Darren Rowse of ProBlogger fame just posted a couple of articles on how he's noticing a welcome upswing in Facebook traffic, a tactic that's working OK for this little site at the moment.

If you've seen my Facebook Page, you'll notice I use a couple of tricks used in the "Static FBML" landing page (see Step 6 in Darren's article).

The Static FBML application supports a subset of the tags full blown Facebook Applications use, but the most useful two work - fb:visible-to-connection and fb:multi-friend-selector

Member Only Content

fb:visible-to-connection allows you to show member (or "liked") only content, which I use to "hide" Step 2 in the Landing Page

You can take advantage of this to offer an ethical bribe, which could be a link to a free report, video etc that's only displayed once user's "Like" the page

Invite Friends

For really keen visitors, the fb:multi-friend-selector shows the common "Invite Friends" Facebook Dialog you see all over Facebook. I can't track how well this works, I suspect it's very low on a landing page, but you could easily create a second page and host this, and then try to encourage existing members to use it if they're liking your content.

Free Code - Facebook Landing Page

You can see the basic outline of my Landing Page in the code below. Just follow Darren's steps to setup your page, then paste the FBML below into the Static FBML dialog and you'll see it working. You'll want to customise the HTML around the FBML tags with some pretty images/your own text, it's pretty straight forward -

Hey folks, exciting day, because I've got another free Applet for you to download - Facebook Tools

Facebook Tools allows you to see your own FB profile within Really Useful Web Apps, with quick access to your Friend List, "Likes," Events and Inbox.

If you run any Facebook Pages, I've integrated a cool feature for you to monitor your Pages, who's written what on your wall, who your latest "fans" (or should that be likers?) are, and, one-click access to Facebook's Insights statistics for your Page.

Let me tell you, hunting around Facebook for all this information take some time, so this will save you a good couple of minutes every day if you like to keep on top of your stats etcetera. Combine this with Google Tools and you've got a really powerful platform for monitoring stats, social media and more.

Watch the video below to see how it works, then head on over to the App Store to download it. Enjoy!

Hey folks, I'm almost ready to launch a really cool (and really useful obviously) new applet, but in the mean time, I've been doing some thinking this morning about Online Business models, and I figured my notes would make a half decent post, so apologies in advance if this rambles a bit .....

The State of Online - 2010

Looking back, Web 2.0 was a weird period. When we went through "Dot Com" in the 90's, the overriding feeling was "Wow I can make millions on the net!!!!" but because so many were hurt when the bubble burst, I think everyone went through Web 2.0 thinking "Hang on a minute, all seems great but where's the business model?" - in other words, folks wised up a bit, but then we were told we needed to generate free content, or have users generate it...

It's amazing that services the slew of "Web 2.0" products that are provided completely free with no premium offer, advertising revenue or email list can, but here we are.

Fundamentally, I don't think the "old" models of online business have changed much, nor have much significant threat on the future. Currently, I think Mobile is an additional opportunity, not a "replacement" for good old fashioned desktop web browsing. If anything, the iPad proves our Full screen Web Browsing habits need compromise with the small screen.

Video and automated Sharing were the two greatest thinks to come out of the last decade. Online Video changes everything now it's pretty much ubiquitous, and automated sharing (i.e Facebook, Twitter) is just a great benefit for website owners that didn't exist in the 90's.

So what's the best type of Website business to Start?

When a lot of things are changing (Mobile, Video, Cloud, Twitter, etc) it's easy to fall prey to advice that jumping on these bandwagons as the motivation for creating an online business is a reason to exist. In reality (as I am finding) cold hard facts apply:

Business is the exchange of money for something of perceived higher value

Which means if your new iPhone game isn't better than Angry Birds, you're in trouble.

Product

eBook. Video Course. Coaching. Mail Offer. Software Product (that's me) - these are all straight down the line, pay-for-acquisition Product Offers. This model has not, and will not ever change significantly. As long as we believe the purchase of a product outweighs the cost of not having it, products in all their forms, will sell.

Product means overhead (time and materials) and risk in creating that product ahead of marketing it, though this can be mitigated by low/zero cost market research costs via methods as simple as Google Keywords.

Product also means continual enhancement to satisfy existing and reach new customers, and development of new products for cross selling to your existing customer base (that's more T&M).

