:: Part Time Revenue ::

(Page 1 of 2 )

What do you do if your pet enterprise fails? If you’re a brave (or perhaps foolhardy) entrepreneur, you build something even more ambitious. Such is the case with Nick Oba. When his contributor-driven online magazine failed back in 2010, he came up with a bigger idea: take on Facebook, but make the members into shareholders. And thus Zurker was born.

As far as I know, no one has ever set up an online social network as effectively a co-op before, and as you’d expect, Zurker’s set-up isn’t quite that simple. As Zurker’s About page explains, “Every Zurker user becomes a co-owner (future shareholder) of Zurker.” As Zurker hasn’t had an IPO or anything of that nature yet, users earn vShares.

A vShare is a stake in Zurker; it’s the unit of equity the company is allotting to members during the alpha and beta testing phases. They aren’t actually stock. “vShares can be thought of as agreements between the owners of a startup about the size of their stake in the enterprise to be incorporated,” Zurker explains on its vShares page. One vShare equals one-millionth of a piece of the company. Users can earn vShares by signing up, and by inviting friends; they can also purchase them. “When 1,000,000 vShares have been allocated, Zurker will be restructured as a public corporation and vShares will become real shares,” Zurker elaborates.

That’s not the only surprising step that Zurker has taken. In part because it’s a co-op, Zurker has an open books policy. What does this mean? It means they have a page on which you can check their finances, line by line, for each country they’re in.

That’s another interesting difference: Zurker is an independent project in each country it’s in, owned by the members of that country only, with its own balance sheet. Oba did this because “different markets react in different ways.” He’s trying to avoid what he describes as “Friendster syndrome.” Friendster eventually became highly popular in the Philippines; in fact, the site quickly became dominated by members from that area of the world. The social network’s US-based management, which was unfamiliar with that area, didn’t know how to capitalize on the popularity and traffic. So the site ended up stagnating. Local owners will presumably not experience that problem.

So far, there are Zurker projects in the United States, United Kingdom, India, the Philippines, New Zealand, Canada, and Australia; there’s also a Zurker Worldwide, for all other jurisdictions. As near as I can tell, this only matters for which vShares you’re allowed to hold; someone from the US can’t hold vShares for Zurker UK, for example. However, you can connect and interact normally with members on other versions of Zurker. “A member of Zurker UK can subscribe to a member of Zurker India,” the site helpfully explains. This, of course, brings us to the interface.

Next: Zurking Around
 

More Search Engine News Articles
More By Terri Wells

Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.blog comments powered by Disqus

Article source: http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Search-Engine-News/Zurker-Social-Network-for-the-99-Percent/

(Page 1 of 2 )

When trying to rank well on Google, you want to get as many factors working for you as possible. If you can use a few effective techniques your competitors overlook, so much the better. Keep reading for some ideas.

I saw these ideas in an article by Neil Patel that appeared on Search Engine Journal. He goes into great detail explaining why you should use these techniques and what you can gain from them. If anything I tell you here piques your curiosity, I suggest you check out that piece.

We’ll start with a ranking factor that’s near and dear to every writer’s heart: authorship markup. Google has been supporting authorship markup since the middle of last year. Even today, not everyone uses it, though you’ll find it on most of the major publishing websites. If you run a site with authored content, you’ll want to use it as well.

So how does it work? Google provides information on the technical details of authorship markup (), so you can implement it on your own site. But what do you gain? Patel showed an image from a search he performed which displayed an author’s thumbnail picture – in this case, Joost de Valk – underneath the link to de Valk’s article. Next to de Valk’s picture, Google displayed his name as an active link, listed how many Google+ circles he was in, and finally included a link for “more by Joost de Valk.”

I don’t need to tell you that anything extra that catches the eyes of searchers may be worth doing, but you can already see that this gives you something special. Searchers can see that there’s a real person behind your articles; that builds trust. Content farm postings usually don’t list authors on their pages, so right away this separates your site from the fluff.

Bill Slawski at SEO by the Sea sees even more positives to using authorship markup. Based on some Google patents he’s read, he believes the search engine will take it further. For example, if you do a guest post and have an authorship markup profile, authorship markup could let you connect all of your content so readers can follow you wherever you blog. Slawski also thinks that authorship markup could stop content scrapers in their tracks – if Google crawls both pages and finds authorship markup on one, it might recognize that as the original page, thus keeping the scrapers from outranking you.

