If you have a gmail account, you couldn’t have missed it, the first time you have to click through an interstitial buzz setup page on the way to your gmail inbox, and once in, the colorful buzz icon is on the left nestled in among your folders.

The initial launch caused some privacy alarms, and google backed off from automatically linking your other google activity, such as Picasa to Buzz.

It seems to be catching on. I already got two buzzes from one of my gmail chat mates and I noticed that Joel Comm is publicizing his Buzz profile. And Mashable, the venerable social media blog, already has a new Buzz icon next to it’s Twitter and Facebook icons.

I went ahead and created a basic profile so I can join the party but deliberately left many things inactive or blank, I’ll watch how the privacy debate unfurls first.

No one really should be using IE 6. Its security failings are widely known and missing features such as tabs should goad anyone to upgrading to IE7 or IE8, if they wish to continue using Internet Explorer, rather than Firefox.

In fact a recent eWeek article tied google’s recent announcement to the gmail Chinese hacker incident, where hackers that originated from China got access to gmail accounts of Chinese dissidents, apparently exploiting security holes in IE 6 to place some malware for download onto user’s computers. Google in their blog simply points out that the web is evolving at a fast rate and the newer browser versions offer a better experience.

The change will first roll out on google docs and sites on March 1st and then work its way through calendar and gmail through out 2010.

Bottom line? It’s time to upgrade.

There are a couple of trends moving away from the long sales landing page approach.

• The price isn’t mentioned on the sales page. For higher end products, internet marketers have stopped putting the price on the sales page, you don’t find out the price until you click on the “Add to Cart” or “Buy Now” button. This allows the marketer to first build a compelling case for the product before the user rejects the product as too pricey.
• The sales letter is replaced by a video. If you haven’t heard about the explosion of video internet marketing, you have been living under a rock. Most people don’t really read anyway and for close to half of the population the preferred learning style is visual. And people retain more information when there is a mixture of visual and audio, making video a much stronger medium than just text. You can convey a lot more information in a 5 minute video than in a 5 paragraph sales letter.

The recent launch of The Magic Bullet System is a good illustration of both points above. BTW, no affiliate link here. I don’t get anything if you buy this and I haven’t evaluated it as a product.

Right now, unless you are a search and rescue team or have medical supplies, money is what they need the most from you. And quickly. Doesn’t have to be much, just what you can spare.

Here is some places you can donate:

• Clinton Foundation
• American Red Cross
• Mercy Corps
• Oxfam
• Direct Relief International

Thanks to webaddict for his tweet with the haiti 48 hours later link, you’ll just have to look, words are not adequate.

These moments are so wonderful when they happen that sometimes they blind us to how to win the game. Which is … consistency and high percentages of not necessarily winners but keeping the ball in play.

Consistency is what we all need to do more with in our jobs and our businesses. Would you rather have a site that was a flash in the plan and earned a lot of money in one week or the site that is a steady if not spectacular earner for years?

Think of this in the context of PPC vs. SEO as a SEM strategy. While arguments can be made to the contrary, PPC in general is better for quick results and SEO is slower and works best with consistent efforts. Which one do you prefer?

It’s no wonder that Facebook attracted 25 million new users in the last month alone.

Facebook, a phenomenon that started with the under 35 set, is maturing in both demographics and uses. Facebook was born in a Harvard dorm room in 2004 and originally only for college students. A year later, high school students were allowed in. In 2006, Facebook got rid of its gatekeepers and began letting anyone in.

Over the next year, it grew from 12 million to 50 million users. Then it launched versions in Spanish, French and German. Today about 175 million people are on Facebook.

While most Facebook users are younger than 35, so many older people are now using it that the portion of the college-age users has dropped to 41 percent. Robert Scoble, a blogging and social media technology expert, says eventually Facebook’s popularity will slow — but not any time soon. And it remains hip with the college crowd.

“Having older people there doesn’t affect your experience,” Scoble said. “It’s segregated. You have your friends and your whole experience there is based on who your friends are.”

Of course some overlap occurs. Parents are finding that Facebook is a good way to keep in touch with their college age children who previously forgot to email or call. Of course some young people in college may be a little wary of their parents keeping tabs on them that way, however most just remove a few pictures that the parents might not appreciate.

The older crowd is here to stay on Facebook, in fact UC Davis is examining the “effectiveness of social media used by the higher education sector to communicate philanthropic news”. In other words, UC Davis thinks there might be enough people on Facebook with enough cash to help fund higher education. Since Barack Obama’s successful presidential campaign, which heavily leveraged social media, it has become acceptable to run social media fundraising campaigns. Entrepreneurs are following suit and are using it to reinforce and create new business connections.

Think about the essence of a marketing campaign. You decide on your messaging and branding and with certain key activities you build momentum and buzz towards your event. This translates well to Facebook. Your Info tab .. or even better your business page, informs everyone about and even brands you and your business and your Facebook activity builds momentum towards the event you are marketing. It’s a natural fit.

Whether you plan to use the internet purely for personal reasons or you are looking for professional networking, Facebook will open doors you didn’t even know were there.

An Alexa rank is a calculated measure of unique visitors and pageviews on a given web site. This may be counter intuitive but the lower your Alexa rank the better. Currently google.com has an Alexa rank of 1,and Facebook 4. Now you will find all sorts of debate online on how accurate the rank is, but everyone agrees it is useful as a rough measure of a website’s traffic. If you haven’t already you should compare your Alexa rank to your competitor’s website. Is yours higher? Then you have some work to do.

Google page rank, which ranges from 1 – 10, 10 being the highest measure, indicates how important and relevant Google thinks your site is. yahoo.com is a PR 9. cnn.com has a PR 10.

