Facebook Growing Fast In Germany, Italy

Central Europe loves Facebook. Or parts of it do, anyway. Although the social network didn't really start releasing versions in different languages until March of this year, new reports put Facebook's growth in two countries in the triple digits.

Germany stands as the less remarkable example. Sahana Mysore notes that Facebook's user base in this nation is about 18.5 percent of the one Xing's attracted, and only about 9.2 percent of leading social network StudiVZ's audience. Still, Alexa marks Facebook as Germany's 13th most popular site, and Mysore writes, "During 2008, the number of Facebook users in Germany grew 144% from just under 500,000 to nearly 1.2 million." Not bad.

Then, with Italy, the stats get almost jaw-dropping. She continues, "In the past five months alone, Facebook has grown an incredible 763% from 572k users in July to 4.9 million today!"

Mysore says that 8.5% of the Italian population is on Facebook, and according to Alexa, it's the country's third most trafficked site. Since only Google and Windows Live are ahead of Facebook, this pretty much counts as a complete win in the social networking arena.

Onlookers may criticize Mark Zuckerberg's choice to worry about growth instead of revenue, but he at least seems to be succeeding in this respect.

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Blogging To Build Buzz About Your Business

While blogs are now considered mainstream with more businesses using them to get their message out, just how are they building buzz online? The SES session "Blogging For Business" has the answers.

(Coverage of SES Chicago continues at WebProNews Videos. Keep an eye on WebProNews for more notes and videos from the event this week.)

Jennifer Evans Laycock, Editor-in Chief, Search Engine Guide, said everyone is blogging. "The recession we are in make blogs essential." Blogs are cost efficient especially if you have a tight marketing budget.

Reasons for blogs:

Showcase your personality

Create a feedback cycle

Build a loyal community

Create an emotional investment

Increase your credibility


Laycock said," The value of your blog is the conversation that takes place in your comments."

Leave it open-ended and integrate media into your blog. Engage with your readers-comment back.

People don't trust ads but there is trust online with friends and strangers who have credibility.

Blogging is as effective as word-of-mouth.

Easy blog marketing:

Comment early (gets attention of other readers)

Frequent comments

Spread comments

Comment late (to get attention of the blogger)

Pitching a blogger

Use real language

Respect their time
Develop a friendship

"Whatever industry you're in, start building relationships now in the community because you may need to pitch something in the future," Laycock said.

Before pitching a blogger:

Address them by name

Make sure you have the correct personal email address

Spell check

Send individual emails

Be transparent

Familiarize yourself with their readers

Make sure your pitch is relevant to their readers

Proofread

Bill Balderaz, President and Founder of Webbed Marketing, said blogging is good for businesses that are fast, flexible, can be experimental, and are working with limited budgets.

Engage in customer conversations and respond to negative comments.

"Blogging is less expensive per impression and has measurement capability," Balderaz said.

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YouTube Grabs 100 Million Video Viewers

U.S. Internet users watched 13.5 billion online videos during October, marking a 45 percent increase compared to a year ago, according to comScore Video Metrix.

In October, Google sites once again dominated, ranking as the top U.S. video property with 5.3 billion videos viewed (representing a 40 percent share of all video viewed) with YouTube accounting for more than 98 percent of all videos viewed at the property.

Fox Interactive Media ranked a distant second with 520 million videos (3.8%), followed by Yahoo sites with 363 million (2.7%), and Viacom Digital with 305 million (2.3 %).

Microsoft sites rounded out the top five with 286 million videos viewed (2.1%) Hulu, the joint venture between NBC and Fox featuring full-length broadcast TV programs, took the sixth spot with 235 million videos viewed (1.7%).

More than 147 million U.S. Internet users watched an average of 92 videos per viewer in October. Google sites attracted a record 100 million online video viewers, or more than two out of every three Internet users who watched video during the month.

Fox Interactive took the second spot with 60.8 million viewers, followed by Yahoo sites (45.2 million), Microsoft sites (30.7 million) and Viacom Digital with 25.6 million

More than three quarters (77%) of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video. The average online video viewer watched 274 minutes of video.

There were 99.5 million viewers that watched 5.3 billion videos on YouTube (53.2 videos per viewer) and 51.2 million who watched 520 million videos on MySpace (8 videos per viewer).

The length of the average online video was 3 minutes. The duration of the average online video viewed at Hulu was 11.6 minutes, higher than any other video property in the top ten.

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20 Ways To Increase Your Alexa Rank

Here is a collection of methods you can use to boost your Alexa Rank. Most of these tips are derived from several fellow webmasters I know who claimed to have derived positive results through their experiments with the Alexa Rankings.

Some of the other tips were derived articles and sources, which I have duly referenced at the end of this post.

Do these tips work? According to some, yes they definitely do work. But do note that most of them require active effort of some sort and hence, they will work as long as long as you are consistently performing specific actions.

To increase your Alexa rank in the long run, I would highly recommended that one focus on developing quality content which attracts and maintains a large audience instead of purely focusing on artificially increasing your Alexa Rank.

Great link-worthy content will leads to an natural increase in site traffic and is an excellent way to passively increase your Alexa rank.

It is important to emphasize that you should devote most of your efforts in growing your site audience alongside integrated implementation of any of the following tips below.

