1. Ramp up your advertising
Once your website is ready to go, you need to drive some new traffic. Earlier in the season (there is no ‘too early’ for this!) work on your search engine optimization, or SEO in order to optimize your stores placement in the organic listings before the holiday season arrives. According to a 2011 Marketing Sherpa Marketing Benchmark Survey (1), 75% of marketers consider search engine optimization to be effective for their business. 29% felt that SEO was more effective than any other form of marketing. After August, concentrate on more quick- win efforts like blogging and PPC campaigns. Pay-Per-Click remains one of the best ways to drive traffic to your store, even if your store already has good search engine placement for your major keywords.
Nobody wants to start thinking about the Biggest Shopping Season of the year while on summer vacation, but the truth is: If you haven’t started preparing yet, your competitors may have a head start on you already! To help you get started and get your online store in shape for the holidays, we’ve prepared a little Holiday Checklist – make sure you check it twice!
Web.com eCommerce has the services to help make this your best holiday sales season ever! And to help you out this holiday season, we’ve outlined 5 steps to prepare your online business success.
75% of marketers consider SEO to be effective for their business. — Marketing Sherpa Marketing Benchmark Survey01
2. Refresh your store design. Search engines love new and dynamic content. Holiday shoppers love clean, modern sites that simplify navigate and make it easy to find what they are looking for quickly. If you haven’t updated your store template in the past 18 months, now is the perfect time. Almost as important, make sure that you have a fresh and current blog to stir up interest in your products. Now is a good time to make sure that your blog matches your online stores, so that customers will recognize your brand. Some things to think about: Clean, simple navigation is one of the most critical elements in your control to help convince browsers to become shoppers once they’ve reached your site. Make sure your navigation supports shoppers by providing categories like ‘For Him’ & ‘For Her’ or ‘Gifts for Dad’ and ensure they can sort the products in each category by price, name, popularity, etc.
3. Maximize Online Shopping Engines. Make sure your products are listed in aggregate shopping engines. When trying to find a lot of gifts, consumers start on sites that display a lot of products to try and start narrowing their search. Make sure your products are listed in popular comparison shopping engines like ‘Shopzilla’, ‘TheFind’, ‘PriceGrabber’ and ‘Shopping.com’ so your store can be found.
4. Execute Enticing Email Offers.
Email Marketing is still one of the best ways to spend your marketing dollars in 2012. Email will boost traffic to your website, help reinforce your brand, and drive repeat customers. To maximize your sales with email marketing this holiday season, use a trusted email provider to ensure the best delivery for your marketing messages - don’t send from your personal outlook, or gmail account! Also, personalize your email to maximize opens and click- through’s, include a strong call-to action and be consistent in your message across the holiday season; eg “Avoid the lines, avoid the traffic, shop online for the Holidays!”
5. Engage a call center to handle volume. By now the holidays are quickly approaching. You love the look of your new store template, you are showing strong in the search engine pages, both in the organic and paid results, and you have email marketing campaigns rolling out regularly – and you are likely running out of hands. A good call center goes beyond simple customer service help. They can answer all your phone calls or just the overflow (talking to customer C instead of making them wait on hold while you talk to customers A & B!) They can help you during regular business hours, or just at nights and on weekends when you are off duty. They can be trained to sell, upsell and cross-sell your products, handle returns & exchanges, answer email, or even run live chat on your site.
Thứ Sáu, 30 tháng 11, 2012
Five Ways Technology is Messing Up Our Sleep
We all know that getting a good night’s sleep is important, but just how important is it? Well, according to Dr. David F. Dinges of the Division of Sleep and Chronobiology and Department of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, the first signs of lack of sleep are irritability and moodiness. If the person continues to not get enough rest, they will eventually start to experience apathy, slowed speech and flattened emotional responses, impaired memory, and an inability to be novel or to multitask. If you still do not take notice and get some shut eye, then what comes next can be physically disastrous. As you near the point of falling asleep on your feet, you will experience micro-sleeps of approximately 5 to 10 seconds. Those seconds mean that you can nod off while driving or doing other dangerous activities and drastically increase the risk of getting into an accident and harming yourself or another person.
Continue reading Five Ways Technology is Messing Up Our Sleep
Continue reading Five Ways Technology is Messing Up Our Sleep
How To Find Who Is Linking To Your Website
Over the past few years, my website has ranked pretty high in for some great keywords but, I’ve noticed recently, my search engine ranks have started slipping. My theory for this occurrence is my articles and posts from a few years ago were seen as out-dated and no longer counted (although I could be wrong on this).
To counter this, I started building links through forum posts, articles, guest blogging and video posting. Keen to see if my efforts were paying off, I tried to figure out if my backlink count was increasing. My first stop was Google, where I used the [link:www.mywebsite.com.au] command and found a very disappointing result – only 23 backlinks.
“Are you kidding me?” I thought.
Surely Google must have made a mistake. Many of the links that showed were old and there were very few backlinks from my recent link building efforts. I thought perhaps Google had not yet taken notice of the backlinks, so I waited a few weeks and tried again. The outcome was similar.
Frustrated with the results, I set out to find “the missing link.” I looked at free and paid backlinks checker software and each one showed totally different results.
I figured if I am having this issue, other people must be too. I searched for answers to see what others were doing. On most forums, the solution people offered were various backlink tools. Some even said, “don’t worry about the backlink number Google is showing, instead look at your rankings and see if they are increasing.”
OK, I thought, clearly there is no easy way to find the number of backlinks. I felt somewhat defeated and decided to let it go.
Then, a few days ago, I stumbled on a gem … a YouTube video of Matt Cutts, Google’s Head of Webspam Team, talking about backlinks. In the video, someone asked “How accurate is Google’s backlink check? Are all no-follow backlinks filtered out or why does Yahoo/MSN show more backlink results.” And Matt’s explanation was that Google only shows a random sample of backlinks through the [link:] feature. The reason for that is, if they showed all the backlinks, spammers and competitors could use it to reverse engineer someone’s ranking.
The great news is that, as a compromise, Google has come up with a solution. Simply register with Google Webmaster Tools and you can see the majority of backlinks that Google has indexed for your website. You will need to verify your site through the Webmaster Console and then:
This page shows links that Googlebot has discovered during its indexing process as well as the backlink sources and the pages on your site with the most links. You can also see the most common anchor text found by Google.
Building backlinks should be part of your search engine optimization strategy, since Google sees them as ‘votes’ for your site. Google Webmaster Tools now offers a way for you to be able to see how many backlinks it has indexed for your website, so you can work out if your link building efforts are paying off.
Ivana Katz, Post from: SiteProNews
To counter this, I started building links through forum posts, articles, guest blogging and video posting. Keen to see if my efforts were paying off, I tried to figure out if my backlink count was increasing. My first stop was Google, where I used the [link:www.mywebsite.com.au] command and found a very disappointing result – only 23 backlinks.
“Are you kidding me?” I thought.
Surely Google must have made a mistake. Many of the links that showed were old and there were very few backlinks from my recent link building efforts. I thought perhaps Google had not yet taken notice of the backlinks, so I waited a few weeks and tried again. The outcome was similar.
Frustrated with the results, I set out to find “the missing link.” I looked at free and paid backlinks checker software and each one showed totally different results.
I figured if I am having this issue, other people must be too. I searched for answers to see what others were doing. On most forums, the solution people offered were various backlink tools. Some even said, “don’t worry about the backlink number Google is showing, instead look at your rankings and see if they are increasing.”
OK, I thought, clearly there is no easy way to find the number of backlinks. I felt somewhat defeated and decided to let it go.
Then, a few days ago, I stumbled on a gem … a YouTube video of Matt Cutts, Google’s Head of Webspam Team, talking about backlinks. In the video, someone asked “How accurate is Google’s backlink check? Are all no-follow backlinks filtered out or why does Yahoo/MSN show more backlink results.” And Matt’s explanation was that Google only shows a random sample of backlinks through the [link:] feature. The reason for that is, if they showed all the backlinks, spammers and competitors could use it to reverse engineer someone’s ranking.
The great news is that, as a compromise, Google has come up with a solution. Simply register with Google Webmaster Tools and you can see the majority of backlinks that Google has indexed for your website. You will need to verify your site through the Webmaster Console and then:
- On the webmaster tools homepage, click on your website.
- On the left-hand menu, click ‘traffic’ and then click ‘links to your site.’
This page shows links that Googlebot has discovered during its indexing process as well as the backlink sources and the pages on your site with the most links. You can also see the most common anchor text found by Google.
Building backlinks should be part of your search engine optimization strategy, since Google sees them as ‘votes’ for your site. Google Webmaster Tools now offers a way for you to be able to see how many backlinks it has indexed for your website, so you can work out if your link building efforts are paying off.
Ivana Katz, Post from: SiteProNews
How to Avoid Your Own Email Replyallpocalypse
For some, it’s a nightmare as horrifying as going to class pantsless: the dreaded email thread faux pas.
When a student at NYU attempted to forward an email from the college bursar’s office to his mother, he instead hit “reply all” and exposed a bug in the school’s email system.
The result? He directly emailed almost 40,000 of his fellow students. When some of those students realized this bug in the email system was oh-so-exploitable, all hell broke loose. They began trading jokes, pictures of professional meme Nicolas Cage and –- in some cases –- pleas to end the madness. But for 24 hours, NYU endured what can only be called Replyallpocalypse.
SEE ALSO: How to Avoid Email Overload Highly populated email threads are already notorious for spreading social anxiety. How long or short should a message be? What tone should you take? What if you inadvertently share email addresses you weren’t supposed to? What if you accidentally reply to only the last commenter, setting up an awkward exchange for the ages?
There are already a few simple rules of etiquette you should follow in any circumstance. And while the chances that you might accidentally spam 40,000 peers are probably pretty low, it’s good to keep a few more tips in mind to avoid your own personal Replyallpocalypse.
Gmail gives you the option to retract an email and avoid public shame, but you might not have the option turned on right now. Go to Labs under Settings and make sure the Undo Send option is enabled. After that, you’ll have the ability to snatch messages back immediately after you send them.
BCC (Blind Carbon Copy) allows you to send emails to multiple recipients –- without them realizing there are multiple recipients. Dropping an address into the BCC field makes that person invisible to the rest of the thread, and vice versa. If you want to avoid reply all confusion for you and your contacts, BCC is your best bet. Repeat after me: BCC is your friend.
