The Week in Review

Is Online Lead Generation Right for Your Brand?

As online lead generation gains mainstream adoption, but before diving into the growing pool, take some time to ask yourself: What’s your product? How will you follow up the leads? Who and where are your customers? What is the value of a sale? (Econsultancy)

83 Proven Local Lead Generation Niches

Here’s a list of 83 niches that work well with a local lead gen model. Among them are auto dealers, estate planning, dental insurance, consultants, mortgage brokers, weddings, tanning, vocational training, resorts, pest control and pet groomers. (CDF Networks)

Rewards Are Key for Location-Based Apps

The media hype about location-based apps may have slightly overblown their real-world popularity, given that about 4 percent of all U.S. adults have ever used a location-based check-in service before. (Only 1 percent use these more than once a week.) This isn’t to mention the privacy hurdle that these apps have to overcome. The key to countering the privacy issue is rewards, especially for mobile platforms. Marketers and app makers now need to tinker with different types of reward systems, promotions and deals to discover which ones actually work. (ReadWriteWeb)

Android Will Own Half of the Smart Phone Market

According to analysts at Piper Jaffray, Android will end up with half of the smart phone market, while Apple’s iOS will end up with around 20-30 percent in the long haul. The report from Piper Jaffray also remarks that RIM will regret not going with Android. (ZDNet)

Yahoo Users Can Open a Google Account More Easily

Google is enabling Yahoo users to sign in to Google accounts via OpenID. This is Google’s first foray into the OpenID world, but the company has plans to expand this kind of offering to other OpenID providers in the near future. More than an attempt to grab Yahoo users, it’s a display of interoperability. “So there’s no poaching happening here, just an open door policy on Yahoo’s end, and the implementation of one of Yahoo’s APIs on Google’s end.” (Wired.com)

Facebook Testing ‘Subscribe’ Feature, ‘Liked’ News in Search

All Facebook unearthed a “Subscribe to” feature that will allow users to receive alerts for all actions of a specific user. This would appear to be a vicious wink at Twitter, though it’s only being tested with a small percentage of users at this point. Facebook is also testing out including “liked” news articles in search results. (All Facebook 1, 2)

Big Brands Spending Big Bucks on Google

In June, AT&T Mobility spent $8.08 million on ads in Google’s search results, followed by Apollo Group with $6.67 million, Expedia with $5.95 million, Amazon with $5.85 million and eBay with $4.25 million. BP, which was dealing with a certain Gulf-area headache, spent $3.59 million on these Google ads in June. This was a marked increase from its typical $57,000 per month on these ads. (AdAge.com)

Smart Phones Replacing Credit Cards?

Most of us are already well aware of the advancements being made in the mobile-payments arena, but the question posed by Forrester is: Are consumers ready to leap from credit cards to mobile phones? The key will be to convince consumers that mobile payments are just as simple and convenient as credit card payments. There are indications that mobile payments could be more secure than the plastic kind, especially in places like South Africa, where payday can be a dangerous time of the week. (ReadWriteWeb)

In Defense of Google

Consumer Watchdog has been the object of a lot of attention lately thanks to its Times Square jumbotron ad depicting Google as a privacy attacker and CEO Eric Schmidt as something of a privacy-dishonoring pedophile. The self-appointed organization’s assumptions, and its proposed solution, are nonsense, according to this writer. (Wired.com)

A Brilliant Way to Use YouTube for Ads

Tipp-Ex has found a fantastic way to leverage the power of YouTube with ads, in its “A hunter shoots a bear!” interactive advertisement. (CNET)

Affiliate Incentives

The pre-Christmas period is a time for affiliate incentives for fourth-quarter markting campaigns. The three golden rules for designing affiliate incentives are: 1) Know what you want to achieve; 2) Make it as simple as possible; and 3) Make your incentive as inclusive as possible. (Econsultancy)

7 Ways to Boost User Participation

Enabling social logins, showing avatars everywhere and running member polls are among the seven ways to increase user participation on your sites. (ReadWriteWeb)

Google Music Service: Christmas

Google plans to formally bump heads with Apple in the world of music by Christmas. While Apple clearly has the head start, just like it did in the mobile phone realm, but the industry and consumers are ready for some more competition in the space. The key battlefield would seem to be in the cloud. (Wired.com)

The 80-20 Rule Can Boost Your Conversions

Focus on the 80-20 rule: 80 percent of your results will come from just 20 percent of your stuff. This optimization strategy will not only give you a site that converts better, but it’ll have fewer elements to worry about. Some examples of the non-essential things in the other 80 percent of your site include sidebar widgets, social media buttons and a list of the latest blog posts. If you’re still not convinced, a few case studies accompany the claim. (Six Revisions)