These are just two possibilities that Slawski listed. If Google takes the next step and actually starts using author badges, there’s even greater potential. But for right now, adding authorship markup will at least give your pages more authority, increase reader trust, and might increase your click-through rate even if you’re not at the top of the SERPs – because that author thumbnail really does make a result stand out.

Next: Getting Appropriately Fresh
 

More Google Optimization Articles
More By Terri Wells

Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.blog comments powered by Disqus

Article source: http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Google-Optimization-Help/Overlooked-Google-Ranking-Factors/

(Page 1 of 2 )

You run a local business, and you claimed your Google Local listing so searchers would see your website. That’s a start, but with Bing and Yahoo together holding more than a quarter of the search market in the US, you’re still leaving money on the table. Fortunately, you can easily get onto Bing Local by following a few simple steps.

As Chris Silver Smith explains at Search Engine Land, Microsoft’s Bing Business Portal features a “beta” interface through which you handle your business details. It replaces the Bing Local Listing Center. If you want some information about the service before adding your business, you can read the FAQ.

To star using the interface, you’ll need to find your listing. Bing Business Portal will ask you to enter your business name (required), address, city, state, and zip code, and then press the search button to see if Bing already has information about your business. If you enter only your business name, be aware that Bing will insist that you also enter either your city AND state, or your zip code.

Once you’ve entered this information, Bing will return a listing to you if it finds one that matches. You can then click the claim button. If it doesn’t, you can add a new listing. Smith notes that “having a business owner claim a listing helps to validate the information and establish that the business is active, helping increase ‘trust ranking’ factors.” Remember that search engines hate to show stale information to searchers – and businesses fail all the time. If a business owner has claimed their listing, it may show the search engine that the business is active, and could lead to a more prominent position in the search results.

Once you’ve claimed your listing, you need to check the contact information it displays. Make sure it’s correct. At a minimum, it needs to include your name, address, and phone number, in addition to your website’s URL. If you choose to include an email address, treat it professionally – check and answer the messages it receives at least once a day. Otherwise, customers will think you’re ignoring them, and go somewhere else.

Next, if you can, you should at least consider adding an image to your listing. Smith notes that for Bing Local searches, “higher-ranking businesses appear to more frequently have images associated with their listings!” He was careful to state that this could simply be due to the fact that listings with images are always claimed listings, and they could be ranking higher for that fact alone. Correlation does not equal causation, after all. Smith uses a Bing search on “intellectual property attorneys Chicago, Il” as an example. The first listing past the ads is a box with a map and five options; when I clicked through, I noticed that the top two and the fifth ones included images.

As a potential customer, I think I’d be more inclined to take the next step with a business that includes an image. If users conduct a search on Bing Local (rather than a general web search), those images actually show up next to the relevant listings, drawing the eye and making you stand out. As a searcher, if I don’t know any of the businesses listed in my search, and distance isn’t a huge factor, I start looking for anything that catches my eye and makes it stand out. Including an image is one approach that can help attract eyeballs; there are others you can use as well.

Next: Be Eye-Catching
 

More MSN Optimization Articles
More By Terri Wells

Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.blog comments powered by Disqus

Article source: http://www.seochat.com/c/a/MSN-Optimization-Help/Bing-Local-Basics/

(Page 1 of 2 )

In this article I’m going to lay out a method so devastatingly effective for getting top search rankings really fast that its simplicity might surprise you.

Now, to be fair, I have talked about pieces of this in my last article.  In fact, I’ve been harping on two aspects of this: the use of Google+ (which I’m going to shorten to just G+ from here on out) and becoming an authority in your market.

The problem with the whole “authority” thing is that it can take time. What I want to do with this article is help you get some good rankings quickly.

Actually, what I want to do with this article is help you to absolutely crush it on Google.

The thing is, the new Panda update, followed by the Search+ changes, have made it so that anyone doing any kind of business without a G+ page is foolish.

Understand that before the Panda update I was a little G+ agnostic. There just wasn’t enough going on, and some of the “sharing” features (such as the +1) didn’t seem to be getting enough usage. However, with the growth of G+ has come more sharing. Not only that, but the Search+ additions have made it worthwhile to actually offer an incentive for +1s. 

