Sometimes people get mad at Google ‘cuz they won’t just take their money and run the ads they write. Worse yet, they won’t even tell you WHY.

Maddening, isn’t it?

Dave Bullock explains why, like this:

“People should think of Google as being their first customer.

“People search Google because they trust it. Your ad on their search engine is an endorsement, and you’re borrowing their identity.”

The fact that the whole world trusts Google – and the true meaning and cause of that trust – is somewhat overlooked in all the hoopla about their juggernaut success.

People talk about Google’s skyrocketing stock values and Page Rank Formulas and the birth from fledgling lab project at Stanford, and the geek culture and the free 5-star lunches in the employee cafeteria.

But not too many people really ask, why does the world trust Google?

When someone wants to know something, why is the first place they think of looking, Google? Why is Google a verb?

Because Google is the most accurate available representation of what human beings consider important and valuable on the Internet.

Stop and think for a minute… what if there was no such thing as a search engine. How would you ever find anything? We’d all be sitting in our cubicles asking our friends what their favorite bookmarks are.

It’s not even possible to deal with the whole Internet as it is. It’s such a vast thing, you can only deal with some simplified map of it. Google has to present the Internet in a way to you that makes it tidy and comprehensible. So simple, even a six year old can use it.

It’s difficult to appreciate how hard a job this is.

Earlier this year I had a conversation with a brilliant guy who had, for his own reasons, developed his own search engine. You know, one that crawls the web and follows links and rummages through IP addresses and catalogues the pages.

He says to me, “Perry, it was a nightmare. Did you know that literally 90% of the content on the Internet is pure SPAM? You can’t believe the amount of computer resources it took just to explore it, much less sift and sort through it all.”

He wasn’t exaggerating in the slightest. It’s impossible to comprehend how much of the actual Internet is pure garbage. You would never want to deal with the Internet in its raw, unfiltered form.

The “real” World Wide Web, if you could actually look at it, is not much different from the swirling sea of chaos outside the Nebuchadnezzar spaceship in The Matrix.

It teems with viruses, rogue programs, hackers’ contrivances, incoherent pages of robotically generated “content” and excrement from the bowels of the information superhighway.

The most minimal job of a search engine is to make all that rubble invisible to you.

At the root of the world’s trust of Google is Google’s inability to be bought. I say this even though Google sells a billion plus dollars of clicks every month.

Because first of all, what makes Google valuable in the first place is the extreme difficulty in manipulating the organic (free) side of the engine. The editorial side has high standards and hundreds of millions of web surfers experience that every day.

Google is pretty good at recognizing what visitors do when they come to a site that they like, and rewarding likable sites with free listings.

And when you go over to the paid side of Google, they still have standards which continue to climb. A lot of people think, just because they’re showing up with money in hand, means Google ought to shut up and take it.

NOT!

This entitlement belief of “The customer is always right and the customer is me, because I’m putting up the money here” is actually backwards. It creates an instant adversarial relationship with THE gatekeeper you have to pass muster with before you get to be on the mainstream of the Internet.

The fallacy of that is, you are not the customer. Google is.

On the Internet, the customer is not the person who provides the advertising dollars. It’s the person who consumes the content and buys things from the advertisers. Google is the customer’s advocate.

The day they cease to be that is the day their flanks are wide open for a competitor to eat their lunch.

Though Google is mighty and has built up a huge lead over all their rivals, their place in the world is not eternally secure. They have to keep inflating their expectations of advertisers and content providers in order for the Internet to evolve.

Ask yourself the question:

“Google, what do you want? How can I serve your best customers?”

That’s how you get Google love, people love, link love, and traffic love.

Perry Marshall

The UK’s Labour government will on Friday tell internet service providers they will be hit with legal sanctions from April next year unless they take concrete steps to curb illegal downloads of music and films.

Britain would be one of the first countries in the world to impose such sanctions. Service providers say what the government wants them to do would be like asking the Royal Mail to monitor the contents of every envelope posted.

Welcome to the Nanny State extending it’s reach into areas it doesn’t understand. 

I am not a fan of pirate software, music or other files, as copyright infringement is simply wrong.  But I am even less keen on Government intervention in areas they clearly do not understand.   A couple of weeks ago we were given a sneak preview of the “three strikes” regime of escalating sanctions, to be used by the ISP’s to stop illegal downloads.

