The above Pic is the result of two famous portal website: www.yahoo.com and www.aol.com. Goodle trend use the Daily Unique Visitors to compare the traffic volume of each website.

On the first part of these articles, we mentioned that Alexa has the difficulty of compare the traffic volume of website’s sub-domain for different regions. Google trends overcomes this problem by the “regions selection” function box on the top-right corner. By selecting the region on this box you can get the traffic data on the particular country, the pic below shows the traffic volume of these two website on Unite States.

We can also use the Time period option to view the recent traffic volume. Google trends can provide the absolute traffic volume and user can use it together with Alexa to get much better traffic detail of website.

Edited By Henry Lu

The report form marketing searching company, Net Application, says it is the first time the market share of Window dropped below 90%. On November this year, its market share is 89.62%. The Linux is not the main cause for this, the rapid growing of Apple Mac and iPhone is the Window’s main threat. The Statistics report from Net Application is done by the website’s visiting rate of Operation system, which includes the mobile phone, game console and any device with the OS and can go online. The market share of Microsoft Windows was always above 90% before November this year, and is even above 95% during year 2004/2005. But this year Microsoft loses its share slowly.

Microsoft’s marketing manager admitted that in many countries, Apple Mac is becoming more popular and hence its market share increased rapidly. In Japan and US, Mac becomes quite accepted for many computer users, Unlike Australia, where Window is still the mainstream for people. And many Australia Mac users are the certain professional type people like graphic designer and editor which are quite small group compare with Window’s.

Edited By Henry Lu

Many people wonder about why Amazon has to stop its Alexa search engine? According to the Amazon official, it is because the use rate of search engine is too low, and most US internet users use Google, Yahoo and Live search from Microsoft as their primary search engine look for products and information.

Edited By Henry Lu

Google have added the background and theme functions to Gmail recently, and provides users the personalised information environment. Since continuously, many Gmail users have to download and install the unofficial plug-in application to decorate their email box. Annie Chen, the Gmail developer wrote this on her Blog,

we want to provide not only a simple choice of personal colour and decoration, but a package of 30 types of themes, and users can get the outstanding design of their own background, also people can customise their own design with great range of tools and choices. You can make your email box as a feeling of classical, or a funky background design like raining effect and many more to increase the fun.

But unfortunately, Google’s commercial users won’t enjoy these new features. Google said, the Google Apps users can not use the Gmail’s Background and theme functions. When you want to use the theme function, go to Gmail and select “setting”, then go to the theme page. If you don’t see this page, just wait for few days because Google still is running the test for this feature and it will be released soon.

Recently, Google made lots of effort on Gmail. Last week, Google have added the video catting function, and also the MSN function be added 3 weeks ago, but however been disabled due to the bugs. Since last 2 months, Google have already added 7 new features for Gmail, which includes Gmail Gadgets, Face emotion symbols, Gmail 2.0 Action version, live reply functions, better contact manager, advanced control panel for IMAP and Mail Goggles.

Edited By Henry Lu

I wish this article can help many people understand how the mortgage loan related to financial crisis this time.

The article is very easy to understand, I believe that even the housewives and normal office workers can grasp it. I wish through this article, people can get to know what is depreciating in this crisis, why the stock and funds in your hand devalue so much this time.

1 Gearing or Leverage

Currently, in order to made excess profits, many investment banks adopt 20-30 times gearing operation. We assume that the own capital of bank A is 3 billions, 30 times gearing is 90 billion. In other words, bank A used 3 billion capital as mortgage to borrow 90 billion as investment capital. If the profit of their investment were 5%, then A would gain 4.5 billion as profit. To A, this is excess profit which is 150% of his own capital. However, on the contrary, if the loss of the investment were 5%, then A would lose all his capital and carry 1.5 billion debts as well.

2 CDS Contract

Because the risk of gearing operation is high, according to the normal regulation, bank should not adopt this kind of high risk operation. However, someone find a way to use this gearing investment to buy “insurance”. This kind of insurance is called CDS. We assume that in order to avoid the risk of gearing, bank A found organization B, organization B could be another bank, or an insurance company, etc.

A said to B: “How about you help me to buy the default insurance using my mortgage? I will pay you 50 millions insurance fees every year, for 10 years. In total it is 500 millions. If my investment doesn’t default, you can take the insurance fee for free, but if I default, you should give me compensation.” A thought that if I do not default, I can earn 4.5 billion. But if I default, the insurance company will pay the loss for me. Therefore to A, either way is a net gain.

B is very smart as well, he didn’t accept the invitation of A immediately. Instead, he went back and does a statistical analysis; he found that the risk of default is less than 1%. If he found 100 clients, he would gain 50 billion insurance fees, even among them there were one default, the compensation would be less than 5 billions, if there were two default, B still could earn 40billions.

Both A and B felt this business is beneficial for them, so they made agreement happily.

3 CDS Market

After B made this business, C felt envy. C came to B and said:” How about you sell these 100 CDSs to me? I will pay you 200 millions for each contract, in total it is 20 billions.” B thought: that I have to wait for 10 years to get these 40 billions, now if I sell it I can have 20 billion immediately without risks, what a bargain!

Therefore, B and C made the deal at once.

In the end, CDS can be sold and bought in the financial market just like stocks. Actually after C got these CDSs, he didn’t mean to gain 20 billion after 10 years. Instead, he price them 22billion and sell them out.

D saw the products and thought that 40billion minus 22billion equals 18 billions, there’s still 18 billion profits can earn. This is not too expensive for initial offerings, so he bought quickly.

