Ironvine Search Marketing

This looks to be a really cool hidden feature in Windows 7.

Create a folder called GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C} and upon opening it will contain many customizable operating system features.

See the original article here: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10423985-56.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

Here is some code I found that will allow you from PHP code to export data directly into an excel file. I haven’t personally tested this but the source I had for it was no longer available online so I’m reposting it here.


< ?php session_start();
$ID=$_SESSION["ReportData"];
?>
< ?php
$line = '';
foreach($ID as $line) {
foreach($line as $key => $value) {
$data .= $value . “\t”;
}
$data .= “\n”;
}

$data = str_replace(”\r”,”",$data);
?>
< ?php
if ($data == "") {
$data = "\n(0) Records Found!\n";
}
?>
< ?php
header("Content-type: application/x-msdownload");
header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=extraction.xls");
header("Pragma: no-cache");
header("Expires: 0");
echo "$data";
?>


While working with the new Google Analytics Export API and a PHP example, I wanted to be able to output a csv version of the data to a file that could be downloaded.

I found this PHP function that allows output buffering. Still working the bugs out of my data export, but the output code works well.

http://my.opera.com/zomg/blog/2007/10/03/how-to-easily-redirect-php-output-to-a-file

Google has opened up the Google Analytics API (export) for general use!

http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/gdata/1.0/gdataProtocol.html

Alex C wrote a quick PHP script to pull pageviews from all available accounts. Read the setup here: http://www.alexc.me/using-the-google-analytics-api-getting-total-number-of-page-views/74/

There are a maximum of 50 profiles per Google Analytics Account, and a limit of 25 Analytics Accounts per email address.

My friends over at the OtherPage have announced the launch of the OtherPage Merchant Beta where merchants can join for free and list their products similar to other comparison shopping engines.

As a special note, the first 25 merchants who sign up for OtherPage will receive preferential treatment for life!

Join the OtherPage merchant beta!

OtherPage is launching a consumer facing website in April, 2009, through which we hope to drive tremendous end user product demand. We have some very unique marketing strategies we will be deploying, and invite merchant participation at no risk.

A Revenue Share Business Model
Unlike the vast majority of merchant aggregation systems, OtherPage will work off a percentage of sales that we drive. Our pricing is determined by the category in which you sell. Check out our prices, and then sign up for free.

http://OtherPage.com

Hello Everyone,

I apologize for the downtime over the last two days. I was down with the flu and our hosting decided to do some updates which broke pretty much everything. Bad timing.

Everything should be resolved now (I had to fix it naturally) and we should be back on track.

Thanks for your patience and understanding.

How to market your website with free publicity!

Press releases and well written informative articles are a cheap and easy way to get public awareness of your site and promotions. Not all submission sites charge to send out your PR, although most have some sort of limitation to them unless you pay for features. This article should show you how to get around having to pay anything for some great online visibility!

Are you quaking in your boots about having to write something from scratch? It is not as challenging as you may think, and you don’t always need a professional copywriter to do all the work for you! The main goal to writing a publication is to provide valuable information. It may be something as simple as how to properly wash you hands. That may not sound like much, but to a company that sells soap or paper towels that bit of information could end up making them a lot of money!

Step #1 - Think of something relevant to you or your company to write about!

As I mentioned above, it doesn’t have to be something major like a public stock offering notice. Something simple, easy to understand and relevant to you is all you need. Somewhere in the world there is someone who wants to know what you have to share.

Going back to the example of an article explaining how to wash your hands correctly, there are any number of people or groups that could find this information valuable. Hospitals, dentist offices, supermarkets, Microsoft, you never know! And neither will they unless you tell them.

Step #2 - I have to write now???

Soon, but before you have to get into your creative mode there are some tips that might make things easier. From experience, looking at a blank piece of paper can be scary. It is easy to get lost in the blankness of how to fill the white void.

Solution: Make yourself a template and break the page up!

Not only will a template help you start writing easier, it will help you organize your thoughts, form a well structured document, AND have it ready for all those online submissions later on! Here is a sample template you can use while getting ready to create a document. Notice how the headings are put in brackets to help distinguish the sections.

