Google To Acquire YouTube for $1.65 Billion in Stock
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., October 9, 2006 - Google announced today
that it has agreed to acquire YouTube, the consumer media company for people to watch and share
original videos through a Web experience, for $1.65 billion in a stock-for-stock transaction. Following
the acquisition, YouTube will operate independently to preserve its successful brand and passionate
community.
The acquisition combines one of the largest and fastest growing online video entertainment
communities with Google’s expertise in organizing information and creating new models for advertising
on the Internet. The combined companies will focus on providing a better, more comprehensive experience
for users interested in uploading, watching and sharing videos, and will offer new opportunities
for professional content owners to distribute their work to reach a vast new audience.
“The YouTube team has built an exciting and powerful media platform that complements Google’s
mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” said
Eric Schmidt, Chief Executive Officer of Google. “Our companies share similar values; we
both always put our users first and are committed to innovating to improve their experience. Together,
we are natural partners to offer a compelling media entertainment service to users, content owners
and advertisers.”
“Our community has played a vital role in changing the way that people consume media, creating
a new clip culture. By joining forces with Google, we can benefit from its global reach and technology
leadership to deliver a more comprehensive entertainment experience for our users and to create new
opportunities for our partners,” said Chad Hurley, CEO and Co-Founder of YouTube. “I’m
confident that with this partnership we’ll have the flexibility and resources needed to pursue
our goal of building the next-generation platform for serving media worldwide.”
When
the acquisition is complete, YouTube will retain its distinct brand identity, strengthening and
complementing Google’s own fast-growing video business. YouTube will continue to be
based in San Bruno, CA, and all YouTube employees will remain with the company. With Google’s
technology, advertiser relationships and global reach, YouTube will continue to build on its success
as one of the world’s most popular services for video entertainment.
Congratulations to the West Coast Eagles
Yes, it’s totally off topic, but what the heck - it’s my blog & I can write what I want, right? 
Just a quick post to say congratulations to my local football team (the West Coast Eagles) for winning the 2006 AFL grand final!
Well done lads! A nail biter of a match to be sure, but a fabulous and well deserved win, nonetheless.
Testing New Blogging Software
It’s been too long since I last added a regular post to this blog, and I think part of the problem is that it’s such a hassle to login to Word Press and create a post.
I find that it just runs rather slowly at times (which I am quite sure is more to do with my hosting account than WP itself, but still..), and sometimes it has crashed and I have lost my work!
So, tonight I am trying something new!
A client-side blogging tool that works on my PC and allows me to write everything locally and then it will post remotely to my blog/s. It’s called Performancing For Firefox, and it’s a rather neat but simple Firefox extention that creates a blogging tool within your Firefox browser.
Obviously, this means you need to install Firefox, but given all the hassles I have with IE, that’s not a drama! Then just mosey on over to www.performancing.com and grab their free blog editor for Firefox. It’s quick and easy to install, and so far, looks fairly simple!
Lastly, I am going to add a photo to this post (because I have never posted a pic to my normal blog pics before (except for the one on my permanent contact me page, which is slightly different) and see how it handles that as well.
Anyway, nice work to the folks over at Performancing.com - I recommend you go check their site out. Lots of cool content & tools for bloggers.
OK, here comes the photo…
This is a pic taken late July 2006 of my twin sister & myself at our 41st birthday party! A fun day…
OK, that’s it for my first use of Performancing. Lets see if it speeds up the postings I can make from now on! lol
Eran
powered by performancing firefox
Website Traffic Secrets…
Getting website traffic seems to be the #1 concern of most people trying to make an income on the internet.
Go on, admit it! That includes you too, doesn’t it?
I thought so…
But…I’m not psychic - by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, Blind Freddie could have figured that one out in about 5 seconds, with his eyes closed…
Seriously though, almost every single person I know who’s trying to make money using the internet craves traffic. It’s their addiction, you could say.
Why?
