The BBC reminds us that writing compelling material starts with the headline. How’s this one for an example:

Great tits cope well with warming

That headline is currently the most read article on the BBC website. It’s captured so much attention that it’s already more read than articles many months older.

You can learn more about effective headlines here or in the magazine rack at the end of your local grocers checkout.

Are there any readers left out there? If so..please accept my apologies for the very long delay between posts. As many of you may know, ten24 Media has been making the transition from a pure marketing services company to a web-incubator of sorts. In the days to come I’ll tell you a bit more about that as well as roll-out a new design for our own extremely dated website. You know what they say..shoemaker makes his own shoes last.

See you soon.

Good news today for those of you who’d like to research what keywords to optimize your website for. The industry’s most popular keyword research tool, Wordtracker, is now offering a free version of their service.

Get started here.

[via SEOBook]

Some important news for Yahoo advertisers. Beginning February 5, the ranking / position of your ads will no longer be based solely on your bid amount. Instead, they’ll be ranked by both bid amount and ad quality, similar to the way Google does things.

This change, which will impact all advertisers, is designed to allow you to focus less on competitive bidding and more on the quality of your ads. By improving the quality of your ads and making them more relevant to users, you may be rewarded with a better ranking and reduced cost for your ads.

An ad’s quality will be determined by:

- Its historical performance—the ad’s click-through rate relative to its position in search results
- Its expected performance—determined by various relevance factors considered by Yahoo!’s ranking algorithms, relative to other ads displayed at the same time

More information here.

Google announced yesterday a new feature called “hosted business pages.”

Designed for small businesses who don’t have a website but still want to advertise online with Google, the feature is basically a single, informational webpage that you can use to tell people more about your business, how to contact you, etc..

Hosted Business Pages are currently only available for new advertisers in the US.

The search engine optimization industry has a huge problem - it’s plagued with snake oil salesmen.

“Guaranteed Top 10 Rankings”, “Submit Your Site To 10,000,000 SEARCH ENGINES”. In fact, just now I got a call from such a slinger. Here’s the Coles Notes of that conversation:

Con: Hello Sir. Is this Vagablond.com?
Me: Yes. How can I help you.
Con: Wow. This is a huge honor. I must say sir, you have an incredible site. Soooo…informative.

Ok…I know! I should have hung up here. But I wanted to hear what sort of crap he was going to feed me.

Me: Ok. How can I help you.
Con: Sir. Did you build this site yourself?
Me: With help from many others.
Con: You have an amazing site Sir. One of the best I have ever seen.
Me: Our site is for sale to the right buyer. Are you interested Sir?
Con: No No. But I can help you a great deal. Can you go to Google Sir. And type in the word “travel” in the search engine.
Me: Ok. I’ve done that.
Con: I cannot see your site Sir. And it’s proven that most visitors don’t go beyond the first page. We can guarantee to get your site on this first page instead of giving this succeess to your competitors.
Me: Oh. And how do you do that?
Con: Through our proprietary technology we’ve developed with a large team. We will also create multiple domains that contain your keywords.
Me: But that is against Google’s terms and conditions, multiple domains with the same content.
Con: That is only your interpretation Sir. I assure you that you only will have success.
Me: How much?
Con: Just $30 a month for up to 10 keywords of your choice.
Me: Travel, Casino, Wine, Microsoft, Google, ….
Me: Do you have some examples of clients you’ve had success with?
Con: Of course. Please go here on our web page. You see the sample reports. There you can see Ford, Boeing, JC Penny
Me: (I won’t tell you what I said to him from here on in)

Folks…if it sounds too good to be true - IT IS!

SeattlePI on the beast that is MySpace:

“More and more businesses from around the world are setting up camp on MySpace, using their bit of digital real estate within the Web site like lighthouses bordering a dark sea that, with a little luck — and enough approved “friend” requests — guide customers to their doorstep.”

It’s a good article covering an increasingly important online marketing channel. Read it here.

Most entrepreneurs will tell you that launching a company comes at a stiff personal price. You need to dig deep and make sacrifices for your startup. Maxed out credit cards, tiny salaries (or none at all) and friends that give up calling.

This morning however I reached a new level of sacrifice. A conference call was fast approaching and I didn’t have time for a trip to the grocers. Instead, I went on a scavange through my cupboards and was delighted to discover a box of Raisin Bran.

Down to the last few bites, spoon in one hand and a mouse in the other, I noticed them………

Red Flour Beetles - a good half dozen swimming about.

I’m not sure how many I oblivously devoured, but I’d say I’ve crossed some sort of line here.

“The mice which helplessly find themselves between the cats’ teeth acquire no merit from their enforced sacrifice.”
Mahatma Gandhi

Do advertising and branding opportunities exist in the world virtual world of online games and communities? You bet they do! But where to start right? I know how you feel. Luckily the always excellent TrendWatching.com takes us inside the virtual world with their latest trend report titled YOUNIVERSE.

“Understandably, the focus within virtual communities has been predominantly about integrating offline goods, services and experiences into virtual worlds. As online worlds mature, ‘production’ solely for online use may become the norm, before potentially moving on to invade the ‘real world’. Which means selling opportunities more than anything else. Look at what aforementioned Nike, Habbo, Virtual Kingdom, and American Apparel have planned or have already rolled out, and what other brands like Puma, Nissan are doing in this field.”

This is something I’ve been thinking about for a long time but havn’t yet taken the time to participate in. That all has to change! While its still early, you can’t argue with the popularity of these worlds (50+ million Habbo Hotel users for example). Real people, many of them yours and my customers, are spending a lot of their valuable time there.

Getting started is going to be the hardest part. There’s a tonne of information to absorb and attempt to understand. Luckily TrendWatching’s report is an excellent primer that helps us dive into the ocean of information, and better yet, try out the virtual world for ourselves.

Be sure to put on your marketing hat for a couple hours this week and check out TrendWatching’s Youniverse Report

“Amazing - success has nothing to do with Ajax, or cool stuff. It has everything to do with simplicity and giving users what they want.”

Om Malik on the market share of photo-sharing sites.