Therefore C earned 200 millions.

After that, these CDSs were sold in the market many times and now the market value of these CDSs is 62 trillion US dollars.

4 Subprime Mortgages

A,B,C,D all earned big money, but where dose these money come from? Originally, all these money from the profits of A and the other investors like A. And most of their profits are from subprime mortgage in US. Many people say that this crisis caused by the fact that all the mortgages were given to the poor, but I don’t agree with it.

In my point of view, most of the subprime mortgages were given to the normal US real estate investors. The capital they had was just enough for them to buy their own houses. But when they saw that the house price increased dramatically, they started to think about investing in real estate. Therefore they mortgaged their own house and use the loan to invest the real estate.

The interests of this kind of loan are more than 8%-9%. It is very difficult for them to afford by their own income. However they can keep mortgaging the house to the banks, paying the interest with the loan.

At that time, A felt happy, because his investment was helping him earning money.

B also felt happy, because the default rate is very low, his insurance business can still go on,and C, D E, F who followed them are also earning money.

5 Subprime Mortgage Crises

When the housing price reach certain level it cannot go up anymore, there are no successors follow up. Then the real estate investors felt anxious, because although he can’t sell out the house, he still had to pay the high interests. Finally, he cannot help but leaving the houses to the bank, default happened.

A felt sorry, but he thought even he cannot earn big money, but he still won’t loss too much, he still held the insurance from B. B didn’t feel worry as well, because he had sold it to C. Then where is this CDS? It was in the hand of G.

G just bought 100 CDSs from F by 30 billion, before he sold them out, out of sudden, he received this news that these CDSs have been degraded, and there were 20 contracts default. This is far higher than 1% or 2% default rate estimated at very beginning. For each default contracts, G had to pay 5 billion for compensation, in total it would be 100 billion. Plus 30 billion CDS acquisition cost, the total loss for G is 130 billion. Although G is top 10 organizations in US. He still cannot afford such great loss, and now G was facing bankrupt.

6 Financial Crisis

If G bankrupt, then 50 millions insurance A bought was waste. The worse thing is because A was using gearing operation, according to the result we mentioned before; A would lose all the money and carry great debts. Therefore, A also faced bankrupt.

Besides A, A2 A3… A20 all nearly bankrupted. So G, A, A2…A20 all came to finance minister of US and cried to him: ” G cannot bankrupt, if he bankrupt, we will all die.” Finance minister saw the situation and he nationalized G. So the compensation for A, A 20, total 100 billion was pay by US tax payers.

7 USD Crises

Before, we mentioned that the market price of 100 CDSs was 30 billion. But the total market value of CDSs was 62 trillion. We assume that if there is 10% default, then there will be 6 trillion default CDSs. This is 200 times of 30 billion. After US government purchased 30 million CDSs he would loss 20 trillions. If US government doesn’t want to lose, then he will see A 20. A 1, A 22, etc, bankrupt one by one. Neither way, he cannot avoid USD depreciating greatly.

The figures used in the assumptions may be different from the real situation, but we cannot underestimate the severity of the consequence of US financial crisis.

Edited By Vicky Yin

Now we will talk about Aro (Access Rating Online). If we use the simplest way to describe Aro, we can say it is Nilson rating report in IT industry. Aro is very similar with Nilsom ratering report. Firstly, Aro gets information about age ratio and distribution in certain area. through national telephone census, and then it recruits the participants who are willing to be observed, through portal sites and news websites. The participants will be asked to install the detect ion software.

After that it will collect information about daily Internet behaviour of the samples and calculate the websites traffic in this area by statistic theory. In IT industry, we use the term of “Access Rate” to replace the term of “audience rate” in TV industry.

Access Rate=the percentage of unique visitors of certain website every month among the total number of Internet users

For example, we assume that the number of Internet users in this area is 10 millions; the Access Rate of certain websites is 4% that means the number of visitors for this website is: 10 million times 4% which is 0.4 million visitors.

From this prospective, we can find that:

1. The statistic data of Aro is macro-statistic data, to the website which is too small (Access Rate is less than 1%), the analytical data from Aro is void. And normally, it is also difficult to find the websites who’s Access Rate are less than 1% in Aro searching database.

2. To the middle or large scale websites, Aro can provide more accurate analytical data. For example, we can find the Access Rating ranking for all the IT websites, but this ranking is for all the Internet users in this area and the information about consuming capability of the visitors should be the focus in the point of view of advertising.

3. Aro is the product of InsightXploer Limited, currently Aro information is not available for general users, and clients have to pay for the database to get the data transfer service. To the web masters of new websites who won’t be able to purchase analytical information, this is really a big problem. Hope in the future, Aro can provide special offer for the new websites or open some parts of the database. And next time, we will talk about Google Trend, this is another method of statistic analysis and it is more precise than Alexa data ranks. See you next time. 

Edited By Vicky Yin

This election campaign has greatly revealed the popularity of Internet. Obama has used Youtube to promote his speeches and raised donations through Facebook and other social websites. However, all of tools are not the methods the traditional politician feel familiar with, but they did help him to win a great victory in election campaign.

Also because of greatly using the Internet, the incoming governing team in US has changed the communication mode of whole society. Using Internet lowers the barriers for the public to participate in politics. and dramatically increases people’s willingness to participate. In the future, all the election campaign may adopt Internet, following Obama’s mode, to be more closer to the public.