Simple really, website traffic = $$$
Or, to put it in different terms, the more eyeballs you have cruising through your website, the more chance you’ve got to have them buy sometime from you, or click on an ad on your website, or even sign up for your email newsletter (which you then promote products and/or services to them through that medium…don’t you???).
From an Adsense perspective, the higher your number of website visitors, the more money you make from some of them clicking on your ads.
From an affiliate marketer’s perspective, the more website traffic you get, the more sales you ultimately get.
And if you’re one of the smart ones, you’ll be selling your own products and/or services, and doing even better from all those surfers.
“Real businesses” 
can and should use website traffic to collect sales leads and sell their products and services online. Even accountants and lawyers can make money online - you don’t need to be an eBay or Amazon.com to make money on the net.
So, now that we’ve established the fact that website traffic is a GOOD THING (!), why is it that so many website owners struggle so much to actually get that traffic?
I personally believe it’s because they don’t understand a few key fundamentals about what makes the Internet work, and, they then don’t know how to properly use that knowledge and put a plan of action into place to actively and deliberately get web site traffic to their site/s.
I’m lucky in 1 respect, and that is that I work as a Search Engine Marketer for a real bricks and mortar company. That means that every day I get to play with all the key elements that are important when it comes to getting website traffic, and put them into real-world action for my clients.
These companies and individuals pay thousands of dollars to have myself and my co-workers do “that SEO thing!” on their behalf, and they expect results!
Actually, we plan for results ourselves, because we offer a money back guarantee on our SEO services, so we can’t afford to not perform. Nothing like a bit of pressure to make you get the job done right!
Now, the main reason I am writing this blog post is that there’s 2 things happening at the same time right now, and you can benefit from this day to day experience I get at work, and turn that into your own website traffic!
Firstly, I am about a week away from the launch of my new Video training product:
Website Traffic Secrets: 26 Ways To Drive Cheap Or Free Traffic To Your Website
This CD will contain over 2 Hours of narrated live screen capture video, walking you through all the different aspects of driving traffic to your websites.
It will be all laid out for you in a simple, easy-to-understand, step-by-step action plan…
In Video…
With Audio narration…
And, lots of great free and cheap resources to help you get started.
Plus, it will have my IE Favorites list, pointing you to all the sites that I use on a regular basis that can help you in your quest to get that traffic.
This is a condensed version of my work experiences over the last 12 months + 12 years of working in IT, Sales and Training. In short, you could describe it as a website traffic braindump!
There’ll be more about this CD soon…
But for now, the other thing that’s happening is that I will be adding a new article to my blog every day until the CD is launched, discussing website traffic concepts and hints/tips to get you started.
You don’t have to buy the CD when it’s launched, because it’s only for those folks that are TRULY serious about getting as much website traffic as possible.
However, for those of you just putting your toe into the water and needing a plain english introduction to the whole topic of getting website traffic, then I guarantee you’ll really get value from my upcoming articles.
So dear reader, see you back here tomorrow for article #1 (”The 2 Most Common Ways To Get Website Traffic”), and have a fantastic day!
Joel Comm Is Selling Keywords Now? What a Scam!
God, am I the ONLY person out there in the big wide world who is not frothing at the mouth about the newest “trend” to hit the get-rich-quick Internet Marketing community?
Joel Comm (of Adsense Secrets fame) has been promoting his 500words.com site around the net lately, and when I saw the site, a sense of deja vu wafted over me in a major hurry!
Reminds me of the pixel selling craze of a year or so ago, where everybody went ballistic buying 1 pixel ads on a site to get link popularity benefits from Google & co.
That was great for the first 1-2 players in the field, and it got a LOT of press and some good dollars for the early mover, but have you noticed that no one seems to be paying much attention to it these days?
Why, you ask?
Simple really - because it goes against what Google (in particular) and the other major search engines are looking for when it comes to measuring the worth of incoming links.
My philosophy when it comes to the “fad of the month” brigade is simple: If I can show it to a Google Search Engine “cop” and have him or her be happy that it’s legit and fair and honest, and give me full value for the link, then it’s all good.