[DATE]

[TITLE]

[SUMMARY]

[BODY]

[RESOURCES/LINKS]

[AUTHOR]

Step #3 - Great! You have something on that blank page now right? Now you are wondering what to put in each of those sections. Let’s go through them briefly.

[DATE] - This should be self explanatory. This is more for records keeping than anything. Maybe you write a great article and want to share it more than once, but you want to give it a month or two before resubmitting it. Now you know when it was first published.

[TITLE] - The title may be the first and last step of your creativity. Many times a title that was started with changed dramatically by the end. Still it is a good place to start. Give your article something to go on.

[SUMMARY] - Tell the people what you are going to tell them, briefly. Hit the high points of what you are going to say. This section can either help focus your ideas, or you can come back to it after you are finished writing the bulk of your text.

[BODY] - Here is where your true genius shines through! This part of the writing I can’t give you too many tips on. The content really depends on you and what you want to say.

Some general tips: Be thorough. Be concise. Be intriguing. Write information you want your audience to read and remember. Stylistics: For online reading if you can keep your paragraphs to no more than 4-5 lines long it is easier to read. Remember to spellcheck!

[RESOURCES/LINKS] - Feel free to back up your information with supporting data! Your website/blog being the #1 prime location to link to. Other supporting resources that will provide your readers with valuable information are also good. You may have a great new idea, but help your credibility with supporting data.

[AUTHOR] - Who are you? Where are you from? What do you do? Who do you work for? Why should someone listen to what you say? How can someone contact you? Provide your information here.

Step #4 - Almost done! Now you have your article prepared. What do you do with it?

First of all I would suggest having someone proof-read it. Spellcheck doesn’t always catch wrong words. Now it’s ready for publication! Below is a long list of sites where you can submit articles and press releases for free. I am not supporting one over another as there are many popular to professional news agency sites listed.

You will most likely have to create a user account on each before they will allow you to publish your work. Be careful as most free submission sites will try to get you to pay for certain features. Feel free to use any features you like, they can really add to your visibility, but they can add up ($$$) quickly and are not always needed.

What should you expect to get out of all this work? Getting your name and information out to the public should be worth enough, but there are other perks. Search engines love linkbacks from quality sources. How much more quality can you provide than using yourself as a source publishing around the world? It can be a huge boost to any search engine optimization plan. If you can get people talking about you, good or bad, it’s all publicity.

Hopefully this article has helped you in some small way. If it has then it was worth the effort of writing it!

Good luck and go get that free publicity!

[RESOURCES]

[Press Release Submission Sites]
PR Free [http://www.prfree.com/]
SBWire [http://www.sbwire.com]
Press Zoom [http://www.presszoom.com/]
Press Base [http://www.press-base.com/]
Express Press Release Distribution [http://www.express-press-release.com/]
Press World [http://www.press-world.com/]
Open PR [http://www.openpr.com/]
Free Press Release [http://www.free-press-release.com/]
Free News Release [http://www.free-news-release.com/]
I Newswire [http://www.i-newswire.com/]
Newswire Today [http://www.newswiretoday.com/]
PR.com [http://www.pr.com]

[Article Submission Sites]
iSnare [http://www.isnare.com/]
ArticleBlast [http://www.articleblast.com/]
Ezine Articles [http://www.ezinearticles.com/]
GO Articles [http://www.goarticles.com/]

For more information please visit:
Ironvine Search Marketing Blog - Tips, tricks, code, resources and news 

[ABOUT THE AUTHOR]
Steve Terjeson is an Online Marketing Specialist with over 10 years programming and web experience. As a search engine optimization expert, he has managed hundreds of web sites in high performance search engine rankings and has set up marketing campaigns with exceptional results.

Steve Terjeson
Online Marketing Specialist
Ironvine Search Marketing

Published Source: How to market your website with free publicity! - Amazines.com

Technorati Tags: seo, marketing, ironvine, website, publicity, article, press release, how to, online marketing

ChannelAdvisor Lays off 19% of its Workforce

Sad to say, I was one of them. Apparently there were 32 Employees let go in the US offices.

http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y09/m01/i23/s04
http://onlinesaleschannels.wordpress.com/2009/01/22/my-liquid-lunch-with-ex-ca-employees/

I look at this as a good thing though as I was the only member of the Seattle office left on staff after they vacated the office building in Oct 2008. (Yes, no more west coast office). I have had to work out of my home office since then. It will be nice to be able to get back into traveling to work and getting to talk to other people, sharing and learning new things.