Edited By Vicky Yin

Internet is very fair to everyone; no matter you are a big boss or an office worker, you can always find the chance to open your on-line shop and dig the gold. However, since the capital, and abilities of each person is different, the business types they choose are also various. Find your suitable business types, do some preparation for that, and then, you can start your new business on-line.

1. On-line auction
On-line auction is the easiest on-line business type for people to get in. Normally, the people who post the products for on-line auction mainly are individual sellers who just want to have a try or the owners of small scale shops. Because the barrier to enter this business is low, the competition is great relatively. Moreover, on-line auction customers love to compare the price, normally they will choose the products has lowest quote among the same.

To the sellers have big amount of products, the fees to post products is also very high. It is very common for the sellers to spend thousands dollars one month just for posting and advertisements. Plus the procedure fee charged from on-line auction platform, the cost of on-line auction business won’t be much lower than to rent an entity shop.

However, some sellers build their reputation through on-line auction and then set up their entity shop or company. To the one who is lack of capital, on-line auction is still a sound way to start the business gradually.

2. Community business
This type is for the one who starts their business from running on-line club and managing the on-line community. So far they are more like to be network engineers or the related experts who involved in Internet in the early days. At the time when they involved in web world, although they have abilities to build up their community forum, instead of having a practical mode to earn profit, their management and expectation is a bit unrealistic.

Nine out of ten on-line companies set up at that time had declared to withdraw when the initial capital was used up. And the remain ones had sort of “belief” towards the Internet world, and they also had some sense of mission towards their community. Later on they found that it is a really good way of earning by providing products to the community users according to their needs. And gradually they started to build their reputation and became the key person in certain field in their on-line community. Firstly, they boost the traffic and build reputation and then they provide the professional information which the community interested about following the Internet principle” Content is King”. If their words really carry weight, the product they sell surely will have high customer trust as well.

3. Making own brand
It is the dream of many designers to create their own brand, but the talented designers are over abundant. To become the next LV or Armani is nearly impossible in this situation. However, Internet provides the possibility for the designers to create their own brand. The good thing for the Internet is, it can gather scattered individuals through web. Therefore the designers can find the chance to display their talents to their net friends who has interest. Since it sounds possible for them to manage their own brand with limited capital, many designers started to join this trend. No matter the students in design colleges or many “silent” designers are all busy with building up their own brand on the web. Compared with the era which unknown designers have to work for the others to live, Internet has given all the small brands new hope of survival.

4. Business for special needs
To open an outdoors shop, it is very important to find a good location. Therefore the competition for the shop owners to get the primes location is always fiercely. However, to the shops who sell the products which are not that popular, even it is located at the best area; they still cannot attract many customers to earn enough for the rental. But on the Internet, you don’t need to worry about the location. As long as the owners can call the customers who have needs to come to their own websites, they can always find the way to do the business.

On the web world, no matter what is it, you can always find someone provide it. To the owners, they don’t need to worry that the rental is too high for they to afford; To the customers, they don’t need to complain that the things they need are too difficult to find, the Internet has given both of them a hand.

5. On-line branch
Although many owners consider that their services are better than the big companies, their business has been undercutted by the big shopping malls and their chain stores. But through web, they can find back customers who has recognized their products and their services.

To the owners of small scale shops. Internet has helped them to find their customers in this fierce market competition. While more and more customers rush to the big shopping malls, CBD, the one visits the small shops which is located in relatively outlying area is less and less. However, Internet helps another type of customers who don’t go out that much to find the shops provide good service and run by reliable, friendly owners, to both customers and sellers, this is no doubt a win-win methods.

6. International sales
To most of the people, running international business through Internet is still unrealistic. Although Internet has no boundary, if you cannot speak their languages, how can you do the business with the foreign costumers. However, to the one has international trade background, Internet is a really good tool. They don’t need to go oversea to be international traders; they can just make the deals through the web. In the past, owners need to send the samples to oversea for the customers to check, but now they have their own space in the websites to display their products. The oversea costumers can just browse the pictures and then counsel the companies with mail or telephone. It makes the deal easier to be done.

Nevertheless, through Internet, the sellers can do retail business directly with their foreign costumers. Of course there is one premise: owners need to know at least their language first, they should have the ability to read the message their oversea costumers send to them. If they can write their product introduction with their languages the chance for them to earn money out of their country is much higher.

7. Supplier direct selling
Facing too many competitors, the suppliers always have to consider the channel flows. Moreover, the cost of whole channel flows also raise up, it is not easy to strengthen the band nowadays. In the past, the supplier can only know the market reaction through the retailers, the deviations in between makes it difficult for them to adjust their product positioning.

However, through Internet, suppliers can hear the voice of costumers directly and communicate with them as the manufacturers. It helps them to know the market needs and produce the product which fit the needs of the market more. For the suppliers, to sell product on-line is totally different from making a big order, the profits from selling one or two products is very small, but it opens a new sales channel and a new web costumers service system which can face to the consumers directly.

8. Vertical portal website
Building up a one-stop shop is the ambition for many on-line business owners. But the requirement of setting up this type of business is really high. First, owners should have sufficient capitals and then they need very powerful platform and technology to serve many costumers at the same time in one website. Managing a vertical portal website is like running an on-line supermarket. The running cost of a supermarket is much higher than that of a small shop; this business type is definitely not for everyone.

Currently the most powerful vertical portal e-business websites are the e-market run by few big portal sites, only few owners who have very strong technology and professional knowledge can find the way to involve in this business type.