Try to keep your emails focused, as well: If you have multiple requests, just send multiple emails. It’ll make it easier for your recipients to organize their tasks, and keep you in their good graces (at least until your next email).
Thumbnail image courtesy of Flickr, nicogenin
When a student at NYU attempted to forward an email from the college bursar’s office to his mother, he instead hit “reply all” and exposed a bug in the school’s email system.
The result? He directly emailed almost 40,000 of his fellow students. When some of those students realized this bug in the email system was oh-so-exploitable, all hell broke loose. They began trading jokes, pictures of professional meme Nicolas Cage and –- in some cases –- pleas to end the madness. But for 24 hours, NYU endured what can only be called Replyallpocalypse.
There are already a few simple rules of etiquette you should follow in any circumstance. And while the chances that you might accidentally spam 40,000 peers are probably pretty low, it’s good to keep a few more tips in mind to avoid your own personal Replyallpocalypse.
Learn the Unsend Button, and Learn it Well
We’ve all been there. You send an email with utmost confidence, only to realize a moment later there’s a glaring typo or a factual inaccuracy. You sent it to the wrong person, or you said the wrong thing.Gmail gives you the option to retract an email and avoid public shame, but you might not have the option turned on right now. Go to Labs under Settings and make sure the Undo Send option is enabled. After that, you’ll have the ability to snatch messages back immediately after you send them.
Explain Yourself Well
Always explain why you’re forwarding an email along. Be wary of using “FWD:” in the subject line –- some email services will throw you right in the spam folder for that misstep. And if you’re starting a thread you hope will garner multiple replies, make sure you mark it appropriately –- ”RR” for response required, “NNTR” for no need to respond.Don’t Blow up Someone’s Spot
Before you press that send button, make sure your recipients are likely to have each other’s email addresses. If they don’t, get their permission to share, or use BCC.BCC (Blind Carbon Copy) allows you to send emails to multiple recipients –- without them realizing there are multiple recipients. Dropping an address into the BCC field makes that person invisible to the rest of the thread, and vice versa. If you want to avoid reply all confusion for you and your contacts, BCC is your best bet. Repeat after me: BCC is your friend.
Don’t Write Too Much
But don’t write too little, either. Emails should always be distilled down to the simplest form possible, because no one wants to scroll through half a novel before they get to the point. We deal with a lot of emails every day, and it can get trying. But if you’re responding to a group thread, make sure you have something to say when you post. Brief tidbits like “Great point!” or “Got it!” are good in theory, but really, they’re just a big waste of time.Try to keep your emails focused, as well: If you have multiple requests, just send multiple emails. It’ll make it easier for your recipients to organize their tasks, and keep you in their good graces (at least until your next email).
Thumbnail image courtesy of Flickr, nicogenin
How to Avoid Email Overload
People spend a lot of time on email — way too much for their own good and productivity. Email is a disruptive technology that can take you on a tangent you never intended, and eat up time faster than most other voluntary activities.
Email has addictive qualities. Most of us receive email that is unimportant, and yet we continue to check our inboxes incessantly.
To free you from email burden, try these simple techniques.
Try aggregating. Sometimes you receive non-essential emails that are actually beneficial. Aggregating and unsubscribing will cut down on a lot of the incoming mail you receive to begin with. Services such as FriendFeed send a daily summary of social media activity. Dealery will send all the best daily deals, so you don’t need to individually subscribe to Groupon, LivingSocial, etc. For good measure, sign up for a Google Alert on yourself, as well as a news aggregator like The Daily Beast.
Next comes organization. I’m a huge fan of OtherInbox, which integrates with Gmail and automatically organizes your messages into folders like “Shopping” and “Business.” Imagine an inbox with 1,000 messages; after initiating OtherInbox, you can watch that inbox shrink to 14 emails — in one click. Furthermore, OtherInbox will learn from you, and therefore, get better over time. As an added benefit, OtherInbox has its own unsubscribe service. It will also automatically recognize tracking numbers in an email, then put the delivery date in your calendar alongside relevant shipment information.
Become a filtering ninja. Whether Gmail, Outlook or another service, most email systems allow for filtering. Any type of email you get with some regularity (and some you don’t) should have a filter assigned to it. Sometimes accounts forward emails with certain keywords to an assistant, or provide a specific automated response. Regardless, use filters often.
Answer questions ahead of time. Take away the need for people to email you in the first place. Try including an FAQ section on your website, for example. Answer those mundane, repetitive questions ahead of time. Or, try putting relevant information in your signature. I use UnityFax to get faxes by email. I like Virtual Post Mail to get postal mail in my email inbox.
Finally, use WiseStamp to generate nice little icons that link to your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and blog. I also like to include a link to Tungle in my signature, which gives people access to an appointment book synced with my calendar in real time. That way, I never have to waste time or emails setting up meetings.
Include a sentence in your email signature stating that you only check your email once a day, but if the matter is urgent, the sender can use AwayFind. This service creates an emergency contact page that routes messages to you by voice or text.
Now that you’ve optimized your emails, you’ll need to get better at “processing” them. Check out The Email Game, which adds game dynamics to email processing. When you get an email you have a few seconds to decide what to do: whether to defer it to a later time, delete it or reply to it. If you decide to reply, you have only a short time to craft your response. Depending on how well you do, the game rewards points, all the while training you to process email faster.
If you really want to geek out, go to Read Fast, which trains you, little by little, to speed read. I gained 30 words per minute after one article.
Gmail plugin Canned Responses is indispensable. The plugin lets you create template emails. For example, if you frequently get requests for product information, you can create a template email with all the info. That way, it only takes two clicks to send, rather than five minutes spent writing the email. In combination with filters, you can set automatic template responses to certain keywords, completely removing the task from your plate.
Another great plugin is Boomerang. Among other things, the tool allows you to delay sending certain emails until a later date. Deferring emails makes you more productive by corralling people into your schedule. If you respond to an email immediately, you’ll likely just get more email. But, if you send at a more strategic time, you may be in a better position to deal with that message more efficiently.
The last tool in the automation process is an autoresponder. Your autoresponder should take the same route as your email signature by anticipating people’s needs and provide solutions beforehand. Tell them whom to contact for certain requests, and let them know where to get the information they want.
Once you’ve worked up the email ladder of optimization and automation, you will undoubtedly still be left with messages that require human interaction — but maybe not your own. That’s where virtual assistance comes into play. I use FancyHands to deal with nagging tasks I don’t have time for. Simply forward an email with one line of instructions. Then the service calls people to request information and organizes files into something more useful.
The most important thing to remember is that every problem has a solution. When you examine tasks within the framework above, you can get technology working for you, instead of the other way around
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, mattjeacock
Email has addictive qualities. Most of us receive email that is unimportant, and yet we continue to check our inboxes incessantly.
To free you from email burden, try these simple techniques.
1. Optimize
To optimize email, you need less of it. Try using a service called Unsubscribe.com to get yourself removed from mailing lists, promotional emails, etc. It uses a Gmail plugin, or you can just forward emails to mail@unsubscribe.com.Try aggregating. Sometimes you receive non-essential emails that are actually beneficial. Aggregating and unsubscribing will cut down on a lot of the incoming mail you receive to begin with. Services such as FriendFeed send a daily summary of social media activity. Dealery will send all the best daily deals, so you don’t need to individually subscribe to Groupon, LivingSocial, etc. For good measure, sign up for a Google Alert on yourself, as well as a news aggregator like The Daily Beast.
Next comes organization. I’m a huge fan of OtherInbox, which integrates with Gmail and automatically organizes your messages into folders like “Shopping” and “Business.” Imagine an inbox with 1,000 messages; after initiating OtherInbox, you can watch that inbox shrink to 14 emails — in one click. Furthermore, OtherInbox will learn from you, and therefore, get better over time. As an added benefit, OtherInbox has its own unsubscribe service. It will also automatically recognize tracking numbers in an email, then put the delivery date in your calendar alongside relevant shipment information.
Become a filtering ninja. Whether Gmail, Outlook or another service, most email systems allow for filtering. Any type of email you get with some regularity (and some you don’t) should have a filter assigned to it. Sometimes accounts forward emails with certain keywords to an assistant, or provide a specific automated response. Regardless, use filters often.
Answer questions ahead of time. Take away the need for people to email you in the first place. Try including an FAQ section on your website, for example. Answer those mundane, repetitive questions ahead of time. Or, try putting relevant information in your signature. I use UnityFax to get faxes by email. I like Virtual Post Mail to get postal mail in my email inbox.
Finally, use WiseStamp to generate nice little icons that link to your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and blog. I also like to include a link to Tungle in my signature, which gives people access to an appointment book synced with my calendar in real time. That way, I never have to waste time or emails setting up meetings.
Include a sentence in your email signature stating that you only check your email once a day, but if the matter is urgent, the sender can use AwayFind. This service creates an emergency contact page that routes messages to you by voice or text.
Now that you’ve optimized your emails, you’ll need to get better at “processing” them. Check out The Email Game, which adds game dynamics to email processing. When you get an email you have a few seconds to decide what to do: whether to defer it to a later time, delete it or reply to it. If you decide to reply, you have only a short time to craft your response. Depending on how well you do, the game rewards points, all the while training you to process email faster.
If you really want to geek out, go to Read Fast, which trains you, little by little, to speed read. I gained 30 words per minute after one article.
2. Automate
I use FollowUp.cc to keep track of deadlines within the email realm. It’s a simple concept: Whenever you send an email, you can set an email reminder for any time period. For instance, if you write an email to a potential client, you can choose to CC “3days@followup.cc.” Three days later, if that client hasn’t responded, he’ll get a reminder email, as will you. If you BCC “3days@followup.cc,” only you get the reminder. You’ll find that after a couple weeks of using FollowUp.cc, you’ll stop worrying about follow-ups. It’s out of sight, and out of mind — the way it should be.Gmail plugin Canned Responses is indispensable. The plugin lets you create template emails. For example, if you frequently get requests for product information, you can create a template email with all the info. That way, it only takes two clicks to send, rather than five minutes spent writing the email. In combination with filters, you can set automatic template responses to certain keywords, completely removing the task from your plate.
