SEO Werkt!

Google announced last week that it will start penalizing websites that violate copyrights on a consistent basis. In other words, if a certain website is found to be violating copyrights of other people regularly it will lose search rankings and possibly even be removed from Google’s index.

They will calculate the number of copyright infringements based on the amount of DMCA takedown notices that Google receives from content owners. Here’s a quotation from a Search Engine Land article explaining the process:

But as it turns out, there is a way that Google can guestimate if there’s copyright infringement happening, by making use of Digital Millennium Copyright Act “takedown” requests.

These requests are one of the ways to get content removed from Google. Anyone can file a request. It’s not proof of copyright infringement. It’s merely an allegation, and one that can be challenged. But Google evaluates each request, and if deemed valid, content is removed.

The requests are a pain to file, and they only remove an individual web page. If you’re a big entertainment company, it’s like playing Whac-A-Mole. But now, Google’s shift will change the game from a page-by-page basis to a site-by-site one. Beginning next week, a site will a lot of requests against individual pages will find all of its pages ranking lower in Google.

Overall I think it’s a valid measure, and it should certainly help to control the levels of content theft and plagiarism around the web.

I don’t think the update will have a large impact on small publishers, though, but hey at least you have one more weapon now to fight against people ripping off your content.

What do you think?

All systems are ready to go. Your new blog looks great: the user interface is polished, the layout is perfect, all the widgets are working like they’re supposed to and you already have a snappy social media promotion campaign in the works.

Now, here comes the hardest part- writing content for public consumption.

Writing is a very thought-intensive activity. It takes time and a whole lot of effort just to put words down on paper (or the word processor). People would think that the process is a tedious superhuman feat- often procrastinating, leaving their blogs to languish forgotten without anything interesting written in them.

Blogging, for some, is not just an outlet for thoughts and ideas, but also, a source of livelihood. It can facilitate business deals, promote exclusive product deals, advertising services. Throw in product reviews, and referral programs and your blog’s money-making potential is almost unlimited.

So, how do you find time to write for your blog? Here are some tips which you can use:

1. Keep a notebook with you at all times.

Ideas and inspiration sometimes strike unexpected. A notebook is a handy contraption for catching that idea that has been floating around in your head when you were on your way to work this morning. If you are a bit on the techie side and want more variety, then you can check out a number of note-taking apps for mobile devices like EverNote or Catch Notes.

2. Write about what you know and what you love.

Or to be more precise, be passionate in your writing. It is hard to find words for something that you are not interested about. If you are new to blogging, it’s better to start off with topics that you are familiar with- these are the subjects that will get your writing juices going for the rest of your blogging career.

3. Turn writing into a routine.

This means defining a set schedule for your writing. People have different working times, so it’s best to figure out exactly what time of the day (or night) you are at your most prolific. Then you must maintain this writing schedule conscientiously by working at it on a regular basis. By the time you get used to it, you’ll start to feel guilty whenever you missed out on your writing. Guilt works as a motivating factor here.

4. Use productivity tools and software.

Aside from writer’s block, distractions are among the most troublesome issues that bloggers must face on a day-to-day basis. Thankfully, there are a lot of productivity systems to choose from that can help you get back to your writing. For example, the Pomodoro Technique is a productivity method that can guide writers to manage their time well and to focus on the task at hand by dividing work into 25-minute increments. Apps and software like the Focus Booster extension, on the other hand, block distracting and time-wasting websites.

Got more writing tips for newbie bloggers? Share them with us!

Kickstart Your Writing Gear – Tips For Newbie Bloggers is a post from: We Blog Better. © 2012. Share it freely, but please link back to this source.

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I’m also available for blog startup, content writing and consultation services.

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Editor’s note: Jay Jamison is a Partner at BlueRun Ventures where he focuses on early stage mobile and consumer opportunities. You can read more of his analysis on startups and Silicon Valley at his blog jayjamison.com and you can follow him on Twitter at @jay_jamison.

The highest flying of internet high-flyers, Facebook and Zynga, were laid low last week in public markets on weaker than expected guidance on their paths forward. What a difference public market scrutiny and forward-looking forecasts can make. Given the size, scope and importance of these two companies to the broader technology ecosystem, it’s worth analyzing what these reports might mean for industry trends.

