With the recent election of Barack Obama, there is going to a new Presidential precedence in using the Interwebz to communicate with the US citizens.

There was no question Obama’s Internet marketing was top notch. He and his team had the most effective marketing of anyone who ever ran for office.

Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr – Barack Obama’s team has and is participating in all of these new mediums.

Even though he will likely have to give up his Blackberry when he gets to the Oval Office, Obama will still be the first president to use a laptop at his desk.

Add to that, Obama will now be giving a weekly address via YouTube. This is obviously a HUGE step in the right direction – not since JFK using TV has a president involved himself in new channels of communication.

With regards to his technology policy, perhaps what is best about the election of Obama is that he is a strong proponent of Net Neutrality, the purposed laws and measures which will keep the Internet open and free for a long time to come.

Obama will even be appointing the first Chief Technology Officer of the US. Hello, change.

Check out this video of Arianna Huffington (Editor in Chief of Huffington Post) interviewing Google CEO, Dr. Eric Schmidt about the underlying potential of the new Internet Presidency.

Hopefully, the US government will be able to be as increasingly transparent as businesses/corporations have become through the use of social media.

Whether you agree with the rest of his policies or not, with Barack Obama in the White House, the Internet wins.

What do you think?

Thanks to Israel Lagares, aka Fat Man Unleashed, for sending me this awesome t-shirt.

Israel started Fat Man Unleashed in May of 2007 – a few months after I started my blog (January of 2007). UBD redesigned Fat Man Unleashed in October of 2007. Back then, FMU had only around 400 RSS subscribers. Today, Fat Man Unleashed has nearly 4000 readers! Talk about an online success story!

Israel recently started a social voting site specifically tailored to the health community called HealthRanker. HealthRanker has received mentions on many top blogs and is quickly becoming an authority in the social media circle.

Congratulations goes to Israel for creating two very popular and highly-trafficked websites! Make sure to check out Fat Man Unleashed and HealthRanker.

P.S. – The UBD Block Ad Plugin is here!

WordPress serves as a great platform for not just blog content, but showcasing a portfolio, an e-commerce store, or even a forum. In the next few months, UBD will be releasing premium WordPress plugins, tools and themes that will help YOU use your blog more effectively.

Our First WordPress Plugin

This Friday (June 13th), UBD will be releasing its first WordPress plugin co-developed with the renowned WordPress developer, Alex King. Alex is one of the original contributing developers to WordPress and has authored many popular WordPress plugins, including ShareThis, Twitter Tools, and Popularity Contest.

We will also be releasing a free theme within the next week from the UBD design contest winner, Phillip van Coller.

Some of you may have remember that when I first started my blog back in January of 2007, I was awarded with a PR5 during my first PR update. Unfortunately, when the Google PageRank slap hit everyone six months ago, I was bumped back down to a PR4.

Today on I read on Courtney Tuttle’s blog (nice blog, Courtney that Google is undergoing its quarterly PageRank update. I decided to verify this for myself by checking a few blogs in my Google toolbar. I am happy to report that my blog jumped back up to a PR5. This is a another nice surprise from Google because less than two months ago, I was awarded with a Google authority listing for my name.

Every blogger can do things to increase the chances of them receiving a higher PageRank update. Almost a year ago, I wrote on article on how to prepare for a PageRank update.

How about you guys? Have you noticed a change in your PageRank? Usually, the update takes a few days to be accurate across all Google data centers.

For more information on this mysterious force of Google, check out this Wikipedia article on PageRank, which interestingly, outranks Google’s page about PageRank.

It seems like everyone these days is now Twittering – the micro blogging platform in which people “follow” each others’ updates via a live, instant message-like chat stream. You will see my recent Twitter updates on the top of the sidebar on the right-hand side of my blog.

I first started Twittering in November of 2007 when UBD attended the Blog World Expo. I used Twitter to keep my readers up to date of what I was doing while we were in Vegas at the expo.

At that time, not many other people were using Twitter and I had less than 10 followers. Now, in the past week, the number of people following me on Twitter has more than tripled!

What accounts for such a rapid increase in the number of Twitter users and followers?

I have no idea! Twitter is simply becoming more viral by the day. Way too many of my homeboys and homegirls are now using Twitter.

About a week ago I told John Chow to get on Twitter, and within a few minutes he was signed up and following me. In the past week, John now has almost 500 people following him on Twitter.

Many people seem to think Twitter is just useless bantering, but I have started to see its benefits. For example, Twitters allows you to:

• Keep up to date with what your friends and colleague are doing
• Be on the cutting edge of breaking news – for example, TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington posts tidbits of upcoming news which have not yet appeared on his site
• Keep you readers updated of your new blog posts using the Twitter Updater WordPress plugin
• Share interesting stories or websites you have found with your followers
• Start conversations with people whom otherwise you may never talk to
• Network and become more well-known within online communities
• Ask questions and receive answers from the people who follow you

I asked John, “Is Twitter just useless chat or do you think it allows you to better keep in touch with your readers?” This was his response:

Twitter is like having one big mega chat room. It can be a huge time waster or a good marketing channel depending on how you go about it. I got on twitter as a marketing move and I’m trying very to keep it from being a time waster. It’s VERY HARD!

I have noticed that as more of the people I know have started twittering, I have become more a more active Twitterer myself. In the past week, for example, I have updated Twitter (a.k.a “Tweeted”) over 70x… Compare that to less than 10x in the previous 5 months.

Writing a quality blog post takes significant time and effort, but with Twitter, you only have 140 characters to post, so no one is expecting a novel. A good “Tweet,” as they are called, may simply be a link to a cool blog post, or a question/answer to a problem a fellow Twitterer is having.

I highly recommend Twitter to anyone who is looking to network within a community and potentially increase new readers for their websites or blogs. I know that I will be using Twitter more over the next few months to stay in contact with my readers and also to network with people. I have even started to receive quite a few “follow” requests from many people local to me in Scottsdale, Arizona.

So, what are you waiting for? Follow me on Twitter!

No joke. Microsoft made an offer of $44.6 billion to acquire Yahoo, thus FINALLY creating a competitor to Google. Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO, publicly released the following letter discussing the merger.

