Google is pleased to announce their new sorting algorithm called weighted sort. This is a very useful and much needed improvement to Google Analytics. For the average user with a Google Analytics account (Don’t have one? Get it here .. it’s free) you can now find out what keywords are giving you the worst bounce rate.

So what does that mean? Simple, with the new weighted sort option you can clearly see which keywords you need to improve or tweak and which pages related to those keywords you need to optimise.

To quote Google ..

Ah ha! Now this is something you can make sense of. Weighted sort took into consideration the number of visits for each row bringing to the forefront the items you care about. Keep in mind that because weighted sort is no longer a strict sort, there will be values that don’t strictly follow the order you would assume.

Weighted sort is also available on other popular computed metrics, including goal conversion rate, % new visits etc. Try it out now on your own data! Take a look at the demo below to learn more or read the help article to get started.

Here’s Google’s Video for more info ..

Also, here’s the link to Google’s own Analytics blog .. use this to really get familiar with knowing your sites best optimisation techniques. Congratulations Google, once again you have raised the bar.

~ Bonn Appetite

Not long ago I had a random discussion with a fellow business associate over a few beers that required some thought. Not a good look for a beer supping break, having to think and all, but we did have some insights bleat out from both of our minds. He said “We’ve (Australians) lost the ability to be creative and be recognized round the world as an innovative people”.

I said “CRAP Brian, we’ve already given the world the “Ute”, cast wine and a whole lot of other goodies I can’t think of right now”. He said “Yeah but mate, what about the internet, what have we done with that?”

Good point I thought. I hadn’t really seen nor heard of any Australian innovative ideas being impacted into the internet culture .. well none that would be described as truly Australian original content. So I was stumped, which is, for me, annoying, I don’t like being stumped by Brian, with no come back and all.

So the Brian effect has lead me to post this post and say specifically to Brian .. Your Shout Maaaate.

US Investor Ploughs $68m into Australian Developer
By Nate Cochrane from itNews
Jul 15, 2010 10:05 AM

Biggest Australian investment round this year.

Australian software maker Atlassian scored a $US60 million ($A68 million) injection from US venture capitalist Accel Partners overnight.

The Sydney project management developer known for its Jira bug tracker and Confluence wiki software employed 225, mostly developers, and was in use in more than 20,000 companies worldwide including Facebook, Adobe and Haymarket Media, publisher of this website.

Atlassian booked $A58 million in revenues last financial year and was profitable, the company said.

The Australian round was a departure for the Palo Alto-based Accel Partners that tended to invest in early-stage companies yet to strike profitability; Atlassian was profitable last financial year and was started with about $10,000 in credit card debt in 2002.

Atlassian joined a stellar stable of 300 Accel-backed companies such as:

• information security company Imperva;
• filesharing startup Bit Torrent;
• mobile advertising network admob;
• video-distribution platform founded by Flash creator Jeremy Allaire, Brightcove;
• social media website Facebook;
• and the legendary internet company, now part of defence contractor Raytheon, BBN Technologies that did much to spark the internet.

It’s believed this was this biggest Australian capital raising this year and the biggest in Accel’s 17-year history: “This deal is bigger than all the money combined raised by the Australian software industry over the whole year”, an Atlassian source said.

~ Bonn Appetite (You to Brian)

Having a professional marketing writer is very important for every business. Whether you are looking for an extra shot of flair on your upcoming television advertisement or an eye-catching brochure for your next revolutionary product, an excellent marketing writer can make all the difference! Creativity and innovation are what captures the imagination of your potential customers – and this is precisely the advantage a good writer can give you.

Today’s advertising world is overflowing with a glut of messages barraging the consumer. In all the clamor, how can you make your business stand out? An exceptional writer can add that perfect touch of panache, emotion or humor that will make your product or service memorable to the consumer – and will keep your brand registered in his or her mind. This important cause-and-effect relationship translates to dollars in your company’s pocket.

Once you have a customer’s attention, how do you keep it?