According to Wall Street analysts, Zynga had a “dreadful” Q2 report. Several negatives converged to deliver an egg, reported the New York Times:

“A critical new game, the Ville, was delayed. Another new game, Mafia Wars II, just was not very good, executives conceded. The heavily hyped Draw Something, acquired in March, proved more fad than enduring classic. Some old standbys also lost some appeal.”

Zynga’s problems, however, could be characterized as broader than just a weak quarter. Financial analyst, Richard Greenfield of BTIG painted Zynga’s issues as more far-reaching, saying, “Right now, everything is going wrong for Zynga. In a rapidly changing Internet landscape that is moving to mobile, it’s very hard to have confidence these issues are temporary.”

Things weren’t much better for Facebook, which was reporting its earnings to the public for the first time. Given the symbiotic partnership between Zynga and Facebook, anyone paying attention knew Zynga’s weak results spelled trouble for Facebook. And as expected, Wall Street found Facebook’s earnings disappointing.

In coverage, three key themes of concern arose out of Facebook’s report. First, user growth is slowing. This is undeniably true: the growth of two key user metrics, Daily Active Users (DAU) and Monthly Active Users (MAU), is slowing. It’s unclear whether this is a useful concern. If the entire Western world is using Facebook, then Facebook probably is not going to showcase much growth in DAU or MAU until it cracks China. The land has been grabbed.

A second growth concern is revenue. Can Facebook convert all its social engagement into monetization? Facebook clearly has more to prove, but it’s a strong start. With a topline of $1.2B for Q2, Facebook beat analyst estimates on revenue. Its 32% Q2 revenue growth was equal to its year-over-year growth in DAUs. This revenue growth map to its DAU growth is where concern centers. On the one hand, having revenue growth equal to DAU growth shows that on a per-user basis, Facebook is monetizing effectively. At the same time, if DAU growth continues to slow, as it inevitably will, the question will be how Facebook can continue to grow it’s topline faster than DAU growth. The answer is not yet clear. Expect much hand-wringing here around the answer to this question.

These concerns around growth and revenue point to the third and most significant concern around Facebook (and Zynga): MOBILE. While we’ve known that mobile is the fastest growing technology wave the world has ever seen, it’s been a challenge to frame truly how important, impactful, and disruptive the mobile wave is. Last week’s reports from Zynga and Facebook make crystal clear the implications of mobile—two leading innovators and upstarts that basically created and drove the social computing wave are facing questions about their future earning streams on the basis of their execution on mobile.

So the broader story of what’s happening in technology is this: Mobile is what’s happening.  Here’s one shorthand framework for the technology waves over the last roughly 20 years.  Web 1.0 was about web connectivity, the giants of that epoch catalyzed by Netscape were companies like AOL, Yahoo, and Google. Web 2.0 was social, with Facebook, LinkedIn, Zynga, Twitter, and newcomer Quora as the foundational creators of the web’s ‘social layer.’  The power and impact of the social layer is difficult to overstate—existing industries and corporate giants (to say nothing of several repressive governmental regimes) have faced huge disruption on the basis of these companies.

Now we’re entering Web 3.0, which is mobile, and we are in the thick of it.  The Mobile Web 3.0 has elements that build upon prior eras, but it also has several distinct and different elements from what’s come before.  Some of these distinct elements of the Mobile Web 3.0 era include:

• real-time
• ubiquitous (always connected, always with you)
• location aware
• sensors
• tailored, smaller screen
• high quality camera and audio

These elements have two key implications for today’s leaders and tomorrow’s disrupters.

Let’s Get Small: Designing for Mobile First.The tailored, smaller screens of the Mobile Web offer new entrants the opportunity to deliver value and experience that differentiates from the existing leaders. Most leading tech companies today, with the exception of Instagram, were created with a PC web-first approach. Designing and building for the PC-centric web services packed increasing amounts of information onto ever growing screen sizes. Take a look at Facebook on your computer’s browser—it’s like a Bloomberg terminal full of fun—birthdates, events, status updates, advertisements, chatting. It’s a cornucopia of information laid out all around the screen.

