Nextwave Media - Creative Internet Solutions

Expanding on a program that enables video viewers to click on ads related to content they’re watching, YouTube’s “click-to-buy” ad program will now be available in Germany, Spain and the Netherlands.

The program launched in October 2008 for the US and United Kingdom. It empowered music labels to capitalize on their content, as well as pirated material, by providing links where users can buy songs featured in music videos on YouTube, for example. Purchasing icons currently include Amazon, iTunes, EMI and Electronic Arts.

In an announcement made Wednesday, YouTube claimed such ads helped boost sales of Monty Python DVDs “23,000%,” pushing the series to No. 2 on Amazon’s list of Movies and TV bestsellers. Monty Python launched a YouTube channel last November, a month after the click-to-buy program launched.

If you are trying to improve your search engine ranking and results, and optimize your site, one of the first things you should look at is the wording of links within your site. This not only applies to your website’s navigation menu, but also any links you have on your site that link to other pages or information. More importantly if you can control how other websites link to you this is essential part of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), make sure you get these incoming links (or backlinks) to use keywords and not just your business name.

Don’t Click Here!

The use of “click here” as the actual link to another page or info on your site will not produce good search engine results and you are wasting an opportuinty to add to your site’s SEO performance if you use this for internal (or external links) on your site.

Question: Our company struggles with building a proper opt-in email list. Do you recommend purchasing opt-in email lists? If so, are there reputable vendors that you can recommend? We are just getting started, and I’d like to do this right.

Answer: Don’t cut that check just yet. We do not recommend buying email-marketing lists because many lists contain:

• Old, inactive email addresses that bounce, a red flag for ISPs.
• Spam traps, email addresses set up specifically by ISPs to identify spammers. If you send to these addresses, they’ll think you’re a spammer, too.
• Recipients that are not interested in your message and quickly hit the “This is Spam” button. Get too many spam complaints, and you can quickly tarnish your sender reputation and maybe even end up on blacklists.

Websites are no longer pages of text in a vacuum. Good websites interact with your customers. Search engines are beginning to place a greater importance on video, photos, blogs and much more. Why? Because it makes a website more relevant by serving the user’s needs. That means your online marketing strategies must coincide with your traditional marketing techniques.

Backing up your computer is like brushing and flossing. It looks funny in the pocket, so most people just don’t floss every day or brush after every meal.

But don’t backup, and someday, inevitably, you will lose your files, music, and lose your photos! And that hurts worse than a cavity.

Online backup software makes it easy — continuously backing up your whole computer automatically. Set it up once and go about your life.

Backblaze is the best online backup tool we’ve ever used.

Why we love it:

• No DVDs, no hard drives to mess with
• Backups happen invisibly as soon as files are added
• USD$5/month, no matter how big your hard drive
• Won’t slow down your computer. Really.
• Your online backup can’t be lost or stolen
• Download your backed up files anytime (of course) or have them overnighted to you on DVDs or a hard drive (spiffy!)

We’ve had a lot of queries about search engines and how they work lately. There are many ways to get traffic to your website, but for the average small business they probably boil down to only four. These are outlined below simply, and you can always dig deeper later. The four main ways are:

1. Traffic from search engines, known as search engine optimisation or SEO.
2. Traffic from paid search ads, the pay-per-click (or PPC) text ads that appear in e.g. Google.
3. Traffic from other advertising, such as newsletter advertising, e-mails, blogs, direct mail, print advertising, TV ads, radio spots, etc.
4. Traffic from former visitors, e-mail newsletters that keep you in touch with visitors and customers.

In today’s high speed, fast paced business enviroment, it’s important to be able to work quickly, and efficiently. To do this, you should learn how to use both the keyboard and the mouse simultaneously to do many tasks, such as ‘finding a computer on your network’ to simply browsing folders. This article’s learning exercises not only build up speed, and help you be efficient and more productive, relieve the pressure from working with one hand, now you can work with two.

 Windows XP keyboard shortcuts