Colin Klinkert Dot Com

A few days ago Google officially announced the launch of Google Buzz, a social integration and messaging tool. Google Buzz is Google’s latest attempt to jump into the social networking wave. They already have Orkut and OpenSocial but let’s be honest… who really use them? If you use Gmail, you must know about this new social app already. Google Buzz is a mix of Twitter, Yammer, Foursquare and Yelp.

With Google Buzz, you can share whatever you feel like, including links, photos and videos. It has a few others cool features such as an auto-following function, a public and private sharing function and the inbox integration. Because Google Buzz is integrated into Gmail, it quickly got a great exposure and a lot of internet users started to use it as soon as it was released. According to analysts, 9 million posts were published on Google Buzz within the 56 hours of its release! Wow!

Google Buzz integrates several platforms including Picasa, Flickr, Google Reader, YouTube, Blogger and Twitter. No doubt Google is trying to catch up on social networking and microblogging platforms like Facebook and Twitter. The feedback I read on the web is pretty good so far, and I enjoy using this app myself. I had the feeling it was just another social app… but I quickly started to change my mind. The fact Google Buzz is integrated into Gmail really helps!

To use Google Buzz, you must have Gmail account. No big deal considering it’s one of the best web-based email platforms! Check out the Google Buzz website for more information. It’s pretty simple to use. Right below the link to your inbox, you will see a link to Google Buzz. Click it, start following people and you’re pretty much set up! You can then start posting messages. You can link your Twitter account to your feed so every time you publish a tweet, it will automatically show up on your feed.

If you want to check out my feed, please visit my Google Profile: Colin Klinkert. If you want to have a Google Profile as well, read this blog post: How to set up a Google Profile. Note that Google changed quite a few things to the initial version of Google Buzz as several users complained about privacy issues.

A few months ago I published a blog post about Google Wave. Well… if Google Wave is the future, Google Buzz is definitely the present! Note that Google Buzz is also available on mobiles. If you want to learn more on this new app, watch this video:

Late October I published a blog post about Google Social Search explaining that Google uses your Google Profile to know who your friends are and deliver you relevant social search results. A Google Profile can also help you gain online exposure, which is obviously very important if you’re in the internet marketing industry. This week let’s see how to set up a Google Profile. It’s a very simple process but let’s go through it step-by-step so you don’t miss a thing.

Step 1

Go to Google Profiles and click ‘Create my profile’. You need a Gmail account to be able to create a Google Profile. I suggest you to use a user-friendly email address as your username can be used in your Google Profile URL (only if you decide to), as in google.com/profiles/yourusername. It’s also more search engine-friendly like this.

Step 2

Enter your details: first name, last name, where you grew up, where you live now and so forth. Don’t forget to add a short bio of yourself so people can learn more about you, and most importantly, add links to your site and blog as well as your Twitter, Facebook, ViralNetworks and other social network profiles. This is how Google will find out about your friends and be able to provide you with relevant social search results. You may also upload a picture of yourself. Once you’ve entered all your details, click ‘Create a Google profile’.

Step 3

You can now see how your Google Profile looks like. You can of course edit it any time you want. That’s all you have to do! Now if you want Google to generate social search results when doing a search, make sure you join the experiment. As explained in a previous blog post, it’s all about relevancy!

Feel free to check out my own profile: Colin Klinkert. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask them here! Julien and myself will be happy to help you. Setting up a Google Profile is quick and easy and has many benefits for internet professionals. You don’t need to tell everything about yourself though. Keep it brief!

Early this week I was invited to join the preview version of Google Wave. There’s been a lot of hype over this new communication and collaboration tool. My VP of Operations and I were able to give it a try over the last few days and even if we aren’t very impressed, we both believe that this new tool has great potential. Google Wave was designed to merge emails and instant messages, along with other forms of communication such as wikis and social networks… but truly, you can use it the way you want.

With Google Wave you don’t send emails to recipients but share waves with collaborators. You can of course add links, but also polls, photos, videos and lots of other different types of file as you can see on the two screenshots above. You can drag waves around, embed them in blogs and sites and even play them back so you get an idea of who said what when. Google plans to release most of the source code as open source, which is great news as web developers will thus be able to create applications and extensions.

Even if Google Wave is still in development and it’s a little too early to tell if this is going to become the next-gen marketing tool, it looks very promising. Google Wave allows you to communicate not only with your friends and colleagues, but also with your customers. It may indeed open new doors to marketers as it allows to share content such as product photo, videos, ratings and testimonials… and almost anything else you could think of. Any business could even invite their customers to join Google Wave for customer support or product development.