Service

Web Design, Hosting, SEO, Outsourcing in all it's forms. Service is all about "do something for me so I don't have to." A great business to be in if you have a reputation that your service works, especially if that service is automated (e.g. Web Hosting), not to easy if that service relies on Human labour. Web Design for instance, will vary wildly in price based on the reputation, quality and ability of the provider, whereas Web Hosting does not have large pricing ranges (assuming you compare the same hosting features) because it's 

Publisher

Ad-supported Blogs, Email Newsletters, News sites. A risky model that only works well for the few who can get a big enough audience to command high advertising revenues or fall back on what AdSense will provide them. This is entirely dependent on building an audience first, and continual publication of relevant content that will retain a readership. Continual publication of that content is why  99% of blogs don't have any content beyond the first 2 or 3 posts, and why the media industry is in so much trouble....

Intermediary

Affiliate Marketing, Websites with Product Reviews etc. In this form you have no product and no service. Your business is to connect buyers with sellers, as an affiliate marketer that means finding eyeballs waiting to buy, and working hard to differentiate & compete with the many other affiliates doing exactly the same thing.

Affiliate marketing seems easy to many, but it's far, far easier when run off the back off the Publisher model above where the trust and engagement of an audience with the publisher (blogger) will result in greater conversions than "overnight" affiliates attempting to make sales off PPC etcetera

Marketplace / Directory

eBay & Craig's list hold the title on this, followed by all the countless classified and niche marketplaces around the web. Similar to Affiliate Marketing in that it's about connecting buyers with sellers, which means you've got that chicken and egg problem of which comes first - the buyers or the sellers? Digital Marketplace experts Envato kicked off their enterprise a few years back by simply giving away thousands worth of "buyer dollars" (or was it free listings? can't remember) to seed their marketplaces with enough content to make them viable.

My friend Bruno runs a few marketplaces and does a similar thing when he launches a market - he simply offers sellers  free listings to kick start the marketplace.

The great thing about this model is it's completely automated - no physical inventory, no product development/maintenance, and no ongoing provision of service. However, because of this low barrier to entry, this model survives on the ability to maintain traffic numbers in both sellers and buyers and stay competitive.

Business Directories like Yellow Pages are the same deal. The big guys like the Yellow Pages may be shitting themselves that Google Maps are making their entire business model free, but don't be fooled - niche directories that can dominate keywords can still make dollars if they can prove they have qualified eyeballs.

Others

There are others I'm sure you know of, but these seem to be the main ones to me, which leads me on to ...

The Holy Grail - What is the Ultimate Online Business Model?

Taking all the above into consideration, I think a blueprint for the perfect business model has these attributes:

1. Business Model

Dollars for Database Rows
The "Dollars for Database" formula of Marketplaces is powerful - based on decent enough website technology it's possible to run a  business with complete automation

Can Scale, and scales vertically
This is a no brainer, but the model needs to be scalable. I nag my friend about this for his site. His site services an ultra targetted niche (he'd rather I didn't say - think "accessories") which could be easily scaled vertically to service different "accessories" within the same niche. Put another way, it's like when a popular book come out (e.g. Rich Dad, Poor Dad) and then suddenly there's 12 variants on the shelves to appeal to different audiences (e.g. Rich Dad, Poor Mum?).

Simple Offer, Understandable Value
A mistake I've made right here with Really Useful Web Apps is some of the premium products are "complex" offers - they contain loads of features that help you achieve results quickly, but don't neatly summarise into a simple offer. Your classic, "Internet Marketing" long form sales letter has the same problem - any offer that takes 40 paragraphs to explain will be outsold by a simple, brutal offer.

So what's a simple offer? Examples you'd probably buy today -

• "We guarantee your website will be featured on 30 PR4+ news websites for $300 or your money back"
• "Sponsor your own email to our list of over 2000 qualified buyers of Marketing Professionals for $500" 

No sales letter necessary - just brutally simple offers

Standard Price Point, Premium Price Point

Whatever the offer, I believe their should be a minimum of two price points - the "try first" price, and the "committed" price point. The whole science of pricing warrants a post by itself, but two price points caters for two audiences - buyers that you've out priced and buyers with cash to lose. Offer of course, comes before price. If the offer's really good (see above, easy said than done), multiple price points matter less.

