Yahoo readies iTunes rival for launch

As previously reported, Yahoo has been working on the project along with digital-music wholesaler MusicNet since before the $160 million purchase of rival music company Musicmatch. Sources familiar with Yahoo's plans said the new store and software had been scheduled to debut early this week but that the launch date was pushed back.

Representatives from Yahoo and MusicNet declined to comment for this story.

Yahoo's full-fledged entry into the digital-music retail business could help shift a market that has remained tilted strongly in Apple's favor. Yahoo has already built a large and loyal following for its streaming-music and video service, and could parlay that into music sales.

Indeed, the company's Launchcast radio services was the highest-rated Webcasting service online in January, according to ratings firm Arbitron and ComScore Media Metrix, attracting more than 2.2 million people that month.

However, Apple's dominance has been challenged by other giants, ranging from Sony to Microsoft, without substantially decreasing the iPod maker's market share. Last week, Apple said it had sold more than 300 million songs through its iTunes store since its launch.

"You have to look at how to create a linkage between a device and the online service," GartnerG2 analyst Mike McGuire said. "But given Yahoo's traffic and their very active communities, the potential (for success) is there."

Yahoo has begun to streamline its music and multimedia properties over the past few months, changing the name of its Launch site to Yahoo Music and consolidating its entertainment businesses in a Santa Monica, Calif., office near Hollywood.

The new MusicNet-powered music service will be integrated into Yahoo's existing infrastructure, possibly including features such as links to its popular instant-messaging program, sources said. MusicNet's technology allows companies to offer subscription services or per-song downloads, and is used by Virgin Digital, America Online and others.

Sources close to the company said the new service is likely to launch by the end of the month.

Google Caffeine - A new Search Technique for Next Generation

Google is turning to the public (or rather, web developers) for help testing its next-generation search infrastructure, code-named "Caffeine." The changes have to do with the way Google crawls the web and indexes content, so you shouldn't notice any changes int he search engine interface.

In order to try out the new version, visit www2.sandbox.google.com, and start searching. You can share feedback with Google by hitting the "Dissatisfied? Help us improve" box at the bottom of the page and sending a message with the word "caffeine" in it.

Overall, the search results look pretty similar, but there are a few minor changes. Some items may be ordered a little differently, while the text descriptions of some pages look different.

If you aren't particularly interested in testing the new technology to help Google out, here's another reason to give it a try: As far as I can tell, there are no ads on the Caffeine interface. I've conducted a few dozen searches, and so far I haven't seen a single sponsored result. Of course, that'll change by the time the new code is integrated into Google's main product. But it's nice while it lasts.

What other changes have you spotted? Let us know in the comments.

Why Is SEO So Popular?

SEO is without a doubt, the most popular of all the online marketing tactics. Is it the best? That’s a matter of personal preference and what you’re looking for, but it is the most popular. In fact, SEO has become so popular that its name has become synonymous with internet searching (have you ever SEO you website?).

There are a couple of reasons that SEO has risen to the top of online marketing.

SEO should be performed by a specialist who is ethical and has experience in the optimizing website before. A popular SEO consultant who have been constantly delivering innovative techniques for SEO.

SEO Delivers
SEO delivers a good ROI. When you do optimize a website, the search engine scours the web and brings back what it determines is relevant, content rich, websites. Most of the time, search engines brings back something you can use. It has a massive database of sites, so it gives you a lot of sites to choose from, and does it extremely fast.

How to Start PPC Campaign?

As we’ve briefly discussed before, there are many advantages of promoting your business with Pay per Click advertising; but at the same time, there are also some catches that PPC newbies should look out for.

How PPC works is that the advertisers have to setup an account with Google and/or Yahoo first. Once the accounts are ready, the advertisers then can start building up their Campaigns, Ad Groups, Ads, keywords, and so on. The account managers at Google and Yahoo then will look after the accounts and make sure everything works (no violations of guidelines, ads are showing up, etc).

At this point, a lot of advertisers will assume that everything is done, and they can just sit at home waiting to count their cash. Well, that maybe the case in fairytale wonderlands, but definitely not in the world we live in. The reality is, a lot of times the teams at Google and Yahoo get so overwhelmed by their work and they lost tracks of what have been done and what hasn’t, resulting in a lot of updates being not approved (because no one had reviewed them).

This is more of a problem with Google than with Yahoo. With Yahoo’s system, if the newly submitted updates are still under review, you can see their status being editorial pending”. If it’s been ten days since you first submitted your update and the status is still editorial pending”, you know someone has forgotten to do their job. Just send an email to your account manager at Yahoo and state what the problem is and the problem should be sorted out in a day or two.

Google is somewhat different. Once you’ve submitted an update to Google, you will immediately see its status being reactive”, same as all the existing ads, keywords, ad groups you have. So if after ten days and you are still getting no impressions from the new update, and you intuitively check to see if the update is actually running, and when all you can see is it being reactive”, you will just think oleo, I guess no one has searched for it yet”, when in fact, Google’s just forgot to review them.

So monitor your accounts frequently, and the moment you sense something’s weird, fire an email to your account manager. Don’t be shy to send multiple emails in a day if that’s what it takes to get things fixed.

Summary: As we’ve briefly discussed before, there are many advantages of promoting your business with Pay per Click advertising; but at the same time, there are also some catches that PPC newbies should look out for.