Another great plugin is Boomerang. Among other things, the tool allows you to delay sending certain emails until a later date. Deferring emails makes you more productive by corralling people into your schedule. If you respond to an email immediately, you’ll likely just get more email. But, if you send at a more strategic time, you may be in a better position to deal with that message more efficiently.
The last tool in the automation process is an autoresponder. Your autoresponder should take the same route as your email signature by anticipating people’s needs and provide solutions beforehand. Tell them whom to contact for certain requests, and let them know where to get the information they want.
3. Outsource
Once you’ve worked up the email ladder of optimization and automation, you will undoubtedly still be left with messages that require human interaction — but maybe not your own. That’s where virtual assistance comes into play. I use FancyHands to deal with nagging tasks I don’t have time for. Simply forward an email with one line of instructions. Then the service calls people to request information and organizes files into something more useful.
The most important thing to remember is that every problem has a solution. When you examine tasks within the framework above, you can get technology working for you, instead of the other way around
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, mattjeacock
Thứ Năm, 29 tháng 11, 2012
How you can use Google Analytics to monitor your organic traffic
Monitoring organic traffic is a key part of any SEO professional’s job. And with Google Analytics, doing this is easy, and free. Here’s a quick guide to help you explore some key metrics.
Google Analytics is one of the web’s most popular analytics tools. It’s a free service, so you should set up an account now if you haven’t already done so.
To check your traffic, click ‘Traffic Sources’, 'Sources' 'Search', then 'Organic' on the left hand side of the navigation bar, as shown in this image.
You’ll notice an increasing amount of this traffic is (not provided) ...
... which you can learn about by clicking on that last link.
If you want to look at subsections of that traffic, type in some of your target keywords in the search bar. Google will then show data for the keywords that contain that term. Here is the report for Wordtracker.com. I’ve put in SEO blogger, so all terms that contain that phrase are returned, such as Wordtracker SEO blogger and seo blogger tool for firefox add-on word tracker.
Looking at the traffic for certain keywords can be very informative. You can see how many people are searching for you by name (and how this changes over time). And you can see what stage of the buying cycle your customers are at. Are they looking for more general products, like laptops, or something very specific, like Samsung Series 3 laptops? These insights can help you ensure the content on your site matches your customers’ needs.
Similarly, if you’ve been link building to certain pages, using keyword rich anchor text, you should see (over time) traffic for these terms increase. So if you’ve been link building around the term shoes, you might see an increase in shoe-terms.
You can then compare this with any changes in your keyword rankings to see if there’s a correlation. There might not be. Often you can optimize a page for a given term like shoes, but you might not see any improvement in ranking for that term, at least not for a while. But if you’re looking at your traffic too, you might see an increase in traffic for long tail terms (like discount women’s shoes) that you’re not tracking the ranking for. Tracking both keyword traffic and keyword rankings will give you a fuller picture of how your SEO is doing.
If doing all this manually seems too much like hard work, Wordtracker’s Strategizer tool can do it automatically. We’ll look at your groups of keywords and overlay them with your ranking, traffic and conversion data. You can see all your most important data in the same place.
You can see that you have three options here: Queries, Landing Pages, and Geographical Summary.
I'm going to ignore Geographical Summary because it just tells you where your customers have come from, which won't be interesting (or actionable) for most of you. But let's focus on the other two areas.
Queries
This section of GA lets you see how people are reacting to your site in the search results. Let's look at Wordtracker's:
The keywords you’re looking at are the top 2,000 traffic drivers to your site. They're only estimations (notice how they're all conveniently round numbers). Again, you can see how much traffic you're getting for your certain keywords by using the search bar.
With Queries however, you can also see you how many people saw your site in the search results, then clicked through. We call this the clickthrough rate, or CTR.
People are more likely to click on your search result if it ranks well (so it appears at the top of the page where users can see it), they recognize your brand or the page description is written persuasively. Improving your brand strength and search engine ranking takes time, but you can change your page descriptions quickly. If you’ve got a low clickthrough rate, see if you can improve the description with persuasive copy and strong calls to action, like ‘click here’ or ‘check us out today’. You could see uplift in traffic very quickly. The BBC did this. Just by changing the page description, the clickthrough rate went from 67% to 81%!
You can also improve your CTR by using rich snippets. These allow Google to show more helpful information in the search results, like reviews or important dates. Snippets make search results more relevant to what the searcher is looking for, so they are more likely to click through.
As a rough idea of what sort of CTR you can expect, Wordtracker’s top ranking keywords typically get around a 20% clickthrough rate, rising to about 80% for branded searches like wordtracker. If your site isn’t very well known, or you don’t rank very well, your CTR will be much lower. But watch this improve as your brand grows.
Surprise ranking
Looking at your Queries, you might spot some terms that you’re not actually targeting. These can improve your business in unexpected ways.
Wordtracker ranks for LinkedIn logo for example. It's a great traffic driver, even if it's not one of our target terms. But we can still create relevant content for it. Users may arrive at the site looking for the LinkedIn logo, but if we can entice them to download an e-book in exchange for their email address, we've capitalized on that traffic. But we do this only because it’s a quick win. Don’t spend your time chasing irrelevant traffic because it’s unlikely to convert. But if you do get some traffic you weren’t expecting, think if there is an easy and quick way you can capitalize on it.
Landing pages
The pages people arrive at on your site are called landing pages. And the better your landing pages rank, the more traffic they’ll get. So with Google Analytics, we can monitor landing page traffic and see how our SEO is working.
You can see from Wordtracker’s analytics that we get lots of traffic to the LinkedIn page.
This is happening because we have great content that talks about LinkedIn and lots of links to that page.
If you want more traffic to a given landing page, make sure the content is well-written and focused. So if you want a page to rank for Samsung laptops, only talk about Samsung laptops on that page. Also try to get more keyword rich links to those pages. So in this example, try to get links that use Samsung laptops in the anchor text.
In the dashboard I’ve also included some referrer data. This let’s you see the other sites that are driving traffic to yours. This lets you see the impact of various things. For example, if you’re running a social media campaign, you’d expect to see more referral traffic from the social networks you used, like Facebook or Twitter. Similarly, if you got a link from a very popular site, you’d expect that link to drive lots of traffic. The referral section is how you monitor this.
But this dashboard is just designed to get you started. As always with Google Analytics, explore the data for your own site and see what insights you can extract. Don’t be afraid to play around. Google Analytics offers a treasure trove of information, so go explore!
Pictures: wordtracker.com
Google Analytics is one of the web’s most popular analytics tools. It’s a free service, so you should set up an account now if you haven’t already done so.
1) Organic search traffic section
Google Analytics (GA) lets you see the keywords people searched for when they arrived at your site via the organic search results, the traffic that comes from Google or Bing that you’ve not paid for.To check your traffic, click ‘Traffic Sources’, 'Sources' 'Search', then 'Organic' on the left hand side of the navigation bar, as shown in this image.
You’ll notice an increasing amount of this traffic is (not provided) ...
... which you can learn about by clicking on that last link.
If you want to look at subsections of that traffic, type in some of your target keywords in the search bar. Google will then show data for the keywords that contain that term. Here is the report for Wordtracker.com. I’ve put in SEO blogger, so all terms that contain that phrase are returned, such as Wordtracker SEO blogger and seo blogger tool for firefox add-on word tracker.
Looking at the traffic for certain keywords can be very informative. You can see how many people are searching for you by name (and how this changes over time). And you can see what stage of the buying cycle your customers are at. Are they looking for more general products, like laptops, or something very specific, like Samsung Series 3 laptops? These insights can help you ensure the content on your site matches your customers’ needs.
Similarly, if you’ve been link building to certain pages, using keyword rich anchor text, you should see (over time) traffic for these terms increase. So if you’ve been link building around the term shoes, you might see an increase in shoe-terms.
You can then compare this with any changes in your keyword rankings to see if there’s a correlation. There might not be. Often you can optimize a page for a given term like shoes, but you might not see any improvement in ranking for that term, at least not for a while. But if you’re looking at your traffic too, you might see an increase in traffic for long tail terms (like discount women’s shoes) that you’re not tracking the ranking for. Tracking both keyword traffic and keyword rankings will give you a fuller picture of how your SEO is doing.
If doing all this manually seems too much like hard work, Wordtracker’s Strategizer tool can do it automatically. We’ll look at your groups of keywords and overlay them with your ranking, traffic and conversion data. You can see all your most important data in the same place.
2) Search engine optimization section
If you type not provided into the search bar, you'll see that Google provides less and less keyword-level traffic. So we can’t rely purely on the above method for our SEO reporting. We also need to look at the Search Engine Optimization section.You can see that you have three options here: Queries, Landing Pages, and Geographical Summary.
I'm going to ignore Geographical Summary because it just tells you where your customers have come from, which won't be interesting (or actionable) for most of you. But let's focus on the other two areas.
Queries
This section of GA lets you see how people are reacting to your site in the search results. Let's look at Wordtracker's:
The keywords you’re looking at are the top 2,000 traffic drivers to your site. They're only estimations (notice how they're all conveniently round numbers). Again, you can see how much traffic you're getting for your certain keywords by using the search bar.
With Queries however, you can also see you how many people saw your site in the search results, then clicked through. We call this the clickthrough rate, or CTR.
People are more likely to click on your search result if it ranks well (so it appears at the top of the page where users can see it), they recognize your brand or the page description is written persuasively. Improving your brand strength and search engine ranking takes time, but you can change your page descriptions quickly. If you’ve got a low clickthrough rate, see if you can improve the description with persuasive copy and strong calls to action, like ‘click here’ or ‘check us out today’. You could see uplift in traffic very quickly. The BBC did this. Just by changing the page description, the clickthrough rate went from 67% to 81%!
You can also improve your CTR by using rich snippets. These allow Google to show more helpful information in the search results, like reviews or important dates. Snippets make search results more relevant to what the searcher is looking for, so they are more likely to click through.
As a rough idea of what sort of CTR you can expect, Wordtracker’s top ranking keywords typically get around a 20% clickthrough rate, rising to about 80% for branded searches like wordtracker. If your site isn’t very well known, or you don’t rank very well, your CTR will be much lower. But watch this improve as your brand grows.
Surprise ranking
Looking at your Queries, you might spot some terms that you’re not actually targeting. These can improve your business in unexpected ways.