January 31, 2008

Board of Directors
Yahoo! Inc.
701 First Avenue
Sunnyvale, CA 94089
Attention: Roy Bostock, Chairman
Attention: Jerry Yang, Chief Executive Officer

Dear Members of the Board:

I am writing on behalf of the Board of Directors of Microsoft to make a proposal for a business combination of Microsoft and Yahoo!. Under our proposal, Microsoft would acquire all of the outstanding shares of Yahoo! common stock for per share consideration of $31 based on Microsoft’s closing share price on January 31, 2008, payable in the form of $31 in cash or 0.9509 of a share of Microsoft common stock. Microsoft would provide each Yahoo! shareholder with the ability to choose whether to receive the consideration in cash or Microsoft common stock, subject to pro-ration so that in the aggregate one-half of the Yahoo! common shares will be exchanged for shares of Microsoft common stock and one-half of the Yahoo! common shares will be converted into the right to receive cash. Our proposal is not subject to any financing condition.

Our proposal represents a 62% premium above the closing price of Yahoo! common stock of $19.18 on January 31, 2008. The implied premium for the operating assets of the company clearly is considerably greater when adjusted for the minority, non-controlled assets and cash. By whatever financial measure you use – EBITDA, free cash flow, operating cash flow, net income, or analyst target prices – this proposal represents a compelling value realization event for your shareholders.

We believe that Microsoft common stock represents a very attractive investment opportunity for Yahoo!’s shareholders. Microsoft has generated revenue growth of 15%, earnings growth of 26%, and a return on equity of 35% on average for the last three years. Microsoft’s share price has generated shareholder returns of 8% during the last one year period and 28% during the last three year period, significantly outperforming the S&P 500. It is our view that Microsoft has significant potential upside given the continued solid growth in our core businesses, the recent launch of Windows Vista, and other strategic initiatives.

Microsoft’s consistent belief has been that the combination of Microsoft and Yahoo! clearly represents the best way to deliver maximum value to our respective shareholders, as well as create a more efficient and competitive company that would provide greater value and service to our customers. In late 2006 and early 2007, we jointly explored a broad range of ways in which our two companies might work together. These discussions were based on a vision that the online businesses of Microsoft and Yahoo! should be aligned in some way to create a more effective competitor in the online marketplace. We discussed a number of alternatives ranging from commercial partnerships to a merger proposal, which you rejected. While a commercial partnership may have made sense at one time, Microsoft believes that the only alternative now is the combination of Microsoft and Yahoo! that we are proposing.

In February 2007, I received a letter from your Chairman indicating the view of the Yahoo! Board that “now is not the right time from the perspective of our shareholders to enter into discussions regarding an acquisition transaction.” According to that letter, the principal reason for this view was the Yahoo! Board’s confidence in the “potential upside” if management successfully executed on a reformulated strategy based on certain operational initiatives, such as Project Panama, and a significant organizational realignment. A year has gone by, and the competitive situation has not improved.

While online advertising growth continues, there are significant benefits of scale in advertising platform economics, in capital costs for search index build-out, and in research and development, making this a time of industry consolidation and convergence. Today, the market is increasingly dominated by one player who is consolidating its dominance through acquisition. Together, Microsoft and Yahoo! can offer a credible alternative for consumers, advertisers, and publishers. Synergies of this combination fall into four areas:

Scale economics: This combination enables synergies related to scale economics of the advertising platform where today there is only one competitor at scale. This includes synergies across both search and non-search related advertising that will strengthen the value proposition to both advertisers and publishers. Additionally, the combination allows us to consolidate capital spending.

Expanded R&D capacity: The combined talent of our engineering resources can be focused on R&D priorities such as a single search index and single advertising platform. Together we can unleash new levels of innovation, delivering enhanced user experiences, breakthroughs in search, and new advertising platform capabilities. Many of these breakthroughs are a function of an engineering scale that today neither of our companies has on its own.

Operational efficiencies: Eliminating redundant infrastructure and duplicative operating costs will improve the financial performance of the combined entity.

Emerging user experiences: Our combined ability to focus engineering resources that drive innovation in emerging scenarios such as video, mobile services, online commerce, social media, and social platforms is greatly enhanced.

We would value the opportunity to further discuss with you how to optimize the integration of our respective businesses to create a leading global technology company with exceptional display and search advertising capabilities. You should also be aware that we intend to offer significant retention packages to your engineers, key leaders and employees across all disciplines.

We have dedicated considerable time and resources to an analysis of a potential transaction and are confident that the combination will receive all necessary regulatory approvals. We look forward to discussing this with you, and both our internal legal team and outside counsel are available to meet with your counsel at their earliest convenience.

Our proposal is subject to the negotiation of a definitive merger agreement and our having the opportunity to conduct certain limited and confirmatory due diligence. In addition, because a portion of the aggregate merger consideration would consist of Microsoft common stock, we would provide Yahoo! the opportunity to conduct appropriate limited due diligence with respect to Microsoft. We are prepared to deliver a draft merger agreement to you and begin discussions immediately.

In light of the significance of this proposal to your shareholders and ours, as well as the potential for selective disclosures, our intention is to publicly release the text of this letter tomorrow morning.

Due to the importance of these discussions and the value represented by our proposal, we expect the Yahoo! Board to engage in a full review of our proposal. My leadership team and I would be happy to make ourselves available to meet with you and your Board at your earliest convenience. Depending on the nature of your response, Microsoft reserves the right to pursue all necessary steps to ensure that Yahoo!’s shareholders are provided with the opportunity to realize the value inherent in our proposal.

We believe this proposal represents a unique opportunity to create significant value for Yahoo!’s shareholders and employees, and the combined company will be better positioned to provide an enhanced value proposition to users and advertisers. We hope that you and your Board share our enthusiasm, and we look forward to a prompt and favorable reply.

Sincerely yours,

/s/ Steven A. Ballmer

Steven A. Ballmer

Chief Executive Officer

Microsoft Corporation

2008 is going to be an exciting year, no doubt.

Full story here

It’s hard to describe the feeling that is *being* in Las Vegas. The places, the people, the parties… it’s quite extravagant. One month ago, I had never even been to Las Vegas, but now, I have been twice thanks to the recent Blog World Expo and most recently, Pubcon Webmaster Convention.

What do you get when you combine Las Vegas, with a professional networking event and a contest called Party Like A Search Engine Rockstar? ANSWER: A ridiculously fun and productive networking experience!

Rolling With The Search Engine Rockstars

Unlike Blog World Expo, UBD did not exhibit at Pubcon, and this time, it was only I who traveled to Las Vegas.

The primary reason for going was that UBD sponsored Shoemoney’s recent contest, Party Like A Search Engine Rockstar. The contest winner was Laura Martin, who won an all-expenses paid trip to Pubcon to party with the search engine rockstars.

This is not the first time that Laura has partied with search engine rockstars, however. Laura was also a contestant on The Next Internet Millionaire and even prior to that, Laura worked closely with some of the top Internet marketers in the industry.

