Signing up for Google Tags is Quick and Easy

We get it: as a local business owner, you’re busy. Really busy. That’s why throughout the development of Google Tags - our online advertising offering available through Google Places - we’ve been acutely aware of the need to create something simple, easy, fast and effective for you and the potential customers looking for you online.

screenshot of a business listing with a coupon tag on Google.com

You may have heard about our recent promotion inviting business owners who are new to Google Tags to take advantage of a free 30-day trial. That trial is still going on, and we’re also excited to announce that we’ve streamlined the sign-up process into three easy steps. Now, it’s even easier to set up the little yellow tag in your business listing and start attracting more local customers for your business!

If you’ve already verified your free business listing in Google Places, sign in to your Google Places dashboard to begin:

1. Click “Add a Tag” from the dashboard


2. Select one of the seven available tag types, and follow the prompts. For example, if you choose a post tag, enter a note about the the unique aspect of your business that you want to highlight in the empty box.


3. Enter your credit card information. If you’ve never tried Google Tags before and are eligible for the free trial, your first month will be free!


Business owners can typically complete the sign-up process in less than five minutes. With that speed, you can get back to all the other tasks that require your attention to keep growing your success!

We’re thrilled that thousands of local businesses have already been using Google Tags to attract and connect with local customers since it became available throughout the U.S. this summer. And if you’re a business owner that hasn’t yet claimed your listing in Google Places, learn more about that simple process, and then follow the same three-step tags process. This new sign-up flow is one the many features we’re working on to make the product even more efficient. As a reminder, Google Tags is usually offered for a $25 flat monthly fee, and does not affect the ranking of the business listings on Google.com or Google Maps. Try it out today!

Posted by Shalini Agarwal, Product Manager

Stop Losses

Poorly placed stop losses are one of the reasons that most traders lose. Correctly placed stop losses save your life and make you profitable.

Right at the beginning I have always said that I have a drop dead stop in the market to cover each and every trade but I don't use stops to exit a losing trade - I watch the trade and stop myself out through the DOM.

The problem is then, how can you back test to find your trader's profile and gain the confidence in SIM to KNOW that your methodology has the required win rate and profitability?

The answer is to use dynamic stops. In the beginning of learning to trade, we use hard stops. We don't know what we don't know and believe that if I can limit my losses then I will make money. Problem is that while this may be partly true, picking a number for a stop loss to use will be the right number probably only about 33% of the time. These average stop loss numbers, discovered by a computer, are exactly that: average. Losing trades should be exited when you know they will be a losing trade. Just picking a number based upon the entry price will give only very average results at best.

Stops, to be dynamic, should not be based on the entry price but be linked to support or resistance or other market related action. Back testing this by computer is more challenging as it requires more complex coding and an understanding of market action.So developing an exit strategy, the way you developed your entry strategy, needs to be part of a final trading plan.

Our broken government

While watching the Senate primary results roll in from Delaware, I couldn't help but wonder how broken is our government? The fact that Christine O'Donnell could win the Republic nomination with just 30,000 votes -- less than the number of people at PNC Park for a SkyBlast -- and could eventually decide such a powerful position is astounding to me. Sure, she still must win in the general election, but how could someone with such poor qualifications get the nod for such an important position?

It makes me wonder why we still allow a bicameral federal legislative body. Why should we give 30,000 people -- just 3 percent of the entire population of Delaware and a micro-fraction of the American population -- an opportunity to be 1/100 votes in the U.S. Senate? That means people in smaller states have much more voting power than people living in larger states such as Pennsylvania.

The founders decided on the bicameral government to give both small and big states equal representation. But it's becoming increasingly clear that the minority in dime-size states has an overwhelming voice in our government.

How-to videos put more sexy golf carts on the road

[Cross-posted from the YouTube Blog]

We all have a dream. America’s 25 million small business owners are making their dreams happen. But it’s never easy.

For E.C. Hundley, his dream had four wheels, an engine, and a smooth ride. As the proprietor of Everything Carts in Martinsville, Va., E.C. built a business that custom assembles souped-up, street-legal golf carts. He also sells cart accessories online, and his business now employs eight people. With your dream, some hard work, guile and a penchant for online marketing, you can do something like this, too.

Let’s see how E.C. is using YouTube to build his business.

Did you get your business online from the start?
Oddly enough, we started out as a local retail store, and we never thought about taking our business online. After the first 8 months, we were going broke with just one employee, and I figured we had to do something if we were going to survive.

So you took your business online just to keep it alive.
Yes. At that point we had maybe $1,500 in inventory sitting on the shelf, so we started putting some of it on eBay. We then got with a friend who’s a web designer, and he built our website. Since then we have revamped the site about four times to make it friendly for our customers. It saved our business.

How much of your business comes from people finding you on the web, compared to other channels?
Our direct web activity is about 70% of our sales. Most of the rest is via telephone, and we also promote our business via a print catalog.