Wordtracker ranks for LinkedIn logo for example. It's a great traffic driver, even if it's not one of our target terms. But we can still create relevant content for it. Users may arrive at the site looking for the LinkedIn logo, but if we can entice them to download an e-book in exchange for their email address, we've capitalized on that traffic. But we do this only because it’s a quick win. Don’t spend your time chasing irrelevant traffic because it’s unlikely to convert. But if you do get some traffic you weren’t expecting, think if there is an easy and quick way you can capitalize on it.
Landing pages
The pages people arrive at on your site are called landing pages. And the better your landing pages rank, the more traffic they’ll get. So with Google Analytics, we can monitor landing page traffic and see how our SEO is working.
You can see from Wordtracker’s analytics that we get lots of traffic to the LinkedIn page.
This is happening because we have great content that talks about LinkedIn and lots of links to that page.
If you want more traffic to a given landing page, make sure the content is well-written and focused. So if you want a page to rank for Samsung laptops, only talk about Samsung laptops on that page. Also try to get more keyword rich links to those pages. So in this example, try to get links that use Samsung laptops in the anchor text.
Get started!
To look at these numbers in Google Analytics right now, check out this Google dashboard I made. Click the link, and select the GA profile you want to use. You’ll then see the metrics we’ve talked about, using your site’s data. They’ll be presented in a dashboard, so you’ll see a collection of tables and charts. To drill down on a given data set, click the header, and you’ll go through to a fuller report.In the dashboard I’ve also included some referrer data. This let’s you see the other sites that are driving traffic to yours. This lets you see the impact of various things. For example, if you’re running a social media campaign, you’d expect to see more referral traffic from the social networks you used, like Facebook or Twitter. Similarly, if you got a link from a very popular site, you’d expect that link to drive lots of traffic. The referral section is how you monitor this.
But this dashboard is just designed to get you started. As always with Google Analytics, explore the data for your own site and see what insights you can extract. Don’t be afraid to play around. Google Analytics offers a treasure trove of information, so go explore!
Pictures: wordtracker.com
Do You Need Virus or Malware Protection on Your Smartphone?
Smartphones are quickly becoming a common part of the average person’s arsenal of gadgets. From banking information and contacts to personal documents and family photos, these devices are a treasure trove of goodies for hackers and identity thieves. While virus and malware scanners have become a common part of computer use, their entry into the portable device arena is still relatively new. These tips will keep your phone secure and help you decide if malware or virus protection apps are right for you.
Threats to Mobile Security
While there are very few self-distributing or traditional viruses for Android, iOS or Windows Mobile, there are plenty of security threats to be concerned about. From keystroke and data loggers to those that send SMS messages to premium numbers without your knowledge, these apps can cause trouble once they are installed. There is also the chance that your phone might be lost or stolen. Without proper security, everything on your phone will be accessible to the person who finds it.
Apps for Securing Your Phone
Since most Smartphone apps access only their own files, standalone virus scanners do not offer much protection. Security suites, however, can help identify potentially suspicious phone activity and allow you to monitor what is occurring on your phone. Many of these apps also allow you to remotely wipe or lock your phone and activate your GPS should you lose the phone for any reason.
Top Rated Security Apps Include:
1. Lookout Security & Antivirus: This app is available in both free and paid versions. While the free version takes care of basic trojans and malware blocking for most devices, the paid version adds advanced scanning for phishing attempts, data backup features, remote GPS activation and remote phone wiping.
2. WebRoot SecureAnywhere Mobile: This suite features full coverage for malware and viruses along with a number of other useful features. Remote phone locking, GPS activation and data wiping provides security in the event of phone loss. Advanced features, such as connection viewing, call blocking and phishing detection provided added control for those looking for a robust toolkit.
3. Sophos Mobile Security: For users looking for a lightweight app, Sophos offers real-time scanning of all running apps and app installations as well as in-depth on-demand scans of both the phone’s internal memory and SD card.
Practices for Improving Phone Security
Though apps can help to prevent infection of your phone and identity theft, the best way to avoid these issues is to use your phone in a safe manner. These practices are easy to remember and can provide an impressive level of security for your phone:
• Always check app permissions. While iOS users can trust nearly every app on the official iTunes App Store, other mobile app providers might not be as thorough in testing new apps. By checking the permissions that an app requests before installing it on your phone, you can avoid the majority of malware apps. For example, an image-editing app requesting SMS rights or contact list access should raise suspicion.
• Set a password on your phone. Whether you are using a pin, pass phrase or touch gesture, adding this security is enough to thwart many potential identity thieves should they obtain physical access to your phone.
• Always download apps from trusted providers. Each mobile OS has a dedicated app store. Purchasing through these stores is often your safest method. While other sites may offer apps at lower prices, they may contain malware or other surprising additions.
Michelle Lim, Post from: SiteProNews
Threats to Mobile Security
While there are very few self-distributing or traditional viruses for Android, iOS or Windows Mobile, there are plenty of security threats to be concerned about. From keystroke and data loggers to those that send SMS messages to premium numbers without your knowledge, these apps can cause trouble once they are installed. There is also the chance that your phone might be lost or stolen. Without proper security, everything on your phone will be accessible to the person who finds it.
Apps for Securing Your Phone
Since most Smartphone apps access only their own files, standalone virus scanners do not offer much protection. Security suites, however, can help identify potentially suspicious phone activity and allow you to monitor what is occurring on your phone. Many of these apps also allow you to remotely wipe or lock your phone and activate your GPS should you lose the phone for any reason.
Top Rated Security Apps Include:
1. Lookout Security & Antivirus: This app is available in both free and paid versions. While the free version takes care of basic trojans and malware blocking for most devices, the paid version adds advanced scanning for phishing attempts, data backup features, remote GPS activation and remote phone wiping.
2. WebRoot SecureAnywhere Mobile: This suite features full coverage for malware and viruses along with a number of other useful features. Remote phone locking, GPS activation and data wiping provides security in the event of phone loss. Advanced features, such as connection viewing, call blocking and phishing detection provided added control for those looking for a robust toolkit.
3. Sophos Mobile Security: For users looking for a lightweight app, Sophos offers real-time scanning of all running apps and app installations as well as in-depth on-demand scans of both the phone’s internal memory and SD card.
Practices for Improving Phone Security
Though apps can help to prevent infection of your phone and identity theft, the best way to avoid these issues is to use your phone in a safe manner. These practices are easy to remember and can provide an impressive level of security for your phone:
• Always check app permissions. While iOS users can trust nearly every app on the official iTunes App Store, other mobile app providers might not be as thorough in testing new apps. By checking the permissions that an app requests before installing it on your phone, you can avoid the majority of malware apps. For example, an image-editing app requesting SMS rights or contact list access should raise suspicion.
• Set a password on your phone. Whether you are using a pin, pass phrase or touch gesture, adding this security is enough to thwart many potential identity thieves should they obtain physical access to your phone.
• Always download apps from trusted providers. Each mobile OS has a dedicated app store. Purchasing through these stores is often your safest method. While other sites may offer apps at lower prices, they may contain malware or other surprising additions.
Michelle Lim, Post from: SiteProNews
Creative Invoicing Techniques That Work - Getting Paid
After 37 years of marketing experience, I can tell you one thing, there are certain words that clients do not like to hear. I call them the dirty words of marketing because when they appear on an invoice, clients don’t like it one bit.
One of these words is “design” or, heaven forbid, “graphic design.” Clients don’t think it’s important, necessary and, most of all, it’s not something they want to pay for. In most clients’ minds, design is something they feel they can do themselves for free. As a designer for my entire career, I have resorted to camouflaging the service, relegating it to the most mundane, generic and unglamorous of tasks. I call it “setup,” “composition,” “artwork,” or “production” in various contexts. It hasn’t been very long since I finally got up the nerve to actually list “graphic design” as a service on my website, influenced by Google’s need for appropriate SEO keywords. Ironically, it is one of the jobs I devote the most time to, perfectionist that I am.
Since I don’t bill by the hour, clients never know how much behind-the-scenes’ time I spend refining their presentations. As my own harshest critic, I realize I ultimately strive to please myself. In my experience, most clients wouldn’t recognize good design if they fell over it. If I were to mention such subtleties as kerning, leading, tracking, typeface balance, color balance, or resolution issues, they probably would think I was speaking Greek.
With marketing success as my overall objective, I often incorporate text to enhance my design. Without these nuances, my work would not look the same. My clients may not understand what it takes to get the presentation to be crisp, professional, impressive and, most importantly, effective, but they do know what they like. They just don’t want to be charged extra for it on the invoice.
The Difficulties of Making a Profit
Another word I never utter anywhere, let alone on an invoice, is “commission.” No one wants to pay an agency commission for anything, especially if it is a surcharge not paid by a vendor or the media.
With the word completely removed from my business vocabulary, I am forced to invent creative ways to make some profit on services I provide. Instead of charging commission, I must mark up pricing when I quote costs so my take is included. And believe me, there isn’t much room to make a little extra with everything so competitive these days. This is one of the most distasteful of all my functions.
Having to operate in this way always strikes me as dishonest, deceitful and culpable, regardless of the fact that markup has been an accepted business practice for centuries. In fact, there are formulas for it that accountants recommend.
And here’s a honey: “royalties.” Among the clients I deal with, dentists, doctors, lawyers, business owners, administrators and directors, there is rarely one who would accept (or in many cases, comprehend) the need for such a charge. Usually associated with the purchase or rental of rights-managed stock photos, for example, royalties are charged because they are protected by copyright.
Charges are determined by how the photo will be used including its prominence in size, its exposure to numbers of viewers, its application, etc. That leaves me with the only other worthwhile option: royalty-free choices, which tend to be not as aesthetically select while still requiring an investment. I often solve the problem by using my own images (from my years of photography) – at no charge, of course. Otherwise, the project could remain stagnant or worse, be canceled altogether.
How Clients Circumvent Extra Charges
When images are essential, some clients have decided to become their own photographers, which I can live with, as long as they use a camera with adequate megapixels for the final size of use. What I most typically receive, however, are poorly composed, terribly lit, tiny, bitmapped photos (sometimes out-of-focus), that I somehow perform miracles on in Photoshop to convert to something usable.
Again, on the bill, this is a no-charge. Keeping the customer happy is my modus operandi.
Other clients with a little more advanced knowledge of the Internet have actually found good, low-cost, stock photos on their own. Then they ask me to make the purchase since they wouldn’t know what to do with them once downloaded, stymied by file sizes too bulky to e- mail. For me, these are all acceptable ways of doing business, as long as they’re happy.