For much of the trip, I hung out with Laura and Tigh Buckles, Shoemoney’s new project manager. Everyone stayed at the Flamingo Hotel on the North Strip.

Tigh Buckles, Me, and Laura Martin hanging out at the Wynn

The Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas

The Flamingo has been around since the 1970s and has recently undergone significant renovation. I was lucky to have stayed in one of the renovated rooms, which included among other things, a flat screen plasma on the wall, a TV in the bathroom, and pillow-top mattresses. Not bad for only $100 per night, heh?

The Pubcon Convention

The Pubcon Convention was held at the Las Vegas Convention Center, which is also where Blog World Expo was held last month. The first day of the expo was Wednesday, which was also the day I flew in.

When I arrived at the Flamingo on Wednesday morning, I met up with Shoemoney and Dillsmack where we had lunch and then headed over to the expo.

The number of exhibitors at Pubcon was far less than Blog World Expo. I was first surprised by this, because Pubcon has been around for several years while this was the first year for BWE. In theory, this makes sense because Pubcon encompasses a much more specific industry niche, and it is quite a bit more expensive to exhibit at Pubcon relative to Blog World.

Dave Dellanave, Me, Tamar Weinberg, Shoemoney and Michael Gray

As always, the best thing about these conferences are the people you meet. As far as creating an impression, nothing is more powerful than meeting someone face-to-face. These kinds of events are priceless because there are, of course, unlimited number of directions in which professional relationships can go once conceived.

On the second day of Pubcon, I was able to walk around and talk to a number of the exhibitors at the show. UBD is putting together a Recommended Resources section for our new website, and we have been closely monitoring a lot of the new advertising networks, looking for the best ones to recommend to our clients.

These conventions are the best place to get information about up-and-coming products and services. I even found one advertising network that promises a 75% revenue share!

These conferences are also the best place to get free stuff, including t-shirts, hats, stickers, pens, etc. I will be giving all of that stuff away in a contest which will start tomorrow and go for one week. More details on that later.

Justine and Shoemoney

When Shoe and I first arrived at the convention, we walked into Starbucks where we randomly met iJustine, up and coming blogger and video blogger from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Shoe and I had been talking about wanting to meet her earlier in the day, so it was a total coincidence that we ran into her other at Starbucks. Justine’s video blog is quickly gaining popularity, so she was invited to give a keynote speech at Pubcon.

Me, Alan from Cappex, and Laura Martin

Cappex is a new online service where colleges apply to you. In other words, instead of you endlessly mailing out college applications, colleges find you through their online service.

Tigh, Laura and I met Alan from Cappex where he explained that Cappex acts as a recruitment tool for universities looking for specific qualifications or looking to fill a quota at a particular college.

Brett Carr, Shoemoney and Greg Boser at the Rubicon Project party

On the night of my arrival, everyone partied at the Wynn where the Rubicon Project was sponsoring a party.

The Rubicon Project is a new advertising solution which ensures your website is making as much money as possible by optimizing it for not only the highest paying advertising company, but also for demographic/geographical data.

At the Rubicon party, I was also able to meet Elmer Thomas from Thembid.com, a business tool that allows you to seek services and have businesses bid on the contract. For example, if you have a leaky roof and you need someone to fix it, you can post your request on ThemBid and appropriate businesses will bid to fix your roof! It’s kind of like eBay, but for traditional businesses. Awesome concept, guys.

Also at the Pubcon party, I met Brett Carr, who is producing an independent movie meant only for the New Media, called Revoloution, which I will be writing more about on Monday.

Me and Shoemoney

This was my second time meeting and hanging out with Shoemoney. Shoe is an extremely down-to-earth guy and it has been great to work with him over the past few months.

On the second night of my time in Vegas, there was a huge poker tournament being held at the Venetian for all of the search engine rockstars. I am not a big poker player, so Tigh, Laura, Markus from AU Interactive and I decided to go hang out and have drinks at the Wynn.

Later that night, we went over to Bally’s where Laura and Tigh played black jack. I decided to play the $2 slots. Keep in mind, I have gambled less than half a dozen times in my life. First pull, I strike 7-7-7 and win $200. Second pull, I win $2. Third pull, $90. Okay, that’s enough. I cash out with $292 for 5 minutes of time.

I also got the chance to talk to Bill Slawski from SEO By The Sea. Bill writes a great blog on Internet marketing and search engine optimization. Bill has been involved with Internet marketing since 1996 and he is an expert on many search and marketing related topics.

Conclusion

Just like Blog World, Pubcon was tons of fun and contained an incredible amount of professional benefit. I highly recommend everyone goes to an industry conference at least once. I’ve gone to two in the past month, and both times have been worth their weight in gold.

Win All of My Free Pubcon Swag Tomorrow!

As mentioned, I will give away all of the free Pubcon swag I picked up including tshirts, pens, drink holders, mousepads, back massagers, coupons, and even a free UBD tshirt. One winner gets everything. More details tomorrow.

Courtesy: John Chow

When the whole “social networking” thing first started to become popular in the summer of 2004, I was one of the first persons in my class to sign up for MySpace. At that time, it was the only “must join” social network because Facebook was only available at select colleges.

All of my friends thought I was stupid for signing up for a MySpace account to meet and collect e-friends, but I had an intuition that there was something worthwhile, not to mention efficient, about networking online. Over the next two years, I collected over 500 friends on MySpace despite never seeing the benefit of having so many friends for only “social” reasons.

Peace Out, MySpace

After becoming progressively more frustrated with the useless Myspace comment banter, I deleted my account in December of 2006 and haven’t looked back since. A month later, I started my personal blog, NateWhitehill.com. Social networking for me evolved from MySpace to blogging; one of the best decisions I have ever made was to migrate my social networking to my blog.

It didn’t take long for me to see the benefits from networking through my blog compared to networking through MySpace. Instead of people seeking me out for purely social reasons (e.g., an ex-girlfriend), people were seeking me out for professional reasons. This eventually led to a realization that I could market my products and services exclusively through the Internet and thus save thousands of dollars of marketing costs.

Given where I am at in my life – professional development is much more important to me than socializing, partying, or dating. In other words, I found my blog to be much more beneficial than MySpace as a professional networking tool, even more so than LinkedIn, which I have also used, but not quite seen the benefit from.

What About Facebook?

Ever since Facebook opened their registration to everyone, my sister and many others have encouraged me to sign up. As a result of my useless Myspace experience, I never saw value in signing up for another social service that provided little-to-no professional benefit.

