“Google Slap” – May 15th

Has anyone noticed significant changes in Google Adwords traffic patterns around last weekend?

This previously happened around April 1st, April 15th and May 1st of this year.

I come to a conclusion that twice monthly algo changes (aka “Google Slaps” ) can be considered as the norm now.

Sequoia Capital Invest in Kenshoo

Sequoia Capital , a well known VC fund with a substantial track record in the Internet industry has invested in Kenshoo, Search Engine Marketing Innovators from Tel Aviv, Israel, and is now a partner in the company. The exact terms of the deal were not disclosed, however given the strategic investment, Sequoia’s market positioning and the synergy between parties, one should expect a major leap for Kenshoo and a much higher profile in the global marketplace. 

Google Adwords – The Ultimate Guide

Epiphany Solutions, a Search Engine Marketing agency from Leeds, UK has set up a free, step by step online guide to understanding Search Engine Marketing and PPC. This guide is a very useful resource for beginners, as well as for marketers who want to understand more about Google Adwords.

Google Adwords – The Ultimate Guide

Digital Point Forums review

With over 3 million posts and an impressive 30,000 active members, Digital Point Forums is one of the best – and certainly, most visited – community message boards on the Internet.
 
Boasting such a rich vein of traffic, the board has developed in to a hotbed of e-marketing activity. A quick visit to the website will uncover pages upon endless pages of Internet orientated advice. Indeed, there’s so much information on Digital Point that it can be hard to determine where to start.
 
So let’s get to the basics. What is Digital Point focused on?
 
You’ll notice that the forum is divided in to five main sections; Search Engines, Marketing, Business, Site Development and Products.
 
It’s pretty self explanatory what you can expect to find in each section, but slightly less expected is the sheer volume of traffic that passes through these boards on a daily basis. Each forum is bustling with new posts and topics, and they appear on a 24/7 basis. Indeed, you could call Digital Point the forum that never sleeps.

From a marketing perspective, there is plenty to take note of on Digital Point. The board covers all of the major topics that you’d be interested in, from search engine optimization to link development, from affiliate marketing to pay-per-click advertising. It’s all here.

The members that contribute to the discussions are extremely active, although as is always the case with a board of this size, it can take weeks or months before you begin to feel like part of the community. The older members are welcoming to new registrants and if you have a question or a concern, Digital Point is friendly enough to address it accordingly.

One of the centrepieces of the board is unquestionably the “Buy, Sell, Trade” forum. With up to half the members browsing this area of the site at any given time, it immediately becomes clear that Digital Point is much more than a simple advice-based forum.

Sure, if you have a technical issue, the knowledgeable members will more than likely have a solution. But it’s the ability to sell links, trade services and network with the developing community that makes Digital Point such a diverse home for webmasters around the world.

Indeed, browsing Digital Point will give you a fairly good idea of your own progress in an ongoing web project. A little research will uncover several members operating similar web businesses, and you can use their own experiences as a reference for your own.

Many people flock to the link exchange forum as a means to building their link popularity. It should be noted that all payments are handled off-site – PayPal will make life much easier for you – but Digital Point does employ a reputation and auction system.

Most of the control is left down to the members. This is perfectly fine if you’re outsourcing small projects, but think twice before accepting a forum bidder for several months’ worth of work! Digital Point is built on trust and while most members uphold the values honourably, there are always a few bad apples in the basket.

The board is laid out cleanly with what can only be described as a no-thrills layout. It isn’t the greatest design, but it doesn’t have to be. This is a website where functionality and content are the main selling points. And by that judgment, Digital Point excels as one of the best resources on the Internet.

Warrior Forum review

Claiming to be the number one Internet Marketing forum since 1997, WarriorForum.com has certainly laid down the gauntlet for its competition. While it may not sit as the largest community for web marketing, it certainly boasts a wide array of content and articles for the would-be Internet entrepreneur.

Warrior Forum is run off Snit2 software, a rare breakaway from the usual vBulletin code which most webmasters choose to go with. The forum is laid out in a clean red and black skin. It’s by no means spectacular, and the theme seems to clash with the identity of the site.

