Internet Marketing Blog by Noon-an-Night

Although you most likely know about tools like Google Analytics and the SEO for Firefox extension, the internet is filled with tons of great free SEO tools that don’t always receive the publicity they deserve. Here are three powerful search engine optimization tools that you may not be aware of and won’t cost you a dime to use:

Vertical Leap: Vertical Leap provides basic results for people that need a simple, quick report. This tool can provide a broken links report, geolocation information and site relevance tests.

SEO Chat: Did you know that SEO Chat offers over forty different analytics tools? From general tools to tools that can help you evaluate specific search engines, SEO Chat is full of great tools that provide with loads of information that you can use to improve your web site.

Market Leap: In addition to their “university section,” Market Leap has three powerful tools: search engine saturation, keyword verification and link popularity. These tools not only allow you to gain information about your own web site, but also make it very simple to see how your web site stacks up against your competitors.

Previously, we discussed Twitter and its key features. Although it has gained a lot of popularity in a short amount of time, many people feel that it is nothing more than another entertaining social media based idea. However, this is actually not true at all. As the 97th Floor explained, when used correctly, Twitter can actually boost your marketing strategy.

So, how exactly do you use Twitter to help your marketing efforts? Well, here are a few of the potential scenarios that 97th Floor offered to use Twitter in a productive manner:

Show your SEO Skills: If you want to make a name for yourself in the SEO industry but haven’t reached the level of the SEO elite, why not use Twitter to show off what you’re made of? You could start from scratch in an extremely competitive niche and use Twitter to track every SEO decision/move that you make. You could make it even more controversial by proving that you can achieve great rankings with only paid links.

Cooking, Investing, Real Estate, etc: If you are looking to generate clients, why not use Twitter to show them what you have to offer. The example used in the original article is a real estate investor that wants to sell his consulting services. This person could use Twitter to keep his followers updated on the activities that prove his competency as a real estate investor.

A Day in the Life of a Social Media Expert: Much like showing off your SEO skills, you could use Twitter to demonstrate exactly what it takes to build up a powerful social media profile. From digging stories to adding friends, you can use Twitter to document in real-time what you are doing to buildup your social media profiles.

Keeping in line with this week’s posts about capitalizing on the huge amount of online holiday spending that will continue throughout the holiday season, let’s take a look at a recent post by Shoemoney….

If you are looking to get into the world of affiliate marketing but feel like you don’t have the technical skills to setup your own website (and don’t want to deal with paying someone to do it for you), Build a Niche Store may be the solution for you. Although it costs $97, Shoemoney (and the majority of the comments on the post) agree that it is well worth its price tag.

To sum up the product, Build a Niche Store allows you to create a affiliate based niche store in less than thirty minutes (Shoemoney stated that it only took him ten minutes). The software only uses the eBay affiliate program, but it allows you to choose whatever niche you want (once you have purchased the software, you can use it to build as many websites as you want).

Here’s a quick breakdown of how easy it is to build your own storefront with this software:

-Purchase the software
-Register a domain name
-Upload the BANS software
-Enter store name
-Choose keywords
-Enter eBay affiliate ID
-Choose template
-Enter additional ad information
-Customize any elements you choose (such as the header)

Once you’ve completed those simple steps, you will have your own attractive, affiliate based website!

If you encountered technical problems during Cyber Monday, you were not alone. One of the biggest names on the internet was unable to handle the flood of traffic generated by Cyber Monday and its seven hundred million dollar spending spree…

According to the NY Times, Yahoo’s Merchant Solutions were experiencing numerous technical difficulties throughout Cyber Monday. Yahoo’s Merchant Solutions help over forty thousand small business owners run their websites and manage their e-commerce activities.

The article profiles a variety of problems that different website owners faced.

As stated in yesterday’s blog post, this is a perfect example of why its so important to have the technical side of your business ready for high traffic days. Additionally, as this case demonstrates, its always good to have a backup plan that can be quickly implemented!

To read experiences from actual webmasters that had trouble with their Yahoo Store, check out this thread on WebmasterWorld.

Yes folks, it’s finally here. After a hectic Black Friday for brick-and-mortar retailers, today is the time for internet marketers to shine. According to ComScore, $700 million will be spent online TODAY!