For any company whose heritage is designing for the PC web, mobile is a big challenge in getting small. Compress a PC-web experience down onto a smartphone screen doesn’t work all that well. You may get the users—Facebook certainly has—but it is easy to overwhelm a user with an experience that packs in too much information into too small a screen size.

The challenge of mobile offers new entrants focused on a mobile-first strategy an opportunity to craft and tailor a user experience that is easier to use and enjoy on mobile. Instagram is the poster child example with its mobile-only, photo-centric social service. Rather than pack more information onto a mobile screen, for Instagram a picture was worth a thousand words (and a billion dollars). Instagram’s mobile-first, photo-sharing service created an alternative social network, and has since grown to over 80M users and its billion dollar acquisition by Facebook. Other mobile-first social services are following—Foursquare, Path, Foodspotting, Banjo, Pulse, and others—and each has an opportunity, through an approach that focuses on getting small to build a new audience and brand that stand out from the PC-web-based incumbents.

Getting Real: Mobile Will Drive MoreReal-World Commerce

Whether they’re a newer mobile-centric startup like a Path or an existing giant like Facebook, the key will be monetizing n a mobile world. Monetizing in mobile will likely evolve in new directions relative to what we’ve seen in the PC-web. Specifically: monetizing in Mobile is about getting even more real and concrete in the value delivered to customers.

Here’s why. In Web 1.0, Google achieved supernova momentum when it introduced its Cost-Per-Click ad model. With a dominatingly high quality search engine for users, Google gained share on search, and in effect knew what people were interested in. This was a break-through for advertisers in terms of measurability. Advertisers could escape the Mad Men world of spending on TV, print, OOH, and banner ads with their fuzzy efficacy and measurability. With Google, advertisers now could place ads in front of people searching on relevant terms. A huge step in terms of measurability, Google’s model had the added benefit of only charging when a user clicked on a specific ad. All combined to deliver a vastly more measurable and as such valuable approach to spending ad dollars.

Web 2.0 ushered in the social wave. Facebook now is showing ads of stuff we might like based on the interests we’ve indicated or based on referrals from friends. This embraces and extends much of the Google model, but provides potentially even more. Facebook knows what we like day to day (Graf Ice Skates, Breaking Bad, Crossfit for me), and what our friends like. Add to this the tremendously detailed demographic data that its users have willingly provided, and the opportunities for advertisers are pretty profound. While Facebook will continue to optimize its appraoch to ads, there should be little question that its current core business of ads is going to continue to grow.

With Mobile Web 3.0, the user experience opens the door for another level of innovation in advertising and promotion. Now technology services have the ability to leverage not just the social graph data from Facebook, but even more real-time / real-world information. Your current location, weather, traffic, local merchants other friends nearby, how often you’ve been to this specific store or location are available (or will be soon). And this in turn provides a whole new level of commerce opportunities for potential advertisers. Mobile brings advertisers and users closer to being able to close a transaction. It’s real-world commerce. Which leads to the question: Why pay for a click when you can get an actual customer? That’s the promise of mobile for advertisers, brands and merchants. The opportunity is huge: both in pure dollar size opportunity and for disruption. The internet advertising models of selling clicks to advertisers will need to evolve.

A few companies to watch in this new world are Waze, ShopKick and Foodspotting, to name just a few. Waze, the social mapping and GPS service, provides free turn-by-turn directions with real-time traffic information and routing to over 20m users. With users depending on Waze to help them find the fastest and least congested routes, Waze now shows offers for the cheapest gas prices along the way. Real value for users translates to real commerce for merchants.

ShopKick is a mobile app that gamifies retail shopping. Users who open ShopKick gain rewards for different tasks or quests they complete on ShopKick. What ShopKick is starting to show retailers is that ShopKick tend to spend more money when they’re in store, because of the interaction and engagement the ShopKick app can drive while the user is at the point of purchase. Again, real value for users leads to real commerce for merchants.

Open Foodspotting, a visual guide to what’s interesting to eat near you, and the app will locate where you are and show you pictures of the best food at restaurants nearby. Over 2m dishes have been submitted to Foodspotting at over half a million restaurants in the US alone. Users can express that they love certain restaurants and dishes. As it has grown its community, Foodspotting can now approach restaurants with promotional offerings for people who are nearby right now, who are fans of their type of food. Real value for users, real commerce for merchants.