To get to the point of this story, I never thought I would say this, but I finally signed up for Facebook and have to say that I have been VERY impressed.

Why did I sign up? Our team is in the beginning stages of developing a web application, and what better place to study what works and what doesn’t than on one of the most widely used web apps on the net – Facebook. Not to mention, but with 50 million users and a new platform for delivering highly-targeted Ads, Facebook looks very attractive from a marketing perspective.

Mark Zuckerberg Deserves To Be A Billionaire

Facebook really took off in 2004 when Harvard freshman Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of college in order to develop the application full-time. Within 7 months of launch, Facebook had over one million college students actively using the network. Three years later, over 57 million people are actively using Facebook, including over 200 people from my graduating class!

Check out this growth chart of Facebook’s users over the past three years:

Facebook has been averaging over 250,000 new registrations per day since January of 2007 and active users are DOUBLING every 6 months!

Facebook’s Legitimacy

To me, what makes Facebook much more legitimate than Myspace are several things:

1. Instantly when you register, it more easily facilitates finding old friends and other people you know. Case in point, within 24 hours of signing up for Facebook (and not even publicly announcing it to anyone), I received over 30 friend requests from people I know.
2. The demographic of Facebook is much more mature than MySpace. According to Facebook’s own statistics, more than half of Facebook users are outside of college. Not only that, but the fastest growing demographic is those 25 years old and older.
3. The applications built into Facebook, such as photo and event sharing, are light years ahead of MySpace.
4. The Facebook Developer Platform provides for an infinite number of marketing and data collection possilibites.
5. With the new Facebook Ads platform, you can reach a niche audience with relevant and highly-targeted ads and optimize your site with onsite analytics.
6. There is less risk of encountering fraudulent users on Facebook compared to MySpace.

Facebook As An Application

I am sure this is not news to most of you who use Facebook, but the technologies, networking tools, and web applications built into it are incredibly intuitive and advanced.

Facebook’s photo sharing application is the most widely used one on the Web (according to comScore). This puts it ahead of other applications including Flickr and PhotoBucket, which reminds me… PhotoBucket sold earlier this year for $250 million.

Probably the coolest thing about Facebook is that it is a platform on which others can build applications. There are currently over 7,000 applications that have been built on Facebook. Applications can do everything from displaying quotes of your friend’s favorite pop artists to allowing you to showcase your recent blog posts on the Facebook profile (like I do).

I was so impressed with Facebook that I took time to watch the young Facebook CEO give a 45-minute keynote speech at the f8 Developer Conference. If you want to check out this soon-to-be billionaire give a great speech to over 800 developers, check out this link: f8 Keynote.

Facebook’s Professional Benefits

From a professional and business marketing standpoint, Facebook appears to be much more useful than MySpace. We all know that a huge majority of people using MySpace are high-schoolers, whereas Facebook’s user base consists more of college-aged individuals and adults.

Facebook allows one to create special Pages for businesses or brands. I created a Facebook Page for Unique Blog Designs, and instead of accumulating friends, we have fans. (Click here to become a Facebook fan of Unique Blog Designs.) Our Facebook page seems like it will fit well into our marketing mix as we now have another avenue to communicate with past and future clients.

Young Entrepreneurs Are Inspiring

A huge part of what motivated me to get involved in making money online was from other young and successful entrepreneurs. It was November of 2006 when I first became intrigued with Zuckerberg’s success, and it was through researching him that I stumbled upon Digg and eventually John Chow’s blog. It was through John’s blog that I became inspired to start my personal blog…and here I am, 11 months later, involved in my most successful and fulfilling business enterprise to date (UBD).

Late last year (2006), Zuckerberg turned down a $1.6 billion buyout offer from Yahoo. Some would say he is stupid, but maybe he is just that much smarter. A month ago (October, 2007), Microsoft purchased a 5% 1.6& equity share in Facebook for $240 million.

By this measure, Facebook’s actual value is between $5-10 billion $15 billion, which is almost as much as worth more than MTV! All this for a company that was conceived only three years ago!.

Zuckerberg still possesses a roughly 30% share in the company, so when and *IF* Facebook sells, Zuckerberg will very likely be one of the youngest billionaires in history! The other option is of course, Facebook going public which will also make Mark a very well-off individual.

Conclusion

I suppose that most people would expect that a geek like me would be all over what many people call the coolest web application on the Internet. Honestly, it is surprising even to me that I didn’t sign up for Facebook earlier. Reconnecting with old friends and meeting new ones is done much more easily and professionally through Facebook.

Even though Facebook is light years ahead of MySpace as far as technologies, application, networking tools, and professional benefits, in my opinion, Facebook is still dwarfed by the tremendous professional benefit that one can achieve through personal blogging. I will save that comparison for a future article when I have had more time to evaluate Facebook.

If you want to be my friend on Facebook, you know what to do.

Corrections made: Microsoft purchased a 1.6% equity share in Facebook for $240 million, making Facebook worth approximately $15 billion, which is more than MTV. On paper, Mark Zuckerberg is worth several billion dollars.

What happens when you mix golf, fitness and the dedication to be an expert in a particular niche? Meet Mike Pedersen, the golf fitness expert. Mike Pedersen is a well-known golf blogger in the golf and fitness communities.

Don’t be fooled by his excellent search rankings – Mike doesn’t practice any Blackhat SEO. Mike is simply a great example of how to build authority in a particular niche – by teaching other people who you know! Mike has done this by recording dozens of videos and writing hundreds of articles for people looking to be healthy and perform better golf. In his time online, he has built a newsletter list of over 40,000 people!

Mike is most well-known for his Perform Better Golf which provides golf exercise dvds, a best-selling golf training manual as well as a golf stretching dvd.

Golf Online Fitness Professional

Mike is the golf fitness professional for Golf Magazine’s site GolfOnline.com and for Golf Illustrated.com. He has produced over 500 articles on the topice of fitness and golf that have been seen various publications and sites (including Pub Links Golfer, Orange County Register, Arizona Golfer,and Men’s Health), journals and newspapers worldwide.

How is that for using your authority to reach the outside world?

Meeting Mike

I was fortunate to have met Mike very recently as both he and I reside in Scottsdale, Arizona. Not only is Mike very well educated in online business development, marketing and search engine optimization, but he also is a guy who you don’t want to mess with, and I say that in the nicest of ways. Mike has been in the fitness industry for 25 years and it clearly shows – the guy is incredibly ripped, and it doesn’t surprise me that his average golf drive is over 300 yards.

