We Asked. You Told Us Your Wishes for 2011

Two weeks ago, the Small Business Marketing team asked about your aspirations for the coming year. You told us the biggest wish for your business, and the wish for expanding your business’ online presence. Today, we’d like to share what we heard.

We combined your responses from our blog, Facebook and Twitter and organized them into three main themes and then sub-themes. Of course, not all wishes fell neatly into these themes, so we did create a Miscellaneous category.

Before the drum roll, thanks to everyone that took time to share and participate. Some wishes were big and audacious and others more practical, but all with an underlying tone of passion for what you do and a focus on delighting your customers. On with the results…

Theme 1: Move my business online

Not surprisingly, you’re passionate about the business products you’re using and made very specific feature requests. Rest assured if they were Google product related, we’ve shared your wishes with our product teams. Additionally, you said you want more online resources to help your business grow. Your comments acknowledged that referrals are now happening online through social media channels and, as such, you want to understand how to use these online tools. You also want more out of your websites. Ultimately, you said you want to do more online to run your business more efficiently and spend more time concentrating on your customers.

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Theme 2: Grow my business

We heard that you want to continue to grow your business with increased profits, more customers, or more people. Lots of wishes for more marketing tools to increase your business’ visibility – the range included the entire marketing mix. You want simple tools made specifically for you. There were wishes for funds to buy equipment, spend more on advertising, build e-commerce into your offering, and lease real estate – to name a few.

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Theme 3: Love my business

Many resounding wishes to continue fueling your passion because you love what you do. You’d love to learn more – from social media, AdWords and Places to creating marketing plans. You prefer support face-to-face with people and training at a relatively low cost. Many of you want more opportunities to network and support your fellow business owners. Whether it’s help getting the most out of applications and tools, or navigating a healthcare plan, you’d like some expertise to assist.

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We thank you again for telling us your wishes for the coming year. Stay tuned as we will use these wishes to build upon our plans to help small businesses succeed in 2011.

Posted by Leslie Hernandez, Product Marketing Manager, Google Small Business Team

Repetition Is Key

Over half of what a good trader does is repetition, much like professional athletes. As Reggie Jackson says, "A baseball swing is a finely tuned instrument. It is repetition, and more repetition, and a little more after that". He could easily have been talking about trading instead.

Developing trading skills, as I have often repeated, is all about repetition. A trader needs to hone his skills with repetition in SIM. A trader needs to test and develop his trading plan through repetition in SIM. A trader needs to perfect his entry and exit skills with repetition in SIM.

I had a comment to yesterday's post that said: "Your blog has become a broken record."

Mate, you're missing the point.

This is my 351st blog post since October 2009. I blog almost every trading day. Yes, there is repetition. It's repetition because I say it and show it in different ways. Some people don't get a concept the first time or they don't get it the way I first showed it. Learning can be tedious unless you really love to trade. I learn every day. When I'm not trading I'm either researching or teaching.

On top of it all, there is not a lot of "new" in learning to trade. Trading is simple, but not easy. To achieve that "aha" moment can take months, but usually years. Mentoring and seeing ideas such as those in this blog helps shorten the learning curve. I know, because readers and students have told me so.

Additionally, a lot of time and effort has gone into writing blog posts that I think readers would enjoy or benefit from. And that is my criteria- Would I want to read that post?

On that note, I will be blogging on some additional topics in 2011, including exploring ways to make money using longer term trading techniques. I'm also bringing back the video trading recaps.

Today's trades show the benefits of identifying the beginning of a trend. This was the topic with one of the guys I am mentoring today during our 1 to one.

We begin anew

My new journalism website, Chartiers Valley Patch, launched at 6 a.m. Monday. I welcome all of my followers here to visit the site and pass along the hyperlink to anyone who lives in and around Bridgeville, Collier Township, Heidelberg and Scott Township. Your support, opinions and suggestions on this blog over the past 17 months have been very-much appreciated. Thank you.

http://chartiersvalley.patch.com

Now available with Google Apps: DoubleClick for Publishers

[Cross-posted from the Google Enterprise Blog]

Editor’s note: We recently launched an improvement that makes over 60 additional Google services available to Google Apps users. This series showcases what’s new and how your organization can benefit.



Welcome to DoubleClick for Publishers
For millions of online publishers—from the smallest blogger to the largest entertainment, news, e-commerce and information sites—online advertising revenue is vital. When publishers can maximize their returns, everyone benefits from more vibrant online content and websites. A publisher's ability to manage this process can have a significant impact on how much money they make from their online content, which is why we’re happy to bring our Google Apps customers our next generation ad serving platform to solve these problems: DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) from Google.

Imagine you're a major online publisher with a popular global surfing website and an ad sales team. Every second of every day, you have difficult decisions about what ads to show and how to measure their relative performance. For example:

• In the same ad space, a surfboard wax advertiser wants to run a static image ad for your Australian readers, while an airline offering flights to Hawaii wants to run an expandable interactive ad for your American readers.


• A fast-food restaurant wants to run its burger ads before noon and its pizza ads in the afternoon.


• You've sold 10 different surfboard makers a million ad slots at slightly different prices; now you have to allocate them across your various webpages to fulfill all these orders over the next two weeks.


• One of your surfing tournament reviews is linked to by a popular news site and you have a surge in traffic. Your sales team couldn't predict this, so you’re left without any ads for thousands of readers. You want to fill this ad space by selling it via an ad network that has ads available.

These examples illustrate how complicated it can be to optimize ad serving on your website, and they only scratch the surface.

DFP comes in two flavors, tailored for different publishers' needs: DoubleClick for Publishers, for the largest online publishers, and DFP Small Business, a simple, free version designed for growing online publishers. As a Google Apps user, you now have access to both versions of DFP with your existing Apps account.