Hopefully, you’ve got your PPC campaigns, servers and websites optimized so that you can grab your piece of this huge chunk of consumer spending.

Assuming you’re just taking it easy and watching the money roll in, here are a few posts about today’s activities:

Online Holiday Shopping Season Charges Out of the Gate

Forget Black Friday! Are You Ready For Holiday Season’s Cyber Mondays?

Manic Cyber Monday expected, as e-tailers lure shoppers

Happy Black Monday! Will you get your share of $700 million today?

In case you have been living under a rock for the past couple of months, Facebook applications have become one of the internet’s hottest commodities. From slide shows to zombies to polls, Facebook users are constantly adding new applications to their profiles. Coverage of the widget craze has even spread to the mainstream, with well-known publications like USA Today discussing this new phenomenon.

So, as an internet marketer, what does this explosion of applicaiton popularity mean for you? Simply put, if you are not utilizing the power of applications to promote your own website, you SHOULD BE! By developing a popular application for Facebook, you can potentially reach millions of users on a daily basis.

To get started, you can visit the official Facebook Developers website.

Are you addicted to Twitter? If you haven’t heard of Twitter, it’s a service that allows you to stay connected with your colleagues, family and friends in real-time. Twitter combines power of the internet and mobile phones into a single application. “Twittering” is not only fun, but it can also be extremely useful.

If you would like to expand the reach of your Twitter account by adding it to your blog, as long as you are using the Wordpress platform, doing so is extremely easy.

Although there are several different ways to add your Twitter status to your Wordpress blog, here’s the step-by-step guide JohnTP used to add Twitter to his blog:

-Download twitterRSS
-Rename it to twitterrss.php
-Edit the file to add your Twitter RSS URL, home URL, username, number of twitters to display, etc (your Twitter RSS link can be found at the bottom of your Twitter page)
-Upload the file to your WordPress Plugins folder and activate it
-Add < ?php get_twitterRSS(); ? > in your theme where you want it displayed

If all goes well, you should seeing something like this on your own blog:

Whether you love or hate the term Web 2.0, having features on your blog or website that give it a Web 2.0 feel can make your blog or website much more attractive to your visitors.

Although getting a complete Web 2.0 redesign can cost you hundreds (or even thousands) of dollars, there are free tools which can give your blog or website a little touch of Web 2.0.

One of these free tools is QuickRibbon. QuickRibbon allows you to generate the popular Web 2.0 ribbons found on many blogs and websites for free.

QuickRibbon is a completely free Web2.0 tool, a website ribbon generator which lets you create a custom ribbon, insert a link in it and place it in the top right corner of your website. It will take you less than 5 minutes to generate your own website ribbon with this trendy widget and add a stylish Web2.0 look to your page – it’s quick, easy and fun. We recommend using our QuickRibbon tool to attract your site’s visitors attention to new features, announcements, sales, etc. Get rid of the boring banners and make your news stand out with a style.

Although it should be a top priority, data security is often overlooked by companies of all sizes. Whether its because they don’t take the time to secure their data or simply don’t know how to completely secure their data, there are far too many companies which are letting valuable data slip out.

If you think I’m exaggerating, keep reading…

Recently, Shoemoney made an extremely alarming post about data security. Although he removed the post from his blog relatively quickly (no doubt in an effort to protect the privacy of the individuals that were impacted by a company being careless with their private information), I was fortunate enough to catch it in my Feed Reader and save it for later.

Even though I’m not going to provide any specific links (although the data is still cached by Google), here’s a quick overview of what Shoemoney found:

By typing a simple search query into Google, Shoemoney was able to find multiple results from different companies that contained the following publicly viewable information about their employees: employees ID, manager ID, Employee first and last names, full address, phone, SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBERS, SALARY, start dates, termination dates, date of birth, and health benefit packages

The next time that you think optimizing your blog or website’s design isn’t important, think about this for a second:

Marisa Mayer says that less than 1 percent of Google searches are done through the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button but some estimates suggest that Google could be losing $110 million of advertising revenue due to that button because people are skipping results pages that have Google ads.

If you want to ensure that your company doesn’t make this kind of mistake, you may want to enlist the help of Noon-an-Night’s talented web design team.