Let’s face it though. If making money is at the top of your agenda, a slightly off-key forum layout isn’t going to deter you. The content comes first, and it’s here that Warrior delivers plenty.

In contrast to the more vibrant communities like Digital Point, Warrior.com encourages its users to contribute static content in the form of articles and reviews. You’ll find that the main entry pages are obtained from these archives of how-to guides and useful advice. So in one way you could argue that Warrior sits above its competitors, certainly in terms of readily available information.

The 50,000 members – of which around 50% are active – are mostly friendly and affable. You might have to wait longer to get a response in the Warrior community, but the percentage of users who have active experience in what they’re talking about is noticeably higher. There are people using the boards who genuinely do make a large slice of profit, and this is naturally a great selling point to have on any money making forum.

You will find a healthy level of discussion in the Adsense and SEO forum, as you’d probably expect when glancing over the e-marketing spectrum. There is plenty of advice for optimizing your web business, and as we’ve already said, the members are highly knowledgeable of their profession. You won’t find much bad advice, and when you do, the more experienced members will step in with informative re-evaluations.

Unfortunately the site isn’t as independent as it perhaps could be. The page is lined with what looks like forum links, but when clicking on them, you’ll be taken to third party websites under a barrage of affiliate talk. It’s clear that the owners of Warrior Forum are looking to make a fast buck by drawing from the traffic that their board brings, and you could argue that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.

But as a browsing experience for a new member, the affiliate links do somewhat detract from your first impression of the site. It makes it hard to determine whether there is genuine good advice on offer, of if you’re there as bait to the affiliates.

It would be unfair to write off The Warrior Forum as a collection of other people’s sites. You will find a lot of good advice on Internet marketing and there are some genuinely innovative concepts described. In short, there’s money to be made.

But for all of the rich content, this is a community which would rank much higher if it wasn’t convoluted with third party deals and blatant advertising.

EWealth.com review

Compared to some of its direct competition, EWealth.com isn’t the largest of the affiliate marketing message boards on the Internet. Digital Point has more discussion on the subject without even trying to corner the market. But that’s not to say that EWealth isn’t worth checking out.

Choosing to focus completely on the subject of marketing, EWealth doesn’t bother scratching around the edges. Many forums strive to cover a bit of everything, and in the process, they lose half of the appeal that they’re trying to reach out to their audience with in the first place

It’s refreshing to see a marketing board where you know that the members are there for the same reason. And what might that reason be, you ask?

Well, EWealth covers anything and everything you could possibly need to know about affiliate marketing. All the major commission networks are covered. We have forums for ClickBank, Commission Junction, Clickbooth, Linkshare, NetTraction and oneNetwordDirect to name just a few.

You’ll find plenty of communities housing the usual Clickbank and Commission Junction chat, but it’s rare to find a line-up as comprehensive as this. The downside is that many of the smaller affiliate forums have sparse few posts and the topics are fairly few and far between. It’s never a good idea to pack a board with lots of less active forums, and EWealth would undoubtedly benefit from a more compact category listing.

If you can get over this, you’ll find that the community members are friendly and eager to find an answer to your questions. Responses, as you’d expect, are not quite as quick as the larger boards, but they’re certainly more detailed and there is a core of regular experts who can be counted on.

Despite being keen to cover all areas of the affiliation market, EWealth – one way or another – has a community which is considerably lop-sided. Most of the discussion revolves around the Clickbank forum, with up to ten times as many posts in this area as there are in some of the other affiliate schemes. Now admittedly, Clickbank is a popular service and widely used around the world. But Commission Junction is arguably just as influential, while it languishes in almost obscurity below the buzzing Clickbank area on EWealth’s main page.

If you’re priding yourself on offering the most rounded meeting point for affiliate marketing experts, it’s probably not a good thing to have such a heavy weight on one part of the market. That said, EWealth does offer fantastic coverage of the Clickbank service. So if that’s your thing, you really should be marking this down as a site to visit.

The forum offers a fairly popular “Buy, Trade, Sell” area, in keeping with the tradition of webmaster boards these days. You’ll be able to bid on domains, sell your links and get in the thick of the action. The smaller scale of the site increases the likelihood of snapping up a bargain, but it also gives you less opportunity if you’re the one doing the selling or promoting.

