Exponental growth rate of Facebook usage all over the world led many developers create applications for Facebook, and for other social sites. VC’s are also interested in good applications. I have written about How to Make Money with Your Facebook applications couple of weeks ago.

Main problem developers facing was the compatibility issue between social sites. If you have an application project for Facebook Platform, first you have to learn the Facebook Markup Language, but if you want to implement this application to another social site, you need to rewrite the code for the other site’s markup language. This process is very time consuming for developers.

To help the application developers, Google has launched OpenSocial this month.

What is Google Open Social?

OpenSocial is a set of three common APIs, defined by Google with input from partners, that allow developers to access core functions and information at social networks:

• Profile Information (user data)
• Friends Information (social graph)
• Activities (things that happen, News Feed type stuff)

Social sites which participate in this project agree to accept the API calls and return appropriate data. Google won’t try to provide universal API coverage for special use cases, instead focusing on the most common uses. Specialized functions/data can be accessed from the hosts directly via their own APIs.

Unlike Facebook, OpenSocial does not have its own markup language. Instead, developers use normal javascript and html (and can embed Flash elements). The benefit of the Google approach is that developers can use much of their existing front end code and simply tailor it slightly for OpenSocial, so creating applications is even easier than on Facebook.

Applications can have full functionality on profile and/or canvas pages, subject to the specific rules of each host. Facebook, by contrast, limits most functionality to the canvas page, allowing a widget on the profile page with limited features.

Marc Andreessen, founder of Ning, has a blog post with some nice set of screencast and screenshots about OpenSocial.

Google OpenSocial will definitely start a new way of application development for social networking sites. I will be checking the new applications written on Google OpenSocial platform, and will write about some of them in the future.

Sources:
1) Google OpenSocial
2) TechCrunch

Ali G invents ice cream glove and goes out to shop for VC funding. This is hillarious, and a must to watch.

Look at Donal Trump’s face, he was kind of pissed with the whole situation.

You have the great idea for a Web 2.0 Startup project. It might be the next Facebook. But you don’t have the experience to properly put a business plan, sales pitch for VC’s, or any development experience. You believe in your idea so much, you have the entrepreneur spirit, but no experience. What would you do?

Duncan Riley from TechCrunch introduces us to the company which will answer your questions; Digital Telepathy. If you are an experienced entrepreneur in Web 2.0 field, you might not need a helping hand even though Digital Telepathy offers services for existing startups looking for advice on taking their business to the next level, but if you are new to all Web 2.0 thing, this might be a great choice for you.

Duncan Riley explains the 3 “Biz in a Box” Products which Digital Telepathy offers;

The concept is simple: Digital Telepathy offers three design my business options with varying service levels based on the length of each plan. The 15 day plan provides a wannabe startup with market research, strategic alignment, scalable revenue model, instruction manual for project completion and a concept summary delivered as a “Biz in a Box”. The 45 day plan offers (in addition to the 15 day plan) “initial buzz building,” and a range of design services including basic prototyping, usability testing, blueprints, concept mapping and other design services. The 90 day plan adds development services including full scale back-end development for beta release, front end development, private beta invites, feature development and more.

Prices range from $15,000 through to $250,000. Each project has its unique needs, therefore you will need to contact them for a quota. Below is a comparison chart for Digital Telepathy’s services:

Check out the projects they have already done. Their work looks promising.

Facebook had flyers ad networks called; Facebook Flyers Basic (CPM Flyers Ad Network within Facebook), and Facebook Flyers Pro (CPC Flyers Ad Network within Facebook). Many blogs, especially affiliate blogs had posts about these services such as “how to cheat the $50/day limit”, “affiliate link banning”, etc.

Facebook will be discontinuing the flyers services and started an ad service called Facebook Ads or Facebook Social Ads.

Click to Enlarge the Image for Full Preview Page

Here’s the explanation of Facebook Social Ads from Facebook:

Facebook Social Ads
Social Ads leverage the power of Facebook News Feed by serving relevant stories about friends engaging with your business.

New Facebook Ads also has service called “Facebook Pages”. Basically you can create a Facebook page for a company, product, artist, etc. and promote it. Here’s an example of a Facebook Page. Creating a Facebook page is free, you pay to promote it.

Here’s the description of Facebook Pages from Facebook:

Establish an interactive presence on Facebook.
Every Facebook Page is a unique experience where users can become more deeply connected with your business or brand. Users can express their support by adding themselves as a fan, writing on your Wall, uploading photos, and joining other fans in discussion groups. You can send updates to your fans regularly — or just with special news or offers. Add applications to your Page and engage your users with videos, reviews, flash content, and more. Creating a Facebook Page is easy, free, and great for all types of businesses.

