The question of whether your site, product, or service is inherently viral is an important one.  Can you construct it so that it is?  Well, in many cases the answer is yes, but it typically takes some thinking through before it can become viral.  The incentive really needs to be there for someone to tell their friend, and the “payment” needs to be something other than money.  For example, your experience with the service needs to get better when you have more people within your network using it.  Otherwise, people don’t really care about telling their friends unless they’re the few who tell everyone.  Getting to those people can be challenging, and although that’s important to get initial traction for your business, I would argue that you need more mass appeal to reach a “tipping point”. Read more at viral.ryanpitylak.com

Ryan Pitylak here covering Mike Blumenthal’s coverage of Google’s new Places functionality.

Google has been doing some pretty interesting stuff with their new Places pages. Although I was a bit unhappy with the Places pages at first, I’m starting to like them as I become used to them. Some of the new functionality, as outlined by Mike Blumenthal in his Google Maps: Now Adding Reviews from News Sites, Hyperlocal Blogs, and Other Non Traditional Reviews Sources (long title…) writes about how Google is parsing review based content from blogs and using that information in the Google Local post. This is very interesting because it means that Google is starting to understand the details of the content within local websites. I thought it would take some standardized format, such as hReviews, but I guess it didn’t. However, I think some standardization would be nice for everyone, including Google. Read more at www.ryan-pitylak.com

Thursday, December 31, 2009 BitDefender finds web 2.0 possible source of spam BitDefender writes about how there is a potential problem with web 2.0 services. You do need to be careful when signing up for new services, as you’ll never know what type of email will result from the sign up. I recommend my friend’s company OtherInbox to deal with the problem. Posted by Ryan Pitylak at 4:42 PM Labels: antispam, otherinbox, ryan pitylak 0 comments: Post a Comment Links to this post Create a Link Older Post Home Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom) Read more at combatspam.blogspot.com

Mike Blumenthal’s 2009 Most Read Stories – Ryan Pitylak

Mike Blumenthal has a great blog that discusses local search marketing trends before they really become trends.  He posted a new article about the most highly read articles in 2009.  I would recommend reading the articles referenced in this post if you’re interested in knowing more about local search. Read more at ryan.pitylak.com

Ryan Pitylak is a search marketing guru who finds the best marketing method for the businesses he helps.  The techniques used to get people ranked cost-effectively in the search engines is always changing, and Ryan Pitylak keeps up to date with these trends and applies them to the ever expanding list of sites under his management.  Read more at www.merchantcircle.com