On my own G+ page I’m doing this as well, by giving people who +1 and add me to their circles a special report containing information that I’ll never give anywhere else.

All of that is a long way of saying that G+ is now important for businesses of any kind. As with Facebook, it allows an impressive level of engagement with your customers.

For the purposes of this article, however, G+ can receive preferential search treatment. The emphasis here is on the word “can,” as it’s important to make sure that you do things correctly.

Not only that, but G+ being so completely spidered by the search engine means that posts you create on G+ that are important, and get heavily shared, will be “findable” years down the road. In fact, great posts on G+ can easily “take on a life of their own” and be spread and shared around in ways that simply are not possible with Facebook.

Not only that, but the “circles” concept allows you to segment people in ways that are frankly awesome, besides being incredibly intuitive. Imagine having one circle that is prospects or leads, and another that is customers. You can now vary what each sees through their G+ streams based on their relationship to you. In other words, you can give different information to a prospect than to a long time customer.

With the background information out of the way, let’s talk about how you can absolutely crush your competition on Google. 

Next: Optimize Your Profile
 

More Google Optimization Articles
More By Matt Goffrey

Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.blog comments powered by Disqus

Article source: http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Google-Optimization-Help/The-EXACT-Method-for-Crushing-It-On-Google/

(Page 1 of 2 )

What do a great cook and a great blogger have in common? A lot more than you might think. So grab a quick snack and keep reading for an explanation you can really sink your teeth into.

Inspiration strikes in strange ways; in this case, I reached the end of Neil Patel’s excellent article covering 13 questions you should ask yourself while writing a blog post. In his discussion of the last question, he compared a blog post to a restaurant meal. Will your reader complain about your blog post because you’ve served them skimpy fare? “Are you feeding people content so they are full when they leave your site…or are they hungry, looking for more?” Patel asked. “If they are still hungry, your readers probably won’t come back.”

So if your readers are devouring your blog content, that makes you a cook. And if a blog post is a complete meal, then writing a blog post is like cooking that meal. As with a meal, your visitors enjoy the finished product, but you know how much work went into it. Creating a good blog post, like cooking a good meal, involves a process that begins even before you turn on your computer or open your cookbook to track down some recipes.

It starts with what you enjoy. No, actually, it starts with what really makes you salivate. Can’t get enough spicy Indian food? Then you probably shouldn’t be cooking potato pancakes – unless you want to give them a very different twist. The best chefs, like the best bloggers, are passionate about what they’re doing. So write about your passion. Or at least find something in what you’re writing that makes you feel passionate.

Now if you’re preparing a meal for a group, you need to take their tastes into consideration. Is someone allergic to garlic? You’ll need to exclude that spice and find ways to make your meal just as flavorful. That’s eminently doable. I’ve talked about many aspects of my life in the literally hundreds of articles I’ve written for SEO Chat, but there are certain things I won’t discuss – because they’re private, or because some of my readers might find them offensive. So cater to your readers’ tastes. You can certainly spice things up a bit, but let’s face it, you wouldn’t serve steak tartare to a table full of vegetarians, right?

Okay, once you get a general idea of what you’re going to serve, you need to look up some recipes. What this means in the context of a blog entry is, you need to do some research. And unlike many cooks, you won’t want to copy a recipe exactly. “Before you sit down and write an article, it’s important to search the web for articles like your idea,” Patel notes. “One of the things that I do is take the headline that I’m thinking about using and drop it into the Google search box. Then I look at what comes up.”

In the context of a blog entry, that might mean that you find some provocative research, an analyst’s opinion relevant to the research, and form your own point of view about it all. There are plenty of ways you can combine different ideas, but you need to add something original to make a blog entry – or a dish – truly yours.

Next: Assemble Your Ingredients
 

More Search Optimization Articles
More By Terri Wells

Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.blog comments powered by Disqus

Article source: http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Search-Engine-Optimization-Help/Feed-Your-Blogs-Readers-Well/

(Page 1 of 2 )

Streamlining and simplifying seem like such good things on paper. Strangely, though, when Google is the one doing the simplifying, and the subject of the process is its privacy policy, most observers get hot under the collar. Why is it so bad when Google does it?