Edited By Vicky Yin

The data about the web visitors, this data packet includes:

The most important: The numbers of unique visitors. From the perspective of marketing (include advertisement and sales), the number of unique visitors who really browser your website is the most solid and critical data for you website. Because even if one people click your website twenty thousand times it doesn’t means your website has twenty thousand visitors. Actually Web Reach is build up through unique visitors.

The second important: Page views. The reason why this data is important is because, currently, web advertisement is charged by CPM. For example, when CPM=40, if the website has been viewed 1000 times, in other words, the advertisement is also viewed 1000 times, then the advertiser should pay the website 40 dollars.

The web masters can think in this way: if the Page Views of the website for one month is ten million, and CPM for one advertisement is 40 dollars, then if this page is sold out for one month, the income from advertisements will be 400 thousands. If we put three pages for advertisement in the website, then the income of advertisement for all these three pages in this month will be 1,200 thousands. Of course, this is just an ideal number in mathematics view, if the website can sell the advertisements simply rely on traffics then the webmasters of XXX analytic or fortune telling website had already become millionaires.

How the visitors find your website?

1. Type the link directly
2. Through search engine
3. Though click the link on other websites

The best ratio of the numbers of visitors using these three methods respectively is 3:4:3

As Google Analytics is the best tool for you to know the data of your own website, which tool is the best to analyse the competitor websites for the web masters and advertisement agency? Currently there are a few good choices: Alexa, ARO and Google Trend.

Alexa:

Alexa has become a basic tool for nearly all the web masters, I will not explain too much about how to use Alexa. I will directly point out the blind spots of Alexa.

1. Alexa data is very easy to be manipulated: Through installing Alexa tool bar, Alexa can detect states of the web users and then estimate the number of online user through statistical inference. But the sample number is not defined strictly. The effect is that the bigger the website is, more precise the data Alexa can provide. However, on the contrary, the smaller the website is, the data is less representative. Therefore, to Web Reach, the data from Alexa can only be used as suggestion reference value but not the absolute reference value.

2. The problem to compare the local website with foreign one: For example, the business news website IBTimes(www.ibtimes.com) has the Australia sub-domain (au.ibtimes.com), and if we compare the traffic between au.ibtimes.com and its Australia competitor The Age(www.theage.com.au), it will say au.ibtimes.com has the greater traffic then its competitor in Australia. But actually it is not true. www.theage.com.au has lots more traffic than au.ibtimes.com in Australia. That is because Alexa treats all the traffic source for au.ibtimes.com as same as its parent domain www.ibtimes.com. Hence the Alexa cannot provide reliable comparison if webmaster want to compare the traffic data with the foreign website with sub-domain.

The shortage of Alexa can be fulfilled by the other analytic tool: ARO(Acess Rating Online) and on the next part, we will discuss the details of ARO and Google Trend.

Edited By Vicky Yin

Defining keywords for your website requires originality and brainstorming. The one interested about doing SEO for their websites needs some reverse thinking: what kind of keywords your target group will use to search the website they want to find. If you can use these keywords to optimise your website then the one visit your website will be the visitors your really aim to target.

Actually SEO means optimise all the pages in whole website and let every page of the thousands which is using different keyword to gain good rank (As good as possible, but not always first). For example, let us say there is one website has ten thousands pages. If each page can bring 1 traffic per day, then in one day, this website can has ten thousands traffics.

How to find keyword for SEO

Actually analysing keyword is a very hard and long term work. The right way of SEO is to keep increasing the web page, which also means to keep finding the effective keyword. It looks very simple to find the proper and effective keywords, but actually even the SEO expert sometime can not get in door. There are some simple skills which will help you find the suitable keywords.

1. Who, what, when and where: no matter what kind of website you are making, the basic information it provide should include: who, what, when and where. for example, using Italian restaurant (what) in Newtown (where) as keyword .First of all, you can start to analyse the keyword from these elements and see whether there is any keyword you can use inside of these 4 Ws.

2. Brand and model: if your website provides various products, especial 3C products, then don’t forget to consider the brand and model as the keyword. For example, normally, the one sale the mobile may think “mobile phone”, “cell phone”, or this kind of keyword should be the main keyword for their website, but actually it is wrong.

Most of the internet users will use the keywords like “mobile phone” as main keywords when they just want to check what kind of mobiles is popular. When they found the mobile they are interested in bigger website, they will focus on this mobile’s brand and model to do further research. And search volume of this kind of keywords can be accumulated in a very astonishing level; it can be 10 times more than that of the keyword like “mobile phone”. At the same time, normally, users will search brand +model; the chance for this kind of user to purchase the product is much high than the one just generally check the information of mobile. Therefore the more specific the keyword is, the higher the search accuracy is, and, the higher chance for this deal to be done.

3. After you list down all the keywords you can think about, the next step is to observe your competitors. You have to see what kind of titles you competitors have listed down, you may find some keyword you neglect, and it can be a good reminder for you. This is a method really save lots of time.

4. Use keyword advertisement: if you have permission to use keyword advertisement, you will find that normally there will be a tool which can suggest keyword for you on keyword advertisement. Under this tool, you can find many related keywords. This is also a sound way.

5. Use web traffic analytic: please add traffic analytic tool on your website, it can help you to know through which keyword the visitors find your website. Always you can find many keywords you neglect but really help people to find your website. If you find the traffic volume of these keywords is not bad and rank is not in front, then you can enhance this keyword to let it has better rank. However this method needs long term operation and observation. Although it may take long time, the keywords you find are always the keywords you can never think about by yourself.