Tell us about your YouTube channel. What kind of videos do you make, and how do they help your customers?
I help people with installation of the products we sell. Our call volume had gotten really high on some of our products, so helping people over the phone was taking a lot of time. Then I remembered watching a Photoshop tutorial on YouTube, and I thought to myself this is the answer to our problem. So we started shooting a few how-to videos and posted them on our YouTube channel, and soon those calls stopped completely.

Do the videos help you sell more, too?
Yes. The videos also help us earn new business, because our customers can see that we know the products we sell, and they can buy with confidence.

What are your future plans for online video?
With the success we’ve had with the few videos we have done, we have now built a studio just for shooting how-to videos. This way the customer can see how the products are installed and get a better idea of how it is going to look. One of the toughest parts of selling a product online is that the customer usually just gets to see a picture of what they’re interested in. With video they get a better idea of the real look and size. It is the closest thing you can get to seeing, touching, feeling the product.

That’s the real power of video, isn’t it? How hard was it to get started building a YouTube channel?
It was the easiest Internet task we had ever done. It’s pretty easy and inexpensive to make good-looking videos today, too.

What advice would you have for other business owners or managers who are considering YouTube as a marketing channel?
The main advantage of producing online videos, especially for an online business, is it makes your business real. Customers need to see that your company has real people behind the website.

Eric Meyerson, Video Business Marketing Lead recently watched "1981 primitive Internet report on KRON"

Introducing ‘Improving Online Conversions for Dummies’

[Cross posted from Inside AdWords]

Are you eager to optimise your Conversion Rate, but feel a little bit overwhelmed by all of the tools available to help you? Today we're delighted to introduce Improving Online Conversions for Dummies.

We have just released a simple, easy to follow mini book, in conjunction with John Wiley Publications, to help you get a better grasp of the conversion improvement tools offered by Google. Improving Online Conversions for Dummies explains how you can make sure your ads show on searches that are most likely to convert into sales. Understand which ad clicks and impressions lead to conversions, better apportion your marketing spend and even develop your own conversion attribution model. Discover the secrets to getting more bang for your buck with this ebook.

click for full size image

For more information, visit www.google.com/conversion/fordummies

Posted by Gordon Zhu, Inside AdWords crew

Free Sept. 23rd Webinar Details AND What a difference an Hour Makes

 YOUTUBE ISSUES NOW RESOLVED

As I said yesterday, I am doing a free webinar for Infinity Futures on September 23rd. Here is the link for signing up:
http://onlinetradercentral.com/presenter_WATG35.asp

This will be a webinar that lasts about an hour and is designed to show traders how I teach them to learn to trade. I'll be going through the training steps by using one of my trading pictures as an example. There are 12 long and 12 short pictures that I currently trade and teach and am adding more from time to time.

To be consistently profitable requires a learning process that inserts a lot of information into your "muscle memory" in your brain. The process I use is designed to give you that muscle memory IF the trader does the immense amount of work that is needed. I will show in the webinar what type of work you need to do to help you achieve this muscle memory.

While this webinar will be informative, it's just an hour, and only will give you a small taste of what you will learn in the EL MarketDelta seminar in Chicago or from the DVDs.

And now for today's trading.

What a difference an hour makes. I was trading the Euro FX  from the short side in the London morning. then the numbers came out in the U.S. and it was all change. Watch the vid.

Mind the NoGap and Free Webinar

One of the things that I taught Kiki and the other traders is the importance of envisioning.

Part of each day's prep is creating a vision of how I see the market unfolding. I use this vision to see the possibilities and to see the pictures that I trade more clearly.

This pays huge dividends on most days especially ones like today in the ES.

My vision for the ES today was bullish and as the London morning unfolded I believed it more and more. Don't get me wrong. I'm ready to amend my vision as the market becomes clearer, this vision is not written in stone. More written in butter. I can smooth it over and start again.

Today, as you can see from the vid, there was no ambiguity. The final clue for the RTH only traders was the fact that just before the RTH open, the price pushed through the POC resistance (which became support) that you can see on my RTH Market profile chart on the left. Watch the vid!



FREE WEBINAR

Those of you who want to hear directly from me how I trade, and the steps that I used to teach Kiki and another 25 traders to learn my methods, will have the chance on September 23rd. Infinity Futures have asked me to do a session after the close of the RTH ES market.

I will be showing what you need to do to get to Consistent Profitability (CP) - all the steps - exactly what needs to be done. I will show one of my pictures (setup plus nuances) and how to trade it = how to learn it.

I want to repeat what I said almost a year ago in this blog: I believe that most people can learn how to trade if they are taught the right way to learn, and I don't mean just the setups. The process of learning is crucial to CP. I believe unless someone goes through all the detailed steps of learning and believing, they will have difficulty in maintaining the focus and discipline needed for CP.

Here is a link:
http://onlinetradercentral.com/presenter_WATG35.asp