2. Competitiveness

The "Dollar for Database" model doesn't bode well for competitiveness, but by creating a scaleable model this can be alleviated by narrowing the focus to niches, thus (hate to say it) using a Long Tail effect. The Yellow Pages / Google problem is the opposite of this, suppose Yellow Pages launched a site just dedicated to Chinese restaurants, or even better, Chinese Restaurants in New Jersey. Blow $8 on a domain name and they'd own Google Searches for that forever (well maybe not Google given this particular case but certainly Yanoo and Bing)

Ideally the business in question has less than 500,000 results per search term in Google for key terms, and at least two advertisers (i.e. it's worth spending money to be there) with a CPC preferably under $2

3. Operation

No Content Creation, No Product Creation
Product creation is time consuming and risky, and I write on this blog because I want to, but I don't believe the "Publisher" model is a particularly great one to be in. The overhead in either creating content or managing other people doing it is unappealing to me as a business model.

So here's the problem - create a business that doesn't rely on creation of content, but still attracts and retains users? User generated content? - Easier said than done. If Dot Com left behind a million websites with no business model, Web 2.0 left behind even more with a "User Generated Content" system with no .. content (I should know, I made one).

But I only go to websites with interesting content, or websites that do something for me. Aggregate content? - I don't think so. Google Reader is probably the greatest content aggregation website on the planet, but they're unlikely to engage me in selling a marketing product versus Seth Godin's blog.

What about if you could leverage businesses to create content based on information of relevance to their audience? 

Facebook & Twitter are the primary winners in this - Facebook Pages especially have seen hundreds of businesses flock to maintain outposts on Facebook to get some of their "Like" love (me included) and what are they selling? - that's right - advertise your page. Twitter are catching up, but users benefit - Business Generated Content.

Business Generated Content
BGC is going to be more relevant, more professional and more valuable than any User Generated Content will ever be - Businesses aren't going to create spam, they're going to carefully create their content to ensure it's appealing enough to engage / retain an audience, and it's going to be worth more to users than sifting through meaningless Tweets, YouTube videos etcetera. In reality, the best Twitter accounts (celebrities aside) are examples of BGC  - individuals or companies using Twitter to provide links to valuable stuff to attract an audience.

So if getting Users to generate content is difficult, how on earth do you get businesses to? There's only one way in my mind - and that's to combine content businesses generate with the core offer that forms part of the business model. In other words, the content a business creates through this model is content they are actually paying to publish.

And why would they do that? Because they believe it will provide them with more customers, which means the model is that a website has enough targetted visitors to warrant charging related business for creating content for you. But we're back to that chicken and egg problem ....

Automated List
Before I move on, let's mention lists - "The money is in the list" - I've heard it so many times it rings in my ears, but just like that Blog / news website, it's an overhead in content creation, unless that BGC I talked about above IS the list. Don't get me wrong, a personal list from a human being is going to far outweigh an automated generated email, but if that content is valuable, it will hold enough subscribers.

4. Technology & Delivering it

Simple To Build
Many "ideas" (products) take too long to create and test. The most important thing is being able to deliver an idea quickly. If it's a simple offer (above), focusing on just delivering the technology for that and no bells and whistles (erk. guilty again) should mean a market can be entered quickly. Once the idea is proven to work, enhancements can be made - where I mention "automated lists" etcetera above, these don't need to be there from day 1.

As I am discovering, speed in delivering less than guaranteed ideas is incredibly important ...

Simple To Sell Up
If the idea scales vertically, the technology should be able to be re-configured per niche it scales to, which means if a niche doesn't work out, it's easy to sell. What makes a few dollars in revenue but has an audience may be worth something to someone willing to buy on Flippa which means the investment's not dead if it doesn't work out.

5. Marketing, Gaining Traffic & Users

Resolving Chicken or Egg
Simple order of events - (1) Value on website (2) Visitors (3) Buyers. There's no other route. Start with something small but valuable (see below), get visitors you can provably keep, then work on buyers.

Seed it with a freebie
To begin, the one piece of content that's worth creating (or paying someone else to create) is a decent, valuable "freebie" that will be of value to the target audience. This should then be used as a viral bribe to encourage users to either (a) Email a friend about it to get it or (b) Tweet / Share it to get it. An additional viral bribe should be created to get list sign ups in the first place.

Seed it with $$$
Once it's ready and those freebies are built, PAY for traffic in the cheapest places you can get it. That means low cost keywords, and preferably using your $$$ to pay for other people (eLance, TaskUs) to do stuff for you.