One way is to make sure your website and Internet advertising are always fresh and dynamic by hiring a marketing writer to post new material on a regular basis. This will pique the interest and curiosity of your potential customers and keep them always coming back to see what’s new. A good marketing writer understands the importance of keeping up with current trends in news, technology and entertainment to help build a marketing package that will be formidable to your competition.

If you are just starting out in your new business, you need a novel and alluring company message.

This is one of the most important building blocks of a successful business, the cornerstone on which its future is built. Your company’s image, growth potential and dominance in the marketplace – in short, the success of all company products and/or services – rests upon this very message.

A powerful company message grabs the attention of your potential customers and what’s more, helps to keep their attention. It can also attract the most talented personnel in the business, another essential ingredient of future success. Consider using a marketing writer for any of these additional needs:

• Internet Marketing Campaigns
• Press Releases
• Brochures
• Articles
• Social Networking
• Advertising Scripts
• White Papers
• Case Studies
• Product and Service Descriptions
• Speeches
• PowerPoint Presentations
• Sales Landing Pages

Creating exciting and sometimes controversial press releases is an art in which the seasoned marketing writer particularly excels – the right words at the right time, especially in response to current events, or even a well-timed media stunt – can push your brand right out to the front of the marketplace by creating a well-timed “buzz”. In today’s social networking world, a press release that captures the public’s imagination can spread like wildfire across the Internet, increasing your company’s presence and sales exponentially.

A good marketing writer has the experience to know what works – and what doesn’t. Avoid all the common mistakes that could potentially damage the good reputation that you have worked so hard to achieve.

It’s your business. It’s a new world where every single word counts. Hiring a professional marketing writer is one of the most financially sound investments you will ever make!

~ Bonn Appetite

The BP Oil spill has reached unbelievable major proportions and is effecting peoples lives in a disastrous way, not to mention the environmental impact this is having.

Lots of people round the world have their eyes focused on what BP is doing to try (or not trying to do) to fix this disaster.

To really get a great idea of what’s happening with this oil spill and the attitudes that BP are applying to quell the problem it has taken, yet again, comedy to explain some fundamental errors that people in power seem to constantly adhere to when things go wrong, sort of  like a chicken with it’s head cut off ..

So .. What do you think? Add comments below ..

In the marketing business, if you want to be successful, it’s extremely important you understand these 5 of 10 concepts, no matter what type of business you choose. These concepts are the building blocks that you can use and develop to really get involved with your business and your marketing efforts to increase your knowledge, professionalism and of course your business sales.

#1 Follow Your Passion!!
Anyone that tells you that starting your own internet business is a sure-fire way to make millions overnight with hardly any effort is simply lying. The truth is that you CAN make millions of dollars online, but it’s going to take some work .. of course.

For this reason alone, it’s so very important that you develop an online business that you’ll really really love. After all, you’ll be spending a lot of time developing it and so why not spend it loving every minute of it.

If your business IS something you love, you’ll not ever work a day in your life.

#2 Find A Niche Market
Once you have a few ideas your passionate about you’ll need to make sure that other people (your potential customers) are passionate about them too. You’ll need to do some market research to find your niche market to sell your products or services ideas to.

Simply put, a niche market is a targeted group of people who share a specific interest. The more specific your group is, the easier it will be to tailor your marketing messages to them directly. This next point is critical to identifying your market .. you must identify and locate your niche market online .. makes sense right!

The secret is to focus focus focus! Why? Because everyone does NOT want your product, so just concentrate on the people that do. Develop your products or services with these people in mind and you’ll be far more successful than trying to sell to everyone.

#3 Solve A Problem
Made it this far .. great. Here’s a very useful and important aspect to really get your teeth into, Solve A Problem!!!Once you’ve found your niche market and figured out who your niche market is you’ll need to study them to find out what products or services they’re looking for.

It’s always better to discover what people want first and then provide it, instead of creating a product or service and then try to find the market for it.

How do you do this I hear you asking .. well it’s easier than you think. With your passionate business idea in mind go to chat rooms and forums where members of your niche market are likely to hang out. Do a Google search using your business idea keywords and you’ll find a list of chat rooms / forums etc that you can join or sign up to that your target market has already signed up to and receive emails that your niche market are getting.

