Brent Hodgson, Copywriter

Fact: If you want to stay up-to-date with the latest tools, market trends and strategies as an internet marketer, you need to constantly keep your ear to the ground. Read blogs, forums, news feeds - anything which you can get your hands on which can tell you what’s happening in the world of Internet Marketing…

Because the internet is constantly changing - if you’re not keeping yourself up-to-date, you’re getting left behind.

Painfully… I let myself get behind while I worked through a Christmas backlog of work.

Just looking at the number of unread posts in my feed reader would leave me trembling in a corner of the office in a foetal position… It was like looking up at Mt Everest (or at least Mt Kosciusko!)

So in the interests of clearing my feed reader (and sharing a bit of “link love”) I’ve decided to share the insights I’ve received on what’s happening right now in the world of Internet Marketing:

• YouTube announced it will begin paying users (who submit unique videos) a share of revenue that their videos create through an interesting [proposed] advertising arrangement. This follows a similar advertising revenue model recently developed by Revver. To be honest, I’d never heard of Revver before today, but I bet they’re wishing they’d been able to hold onto that USP for a bit longer…
• Guy Kawasaki always has some great things to say. Make sure you check out his post on The Top Ten Stupid Ways to Hinder Market Adoption - a great read, and he makes some very interesting points.
• Wikipedia is heading back to using rel=”nofollow” attributes in links to diminish the value of links it provides to external sites. This is due to link spam, and may just be (as it has been in the past) a temporary measure. As an SEO (no, not link spammer) having a Wikipedia link to quality content on your web-site is highly valuable when it comes to helping your site to rank well in SERPs - however, it’s been suggested (by Brad Fallon) that this was exploited by link spammers recently in an SEO competition who weren’t worried about whether or not the links would stick around. Rather they simply spammed in the hope that their links would stay up long enough so that they would get indexed by Google, and give them a (short term) advantage in the SEO competition which stuck around long enough to help them win.
• Google announced it has implemented an algorithm change which has “defused” Google Bombs. - Although Google doesn’t release details of algorithm changes, comments on Matt Cutts blog would suggest this hypothesis (see update at bottom of post) is spot on the money. Although it’s only a “best guess”, it would appear to be a solution which would have had the potential to work well for Google in this instance.
• In more Google news, Google Video and YouTube have announced “it has begun” - they’re now morphing into the inevitable monster video site we all predicted, now showing YouTube videos in Google Video search results.
• Wikipedia announced new search engine as a (limited) challenger to Google. It’s limited in that it’s designed to only return content-rich, high quality Wikipedia pages. However initial reactions to WikiSeek haven’t been great, with some Search Engine Commentators questioning the value of the new engine, and even more complaining about relevancy of listings in SERPs. Update: I forgot to mention the interview Danny Sullivan did with Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia co-founder) which you can read here.
• Ed Dale blogs on the demise of Overture’s (er, Yahoo’s) inventory tool - useful for assessing the traffic around particular keywords. RIP
• Ed also vlogs on the difficulties some niche marketers are having with PPC advertising - specifically, using Google Adwords profitably. I don’t see much more current info on this topic in the blogosphere, so maybe this problem is limited to certain types of marketers, isn’t being experienced by the bulk of advertisers, or perhaps caused by bad PPC techniques… I’ll nonetheless be keeping an eye on this.
• Web 2.0′ers keep talking about how the new internet revolution is changing salesletters forever. I’m far from convinced by tech-jockeys who suggest the days of the Long Form Salesletter are gone forever - or even gone at all, because this isn’t reflected by my clients’ sales figures. But I do agree with Michel Fortin’s use of pictures to grab attention and increase conversions (because I’ve seen it work for myself). And I think Michel has some great things to say (if you can read your way through it)… But for a copywriter to write over 1,000 words on writing pithy sales copy… Man!
• In a move which can only be described as “Comical”… or maybe “Absurd”… the US Government proposed legislation which would have made it mandatory for bloggers with 500+ readers, writing on political matters, to register with congress or potentially risk jail. Although the bill seems to have passed the Senate, the “grassroots regulations” were voted out of the bill before it was passed after the Senate was on the receiving end of an “effective grassroots campaign” from the blogging public.
• Vista is hitting shelves this week in Australia… Hillariously, Harvey Norman’s countdown to the launch of Vista was set incorrectly, and has now begun counting up (roffle). Meanwhile, does anyone find it odd that Jim Allchin (Microsoft Windows boss) retirement roughly coincides with the release of Vista? Has he given up on Windows after years of Vista troubles, and after famously declaring he’d buy a Mac if he didn’t work for Microsoft.
• Finally… It’s been a month since we last heard from John Reese about Income.com… I’ve been eagerly awaiting the launch, but no new news to report yet.

And that’s just about everything interesting which is happening right now in the blogosphere which has anything to do with Internet Marketing.

Technorati Tags: SEO Internet Marketing Ed Dale Google Bomb Michel Fortin Brad Fallon WikiSeek

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