If anyone knows a company looking for a Search Marketing guru feel free to contact me at steve @ ironvine.com!

My condolences to all the other employees that were let go this week I wish you all the best, and to my former co-workers it was a great 2 years. Take care!

Amazon Webinar - September 10, 2008

ChannelAdvisor will be hosting a webinar this Wednesday, September 10, 2008, at 2 p.m. EST on how to build and grow your Amazon business.

Listen to Scot Wingo and Sam Wheeler, Director of Merchant Services at Amazon Services, as they discuss the various Amazon programs and best practices for succeeding on this channel. Better yet, they’re available for Q+A after the main act to answer questions that you may have.

Click here to register for the event.

ChannelAdvisor, Amazon, Webinar

Below is the latest press release from ChannelAdvisor about the securing of a new round of venture capital funding.

CHANNELADVISOR SECURES $20 MILLION IN FUNDING
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) Leader in E-commerce Channel Management Accelerates Path to Profitability

Research Triangle Park, NC – September 04, 2008 – ChannelAdvisor, the leading provider of e-commerce channel management solutions, today announced it has received an additional $20 million in funding to accelerate its growth. The funding round was led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA) with participation from current ChannelAdvisor investors Advanced Technology Ventures, Kodiak Venture Partners, eBay and Southern Capitol Ventures.

Additionally the company plans on implementing a restructuring plan that will both streamline operations and accelerate the company’s path to profitability.

“We continue to be increasingly impressed with ChannelAdvisor’s superior technology, significant traction in the retail sector, and leadership in the software as a service e-commerce industry,” says Patrick Kerins, General Partner of NEA. “We’re not only excited that the company continues to grow rapidly, but will also be able to do so profitably.”

During the past year, ChannelAdvisor’s revenues have grown over 55% and gross merchandise value (GMV) has grown over 45%. Additionally, the company has experienced significant customer growth, now boasting more than 100 top internet retailers from the prestigious Internet Retailer magazine’s Top 500 list.

With several acquisitions over the past two years, ChannelAdvisor has expanded its paid search offerings, distanced its leadership in the online marketplace space and most recently entered into the rich media segment with the acquisition of RichFX.

“ChannelAdvisor has grown rapidly over the last two years, both organically and via two material acquisitions, and has strengthened its leadership position in the e-commerce channel management space,” says Scot Wingo, CEO of ChannelAdvisor. “With the additional financing and restructuring of the company, we are excited about accelerating our path to profitability. We have reached not only a revenue scale that very few Software-as-a-Service companies have achieved, but also outstanding growth and profitability metrics.”

The following ChannelAdvisor leaders will take on expanded roles as part of the restructuring:

David Spitz, Vice President of Operations, is responsible for global products, services, and finance operations.

Michael Jones, Vice President of Business Development, Marketing and Strategic Partnerships, currently leads ChannelAdvisor’s global marketing, business development, corporate development and acquisition strategies. Jones will be expanding his role to include global sales and revenue responsibilities.

Scott Alridge, Vice President and General Counsel, will be expanding his role to include human resources operations.

About ChannelAdvisor Corporation
ChannelAdvisor Corporation provides technology and services that enable leading online retailers to maximize their products across multiple ecommerce marketplaces such as eBay, Amazon.com and Overstock.com, comparison shopping engines such as Shopping.com, Shopzilla, Nextag and Google Product Search and search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and MSN. In 2007, ChannelAdvisor managed over $2.1 billion in gross merchandise value (GMV) on behalf of its customers. ChannelAdvisor solutions combine best practices, on-demand software and integration technology to help retailers sell more products, faster, by automating labor-intensive, manual functions so they spend less time optimizing campaigns and more time solving marketing and business issues. ChannelAdvisor has expanded its retail technology and services by acquiring Rich FX media solutions. MyRichFX™, RichImage™, RichCatalog™, and RichCircular™ are now part of the ChannelAdvisor rich media technology and service solutions that ChannelAdvisor offers. ChannelAdvisor’s customers include Wal-Mart, GSI Commerce, Brookstone, Abebooks and Motorola. ChannelAdvisor Corporation is headquartered in Research Triangle Park, NC with offices in Atlanta, Seattle, New York, the United Kingdom, Australia, Ireland and Germany. For more information, visit http://www.channeladvisor.com/.