Then analyse that information over a week or so and try to uncover a common problem your niche market has. Once you’ve found a common problem try and develop a solution! This is the simplest way to find an obvious void in the market place and fill it. Also, it’s the best way to ensure you have an eager market for your product or service.

#4 Focus On Benefits .. NOT Features
Following on from the previous concepts, you may have found a great product or service to release .. but .. you will not earn a cent until you convince your prospects that they need it, want it and can afford it.You must emphasize how your product or service will BENEFIT your customer. You know how it will solve their problems and make life easier for them and you need to make sure they know this too. This technique will ultimately make the sale.

Simply listing off features of your product or service won’t do the job. You really need to know how to turn the features of whatever your selling into compelling benefits. A feature is a simple fact about your product .. a benefit explains what advantages your customer will actually get from using it. Makes sense right!

#5 Develop A Unique UPS (Unique Selling Position)
No matter what your selling you need to develop your very own unique selling position. You need to emphasize what makes your product better than your competition. Explain to your customers exactly how and why they’ll benefit from doing business with you as opposed to someone else.

Your product or service might cost less than others .. you might offer a better guarantee than anyone else .. you might provide special knowledge or advice that is not available anywhere else .. you might offer special incentives that no one else does .. or your customer service might be better than your competition’s.

Whatever your unique selling point is you need to clearly define it, clearly understand it and always have it ready at your fingertips so that when you’re asked “What makes your product / service special?” you’ll be able to deliver the goods, your UPS, in a caring, beneficial way.

Continue to the next Top 10 Concepts #6 #7 #8 #9 & #10

Or if you like, download your free Top 10 Business Marketing Concepts by adding your name and email address to our form below and receive our Top 10 PDF zip file to store on your hard drive and access any time you like .. easy as that!

Bonn Appetite

WordPress 3.0, the thirteenth major release of WordPress and the culmination of half a year of work by 218 contributors, is now available for download (or upgrade within your dashboard).

Great news .. take the tour then read on ..

This is great news for all of us that use WordPress as our main CMS website, as I’m sure you’ll agree.

The efforts of all those that have contributed to making the 3.0 version solid & workable should be congratulated, so Congratulations Everyone!! Thanks heaps.

For all that’s great about the new WordPress 3.0 release there always has to be the down side, as you would expect. I suppose calling this a down side is probably too strong a phrase more like Upgrader beware type issue instead.

While roaming through my Facebook domain I found an interesting post by Kimberly J. Castleberry who wrote ..

WordPress 3.0 officially launched today. Regardless of what you may be hearing, if you want the best odds of a smooth upgrade – and substantially less risk of losing data and needing to do a full restore after your upgrade – PLEASE wait to upgrade for ONE week!

This seemed an odd thing to post to me that is, as I thought “why not upgrade now”, as you do and Kimberly’s reply made absolute sense, which was ..

Because there are thousands of plugins in the repository that coders are still working to get updated. For example, Nile just submitted one to the repository yesterday that is broke on 3.0 and probably wont be approved for a day or three. So many times a new release comes out and because the increase in mass testing and fringe cases, we see a almost immediate push of a sub-release.

For example when 2.9 released it was badly flawed in maybe 5 or 10% of all blogs. There was an almost immediate patch to 2.9.1 at the end of the first week. Lots of blogs were crippled due to the 2.9 release that would not have been if they’d simply waited a few days. The real challenge is to not wait more than a week or two. This is a security release too so what we dont want to see is people waiting six months! LOL

Makes sense right?

So to everyone using WordPress have a great time upgrading and playing with your new toy and to Kimberly J. Castleberry (my new hero) I say thanks for thinking of everyone using WordPress, you rock!!

~ Bonn Appetite (as always )

Writing sales letters and direct mail materials is no small task. In just a few short paragraphs, you need to introduce a product or service, outline the benefits, explain why your product or service is better than your competitor’s, and convince the reader that they cannot make do without purchasing what you are selling. This is a tall order, especially for an inexperienced copywriter or a small business owner who must double as a copywriter in order to introduce products and services to the target market. Following these tips for writing a great sales letter will help you maximize the effect of your words without resulting in a lengthy letter that gets tossed in the trash.