However, if the Google cop laughs at me and asks me if I’m on drugs, I know it will ultimately be a waste of time. It might work temporarily, but once Google figures it out, they will add a small routine to their algorithm to ignore the value of links from sites like this.
Even more than that, I am really disappointed that Joel Comm is the one promoting this. Mr Adsense himself should know better than to try and get one past Google!
If his idea was SOOOO good, he would keep his mouth shut & just build these sites for himself to get the link popularity.
Instead, he’s selling the script to build the keyword sites instead - THAT’s where the money is. He’ll sucker in hundreds of get-rich-quick starrey eyed individuals who think they will make a fortune with it, and in reality, HE will make a small fortune and probably only 1-2 others will as well.
Folks, use some critical thinking here PLEASE!
If this was really as good as he says it is, why is he selling the system instead of using it for himself?
Simple really - he makes money on the people who buy the links AND he makes money on the people who buy his script.
However, I can guarantee you that within 6 months (probably less), Google will be giving links from these sites little or NO value. All these word links are doing at the moment is drawing traffic from the buzz, which is nice, but not sustainable long term!
If you want link popularity, spend the money you would have paid Joel to buy his script and/or buying a word on his site, and pay someone from rentacoder or elance to write you some unique articles instead.
Link your primary keyword/s in the author resource box and publish the articles on your own site. THEN, modify the articles sufficiently so that they have at least 25-50% different wording & content to the original, and publish them on the major article sites like ezinearticles.com.
The value of the link popularity you will get from doing this will far outweigh any value you will get from the 500words site over the medium to long term.
Just this technique alone has got my biggest client to #1 GLOBALLY on Google for one of their primary keywords in less than 6 months. It took me about 2 hrs of work to publish the articles for him, and that’s all I’ve had to do since.
The link popularity he has earned from those published articles has steadily climbed and climbed, until it is now at #1 against 115 MILLION competing pages!
Now, THAT you can take to the bank. It’s a solid strategy, it keeps Google happy, and obviously it thrills my client and makes me look good.
What more can an SEO ask for!
I love Internet Marketing, but I despair at times at how many people just chase the newest fad, hoping to get rich quick, instead of working smart & hard and putting together a quality site.
One-way Incoming Links from Directories
As with everything in life, there is an easy way, and there is a way that works effectively…
There are plenty of software tools out there that will submit your sites to the free directories…BUT, they come with a price, and I aint talking purchase price either.
It’s the same old story. If you try to cheat the system, the search engines will just ignore your efforts, which defeats the purpose of submitting to the directories in the first place.
Submitting the same entry (via software)Â to 50, 100, even 200 different directories is much the same as posting a copy of the exact same article to 1000 different article sites on the web. It will get indexed, and then promptly ignored, except for MAYBE 1-2 entries, by the search engines.
The search engines are wise to this spamming of the directories, and are ignoring entries that are the same.
Also, another thing about submitting a link to 200 directories is that those links will all show up on the next crawl of the spiders, and all of the major SE’s now monitor the growth rate of links to websites. If they see a massive level of growth in 1 day/week/month, and then no more after that, they automatically flag that site as suspicious, and it suffers for this. So, using a software tool to submit to a pile of directories in 1 shot is just a waste of time.
What’s the only way to avoid this problem? Submit a different entry to each directory, and the best way to do that is to do them manually… which is what everybody wants to avoid.
Think long term people - don’t spam the search engines, and your sites will perform better and last longer. If you can create sites that last for years in the SE’s, even if their rankings aren’t huge and their traffic isn’t massive, you get a much better bang for your buck than thinking short term.
That’s why just building scraper/spam sites for adsense earnings is a short-term tactic. At the end of the day, you will have to keep building new ones all the time to replace the ones that fall over after a month or 3.
Tag and Ping Disaster
Poor Sean Wu!