Mike Pedersen’s Golf Blog

Mike’s new golf blog contains a plethora of useful articles for people looking to play better golf and live a healthier lifestyle. Mike does a fantastic job of consistent, day-in and day-out writing thorough and useful content. As proof, within two weeks of launching his blog, Mike already had over 150 RSS subscribers!

I play a little bit of golf myself and I particular enjoyed the following articles:

• 10 Sure-Fire Ways To Enjoy Holidays Without Gaining A Pound
• Golf Exercise For An Improved Backswing
• A Bad Day On The Golf Course Can Be A Positive

To me, there are several things Mike does which makes him an excellent blogger, several of which include:

• Frequently posting high quality and thorough articles on link-worthy topics
• Carefully choosing titles which encourage the reader to continue reading
• Excellent usage of photos and other visuals within the post to help break up the blocks of text
• Implementing other forms of media into his blog such as his regular videos containing golf fitness tips
• Engaging in a dialogue with his readers which encourages more comments to be made
• Internally linking to other posts and articles he has written

The funny thing was that I first read about Mike before I ever met him! An old friend of mine recommended a book to me called The New Rules of Marketing and PR (no aff) written by David Meerman Scott. One of the stories in the book was all about how Mike used the Internet and online communication to establish authority as a golf fitness expert.

It was only when I launched Unique Blog Designs that I received a contact message from Mike looking for assistance at setting up a new blog, MikePedersenGolf.com. It didn’t take me long to realize this was the same guy in the book I had just read! Those kind of experiences definitely make you feel like it is a small world.

I want to congratulate Mike on his success so far in his niche and I wish him the best of luck in expanding his empire.

For more information about Mike and Perform Better Golf, visit:

This new product and service is called Entrecard. Many of you may have recently heard about this new Internet advertising exchange service!

What is Entrecard? Entrecard is your 125×125 Internet business card. It is also an ad network for you to get free traffic. You can network with other bloggers when you leave them your card, and you use credits that you earn networking to advertise your card, for free, on any blog in the network (including this one). All over the internet people are saying great things about Entrecard, the traffic it is bringing, and the blogs they are discovering through it.

Entrecard is the brainchild of Million Dollar Wiki mastermind, Graham Langdon. I recently met Graham at the Blog World Expo where he was exhibiting Entrecard. Like me, Graham is a young and dedicated Internet entrepreneur.

Here is a video of Graham explaining to Entrecard to Shoemoney…

Many well known bloggers, such as Shoemoney, have already jumped on the Entrecard bandwagon!

After chatting with Graham for a while, we both realized the great potential of teaming up. What does this mean? Unique Blog Designs will become the official Internet business card and blog designer of Entrecard.

Given that proper advertising is just as important as a unique blog design, we will be recommending to our clients that they use the Entrecard service to increase their traffic to their blogs.

What does this mean for you? If you are a member of Entrecard, Unique Blog Designs will give you a free Entrecard design with your purchase of a Unique Blog Design! We are also offering premium Entrecard designs for sale to you.

How do you take advantage of this offer?

1. Sign up for Entrecard.
2. Email entrecard@uniqueblogdesigns.com and we can get started designing your 125×125 Internet business card!

By the way, make sure you drop off your Entrecard on my blog – over on the top of the right sidebar!

Stand Out From The Crowd or Bust

The make money online niche has become extremely saturated over the past year. There are more blogs than ever trying to rank for the phrase “make money online,” despite little-to-no prior knowledge or without any original content. As a result, we are surrounded by a sea of similar blogs and it has become harder than ever to stand out.

One blog which has differentiated itself in the blogosphere is Cash Quests. Cash Quests describes itself as the “personification of online greed.” To put it simply, what makes Cash Quests stand out is a clever combination of juicy content, well-written opinion, and practical knowledge of how to make money online. Add a dash of humor and the guts to call out AGLOCO, and it is clear why Cash Quests is one of the most widely read blogs in the “make money online” niche.

Judging from this Alexa chart, it is clear that Cash Quests has enjoyed almost instantaneous success since its mid-May inception progressive success since it’s December 2006 inception.

Stop Being Everyone Else

Cash Quests is popular for many reasons. One aspect of Cash Quests’ popularity is that it is not like any other blog. Let me illustrate this point with several examples:

Calling out the big boys. The success of Cash Quests can be attributed to many factors. One aspect in particular is its stance on AGLOCO. While everyone was praising AGLOCO to no tomorrow, Cash Quests was calling it out for being too much like its predecessor, AllAdvantage, a company that was dead in the water after two years.

A few months later, CQ further proved its point in the article, “How Much Money Can You Make From AGLOCO? I Know!” Hats off to CQ for calling out a scheme. I never personally invested a single keystroke promoting it, but I know many others did.

The removal of comments. What is a blog without comments? Cash Quests did a study on the top 10 blogs on Technorati and found out that only 3% of readers leave comments. The conclusion that CQ drew was that “…comments do very little to add value to a site and that the main focus for a blogger should be on rewarding and encouraging readers – not just those who leave comments.”

After 7 days without comments, CQ shared its results. CQ noted one surprising change from turning off comments:

Better relationships will be built: Without having to spend time reading, moderating and replying to comments I predicted that I would have more time to spend e-mailing and building relationships with other bloggers. This has definitely occurred with some fantastic relationships being built that have resulted in some very high PR links being both given and received.

Did turning off comments have an effect on readership?

Interestingly enough, readership has only INCREASED on CQ! With over 800 RSS subscribers now, Cash Quests is one of the most popular blogs in its niche, and it’s no surprise with its consistently outside-the-box content.

All guest bloggers should die? I will admit – that post title is pure linkbait, but Cash Quests makes a strong argument for why guest bloggers do not provide value to blogging. To illustrate, CQ purposes this question:

Imagine you have just written a super-awesome post that will be linked to by everybody who reads it. Will you publish it on your own site or will you e-mail it away to be published here on CashQuests.com?

CQ says that we would rather save it for our own site, but I disagree. If I had the opportunity to post on a blog with as large of a readership as CQ, I would want to make sure it was some of my best content, not just B-work. Like anything, guest-blogging is an opportunity to surpass what people expect from you. If I wrote a crappy post for a guest blog, of course no one will want to visit my blog! A-work all the way for guest posts is what I say!

That being said, CQ follows up its argument about guest blogging with an interesting example taken from Shoemoney’s blog in a post entitled “Helping Shoemoney Make Money Online.” Like many of CQ’s posts, it is a hilarious read!

