Google Writely: Viable Marketing Tool? YES.

Google's latest service that has just recently opened it's beta to the public promises to be yet another innovative tool for internet marketers, and the end user alike. When thought of in it's simplest terms, Writely is an online environment to write in and store word documents, html, and other text formats. But why do this online? Why not just perform these actions on your own desktop. Well Google Writely gives you many unique options for your writings you wish to store online.

-Writely acts as a way to backup your documents in case the original copy were lost.
-Writely has a simple WYSIWYG editor that allows you to format, spell check, etc.. your documents.
-You may invite others to share your documents with. (This is where it gets pretty cool.) Not only can you share documents, but you can edit your documents online with anyone you choose to share with. In the realm of marketing, this could be very useful for joint ventures for editing sales letters, product descriptions, or any number of things. The possibilities are quite exciting.
-Editing documents in Writely will allow you to view a documents revision history, and allow you to rollback to any previous version, this could possibly save a lot of time.
-Writely allows you to publish your documents to the world, or to just certain people. This will allow for a great viral marketing opportunity.
-Writely will allow you to post your documents to your blog. Another very useful feature.

With all these great features in Writely, it could be a very useful marketing tool, and maybe even a marketer's best friend. http://www.writely.com

Here's to success!

Google Services Released in 2006

As far as marketing software, tools, resources, and anything else, google is becoming quite the marketer's friend. Google does not just stop there however, they release all sorts of useful and interesting tools and services that anyone can use.

So I thought I would check out what google has released so far in 2006, and to be quite honest, it is pretty exciting. What is even more exciting is what Google is undoubtedly working on currently. But let us get to the list of tools. It is quite large for just an 8 month period, so I will not get too into any of them yet. But I will be sure to cover some ways that you can utilize Google's services in future posts.

Without further ado...... THE LIST!

Browser Sync
Google Browser Sync for Firefox is an extension that continuously synchronizes browser settings – including bookmarks, history, persistent cookies, and saved passwords – across multiple computers. It also allows users to restore open tabs and windows across different machines and browser sessions. It was launched on June 7, 2006.

Calendar
Google Calendar is a free online calendar. It is similar to those offered by Yahoo! And MSN. It was launched on April 13, 2006. Google Calendar can export calendar files in iCAL and XML formats. It can import calendar files from Microsoft Outlook, Yahoo! Calendar and iCAL. Features include: simple Google-style interface, calendar sharing, Gmail integration, and "Quick Add".

Co-op
Google Co-op was launched by Google on May 10, 2006. This program enables users to subscribe to two types of content feeds: (1) Content feeds from sites they trust, and: (2) Feeds of sites labelled by subject matter experts. When a user subscribes to links and labels provided by a Google Co-op contributor this information is incorporated into that user's web search results when they search for a related topic.

Finance
Google Finance features searchable US business news, opinion, and financial data. It was launched on March 21, 2006 (Official Blog Post). Features include: company-specific pages, blog search, interactive charts (with prices and news stories), information about executives, discussion groups and a portfolio.

Joga.com
Joga.com is an Internet community for those interested in soccer. It is in the mold of services such as Myspace, in that each member has their own page, and can join groups based on shared interests. The service allows a user to meet other fans, create games and clubs, access athletes from Nike, and watch and upload video clips and photos. Joga.com is a joint venture of Nike Football and Google, launched on March 29, 2006.

Mars
Google Mars provides imagery of Mars through the Google Maps interface. Elevation, visible imagery and infrared imagery can be shown. It was released on March 13, 2006, the anniversary of the birth of astronomer Percival Lowell.

Measure Map
Measure Map provides statistics for blog writers. It was launched on February 2, 2006.

News
Google News is an automated news compilation service and search engine for news. There are versions of the aggregator for more than 20 languages. While the selection of news stories is fully automated, the sites included are selected by human editors. Google News was launched in April 2002 and left beta testing on January 26, 2006.

Notebook
Google Notebook is a free service that provides a simple way to save and organize information when conducting research online. The tool permits users to clip text, images, and links from pages while browsing, save them online, access them from any computer, and share them with others. It was launched on May 15, 2006.

Pack
Google Pack allows users to download the following programs in a single package: Google Earth, Google Desktop, Picasa, Google Toolbar, Google Talk, Google Video Player, Google Pack Screensaver, Mozilla Firefox with Google Toolbar, Ad-Aware SE Personal, Norton Antivirus Special Edition 2005 (with 6 month trial), Adobe Reader 7, RealPlayer and GalleryPlayer. It was released on January 6, 2006.

Page Creator
Google Page Creator is a beta release of a web-publishing program which creates pages and hosts them on Google's servers. The URL given to members is http://username.googlepages.com/ It was launched on April 20, 2006.

Picasa Web Albums
Picasa Web Albums is Picasa’s newest feature, designed to help users post and share their photos quickly and easily on the web. It was released on June 13, 2006.

Spreadsheets
Google Spreadsheets allows the creation and editing of spreadsheets online, as well as real-time chat collaboration and editing. It was released on June 6, 2006 on a 'limited test basis'. Users were granted access on a first-come, first-serve basis after requesting to sign up.

Trends
Google Trends shows, as a graph, the popularity of particular search terms over time. Multiple terms can be shown at once. Results can also be displayed by city, region or language. Related news stories are also shown. The service was launched on May 10, 2006.

Web Toolkit
Google Web Toolkit allows users to create AJAX interfaces for their websites. Google claimed it could be used to create similar interfaces to that of Gmail and Google Calendar. It was released on May 15, 2006.

Writely
Writely is an online word-processor. On March 9, 2006 Google acquired Upstartle, the maker of Writely. It is still in beta. Writely also has a blog reporting on it's process. It looks as though sign-ups have just been opened up to the public. Check that out here.

Make Alexa your own personal spy

In the quest for internet immortality with a top 10 Google Ranking for the top keywords for your site, many things must be accomplished. One of those many things is to get as many high quality and relevant in-coming links to your site as possible. Now this can be done in a number of ways. It can be done through joining link exchange services, personally contacting other sites to trade links, finding sites with an automated link trading system built in, or even paying for your links to be placed on popular sites. Now these can all work, but there is one very under-utilized method that anyone can use.

http://www.alexa.com

For those who don't know, alexa is THE website for traffic rankings and more for all websites online. If you would like to find out how popular a certain website is, just go to Alexa and type in the url. But alexa even goes beyond that. And this is where you can make alexa spy on the competition for you. First what you want to do is make a few searches for the top keywords in your market, and note the top websites that come up.

Now head on over to alexa and enter the url to see how well the website ranks in Alexa. Scroll down the page and find where it says "Other Sites that Link to this site:". This is where you will find the number of websites that are linking to the site you entered. Now just click on the number and it will show you each one of these sites that is linking to the site.

So now you have this list of potential sites to trade or submit your website link with. This is a huge way to search for potential linking partners, and is very simple. I urge you to give it a try. Bookmark my blog for more practical and useful marketing tips to come.

Yours in Success,
Jon