Don Lewis Designs

Since its public launch in January 2006, Google News has been one of the most common ways that people access online news providers. The ability to use the automated news aggregator to see the most popular or the most recent stories is as useful to many online users as the ability to see how other online news providers are covering the same story.

One of Google News’s biggest features is something that would seem a little odd coming from anywhere but the company which proudly announces “this process is entirely automated; no humans are involved” on many of its product pages. Every aspect of what the end-user sees on Google News (outside of the initial page design) is entirely automated, with no human action involved in altering the front page or deciding which stories get the most visibility on the site.

This algorithmic approach to editorial selection is based upon the ‘StoryRank’ concept – a spin off of Google’s founding PageRank formula. Created relatively early in the company’s history by principal research scientist Krishna Bharat, it was first devised in 2001 in the aftermath of the 911 attacks to keep Bharat abreast of related developments.

Although it would be years until the service moved from the beta release of March 2002, Google News is particularly significant to the company as one of its first endeavours outside of plain text Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS). Today the service is available in different versions optimised for 19 different languages and across 40 different geographical regions and in 2010, Hitwise reported that it delivered 17.32% of all upstream traffic to online news providers in the US.

The key to understanding how Google News works is very similar to understanding the basic principle behind its Search technology; relevancy. Applying this concept to ‘News’ – to current events and developments – its clear to see why Google sets certain limits on its aggregator. Only articles that have been crawled in the past 30 days appear in Google News and to a great extent, websites (or ‘publishers’) with the highest PageRank will get greater visibility in News results than others.

One area of controversy that remains with Google News – aside from the ongoing debate regarding paid content and lost advertising revenues – is how the company selects which sources its software will draw stories from. Whilst the selection of stories is entirely automatic, the selection of online news providers still requires some human oversight.

This is largely due to an incident in March 2005 when the still-in-beta product was criticised for including material from the white supremacist magazine National Vanguard. Still, inclusion in Google News is largely automated; publishers simply submit a form to Google detailing their .xml feeds or the sitemaps for their news content. However unlike story selection, Google reserves the power to screen news sources if their inclusion would be problematic

The amount of email marketing tips available on the internet is staggering. You’d probably need a bulldozer to sort through all of them. These are basic tips, with the addition of a few tips for B2B email marketing. B2B marketing strategies are slightly different from personal email marketing, but there are a number of tips that are relevant for both.

General email marketing tips:

1. Subject line must relate to the content of the newsletter and grab readers’ attention.
2. Keep the from line honest; emails should be the name of your company, or if there is someone’s name that everyone associates with your (ex: Bill Gates and Microsoft), use that.
3. Create a clear call to action. Make sure that recipients know exactly what they are supposed to do after reading your message.
4. Use testing features within your email marketing software. Well-tested emails are more likely to hit their mark than non-tested emails.
5. Always, always get permission before sending.

B2B-specific marketing tips:

1. Emails for businesses should identify the business’s potential problem and propose solutions. Relevancy is so important in all email marketing—it helps guarantee the email recipients will actually read and then use the message. In other words, the message should clearly articulate purpose and value to the subscribers.
2. The tone of B2B emails should be direct and professional—much like it would be in a face-to-face meeting with prospective clients.
3. The main measurement analysis should not be based on opens and clicks, but on leads generated. Opens and clicks are important, but specifically because they let you know if your subscribers are actually reading your email marketing emails.

Follow these tips for your next B2B email marketing campaign—you’ll gather more leads and create more business opportunities.

As a web designer I have always done well. I think it is because I was at the fore front of what I do right at the beginning of the .com boom. Obviously there were some problems when the .com industry fell on hard times but luckily for myself, I had already forged myself a reputation, and I managed to get a lot of the small amount of work that was still out there.

These days, however, things have changed again. Gone are the days when you could build someone a site, let them know it was ready and forget all about it. These days people want optimisation for their site, and full marketing campaigns to coincide with the launch of the site. Because I don’t really offer this service, the numbers of fresh enquiries I am getting has dropped. It seems that the general public are now only too aware of the importance of on-site optimisation, and because I don’t do that, I am missing out on work.

After a bit of a search around online, I found that it is possible for a company like me to outsource SEO to other companies. If I hooked up with one of these companies then I would effectively be able to offer clients a full service.

I decided right away that this was the best thing to do, and I immediately contacted a pure SEO company to arrange a working relationship. I have to say that once I had changed my terms of service and changed my site to indicate what I can now offer to my clients, the number of jobs I am picking up has trebled! Suddenly I don’t even have time to do all of the work I have in the pipe line, and I am having to take on another member of staff!