When Technology Rules
Over the years, some of my clients have asked me to add flash animation to their websites. With current technological developments banishing flash from some Apple products, mobile units, etc., “flash” has become a dirty word, and another problematic element in my business. If I were to educate one of my large law firm clients that the flash on their website should be replaced with an alternate mode of animation all their viewers can see, they would hit the roof. With so many tech-savvy members on their staff, it is hard for me to believe that they don’t already know this. But keeping mum on their part is a money-saving tactic, as is turning a blind eye. So, coward that I am, it is my decision to ride this out for as long as possible with the hopes that flash may be resurrected somehow and no change will be needed. Whenever any situation arises which involves an unplanned expenditure, the most common response is to shoot the messenger. Ouch.
Finally, the words “consultation” or “research” on an invoice followed by a charge would be sure to infuriate most clients. Without a doubt, I spend many hours offering free advice as part of the value of my service. It is so natural to my business life that I don’t even keep track of the time I devote to gathering information, composing lengthy e-mails, or discussing my recommendations. I consider our relationship golden and try to help them all I can.
Trust is a Big Part of Every Business Relationship
My solutions to making sure I get paid vary. In the case of new clients, I always require a deposit on work to start and final payment upon completion, usually handled via a PayPal invoice that spells out every detail of our agreement. While these clients usually process their credit card payments promptly so there is no delay, I recently had a case where a relatively new client could not get his credit card to work on PayPal, despite his having done so on a previous job. Years ago, I would take in new work without so much as a handshake and render a mailed invoice when the job was done. In practically every case, I always got paid. So I decided that since this client was within driving distance of my office, I would trust him to mail me a deposit this time. It arrived the next day totally confirming my positive expectations of him. It is people like this that make my job a pleasure.
The Prettiest Word on Your Invoice
For clients I have been working with for years, the question is not so much whether they will pay an invoice, but whether they will be happy doing it. The last thing I want to do is to create a dispute over something I put on an invoice. For this reason, my invoices sometimes include up to 10 pages of items, described in great detail with dates performed and authorizing agents, many times with “n/c” (no charge) indicated as the amount due. With enough of these pages, when a charge finally does appear, the client feels humbled by how much he got for free. I often get e-mails thanking me for my invoices, which is an ironic turn of events considering the economic climate in which we find ourselves.
Marilyn Bontempo, Post from: SiteProNews
One of these words is “design” or, heaven forbid, “graphic design.” Clients don’t think it’s important, necessary and, most of all, it’s not something they want to pay for. In most clients’ minds, design is something they feel they can do themselves for free. As a designer for my entire career, I have resorted to camouflaging the service, relegating it to the most mundane, generic and unglamorous of tasks. I call it “setup,” “composition,” “artwork,” or “production” in various contexts. It hasn’t been very long since I finally got up the nerve to actually list “graphic design” as a service on my website, influenced by Google’s need for appropriate SEO keywords. Ironically, it is one of the jobs I devote the most time to, perfectionist that I am.
Since I don’t bill by the hour, clients never know how much behind-the-scenes’ time I spend refining their presentations. As my own harshest critic, I realize I ultimately strive to please myself. In my experience, most clients wouldn’t recognize good design if they fell over it. If I were to mention such subtleties as kerning, leading, tracking, typeface balance, color balance, or resolution issues, they probably would think I was speaking Greek.
With marketing success as my overall objective, I often incorporate text to enhance my design. Without these nuances, my work would not look the same. My clients may not understand what it takes to get the presentation to be crisp, professional, impressive and, most importantly, effective, but they do know what they like. They just don’t want to be charged extra for it on the invoice.
The Difficulties of Making a Profit
Another word I never utter anywhere, let alone on an invoice, is “commission.” No one wants to pay an agency commission for anything, especially if it is a surcharge not paid by a vendor or the media.
With the word completely removed from my business vocabulary, I am forced to invent creative ways to make some profit on services I provide. Instead of charging commission, I must mark up pricing when I quote costs so my take is included. And believe me, there isn’t much room to make a little extra with everything so competitive these days. This is one of the most distasteful of all my functions.
Having to operate in this way always strikes me as dishonest, deceitful and culpable, regardless of the fact that markup has been an accepted business practice for centuries. In fact, there are formulas for it that accountants recommend.
And here’s a honey: “royalties.” Among the clients I deal with, dentists, doctors, lawyers, business owners, administrators and directors, there is rarely one who would accept (or in many cases, comprehend) the need for such a charge. Usually associated with the purchase or rental of rights-managed stock photos, for example, royalties are charged because they are protected by copyright.
Charges are determined by how the photo will be used including its prominence in size, its exposure to numbers of viewers, its application, etc. That leaves me with the only other worthwhile option: royalty-free choices, which tend to be not as aesthetically select while still requiring an investment. I often solve the problem by using my own images (from my years of photography) – at no charge, of course. Otherwise, the project could remain stagnant or worse, be canceled altogether.
How Clients Circumvent Extra Charges
When images are essential, some clients have decided to become their own photographers, which I can live with, as long as they use a camera with adequate megapixels for the final size of use. What I most typically receive, however, are poorly composed, terribly lit, tiny, bitmapped photos (sometimes out-of-focus), that I somehow perform miracles on in Photoshop to convert to something usable.
Again, on the bill, this is a no-charge. Keeping the customer happy is my modus operandi.
Other clients with a little more advanced knowledge of the Internet have actually found good, low-cost, stock photos on their own. Then they ask me to make the purchase since they wouldn’t know what to do with them once downloaded, stymied by file sizes too bulky to e- mail. For me, these are all acceptable ways of doing business, as long as they’re happy.
When Technology Rules
Over the years, some of my clients have asked me to add flash animation to their websites. With current technological developments banishing flash from some Apple products, mobile units, etc., “flash” has become a dirty word, and another problematic element in my business. If I were to educate one of my large law firm clients that the flash on their website should be replaced with an alternate mode of animation all their viewers can see, they would hit the roof. With so many tech-savvy members on their staff, it is hard for me to believe that they don’t already know this. But keeping mum on their part is a money-saving tactic, as is turning a blind eye. So, coward that I am, it is my decision to ride this out for as long as possible with the hopes that flash may be resurrected somehow and no change will be needed. Whenever any situation arises which involves an unplanned expenditure, the most common response is to shoot the messenger. Ouch.
Finally, the words “consultation” or “research” on an invoice followed by a charge would be sure to infuriate most clients. Without a doubt, I spend many hours offering free advice as part of the value of my service. It is so natural to my business life that I don’t even keep track of the time I devote to gathering information, composing lengthy e-mails, or discussing my recommendations. I consider our relationship golden and try to help them all I can.
Trust is a Big Part of Every Business Relationship
My solutions to making sure I get paid vary. In the case of new clients, I always require a deposit on work to start and final payment upon completion, usually handled via a PayPal invoice that spells out every detail of our agreement. While these clients usually process their credit card payments promptly so there is no delay, I recently had a case where a relatively new client could not get his credit card to work on PayPal, despite his having done so on a previous job. Years ago, I would take in new work without so much as a handshake and render a mailed invoice when the job was done. In practically every case, I always got paid. So I decided that since this client was within driving distance of my office, I would trust him to mail me a deposit this time. It arrived the next day totally confirming my positive expectations of him. It is people like this that make my job a pleasure.
The Prettiest Word on Your Invoice
For clients I have been working with for years, the question is not so much whether they will pay an invoice, but whether they will be happy doing it. The last thing I want to do is to create a dispute over something I put on an invoice. For this reason, my invoices sometimes include up to 10 pages of items, described in great detail with dates performed and authorizing agents, many times with “n/c” (no charge) indicated as the amount due. With enough of these pages, when a charge finally does appear, the client feels humbled by how much he got for free. I often get e-mails thanking me for my invoices, which is an ironic turn of events considering the economic climate in which we find ourselves.
Marilyn Bontempo, Post from: SiteProNews
21 Great Minds on What it Means to Be an Entrepreneur
Jesse Draper is creator and host of The Valley Girl Show, through which she’s become a spokesperson for startups and helped pioneer the way of new media content distribution. Formerly a Nickelodeon star, Draper is now CEO of Valley Girl‚ where she oversees the show and runs the technology blog Lalawag.com.
Everyone defines the qualities of an entrepreneur differently. Are they creative, confident, driven or just plain insane?
See what 21 of our guests think and how they define an entrepreneur. From Mark Cuban, Sheryl Sandberg and Jimmy Wales, to the founders of Practice Fusion, Socialcam, Parkme, 99Designs, our favorite Valley Girl Show guests offer up some of this great advice.
Read more....
Everyone defines the qualities of an entrepreneur differently. Are they creative, confident, driven or just plain insane?
See what 21 of our guests think and how they define an entrepreneur. From Mark Cuban, Sheryl Sandberg and Jimmy Wales, to the founders of Practice Fusion, Socialcam, Parkme, 99Designs, our favorite Valley Girl Show guests offer up some of this great advice.
Read more....
How to Drive Web Traffic to Your Site by Participating with Q&A Online Resources
Many Internet marketers promote their products or services by taking part in forums and blog discussions. There is a category of websites, however, that are neither forums nor blogs. I’m talking about Q&A (questions and answers) sites.
Well-established Q&A sites that could be used to win the hearts and minds of potential clients are:
What I truly love about Q&A sites is they encourage community members to stick to the question-answer mode, which makes discussions to-the-point and, hence, more valuable. As stated in Yahoo! Answers Community Guidelines: “Yahoo! Answers is a community of questions and answers, not a chat room. If a post is neither a question nor an answer, it doesn’t belong here.”
Advice provided at Q&A sites is usually more substantial and better trusted than the advice one finds on, say, industry forums. This makes Q&A sites a great place to showcase your expertise and to inconspicuously drive traffic (and perhaps backlinks) to your website.
Take the time to get to know the community Each Q&A community has its own guidelines, its own system of earning points and its own unspoken rules. For example, if a magna-esque avatar might be acceptable at Yahoo! Answers, it will definitely look spammy at Quora.
So, before you begin asking or answering questions at Q&A websites such as Askville, Quora, LinkedIn Answers, and StackExchange, find out what earns you points there and what could have an adverse effect on your account’s reputation.
