If you’re not familiar with Google Labs, you need to go to http://www.googlelabs.com and bookmark the site so that you can check back and get in on whatever Beta functions they’re allowing you to play with in 2010.

Google has this experimental section open to the public so that they can have their users test out applications, allowing them to weed out problems and get feedback on how to make it better before it officially launches.

Now we don’t know what’s on the horizon, but it’s important to check in frequently so that you can test features that may be limited to a certain number of people or may be pulled without warning before you got to try it out.

Here are some past examples of what’s come out of the box for you to have fun with and utilize in ways that help you reach your target audience:

Social Search – This cool new feature lets you see results pages that are in line with what your social circle has created. That circle is made up of people in your Gmail account – chat buddies, friends, family, groups and even Twitter and FriendFeed.

Related Links – This is a neat gadget that lets you present a bunch of relevant pages within your own domain that your visitor might prefer to go to. Instead of clicking out if they don’t see what they need immediately, Google helps them find what they do need without them having to conduct another search.

Google Audio Indexing – Did you know that Googlebots can crawl your YouTube video and index it based on what it hears you say? Not only can people find your video through this tool, but they can jump right to the point in the video where you speak a certain keyword phrase. Many say this will eliminate text tags in some instances and will force marketers to be honest about the content of their video.

Google Checkout Store Gadget – This lets you have an online store without having to know complex code. Use a simple Google Docs spreadsheet and in under 5 minutes, you’ll have code you can cut and paste into Blogger, Google Sites, and your own domain with ease.

This helps many marketers who are on a shoestring budget get started. For example, using Google Analytics lets you analyze the traffic of your website for free while others are paying an arm and a leg for similar tools.

There’s not a marketer on the planet who prefer to pay for something when they can get it free. Free marketing tools are getting better and better – with developers often making money on the ad slots they provide in and around the site or on the tools themselves.

If you’re watching pennies, or just like to get a good bargain from time to time, consider these five free tools for marketers that you may need for 2010:

1.) CamStudio for Video Screen Capture Marketing – http://camstudio.org/

Camtasia can be pricey ($299) when you’re just starting out. But luckily for you, there’s an open source project called CamStudio that allows you to make an endless number of screen capture videos for free!

Pair your version of CamStudio with some free audio recording software at http://www.audioflash.org/ and you can create very professional videos to help you generate interest in your products and services.

2.) GIMP for Graphic Creations – www.gimp.org

Photoshop is often very hard for some non-tech savvy individuals to learn. And when you spend money on a tool like PhotoShop, you want to have the shortest learning curve possible.

Now you can take your time and use GIMP instead. GIMP stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program and you can use it for free, along with their thorough documentation, to make call to action buttons, minisite graphics, ads and more.

3.) WIX – Free Flash Website Design Tool – http://www.wix.com/

Flash sites are so expensive when you’re searching for a company or professional freelance individual to create one for you from scratch. With WIX, you can customize a template or make your own.

With a WIX site, you’ll have drawbacks, such as WIX ads being placed on your domain – and the domain won’t be your own dot com moniker, but you can upgrade when you have the money to invest in it and remove ads and use your own domain.

4.) WordPress – Free Blog Software http://wordpress.org/

Chances are you’ve heard of this one before, but some people still think they have to pay for a WordPress blog. Not true. You can either host a WordPress blog on their dot org site, or install it free on a domain that you own. As most marketers already know, WordPress is loved by Google if you utilize it right by posting relevant content on a regular basis.

5.) MailChimp – Free Autoresponder Tool – http://www.mailchimp.com/

This tool is great for those with no list or a very small list to begin with. You can use MailChimp for free to store up to 500 contacts and send out up to 3,000 emails per month.

“This niche seems so saturated – I might as well not even try to go into that one.” This is a common complaint that’s uttered by newer Internet Marketers who come into this business wet behind the ears and intimidated by their existing competition.

There’s a saying that you should adopt when you decide whether or not to get into a niche – “Everything that can be done has been done before.” Business is all about reinvention.

It’s about putting your own stamp on a product or topic and making people understand that yours is better than the rest. If it didn’t work this way, then we’d all be resigned to accepting only one hamburger brand, one brand of jeans, one movie with the same theme.

Think of how many Internet Marketing guides you’ve read to date. There are a wide variety of styles in teaching this business. Some will give a methodical, step-by-step technical accounting of AdWords, while others will deliver a more theory-based approach based on gut instinct and trend forecasting.

In the dating niche for men – there are those who teach you the traditional, seemingly common knowledge strategies and some who tell you to throw caution to the wind, forget everything you’ve ever known and use some tactic that would seem to get you slapped rather than score with a woman.