Contact:
Ashley Jones
ChannelAdvisor Corporation
Ph: 919.349.4177
ashley.jones@channeladvisor.com

32 Most Important SEO Tips
By Edwin Reyes (c) 2008

Following these simple tips will definitely boost your traffic and search engine rankings for free.

1. Make sure your site is not under construction or incomplete with little or no unique content.

2. When your site is ready, submit it to Google, Yahoo, MSN and ASK.com. Consider also submittíng to other search engines but most of them are powered by these four leading search engines. Also submít your site to reputable high PR web directories, open directories, yellow pages and social bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us, furl, etc.

3. Submit your sitemap to Google, Yahoo, MSN and ASK.com (sitemap for search engines usually in XML format)

4. Offer a sitemap to your site visitors for easy page navigation. (sitemap for visitors in HTML format)

5. Create unique and rich content sites. Avoid duplicate content. Do not create multiple pages, sub-domains, domains, mirror sites or sites with different domain names but the same content.

6. Check your keywords and make sure they are relevant and actually are contained in your site. Avoid keyword stuffing.

7. Use text instead of images in your content, links and important subjects.

8. Make your TITLE and ALT tags descriptive, simple and keyword rich. Avoid irrelevant and repeated keywords.

9. Your Title tag should be 60-80 characters maximum length.

10. Your Meta tag description should be 160-180 characters, including spaces. (about 25-30 words)

11. The keywords Meta Tag must be 15-20 words maximum.

12. Optimize pages with Headings (H1, H2, H3..) containing your site’s primary keywords.

13. Validate your CSS and HTML. Check for errors and broken links.

14. If your site contains dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a “?” character), make sure you use SEO friendly URLs. Search engine spiders have difficulty indexing dynamic pages.

15. Maximum links per page must be fewer than 100. Avoid the risk of being flagged as a link farm by search engines.

16. Use Lynx as text browser to check your site.

17. Allow search bots (good ones) to crawl your sites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site. Using these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of your site.

18. Check your web server/host if it supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. It tells search engines whether your content has changed since your site was last crawled. It will save you bandwidth, resources and avoid server overload.

19. Use a Robots.txt file to manage and control search engine spiders that index your site. You can allow and disallow spiders and choose directories you want to be crawled and indexed. With bad bots or spam bots you need to modify your HTACCESS file to properly and effectively manage bots or spiders. Visit http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/faq.html to learn more about the Robots.txt file.

20. Do not attempt to present different content to search engines than what you show to your site visitors.

21. Avoid dirty tricks and exploiting loop holes to improve search engine ranking.

22. Avoid links to bad neighborhoods such as web spammer, link farm, phishing, hacker, crack, gambling, pörn and scam sites. Linking to them will greatly affect your search engine rankings.

23. Do not attempt to join in link schemes, excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging and link exchange web rings.

24. Do not use unauthorized programs or online tools to submit your site, check page rankings or perform other automated queries. Avoid the risk of being flagged as a spammer.

25. Do not use hidden text and links. Show the search engines what you show to your vistors. It will greatly affect your site’s reputation.

26. Do not attempt to create pages that contain phishing, scam, virus, trojan, backdoor, spyware, adware or other malicious programs.

27. Make your site useful and informative.

28. Improve your link building. Link to high PR websites. Quality of relevant links is far more important than quantity. Links will greatly improve your site’s visibility, popularity and ranking. Search engines consider links as votes to your site.

29. Check your page link structure. Every page should be reachable by a single static text link.

30. Be extra careful in purchasing SEO services. Some use illegal and questionable methods to improve rankings.

31. Do not buy or sell links.

32. Do not create sites that contain purely affiliate links and no valuable content that is useful to users.

I hope these tips will add more popularity and visibility to your site. Enjoy!

About The Author
Edwin Reyes is a Web Developer and the Webmaster of Findmesoftware.com, a Philippine based website that provides free software downloads, tools, reviews, online tips, blogging resources, tutorials and Free SEO Tools and Software Download.