Use Search Architect to discover places you can list your site and get those all important keyword links necessary to maintain traffic levels

Promotion Auto Pilot
Once there's enough traffic, you're in a position to let users promote for you perpetually. The idea here is simple - get the businesses using your system to provide special offers through your site, then get users to take a sharing action to take advantage of the offer - tell friends for a group price, tweet for a discount, any action that will spread the message and can be automated without human involvement. 

Have you got a fit?

So that's my thoughts. It's probably a tall order, but it contains the basic ingredients for a practical business. My challenge to you is, what's the closest fit that you know of that meets some of the criteria above? Answer below ...

Search Architect is my new SEO software, designed to help you get the most out of your search efforts on Google, Bing and Yahoo. To introduct Search Architect I've created a 5 part video series, the first of which you can watch here:

Search Architect, Part 1

Search Architect is initially on sale at $97, along with the Professional version of the Website Database Editor

You can find out more about Search Architect and Website Database Editor Pro at the dedicated page I've created for it here -

Search Architect Information Page

Another week, another awesome video. This one's all about working out what your competitor's have been up to online, and copying their marketing tactics to achieve similar results.

It's in glorious HD video below -

Enjoy

Today's Video is a 2 part (damn you YouTube 10 minute limit) special on Pay Per Click advertising, and how to work out whether a PPC (or Cost Per Click) advertising campaign will be affordable for you ...

More video goodness this week - for your viewing pleasure, a demonstration of the free Website Database editor in Really Useful Web Apps. Run VT ....

Transcript

In this video, I'm going to show you how to find out how influential any website is, using one of the new tools in our software package, Really Useful Web Apps. Best of all, everything I'm going to show you in this video is free.

So to demonstrate this, I'm going to use a new file type we've added support for in the software, which is called a Website Database; and what this does is allow you to store a list of web pages or URL's if you prefer, and then run analysis on them to find out how well those pages perform, in terms of their search engine ranking, inbound links and social media.

There are so many uses for this - you can use this to monitor competitors, monitor the performance of your own websites or web pages, and use it to evaluate link building partners to increase your search engine rankings.

Creating A Website Database

So, to create a Website Database file, you'll first need to open or create a new project within Really Useful Web Apps. Projects allow you to work with various different types file within the software, of which Website Databases are just one.

To Add the new file, right click the root of the project or any folder you have within it, and select Add File.

Select miscellaneous, then Website Database, and give your new file a name. Click Add, and your file will be created and open up in the Website Database Editor.

This is obviously empty because I've just created it, so to start, let's add a web page by clicking the first icon, add url. If you enter a URL for a webpage, then click download details, the page will download and automatically fill in the title and description for you, if they are available on the page. Click OK to return to the list.

Adding a URL

To get statistics for the page, right click it and select "get statistics for selected website". This will set off a bunch of queries to retrieve statistical information from various services across the web. As each finishes you'll see the results appear, you can cancel the remaining statistics queries by clicking on the red cross at the top right. You may need to use that if you run these queries on a lot of different sites you add at the same time, which I'll show you how to do later.

Statistics

Hover your mouse over the heading on each column to see what each column is, in order, you can see the site's Google Page Rank, it's rank on Alexa, and inbound links to the page as counted by Google, Yahoo and Bing. These columns may not populate with any results, which means no links were found to the page on the given search engine. Moving across, you can see sharing statistics from Social Media websites - Facebook shares, Twitter re-tweets, Delicious saves for the url and all Delicious saves for the primary domain. Stumbleupon, Google Buzz and Digg counts follow that.

If the url has an RSS feed, that will appear here, and if that RSS feed is hosted on feedburner, you'll see the number of subscribers if the website has chosen to share subscriber count details on feedburner.

Right of RSS, You can see traffic estimates from Compete.com, the first column shows Compete's estimation of how many visitors the site gets per month along with an icon that indicates whether that's a little or a lot of traffic, and right of that is Compete's traffic ranking for the site, which is similar to Alexa, and the icon shows whether Compete considers this a trustworthy site. Clicking on the links in either of these columns will take you to the full statisitics page on Compete.com which shows a lot more information you may want to look at.

Lastly, you can see the age of the domain and the description you entered at the begining.

Configuring Columns

Now, this is obviously a lot of information to display on screen so if you're more interested in certain statistics over others, you can drag the column headers to reorder them as you wish, and the order you leave these columns in will be preserved when you save the file and reopen it next time.