So Mobile Web 3.0 is super exciting. But a word of caution: delivering value and driving monetization in the Mobile Web 3.0 era is hard. The answer will not be for web-first properties to scrunch their ad platforms onto mobile. Monetization via mobile advertising will require offerings that do more to close the loop of commerce. Advertisers increasingly will ask of mobile: why buy a click when what I want is a paying customer or user? The services with the best offers here will be big winners in this Mobile Web 3.0.

Ad inventory is typically broken down into four buckets: sponsorships, premium guaranteed, audience targeted, and remnant. Each of these buckets can be sold through a variety of sales channels.

Revenue distribution across this “layer-cake” inventory model flows downward — with the vast majority of inventory coming from premium and a significantly lower amount of revenue coming from the remainder:

The process of an advertising sale begins with the media buyer, who sends a request for proposal (RFP) document to numerous publishers. These RFPs typically are written in prose and define the overall goals of the advertiser in question, and of the specific campaign being executed. A typical RFP has between 50 and 100 elements that are laid before the publisher as acceptable or desirable outcomes, and these elements (attributes or attributes of the buy) are generally descriptors of the audience, of the media the advertiser is looking to run on, of the acceptable (and unacceptable) content to be associated with, etc.

Advertising inventory is the base unit sold by a publisher to an advertiser. It is measured in “impressions,” which are defined as an opportunity to show an advertisement to a person. Impressions at their most basic are blank vessels made up of opportunity. Inventory is generally defined in advance by the seller based on a variety of factors, and it is these predefined impressions that are contractually agreed up on between buyer and seller.

Nearly all impressions sold are made up initially of one or two media attributes based on content association (e.g., MSN>Entertainment or MSN>Entertainment>Celebrities; Yahoo>Autos, or Yahoo>Autos>News). Or they’re sold just based on category — in some cases blind, meaning without the knowledge of which publisher the impression ran on. Further refinement of the inventory is based on other attributes such as above the fold, rich media units, or a variety of quality scores. Additional media attributes included in the definition of a piece of sold inventory include various types of targeting and other types of intelligence and filtering such as inventory quality scores and contextual targeting.

Beyond media attributes, there are numerous audience-based targeting attributes available for the buyer to request, or for the seller to offer. These include such attributes as geographic, demographic, psychographic, behavioral, etc.

It is the combination of these various attributes that define the inventory that is sold. Inventory is sold in a number of ways, including on a guaranteed basis (a buyer contracts with a seller for a fixed volume of inventory between specific dates) and on a non-guaranteed basis (if inventory is available that matches, it will be sold, but the seller doesn’t make any guarantees on volume).

In order to predict how much inventory will be available, publisher ad platforms need to look at historical data with seasonality and apply some very sophisticated algorithms to make a guess as to how much inventory will be available during specific date ranges. These “avails,” as they are called, become the basis for how all guaranteed ad sales are done.

But ad inventory has many very complex and difficult-to-predict issues that are endemic to the problem — the problem of predicting how many impressions will exist in a specific month is sort of like imagining how many cars will cross the Golden Gate Bridge in a given week. Predicting this based on historical data isn’t too hard. And predicting the color of the various cars that might cross the bridge is probably feasible with some degree of accuracy. Maybe even predicting the general destinations of the cars crossing the bridge is possible. But trying to predict how many red Toyotas driven by women with an infant in the car who have red hair and who make more than $125,000 annually is probably not a solvable problem.

This is akin to the requests given on a daily basis regarding ad targeting. This type of prediction is extremely technically challenging; nobody has been able to accurately predict how much ad inventory will be available in advance for more than three to four targeting attributes in advance. Therefore, publishers rarely will sell inventory that contains more than three to four attributes because this causes an immense amount of work during the live ad campaign for the publisher’s ad operations team. (They must monitor ad delivery carefully and adjust numerous settings in order to ensure delivery of the campaign.)