There will be plenty of room for you as an Internet Marketer in 2010. It doesn’t matter what niche you want to enter. There’s a spot with your name reserved on it, and here’s why:

If you want to succeed, then you should be going into this business truly believing that you can do it better than any of your competitors. That you can provide something no one else can – whether it’s secret knowledge of a trick used to make more money (or pick up women) or it’s in the way you teach – that helps people learn better from you than others.

Don’t go into Internet Marketing with a mindset that you’ll throw darts against the wall and hope something sticks. There’s room for you in this industry – but only if you’re willing to do the research and map out a plan of attack before you haphazardly jump in and waste time, money and patience on something you don’t really grasp.

There may not be an Internet Marketing degree you can earn at a college near you, but there is a wealth of information that can prepare you to succeed as an online marketer in any niche market you want to tap. All you have to do is generate enough interest, determination and motivation to get you from point A to point Z.

The FTC (Federal Trade Commission) passed new regulations that will affect Internet Marketers in regards to the Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising section.

The changes they’ve made affect bloggers and website owners who use testimonials or those with celebrities. If you’re an affiliate marketer, it affects you, too. While most of the buzz was about celebrities who fail to disclose they’re being paid or receiving freebies when touting a certain product, it’s smaller entrepreneurs we’re concerned about.

You’ll want to do ample investigating on your own before you start promoting anything for a paid commission. This article isn’t meant as legal advice for you – it’s simply an observation about the new rules and how we might feel their impact.

The point of the changes is to connect the dots for consumers between advertisers and endorsers. Not everyone has an Internet marketing background and can spot an affiliate review compared to an unbiased, unpaid one.

This will affect marketers who make up their testimonials. Some of them have written up their own testimonials and bought a stock picture of the “testimonial giver” – falsely making the consumer believe people have gotten good results with the product, when it fact not a single person had tried or purchased it yet.

Traditionally, advertisers could simply put an asterisk next to a real testimonial with the words “results not typical” in fine print. This was still shady because it wasn’t blatantly exposed on the site.

Now, if you get paid a commission, or if you got a freebie in exchange for recommending a product, then you’d better openly disclose that connection to your readers or you could face an FTC fine.

There’s no broad laws governing bloggers and marketers, though – the FTC says each case will be investigated individually. Aside from the payment being disclosed, you also have to be honest. You can’t say something helped you make $10,000 in revenue if it didn’t – and if you get caught, you could be forced to pay up.

Now if you’re caught, the burden is on the FTC to prove their case and how it violates the FTC Act. You can order a copy of the FTC’s updated Act here: FTC’s Consumer Response Center, Room 130, 600 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W., Washington, DC 20580. The bottom line for 2010 is – don’t cheat your readers out of an honest review, even if that means you admit you’re getting paid for your opinion!

SEO a.k.a. Search Engine Optimization is an important asset to any business and it is something that business owners all over the world are looking into doing for their websites. Not only is it helpful to get more business now during this economy, but it is almost necessary nowadays to have an online presence just to survive as a business! Although SEO can be a confusing subject at first, it is still crucial to educate yourself about it now and jump on the bandwagon now because it is an asset that no business should ignore.

What is SEO?

SEO is the term used for optimizing a website so that it shows up on the search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing, Etc) when someone searches for a keyword phrase that is related to their website. If you have a website that is for a Chinese Restaurant in Chicago, you would certainly want your site to show up when people search for “Chinese restaurants in Chicago” or anything related, right?

If your website isn’t there, then your competitors’ websites will surely be there and then you can lose out on the traffic and therefore lose money. Why leave money on the table when such a HUGE share of the market is searching the internet to find practically everything they need? And why hand over the targeted traffic to your competitor?

There are a couple of ways to show up on the first several pages of Google, Yahoo, etc. One of those ways is to do “Pay Per Click” advertising where the business owner pays Google every time someone clicks on their websites listing. This allows them to show up on the first page (depending on how much they’re willing to spend) but it can be extraordinarily expensive and in many cases not profitable. Also, many people prefer to not click on the results that they know are “paid for” and “sponsored” ads.

The more desirable way to rank in the search engines is to rank “organically” or naturally, without paying for any clicks and without paying a dime anytime someone clicks on your search result. This results in a long term stream of “laser targeted” traffic to your website (since the only people who find your site are searching for something related to it) which will turn into leads and eventually customers. Remember: Traffic = Money!

This is accomplished by optimizing your website for certain keyword phrases that have been proven to have a decent search volume, building incoming links to your website, formulating the proper META tags and making sure you have clean HTML code, etc. It will take hiring an SEO specialist to come and give you a consultation as to what your site needs and what it already has, as well as if there is anything you may be doing wrong that is penalizing you or preventing you from showing up on Google, Yahoo, etc.