I wrote about him & his upcoming release of Tag and Ping the other day. I am guessing things went well, sales-wise, but the poor guy has been visited by Murphy (that famous Irish gentleman, whose law has been one universal constant in our world since day dot!) since then.
I just got home this evening, and found an email waiting for me from Sean…
Seems he had a major snafu with his autoresponder system:
Today I woke up to check my email - only to find
out in HORROR that my autoresponders from my
automation system has been sending me ALL of the
pre-programmed messages in the sequence
repeatedly… to MY inbox!At first I thought it was only doing this to me -
until I noticed that I’m getting a few complaints
from some people telling me that they’ve been receiving
up to 10 or more emails from my autoresponders,
in ONE day.Also, I’ve also noticed that some people are NOT
able to “opt out” of the sequence - even after
they’ve removed themselves from my autoresponder’s
database (I checked and their records have already
been removed - but the emails won’t stop for some
reason).*I’m also getting emails from ALL of my autoresponders
to MY inbox repeatedly too (and I can’t even “opt out”
of my OWN autoresponders!)
I hope the poor guy manages to sort this drama out! I’m sure its probably freaking him out a bit…
However, much more importantly AND significantly from my point of view is the latter part of this email, which says:
Third and finally - a BIG WARNING I want to give to
you:http://www.tagandping.com/warning.html
I’ve warned repeatedly, in EVERY teleseminar I did and
also on my Update Blog at http://www.tagandping.com/updates/,
as well as on the “Download Page” you are forwarded to
after purchasing the course…To NOT, in ANY circumstance, attempt to abuse or *spam*
the “authority sites” I mentioned in the course. I’ve
warned repeatedly that you should “go slow” AND add
valuable links & content… and NOT just links to your
own sites.The methods presented in the course are powerful -
BUT you MUST use it ethically.I’ve already seen some attempts to flood the authority
sites mentioned in the course with links to “page
generated” sites… and if you’re doing this - I ask
that you please stop.You should use these services the way that they’re
designed to be used - by adding valuable links that
other people will also find useful (in addition to
links to your own sites).DON’T overdo it!
Sean, you should have thought of the “possibility” of some morons using your techniques to spam and/or abuse these sites BEFORE you released this product…
Where I live, we have a saying for this - something along the lines of locking the barn door AFTER the horse has bolted!
This is why I often describe the Internet Marketing field as a shark infested pool…Along with all the nice fish, there are plenty of sharks who really don’t give a damn what they do to get traffic and sales on the net.
It’s not just the black hat crowd, it’s also the unethical, the ignorant, and the stupid that screw things up for the rest of us, who are happy to earn a living online without crossing the line into inappropriate tactics and techniques that just muck it up for everybody else.
Let this serve as a warning to those of you who think it’s OK to cut corners and not care about the consequences of your actions. If you’ve ever complained about all the trashy spam sites in the search engines now, then know that these unethical people are responsible for them. Makes Google and Co’s life hard, so in order to deliver the best deal possible to their REAL clients, they are now making legitimate internet marketers lives difficult, just to cope with the spam and dirty tricks brigade.
I truly hope Sean Wu won’t be looked upon (in 1-2 years) as the guy who started the downhill slide for tag and ping, and destroyed the value of this technique and these social bookmarketing sites, etc. I wonder if he thought about this properly before he decided to release this product?
I wonder…
Tag and Ping Launches…
Yes, it’s true. Tag and Ping has finally launched onto the market, and the hype surrounding this product from Sean Wu has got a large portion of the internet marketing world up in arms and semi-fighting between each other!
Wu, a 24 year old ‘kid‘ from Thailand claims to have cracked the ‘secret code To Instant, Unlimited Supply Of PageRank 5+ Backlinks From AUTHORITY SITES…‘. Further, he claims tag and ping is so effective that it puts the (in)famous blog and ping to shame!
Big claims for a young guy I’ve never heard of before (which means squat, ‘cos if he’s smart, he’s been under the radar for a few years making big bucks using Tag and Ping, before releasing it into the shark infested waters of the Internet Marketing fraternity).