Inventory is sold within a contract called an insertion order (I/O), and each sold element is typically called a “line item” on the I/O. Line items correspond to a variety of attributes within the publisher’s inventory management systems. A simple example would be MSN>Entertainment. But a more complex example would be MSN>Entertainment>Women>18-34.

Beyond a typical guaranteed media buy, there are several other mechanisms for selling ads. Some ads are re-sold by a third party such as an ad network (examples include Collective Media, ValueClick, Advertising.com, etc.). Some ads are sold through an automated channel such as a supply-side platform, or SSP (examples include Rubicon, Admeld, PubMatic, etc.). There are also ad exchanges that can sit in the middle of all the transactions, and as the industry has matured, the difference between an exchange and an SSP has become less clear. These exchanges and SSPs then create a marketplace that allows ad networks and various demand-side platforms (DSPs) to compete for the inventory in real time. We’ll refer to this as real-time bidding (RTB) even though in some cases this term doesn’t apply exactly. 

The management systems for buying RTB inventory are generally called demand-side platforms (DSPs). In RTB media buys, it is extremely rare to have more than three to four targeting attributes (just like in guaranteed media buys), not because of prediction but because inventory that exists for each campaign or line item that contains more than three to four attributes delivers with extremely low volume. In fact, the amount of inventory available on a per-impression basis as you layer on more targeting attributes generally drops significantly with each new attribute.  This means that a typical line item for an RTB campaign would look very much like the one for a guaranteed buy: Entertainment>Women>18-34.

For a DSP to spend an entire media buy at more than four targeting attributes, the buyer would have to manually create hundreds or thousands of ad campaigns that each would then be manually optimized and managed. It isn’t actually feasible to do this at scale manually.

In summary
In a perfect world, advertisers would be able to find all available ad inventory that matches their goals, with as many attributes as exist on all impressions. The problem is that existing inventory management and ad serving systems are not designed to deal well with more than two to three concurrent targeting attributes, whether for guaranteed media buys or RTB.

So why do advertisers and publishers prefer to sell ads on a guaranteed basis?

Inventory guarantees serve several purposes. The most critical is predictability; media buyers have agreed with the advertiser on a set advertising budget to be spent on a monthly basis throughout the year. They are contractually obligated to spend that budget, and it is one of their primary key performance indicators. Publishers like to have revenue predictability as well, which is solved by selling a guarantee on volumes for a fixed budget.

For all the innovation in the ad-tech space over the last decade, it’s fairly impressive that very few of the core problems of a publisher have been solved. At the end of the day, 60-80 percent of the revenue that publishers bring in comes from their premium inventory, sold on a guaranteed basis — which represents generally less than half of all their available inventory. Nearly all the ad technology innovation in the last decade has focused on what to do with that other half in order to raise the median price of that revenue from nearly zero to a bit more than zero.

It seems to me that there is an opportunity to focus on something else. (And you might imagine that I’m doing just that.)

Eric Picard is CEO of Rare Crowds.

On Twitter? Follow Picard at @ericpicard http://twitter.com/#!/ericpicard. Follow iMedia Connection at @iMediaTweet.

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In 2012, zo’n veertig jaar na de start van het informatietijdperk, zijn alle ogen gericht op de basis daarvan: op digitale data. Dat lijkt misschien weinig nieuws, maar de toevloed van verschillende datatypen plus de snelheid waarmee die trend tot in lengte van dagen zal doorzetten, is opzienbarend. We leven nu in een wereld waarin we overspoeld worden met informatie. Data, data en nog eens data: we bevinden ons in een uitdijend data-universum, vol met onontdekte verbanden. Lees meer

Kiip — the San Francisco-based mobile marketing startup that has created a “rewards network” in which users see offers for free goods and services instead of mobile ads — is going international. The company has signed on the UK-based sushi chain, Yo! Sushi, to deliver offers for free food across apps used in the UK that have integrated Kiip’s service.

Although Kiip has had some of its U.S. customers serve ads outside of the U.S., this is the first time a non-U.S. company has signed on for the service, and the first time Kiip is sending out offers in the UK on a localized, London-only basis, to coincide with the fact that there are so many more people (and specifically Americans) in town for the Olympics. In a meeting this past weekend in a little coffee shop in London, CEO and co-founder Brian Wong told me this is just the beginning of many deals like this as Kiip ramps up its growth, on the back of a recent $11 million Series B round of funding.