There are a number of ways to find out Alexa and Google page ranks. For Alexa, you can go directly to alexa.com and look a particular site up. There are also a number of plugins you can install directly into your Firefox browser (if you needed a reason to switch from using Internet Explorer, these tools might just convince you). If you like simple and unobtrusive check out searchstatus. For a more full featured tool you’ll want to download the SEO toolbar from seobook.com.

Check out searchstatus’s icon for options next to the PageRank and Alexa measures. It will, among other things, give you a list of meta tags for a site. SeoBook’s tool bar installs underneath your toolbar bookmarks and presents backlink information at a glance.

Called “backlinks” in SEO (search engine optimization) terminology, these links occur whenever another site has a link back to yours. While I am oversimplifying matters, you could do worse than encourage other sites to link to your website.

Part of a chamber of commerce? Have you spoken at an event? Make sure that any online presence these events have identify you and your business and most importantly: have a link to your web site. You will be on your way to participating in one of the largest popularity contests there is in the business world.

Do you participate in social networking? Do you comment on other blogs? Participate in online groups such as google groups? In all these activities, make sure that your signature in your post includes a link to your website.

Of course you do not want to just post your business name and website without adding some value. While yes any backlink helps, you also want your link to invite people to click on it. That can be even more valuable than just improving your position in the SERPs, especially if you are in a competitive niche. Also many bloggers moderate (review) comments to their blog and will not post your comment unless it provides some value to the conversation.

Many blogging sites tag backlinks as “no follow”. This tells google not to “follow” the link and not count it. However there is some debate on whether google truly ignores it. Yes, it is not as valuable as a “followed” link but some SEOs believe that it still counts in google’s algorithms. And if you want to find blogs that allow “follows” just search in google for “dofollow blogs”.

How do you find out how many backlinks your site has?  In a post I will showcase some tools you install into your Firefox browser (sorry IE users) that will give you this and other SEO information, but for now you can follow the below:  Ready?

1. Go to http://search.yahoo.com
2. Type in the following, replacing “yoursite.com” with your website URL: linkdomain:http://www.yoursite.com -site:www.yoursite.com
3. On the page that appears, look at the upper right for the number of results this query returns
4. This is the number of backlinks your site has … take some time and see who has linked to you. Can you encourage more of them?

The reason for the “-site:www.yoursite.com” part of the query is to remove all internal linking (pages within your site that link to other pages).

As an SEO practitioner I have looked at a number of backlink profiles, some of very large companies. Backlinks can come from interesting places. Google looks very kindly on backlinks that come from educational institutions (.edu) and to a lesser extent the .orgs. I’ve seen very good quality backlinks that come from sponsoring charitable events. One company got quite a bit of mileage from a “cartoon character” shown on TV that the animation industry created many variants of. Viral food for thought.

Here’s another tip. The “anchor text” (the text comprises the clickable link) is important too. Help the folks linking to your site avoid the dreaded “click here” and ask them to use descriptive language (such as “wellness doctor focusing on back injuries”) in the anchor text.

Finally, if your site has no backlinks and no traffic, consider adding a listing in one of the directories. This is a topic worthy of an article on it’s own, but it might be worth paying for a listing in yahoo business directory or best of web. Some directories are free. Look for topical directories that are related to your business. Just keep in mind the tip about focusing on websites that are well regarded by google and stay away from the many “spammy” directories that google ignores. You may also consider approaching a complementary business and asking them to link to you. If you have an interesting blog or articles that might be of interest to their audience, this often occurs naturally, however sometimes it doesn’t hurt to ask.

Link building can be a time consuming activity and many business outsource this work, however it is just another tool in an business’s tool belt and if you keep your eyes open you can opportunistically capitalize on a “backlinking” opportunity as they arise.

Title Tag encircled in red above

But before I did that, I realized I should eat my own dogfood and install the All in One SEO Pack in this wordpress blog. This allows the title tag to be set to something other than the blog post title as well as setting the meta keyword and description tags, eliminating the conflict over choosing a catchy blog post title that is devoid of keywords in favor of a well optimized one.  An action long overdue, especially given that I had installed it on quite a few other blogs already.

However to be honest I have spent very little time on SEO of this blog, the subject matter is frightfully competitive and my SEO efforts are better spent elsewhere.  But it’s just one of those wordpress plug-ins you should just install.

Recently, I got the chance to simultaneously spend time with both and compare them side by side. Here’s my impressions of the initial use of both products.

AWeber is more intuitive. For the initial user, AWeber has a handy wizard that steps you through the initial creation of your list, customizing the initial emails and generating the web form. In GetResponse, where lists are called campaigns, the setup was a little less intuitive, there isn’t that handy step by step wizard. For example, I had a lot of trouble locating the confirmation email (what is sent to your contacts to confirm they want to be on your list) to customize it. I wouldn’t have thought that it would be located under “languages”.

Both have a variety of choices of confirmation email message subjects that allow limited customization. AWeber allows further customization of the subject with manual review. GetResponse does not. Both allow customization of the template, which is good. I recently worked with another autoresponder that did not, which seemed unnecessarily limiting (with imports I consider being able to personalize the confirmation email an important way to remind the contact how you know them).

Regarding the always controversial topic of enforcing double opt-in (or confirmation), both allow you to turn off confirmation if you know where to look. GetResponse, in this cases, is a a little more intuitive and flexible (you can find this under contact settings), you can selectively turn it off for just email subscriptions for example. However in my account turning it off for import subscribers was greyed out, I guess they have had too much trouble with purchased lists. With AWeber the User Interface (menu option: “Confirmed opt-in”) infers you can only turn it off for Web Form Opt-Ins, however I did not confirm this.

Overall both AWeber and GetResponse are decent products and you can’t go significantly wrong with either one.