including:

Gmail
Google+
Google Reader
Google Analytics
Google Webmaster Tools

When you log in again, Google automatically forces you to use SSL search again on its https//google.com site. Advertisers who use Google ads will see the hidden data as well, by the way. So if you use SSL search to cover your tracks, at least from the website owners of the sites you click in Google, you have to refrain from clicking Google ads. So what can we actually do about this (not provided) issue?

Ask your web hoster whether they offer SSL for your hosting package

or otherwise upgrade to one where SSL is an option. Sites that use SSL will still see complete referrers from other SSL sites. Thus you can use also see Google keywords used by logged in searchers to find you.

On the other hand, many sites may not notice from then on that you have sent them valuable traffic as long as they don’t use SSL for their sites. You may wonder how that affects you. In the SEO industry at least, people monitor their analytics for incoming traffic and thus find out who links to them. Based on that, relationships between webmasters and bloggers sometimes get forged to the mutual benefit of the two parties. This “SEO technique” will not work most of the time in future unless most webmasters embrace SSL.

Google’s business model is to sell ads on search results and third party pages. More than 95% of their revenue stems from these ads. So they compete against webmasters and SEOs to get the attention of web users.

Advertisers buying Google ads will have access to the referral data. So in a way Google is blackmailing webmasters either to buy ads or lose a truly important and meaningful metric. They have presented the change as a move to protect privacy, but we all know that Google doesn’t care about privacy in many other cases. Just think Google Street View.

I won’t let Google force me to buy ads. I don’t need them as I do SEO myself. It’s like having a car and still using a taxi regularly. We can only hope that lawmakers throughout the world will make Google stop anti-competitive measures like this one. It may take a few years before the authorities can sort out this issue, and until then we have to deal with it ourselves.

Going SSL yourself is the best option as of now. Otherwise soon 1/5 or 1/4 of your Google search visitors may not provide you with the full referral data. You won’t know for sure which keywords have the biggest impact on your site. The number one keyword will be “not provided” as more and more people start using Google services where they actually stayed logged in throughout the day.

Unless of course you’re in an industry where most people are not Internet-savvy and thus do not use Google services much. There are many people, if not the majority, who do not even know what RSS is and thus do not use Google Reader, for example. Only webmasters use Google Analytics or Webmaster Tools and Google+ has still a market share below 1% of social networking. So in many cases the impact might be far smaller than in the technology-driven search marketing space.

Ironically, the people who really care about privacy, such as Linux users for example, are also rather prone to browse the web anonymously than using Google services

and tell Google their real names each time when they search for some questionable sites. So in niches where real power users are the majority, the search referral issues might be a minor one. Everybody else has to consider either buying ads at Google or encrypting their site as well to get proper referrer data again.

More resources on SSL search, (not provided) and analytics:

© SEOptimise - Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter. Why is (not provided) My Most Popular Keyword in Google Analytics and How Can I Fix it?

Seth's Blog : Worth it?

Worth it?

That's a question you hear a lot. "Was it worth it?"

Not certain what either "it" refers to, but generally we're saying, "was the destination worth the journey? Was the effort worth the reward?"

The thing about effort is that effort is its own reward if you allow it to be.

So the answer can always be "yes" if you let it.

• Email to a friend •

marți, 15 noiembrie 2011

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Chinese Banking System Nearly Bankrupt Says Professor of Finance at the Chinese University of Hong Kong; Nothing Shocking About Mistrust, Lies, Suppression of News
Sovereign Debt Yields and Spreads Soar Everywhere: Belgium, France, Italy, Spain, Ireland; Major Problem List is Every Country but Germany; Belgium Spread Inverts Significantly
German ZEW Economic Sentiment Index Falls Sharply Again in November; Europe Already in Recession, Expect it to Dramatically Worsen
Jim Grant Video on Central Bank Printing (ECB and Fed), Leverage, and the Bubble in Farmland

Chinese Banking System Nearly Bankrupt Says Professor of Finance at the Chinese University of Hong Kong; Nothing Shocking About Mistrust, Lies, Suppression of News

Posted: 15 Nov 2011 05:52 PM PST

In one of these headline news stories that sounds shocking but is not shocking in the least, The Epoch Times reports Chinese TV Host Says Regime Nearly Bankrupt

China's economy has a reputation for being strong and prosperous, but according to a well-known Chinese television personality the country's Gross Domestic Product is going in reverse.