The expansion comes at a time when Kiip is competing against a number of other companies that also deliver rewards instead of straight advertisements, like Foursquare and Groupon. The space remains wide open, says Wong, and “we have realized that we could become the trusted rewards provider out there.”

If there’s one thing that seems to annoy the otherwise mild-mannered Wong, it’s that Kiip often gets called a mobile advertising network. “We’re about rewards, not ads,” he told me, stretching out the r-word. He thinks ads, in their current state, have some major limits because of issues with usability and effectiveness. “When you see companies jamming ads into small formats, saying ‘let’s just shrink this billboard,’ it just doesn’t work,” he said.

Rather than trying to figure out how best to cram lots of information into a limited space, Kiip has moved the goalposts altogether and focused its use of small real estate directly on something that a customer can use immediately. While there are a number of apps on the market that push offers to users — Groupon and Foursquare being two examples — Kiip’s innovation of putting those rewards directly into apps by way of its network means that its offers go, in Wong’s words, “wherever you are.”

He says that up to now the engagement rates have been very encouraging. So far, Kiip has seen a 22%  redemption reward rate, and 50% of its redeemers come back to Kiip for more. The majority of users, Wong says, are between the ages of 18 and 34, and Kiip sees a relatively equal mix between male and female users, with ads coming in from big names like Disney, Best Buy and Procter & Gamble.

The bigger picture will see Kiip trying to better match up rewards with increasingly relevant apps. Right now, the company is still in early-adopter phase with a lot of the activity focused around gaming — either in the form of actual mobile games or in areas like fitness apps, which have a natural gamification element to them. It is here that the Yo! Sushi brand fits in particularly well — the company has a kind of Japanese-manga-inspired branding that matches well with gaming design.

But down the road, there will be separate micro-networks around areas like female-focused apps and women’s consumer products; car apps and car-related rewards, and so on. And with the increasing push on location-based offers you can see how this, too, will also start to play a more prominent role with Kiip.

Looking ahead, Kiip is planning to announce more brand partnerships in the UK soon, and it is “on the verge” of rolling out its first campaigns in the middle east and Asia Pacific, with Kiip’s London office, led by Eamonn Carey, leading much of that growth.

Mexican.VC, a startup accelerator based in Mexico City, announced today it is merging with 500 Startups to source and fund a growing number of promising Spanish-speaking startups.

The two programs have been working together for some time, but only on an informal and sporadic basis. Today, Mexican.VC’s founding partners César Salazar and Santiago Zavala will be joining 500 Startups full-time.

500 Startups founding partner Dave McClure provided the following statement: “Mexican entrepreneurs: We’re coming for you, bitches!!!” (That’s pretty typical McClure. Earlier this month, the no-hold- barred investor inspired the startup community in Montreal by flipping it off.)

Mountain View-based 500 Startups was founded by McClure in 2010. If you’re not familiar, it’s an early-stage seed fund and incubator program that has invested in wildly successful startups like Wildfire, Twilio, SendGrid, and TaskRabbit. Read here about 500 Startups’ most recent investments.

Venture capital firms and accelerator programs are constantly looking to expand to emerging markets. In an interview with VentureBeat, Salazar said Mexico is on the brink of explosive growth. “The Latin American market is underserved and overlooked,” he said.

Salazar points to statistics, including recent statistics cited in Forbes that Mexico is the 12th largest economy in the world. Mexico’s GDP last year was $1.65 trillion, up from $1.59 trillion in 2010 and $1.51 trillion in 2009.

Salazar and the other partners at Mexican.VC typically invite around 30 entrepreneurs per year to move to the capital to work with them for four months. Now, with the partnership formalized, companies have the option to raise funds in Mexico or in Silicon Valley.

“This is the biggest thing we are doing to expand our international focus,” said 500 Startups’ partner Christine Tsai.

We’ll see more startups in the firm’s next batch geared toward the Hispanic market.