Just in case you didn’t check Google yesterday, the search giant started posting a note under its search box explaining that it will be updating both its privacy policy and its terms of service, with the new terms going into effect on the first of March. If you can’t be bothered to read the entire policy previews to which I’ve linked, no problem; Google also provides a policy overview to help you understand why the company is making these changes and how they’ll affect users of the search giant’s various services.

So why exactly is Google doing this? Well, if you had more than 70 different privacy policies that applied to your tremendous array of products and services, as the search company explains in its blog post, you’d probably feel as if you had too much legalese to deal with, too. And if Google finds all of these different policies complicated – and that’s AFTER they trimmed back on their policies in 2010, by the way – surely their users find the situation a little bewildering as well.

Google retained separate privacy policies for Google Chrome Browser and Chrome OS, Google Books, and Google Wallet, but more than 60 will be covered by just one policy. The company says that this will assist it in its “efforts to integrate our different products more closely so that we can create a beautifully simple, intuitive user experience across Google.” Google notes that this approach “is now fairly standard across the web,” and in line with regulatory calls for shorter, simpler privacy policies.

Basically, the new policy will allow all of the information that Google collects about you to be shared between its services. It’s important to note that Google won’t be collecting any MORE information about its users than it already does; it just won’t be kept in separate silos any longer. Combining information in this way could allow Google to make more intelligent guesses when you use their services.

For instance, if Google notices from your YouTube viewing or sharing that you’re more interested in jaguars (the animal) than Jaguars (the car), when you put the word “jaguar” into its search engine, it will return results relevant to the animal and not the auto. Or if you use Gmail, Google may remember the way your friends spell their names, and make corrections accordingly. As an example of what might eventually be possible in an environment where information gets shared between services, Google notes in its blog entry that “We can provide reminders that you’re going to be late for a meeting based on your location, your calendar and an understanding of what the traffic is like that day.”

Next: Activists Outraged by Changes
 

More Google Optimization Articles
More By Terri Wells

Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.blog comments powered by Disqus

Article source: http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Google-Optimization-Help/Google-Simplifies-Its-Privacy-Policies/

(Page 1 of 2 )

I’ve only just started writing here at SEO Chat and already I think I’ve created a bit of a problem. I’ve discussed several techniques, but provided no real way of turning those into a single cohesive strategy. Consider this piece the first part of my correcting this issue.

Now let me be clear about something. This article isn’t meant to provide some all-encompassing strategy for traffic generation or search engine rankings. It is instead meant to take the information I’ve already given and roll that information into a strategy. As I do more articles, I’ll continue to expand on this. Right now, however, what I’d like to do is start putting some of the pieces together that I’ve given to you into a single picture.

In the article “Real Link Wheel Secrets To Top Google Rankings” I talked about link wheels and how to build them using white hat techniques to improve your search rankings. Most importantly (to me at least), I talked about how to use them to expand your authority presence and gain traffic from many different sources.

Then, in “10 Steps To Being #1 On Google” I gave several techniques that can improve your chances of obtaining links and getting your content shared. Again, the idea with this article was to give you methods to expand your authority presence in your market and gain more traffic from more sources.

Then recently I wrote “The Google Optimization Truth You Aren’t Being Told,” in which I talked about how search results can vary tremendously from one person to another. I hammered home yet again how important it is to get traffic from as many sources as possible. I talked about (yet again) making sure that your market sees you as an expert in the space.

You’ll notice that’s a recurring theme with me. Once the marketplace sees you as an expert and bona fide authority, you are no longer limited by whatever the search engines deign to send your way. You’re getting a ton of traffic from a lot of sources.

The problem, however, is that it can take quite a long time to build the perception in the marketplace that you’re an authority, unless there is some way to shortcut that process.

Fortunately, the changes at Google actually can help that to happen. In other words, it is now easier than ever to rank well. Done correctly, you can very quickly build the impression that you’re the overwhelming leader of your market.

You can quickly create this huge domination of the search space, then use that to build market authority much faster and easier than waiting around for years for it to happen on its own.

So the question becomes … how do you do that?

Next: It Starts With Google Plus
 

More Search Optimization Articles
More By Matt Goffrey

Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.blog comments powered by Disqus

Article source: http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Search-Engine-Optimization-Help/Laying-Out-An-SEO-and-Traffic-Generation-Strategy/