Additionally, if you're not interested in some of this information, you can disable each of the statistics by right clicking the header here and unchecking the column you don't want to see. This will hide the column, and stop the statistic being retrieved when you run the update function, so if you turn each column you don't want off BEFORE you run the update checks, the hidden columns won't be retrieved. You can turn all the columns back on by selecting "Show All," andthen you'll need to re-run the statistics update if you want to retrieve the missing statistics you had turned off. Like the order of the columns, which ones you have enabled will be preserved in your file for the next time you open it.

Toolbar Options

In the toolbar, there are a couple of options for importing url's in bulk, the first of which is the Import URL button, which lets you simply paste a list of url's, one per line in the textbox and each will be added to a separate line.

To analyse these in bulk, simply click and drag on the rows of the URL's you've added to select them, then right click the selection and click "Get statistics" again, and the analysis will run for every url you've selected. This will obviously take some time to run for each site, so you may decide to cancel all the remaining queries using that cancel button I mentioned earlier.

You can delete any of the url's by right clicking and deleting a row, or making a selection again and deleting in bulk.

Search Engine Results Analysis

Now, let's say you're trying to build backlinks and you want to uncover these kind of statistics for websites that rank well for a given keyword, in order to ascertain how approachable they may be for a link building campaign.

So, if I head over to Google and do a search on say ... "Hign Definition cameras," ... I'll get a bunch of results that rank well for that term.

Now to import that list of results into the Website Database, what I can do is actually import all the links on the page by copying the URL of the Google Search Results, swithc back to Really USeful Web Apps, and then select the "Download Links from Web Page" option in the toolbar. Paste the URL in and the software will download the page again, and extract every link on the page.

Partial Delete

Now the problem with this is that a lot of the links on the page are Google's own internal links to other pages on their site, so to get rid of them, what I can do is hit CTRL + A to select all the URL's, then right click and choose "Delete (filtered)" what this will let you do is delete all the url's in your selection that match the text you type in.

So, I'll type in google.com to get rid of the google links, and I can see I'll need to do it again on webcache.google, .... and youtube.com to clean the list up. What I'm now left with is all the search results, and I can run the statistics queries over all these URL's so see how well each of these compare in terms of inbound links, page rank, social media etcetera.

You'll find other uses for this "download links" feature on pages that contain hundreds of links, where you may want to quickly analyse all of them without manually copying and pasting each link.

Similiar to Download links from Web Page, there's a "Download links from RSS Feed" which will download an RSS feed url and import all the links in the feed.

Sorting

Once the statistics queries are complete, you can sort the url's by any of the different columns to see which ones rank higher than others, and if you save these results and open them at a later date, you can simply select them all again and update the statistics to see how each site's performance changes over time.

This is really useful if you're analysing your competitors on the web, and want to track how well their websites are performing over time alongside your own, or evaluating the performance of your own webpages alongside any SEO and promotional activities you are doing to monitor the results for yourself, or your clients.

Adaptive Mutation

You'll notice when you right click on a site or selection of sites that a number of options appear, and beyond the first few obvious ones, what you'll see at the bottom of this menu is a whole bunch of different features that will change depending on what other applets you've got installed in Really Useful Web Apps.

We call this adaptive mutation, and what that means is that whenever you download a new free, or premium applet from our App Store into the software, it has the capability to extend the features of existing applets.

So to explain that a little more clearly, you'll see this option to Bookmark the url on delicious, and that's appearing BECAUSE i've also installed the Delicious Browser applet in the software. The other options available there are all introduced based on the different applets I've got installed, so the power of this tool just grows and grows every time you add other applets to other software - and you can see I can do things like a WHOIS lookup to find out who owns the domain, view the page in a text web browser which will show me what search engines index on the page, and see the most popular pages on this domain via Diig.com

You can create and save multiple website databases, allowing you to separate lists of websites based on what you're working on. For instance, I maintain separate databases of web pages that review my competitor's products for each product category I compete in, so I can then evaluate those review sites to decide whether to try and contact them about my products.

You can also export all these results to CSV using the toolbar option, which means you can open these statistics in Excel to do further work on.

Summary

So that's the Website Database editor, you'll find it in the free standard edition of Really Useful Web Apps which you can download at www.reallyusefulwebapps.com.

Hopefully you can now see how useful this is in terms of evaluating your own websites, competitors, link partners and any other type of website you need to work with - there's really nothing this tool can't tell you about a website in terms of it's traffic, popularity, rankings and social media reach.

I've got a bunch of cool upgrades planned for this tool along with a premium version so subscribe to my Twitter, Facebook or YouTube channels for updates, and subscribe to the RSS feed and email list on the main site for details on special offers and other exclusives.