With advanced features such as streamlined ad trafficking, inventory management and forecasting, revenue optimization, granular reporting, and an open API, DFP offers a complete toolkit to easily sell ads on your site directly to advertisers while also working dynamically to help you get the most money from inventory you sell through partners like AdSense and ad networks.

Just like Google Apps, DFP runs in Google’s cloud so you get the same reliability, flexibility, and easy access without any software to install or hardware for IT to maintain. Also, DFP is fully supported by Google so you don't have to worry about manual system updates or downtime.

Learn more and get started
DoubleClick for Publishers can be enabled by your domain administrator from the Google Apps Control Panel at https://www.google.com/a/[your_domain.com] (replace [your_domain.com] with your actual domain name). If your organization isn’t using Google Apps yet, you can learn more and sign up today at http://www.google.com/apps/more.

To learn more about how DFP can help you manage and grow all of your online ad inventory, please visit our website or follow along with the latest news and release updates at the DoubleClick for Publishers blog.

Share your story
Have you already started using Google Custom Search at your organization, or plan to now that it’s available? Please share your story and your organization could be featured in the next Gone Google ad campaign!


Posted by Stephen Kliff, DoubleClick Team

Note: DoubleClick for Publishers may not be available in all areas.

The Euro FX and Market Profile

I have been working on using Market Profile for the truly 24 hour markets, such as the currencies. My current conclusion is to treat those markets, such as the Euro, in the same way that the big trading houses treat them.

Most of these trading houses have trading presences in the three major time zones: New York, London and Hong Kong. There are slight variations to the cities - Hong Kong may be Sydney, Singapore or Shanghai, but broadly speaking these are the areas where the trading originates.

These same houses run "trading books" - positions - that they pass around the world when each regional office stops trading for the day as the dawn is breaking and the sun heads west.

If you look at the markets, the usual human characteristics are evident. Everyone is different, and as the book is passed the local office puts it's own slant on things, adjusting the book in line with it's opinions and news.

So, I join these guys and start my Profile when Globex opens in the U.S. on Sunday afternoon (9.30 pm in London) and create 3 Profiles every 24 hours from that moment - each profile being 480 minutes (8 hours) long. This roughly meets the beginning of activity in the U.S. at about 8.30 pm NY time.

The Euro FX future looks like this in Market Profile:

I use each Profile as I use other Profiles. I split the Profiles as necessary and merge them too. But this is a good starting point for me.

Now available with Google Apps: Google AdSense

[Cross-posted from the Google Enterprise Blog]

Editor’s note: We recently launched an improvement that makes over 60 additional Google services available to Google Apps users. This series showcases what’s new and how your organization can benefit.



Welcome to Google AdSense
Do you have traffic to a web property that you would like to monetize? Whether you’ve invested time and energy in developing web content that brings in tons of traffic or would just like another income stream to support your business’s online presence, there is a solution for you that now works with your Google Apps account: Google AdSense.

Google AdSense enables millions of website owners of all sizes to display relevant ads alongside their online content. AdSense taps into Google’s vast network of local and international advertisers so there is great variety in ads, and Google technology selects ads specifically targeted for your website and visitors. By allowing advertisers to compete to display ads you can easily monetize traffic to your website and earn revenue.

Setting up an AdSense account is easy and free. As soon as you set up your account you can begin to place ads on your website. AdSense provides actionable data to help maximize your revenue, rich controls to protect your brand, and other helpful resources to improve your efficiency in managing and optimizing your revenue streams.



AdSense is simple to set up, you just have to add a few lines of code to the HTML of your site and you’re ready to start displaying ads. With AdSense, you stay in control of the user experience on your site by customizing the size, location, and types of ads that appear, and there is no commitment so you can turn the ads off at any time.

Before this improvement enabled access to additional applications, Google Apps users had to create a separate account to sign in to AdSense. Now, Apps users can access their cloud-based productivity applications, along with AdSense, using the same account. As an Apps user, you will now be able to seamlessly control your AdSense ads, as well as view a wide range of descriptive statistics and graphs about your ad performance using your existing Google Apps account.



Just like Google Apps, AdSense runs in Google’s cloud so you get easy access from anywhere without any software to install or hardware for IT to maintain.

Learn more and get started
Google AdSense can be enabled by your domain administrator from the Google Apps Control Panel at https://www.google.com/a/[your_domain.com] (replace [your_domain.com] with your actual domain name). If your organization isn’t using Google Apps yet, you can learn more and sign up today at http://www.google.com/apps/more.

You can learn more about Google AdSense in the Help Center or stay up-to-date on the latest launches on the Inside AdSense Blog.

Share your story
Have you already started using Google AdSense at your organization, or plan to now that it’s available? Please share your story and your organization could be featured in the next Gone Google ad campaign!


Posted by Nate DeOms, AdSense Team

Note: Google AdSense may not be available in all areas.
Update: For those of you who already have a Google AdSense account, we're in the process of finalizing the infrastructure that will allow you to seamlessly transition your existing AdSense account and data over to your Google Apps account.

Longer Time Frame Trading

As I said in earlier posts, I do some longer term trading with pairs and options. The methodology I use is very similar to my day trading, except that I usually only need to look at the trades once a day.

Today's chart is an example from the Gold market. It's a daily chart, but if I had cut off the information that gave away the time frame, it could just as easily have been an intra day one.

I just keep it simple, add proper money management to a high win rate and it all comes together. Again, I need different bits of information in my picture and then the order flow tells it all. The Market Profile adds the context and in the longer daily time frames, it adds the "volume" component.

These longer time frames can be traded with futures out right, options, option spreads, ETFs and options on ETFs. We are spoiled for choice for instruments and can choose the one(s) that best suit our financial objectives.