Why Apple Ping Threatens Twitter, Facebook

The strengths of Apple’s new musical social network, Ping, come from the innate power of iTunes and the existing common ground between all its users: an appreciation of music, no matter how disparate. Ping is built around media, not you, which offers some comfort to those worried about their privacy. It also melds two topics that elicit passionate responses: Apple and music. (CNET, Seeking Alpha)

Understanding Baidu SEO

China has a lot of people. Baidu is the most popular search engine in China. Focusing on your Baidu SEO tactics could be worth your while. Among the eight steps to get you started are: building inbound links with relevant sites in the Chinese realm of the Internet, investing more time and money into your PPC ad campaigns, and keyword research. (Econsultancy)

AOL and Google Extend Their Search Deal to 2015

Google will be AOL’s exclusive search partner through the end of 2015. The new five-year deal expands to cover mobile search and places AOL’s content on YouTube. While the financials of the deal are undisclosed, we know that AOL has earned $209 million from its current deal with Google during the first six months of 2010. (paidContent.org)

How to Install Twitter Testimonials on Your Blog

Leveraging Twitter feedback is good for your brand, so it makes sense that it would be wise to at least consider placing some of these positive tweets and place them on your blog. The Tweet-stimonials WordPress plugin makes this easy. (Search Engine Journal)

Twitter Will Record All Clicked Links

By the end of 2010, Twitter is aiming to record and analyze every link users click on via its website or any of the many third-party apps linked to the popular social network. This was mentioned in that e-mail from the company you’ve probably received by now, which mentions that t.co will be the link shortener of choice going forward, and that when a user clicks “on these links from Twitter.com or a Twitter application, Twitter will log that click.” Privacy concerns surely abound from many, but this move isn’t totally surprising – and Twitter isn’t the only one to log clicks. On the upside, this will help the company better protect itself and its users from malicious links. (CNET)

Mobile SERPS and Usability

Mobile pages can rank well in traditional search, which is something that needs to be addressed strategically. Start your mobile rankings research by doing a normal search from a traditional computer. Then examine the differences between those and the ones on Google.com/m. The best way to show search engines that your page is mobile-ready is to provide pages that are mobile-ready. There are a variety of options to go with from here. (SEOmoz)

Phases of Mobile App Maturity

There are three distinct phases of the “application maturity model”: 1) The Information Phase; 2) The Participatory Phase; and 3) The Business Operations Phase. (ReadWriteWeb)

Real Estate’s Sluggishness

While the travel, advertising and financial services industries have made good headway into the Internet, real estate has not. In order to overcome this, brokerages need to become tech companies first and sales organizations second. In related news, Zillow has linked arms with Apartments.com. (Business Insider, WebProNews)

Facebook Credits Gift Cards

Target will be the first retailer to sell Facebook Credits gift cards at all of its stores and on its website beginning Sept. 5, in time for the holiday season. They will be available in $15, $25 and $50 denominations. (WebProNews)

China Requires IDs for SIM Cards

The Chinese government began requiring to see identification for cell phone users who want to purchase a SIM card, in a move to battle spam, porn and fraud schemes. The plan has been in the works for years, and gives users until 2013 to brandish ID to avoid losing their service. The worry is that this will give the government the ability to punish people who send messages that upset censorship rules. A black market is expected. (NYTimes.com)

Gmail Priority Inbox and What it Means for E-mail Marketers

Here are some insights from keen e-mail marketing experts regarding what Gmail Priority Inbox will mean for the industry. One respondent said “it is a bar raiser as opposed to a game changer, if you are delivering engaging email marketing campaigns which elicit decent opens and clicks you’re probably not going to see a significant change.” Another said, “Preparing for Gmail’s priority inbox is actually an exercise in being a better email marketer.” (Econsultancy)

Take Mobile Seriously

A report from Burson-Marsteller and Proof Integrated Communications lists 53 reasons to start taking mobile seriously – for those that haven’t caught on yet. Among the main points are: mobile users are not passive, location-based targeting is what makes mobile more powerful than other channels and QR codes are moving West. (AdAge.com)

Apple TV: FAQ

Here’s a rundown of Apple TV, for those who still don’t get what the big deal is. Among the questions answered are: How much does it cost? How much does it weigh? How much media can you store? How do the prices compare? How do the rentals work? Does it stream music? (paidContent.org)