Now, anything I say from here onwards is just opinion, since I haven’t seen a copy of Tag and Ping.
The short version to Tag and Ping, as I understand it, is that it involves getting links from Social Bookmarking sites such as Technorati, Del.icio.us and Furl (just to name a few). These links can generate web traffic back to your website IF they get a decent level of popularity from the net denizens who vote for them (this is the social bookmarking).
To give you an overview of Social Bookmarking, here’s what the folks at wikipedia have to say about it:
In a Social bookmarking system, users store lists of Internet resources, which they find useful. Often, these lists are publicly accessible, and other people with similar interests can view the links by category, tags, or even randomly. Some social bookmarking systems allow for privacy on a per-bookmark basis.
They also categorize their resources by the use of informally assigned, user-defined keywords or tags (see folksonomy). Most social bookmarking services allow users to search for bookmarks which are associated with given “tags”, and rank the resources by the number of users which have bookmarked them. Many social bookmarking services also have implemented algorithms to draw inferences from the tag keywords that are assigned to resources by examining the clustering of particular keywords, and the relation of keywords to one another.
This system has several advantages over traditional automated resource location and classification software, such as search engine spiders. All tag-based classification of Internet resources (such as web sites) is done by human beings, who understand the content of the resource, as opposed to software which algorithmically attempts to determine the meaning of a resource. This provides for semantically classified tags, which are hard to find with present-day (2006) search engines.
Additionally, as people bookmark resources that they find useful, resources that are of more use are bookmarked by more users. Thus, such a system will “rank” a resource based on its perceived utility. This is a more useful metric for end users than other systems which rank resources based on the number of external links pointing to it.
The 3 obvious bonuses here are:
- You get traffic to your site to read your content if its popular (and this traffic is free), and
- If you are lucky, you’ll also get the link to your site on the front page of these high PR sites, which may just lead to it spidering your site quickly, and
- If your content is popular enough, you’ll also likely get links to it from other sites, which will improve your site’s link popularity (PR), which will also bring increased search engine traffic.
Now, ALL of these things are fantastic. I wouldn’t turn down any of them for a second…but here’s my biggest concern about this whole Tag and Ping thing…
It’s going to attract a bunch of black hat types (and the generally dumb) who will use and abuse this technique to get traffic to their sites (many of which will be little more than spam sites built to earn money from adsense with little real value to the internet - as if we deperately need 1 more spammy adsense site on mesothelioma cancer!!!).
If they use and abuse it too much, the whole benefit that these sorts of sites offer will be comprimised, and once again, they will spend a lot of their time and resources fighting the tag and ping equivalent of content spam!
So, while I believe that tag and ping (as a concept that has been freely available for some time now) is a valuable tool, and Sean Wu may well be a top bloke, I just hope that if you read this blog post, you might just take heed of what I say, and not go crazy with this whole tag/ping thing.
Please, do EVERYBODY a favor and be responsible in the use of it, and it will be there to benefit us all for years to come.
WordPress: A Quick And Easy Website Solution
Just a quick one today, and my apologies for the long time between posts. I have been busy with other projects and have just not had time to add to this blog.
So, my topic for today (well, tonight actually - its 1.40am!) is that of using WordPress as a quick and easy solution to building a functional website.
Just in case you have never heard of WordPress before, it’s a software application called a Blog.
WordPress is perhaps the most popular blog system on the market today, and best of all, it’s totally free for anyone to download it and use it.
To give you a slightly more exact description of a Blog, here’s what the good folks at WordPress have to say themselves:
“Blog” is an abbreviated version of “weblog,” which is a term used to describe web sites that maintain an ongoing chronicle of information. A blog is a frequently updated, personal website featuring diary-type commentary and links to articles or other Web sites. Blogs range from the personal to the political, and can focus on one narrow subject or a whole range of subjects.