If you are an affiliate marketer or online marketing professional, Facebook Ads might a great place to run highly targeted ad campaigns.

I’ll be creating a test campaign and blog about it with details and screenshots to help the beginners.

Have you ever thought about starting a company within 1 weekend from concept to completion? Is it even possible?

If you try to do it yourself, it might be little hard, but a group of highly talented and motivated people might succeed. They are actually doing it.

Founded in 2007 by Andrew Hyde, Startup Weekend is a concept of a conference focusing on learning by creating.

It is free to participate, and founders receive equal shares of founder stock of the company they create. 5% of each company created goes towards Startup Weekend.

It is so crazy, but I love the idea. I have no idea if these startups will live long, but who cares? It’s the idea of learning while you are doing it. You get to read so many case studies at school, at Startup Weekend, you will be in the case study. It never gets better than this.

Startup Weekend already got some national media coverage, and I’m sure will get much more.

Some of the news mentioning Startup Weekend:

• Building a Community, Byte by Byte by WashingtonPost
• 3 Days to Reality by The Boston Globe
• 70 Founders Create Company In One Weekend by TechCrunch.com

A picture from Atlanta Startup Weekend where Skribit.com was born.

Scheduled Future Weekends

• San Francisco (November 16-18)
• London (November 30- Dec 2)
• Dublin (December 7-9)
• Los Angeles (December 14-16)

If you live in one of these cities, and have a passion about entrepreneurship, you HAVE to attend the Startup Weekend in your city.

Big THUMBS UP for this brilliant idea ; Startup Weekend.

We watch so many interviews of tech startups from Silicon Valley and CA. Finally, there’s a site for New Yorkers which will only interview New York Tech Startups, and it is called nextNYers. Being an entrepreneur living in NYC, this makes me happy.

About nextNYers
The hottest up-and-coming technology, new media and Web 2.0 companies are profiled on nextNYers: the new weekly web series that tells you which companies in the New York City area should be on your radar through interviews with their top executives.The profiles offer insight into their vision and industry, their competitive landscape and their unique abilities.

nextNYers is in partnership with NY-based tech blog CenterNetworks, which will post each week’s show.

I will be watching the episodes at nextNYers each week, and will write about some of the companies. Time to support local tech companies.

A good credit history always helps in life. When you buy a house, you get better mortgage rates, you want to get a lease for the new BMW, first they will check your credit history. Google started caring about the age of the sites for some time now, as we all know. Google thinks the websites are like good wine. When it gets older, it gets better. Now, the same thing is happening with Google Adwords Quality Score.

Amit from SuperAffiliateMindset had a post yesterday about the affect of the age of your Adwords account to the quality scores you will get for your campaigns. I have figured this out by myself almost a month ago. I was trying a new campaign with a brand new account, and all the quality scores became Poor, and OK after a few hours. When I have paused the campaign and started the same one at my old adwords account, all QS’s went to GREAT right away, and stayed there.

The important question is:

Is the age of your Google Adwords Account only criteria to get great QS?

It’s just like personal credit history, older the better. Let’s compare 2 person’s credit histories. Both have the same credit card for 10 years, but first person pays it all every month before the due date, and the second one is always late on payments, goes over his limit. Who will get a better credit history?

Therefore, there are many factors considered when assigning quality scores for your campaigns. Basically, Google assigns a credit history score for your adwords account. Here are a few factors that I strongly believe are used to determine the quality of a Google Adwords Account:

• Age of the account.
• Your average monthly spending.
• Your average CTR’s (Click Through Rates)
• Number of inactive keywords accountwide
• Number of unapproved ads

For brand new accounts, I don’t believe you will be penalized for a long time before getting great QS’s. It doesn’t make sense to scare new advertisers businesswise.

So, if you want to try/test new campaigns I’d highly recommend using a test account instead of your main account. It might hurt your Google Adwords overall QS’s, and increase your overall cost.

I spent the afternoon visiting Ad Tech NY today. It was overwhelming with so many company booths to visit. I didn’t know there were these many advertising companies in the market.

My goal for this visit was to do some networking, check out the software providers for PPC management softwares, and meet affiliate marketing managers.

Most of the PPC Management softwares were for SEM Companies, but I have found a solution called Search Force which also targets advertisers like myself who manages PPC Campaigns for multiple websites. They were kind enough to do a detailed demo for me. I’m seriously considering this software now.

I have also met the CEO of a company called Hyper Bidder which has a unique ad concept. Basically, it’s an auction ad network where you bid for CPM by choosing specific sites for your campaigns, and your bid gets you the exposure. They have a patent pending technology and their slogan is; “The higher the bid, the more frequent the ad is served.” I’m definitely planning to give them a try.