In Mexico City, the partners will be on the hunt for 5 to 10 early-stage companies with a focus on mobile, consumer internet, and small business software-as-a-service. Salazar said that this year, they will be looking for startups with an eye for customer acquisition and marketing, which will appeal to investors in the U.S.

“In Mexico, the idea of a scalable startup is something really new,” said Salazar. “It’s been growing really fast.” In Mexico City, you’ll detect some of the telltale signs of a burgeoning startup culture, including a Women 2.0 chapter and regional office for Startup Weekend.

Filed under: VentureBeat

If you have your own blog or even a niche or business website for that matter, at some point in time you most definitely will discover that traffic generation is an integral part in your online strategy plan.  Effective and results-driven traffic generation; however, is not all that easy, especially when starting out and is completely new to you.

To drive any acceptable and descent amount of traffic to your online venture takes hard work and most definitely it takes time. When you just start out or even if you are an experienced online junkie like myself, you might want to look into other traffic generation strategies that you haven’t gotten to yet.

You may have tried some that you personally don’t find all that appealing and thus really difficult to sustain.

Remember that driving traffic to your website, and I’m talking about a consistent flow of targeted and returning traffic, does take hard work and also a lot of time.

Persistence also plays a huge role in any strategy that you plan to implement. If you thought that setting up a strategy or getting it going and then you can just leave it and sit back expecting the results you’re after to come in beyond expectations, then my friend, please think again, with all due respect.

You need to focus on no more than one or two strategies at once, keep at it for at least a couple of weeks so that you have some results that you can measure. Then only should you move onto something else and see if you can get better results, with the same persistence in mind.

The good news; however, is that you don’t need to go about it all on your own and try to re-invent the wheel in terms of results-driven traffic generating strategies. There are quite a number of strategies that are currently being used on a daily basis, strategies developed and tested with physical proof by highly successful people out there. They all use these on a regular if not a daily basis to drive the massive amounts of traffic to their own sites and ventures.

So who are these people I’m talking about?

I’m talking about people that have the social and physical proof that whatever strategies you need to be focusing on actually work and get the results that you are after. I am talking about people such as Darren Rowse (ProBlogger), Jon Morrow (Boost Blog Traffic & Copyblogger), Derek Halpern (DIYthemes & Social Triggers), Ana Hoffman (Traffic Generation Cafe), Jane Sheeba (ProBloggingSuccess), Mavis Nong (Attraction Marketing) and our very own Kiesha Easley (WeBlogBetter).

In fact, I am talking about 10 specific highly successful bloggers and online entrepreneurs including the above mentioned.

Need proof that they all know what they are talking about? Sure you do… So go on, go to each of their sites and look at the popularity of the blogs, the social engagement between themselves and their audiences, look at the numbers and do whatever you think you could to find out and make a decision on whether they know what they are talking about or not. Soon you will come to realize that these people are for real.

So what has this got to do with you and your project?

Well, think for just a second about this. If you had to go through to all these people and follow them, learn whatever they are willing to teach you (all of which you should do by the way), keep in mind that they have been doing what they do for quite some time now, some even years and years.

How long do you think it will take you to get to their level of knowledge and then more importantly master their skills to achieve the same level of success? Quite some time, right? Listen, I encourage each and everyone of you to do it anyway, as it will be well worth your time investment.

The thing is, you are looking to get results as quickly as possible, right? Don’t we all? The reality is that good things take time, especially new skills to master. There is just no way around it. But what if there is a quicker way? What if you could have all of these people’s own traffic generation strategies all in one place, pick and choose which ones are the most appealing to you and your online venture, and then actually have them teach you exactly how to implement them yourself? Wouldn’t that be just the ideal scenario? Of course it would.

Your wish is my command…

So here’s what I’ve got for you. All of the above people, I have gone to them personally and told them about my idea to use their own personal traffic generation strategies and share it with as many people as possible.

I have put many hours and a lot of dedication into this project and compiled an eBook called The Best Website Traffic-Generating Strategies | A Tribute containing every single strategy they each use as the driving force behind their own traffic success. The eBook showcases each person, with the strategy, EXACTLY how they’ve used it and explaining step by step how you can use the same strategy in your own ventures. Think you would love that? Of course you would. Who wouldn’t?