Many blogs focus on a particular topic, such as web design, politics, sports, or mobile technology. Some are more eclectic, presenting links to all manner of other sites. And others are more like personal journals, presenting the author’s daily life and thoughts.
Generally speaking (though there are exceptions), blogs tend to have a few things in common:
- A main content area with articles listed chronologically, newest on top. Often, the articles are organized into categories.
- An archive of older articles.
- A way for people to leave comments about the articles.
- A list of links to other related sites, sometimes called a “blogroll”.
- One or more “feeds” like RSS, Atom or RDF files.
Some blogs may have additional features beyond these.
WordPress is simple to use (at its basic level - if you want to get fancy, it can be quite complex), so you barely need any html coding experience to use it. Perhaps just enough to understand how to form a hyperlink…
You can download HEAPS of great free plugins for WordPress, which enhance its functionality, and if you want it to look fancy as well, there are lots of free themes for it, to change the look of the site. My site (eranmalloch.com) uses a free 3rd party theme (The Semiologic theme, designed by Mesoconcepts), and there are plenty more out there.
If you need to whip up a neat looking website in a very short time frame, WordPress is perfect. You can download it for free from their website, install it in 5 minutes, add a sexy new theme in another 5 minutes, and you will be ready to begin publishing in 30 - 60 mins or less. The longest time required will be for browsing through the free themes on the net and choosing one you like.
Now, for those of you who want to do this even quicker, and who don’t yet even have a hosting service to put your site one, I recommend you take a look at the facility where I host my sites. Not only do they have great prices and you get lots of goodies for your money, but more importantly, they have a free scripting system included in the package called Fantastico (strange name, great product) which has the ability to install a fully operational WordPress blog into your host in less than 1 minute.
Truly WordPress for Dummies - you barely need to know anything to use it, and it’s heaps quicker and simpler than downloading and manually installing WordPress by yourself.
Check out my hosting service and when you register, take a look at the Fantastico tool inside the Cpanel (your control panel for managing your hosting account, domains, and email accounts, etc.). When you click on it, you will get a menu of different FREE applications that Fantastico can install for you. Just look for WordPress in the blogs section and click on the link.
From then on, it’s all pretty simple to do - just follow the instructions, and before you know it, your first WordPress blog will be live.
Oh, be sure and have a good look around inside Fantastico - it has HEAPS of fabulous free software applications that you can use for your website/s - stuff that you would normally expect to pay hundreds, if not thousands of dollars for. All free, and easy to install using Fantastico…
Delete Your Google Toolbar!
Ahhh…the Google Toolbar.
Much beloved of the web marketing & SEO fraternity.
However, I just deleted it off my work PC the other day, and I’m a full-time SEO / SEM specialist, so what gives?
Well, the truth of the matter is that it is no longer something I think I can rely on to give me quality information with regards to their Page Rank rating.
The search market keeps changing, and none more regularly than Google, and its become quite apparent to me that that little green bar that we all worship is getting less useful AND less accurate than it has ever been before.
I suspect Google knows this well, but are quite happy to let us all run around like silly dogs, chasing our tails and getting all in a lather about the Page Rank (PR) of any particular page. When we chase PR in preference to TRAFFIC (do any of you remember that little thing???), then its a sign that things are getting out of control.
Apparently it has been recently reported (IÂ have NOT verified this yet)Â that it’s very easy to fool the Google toolbar by the addition of several lines of code to a webpage. You can make nearly any page appear to have a much higher PR than it really does. There will (no doubt) be people out there who will try to play this to their (unfair) advantage, but they’ll eventually get caught out.
Remember, what goes around, comes around!
So, I have made an “executive decision” and removed the toolbar from my PC. That way, it doesn’t distract me from the real issue at hand, which is to build traffic with sensible ethical smart methods. No black hat scamming, no sleight of hand, and no outright falsehoods.
Just add quality unique content, get quality links, optimise your pages properly (title tags, etc), and keep doing this over and over. Eventually, your site will begin to rank well, and your traffic will grow. It’s really VERY simple.