6. Write the article diligently: this point is related to the third point, when you write the article, there will be more words in your website and have the chance to be searched through search engine. Only when you accumulate more articles, you will know more deeply that which keyword has been neglect.

7. Connect with the “hot” keyword: this is the most advanced method. When you are reading the newspaper or watching TV or listening to radio, you can find many popular topic people really interested at this period. You can use some of these popular issues to create your own keyword. For example, recently the news about poisoned milk in China is very hot. If you are a soybean milk products, you can use poisoned milk as a keyword, and in your website, you can post the article about the benefit of the soybean milk, how to use soybean milk to replace milk to make coffee, and so on. Of course this may requires certain level of professional knowledge, but normally this kind of “hot” keywords has terribly great volume. It may just last a while; but if you can successfully get a good rank using these keywords, it can bring great traffics in very short period of time for you website.

Edited By Vicky Yin

After you have ideas, then you need to set up the website itself. I really wish the e-business entrepreneur see building a website as building a house in this stage. For both, the foundation has to set up properly. Therefore you really need some knowledge of web structure. In order to set up foundation properly you have to consider that which platform you will use to develop the product; whether there will be any difficulties for you to add new items based on the current service you provide in the future; whether there will be any troubles of system efficiency when the website is enlarged in size later.

All these problems will not emerge in the early stage of website construction. But you will find it is really hard to come back to solve all these problems after your website has developed in certain scale. This is one of the reasons why many articles about e-business emphasized on the important of having good technology development team at the first place. You also have to know that a good programmer is not always a good system planner. If you can have one or two people who have talent in system planner in your initial web development team then it will be really helpful for you to build up your website on a good foundation in the future.

One thing I have to mention that no one can predict whether the website will have great traffics at very beginning. You might feel annoying if the web technicians keep telling you how important it is to set up a good foundation at beginning. In this case, you have to understand that what they concern about is related to the three elements of web structure. They are “design”, “usability” and “Search Engine Optimization - SEO”.

To set up a commercial website is not something easy, good web skills and three elements actually are different things. Normally designer will in charge of the design part to make the page looks attractive; on the other hand, usability is to reduce the level of difficulty for the users in using this website. However in the eye of the designers, design and usability always conflict with each other. Therefore, balance these three elements is already a very difficult job in planning a commercial website, which expects to gain the profits in the future.

But actually the most difficult part for the website structure is SEO (Searching Engine Optimization). These three letters can mean many things to e-business, some people view this as cheating, like playing some tricks with the search engine while some people think this is just trivial things that all the developers can do. Some people can not bear the changes of the web page after the work of SEO; designers always complained about why they can not use Flash here or there because website with lots of Flash is hard to get optimised.

Then what on earth does SEO really mean? Before we doubt the validity of SEO, we should first understand SEO from the view point of the search engines.

If you are Yahoo or Google, what kind of websites you want to put into the front?

When the online users are using a search engine, if the searching results on this search engine provided can not direct them to find the information they want quickly; instead, they have to check page by page; then surely they will feel this search engine is not convenient and they may consider to choose another one. Therefore in order to enhance their competitive strength, search engines need to precisely rank many good websites, and provide more convenience to the users to find the information more quickly.

For this reason, search engines need good websites as well. If a search engine can not find good websites and give them suitable rank, then it will be very difficult for this search engine to be accepted by the users. The web designer with good SEO skills will enrich the information in website and let the search engine consider this website as a good website; then naturally this website will get a good rank. To evaluate whether it is a good website, search engines have developed a serial of program to rate the websites.

Some of the standards search engines have made are open, the search engine even provide assistant tools (like Webmaster Tool which Yahoo released recently) to help the websites improve themselves following this standards. Why they do in this way? Suppose search engine is using one kind of language follow the standards and rules they have made, for example, English. If the website designer doesn’t know English but only speak French while the search engines only accept English, then the search engines will have difficulties to estimate whether this is a good website and there will be a great confusion for the search engine. Therefore in order to have a good rank, website makers have to know what search engines want and what they don’t want and they have to help search engines to know their website well. This is why SEO is not a trick or cheating, on the contrary, SEO not only help the website boost their traffics through the search engines but also promote the search engine to the users through introducing good websites by their rank.

As we know, marketing expense occupies the biggest part of cost in operating the website. But if the websites can improve their traffic through SEO, it will not just greatly reduce the expense on advertisement but greatly increase the survival rate of the websites as well. Although SEO may cause some impacts on design and usability, if the website maker can plan it well, it is not a difficult job to minimize the side effects SEO brings. The reward of this effort is pretty high and surely the search engine will consider your website as a good website even more.

Summary : If you don’t want to deal with the search engine, then surely the search engines won’t be happy to be “friend” with you as well, they won’t put you on the tops of their friend list (ranking). For example, if the search engines say very clearly that they don’t like Flash of course it doesn’t mean you can not use flash at all, unless you want to make the whole page as Flash but you just follow your own favouritism and ignore the feeling of search engine, then later on, you should not complain about why search engines are not “friendly” to you.

Edited By Vicky Yin

In the recent interview of Schmidt, he told Wall Street Journal this is my personal decision. He emphasized that Google, whose headquarter is located in Mountain View, California will be remain aloof in the election campaign.

Wall Street Journal reported that Schmidt planed to publicly support Obama with the other technology company administrators but this report didn’t mention the names of the other technology company administrators.