Larry Lang, chair professor of Finance at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said in a lecture that he didn't think was being recorded that the Chinese regime is in a serious economic crisis—on the brink of bankruptcy. In his memorable formulation: every province in China is Greece.

The restrictions Lang placed on the Oct. 22 speech in Shenyang City, in northern China's Liaoning Province, included no audio or video recording, and no media. He can be heard saying that people should not to post his speech online, or "everyone will look bad," in the audio that is now on Youtube.

In the unusual, closed-door lecture, Lang gave a frank analysis of the Chinese economy and the censorship that is placed on intellectuals and public figures. "What I'm about to say is all true. But under this system, we are not allowed to speak the truth," he said.

Despite Lang's polished appearance on his high-profile TV shows, he said: "Don't think that we are living in a peaceful time now. Actually the media cannot report anything at all. Those of us who do TV shows are so miserable and frustrated, because we cannot do any programs. As long as something is related to the government, we cannot report about it."

He said that the regime doesn't listen to experts, and that Party officials are insufferably arrogant. "If you don't agree with him, he thinks you are against him," he said.

Nothing Shocking About Mistrust, Lies, Suppression of News

The article was clearly meant to sensationalize. I gave it a big "so what else is news?"

You may wish to read the reasons for Larry Lang's statements but there is nothing shocking at all about mistrust, about news suppression, about lies, about Chinese bank insolvency.

I say that because I have reported on numerous occasions "the entire global financial system is bankrupt".

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List

Sovereign Debt Yields and Spreads Soar Everywhere: Belgium, France, Italy, Spain, Ireland; Major Problem List is Every Country but Germany; Belgium Spread Inverts Significantly

Posted: 15 Nov 2011 10:03 AM PST

The ECB, IMF, EMU, and EU are on the verge of multiple emergency meeting, if indeed meetings are not already underway. A quick check of the following bond spread tables and today's yield action will explain.

Across the board, yields and spreads widened significantly today. Note in particular the jump in the 2-year bond yield of Belgium.Also note the inverted spread situation for Belgium.

The spread to German 2-year bonds is 3.49 while the spread to 10-year bonds is 3.13.

Sovereign Debt Table 10-Year Bonds

Country	Change	Yield	Spread
Germany	+.00	1.78	0.00
France	+.26	3.68	1.90
Spain	+.23	6.34	4.56
Italy	+.37	7.07	5.29
Portugal	-.16	11.29	9.51
Belgium	+.32	4.91	3.13
Ireland	+.47	8.21	6.43

Sovereign Debt Table 2-Year Bonds

Country	Change	Yield	Spread
Germany	+.00	0.31	0.00
France	+.28	1.82	1.51
Spain	+.31	5.31	5.00
Italy	+.49	6.48	6.17
Portugal	+.27	17.40	17.09
Belgium	+.53	3.80	3.49
Ireland	+.19	8.34	8.03

Belgium has been off nearly everyone's radar, but not for long. The EFSF is underfunded for Spain and Portugal alone. It's now time to add Belgium to the major problem list.

On second thought, the major problem list now includes every country but Germany.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List

German ZEW Economic Sentiment Index Falls Sharply Again in November; Europe Already in Recession, Expect it to Dramatically Worsen

Posted: 15 Nov 2011 08:52 AM PST

Barclays Capital via email reports that German ZEW economic sentiment index falls sharply again in November.

The ZEW German economic sentiment index fell to -55.2 in November from -48.3 in September, below our forecast (-52.0) and consensus (-52.5). The current reading is far below the long-term average of about +25 points and reflects the very low expectations of the financial experts taking part in this survey for German economic activity over the next six months.

The ZEW's current situation index declined from 38.4 in September to 34.2 and the gap between sentiment and the current situation remains large. Current readings are now very close to those in June 2008, before the current situation index went into free fall and a sharp recession followed. The ZEW said that "world trade is weakening and the public debt problems in the Eurozone and in the US weigh heavily on business activity. These risks could even gain more importance and thus could further harm economic growth in Germany."

In our view, these figures underline the very pessimistic outlook of financial sector experts which is increasingly shared by others and clearly shaped by the sovereign debt crisis in the euro area. They point to growing risks to our German GDP Q4 forecast of only a slight contraction in Q4 GDP by 0.1% q/q.