All in all, EWealth hosts a tidy little community which will appeal to affiliate marketers who don’t want to get lost in the swarm of members on larger sites. There is a large precedence on Clickbank, which can be slightly misleading for those new to the affiliation game. But if you’re experienced in the field and simply want a friendly forum to share your ideas with, this could be the place to do so.
 

WebmasterWorld.com review

Webmaster World takes all the ease of use from a vBulletin forum and throws it out the window in favour of a board powered by BestBBS. It’s quite obvious that the owners of the site are trying to appeal to a different audience in their approach, and upon first impressions, they’ve succeeded.

Webmaster World looks more like an article resource site than a buzzing community housing thousands of members. But a forum it is, and for those who prefer content over appearance, this is a site which will rapidly feel like home. As you’d guess by the name, Webmaster World offers discussion for those looking to start-up or improve their websites. It could be an online business, a hobbyist site or just about anything in between.

It is presented rather simply with a list of selected topics down the left hand side, and an overview of the forums on the right. The selected topics are titled as “Highlighted Posts”, which essentially means the discussions that are elected worthy of inclusion by the staff team. You’ll typically find two or three of these per day, so it helps to get an immediate idea of what’s going on – whether you’re new to the board, or returning to check up on what you’ve missed.

So what are the main selling points of Webmaster World? Anybody who has dabbled in the arts of E-Commerce will be well aware that the field is literally seething in sub-topics and new technologies. Webmaster World, in a bid to provide a comprehensive coverage of the entire industry, has opted to include just about every forum imaginable on its site.

We have categories for the basic languages of development, in HTML, CSS, PHP, XML and AJAX. We also have an area dedicated to the so called Web 2.0 movement. As the Internet swings towards a new generation of development, you’ll find all the latest discussion on mobile technology, scaled down application and multimedia design.

Perhaps the most useful area of the site is the forum for marketing on the Net. Whether it is link baiting, PPC programmes, Google Adwords, Yahoo…you’ll find just about every noteworthy topic under the sun in this section of the board.

Given the huge breakdown of forums that we’re talking about, it’s quite surprising to browse through each area and see that almost every topic has a reply of some kind. The member-base is clearly large, and the experts are active in providing help for the troubled members. Despite that, the forums aren’t overflowing with information. You can enter a sub-category and track topics dating back a couple of months in the first page.

If you post a thread today, it won’t be buried under four pages by tomorrow morning!

Under each topic is a neat little line which describes more about the subject at hand. This makes it much easier to locate noteworthy threads, and you’ll spend less time tapping at the search function.

Webmaster World should be commended for sticking to its guns and offering a board that relies on unique content rather than tidy presentation. If you prefer this kind of approach, drop by and see what you think. There’s enough relevant content to be reading for days!

Internet Marketing Discussion Board Forum Research

We have performed an extensive research of the leading internet marketing forum (discussion board) marketplace. Stay tuned for our detailed reviews of the best places to pick the latest online marketing information & tips - for free.

Quantcast.com – editorial review

Quantcast.com is the latest site to tip its name in to the web analysis market, offering a free service to webmasters and a large database of statistics for advertisers. It’s goal is stated boldly; to even the market and provide a more accurate representation of a website’s current statistics.

The website strives for a worthy cause. It is very true that advertising on the web can be a hit and miss affair. How do we weigh up the accuracy of statistics when they can be so susceptible to black-hat alteration and quick changes? Quantcast aims to settle this issue once and for all.

Genuine publishers can come and register their websites for detailed statistical analysis. In return, advertisers can use the service to outline their marketing strategy and gain fair insight in to the best websites for their cause. Quantcast offers excellent demographic analysis and the unbiased third party concept helps to increase the productivity of the advertisers. It cancels out the mistrust of where a site’s bloated statistics might have come from. Advertisers get a fairer price and publishers get a platform for their service. It’s a win-win situation, you could say.

So how does Quantcast actually function?

Ratings were available for over 200 million websites at the time of this review. That, we’d have to say, caters for the large majority of websites that hold any kind of significance on the web – and then some.

