A few months ago I wrote a post on this blog about video marketing.  Unfortunately, I tried to do a WordPress upgrade and I blew a blog away.  Part of video marketing is touching and emotional nerve with your audience.  Another part of the your marketing is attempting to get your audience to want to take an action.

There is a video that the New Zealand travel industry put together that does both of these things.  I wrote more extensively about this on a HubPage.  Here is the video see if you agree with me:

It makes me want to catch the first plane to that paradise.

Google has released a new search engine optimization tool called The Search-Based Keyword Tool.  When it does is the search based keyword tool generates keyword and landing page ideas highly relevant and specific to your website.  Google suggests that it will help you identify additional advertising opportunities.  I suggest that you can use it for finding relevant keywords to optimize your website.

Based on your URL they display a list of relevant user queries that occurred in global searches with some frequency over the past year.  Additionally, keywords are organized by category, and when you click on a category.  You can expand it to do its subcategories.  Imagine the possibilities in finding longtail keywords.

Assuming that you have an adwords account you can add options for showing partial matches to keywords, mostly queries, competition with the parameters low medium high, and suggested bid thresholds.  This is a good way to figure out the weight of your keywords.

Thanks to Google, it is getting easier to optimize your website for search engines.

A little over a week ago, Google released a new report in pdf format called Google’s Search Engine Starter Guide. It is a concise 22 page guide for Search Engine Optimization that helps the webmaster understand best practices for site searchabilty and usability. If you have been wondering why your SEO company has been recommending certain things, it will help you and him or her communicate better.

Some of the subjects the guide covers are:

- page titles
- page description
- URL structures
- site navigation
- your content
- anchor text
- heading tags
- optimized use of images
- robots.txt
- using nofollow
- site promotion
- webmaster tools

Inside the report Google links to other Search Engine Optimization tools that help your SEO efforts.

While there is more to SEO than is covered in the guide, it is a good foundation and it might help to dispell a lot of the misinformation on the internet that that could cause you to go down the wrong path and wonder why your site is floundering.

Amazon.com has a storage service for web businesses called Amazon Simple
Storage Service (Amazon S3). They utilize their world wide distributed
servers that load balance the network giving Amazon very fast download
speeds.

From a customer standpoint its wonderful because their user experience is
good and their is no concern about overloading a hosted site server. To
make this even better, as of November 1, Amazon is lowering their prices
to - get this - $.15 per 50 Terra Bytes. After the first 50TB, it drops
further.

You can find out more about their service at aws.amazon.com/s3/

When I first saw the people were starting to use something called Twitter,
I thought the concept was really dumb. After all, why would I want to read
micro-blogs that allow only 140 characters? Who would want to read what
other people are doing?

After reading what several people said about Twitter on the Warrior Forum,
and having made a comment that I couldn’t see the use of it, I decided to
try it anyway.

Here’s what I found:

I found people who I am interesting in who use it and make interesting
tweets.  These are people like Frank Kern and Andy Jenkins to name just
two of many.  Both Frank and Andy give heads-up on Twitter of their most
recent posts and website offerings.  It’s a great place to be among those
who get information first.

You can find many interesting people on Twitter and you can choose to
follow them or not.  Just by seeing who other people follow I’ve been able
to find some these really cool people.  It becomes very viral and
addictive.

There are people I didn’t even know existed that I now follow because
they are interesting, have interesting opinions, and add links to other
interesting things.

Without even trying, you can get people to follow you because they are
interested in what you’re doing.

Here are some things that you can do:

You can get breaking news.  Even CNN has Twitter links.  You can share
your photos with a Twitter application.  You can alert people when ever you
make a blog update.  And, whenever you make a new Twitter post, you can
have it update your FaceBook account.

Some of these things are possible because of fancy applications that have
been written for Twitter.

You can find out more about it by checking out my Twitter account.