Introduce the Features of the Product or Service

Are you selling a home computer that has double the processor speed of any computer on the market? Does your small business consulting service offer free business plan writing guidance? Outline these features in your sales letter so that the reader gets a good sense of what the product can do to save time, save money, or increase sales. If you don’t adequately address the features of your products and services in a sales letter, you will most likely be wasting time and postage instead of piquing the interest of potential clients.

Let Readers Know Which Benefit is the Most Important

Do you have a product with many features but the best feature is that the product saves 75% of the time normally spent on performing a certain task without the use of your product? Does your consulting service have one outstanding feature such as free marketing advice or the ability to reach someone twenty-four hours per day? Let your audience know why your product or service is so special.

Target the Product or Service to a Particular Market

If you’ve already started writing your sales letter, hopefully you haven’t written one sales letter to be sent out to thousands of people in dozens of different industries. If you have several niche markets, you will want to develop multiple sales letters that address the needs of each individual market. If you have a real estate book that will appeal to both commercial and residential real estate agents, write one letter for each group. Your letter addressed to commercial agents might talk about how the book can help them identify more lucrative commercial investment properties. Your letter to the residential real estate agents can describe how your book offers information on marketing residential properties that can’t be found anywhere else.

Describe What Support is Offered After a Purchase Has Been Made

If you offer twenty-four hour support for customers, let them know about it. If you have an online assistant or a toll-free helpline, include this information in your sales letter so your customers know they will be able to get in touch with you should they have difficulty using your product or service. If your competitors do not offer this type of service, make sure you remind your readers of this within the text of the sales letter. If you have extended support options, you may also be able to command a higher price for your products and services.

Writing a great sales letter takes time and effort, but can be done if you are willing to do the research and writing necessary to produce an excellent direct mail piece. Once you have mastered the technique of writing an effective sales letter, you should see an increase in the number of qualified leads that contact you about your products and services.

Kristy Taylor is a syndicated freelance journalist with articles and short stories strewn across all forms of media. To add personalization and pizzazz to your sales letters visit http://www.coolscruffys.com/?salesletterbasics

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Kristy_Taylor
http://EzineArticles.com/?Sales-Letter-Basics&id=295805

From the WebCEO Team

Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese military general, strategist and philosopher, wrote in his “The Art of War” treatise about the importance of knowing competitors before competing. The marketing revelations made by Al Ries and Jack Trout in “Marketing Warfare” (1986) also underline the same idea – marketing strategy and tactics are based on the same principles that military strategy and tactics are based on.

You should learn and analyze your competitors’ marketing strategies before you start developing your own strategy. In this way you will avoid mistakes your competitors made and employ their best practices. And to be a step or two ahead of your competition, getting information on what your competitors are doing at every moment must become your daily business routine. The good news is that to track your competitors’ online efforts, you do not need to plant a mole or steal their secret documentation. You just need a few online tools.

• Xinu Returns tells you how well your competitors’ sites are doing in popular search engines and social bookmarking sites. It shows a great variety of important sites’ statistics. Along with the SEO information such as Meta tags of the index page, its rankings in Google, Alexa, Technorati, Compete, a site’s number of backward links and indexed pages, Xinu will give you information on how many times the page’s URL was mentioned on social bookmarking sites and will let you see those mentions. Armed with this data, you can work out your own strategy to outperform your competitors: get more backlinks and add your interesting stories or helpful articles to the social media sites.

• Board Tracker is an innovative forum search engine, message tracking and instant alerts system designed to provide relevant information quickly and efficiently while ensuring you never miss an important forum thread no matter where or when it was posted. Search for your competitors names and be aware of what their clients say. And, of course, do not forget to monitor your keywords and your product names to react on time.

• Google Alerts notifies you when your competitors are mentioned in the news or when you have a new competitor in your area. Google will let you set up to 1,000 alerts for each account you create with them, so you can monitor all your keywords and competitors’ names.

