Nextwave Media - Creative Internet Solutions

In a revamp of its industry-leading Internet search engine, Google Inc. today introduced a “universal search” application that blends video, images, news, books, and local search results.

People searching for “I Have A Dream,” for example, will not only be able to get information about the Rev. Martin Luther King’s famous civil rights speech, but also view a video clip of the speech and scroll through books about King’s speech on Google’s search pages.

“Let’s face it,” said Marissa Mayer, the Google vice president for search results and user experience, when people type ‘big wheels races’ into Google, they want to see some action… They want so see some crashes.”

The new universal search application, meant to drive more traffic to Google products like its YouTube video clips, is the most radical of several innovations rolled out at a press briefing at the company’s headquarters.

As bands move from CDs to digital downloads, they need something to hook potential customers at concerts, instead of hoping they’ll download later. DiscRevolt comes to the rescue with collectible cards.

Bridging the divide between digital and physical, DiscRevolt provides a tangible solution for selling digital media. Artists upload songs to DiscRevolt’s website and design their own artwork for a plastic download card. The cards are then printed by DiscRevolt with a unique redemption code on the back. Artists sell the cards to fans at live shows, and the fans can then download songs or albums from the artist’s online page.

It’s the question that everyone wants to know. How much do I need to pay to get a website developed? What is a good deal? The answer is actually quite simple, but most people don’t realize it until it’s too late.

Let’s say that company ABC, Inc. wants a website developed to sell the Widgets that they make. Each Widget sells for about $50 and they generally sell 50 Widgets a day. That’s $2,500 in revenue every day or about $75,000 every month.

ABC Pty Ltd. decides to go to two different web design companies to get quotes. Each company comes back with a price. Web Company A says they can build the site with full ecommerce capability for just $300. Web Company B says they can build the site for $6,000. Which is the better deal? Web Company A, right? Well, maybe not.

Tips to keep in mind:

1. Put at least the excerpt of your latest blog post on your website home page. It only takes a little code to display. This will help to keep you home page more dynamic, and puts the blog front and center for your customers and search engines to find.

2. Make sure to install the blog database tables into the same database as your ecommerce site tables. This makes it easy to display the blog posts in the ecomm site pages, and store information in the blog pages.

3. Put your product category list in the side menu of your blog. It makes your products stand out, and should result in more clickthroughs into the store portion of the site (we are currently testing this idea, and will update later with our results)

While new, advertising on video hosting sites is proving to be a valid type of advertising. Quite a few webmasters are are uploading videos to the three major video hosting sites (youtube, myspace, and google video) with branding of their website in hopes of receiving targeted traffic.
If uploading a video for advertising purposes, here are some points to keep in mind:

* Use an original / unique video
* Fade in with your URL, keep the URL present during the video, and then fade out (of the video) showing your URL
* Upload the video to a number of video sharing sites
* Socially bookmark the video on each site
* Include a live link in the sidebar or comments if possible

If you use the above list as a base, expect a low but still worthwhile conversion rate. Also, copyright considerations need to be considered. For the best conversion, a unique (but funny, or extreme, or viral) video should be created. Stay tuned for a case study.