Europe in Worsening Recession

Europe is already in recession and it's going to get worse, much worse. European country after country is struggling to little avail to prove to the bond markets it is going to tackle budget problems.

While long-term structural reforms are certainly needed, austerity measures in Italy, Greece, Spain, and Portugal are going to bite, and bite hard.

Moreover a Technocratic Showdown in Greece with Troika is underway.

The leader of Greece's main conservative group Antonis Samaras said on Monday his New Democracy party would not vote for any new austerity measures and said the mix of policies demanded by international lenders should be changed.

"We will not vote for any new measures," Samaras told a meeting of his own MPs.

Good luck with that. And good luck with Spanish unemployment at 22% with new austerity measures coming.

In Italy, there are more people on retirement than there are workers. Good luck with a program to make it easier to fire people.

It will be impossible to fire workers and maintain pension benefits.

And what happens to spending and GDP when benefits are reduced and people are fired? What happens to the bond market if that does not happen?

These are the questions and scenarios analysts should be asking and discussing instead of making wooden forecasts of slight recessions.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List

Jim Grant Video on Central Bank Printing (ECB and Fed), Leverage, and the Bubble in Farmland

Posted: 14 Nov 2011 11:25 PM PST

Here is an interesting video on Bloomberg with Jim Grant regarding the European Central Bank's response to the sovereign-debt crisis, ECB policy, Fed policy, central bank printing, and farmland.

Link if video does not play: ECB's Response to Debt Crisis, Money Printing

Grant notes that farmland in Iowa is going for $17,000 an acre far above the rental value of the land. Grant does not use the term bubble, but does suggest this is the wrong time to buy.

Bubble is the correct term.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List

Damn Cool Pics

Motorcycle That Runs on Poop
Tumblr Numbers: The Rapid Rise of Social Blogging [INFOGRAPHIC]
Epic Stuntman and Free Runner Damien Walters
Moses Bridge Cutting Through Fort de Roovere’s Moat

Motorcycle That Runs on Poop

Posted: 15 Nov 2011 12:13 PM PST

Japanese toilet manufacturer TOTO has created a bike that runs on feces. The human waste, which is stored in the driver's seat, is turned into biofuel that powers the three-wheeled chopper, according to WTOP. It has even performed 870-mile (1,400 km) countrywide tour across Japan.

The company says it hopes the bike will help raise environmental awareness and reduce CO2 emissions in bathrooms by 50 percent by 2017, motorcycle magazine Clutch and Chrome reports.

Tumblr Numbers: The Rapid Rise of Social Blogging [INFOGRAPHIC]

Posted: 15 Nov 2011 11:48 AM PST

In four short years, Tumblr has grown from relative obscurity to start-up darling to international microblogging network. The platform has grown a staggering 900% in the past year and eclipsed platform competitor WordPress, largely due to its global reach and brand-building potential.

Those under Tumblr's influence are fiercely loyal — with 2% of users making up 43% of total visits — and they log in from all over the world.

Take a look behind the scenes at Tumblr's influence on the web, including top tags and fun facts, in this handy infographic.

Click on Image to Enlarge.

Source: mashable

Epic Stuntman and Free Runner Damien Walters

Posted: 14 Nov 2011 10:44 PM PST

Damien Walters is a self-described professional stuntman, gymnastics coach and free runner. Every year, Damien, who I'm renaming "Not human probably an alien," releases a special show reel of him doing flips, twists, turns, and stunts that boggle the mind and coccyx. In this video Damien Walters shows of his skills as a professional stuntman, gymnastics coach and free runner in his 2011 showreel.

Moses Bridge Cutting Through Fort de Roovere’s Moat

Posted: 14 Nov 2011 04:23 PM PST

The Sunken Bridge is pedestrian bridge is designed by RO & AD Architects in Fort de Roovere, West Brabant Water Line region of the Netherlands. The speciality of this bridge is that it creates the illusion of walking through water. The project was recently awarded with the prestigious BNA (Union of Dutch Architects) Building of the Year 2011, Southern Region.

"From afar, the Moses Bridge is invisible to the eye. The flow of the moat appears continuous, as the water level remains at the same level, reflecting the surrounding foliage. As visitors approach the fort, the bridge appears as a break in the water with its sloping walls containing it."