Schmidt is the one of the chief executives in Silicon Valley who used to be the technology advisors of Obama’s campaign. Newmark, the founder of online classified advertisement website, Craigslist is also one of Obama’s advisors.

Compared with the Republican president candidate, McCain, High-technology industry has show greater favorite on Obama. Up to the end of August, Google staffs have donated $487,355 Dollars to Obama’s campaign while there are only $20,600 Dollars for McCain’s campaign.

Although between Google, Parliament and Ministry of Justice, there are still many unsettle disputes, includes the advertisement cooperative agreement with Yahoo, Schmidt still keep his determination to support Obama.

Edited By Vicky Yin

Marketing Company Crispin Porter + Bogusky, run this advertising Campaign. In first series ads, Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates play as two people shopping for shoes and home stay with a family but never mentioned a word to Window or Vista. Later on the second series of ads, “I am PC” as the reply for Apple’s “I am Mac” campaign, focus on the PC users and try to change their negative impression toward PC and deliver the message “I use PC, and I am fun”.

Bill Gates / Jerry Seinfeld  Series 1

Series 2 — Click here

I am PC Series 1

I am PC Series 2 and 3

Can these Advertising Campaign change the Microsoft’s image?

From the view point of experts, these Campaign are not successful viral marketing, because their topics are not related to the Window products, and however, they focus too much on this Comedy Star. And most people have difficulty to understand this commercial. For the “I am PC” series, Microsoft tried to promote its already number 1 window Operation System, which made people feel funny and say: “Microsoft is afraid of Apple too much” The experts from IT industry said, Microsoft should produce adverting Campaign which focus more on their products, or try to focus current bugs of apple’s MobileMe and Iphone’, which are the apple’s weak points. This way may have better result. And Window developers should improve the Vista and design a better user-friendly Interface. A Good Advertising Campaign is not a cure for Vista.>

Apple takes a Jab at Microsoft Ads

Apple has come out with a clever retorts in response to Bill Gates / Jerry Seinfeld series.

This is one pokes fun at Microsoft for spending too much money at advertising instead of fixing window’s problems;

In the second one talk about that Microsoft not mentioning any of their product names in the adverts at all;

Edited By Henry Lu

Recent survey conducted by MasterCard on e-commerce market in Asia-Pacific region has pointed out that by 2011, the annual growth rate of online sales in Asia-Pacific region will exceed 23% and by 2010 China

will replace Japan to be the largest online sales market in Asia-Pacific region.

The survey believed that China and India will be the main driving force to boost the online sales in Asia- Pacific region. The graduate increase of the number of upper-middle-income urbanite in these two countries will stimulate the dramatic development of their online sales market. The fast speed of urbanization, rapid economic growth and increase of the purchasing power in these two countries all imply that the domestic consumption will grow strongly in these two countries. 

This report predicted that by 2010, there will be 480 million online customers in China, account for 58% of the total number of the online customers in Asia- Pacific region.  At the present, this number in China only account for around half of the total.

The report also mentioned that by 2010, the online sales in China will reach 1.4 trillions Dollars, becoming the first in Asia-Pacific while Indian is expected to be the second.

Edited By Vicky Yin

E-Business all happen on digital platform like on-line shopping
Marketers have to break the traditional marketing media mind-set

Now many advertisers still underestimate the power of web marketing, they still hold this old idea that “internet is something only for young men” but, in fact, this idea is definitely wrong. The greatest advantage of web marketing is its interactivity. Through interaction, customers can involve more and business owners can also gain lots of useful information from customers as well. This information definitely will help the owners to make a good marketing plan. Therefore, in order to response this new market environment; marketers should not rely on their traditional media mind-set to make their plan and strategy; they have to fully recognized the fact that nowadays the consumption of customers all happen on the digital platform.

Web optimization strategy
Narrow the ‘confidence gap” among the company marketers.

Some experts have mentioned that many marketers have confidence gap toward web media. Although among the total media consumption time, around 30% is used in web browsing; the budget used in web only occupied 5 % of the budget used in all media. The main reason is that lots of marketers worry about that affectivity of web marketing. According to one survey, the conversion rate of the web costumers is only 2%-3%. At the same time, the dropout rate of the customers when they are browsing the website reaches 70%-80%. The marketers found that boost the web traffic cannot solve the root problem, only method which can bring the actual benefits to the company and narrow the confidence gap is to optimize the website, catch the attention of the target clients, and meet their needs.

Manage well the website content
Unified brand image and information

Many companies have developed their content management platform system, it can built-up the unified management platform for company inner website, official website, dealers/agents/business partners outer website, and help the companies to manage well all the separate but important information and brand experience.

Good content management platform can automate the business working flow, and simplifies the content editing and management. It helps each branches submit their contents easily even if they don’t have much knowledge of IT technology. It also reduces the round trip operation between each department and accelerate the time to the market.

Attraction optimization
Successfully increase the conversion rate

Web is a tool can be innovated, measured, analyzed and improved; it is also a key media which can help companies to manage their brands and keep the customer loyalty. Nowadays the companies have to face this great challenge: how to assist the company to maximize their online operation performance.

When the web operation performance is unsatisfied companies always choose to change the whole things, but actually many time, it is unnecessary. Many times, by slightly modifying some designs, the problem can be solved. Companies should consider doing the several variables test, optimizing the functions, developing online sales and registration with the help of the professional companies to find the most attractive page setup, include page arrangement, picture content and text.