• PostRank monitors and collects social engagement events correlated with online content in real-time across the Web. PostRank gathers where and when stories generate comments, bookmarks, tweets, and other forms of interaction from a host of social hubs. With PostRank you will discover the best blogs, news, and articles by your topic, so you will see whether your competitors create stories that engage an audience.

• Social Mention is a social media search and analysis platform that aggregates user generated content gathered across the universe into a single stream of information. It allows you to easily track and measure what people are saying about your competitors and you, your company, a new product in your market, or any topic across the Web’s social media landscape in real-time. Social Mention monitors 100+ social media properties directly including: Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google etc.

• SpyFu. Frankly speaking this tool has nothing to do with social media, but since we’re talking about spying, we can’t help mentioning it. SpyFu allows you to browse competitors’ daily AdWords PPC budget, average position of ads, estimated value of organic traffic, paid traffic compared with organic traffic estimates, top ten paid keywords with keyword ad history, total paid keywords, total organic keywords, PPC competitors (with a link to overlapping keywords), organic competitors (based on semantic relationships). You will get more information as a subscriber, but free reports also help you get the general idea.

With all of the above mentioned, remember that success in marketing and promotion of your product can be achieved only if you keep the balance between smart copying of the best competitors’ practices and introducing your own innovative marketing ideas.

- Bonn Appetite

To answer the above question, one needs to understand a few basic ideas.

There are only two ways of getting Web traffic – either you let your visitors find you which is rather a passive method, or you actively search for places where your targeted visitors may hang around and personally engage them into communication. While the first type is illustrative of SEO and the traditional paid advertising approach, the second is more the Web 2.0 style, and may include blogging, blog commenting, participation in forum discussions, posting and voting for articles, social bookmarking, and so on.

Imagine what effect your efforts in social media marketing could bring. For example, communicating your company news to your existing and prospect customers for your brand exposure and following their feedback is one task, while receiving quality backlinks and traffic to your site are the second and the third tasks.

Next, if you look for inexpensive traffic from social media as your primary goal [its quality can hardly be compared to search engines' paid and organic search traffic], you should understand that your message should have a great viral potential and your landing page should justify visitors’ attention. Otherwise, in spite of a possible visitor deluge, you will be back to square one.

There are different and often quite opposite opinions on the value of traffic from social media. There are Web experts who consider it to be garbage, but far more people tell about the importance of social media for creating brand awareness, getting customer feedback and attracting traffic. So the logical conclusion is not all products and services can be efficiently promoted on social media sites.

Let’s see what effects you can expect from the leading social media entities.

According to Compete‘s most recent data (February 2010, also mentioned further), Facebook is the largest social media site with over 127 million unique monthly visitors. Both corporations and one-man-bands can use Facebook for creating their company and product brand awareness quite effectively, but you cannot expect much traffic and link popularity increase in connection with your Facebook activity.

YouTube comes second having more than 90 million unique visitors. YouTube is a good playground for your branding efforts, whether you are a small business company or corporation. A well-crafted creative video will become a valuable brick in your link popularity building. But since video files are hosted by YouTube itself, you can attract solid targeted traffic to your site only if your video includes a smart call to action requiring a visit to your site.

Twitter enjoys 20+ million unique visitors. Being a blog in nature, it is best for communicating company news if you are a large corporation, and for establishing your brand reputation if you are a small business, especially if you do consulting work. Don’t expect much traffic from Twitter as a reply to your marketing attempts, and shortened URLs in tweets are useless as SEO links.

Digg‘s potential with more than 37 million unique visitors is a great place to release provocative information, but not for general marketing efforts. This is why so many marketing gurus have abandoned this battlefield. But if you can provide information in the format appreciated by Digg enthusiasts, you can receive rich traffic from this resource and a valuable link.

27 million unique users of Flickr have made it a great social medium but only if you have some photo and image materials to promote your brand among Flickr visitors. So if you are a web design company or your business can be represented by artwork, you may find Flickr a decent place to have a presence in.

The LinkedIn business network (14+ million unique users) is good for both individual experts and larger companies to establish and support their brands. Personal and company profiles appear high in search results for a name request and your company news can be released for members of the various “groups”.