Even though we are in the industry and we try to follow everything online, sometimes you need to meet the people face to face, and exchange business cards. You will definitely get some new updates from the industry by directly speaking to the company owners, and reps.

Here are the highlights of the Ad Tech NY for me;

• Video, and mobile advertising is becoming huge. There were so many new companies presenting.
• All PPC Management Software Providers use Trellian (The company behind KeywordDiscovery.com) for the keyword data. I have tried Wordtracker, and Wordze. Now it’s time for me to try KeywordDiscovery.
• I did some partnership connections with some email marketing companies which was worth the time I’ve spent.
• A few companies weren’t interested in providing me any info about their products when they’ve figured out I’m not the guy with million dollars a month ad budget. This is something I never get. You pay high rent for these types of shows, and you don’t even want to sell your products?
• I have spoken with some affiliate networks and it was very helpful to decide my future affiliate partnerships. Affiliate companies are the friendliest.

Overall, it was a pretty good experience, and networking for me. If you want to improve yourself and your business, you need to attend the industry related events and shows. You might be surprised how much these events might help.

I have been an eBay Powerseller since 2002. Like many other eBay Powersellers, I have so many stories about eBay and eBay customers. Many of you are tired of hearing these stories, but let me tell it again, eBay used to be so much profitable and fun. Just like any other company which grows too fast, eBay has lost some of the main points in its business model. They started caring less about the problems of the sellers (actually their customers). They have become more and more interested in increasing their quarterly profits.

This path has helped many eBay sellers to start their own websites, and sell through their own sites. By making international sellers job easier to sell at eBay USA, it has become almost impossible to compete for small home based US sellers. But we are talking about selling retail on eBay. I have also written about ebay affiliate marketing before.

I will talk about a different business model for eBay selling. Since eBay has become so big, and there are so many success stories out there, now so many people try to sell on eBay. But they have no clue how to find the real sources to buy. eBay has created a new platform called eBay Reseller Marketplace. You can sell wholesale direct to eBay Powersellers.

What are the advantages of eBay Reseller Marketplace?

• All the prospective customers are current powersellers (pre-qualified).
• You can make money without spending any money from your pocket (I’ll get into this little later).
• Your fees will be much less compared to regular eBay fees.
• You don’t have to deal with many retail customers, and make small profit. You can have large profits per month with dealing a few wholesale customers.
• If you keep your promise, and if your customers like your products, you will be having returning customers. Because they will want to buy more to resell retail.

How to make money at eBay Reseller Marketplace without spending any cash?

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I have recently had a successful email marketing campaign for one of my ecommerce sites. I will share the story of this email marketing campaign as a case study.

The site we have launched the email marketing campaign is an ecommerce site which is 14 months old. We have never done email newsletter or any type of email marketing for this site due to very busy schedule. We had around 14,000 email adresses collected from our customers. So, I thought it was time to start our regular newsletters, and increase our returning customer rates by offering specials through email marketing.

After an extensive research, we had 3 choices of hosted email newsletter programs on the table, and we have decided to go with Aweber. (Read my Aweber Review). Aweber had all the features we needed, plus some extra features such as a great autoresponder system integrated. After we’ve signed up with Aweber, the only down side seemed as the verified opt-in requirement. Yes, our only choice was to have a verified opt-in email list. We couldn’t just email our list of previous customers. We had to send them an email asking if they wanted to be added to our newsletter.

* What is verified opt-in?

Frequently called confirmed opt-in or double opt-in, it is generally defined as sending an email to a new subscriber request to verify that they are the person who made the request before adding them to a mailing list. This is usually accomplished by means of an email message sent to the subscriber to which they must reply, or containing a URL which they must visit, in order to complete the subscription. This prevents others from accidentally or maliciously adding an email address to a mailing list that does not belong to them.

After sending 14,000 emails to our previous customers, only 750 of them opted in the newsletter. I was first shocked and very disappointed with the low return rate. After speaking with a few friends in email marketing field, they have encouraged me with the success rate. Even though we had only 750 people on the list, they were all previous customers, and also were very interested in receiving emails from us. Because we have asked their permission for it.

It has been little less than 24 hours since we’ve sent the newsletter, and I believe we have already great success. Here are the facts:

• Only 6 emails were undeliverable
• 79% open rate (79% of the people who have received the newsletter have opened it)
• Almost 80% of the people who have read the email have clicked a link within the email.
• Already had 20 orders with over $2000 revenue.

We had a very simple design with a short text. We had the company logo, 1 coupon code, 1 short paragraph thank you letter for being a customer, and 3 new product images/links. Short and simple, to the point.
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