Edited By Vicky Yin

This new display advertising platform is called “APT”, it allowed the publishers and advertisers to put the traditional online advertisements, like banners or pop-up windows on hundreds of news websites, all the websites under Yahoo, and other big websites like eBay, WebMD in US.

New York Times said that, to the advertisers, APT is easier to use. In the past, normally advertisers had to purchase the advertisements from the individual websites and if they want to play their advertisement online, it is also very difficult to control where the advertisement will appear.

However Yahoo promised that, under APT system, the advertisers don’t need to negotiate with the website one by one in order to put their online advertisements. This system may not only help the news sites gain the benefits from online advertisements but also display the advertisement to the visitors according to their own searching habit and interests.

Jerry Yang emphasized that APT will change the whole environment of online advertisement industry. He has great confidence that APT will stand in the leading position in this revelation and Yahoo indicated that through this advertising platform Yahoo and newspaper can sell the advertisements in higher price and they can display the advertisements to certain customers groups. Yahoo wishes to sale search engine advertisement on APT in the final stage as well.

Currently, the prospect of Yahoo online advertisement market isn’t really bright, however APT seems bring a gleam of hope to Yahoo.Since the acquisition negotiation with Microsoft was broken in the beginning of the year, Yahoo has received great pressure. From the middle of July till now, the stock price has decreased 16% and now it reached to around 19$.

Recently, Jerry Yang has received some objections from company top officials and Fortune magazine said that they don’t think APT would help much in this situation.

However, e-Marketer senior analyst believed that any new method which works in displaying advertising worth to try. “The reason why paid search advertising can have such great profits is because it is easy to purchase relatively. But display adverting is not.” At the same time, he also pointed out that Yahoo seems didn’t choose a good time to release this adverting platform. Since the current economy growth is declining the advertising budget of clients is also reducing.

Edited By Vicky Yin

Web portal is a do-all, mega Website providing search engines, e-mail, blog, forums, shopping malls, etc. For examples: Yahoo, AOL are the well known web portal which provides users great range of information and services.

Everyone wants to have the portal website with large amount of user traffic. Web Portal bridges the gap across the internet and attracts internet browsers from all walks of life.

We can catalogue all the current web portal into 2 types: The vertical web portals; those specialized in only certain industries, and horizontal web portals, those applicable across multiple industries. Vertical web portal is a portal specialized on certain catalogue, and provides deep information and services regarding to it, for example, the on-online shopping portal Amazon(www.amazon.com). Horizontal web portal, like Yahoo(www.yahoo.com) in other hand, can includes catalogue with great variety, and offer user much wider information and led them to any unexpected internet world.

Goldman Sachs, the famous Wall St invest bank concludes the 6C golden Rules to develop a successful Web Portal, there are:

Connectivity
– Web portal should have the broad external links to other good website.

Context
– Well organized Context for user to find right information.

Content
– Good quality content to catch user’s eye.

Commerce
– E-Commerce to offer user the e-business service.

Communication
– Online communication to offers user email, or on-line chatting service
like ICQ.

Community
– Web 2.0 design to offer social network service like blog for the community.

For both vertical and horizontal web portal, the 6C rule should be its design standard to build a powerful and popular website as portal leads users to the beautiful internet world.

Edited By Henry Lu

Although there are still some interviewees in this survey mentioned that their capability in using web technologies hasn’t improve much, but more than half of the interviewees felt satisfied with the result of their past investment on web; there are more interviewees even think that they should take their actions earlier.

The benefit of sharing new technologies in emerging market

The retailers used to regard themselves as prudent investors now have already accelerated in investing on new technologies. Yet again, many business managers in the emerging markets, such as business from India and Latin America have tried to speed up to share the benefits brought by these new technologies.

When the web users-led online services like, MySpace, Wikipedia, YouTube has become more and more popular, these technologies called Web 2.0 technology has stepped into limelight. The technologies which need the users to participate together, include Web Service, P2P network, Blogs, Podcasts, Online community, etc.

A recent survey indicated that the interviewees generally show great interested in this trend. Besides the fact that the interviewees fully satisfied with the result of their investment on web itself, they also recognized the great market value of Web 2.0 technology; therefore they plan to increase the investment on developing this technology. However, these companies won’t only focus on the wide-known web 2.0 product such as blogs. Their greatest attention is on the technologies which will enhance the automation and networking.

Half of the interviewees felt satisfied with the result of the investment on web technologies

More than half of the interviewees felt satisfied with the result of their past 5 years investment on developing web technologies. More than three fourths planed to maintain or increase their investment on improving their Web 2.0 technology. (Only 13% of the interviewees felt disappointed with result of past investment. )

Generally, the companies which has taken earlier actions (known as early adopters, and fast followers) in the last investment trend has higher level of satisfaction with their investment than the companies started latter. This result matches the “speed first” ideal in technologies investment.

strong>80% interviewees considered to use web service

More than three fourths business managers who have the ideas of the 9 different Web 2.0 related technologies mentioned in this survey stated that their companies had invested more than one of them. The most popular one is Web Service, 80% the managers who know this technology have or are considering using Web Service, P2P net work is also very popular, 84% managers said they have or are considering using it.

Using Web 2.0 technologies to communicate with the clients and business partners

Many business managers indicated that they will use Web 2.0 Technologies to communicate with the clients and business partners and improve the cooperation within the company. 70% of the interviewees mentioned that they will assist with these technologies to keep in touch with their clines. For example, around 20% interviewees have used Blog to collect the opinions from their customers and strengthen their custom services.

