Actually, it’s not even a contest because the only thing you need to do is to enter your email address here:

AppSumo Dropbox Contest.

You can refer friends to get even more chances to win (yes I did too, thus the link above as well ). Contest ends on October 13th.

I have been using Dropbox myself for a while now but only the free 2gb version and I haven’t found a better cloud solution to keep my files in sync on my different computers and to share those with my colleagues and friends. So getting a 50gb account is definitively a no-brainer.

So what is exactly the google plus user ID and where do you find it?

Your google plus user id is actually the string of numbers you find in your google plus url.

Once logged in your google plus account, click on profile:

You will see in your url bar an address that looks like: https://plus.google.com/u/0/113129296716822549489 (this is my profile by the way )

The long string of numbers at the end is your google plus user id.

When using tracking tools such as Google Analytics, your customer’s last visit before checking out (be it from paid search, organic traffic, social media, email marketing….), is the one getting the credit for the conversion. The problem is, more often than not, the whole marketing funnel prior to this purchase is longer and more complicated than that.

Your customer’s purchasing behavior is indeed, often the results of a combination of some, if not most of the above traffic leads.

For instance, Facebook and Paid Search will be responsible for branding your site (putting the name of your site and your products in front of the customer’s eyes).. Now, the customer knows you. Couple of days/weeks after he will make a search in Google for a product he is now ready to buy. In the organic results, your site will appear and because he already knows of you he will click on your listing, go to your site and, ase he was already pre-sold by your other marketing messages (ads, facebook), finally decides to make the purchase.

For this reason, Google is introducing Multi-Channel Funnels in Analytics. This new tool (not yet released to the public) will show you exactly what marketing funnel has lead to a conversion. This powerful free tool will help you have a better understanding of your customer’s purchasing behavior and allow you to Optimize your Marketing Funnel.

It does make sense when you believe in all this evil-google stuff some people believe in.

In my own experience I haven’t seen any push in the rankings on my site running adsense versus sites not running them and using other affiliate banners and such. Couple of weeks ago Google released this video below to put an end to the myth:

So now it’s up to you if you want to believe Google or not. I have made the decision to trust them on that specific issue (does not mean I trust them about everything though ) and believe that a website won’t be given a higher rank in the natural listings when using Google Adsense.

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Click here to have access to these incredible deals:

But that’s the naysayers.  For them, the only way to secure a Number 1 position for your website in Google and all the other search engines is by stealthily scheming their way up into the rankings.

Notice we say schemes.  The Internet is full of that.  In fact, a lot of what happens in the Internet is all rigged.  Just machinations and manipulations designed to launch a website into stratosphere, haul in a lot of visitors and traffic, and get us clicking.

Google Hates Unethical

Remember Google’s motto?  Do no evil.  They believe that.  That’s why they put it into action too.  They’ve even released  articles about their recommended best SEO practices.  Best meaning ethical and legitimate.

And that’s why machinations and manipulations just won’t work.  All the “black hat” techniques that the so-called search engine optimization specialists like to employ have already been sniffed out by Google, and Yahoo, and the other search engines.  We think we can outwit them, but the consequences for you and your website (especially one with an already established domain name) won’t be worth it.

Black vs. White

Hidden text, keyword cramming, nonsensical text writing, sabotaging a rival company, spamdexing and using redirects with multiple domains, shadow or ghost pages, link farm directories—these black hat tactics are so year 2000.  A decade since and people are still doing these.

Google hates unethical.  What do they like?  The white hat strategies of course.  Honest to goodness ethical search engine optimization.  There.  They readily mixed.  And here’s how.

A Better Kind of SEO

Google still values content.  Content is chief, content is boss, content is king.  CONTENT is capital.  That’s what really drives in the visitors and assures your website’s presence in the search engines.  Good useful content, not a bunch of keywords stuffed here and there.  Good useful content aimed at human readers, not at the search engines.

And trust me: this is way better than cramming your website with nonsensical keywords.  Not only does it promote a bad image for your company (yes readers are now discerning), it also puts your website in hot water.

In fact, Google can penalize your website should you persist in using the above-mentioned black hat tactics.  You’ll lose visitors, you’ll lose online visibility, and you lose those potential bucks.  You don’t want that to happen.

Die, Spam, Die

So enough with spam.

Enough with search engine optimization companies guaranteeing your website’s Number 1 rank.  No such thing.  At best, search engine optimization can influence that ranking, not control it.  And it’s always up to Google.

Do no evil.  Instead, be ethical in your search engine optimization, and you’ll reap the benefits in due time.

Make Google happy, and you make the Web a better place, if only one honest useful website at a time.

P.S:

Content is King.  We can never overemphasize that.

• You want to keep the number of competing sites for the keyword phrase under 100 000
• You want to keep the number of competing sites with the phrase keyword in the title under 10 000
• Avoid keywords with amazon, youtube or similar authority sites pages  in the top 3
• Avoid keywords with keywords rich domains in the top 3. For example, If your keyword is “dog food” and if you have a domain like dogfood.com
  on the first page, then you must understand that a you might need lot of backlinks to beat it.

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I’m not sure when it expires, but I just tried it and it works!

For those of you who would like to buy a domain name on Godaddy.com I would strongly suggest using those two discount coupons:

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I know I often need to find out this information when adding Adsense on my sites. Indeed, it is always better to match your adsense ads border with the font of your theme. And because I am somewhat color blind it was a pain the neck to get the information in the html code of my site.

Introducing Colorzilla, a firefox plugin that will give you a little eyedropper in the status bar of your browser. When you’re on a page where you need to guess the html color code, just click on the icon and it will give you a little crosshair that you can point on any part of the site and there you go: the html color code of the part you clicked on will appear in the status bar.

Very neat and did I mention it is FREE!!

Get it here now.

What are the changes within WP 3.0?

• There is a new theme
• You have new menu and post customization
• WP MU is now merged to facilitate multiple WP blogs
• There is some in built short linking

You can have a quick look at the video below for a quick introduction to WordPress 3.0