SEO is a long term investment with astonishing results and ROI’s. It is also necessary for any business — large or small — to invest in having a presence on the internet as well as other internet marketing services including SEO, article marketing, link building, social media marketing, blogging and more. Simply look up a local SEO person in your town or city and ask them to give you a consultation or a basic rundown of what you need to do to your website to make it work for you and make you more money.

By making your website more search engine friendly you will be ensuring long term success for your business.

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Video: How To Use Amazon For Niche Keyword Research

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Search Engine Optimization or SEO, is something that every business owner is looking into nowadays as a way to get the exposure they need as a business and to stay afloat during hard times and times to come. The topic of SEO can be very confusing to some and although it’s confusing, it is still important to learn about it and make sure you take part in it, because it is an invaluable asset to any business.

SEO is the process of optimizing your business’s website for the search engines, such as Google, Yahoo and MSN Search. Although it is said that you are optimizing it for the search engines. What you’re really doing is optimizing your site for the people who want to find it. Basically, when someone searches Google for a keyword related to your business, for example “restaurant in New York City” — You will want to show up within the first couple of pages of the search results, otherwise your competitors will be there and beat you to the punch!

There are two ways to show up within the first few pages of the search results, one way is to set up a PPC campaign, where you have to pay for each click that you get to your website — but this method can cost a fortune. Then, there is the increasingly popular “Organic SEO” method, where an SEO specialist uses the power of keywords, link building and other factors to optimize your website so that it shows up in the natural, “organic” search results. This is when your website gets indexed on Google for keyword related to your niche, only you aren’t paying for each click or for your position.

People strive to show up in the organic search results which are located on the left side of any search on Google, Yahoo, etc. The right side displays the “sponsored links” which are paid for, by running a Pay-Per-Click campaign with the search engine itself and paying hefty fees “per click” to show up on the first or second page.    This is extremely important for any business, being that having a long term listing on the top search engines can bring a significant amount of traffic and therefore potential customers every single day of the year. If you can, try to get a hold of a local SEO expert in your area and see if they can give you a basic consultation or recommendation as to what you should/could do with your website to make it more search engine friendly… It will pay off, trust me!

How SEO Can Help Your Business Greatly

The term SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is one that is used much more commonly these days than ever before. This is mostly due to the fact that now the majority of the market will search the internet (Google, Yahoo, MSN) before anywhere else, when looking to purchase a product or service either locally or internationally. This has caused business owners to frantically look for someone who can perform these SEO services for them, by optimizing their websites for the search engines.

When someone searches for a keyword phrase that’s related to your business, for example “auto mechanics in New York” the first page of results on Google shows only 10 results. There are usually hundreds or even thousands of pages of results for any given keyword. Anyone can show up on the top page of Google, by paying a hefty fee PER click to be there. This can cost a fortune and cause a lot of headaches if you don’t know what you’re doing. SEO on the other hand is usually referred to as “Organic SEO” or “Organic Search Engine Optimization.” This means that you are making it so that your website shows up in the natural search results that are on the left side of the page when you do a Google search (the paid ads show up on the right side).

By landing your website a few organic search engine listings (on the first page or not), you are doing your business a GREAT service. This is perhaps one of the most valuable long term assets your business can have, because you will have a flow of traffic to your website, of people that are actually searching for what it is that you offer. And that is precisely why companies are paying thousands of dollars a month to search engine optimization specialists.

On the local level however, SEO services tend to be much cheaper than at the international corporate level, so they are affordable.

By having that organic listing, you will have “targeted” traffic coming to your site (people who are searching for your specific niche) and you will NOT be paying for every time someone clicks on your search engine listing! Your business will have more exposure on the internet, have a chance of competing with the rest and will survive well into the future… With your rankings going up every year hopefully!

Why Your Business Needs Internet Marketing Services

Nowadays, about 85% of the market will go to the internet FIRST to search for a product or service, before they go to the Yellow Pages or dial a phone directory service. Yes, that is a very large portion of the market and it is a crucial fact to consider. If you have a business, big or small, having exposure on the internet is so important due to the existing statistics as well as the increasing popularity of the World Wide Web. People of all ages are now going online, from their cell phones, laptops, computers, etc. and if you are not there for people to see… Your competitor WILL BE.

As a business owner, you most likely do not have the time to learn how to create websites, write and understand computer code, optimize your website for the search engines, get involved in social networking (Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, etc.), utilize article marketing, set up a Pay Per Click campaign or do anything related to internet marketing! This stuff can be completely confusing, like Chinese to you, but it still needs to be done. It really can’t be ignored.

If you want your business to thrive in modern times, it is crucial that you look into getting an individual or a company to handle your internet marketing campaign or at very least give you a consultation on as to what you need to do to get more exposure on the internet. It will not only make a substantial difference in your profits, but it will secure the future of your business.