The Department for Business, which will lead the bill’s development, has suggested that users suspected of wrongly downloading films or music will receive a warning e-mail for the first offence, a suspension for the second infringement and the termination of their internet contract if caught a third time.

How exactly are the ISP’s going to know what is being downloaded and whether it is legal or illegal.  How are they going to patrol all the P2P traffic? What about “wi-fi piggybacking”? IP masking…  The list of tech solutions to avoid the Governments ideas is endless….

On top of that look at the mess that Tiscali and BPI are in when they implemented the 3 strikes rule of their own.

As mentioned in the DRM blog by Jude Umeh a number of the suggested alternatives may include:

pre-emptive adoption of a voluntary and self-regulatory process that is defined and agreed by the ISPs; or indeed the creation of better value propositions by content owners that can effectively compete with free or illegal content downloads (the BBC iPlayer is a prime example).

But the bottom line is that the Labour Government in the UK is once again interfering in our lives with little regard to the cost or ultimate outcome.. 

So it is fun to have a chance to watch the commercials that are aired in the US.  Of all the ads the Coca Cola parade was my favourite.

Despite a number of surveys that have shown exactly what web users think of pop-ups and other intrusive advertising techniques, advertisers and publishers persist in using these ads. 

• Site intros - Flash-based intros which kick off when you have arrived an interesting site, consuming more of your precious time
• Overlays – These obscure the articles you are trying to read and ruin the user experience.
• Pop-up’s or Pop-under’s – Thankfully, pop-up blockers deal with the majority of pop-ups, though some sites still manage to sneak them in though.
• In-line text ads – These are the double-underlined text links you find on some sites, which link popular words to external advertisers’ sites.
• Audio in ads – There is nothing wrong with audio in video ads, but the user must be in control. When sound plays automatically it forces you to quickly reach for the volume switch / hunt for the ad on the page that is playing the audio.

Put simply, if web users are annoyed by ads when they visit a website, they will transfer that annoyance onto the site that hosts them, and also the brand which is using them to advertise. 

Companies should move forward and look at the range of advertising methods that are currently finding traction with their consumers.

According to Seth Goldin it is “Google yourself”.

Seth makes a very good point

If you’re a salesperson, your prospects already do.
If you’re looking for a job, your prospective employers already do.
If you’ve got a job, your co-workers already do.

What do they see? Do you know?

He points out that “If you don’t like it, you can fix it”.

Start a blog, even if it’s just a few pages worth. Have some colleagues suggest you for wikipedia (if the powers that be think you’re notable enough) or make sure you’re represented on HubPages or Squidwho or write an article for ChangeThis.  You can be finished by tonight. It’s worth it.

This is really good advice and something that we should all realise can have long lasting consequences.  If you don’t believe me have a look at the “waybackmachine” to see what we all looked like way back when…

18 months after the launch of Google Checkout, we are now provided with some analysis on the effectiveness of the system.

Google says web shoppers who’ve signed up for Checkout are 10 percent more likely to click on an ad that features a Checkout button and 40 percent more likely to make an online purchase once they reach a site.  In other words, if an online retailer uses Checkout and spends advertising budget on Google, it improves the chance that shoppers will make purchases on its site.

“These are outstanding results,” says Tom Oliveri, product marketing manager for Checkout. “Merchants are seeing the benefits of higher traffic and more sales. Google is bringing those stores better buying experiences.”

As a number of my clients can testify, using Google Checkout in conjunction with Google AdWords makes sense.  Any extra help in generating traffic is always welcome.

“I believe advertising is the tax you pay for being unremarkable.”

“If you look for ideas in your industry, you’re stealing. If you steal ideas from other industries, that’s innovative.”

There is a lot of hype about the Death of this and the Death of that, so when I got an email about Ellie Drake’s and Mike Filsaime’s Free Report called – “The Death of NetworkMarketing” I took a long breath and was about to hit the delete key.

The report suggests that Network Marketing may be dying.

Having read the report I thought that I would share it with others. The times are changing and it would be a shame not read this report and fail like many network marketers will.

I can recommend it (and it is free).

Consider your future success by going here now…“The Death of NetworkMarketing”

In particular there are some amazing slippers,  now I am not particularly into shoes or slippers but these I am told are not only amazingly fashionable but are a downright steal in the sale.

Not only are there some great bags, but also a wide range of belts and jewellery.

I have tried to keep this a secret but know that it is not possible.