If you haven’t received an invitation to join the preview version of Google Wave yet, make sure you ask for an invitation around you or request an invitation from Google. Worse, if you don’t know anything about Google Wave, check out the following video:

Last week Google announced the launch of a new feature that may revolutionize the way we use search engines: it’s called Google Social Search. Earlier this month, Microsoft announced deals with social giants Facebook and Twitter but Google fired back almost immediately. The social search war is on! Google Social Search is developed by Google Labs and is still an experiment at this blog post is published but is quite likely to be part of the search engine landscape in the near future.

Google basically wants to deliver search results using your social circle as a source: with social sites like Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter, FriendFeed but also other types of platform like Gmail. They want your social networks to have an influence on your search results. If you join the experiment, when doing a search on Google, relevant search results from your social circle will be displayed at the bottom of the results page.

Google will know who your friends are once you have filled out your Google Profile with links to your social network profile pages. If you’re a Gmail user, Google will also look into your contacts. For now the social search results show up at the bottom of the results page but we can imagine that they will climb up as often your social circle if more relevant to you than the first search results. Would you rather read what Wikipedia says about tourism in the Fiji Islands or read a blogpost a friend of yours recently published about the holidays he spent in the region? What means more to you?

Relevancy seems to be one of the keys to Google’s success, and once again they’re on the way to provide their users with more relevant search results than ever before. For more information on Google Social Search, watch Matt Cutt’s video. Matt Cutt works for the Search Quality team at Google.

Any thoughts on this experiment? Do you think that this feature has the potential to change the way we use search engines?

Google is the king of the search engines right now, and a good ranking in Google searches can get you a lot of traffic.  If you are just starting out in affiliate marketing, then you need a lot of traffic to build up your initial customer base.  So, how do you leverage the immense reach of Google to help you do that?

The answer is in Web 2.0 sites.

Web 2.0 is a name used to describe the new kinds of websites that have come about in the past few years.  Social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook, content sharing sites like YouTube and Digg – all of these are Web 2.0 sites.  They  are enormously popular, so they get constantly indexed well by Google and other search engines.

This frequent indexing means that if you submit content to these sites and insert links back to your website, those links will be indexed quickly.

So what’s the strategy?

First thing to do is to prepare a lot of articles about the product you are selling.  You should not use the same article over and over again.  Search engines have duplicate content filters that will block some of them from results.

Once you have these articles, upload them to sites like Associated Content, Ezinearticles, and others like them.  Include a link back to your site in either the content of the article, or in the resource box (some sites have these boxes, some don’t).  Once the article is uploaded, you’ve accomplished two very important things:  you’ve spread word about your product topic on a site that gets lots of traffic every day; and you’ve created a valuable backlink from a website that has a high Page Rank.

Continue to do this (unique content every time) and you will build a lot of traffic for your site.

A Site For Example:

I have a site about Kenneth Cole Shoes and it ranks 4th in Google at time of writing this for the term, Kenneth Cole Shoes. Now that search term gets over 150,000 searches a month and the only sites that beat me out are The main site itself and a very large online shopping site.

Be sure to join my mailing list on the top left of my blog to see a followup post outlining exactly how I did it, so that you can do it too!

Mobile advertising startup JumpTap is taking on Yahoo and Google by by launching a pay-per-click advertising network called TapMatch.

The new network lets advertisers bid on categories and keywords, and elect to have their contextual ads appear on mobile Web searches. TapMatch also can target users by carrier, location, and other data to serve a more relevant advertisement. Advertisers and marketers will be able to access the ad network through a Web portal where they can upload images, text, or graphic banners for their campaigns.

Paran Johar, chief marketing officer of JumpTap believes “Savvy marketers worldwide are moving their marketing spend to where it matters most — in front of mobile consumers seeking relevant content and immediate gratifications. The mobile advertising market has reached a new phase of maturity where targeting is now essential, and TapMatch uniquely delivers a system that best matches advertisers to their desired audience at their precise moment of intent.”

TapMatch is directly competing with contextual mobile advertising offerings from Yahoo and the mobile version of Google’s AdWords. It is considered to be a lucrative market that will grow as more users access the internet from their phones.

While acknowledging Google’s stake in the space, Johar said that the TapMatch network can offer mobile advertisers more value because it can target devices by carrier, demographic, location, and handset. The company said its beta testers have seen up to three times the click-through rate compared with competing ad networks.

As smartphones become equipped with more desktop-like capabilities, it’s easy to see how people on the move may soon be using them as replacements for laptops.