Well, I finally joined the Google Advertising Professionals program. I’ve been juggling a lot of customer accounts and keeping track of all their details seperately was killing me! The Google Advertising Professionals program offers My Client Center which lets me manage everyone’s accounts (minus their billing information) from one place. I hope this is a great time saver for me!

If my clients exceed $1000 in ad purchases, I will be qualified to take an exam to become a “Qualified” Google Advertising Professional. We will see if it goes that way.

I am not new to the ‘certification’ game– I had to get several certifications from Microsoft for past-life careers in technical support. I am also fully aware that passing a test isn’t the end-all-be-all way of determining whether someone is qualified to actually perform a job function or task. My techie friends and I talk about ‘paper MSCEs’ all the time. Basically, there is nothing better than real-life experience to make someone qualified as an expert in a field.

I find it interesting that Google ties the qualification to money spent (by my clients). On one hand, I can see that you really cannot gain *experience* if you’re not using the program and to use the program, well, you have to Pay for clicks. On the other hand, I work really hard at STRETCHING my clients’ budgets! Most my clients are small businesses or individual entrepreneurs. I want to make the most of their money and get the best ROI, so I’m not spending hand over fist on the most expensive keywords. I even try to find ways to get them FREE credits so they can try the program without putting up cash first. I don’t want to feel like I need to overspend my client’s money, so for that I may end up be given the opportunity to ‘qualify’ to take the test. Again, we will see and, of course, I will post the results here.

What is Folksonomy?

Folksonomy is a combination of the words folks and taxonomy meaning “people classification management.” This allows users some level of control over how the web is organized using “tags”. Tagging is the process of labeling a piece data with metadata.

Using Folksonomy as Subtle Marketing

One of the major players currently using folksonomy is Del.icio.us.

Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking web application that is growing very fast in popularity. With a free account, del.icio.us users can submit and access all of their bookmarks from any computer with Internet access. By submitting and tagging your own web pages, you instantly give access to thousands of other users with interests in the same tags. Encouraging site visitors to submit your selected webpages to their own del.icio.us bookmark page is a very good way to get more exposure to del.icio.us users. Submitting to del.icio.us is instant and it creates meaningful relevant links important to the major search engines.

I expect Del.icio.us and other social bookmarking sites to reshape how the web is categorized. And the coolest thing- right now its free. Check it out.

My husband pointed this site out to me.

http://www.googlefight.com

Mostly just for fun, let two search terms duke it out to find out which one rules Google results. Of course, you could use this for serious reasons- checking out the amount of competition for two keywords You’re considering for you site and your search engine optimization. Googlefight losers can be winners for your business…

In creating a CD of photos for an aunt today, I reached into my CD area to get a case to send it in, brushing by my spool of CD backups.
ooh, scary. How long has it been since I made a CD backup of my email? Of my web server? Of all my business documents?

Yikes- it has been far too long for me. How about you?

How big of a hit would your business take if you lost your email, your documents, your quickbooks or invoicing materials? Seriously weigh that against the time it may take (an hour? two?) that it may take to make a weekly - at least monthly - backup of these things.

I’m making my backups now. Why don’t you start one right now too?

Well, it seems news of Google Analytics broke this morning and that broke Google Analytics.
Google has a note posted stating:

Google Analytics has experienced extremely strong demand, and as a result, we have temporarily limited the number of new signups as we increase capacity. In the meantime, please submit your name and email address and we will notify you as soon as we are ready to add new accounts. Thank you for your patience.

I guess that just goes to show you that even Google can be caught a little unprepared.
Right now I’m curious about their beta strategies. Some things Google works on- like Google Local - seem to be in beta forever (Google Local just recently stopped showing “beta”). GMail is still in beta after more than a year, but I never found Google Analytics in beta. Interesting.
Something new in beta that I forgot to mention in yesterday’s post is Google Base. Watch for some future posts from me on Google Base.