Internet Marketing, Web Technologies & News – Best Web Ezy

I have just watched an exciting video about MS’ Windows 7.

Exciting isn’t it? For the people that hates Windows Vista, the good news is that Windows 7 is scheduled to launch in late 2009.

The new feature of Windows 7 is the touch-screen capability. View it here:

Video: Multi-Touch in Windows 7

As you can see from the video, you can drag, enlarge, minimize the images with 2 fingers. Nice isn’t it.

But you do need a screen that support touch-screen.

Apart from this new feature, I do hope that it is a stable version of Windows. This is more important to me.

Bookmark to

If you are experienced / semi-experienced in Adwords, then you would know the difference between these 2 networks.  However, I just read from some news that there is a guy suing Google for making his ads displaying on websites that he doesn’t like.  He thought not putting in the bid for content ads would automatically opt him out of the content network.

I won’t be surprised if Google wins the case.

In brief:

• Advertising in the search network means allowing the ads to show as the sponsored links of the search result pages.  This supports geo-targeting ie. you can choose what country / region to display your ad, and is based on a standard IP table.  Only contextual ads are allowed.
• Advertising in the content network means allowing the ads to show on Google’s content network, which is a pool of Google’s partnering sites.  You can go through the list of websites and only allow the ads to be shown on the sites that you choose, or exclude the sites that you don’t like etc.  You can use contextual ads, banner ads (flash, animated gif or static image), video ads etc.

When you setup an Adwords account, it is always recommended to setup 2 campaigns, one for content network and one for search network.  This way you can control the budget spend better as well.

Bookmark to

Yes, you have read the title right.  Microsoft is going to launch their own social bookmarking site. Apart from Live bookmark.

A preview version should be available for MSDN and TechNet in a very short time (probably within a few days).

Not a surprise – this new social bookmarking site allows users to:

• Bookmark a site on the web
• Tag it
• Bookmark a site on the upcoming “My bookmark” tool

Why is there another social bookmarking site?  MS reveals that the new site should open another stream of advertising income, and also to collect tag data to improve search result relevancy.

Bookmark to

It is the end of the month and things got quiet down a bit.  So let’s have some fun.

I have come across a list of fun facts about eBay (99 of them) and I would like to highlight some of the best fun facts here:

• The very first item sold on eBay was a broken laser pointer for $14.83. (See, broken item sells – no wonder people sell things on eBay)
• eBay went public in 1998, and both Omidyar and Skoll became billionaires in just overnight. (Go on – if you want to setup your online business, better do than think!)
• JayAndMarie is the first eBay member to reach 100,000 feedback, which happen in 2002.
• eBay engineers have to add about 10 terabytes of new storage every week to cover new transactions.eBay has such high margins partly because it has no factories or inventory, but also because its customers do the work.
• If eBay employed the people who earn all or most of their income selling on its site, it would be the second-largest employer on the FORTUNE 500, after Wal-Mart.
• In June 2005, the wife of Tim Shaw, a British radio DJ on Kerrang! 105.2 sold Tim’s Lotus sports car with a Buy It Now price of 50p. This was after Tim’s wife heard him flirting with model Jodie Marsh on air. The car was sold within 5 minutes.
• A toy is sold every 24 seconds on eBay Australia.
• Every minute a mobile phone sells on eBay UK.
• A piece of jewellery sells every 6 minutes on eBay India.
• Insertion fees were added in May. The first attempt was a flat $1.00 insertion fee, which due to “extreme member displeasure”, lasted about 10 days.
• The Feedback Forum began in February, 1996. Originally, Omidyar handled disputes between buyers and sellers via email.
• eBay has already expanded to almost two dozen countries including China and India. The only places where expansion failed were Taiwan and Japan, where Yahoo! had a head start.
• On an average, eBay.com runs into issues for about 50 seconds per day.
• There was at one point an auction for the first ride on Kingda Ka, the tallest roller coaster on Earth. The winning bid was $1691.66, and the winner rode in the front seat.
• One of the weirdest item sold is a chewing gum spat out by Britney Spears which went for £270.

PS. Talking about that, I am going to launch a ebook regarding earning money from eBay effectively.

Bookmark to

A landing page is not just a simple one-page website. It is a webpage that is designed specifically to drive lead / sales when the client visits the page. It is usually heavily employed on PPC campaigns (and earn money fast scams).

To effectively convert on the spot, a landing page should:

1. Contain only the relevant information, presented in bulleted list.
2. Have the conversion form on a prominent spot, usually on the right hand column, above the fold.
3. The conversion form should have less items other than the essential information.
4. Create urgency (buy now and you will get another sample / 20% off etc.). Put in a deadline.
5. Put in testimonies (but not too many).
6. Eliminate the number of links to the minimum.

Remember to test the performance of the landing page. You may need to tweak the design and do another test, to make sure that you get the best result for the money spent.

For testing, I also recommend form tracking. Form tracking allows you to see where the visitor drop out when filling in the form. Heatmap tracking probably won’t do much good as you should have only a limited number of items that are “clickable”.

Bookmark to