The audience of StumbleUpon (4+ million unique users to their website) is not limited to just those who have visited their website. Most ‘stumblers” activity is performed when a visitor to an interesting webpage clicks “I Like It” via the StumbleUpon toolbar in their browser. StumbleUpon is a very good traffic referrer if you publish and bookmark helpful, interesting content. Be sure to submit your own material by clicking on your own toolbar.

When considering if your business will benefit from your promotional activities in social media, you should focus on how the nature of a channel itself (news/article/video/image sharing, personal or business social network) fits your business, and what effects (brand recognition, good SEO links, targeted or just rich traffic) you can expect from your efforts.

~ Bonn Appetite and share it around

Online Brand Popularity ..
How to measure it!

The deeper information technologies penetrate our lives, the more powerfully you and your customers can use them for decision making. All we need to make the best available choice is reliable information – from eyewitnesses, first-hand users, reviewers, and experts.

Search engines and news feeds give you a good idea if your brand is established and how it is perceived on the Web. But sites providing user-generated content – shared opinions in the form of ratings and votes, reviews and comments, tags and bookmarks – are even more important places for you to check brand reputation, and measure brand popularity.

What are the measurable signals of brand popularity?

Search for mentions of your brand name, create benchmarks, and run comparisons with your top competitors. Brand popularity metrics can be monitored at:

• Major search engines for both search volume (Google) and the number of found results.
• Blog search engines (Technorati, Google Blogs) for the overall number of blog posts, tags, comments, blog authority rates. There is no need to track all the blog search engines – select one or two with the results that you find most representative.
• Sites consisting of user submitted content (Digg, Reddit, Newsvine, etc.) for votes and comments.
• Twitter for found search results, followers, retweets.
• Media sharing sites (YouTube, Hulu, Yahoo Video, Flickr, Deviantart, and many others) for the number of uploads and downloads, views or listenings, video/image/photo/music ratings, number of comments.
• Social bookmark sites and toolbars (Delicious, StumbleUpon, Diigo, and others) for tags and saved bookmarks.
• Product and service review sites if applicable (Epinions, Ratings, Buzzillions etc.) for the number of reviews, pro and con votes, ratings.
• Forums for the number of search results, threads, user reputation, connections.
• Social networks for engagement facts such as the number of connections, profile completeness, recommendations, participations in groups, Q&A, etc.

At the same time, brand reputation measurement should rest not only upon the numbers being quantitative characteristics of popularity, but also upon qualitative evidence. An analysis should also include the prevailing tone of the reviews, articles or comments.

How to automate the brand popularity analysis

The market has replied to a social media boom with numerous buzz and sentiment analysis tools. The most comprehensive solutions are quite costly. Nielsen BuzzMetrics, Sysomos’s MAP and Heartbeat and Radian6 are outstanding web buzz tracking and analysis solutions covering tens of millions of blogs, social networks, groups, boards and other CGM platforms, but a typical ‘do-it-yourself’ small business marketer could hardly afford them.

So if the perspective of paying a three- or even four-digit monthly fee is beyond your purse, a healthy approach would be to focus your analysis on a) the most popular (and crowded) social media and b) the most targeted (niche) sites while using free tools to check your brand reputation on them. The below free services will automate your brand reputation monitoring task rather efficiently.

• Major search engines – use the Web CEO Keywords tool to retrieve the search volume from Google and competition numbers from all the major search engines.
• Blog search engines – Nielsen BlogPulse is a great free service to see brand popularity trends. You can also use BlogScope for the same purpose.
• For Twitter info analysis, you can use TweetStats, Twitter Analyzer (< By far the best Twitter App seen in a long while), TweetVolume and Twopular.

Measuring positive and negative sentiments is still difficult to achieve via automated measuring services. Scoutlabs service (which is quite expensive) brings the best results in sentiment analysis and trend building. To our best knowledge, the current technologies for automated text meaning recognition are far from perfect. This is why, to guarantee the most accurate results, some expensive reputation management solutions offer manual sentiment measurement.

~ Bonn Appetite

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