Actually, it is better to focus on fewer communities and to really find your bearings there than to be posting to lots and lots of Q&A sites without realizing their specifics – that would be of little use.
Flaunt Your Expertise at Yahoo! Answers
Yahoo! Answers is the beehive of a community buzzing with tons of discussions every day. The one thing to learn before your join it is its scoring system and how the asking-answering procedure works.
Yahoo! Answers lets the asker pick the Best Answer for his/her question, and even encourages one to do so by granting the asker three points for choosing the best answer. When you pick the best answer to a question you asked, the question is resolved, and other members can no longer answer it. If a ‘best answer’ has not been picked, the discussion is marked ‘undecided and is automatically closed after a few days. The ‘best answer’ can be picked by community voting as well.
Here are a few additional things I’ve noticed about Yahoo! Answers:
Leverage Askville by Amazon to Increase Traffic
I view Askville as a platform that’s meant to maximize sales on Amazon and increase the company’s revenue from sponsored links that are triggered by keywords in questions. However, it has a lot of space for unobtrusive recommendations and helpful answers as well.
What I like about it and what makes it different from other Q&A sites is that it lets you attach an image, a video and even your Amazon product ID to your answer.
Use LinkedIn Answers and Quora to Promote Your Biz
To me, LinkedIn Answers and Quora are somewhat similar – both sites are actually social networks and using a pen name or fake identity is not welcome there. Quora lets you sign in with your Facebook or Twitter account and automatically follows people from your contact list on Quora.
Promoting your brand or yourself at Quora and LinkedIn Answers is similar to Facebook/Twitter promotion. The only difference is communication occurs in the question-answer format. And, perhaps, you should be more cautious about what you say on LinkedIn, because LinkedIn is more about your personal brand. Anything you say is directly associated with you personally (and professionally).
Get Famous with StackExchange
StackExchange is a “network of 91 question and answer sites on diverse topics.” The resource first began as StackOverflow, a community of programmers helping one another with various issues. Later on, however, websites covering other topics were added to the list of sites administrated by the same community, which led to the emergence of StackExchange.
StackExchange is a well-moderated community where one finds answers for really challenging and deeply technical questions. So, if you’re an expert on something (especially programming or information technologies in general), this network is a great place to meet the right people and be noticed.
Whichever Q&A site you choose, posts should be error-free with proper grammar. If you want to sound like an expert, give those posts your best – in many ways it’s similar to public speaking.
Q&A websites can be a great platform to propel your brand – whether it’s a success or a failure depend on how you use them.
Alesya Krush, Post from: SiteProNews
Well-established Q&A sites that could be used to win the hearts and minds of potential clients are:
What I truly love about Q&A sites is they encourage community members to stick to the question-answer mode, which makes discussions to-the-point and, hence, more valuable. As stated in Yahoo! Answers Community Guidelines: “Yahoo! Answers is a community of questions and answers, not a chat room. If a post is neither a question nor an answer, it doesn’t belong here.”
Advice provided at Q&A sites is usually more substantial and better trusted than the advice one finds on, say, industry forums. This makes Q&A sites a great place to showcase your expertise and to inconspicuously drive traffic (and perhaps backlinks) to your website.
Take the time to get to know the community Each Q&A community has its own guidelines, its own system of earning points and its own unspoken rules. For example, if a magna-esque avatar might be acceptable at Yahoo! Answers, it will definitely look spammy at Quora.
So, before you begin asking or answering questions at Q&A websites such as Askville, Quora, LinkedIn Answers, and StackExchange, find out what earns you points there and what could have an adverse effect on your account’s reputation.
Actually, it is better to focus on fewer communities and to really find your bearings there than to be posting to lots and lots of Q&A sites without realizing their specifics – that would be of little use.
Flaunt Your Expertise at Yahoo! Answers
Yahoo! Answers is the beehive of a community buzzing with tons of discussions every day. The one thing to learn before your join it is its scoring system and how the asking-answering procedure works.
Yahoo! Answers lets the asker pick the Best Answer for his/her question, and even encourages one to do so by granting the asker three points for choosing the best answer. When you pick the best answer to a question you asked, the question is resolved, and other members can no longer answer it. If a ‘best answer’ has not been picked, the discussion is marked ‘undecided and is automatically closed after a few days. The ‘best answer’ can be picked by community voting as well.
Here are a few additional things I’ve noticed about Yahoo! Answers:
- Best answers receive much more visibility than regular ones. Hence, provide answers that have the potential to be chosen as the best. Also, spend some time studying the community to understand what makes the best answer in a niche.
- Avoid answering spammy questions and avoid asking such questions yourself. For instance, I just saw this question today: “SEO stands for ?????????” My, oh my, what are these all question marks? What’s this, anger? Despair?
- Don’t stuff your answer with links, unless it is really, REALLY appropriate. On Yahoo! Answers, links are supposed to provide reference to the source of data you share in the answer. So, make sure they don’t look like promo links.
- Provide factual, useful and in-depth advice whenever possible. If a question is not your area of expertise, it is better not to answer it. Instead, look for questions that will showcase your knowledge. For example, to look for discussions in my niche, I use our in-house social app which lets me monitor Yahoo! Answers (and a bunch of other social sites) for topics mentioning specific keywords. I then provide answers right from the software.
Leverage Askville by Amazon to Increase Traffic
I view Askville as a platform that’s meant to maximize sales on Amazon and increase the company’s revenue from sponsored links that are triggered by keywords in questions. However, it has a lot of space for unobtrusive recommendations and helpful answers as well.
What I like about it and what makes it different from other Q&A sites is that it lets you attach an image, a video and even your Amazon product ID to your answer.
Use LinkedIn Answers and Quora to Promote Your Biz
To me, LinkedIn Answers and Quora are somewhat similar – both sites are actually social networks and using a pen name or fake identity is not welcome there. Quora lets you sign in with your Facebook or Twitter account and automatically follows people from your contact list on Quora.
Promoting your brand or yourself at Quora and LinkedIn Answers is similar to Facebook/Twitter promotion. The only difference is communication occurs in the question-answer format. And, perhaps, you should be more cautious about what you say on LinkedIn, because LinkedIn is more about your personal brand. Anything you say is directly associated with you personally (and professionally).
Get Famous with StackExchange
StackExchange is a “network of 91 question and answer sites on diverse topics.” The resource first began as StackOverflow, a community of programmers helping one another with various issues. Later on, however, websites covering other topics were added to the list of sites administrated by the same community, which led to the emergence of StackExchange.
StackExchange is a well-moderated community where one finds answers for really challenging and deeply technical questions. So, if you’re an expert on something (especially programming or information technologies in general), this network is a great place to meet the right people and be noticed.
Whichever Q&A site you choose, posts should be error-free with proper grammar. If you want to sound like an expert, give those posts your best – in many ways it’s similar to public speaking.
Q&A websites can be a great platform to propel your brand – whether it’s a success or a failure depend on how you use them.
Alesya Krush, Post from: SiteProNews
Thứ Tư, 28 tháng 11, 2012
Holiday Game Guide 2012
We've reviewed a variety of games on the PC, PS3, Xbox 360, PlayStation Vita, Nintendo 3DS, and Nintendo DS platforms in order to help you decide which titles deserve to be gifted to friends and family (or yourself!) this holiday season. Our guide includes fighting, role-playing, world building, action, and shooting games across a variety of consoles and portables.
Get those credit and debit cards ready as you check out the best gamer-worthy titles that will be on sale this holiday season.
Assassin's Creed III
$59.99
$49.49 at SearsAssassin's Creed III stands as the best of the series, edging out even the excellent Assassin's Creed II: Brotherhood in size, scope, and story. The stealth and combat elements are polished and it's packed full of content that will keep you playing for hours on end.
Borderlands 2
$59.99
$34.99 at Best BuyGearbox Entertainment and 2K Games take you back to Pandora with Borderlands 2, the sequel to the hit apocalyptic RPG-shooter. It's five years later, Pandora has changed, and there are more Vaults to hunt. Borderlands 2, which is available for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC, is bigger and better than the first game, and it fixes a handful of small issues the original had. It's a fun adventure that will keep you entertained for hours.
Call of Duty: Black Ops II
$59.99
$59.99 at Dell HomeCall of Duty: Black Ops II is one of the most anticipated titles of the year. The game features some excitement and a few minor innovations, but that's not enough to prevent most of it from feeling like a retread in need of a reboot.
Civilization V: Gods & Kings
$29.99
$29.99 at Best Buy®Expansion packs have been available for PC games for more than 20 years now, but it's difficult to think of another that has effected a more elemental transformation on its base title than the first for Sid Meier's Civilization V. The addition of Gods & Kings helps it not only live up to its name, but also lets the 2010 original realize more of the promise that has until now eluded it. If Gods & Kings is too limited in scope to utterly revolutionize this chapter of the storied conquer-the-world saga, it's nonetheless good enough to make Civilization V the game it always should have been.
Darksiders II
$59.99
$29.99 at Best BuyDarksiders II puts you in the role of Death, one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, who sets out the clear the besmirched name of his brother War. The game has its flaws, namely glitchy AI and a weak narrative, but if you check your brain at the door, you'll have plenty of hack and slash fun. It's available on PS3, PC, Xbox 360, and Wii U.
Dead Island
$49.99
When Techland's Dead Island trailer hit the Web earlier this year, it featured one of the most moving video game sequences ever produced: a small child and her family being slaughtered by zombies against the backdrop of a soft, haunting Giles Lamb musical score. Dead Island's now available for PC, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360, and, although it doesn't match the heights of the trailer, the open-world action-RPG offers a very solid single-player zombie-slaying good time.
Dead or Alive 5
$59.99
$59.96 at Walmart.comThe fighting game renaissance that began with Capcom's Street Fighter IV sees its latest high-profile entry: Tecmo Koei's Dead or Alive 5. The polygonal fighter, available on both the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, brings the series trademark rock-paper-scissors style combat to a home console for the first time since 2005's Dead or Alive 4 (it's also the first DOA to appear on the PS3). Featuring intricate mechanics, several beautiful interactive environments, and characters from Sega's Virtua Fighter series, Dead or Alive is a fun fighter, but it lacks the extra depths found in the likes of Namco Bandai's Tekken Tag Tournament 2.