A plethora of hilarious, well-written, and insightful articles in to the world of making money online. A few superb examples:

• Did You Just Throw Up On Your Website? Get Color Smart!: CQ says, “Don’t just pick your favorite color – conduct psychological warfare and choose the color that will best reflect the theme of your site and lead to maximum revenue.”
• Incredible Website Reviews: One thing CQ excels in is website reviews. All of its reviews contain a 500-word minimum, multiple screenshots of your site, and multiple links to your site using any anchor text. For example, its recent review of Derek Beauchemin was a great insight into another clever online marketer.

  Funny thing too is that CQ recently did a review of me. You, too, can have your site reviewed on CQ. At only $80, this is an excellent value for a website review with a readership as large as CQ’s, which is sure to grow bigger in the coming months. You can learn more about its website reviews here.


• Why You Only Need $10 To Become Remarkable. Excellent insight into the need to brand your identity and the surprisingly low cost of doing so. CQ says:
  

  In my quest to make money online, I spend a lot of time reviewing and visiting new sites and it never ceases to amaze me at just how ugly some of them look. As visitors will be assessing your site within the first second of visiting it, it’s essential that you make a brilliant first impression!

Conclusion

If there is anything I try to preach on my blog, it is to stand out from the crowd however possible. This is something that CQ has done exceptionally well. Clever writing, juicy content, and strong opinions only make me want to read more of Cash Quests. I am sure we can expect CQ to easily crest 1000 readers before you know it.

Cash Quests is DEFINITELY one of the more interesting blogs to read today and I highly recommend everyone subscribe to CashQuests.

My web design business used to deal exclusively with setting up shopping cart/e-commerce software for small businesses. The great thing about offering e-commerce solutions is that they provide a tremendous amount of value to the client. As a result, setting up shopping cart software for small businesses can be very lucrative.

My Experience with Shopping Cart Software

We have tried many different e-commerce products, including osCommerce and Zen Cart. That being said, e-commerce setup, installation, and customization can be one of the most frustrating things to do. In my opinion, there is seriously not any good out-of-the-box e-commerce software available. Fortunately, it appears that a much more powerful and easy-to-use e-commerce solution is on the way…

My good buddy and entrepreneur-extraordinaire, Mitchell Harper, is currently working on what looks like will be the best shopping cart software available. It is called StoreSuite and it has many features that I have longed for in e-commerce software.

What’s So Great About StoreSuite?

StoreSuite is a complete PHP and MySQL e-Commerce platform that’s currently being developed by Interspire. It includes everything necessary to sell physical and/or digital products (eBooks, etc) online. It will integrate with all major payment gateways, is 100% HTML template driven, includes a powerful control panel as well as too many other features to list.

Other awesome features of StoreSuite include:

• Drag & drop design mode.
• Extensive use of “AJAX” technology.
• Sell physical and/or downloadable products.
• 100% template driven layout.
• Integrates with all major shipping providers.

If you have ever thought about setting up an online store, I highly recommend you check out StoreSuite. Judging from the product interface videos that Mitch has been posting so far, this software looks ALMOST too good to be true…

Have you guys ever played around with other shopping cart products? If so, what did you think of them? As I mentioned, I used to use osCommerce and wow… customizing that was a nightmare!

Hey everyone, I just wanted to take a moment and let you know that my business partners, Josh Mullineaux, Matt Blancarte and I will be attending the Blog World Expo, November 8-9, 2007 at the Las Vegas Convention Center.

What Is Blog World?

Blog World is the first and only industry-wide tradeshow, conference, and media event dedicated to promoting the dynamic industry of blogging and new media.

Why am I going to Blog World? In my quest to further educate and network myself in the world of new media, Blog World provides an excellent opportunity to meet and learn from some of the best and brightest bloggers today.

While blogging is not my only career, I am convinced that the marketing, networking, and branding benefits of blogging are unmatched by any other marketing tool. Essentially, I see blogging as one of the premier marketing tools businesses will use in the next 5-10 years.

Another important reason we are attending is because we are in the process of developing a business centered around helping bloggers succeed. There is certainly going to be a heap of valuable information which I will take away from this conference and be able to apply it directly to our new venture.

Not to mention, some of the seminars are going to be fascinating:

• Future Business: Online Tactics & Strategies
• Building Your On-line Reputation
• Good to Great: Blogging & Profit Potential
• The Long Tail … Or Not?
• Making a Living Podcasting
• Social Media vs. Corporate Blogging
• How On-line Conversations Change Markets
• Badges, Widgets, Plugins & Gizmos, Oh My!
• The Psychology of Blogging
• Syndicating Your Blog for Profit
• Profiting from Podcasts
• Keeping Your Blog Out of Court
• Maximizing the Benefits of Small Business Blogs
• On Writing Well
• Bloggers for Hire / Hiring Bloggers
• Making Money with Affiliate Programs
• Podcasting as Marketing

Blog World Conference Pricing

The cost to attend starts at $75 for the Basic program which includes: access to Exhibits, entrance to 2007 Weblog Awards (Friday, Nov. 9), and tickets to (3) BlogWorld Conference Sessions.

There is also a full conference pricing for $125 which includes: all of the above, plus (1) ticket to Opening Reception (Evening of Nov. 8), access to Exhibit Hall, entrance to 2007 Weblog Awards (Friday, Nov. 9) and Full Access to all concurrent BlogWorld Conference Sessions (excluding Executive & Entrepreneur sessions).

Meet Me At Blog World

If any of you plan on attending Blog World and would like to meet up at one of the keynotes, send me a message. Perhaps one of the biggest benefits to attending Blog World are the networking opportunities available. I am really looking forward to meeting my readers in person.

Interesting Blogging Statistics:

• Over 12 million American adults currently maintain a blog.
• More than 147 million Americans use the Internet.
• Over 57 million Americans read blogs.
• 1.7 million American adults list making money as one of the reasons they blog.
• 89% of companies surveyed say they think blogs will be more important in the next five years.
• 9% of internet users say they have created blogs.
• 6% of the entire US adult population has created a blog.
• Technorati is currently tracking over 70 million blogs.
• Over 120 thousand blogs are created every day.
• There are over 1.4 million new blog posts every day.
• 22 of the 100 most popular websites in the world are blogs.
• 120,000 new blogs are created every day.
• 37% of blog readers began reading blogs in 2005 or 2006.
• 51% of blog readers shop online.
• Blog readers average 23 hours online each week.

If you are interested in attending, you can pre-register here (aff). Note that the pricing for attendance will increase on October 19th.

