If you are into internet marketing, Google Plus will surely play a big role in the industry so you should have a good knowledge of how to use it on your campaigns.

Google Plus Tips

Your Google Plus Profile – your profile will be the center of all your activity in Google+. Make sure that you fill out the about section. Make a good introduction of yourself and utilize the usage of the Links section in the right side of your about page. You can check what I did in my about page.

Import Your Existing Friends – there’s no harm in socializing with people you already know. Google Plus gives you the options of adding friends via their suggestions option or importing contacts from your hotmail and yahoo email.

Create Circles That Will Easily Identify Audience – In a social network like Twitter, we sometimes get tons of updates when we follow a lot of people which is annoying. With the Google Plus Circles, we can group people. In my account, I group people as Clients, Bloggers, SEO Pros, Online Media, Extended Network, Friends and Family. With this, I can choose easily the exact group of people that can relate to what I am sharing.

Spark Up Things – use the Sparks feature to start discussion of things you share in common with the people in your circles. This is a good thing to build followers of your streams, and eventually show that you are an expert in the field. Sparks is a good thing to grab the latest articles of a certain topic from the search results without leaving Google+.

Hangout with People – this is a video conferencing feature that enables you to speak with multiple people at one time. You can do this for online meetings or for remote client presentations.

Google Plus tricks

Text Formatting -

• *asterisks* makes bold;
• _underscores_ makes italics;
• and -dashes- makes a strikethrough

Shortcut Keys -

• Q to open chat
• K scroll up within a single post
• J scroll down within a single post
• Return or Enter Start a comment
• Tab and Return End a comment
• Space Bar Scroll down your stream

Chrome Extensions for Google+

Helper for Google Plus – share / send posts to Twitter, get desktop notifications on new posts, translates post with Google translate. You can check it out here.

+Photo Zoom – zoom photos and profile pics when hovered. You can check it out here.

Viral marketing is called that because if it is successful, it could easily spread like a virus. This is a good way to place your brand where you want your probable costumers to see them. Plus, you do not have to spend millions of dollars to have a successful viral marketing campaign as part of your social media marketing. With the widespread use of the Internet, more people can watch a good viral marketing campaign than an ad shown during the Super Bowl.

There is no quick recipe you can follow though to make your advertising campaign to go viral. Sometimes, even the most planned advertising stunts do pan out so well while some hastily made videos shared on YouTube could reach millions of views in a matter of days. Although there’s no recipe for success in viral marketing, you can follow some quick tips to make sure that your viral marketing campaign would not be a big flop.
First of all, be sure that what you are promoting is a good one. Your marketing campaign might get a lot of attention from people but it would be useless if the first hundred customers or so come out with negative reviews of your product or services.

Another thing that you have to look into is your site’s resources. If all goes according to plan and your marketing campaign becomes a viral hit, your site would receive thousands of visitors. If your hosting account only has limited bandwidth allocation, your site could go down which is never a good thing especially during that time span when your viral marketing campaign is at its peak or is about to peak. If that happens, you could end up losing a lot of potential customers.

Remember that the chance of making it big with just one shot at viral marketing might not be enough so try and try again if you fail. And don’t forget about search engine optimization since that is one long-term solution to ensuring your brand’s popularity on the Internet.

I have checked a number blogs earlier and found out that most of them don’t care of the permalinks issue. If you’ll notice, wordpress permalink by default shows a question mark and numbers in it, obviously not search engine friendly. You can customize this by going to Dashboard > Settings > Permalinks section of your wordpress powered blog. You’ll see five options there for your permalink:

• Default – http://www.kontrapelo.com/?p=123
• Day and name – http://www.kontrapelo.com/2008/09/12/sample-post/
• Month and name – http://www.kontrapelo.com/2008/09/sample-post/
• Numeric – http://www.kontrapelo.com/archives/123
• Custom Structure – you can create your own here

Of all the choices, I usually prefer making it custom that don’t include the postdate. Why? Well, here’s the idea:

url #1: kontrapelo.com/2008/09/12/wordpress-seo
url #2: kontrapelo.com/wordpress-seo

The first url above tells Google that “2008/09/12″ is more important than “wordpress-seo” as it is placed first. Placing the “date” first before your “name” structure pushes your keywords away. This is the best permalink structure for me but if you’re working a way to have your article featured in Google news which requires a 3-digit included in your url, it’s a no-no. If your wordpress blog already has 100 posts prior to targetting appearance in Google news, then something like “name/id” will do. If the blog is new, then work your way to have a 3-digit number in it. You can play around with the “year/month/date” placing it after the “name” structure.