A basic search facility allows the user to locate statistics for any of these websites. The results will return information on monthly unique visitors, age, gender and even ethnicity demographics. You’ll find a lengthy list of active keywords for each website, along with Quantcast’s suggestions for similar sites.

The statistics are visually presented via a mixture of pie charts and graphs. You have your basic overall ranking mechanism, which works to rank the entire web. We couldn’t even begin to point our fingers on an algorithm to justify such rankings, but it certainly seems a more accurate representation than, say, Alexa, which judges ranking by web browsers with its own personal toolbar.

Publishers can use Quantcast to add their own profiles and increase the likelihood of striking up a deal with an advertiser. The Quantcast profile can then be used as a reference by the selling webmaster to conclusively prove that his statistics are what he says they are. 

For detailed analysis, publishers are asked to add a small snippet of JavaScript code to the pages in their website. This enables enhanced tracking and further statistics which are available on demand by the advertisers.

It should be noted that the website is geared towards usage in the United States. Most of the breakdown analysis is focused on this region, although coverage is available on a worldwide basis. We would give priority recommendation to the Quantcast service if you are based in the US. You can still make use of the website if you’re located elsewhere, but a few of the features will be redundant.

There is a large demand for web services detailing traffic statistics and SEM-friendly information. Quantcast is a worthy addition to the group and should be checked out, whether you’re looking to market a website from scratch or refine an existing strategy.

Drill.com / Syntryx reviewed

The competition for traffic amongst websites has reached a fever pitch over the last year or so and taking advantage of Search Engine Marketing has become a talking point of great debate. What are the best methods? What works? What is a waste of time?

We could go on for days about the intricacies of a field which nobody quite understands completely, and that’s where the thrills and frustrations of marketing a website lay.

Drill.com (aka Syntryx) arrives on the scene looking to provide a helping hand for webmasters and marketing analysts alike. While there are many websites offering a sandbox of tools to analyse web traffic and search rankings, not many can claim to do the job as comprehensively as this new site.

Drill.com has been experimenting through a beta phase, gathering further options to present one of the best online analysis tools on the web. It is a must-have for any webmaster who wishes to keep a close gauge over the traffic of his website – and competition websites too.

Sometimes the best SEM strategies involve pinching what works from other websites, and why not? We all have to start somewhere.

By using Drill’s complex member’s suite (dubbed The Member’s Club), you can draw up a tremendous array of statistics in relation to your website’s popularity. This applies to organic search listings, traffic demographics, Page Rank prediction, and much more.

The service is broken down in to three main areas; domain dossiers, keyword evaluation and advanced link analysis.

Want to compile a list of keywords to aid your marketing campaign based on what your competition is succeeding with? It’s possible to do so with the Drill.com member’s suite. Likewise, do you want to see where those blossoming websites are stealing their traffic from? You can get exact links so as to help your affiliation plans and link building strategies. It’s a wonderfully complete package and you can spend many hours analysing the intricacies of your website’s current performance.

Admittedly, the control panel can seem a little daunting at first view. There are a lot of tabs offering many different tools and it will take a while to get used to how everything functions, especially with the use of slightly confusing icons rather than text.

Don’t be put off though. The functionality is where Drill.com excels in a major way.

It is possible to run a search for a group of similar websites and compare them in great depth. We can look at market share, traffic force, the advertisement schemes that a domain is using, and even the value of the domain itself.

If you’re thinking about splashing out on a new URL, it’s great to have Drill’s analysis at the ready. You can weigh up the competitive rating of it before you’ve spent a penny!

The ability to build keyword dossiers and export them for use with your own campaign will save literally hours of painstakingly repetitive work. Not to mention, it’s likely to hand a major boost to your organic search ranking performance.

Drill.com utilizes an unusual credits system to cater for its members. For example, compiling a list of domains may require 20 credits which will be detracted from your member account. It’s a pay-as-you-go style system and one which can end rather abruptly if you tear through your credits.

All in all, however, Drill offers a brilliant overview of just about every aspect to SEM that you could possibly want to have access to. It is great for analysing successful websites, and starting from scratch with your own. This is certainly one of the webmaster suites that delivers on its promises.