I’ve got a surprise…

I have a pleasant surprise for you but there is a small catch, unfortunately…or is it? I want to share this eBook and the value it contains with as many aspiring and experienced people as possible. Also, I have been given a direct order by the The Mighty One and Only to share any profits and proceedings with those in need. I have decided that I will be contributing 50% of all profits and proceedings to Hand Of Hope, the supporting mission arm of Joyce Meyer Ministries.

However, to achieve this, I need your help. I am currently running a competition to give away 10 FREE copies of the eBook even before it gets released and it ends at the end of August, Friday the 31st. I will then announce the lucky winners on Monday the 3rd of September on my website, updating the post I have written explaining all the small requirements in order to stand a chance of winning yourself a copy. Don’t worry, they are very small and will take only a few minutes of your time. This way you will help me spread the word on the eBook in order that we together as a team can help those in need with as big as an impact as we possibly can.

Think you’re up for it?

If you think you are interested in getting to master the exact traffic generation strategies other highly successful bloggers use on a daily basis, and you would like to try and win yourself a FREE copy of The Best Website Traffic-Generating Strategies | A Tribute then head over to that post on my site and follow the simple instructions on how to qualify.

This post also featured the foreword written for me by another successful internet marketer and friend of mine which I think you’ll enjoy just as much as the rest of us. Even if you decide not to take part, feel free to leave your comment on the post and share your thoughts with me. I’d love to hear what you think.

As always, it has been a pleasure to share with you something of incredible valuable and I am looking forward to engage with you in the comments section of this post!

To all your traffic-generation success!

Why Trying To Re-invent The Traffic Generation Wheel Might Be A Bad Idea is a post from: We Blog Better. © 2012. Share it freely, but please link back to this source.

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It will still be more than two years before we can expect to see the final revision of HTTP 2.0, the successor to the HTTP 1.1 standard which dictates how virtually every application on the web communicates today. Given how much the web has changed since HTTP 1.1 became the law of the land in 1999, it’s long been clear that a major revision would be necessary. A number of organizations, including Microsoft and Google, submitted proposals for this update over the last few months. Last week, the IETF HTTPbis Working Group responsible for this new version met in Vancouver, Canada to discuss the proposed changes and start the process of defining HTTP 2.0. Judging from the state of these current discussions, HTTP 2.0 will adopt Google’s increasingly popular SPDY protocol as the basis for its own standard.

The new standard is, of course, still a moving target, but there now seems to be consensus about some of the areas the working group will focus on, including compression, multiplexing, mandatory TLS, client pull/server push, flow control and WebSockets. The current HTTP standard has served the web well over the years, bit HTTP’s one-request-at-a-time model means that all those small objects that now make up many modern sites can’t always be fetched in parallel. This means HTTP traffic is also often slowed down because latency has increased now that we often rely on mobile networks. Despite the fact that we now have more bandwidth than ever before, some recent research from Google has shown that latency holds back even the fastest network connections when it comes to surfing the web.

Despite the fact that SPDY will form the basis for the HTTP 2.0 standard, though, the working group’s chair Mark Nottingham stressed that “it’s important to understand that SPDY isn’t being adopted as HTTP/2.0; rather, that it’s the starting point of our discussion, to avoid a laborious start from scratch.”

Microsoft also proposed its own set of changes – the “HTTP Speed+Mobility” proposal – earlier this year. Even Microsoft uses SPDY as the basis for its work, but also takes into account the recent work done around WebSockets. The other main departures from SPDY, said Microsoft’s Henrik Frystyk Nielsen, Gabriel Montenegro and Rob Trace yesterday, “are to address the needs of mobile devices and applications.”

What’s interesting here is that Microsoft’s team notes how the approach to defining the new standard has to be data driven and how its own research shows that SPDY often isn’t any faster than HTTP 1.1 with “all the known optimizations” (there is also some research that actually shows that SPDY can slow down some sites).

It’ll be interesting to watch how these different proposals will play out until the end of 2014 when the new standard is expected to be released. Given the changing nature of the web, HTTP is obviously due for an update and despite the fact that there seem to be some disagreements brewing in the background, the new standard will be a major boon for all of us who use the web every day.