Why is the PageRank so beloved and cherished by all that is Geek? Basically, when you have a higher PageRank, you can sell your text links on it for more money. There is also a bragging factor that comes with saying “I have a PR 8,” for instance. The higher your PR, the easier it is to sell links and make money from your blog. Also true is that the higher your PageRank, the more Google considers your site to be an authority or relevant for given search terms.

Last April, I experienced my first PageRank update. Wow, was it exciting! First of all, there was probably a period of two weeks where everyone was expecting the PR to hit any day. I encountered many sleepless nights in anticipation (JK). Finally, the PR hit, and everyone seemed to be able to breathe again.

Before the last PR, I never had any sites above a PR 2, so I knew that with all the work I was putting into my blog posting and networking was bound to pay off. To my pleasant surprise, my blog was awarded with a PR 5, which I was VERY happy with. Many, if not most new blogs with a decent number of links only only hit a PR 4 on their first update. When I got my PR 5, I was able to almost instantly sell out of my text links.

Have You Been Preparing For The PageRank?

Anyone who has experienced one PR update before knows that they could have better prepared for it. What do I mean by prepared? Preparing is done by building links from other high PR sites to ensure you receive as high of a PR as possible. I have learned a lot about SEO in the past few months, and I am now more efficient at building high quality backlinks and optimizing my sites for high search rankings and relevance. Where are some good places to build links?

• Blogroll Exchanges
• Forums and Message Boards
• Free Directories
• Social News Sites (like Digg, Del.icio.us)

It’s What You Know AND Who You Know

It’s very important to have a super solid understanding of SEO in order to begin an effective link-building campaigns. This is best accomplished by reading the SEO Book from Aaron Wall. Aaron pretty much covers every single detail you need to know to be able search engine optimize any web site. I hope I made that clear – you must first fully understand SEO before just aimlessly building links.

When I first started my blog last January, I did not know anyone online. Consequently, I didn’t know where to build links and I didn’t know anyone to do link exchanges with. Thanks to my blog, I networked with and some amazing SEO folks. Several people have helped me build high quality links and provided me with great advice on how to better rank for given search phrases.

What am I saying here? Make an effort to get to know someone who is experienced in SEO or SEM. There is a lot to learn from these experienced individuals and many are happy to share their knowledge with you in exchange for link exchanges.

It’s Not Too Late

The PageRank update is still a few weeks away, so still have time to do those last minute link exchanges and directories submissions. Remember, the more links from higher quality sites, the better! Good luck!

This post was sponsored by PhotoshopStar – Free Photoshop Tutorials.

By the way, sign up for my newsletter! (See top of right sidebar.)

Update – just finished watching the video. It contained a lot of stuff I already knew, but it was still an interesting look into the world of Google. Definitely worth the watch, especially for those who are curious about the mystique of Google.

CBG ROCKS

Thanks David, Fred, and Christine!

By the way, don’t forget to enter Create Business Growth’s Podcast Gear Giveaway contest. All you have to do to enter is subscribe to their RSS (and notify Christine). You could potentially win $335 of podcast gear.

I also have a great new post coming tomorrow, so stay tuned.

Like an Insider’s Perspective

I have been friends with Josh since high school. Over the years, I feel like he always has had an insider’s perspective into many areas of life – including personal finances, working out, girls, business, and just how to best proceed with life. Josh conducts an incredible amount of research on whatever he is interested in and makes every decision based on careful consderations.

Quite Accomplished for Only Being 22

Josh is currently the Director of Operations at infinFX as well as a personal banker at JP Morgan Chase. He is also about to graduate from Arizona State with his business degree. Not bad, for only being 22. Josh is by far the most financially sound person I know. Through his advice, I have learned a great deal about the importance of saving and planning ahead.

I am happy to report that Josh is starting his own personal blog where he will be writing about finance, business, and personal development. I highly recommend you check out his blog and subscribe to his RSS feed. He will be updating his blog 5-6x per week with informative articles on business, finance, motvation, and how to balance your life.

Josh has only been blogging for a week, but he has already written a number of great articles, including:

• Do You Have Motivation?
• Is It Possible to Turn $100 into $2 Million?
• The Difference Between Being Rich and Being Wealthy
• Sell Yourself, Part 1: Take After The Donald

What’s most amazing about Josh is the way he manages his life – he works full-time at a job that most people can’t get until they have graduated college and he also attends school full-time. As if that is not enough, he has also been instrumental in the business success we have enjoyed thus far. Being a financial whiz, Josh’s goal is to be retired by age 30 and he knows exactly what he needs to do to make that happen.

Check out Josh’s blog, Josh Mulllineaux dot Com, for an edge on financial, business and personal success. When you check out Josh’s blog, you will probably notice it looks familiar – that is because yours truly helped him design it.

Josh has always been there to guide me in the right direction and I am sure he will be able to help you, too.

Create Business Growth is giving away $335 worth of podcasting gear, including:

• Behringer Microphono PP400 Phono Preamp
• Sony MDR-V150 Monitor Series Headphones with Reversible Earcups
• CAD EPF-15A 6-Inch Flexible Pop Filter
• Tricks of the Podcasting Masters
• Podcasting: Do It Yourself Guide

How to Enter to Win (It’s Very Easy)

All you need to do to enter the contest is add this link to your RSS reader:
Create Business Growth RSS Feed

Then send an email to christine@createbusinessgrowth.com and let Christine know that you subscribed. Subscribe by Friday, July 18th to win this package of podcasting gear valued at $335!

Click here for more information.

Who is Create Business Growth?

Create Business Growth is a new blog that provides free tips to help your business online and off, including entrepreneurship, business, internet & traditional marketing, management, improving your online presence, and social media.

My good buddy, Mitch Harper, finally gave in and relaunched his wildly popular blog, HarpzOn.com. Mitch started his blog only this March, but within a month he was receiving over 1,000 unique visitors per day and 500+ RSS subscribers per day. Not bad, but what else would you expect from a business development and Internet marketing guru?

In late April, Mitch decided to take a break from blogging in order to devote more time to working on a hosted email marketing solution software called BigResponse. Now that he is wrapping up that project, he is ready to get back into the blogosphere and write the incredibly awesome content that he has become known for.

I decided to do a mini-interview with Mitch for this article.

What made you want to get back into blogging?

Well the only reason I took a month off was because I had to focus on a new email marketing service we’ve just launched here in Australia called Big Response. That took up 99% of my time over the last month, and most of my time for the 3 months before that. And I didn’t feel I could blog at the quality I wanted if I kept blogging. So I put blogging on hold because I didn’t want to post boring or lackluster content. I’m an “all or nothing” type of guy, so that’s what I did.

What kind of articles can we from you expect in the near future?