1. Install the Alexa toolbar or Firefox’s SearchStatus extension and set your blog as your homepage. This is the most basic step.
2. Put up an Alexa rank widget on your website. I did this a few days ago and receive a fair amount of clicks every day. According to some, each click counts as a visit even if the toolbar is not used by the visitor.
3. Encourage others to use the Alexa toolbar. This includes friends, fellow webmasters as well as site visitors/blog readers. Be sure to link to Alexa’s full explanation of their toolbar and tracking system so your readers know what installing the toolbar or extension entails.
4. Work in an Office or own a company? Get the Alexa toolbar or SS Firefox extension installed on all computers and set your website as the homepage for all browsers. Perhaps it will be useful to note that this may work only when dynamic or different IPs are used.
5. Get friends to review and rate your Alexa website profile. Not entirely sure of its impact on rankings but it might help in some way.
6. Write or Blog about Alexa. Webmaster and bloggers love to hear about ways to increase their Alexa rank. They’ll link to you and send you targeted traffic (i.e. visitors with the toolbar already installed). This gradually has effects on your Alexa ranking.
7. Flaunt your URL in webmaster forums. Webmasters usually have the toolbar installed. You’ll get webmasters to visit your website and offer useful feedback. It’s also a good way to give back to the community if you have useful articles to share with others.
8. Write content that is related to webmasters. This can fall in the category of domaining and SEO, two fields in which most webmasters will have the Alexa toolbar installed. Promote your content on social networking websites and webmaster forums.
9. Use Alexa redirects on your website URL. Try this: http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?www.doshdosh.com . Replace doshdosh.com with the URL for your website. Leave this redirected URL in blog comments as well as forum signatures. This redirect will count a unique IP address once a day so clicking it multiple times won’t help. There is no official proof that redirects positively benefit your Alexa Rank, so use with caution.
10. Post in Asian social networking websites or forums. Some webmasters have suggested that East Asian web users are big Alexa toolbar fans, judging by the presence of several Asia-based websites in the Alexa Top 500. I suggest trying this only if you have the time or capacity to do so.
11. Create a webmaster tools section on your website. This is a magnet for webmasters who will often revisit your website to gain access to the tools. Aaron Wall’s webpage on SEOTools is a very good example.
12. Get Dugg or Stumbled. This usually brings massive numbers of visitors to your website and the sheer amount will have a positive impact on your Alexa Rank. Naturally, you’ll need to develop link worthy material.
13. Use PayperClick Campaigns. Buying advertisements on search engines such as Google or Exact Seek will help bring in Traffic. Doubly useful when your ad is highly relevant to webmasters.
14. Create an Alexa category on your blog and use it to include any articles or news about Alexa. This acts as an easily accessible resource for webmasters or casual search visitors while helping you rank in the search engines.
15. Optimize your popular posts. Got a popular post that consistently receives traffic from the search engines? Include a widget/graph at the bottom of the post, link to your Alexa post or use Alexa redirection on your internal URLs.
16. Buy banners and links for traffic from webmaster forums and websites. A prominent and well displayed ad will drive lots of webmaster traffic to your website, which can significantly boost your rank.
17. Hire forum posters to pimp your website. Either buy signatures in webmaster forums or promote specific articles or material in your website on a regular basis. You can easily find posters for hire in Digital Point and other webmaster forums.
18. Pay Cybercafe owners to install the Alexa toolbar and set your website as the homepage for all their computers. This might be difficult to arrange and isn’t really a viable solution for most. I’m keeping this one in because some have suggested that it does work.
19. Use MySpace . This is a little shady so I don’t recommended it unless you’re really interested in artificially inflating your Alexa Rank. Use visually attractive pictures or banners and link them to your redirected Alexa URL. This will be most effective if your website has content that is actually relevant to the MySpace Crowd.
20. Try Alexa auto-surfs. Do they work? Maybe for brand new sites. I think they are mostly suitable for new websites with a very poor Alexa rank. Note that there be problems when you try to use auto surfs alongside contextual ads like Adsense. They aren’t also long term solutions to improving your Alexa Rank so I suggest using with caution.

Source

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Alexa The Web Information

About Alexa Internet
Founded in April 1996, Alexa Internet grew out of a vision of Web navigation that is intelligent and constantly improving with the participation of its users. Along the way Alexa has developed an installed based of millions of toolbars, one of the largest Web crawls and an infrastructure to process and serve massive amounts of data.

For users of Alexa's Toolbar and web site this has resulted in products that have revolutionized Web navigation and intelligence. For developers this has resulted in a set of tools unprecedented in scope allowing whole new services to be created on the Alexa data and platform.

Alexa Products and Services
Alexa Toolbar
Alexa could not exist without the participation of the Alexa Toolbar community. Each member of the community, in addition to getting a useful tool, is giving back. Simply by using the toolbar each member contributes valuable information about the web, how it is used, what is important and what is not. This information is returned to the community as Related Links, Traffic Rankings and more.

Want to help? Install the Alexa Toolbar, and tell your friends. The more people use Alexa, the more useful it will be.

Alexa.com
Alexa's Web site is built on the notion that timely and relevant information is essential to a vital web experience.

Alexa Search and Browse - Alexa has taken search and browse to the next level and made it more complete, more relevant and more useful. Some key features include thumbnail images of sites and traffic information both of which help you to make quick decisions about which results are useful to you and which are not. Try Search and Browse.

Alexa Site Information - Alexa has built an unparalleled database of information about sites that includes statistics, related links and more. All of this information can be found on Alexa's Site Overview pages, Traffic Detail pages and Related Links pages. To access these pages, simply type the URL of any site into the Alexa Search box.

Alexa Top Sites - Alexa has lists of Top Sites available by country, language or in a category. You can download a CSV file of up to 100,000 global top sites that includes estimates of monthly visitors and pageviews.

Webmaster Services
Alexa has created a series of tools specifically for web site owners. These tools can help to drive traffic, make money, find broken links and more!

Alexa Web Services
In November 2005, Alexa released Alexa Web Information Service V 1.0 on the Amazon.com Web Services platform. Gain access to Alexa's processed information about the Web, including traffic details, related links and more.

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