The interviewees also mentioned that in order to have better communication with their business partners and connect with the suppliers more closely; the company will use the web technologies like, Web Service, P2P, Collective Intelligence and Really Simple Syndication(RSS) in the future. These technologies will also help the company in intelligent management.

Last but not the least; through the interview with these business managers, it has been found that the technologies which will bring benefits on automation and cooperation have received much more attentions than those “famous” technologies. Compare with Blog, Podcast and Mash-up, the technologies which can collect ideas and knowledge from more people, or make the communication and information exchange more effective are more helpful to them.

What are in Web 2.0?

Blog, the contraction of the term “Web log”, is a personal online notes or diaries that is frequently updated and intended for general public consumption. It can be linked to the other website and used by RSS (Really Simple Syndication) user.

Collective Intelligence is a system which tried to gain not the personal knowledge but team intelligence and use this as the basis of decision. The technologies involved in Collective Intelligence includes cooperative publish and sharing database.

Match-up is the service combines different online resources to create new products. For example, people can use one program to search and list certain type of restaurants and then combine this list with Google map to indicate the location of these restaurants.

P2P network is a quick sharing files (music, video or word files) technology. It helps the users to transfer the files by more than one computer through World Wide Web or certain closed net work. Some systems can collect the fragments from different computers and recompose them to get the complete files.

Podcast is a series of audio or video digital-media files which is distributed over the Internet by syndicated download, through Web feeds. The best example is YouTube.

RSS is the technology allows users to subscript news, blogs and podcast or other information.

Online community is the system helps the members of certain website to get the information of each other’s interests, talent, knowledge or habits; Facebook and Linkedin are the examples of this technology.

Web Service can improve the communication between two different systems; it can transfer the documents automatically and process the job ordering. The retailer can communicate online with their suppliers through Web Service and update the storage system automatically.

Wiki, like Wikipedia is the system makes cooperative publish become real, many authors to contribute their articles through this system and participate in discussion.

Edited By Vicky Yin

Enterprise’s best tool for the information management

The core of the Web2.0 is “mass collaboration”, and the objects have no geographical boundary and limitation of education level, hence Web2.0 can be the best, most direct and easy to customized tool to manage the information, clients and human resource. Therefore, the pioneers of e-business like Cisco, IBM, MIT etc.., have already started to embrace Web2.0 and utilize the tool for the business.

The current platforms like e-mail, company intranet or portal are not the best tools for information management. For e-mail, the data can only be shared by exchanging mail. And the most company intranets have limited function for users to freely upload and share. But Web2.0 already has the solution for this.

First, by the editing tool “wiki”, the knowledge can be shared and accessed by everyone. And its new function can let users to exchange their opinions and record the changes of contents.

Second, Using of “tag” changes the principle of manage information. From the past we use “taxonomy”to catalog the information. For example, Yahoo created a catalogue table to catalog different websites, and put each website on its individual catalogue. However, one website may belong to more than one catalogue. And often there is big difference from its contents to the catalogue. Therefore with Web 2.0, the editor can put one and more tags on the content, and other users can use the tag search to find the more accurate information.

The importance of tag method is that it established invisible relationship between the web editors. They can use the tag to search for the other related information and editors, and at same time find out the history record of their work and make the information transparence.

Information management is a dynamic method, it is impossible for company to always monitor its changes and renews. Hence the web2.0 has the feature to automatically infom company the latest moving of information and enhances the efficiency of management. For example, the RSS has this excellent function.

Company needs to Harness Collective Intelligence

From the innovation of Web 2.0, the data becomes richer and easier to excess, and the world enters to the era of information. The greatest contribution Google brought to us is its search engine for the effective data searching from the internet overwhelmed with information. So for this, company needs to encourage the staffs to share and receive more knowledge, and it needs to understand Web2.0 is not only a tool for social network but also is new principle to manage the information.

Hence “Learn to Harness Collective Intelligence” is the priority for enterprise, and it needs to understand the Web 2.0’s effective information management ability and how to use Web 2.0 to develop the platform for everyone to join and share their knowledge. From this the company’s information contributed by many others can grow rapidly and become its valuable asset. Company doesn’t only use Web 2.0 to design website, but also can use it to develop the software application. This means software developer needs to rely on data more than the technology, Tim O’Reilly describe “Data is the Next Intel Inside”.

Edited By Henry Lu

Also another famous online marketing research company comScore said the global traffic amount of Facebook is already larger than Myspace. And this demonstrates the success of facebook multi-language platform to greatly increase its global traffic. The competition for the social netwok website is always high from past 2 years, since the introduce of Web2.0 technology. And last year the Facebook traffic amount was way behind MySpace.

Although there is great potential for Facebook, but from the Pingdom research, the number of MySpace user and traffic amount did not drop this year. And this means there is still a long battle between these two largest social network websites.

Edited By Henry Lu

Web browser market is the first battlefield for Google and Microsoft, and the two giants both see each other as the biggest competitor. A week ago before Google announce its Chrome; Microsoft released its beta vision of Internet Explorer 8. The IE8 has the security feature that enable internet users to block their Google search record and behavior and hence Google cannot provide needed ads for users. 97% Google’s income comes from online ads, and if Google don’t fight back, the circumstance will be extremely disadvantageous after Microsoft fully launches the IE8.

The 50% Microsoft’s income comes from its application software package likes “Windows OS” and Office. For Google, the web itself is a free software platform, and from last 2 years, Google lau