All of the articles I’ll be posting on my blog come from what I do every day – marketing, web development and customer service. I take what I learn running Interspire with my business partner and try to put a spin on the articles to help bloggers run a more efficient and more profitable blog.

Mitch decided to dive back into the pool of blogging by writing about his plan to get to the #1 spot in Google for the term “email marketing.” Mitch is going to share his 5+ years of knowledge in search engine optimization as he attempts to get to the top of the SERPs (search engine resuilts).

I’ve been chatting with Mitch on and off since he first launched his blog and I need to say: This guy is the real deal. In 2002, he started what is now the largest PHP software development company in the world, Interspire. They now have over 35K clients worldwide including some big names such as NASA, Dell, General Electric, Chevron Texaco, and Intel.

Mitch is incredibly well versed in many areas of Internet specialization including:

• Copywriting
• Business
• Marketing
• Traffic building
• SEO
• Web development

Mitch has provided me with tons of highly useful information to help me better run my blog and my businesses. His insights and knowledge is invaluable and will help any blogger or business owner reach their potential!

Mitch also offers a free newsletter called “Entrepreneurs Only” which includes his personal online marketing and traffic building secrets.

If you have not checked out HarpzOn before, I HIGHLY recommend you do. The first time I read it, I added it to my RSS reader, and I am sure you will too.

Unfortunately, the much requested and long anticipated “tags” features was scrapped from this version, but it is expected to be released in version 2.3. Tagging will allow you to basically define sub-categories to individual blog posts on the fly. Tagging is a feature currently used by Technorati to better classify blog posts.

New features to WordPress 2.2 include:

• WordPress Widgets allow you to easily rearrange and customize areas of your weblog (usually sidebars) with drag-and-drop simplicity. This functionality was originally available as a plugin Widgets are now included by default in the core code, significantly cleaned up, and enabled for the default themes.
• Full Atom support, including updating our Atom feeds to use the 1.0 standard spec and including an implementation of the Atom Publishing API to complement our XML-RPC interface.
• A new Blogger importer that is able to handle the latest version of Google’s Blogger product and seamlessly import posts and comments without any user interaction beyond entering your login.
• Infinite comment stream, meaning that on your Edit Comments page when you delete or spam a comment using the AJAX links under each comment it will bring in another comment in the background so you always have 20 items on the page. (I know it sounds geeky, but try it!)
• We now protect you from activating a plugin or editing a file that will break your blog.
• Core plugin and filter speed optimizations should make everything feel a bit more snappy and lighter on your server.
• A hook for WYSIWYG support in a future version of Safari.

I am about to install it on my blog so I will let you know how it goes.

Download WordPress 2.2 today. If need help upgrading or installing version 2.2, check out their detailed upgrade instructions.

Check out the official Google Recruitment Video and tell me if you would like to work for Google.

I was tagged a while back by The Paper Bull in a meme entitled “If I Could Only Read 5 Blogs.”

I like the concept of this meme because it assumes I would need to focus my energies of acquiring knowledge through a very select number of sources. So, in a way, these five blogs are the ones I believe provide me with the most useful knowledge in my quest towards success as an entrepreneur.

SEOBook – Aaron Wall never fails to disappoint. He is pretty much known as the Michael Jordan of SEO and he always has great insights into the world of online business and of course, search engine optimization.

If you have not read his incredibly popular SEO Book, then you are missing out. The SEO Book is the definitive guide to search engine optimization and a must read for ANYONE who has a blog or is looking to establish an online presence.

ProBlogger – Certainly a pioneer in the blogosphere, Darren Rowse has proven that blogging can be a very profitable career of choice. His insights into the blogosphere are invaluable because he has been there, done that in the world of blogging. I only wish that he would commit to speaking at the Elite Retreat this September in Phoenix because I plan on attending.

Perhaps the greatest thing about Darren is that he has maintained such a down-to-earth, open and friendly approach despite his incredible success – I’ve chatted with him several times and he could not be more helpful and friendly.

Pronet Advertising – Neil Patel is a master guru when it comes to his knowledge of social media and search engine optimization. Pronet is a great source for industry news and Neil and his writers’ perspective on all things net-related has become highly trusted over the past few years.

Freelance Switch – Being an on-and-off freelancer for the past few years, Freelance Switch has quickly filled a major void in the blogosphere – an excellently written source for all things freelance-related. Freelance Switch is still very much a baby in the blogospere, however, they are quickly proving they are on their way to becoming a superblog.

Zoomstart – If you are an aspiring entrepreneur, Shane Navratil writes pure gold. He has established himself as a successful entrepeneur and he consistently writes highly applicable articles on all aspects of business – from sales and marketing to leadership and innovation. I expect his blog to become extremely popular over the next few months.

Well, those are the 5 blogs that I could not live without. In this age of information overload, I think that we need to be especially selective of the information we take in and if it has a purpose in our lives. I know all of these blogs have provided me with invaluable insights into the world of online business and entrepreneurialism.

I’m tagging: Gary Lee, Jane May, Scot, Shane and Josh.

According to a few people in-the-know, including Mr. Gary Lee and Maki from Dosh Dosh, Google is now in the process of updating their data centers to reflect the new PageRankings.

My first official PageRank is a PR5, which I am quite happy about.

The first Google data center that is reported to have updated is: 64.233.189.104

Here is a tool you can use to check your PR as Google updates all their datacenters: Google PageRank Check by Datacenter.

Note, the tool above is NOT a prediction tool – it is an accurate reflection of PageRank according to Google’s 72 data centers worldwide.

Other notable new PageRanks:

Career Ramblings – PR6

Net Business Blog – PR5

John Chow – PR6 (previously PR4)

The Thinking Blog – PR5

Learn more about the Google PageRank update.

Update – It is now understood that more than 1 data center has been updated and all of the Google data centers should reflect the new Page Rank this weekend.

Today, Google launched a new product – a FREE 411 service called GOOG-411. The 411 industry is a $7 billion dollar/year market, and free alternatives, such as Google’s, are expected to take at least a 50% market share within the next few years.

GOOG-411 can be reached by dialing 1-800-GOOG-411. The service is completely automated and there is no way to talk to a human for any additional information or clarification.

Google accesses local business data from their Google Maps datacenter. You can also have the details of a call forwarded via SMS to your mobile phone, just say “text message.”

For more information, check out Google’s Voice Local Search.

Google has been doing a lot of branching out out lately, expanding their reach beyond just the Internet. Google is also repotedly working on developing a brokerage to start offering radio advertisements.

Our days are only numbered before Google takes over the world…