In addition, I’ve read an article before (can’t remember where) saying Matt Cutts mentioned in WordCamp 2007 in San Francisco that the best permalink structure you can use is just the post title with hyphens.

Well, to make it simple, the whole idea here is to take a domain like http://kontrapelo.com and redirect it to http://www.kontrapelo.com consolidating all incoming links to a single domain, wether they use “www” or not.

Here’s a simple mod_rewrite rule you can add to .htaccess to accomplish this, put it above any other rewrite rules that you are using, you may want the other rules to apply to the www. domain after the initial redirect.

note: replace the sample domain with your own domain.
RewriteEngine on

#Redirect http://kontrapelo.com to http://www.kontrapelo.com
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^kontrapelo.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.kontrapelo.com/$1 [r=301,L]

If you’re about to promote your video, find existing videos in youtube similar to your niche which already has tons of views or those uploaded by users who are really getting good traffic via their uploaded videos, then copy their tags to the video you’re uploading.

The logic is that whenever their video is watched, your video will appear in their related videos in the sidebar which will give you lot more possible views.

Here’s more promo codes that I’ve collected:
OYH3 – $3 off / $6.95 any .COM (renewals too… just used it)
BTPS7 – 20% any order of $50 or more
OYH1 – 10% off whatever
OYH2 – $5 off a $30 purchase
BTPS4 – 10% off anything
chill1 – 10% off
chill2 – $5 off $30
chill3 – $6.95 .coms
hash1 – 10% off
hash2 – $5 off $30
hash3 – $6.95 .com registration
gdd1101c – 10% off any order of $40 or more

You can use these codes upon checking out in Godaddy, just paste them in the promo code box and hit update cart, you’ll notice the changing of prices.

I hope you’ll save a lot from this list too…

*a promo code may change without prior notice. When it happen, just try using other codes in the list

Excerpt from the Google Analytics help center:

Benchmarking is an optional Google Analytics service that shows how your website’s statistics compare against other industry verticals. In the beta version of this service, you are able to compare your site’s Visits, Pageviews, Pages per Visit, Bounce Rate, Average Time on Site, and New Visits data against benchmark data from categories of other participating websites. You can use this data to gain broader context for your site so you can identify additional opportunities to improve your site’s metrics.

To enable this:

1. Log into your account. You’ll see the yellow data sharing settings box on the Analytics Settings page. Click the “More data sharing options” link within the yellow box.
2. Select the second checkbox to specify that you want to share your data “Anonymously with Google products and the benchmarking service”. You can also choose to share your data “With Google products only” to take advantage of advanced Google advertising products and services as they become available.

See screenshots I have taken:

This is another wonderful tool provided by Google. For more information on the benchmarking service, visit Google Analytics Help Center.

XML is short for Extensible Markup Language made to transport structured data across different systems and platforms.

I remember an article from W3C pointing out the following things:

• XML is for structuring data
• XML looks a bit like HTML
• XML is text, but isn’t meant to be read
• XML is verbose by design
• XML is a family of technologies
• XML is new, but not that new
• XML leads HTML to XHTML
• XML is modular
• XML is the basis for RDF and the Semantic Web
• XML is license-free, platform-independent and well-supported

This supports the explanation that xml was created to manage uses of structured data in the web. RSS is a good example of a modified xml format which carries headlines and contents of your blog.

Also note that xml is not replacing html, it is for describing the data and its structure while the latter focuses on how data looks.

Here’s a step-by-step instruction on how to add a bank account:

1. Login to your paypal account ang go to Profile > Add or edit bank account
2. Add your bank details. The 9-digit code is provided above, just look for the corresponding code for your bank.
3. Review your bank information. Make sure that all is correct to avoid penalties. Click Add Bank to confirm.

You may now withdraw your hard earned paypal money to your favorite Philippine bank.
Thanks to Palconit for the heads up.

No charge will be given if the transaction amount is exactly or above Php7000.00 but for transactions of Php6999.99 and lower, a Php50.00 charge will be applied.

All you need to apply is your bank name, bank code and your account number.

Here is the list of 9-digit Philippine bank codes

Thanks to Pinoy Money Talk for the details.