Diablo III
$59.99
$34.99 at Best Buy®Blizzard didn't change much of the Diablo II formula with Diablo III, and the result is a great PC dungeon crawler with modern graphics and addictive, simple gameplay. The requirement to be always online is irritating, but it makes the multiplayer experience more streamlined and prevents cheaters. If you loved Diablo II, you'll love Diablo III, even though it doesn't do much to advance the concept.
Dishonored
$59.99
$24.99 at Best Buy®Dishonored, available for PC, PS3, and Xbox 360, is a fantastic game that puts you in a playground of murder and stealth while still keeping focused on an interesting story in a rich and enthralling world. It's not quite as large, as open, or as well-written as Deus Ex, but it stands as a solid spiritual successor to one of the best PC games of all time. It's Bioshock to Deus Ex's System Shock 2, and it's worth a look no matter your favorite genre.
Fable: The Journey
$49.99
$24.99 at Best BuyInstead of getting you up and active for a casual gaming session like most Kinect-enabled titles, Fable: The Journey sits you down for a long ride through the world of Albion. It's a nice showcase of the potential for storytelling and immersive gameplay on the Xbox 360, but it falls a bit flat with repetitive actions, strict linear story progression, and far too much hand holding. The beautifully rendered scenes and quirky characters add charm, but serious action-RPG fans should probably look elsewhere.
FIFA Soccer 13
$59.99
$59.99 at P.C. Richard & SonWith every new soccer season, comes a new FIFA title. The inevitable question for sports gamers is this: If you currently own the last FIFA title, is the latest version a worthwhile upgrade? While the changes in FIFA 13 are a bit more subtle than some of the new features introduced in FIFA 12, the latest edition represents welcome tweaks to an already strong foundation. The result is a convincing and very enjoyable sports simulation that you can find on nearly every platform.
God of War Saga
$39.99
Kratos, the mad mortal whose quest for vengeance against the Greek gods has enthralled gamers since 2005, comes to home consoles once again in the God of War Saga. This PS3 exclusive collection features five games—four of which are remastered—that tells Kratos's tale, and serve as a warm-up for the upcoming God of War Ascension (due March 2013).
NBA 2K13
$59.99
$29.99 at Microsoft StoreIt's easy to say that the multi-platform NBA 2K13 is the best pro hoops on the market because there's no other competition, but 2K Sports' latest basketball title does the NBA right while keeping flaws to the minimum. Some will naturally decry it as nothing more than promotion for Jay-Z, the Brooklyn Nets, and Barclays Center, but if you can overlook that you'll find one best basketball video games ever made.
New Super Mario Bros. 2
$39.99
It seems strange to keep calling a game "New" when it's the third "New" game in a row with the fourth on the way, but New Super Mario Bros. 2 does just that. It's a "New" sequel to a "New" game that's a successor to the side-scrolling Mario games that helped define gaming for decades. And, sadly, this Nintendo 3DS game isn't particularly "new" in any way besides its name. It lives up to the high standards set by the rest of the Mario series, but it doesn't actually offer anything new that isn't a gimmick with little significance in the game.
Paper Mario: Sticker Star
$39.99
$39.99 at OfficeMaxThe Nintendo 3DS' Paper Mario: Sticker Star is one of the more clever chapters in the Paper Mario series, and its sticker-based design rewards exploration and smart thinking. It isn't as RPG-like as the previous Paper Mario games, and it isn't as rewarding of reflex skills as Super Paper Mario, but it offers a unique adventure and plenty to find.
Pokemon Black and White Version 2
$34.99
The Nintendo DS' Pokemon Black and White Version 2 are more of the same as Pokemon games, but they offer enough twists and changes to feel like a genuine sequel of Pokemon Black and White and not just an upgraded remake like the other Pokemon half-sequels. Even if you played through the last Pokemon game, Pokemon Black and White Version 2 can feel fresh and offer plenty of content.
Ridge Racer Unbounded
$49.99
The Ridge Racer series may not carry Gran Turismo or Forza Motorsport's swagger, but the long-running franchise has a dedicated fan base that loves the drift-centric racing action. The latest series (available for PC, PS3, and Xbox 360) entry attempts to bring a new chaotic element to the familiar gameplay by adding environmental and vehicular destruction as players race for street cred in the fictional Shatter Bay. The story is something you can flat out ignore—it's a racing game, after all—but the driving action is interesting and varied.
Sleeping Dogs
$59.99
$24.99 at Best BuyPart of the fun of Sleeping Dogs—Square Enix's PC, PS3, and Xbox 360 crime caper—is its wild machismo. "Bro gamers" the world over, as well as armchair martial artists, will love the martial arts action and gunplay. The dialogue is painful at times to sit through and as mentioned, the fighting is bit repetitive.
Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed
$39.99
$29.95 at Microsoft StoreSega's latest racing game culls characters from the company's rich video game history into a fun mascot kart racer. The major gripe? The air and aquatic racing segments aren't quite as fast and furious as they should be.
Street Fighter X Tekken
$39.99
$37.99 at SearsStreet Fighter X Tekken joins BlazBlue Continuum Shift Extend and Mortal Kombat as the fighting games of note on the Sony PlayStation Vita. Capcom's tag-based 2D fighter, which pits many of the company's most popular fighting game characters in a knock-down, drag-out brawl with Namco Bandai's Tekken pugilists, is an incredible portable fighting game package. Capcom packs in online multiplayer, cross-platform play with PS3 owners, augmented reality, extra characters not found in the console version, a controversial Gem System, and much, much more. The result is an engaging, deep fighting game that's only hampered by a few game-design issues.
Super Monkey Ball: Banana Splitz
$29.99
Sega's long running Super Monkey Ball series has seen many ups and downs in the 11 years since its debut. The original's simple charm—rolling a captured simian encased in a transparent ball down elevated platforms—got lost in the shuffle as suspect level design and noob-friendly additions killed the need for truly skill-based play. Sega, thankfully, goes back to basics with Super Monkey Ball: Banana Splitz , a game that utilizes classic design and the PlayStation Vita's hardware to produce a series entry that's one of the best in quite a while.
Tekken Tag Tournament 2
$59.99
$59.95 at Microsoft StoreTekken Tag Tournament 2 is a beast of a fighting game crafted with hardcore gamers in mind—there's no watered down control scheme to appease more casual players like you'll find in Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3. Best of all, the game is just plain fun whether alone or with three others on the PS3, Xbox 360, or Wii U.
The Walking Dead
$24.99
$496.01 at RefurbExpertsTelltale Games' The Walking Dead game is exciting point-and-click adventure game sometimes drags in places where characters get a little talky—think of Lori's scenes in the show—but gamers who are The Walking Dead fans won't be disappointed. Typically, movie or TV show game adoptions suck, but not in this case. Full of emotion, blood and guts, and plenty of characters dropping the F-bomb, it's not a game for the kiddies.
Transformers: Fall of Cybertron
$59.99
Transformers: Fall of Cybertron (PC, PS3, Xbox 360), the sequel to 2010's hit Transformers: War for Cybertron, sees the peaceful Autobots continuing its war against the savage Decepticons, but the outlook is bleak. The title provides plenty of third-person shooting action, a thrilling multiplayer mode that lets you take user-created robots into battle, and plenty of fan service. Fall of Cybertron isn't without faults; it features uneven combat, some weak mission objectives, and ho-hum voice acting, but Trans-fans will eat it up.
WWE 13
$59.99
$59.99 at MicrosoftWWE 13 (PS2, PS3, Wii, Xbox 360) excellently captures the WWE's highest and lowest moments with its Attitude Era Mode, which harkens back to a time when professional wrestling was forever changed. It also includes an in-depth character creation mode and numerous match types including the infamous Hell in the Cell. It has a few bugs—THQ and Yukes have recently released a patch to fix some of the issues—but the game is worthy pick up for WWE fans.
XCOM: Enemy Unknown
$59.99
$60.99 at TheNerds.netXCOM: Enemy Unknown (PC, PS3, Xbox 360) is the return of a beloved and forgotten sci-fi franchise that will entertain tactics fans and satisfy classic gaming fans. More randomized maps and more online options would have been great, but as it stands XCOM: Enemy Unknown is already an excellent strategy game, despite the features it lacks.
Sources: http://www.pcmag.com
Get those credit and debit cards ready as you check out the best gamer-worthy titles that will be on sale this holiday season.
Assassin's Creed III
$59.99
$49.49 at SearsAssassin's Creed III stands as the best of the series, edging out even the excellent Assassin's Creed II: Brotherhood in size, scope, and story. The stealth and combat elements are polished and it's packed full of content that will keep you playing for hours on end.
Borderlands 2
$59.99
$34.99 at Best BuyGearbox Entertainment and 2K Games take you back to Pandora with Borderlands 2, the sequel to the hit apocalyptic RPG-shooter. It's five years later, Pandora has changed, and there are more Vaults to hunt. Borderlands 2, which is available for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC, is bigger and better than the first game, and it fixes a handful of small issues the original had. It's a fun adventure that will keep you entertained for hours.
Call of Duty: Black Ops II
$59.99
$59.99 at Dell HomeCall of Duty: Black Ops II is one of the most anticipated titles of the year. The game features some excitement and a few minor innovations, but that's not enough to prevent most of it from feeling like a retread in need of a reboot.
Civilization V: Gods & Kings
$29.99
$29.99 at Best Buy®Expansion packs have been available for PC games for more than 20 years now, but it's difficult to think of another that has effected a more elemental transformation on its base title than the first for Sid Meier's Civilization V. The addition of Gods & Kings helps it not only live up to its name, but also lets the 2010 original realize more of the promise that has until now eluded it. If Gods & Kings is too limited in scope to utterly revolutionize this chapter of the storied conquer-the-world saga, it's nonetheless good enough to make Civilization V the game it always should have been.
Darksiders II
$59.99
$29.99 at Best BuyDarksiders II puts you in the role of Death, one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, who sets out the clear the besmirched name of his brother War. The game has its flaws, namely glitchy AI and a weak narrative, but if you check your brain at the door, you'll have plenty of hack and slash fun. It's available on PS3, PC, Xbox 360, and Wii U.
Dead Island
$49.99
When Techland's Dead Island trailer hit the Web earlier this year, it featured one of the most moving video game sequences ever produced: a small child and her family being slaughtered by zombies against the backdrop of a soft, haunting Giles Lamb musical score. Dead Island's now available for PC, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360, and, although it doesn't match the heights of the trailer, the open-world action-RPG offers a very solid single-player zombie-slaying good time.
Dead or Alive 5
$59.99
$59.96 at Walmart.comThe fighting game renaissance that began with Capcom's Street Fighter IV sees its latest high-profile entry: Tecmo Koei's Dead or Alive 5. The polygonal fighter, available on both the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, brings the series trademark rock-paper-scissors style combat to a home console for the first time since 2005's Dead or Alive 4 (it's also the first DOA to appear on the PS3). Featuring intricate mechanics, several beautiful interactive environments, and characters from Sega's Virtua Fighter series, Dead or Alive is a fun fighter, but it lacks the extra depths found in the likes of Namco Bandai's Tekken Tag Tournament 2.
Diablo III
$59.99
$34.99 at Best Buy®Blizzard didn't change much of the Diablo II formula with Diablo III, and the result is a great PC dungeon crawler with modern graphics and addictive, simple gameplay. The requirement to be always online is irritating, but it makes the multiplayer experience more streamlined and prevents cheaters. If you loved Diablo II, you'll love Diablo III, even though it doesn't do much to advance the concept.
Dishonored
$59.99
$24.99 at Best Buy®Dishonored, available for PC, PS3, and Xbox 360, is a fantastic game that puts you in a playground of murder and stealth while still keeping focused on an interesting story in a rich and enthralling world. It's not quite as large, as open, or as well-written as Deus Ex, but it stands as a solid spiritual successor to one of the best PC games of all time. It's Bioshock to Deus Ex's System Shock 2, and it's worth a look no matter your favorite genre.
Fable: The Journey
$49.99
$24.99 at Best BuyInstead of getting you up and active for a casual gaming session like most Kinect-enabled titles, Fable: The Journey sits you down for a long ride through the world of Albion. It's a nice showcase of the potential for storytelling and immersive gameplay on the Xbox 360, but it falls a bit flat with repetitive actions, strict linear story progression, and far too much hand holding. The beautifully rendered scenes and quirky characters add charm, but serious action-RPG fans should probably look elsewhere.
FIFA Soccer 13
$59.99
$59.99 at P.C. Richard & SonWith every new soccer season, comes a new FIFA title. The inevitable question for sports gamers is this: If you currently own the last FIFA title, is the latest version a worthwhile upgrade? While the changes in FIFA 13 are a bit more subtle than some of the new features introduced in FIFA 12, the latest edition represents welcome tweaks to an already strong foundation. The result is a convincing and very enjoyable sports simulation that you can find on nearly every platform.
God of War Saga
$39.99
Kratos, the mad mortal whose quest for vengeance against the Greek gods has enthralled gamers since 2005, comes to home consoles once again in the God of War Saga. This PS3 exclusive collection features five games—four of which are remastered—that tells Kratos's tale, and serve as a warm-up for the upcoming God of War Ascension (due March 2013).
NBA 2K13
$59.99
$29.99 at Microsoft StoreIt's easy to say that the multi-platform NBA 2K13 is the best pro hoops on the market because there's no other competition, but 2K Sports' latest basketball title does the NBA right while keeping flaws to the minimum. Some will naturally decry it as nothing more than promotion for Jay-Z, the Brooklyn Nets, and Barclays Center, but if you can overlook that you'll find one best basketball video games ever made.
New Super Mario Bros. 2
$39.99
It seems strange to keep calling a game "New" when it's the third "New" game in a row with the fourth on the way, but New Super Mario Bros. 2 does just that. It's a "New" sequel to a "New" game that's a successor to the side-scrolling Mario games that helped define gaming for decades. And, sadly, this Nintendo 3DS game isn't particularly "new" in any way besides its name. It lives up to the high standards set by the rest of the Mario series, but it doesn't actually offer anything new that isn't a gimmick with little significance in the game.
Paper Mario: Sticker Star
$39.99
$39.99 at OfficeMaxThe Nintendo 3DS' Paper Mario: Sticker Star is one of the more clever chapters in the Paper Mario series, and its sticker-based design rewards exploration and smart thinking. It isn't as RPG-like as the previous Paper Mario games, and it isn't as rewarding of reflex skills as Super Paper Mario, but it offers a unique adventure and plenty to find.
Pokemon Black and White Version 2
$34.99
The Nintendo DS' Pokemon Black and White Version 2 are more of the same as Pokemon games, but they offer enough twists and changes to feel like a genuine sequel of Pokemon Black and White and not just an upgraded remake like the other Pokemon half-sequels. Even if you played through the last Pokemon game, Pokemon Black and White Version 2 can feel fresh and offer plenty of content.
Ridge Racer Unbounded
$49.99
The Ridge Racer series may not carry Gran Turismo or Forza Motorsport's swagger, but the long-running franchise has a dedicated fan base that loves the drift-centric racing action. The latest series (available for PC, PS3, and Xbox 360) entry attempts to bring a new chaotic element to the familiar gameplay by adding environmental and vehicular destruction as players race for street cred in the fictional Shatter Bay. The story is something you can flat out ignore—it's a racing game, after all—but the driving action is interesting and varied.
Sleeping Dogs
$59.99
$24.99 at Best BuyPart of the fun of Sleeping Dogs—Square Enix's PC, PS3, and Xbox 360 crime caper—is its wild machismo. "Bro gamers" the world over, as well as armchair martial artists, will love the martial arts action and gunplay. The dialogue is painful at times to sit through and as mentioned, the fighting is bit repetitive.
Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed
$39.99
$29.95 at Microsoft StoreSega's latest racing game culls characters from the company's rich video game history into a fun mascot kart racer. The major gripe? The air and aquatic racing segments aren't quite as fast and furious as they should be.
Street Fighter X Tekken
$39.99
$37.99 at SearsStreet Fighter X Tekken joins BlazBlue Continuum Shift Extend and Mortal Kombat as the fighting games of note on the Sony PlayStation Vita. Capcom's tag-based 2D fighter, which pits many of the company's most popular fighting game characters in a knock-down, drag-out brawl with Namco Bandai's Tekken pugilists, is an incredible portable fighting game package. Capcom packs in online multiplayer, cross-platform play with PS3 owners, augmented reality, extra characters not found in the console version, a controversial Gem System, and much, much more. The result is an engaging, deep fighting game that's only hampered by a few game-design issues.
Super Monkey Ball: Banana Splitz
$29.99
Sega's long running Super Monkey Ball series has seen many ups and downs in the 11 years since its debut. The original's simple charm—rolling a captured simian encased in a transparent ball down elevated platforms—got lost in the shuffle as suspect level design and noob-friendly additions killed the need for truly skill-based play. Sega, thankfully, goes back to basics with Super Monkey Ball: Banana Splitz , a game that utilizes classic design and the PlayStation Vita's hardware to produce a series entry that's one of the best in quite a while.
Tekken Tag Tournament 2
$59.99
$59.95 at Microsoft StoreTekken Tag Tournament 2 is a beast of a fighting game crafted with hardcore gamers in mind—there's no watered down control scheme to appease more casual players like you'll find in Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3. Best of all, the game is just plain fun whether alone or with three others on the PS3, Xbox 360, or Wii U.
The Walking Dead
$24.99
$496.01 at RefurbExpertsTelltale Games' The Walking Dead game is exciting point-and-click adventure game sometimes drags in places where characters get a little talky—think of Lori's scenes in the show—but gamers who are The Walking Dead fans won't be disappointed. Typically, movie or TV show game adoptions suck, but not in this case. Full of emotion, blood and guts, and plenty of characters dropping the F-bomb, it's not a game for the kiddies.
Transformers: Fall of Cybertron
$59.99
Transformers: Fall of Cybertron (PC, PS3, Xbox 360), the sequel to 2010's hit Transformers: War for Cybertron, sees the peaceful Autobots continuing its war against the savage Decepticons, but the outlook is bleak. The title provides plenty of third-person shooting action, a thrilling multiplayer mode that lets you take user-created robots into battle, and plenty of fan service. Fall of Cybertron isn't without faults; it features uneven combat, some weak mission objectives, and ho-hum voice acting, but Trans-fans will eat it up.
WWE 13
$59.99
$59.99 at MicrosoftWWE 13 (PS2, PS3, Wii, Xbox 360) excellently captures the WWE's highest and lowest moments with its Attitude Era Mode, which harkens back to a time when professional wrestling was forever changed. It also includes an in-depth character creation mode and numerous match types including the infamous Hell in the Cell. It has a few bugs—THQ and Yukes have recently released a patch to fix some of the issues—but the game is worthy pick up for WWE fans.
XCOM: Enemy Unknown
$59.99
$60.99 at TheNerds.netXCOM: Enemy Unknown (PC, PS3, Xbox 360) is the return of a beloved and forgotten sci-fi franchise that will entertain tactics fans and satisfy classic gaming fans. More randomized maps and more online options would have been great, but as it stands XCOM: Enemy Unknown is already an excellent strategy game, despite the features it lacks.
Sources: http://www.pcmag.com
Đăng ký:
Nhận xét (Atom)
Bài đăng phổ biến
-
Don’t hold your breath, but Google seems to be connecting the pieces of the authorship puzzle – one social network at a time. I stumbled up...
-
Want a little alert to pop up on your desktop whenever a new Gmail message arrives? Easily done, but you’ll need the right browser first. ...
-
Cara Aman Alami Membesarkan Payudara dengan Herbal dan Pijatan Pijatan tangan sendiri Teknik Memijat Payudara ini praktekkan secara teratur ...
-
Recently, the Blogger team announced the launch of new mobile templates for blogger/blogspot blogs to enable easy reading of blogger blog... -
Whether you’re running the simplest blog or an enormous international ecommerce site, you should be measuring how visitors interact with yo...
-
In this article we will discuss how freebies can help you in blogging. We will talk about using free giveaways to strengthen the relationshi...
-
Inbound links are the single most important factor in determining your position on Google’s results pages. Inbound links are good Here’s wha...
-
Choosing a domain name for your blog is a very important decision, and if you don't choose well, you could be dooming your blog from t...
-
Once upon a time, the iPhone was a simple thing. You flipped it on, slid the unlock switch, and what you saw was what you got. Since then, ...
-
So what do you do when you’re pressed for time, swamped under works and you still need to get some stuff written, and written well? Your n...