Here's a short but action-packed video explaining all the awesome Googleness you can get in Google Tools -

For the visually & aurally impaired (that means you search engine), here's a transcript:

(Transcript)

In this video I'm going to take you on a quick tour of Google Tools, which is one of the free applets that you can download for Really Useful Web Apps. I'll show you where you can download it and how to install it at the end of the video.

Features

So, what's in Google Tools? Well, Google Tools essentially adds two types of features to Really Useful Web Apps. The first feature, or features really, is a bunch of new widgets for the Dashboard . The second feature is a pretty extensive implementation of Google Reader, so you can access your Google Reader RSS feeds right inside the software.

Dashboard Widgets for Multiple Accounts

I'm going to show you the dashboard widgets first, and what's really cool about all of these different widgets is that you can add MULTIPLE widgets for MULTIPLE Google accounts. Why would you want to do that? Well, I know a lot of people use Googles Apps for Domains, so they actually run Gmail, Documents, and Calendar on their different domain name names - and that means you can add the email, calendar and documents widgets for each of these accounts. 

Google Analytics Widgets

The other reason that really makes adding multiple widgets incredibly useful is Google Analytics. Here's the thing, I don't know about you but going into Google Analytics to check all my website stats is a pain in the ass, there's no centralised view and it just takes ages to click through and load each site. We've solved all that - you can pick specific statistics for specific websites and place them on the dashboard, when you come back to the dashboard, those stats just load up without having to spend the time clicking through the Analytics website. 

Secure Authentication with Account Locker

Each time you add one of the Google widgets you'll see that the software is prompting you for your Google credentials, and you'll notice when you add more widgets those credentials are saved and available for you to pick for different widgets. So if you're adding Mail, Documents and Calendar for one account, you've only got to provide those details once, and they're encrypted and saved securely on your hard drive.

What I hope you can see from this is the Dashboard starts to become a really useful place to see a summary of all the information that's important to you, be it mail, site stats, etcetera.

Google Reader

With Google Reader, we've implemented this as a side panel, so you can dock it alongside whatever you're working on, and open up feeds as and when you like. You can add new feeds, delete feeds, and mark feeds as read through the right click options on the panel, and you can also load up feed statistics - this is really cool because it tells you how frequently the blog is posting, and how many subscribers they've got. You'll see a lot of blogs don't publish their subscriber figures and this is a good way of finding out how big their audience is. Bear in mind this statistic is based on Google Reader subscribers, so it won't include the many subscribers that the blog will have in other RSS readers.

View Multiple Feeds

When you click on a feed it opens up in the main tabbed area, and unlike the online version of Google Reader you can have multiple feeds open at one time. 

Feed View Docking

As with all documents and tools within Really Useful Web Apps, you can drag these around and dock them where you like to customise your environment how you wish. 

Adaptive Mutation in Google Reader

What you'll also notice in the Feed view, is a whole bunch of icons above the reading pane. Now this is a feature we call adaptive mutation. What that means is that every applet you install from the App Store has the capability to introduce changes into other applets. 

Google Reader & Delicious Browser interact

For example, I've also got the Delicious Browser applet installed, and that's created one of these mutations in Google Reader, in that it's added this "Add this link to Delicious" button, which allows you to quickly save your favorite Google Reader articles straight to Delicious. This makes the two services work together seamlessly, and the more applets you install the more of these mutations you'll see which make the software more and more powerful each time you add a new applet.

So that's Google Tools, if you use any of these services online I encourage you to download it and give it a try. 

How to Download

To download it, the first thing you need to do is download Really Useful Web Apps which is free, you can get that from the big fat download button on our home page at reallyusefulwebapps.com. Once its finished downloading, just follow the instructions on the download page to install the software, it's pretty easy to step through and install.

Register for a Free Account

You need to register for a free account on the website to get access to the app store, so click on register and enter your details to sign up, you'll need to confirm your email address and once you've done that, you can login and head back to the App Store. 

Google Tools in the App Store

You'll find Google Tools in the free applets section of the App Store on the right, and if you go ahead and click on it, then you can click download. What will actually happen is Google Tools will download within Really Useful Web Apps, so once you've clicked download on the App Store page, head back to the software, and click Help, then Check for Updates.

This will prompt you to enter your new account details, then download Google Tools and any other applets you've chosen to download. You'll need to reboot and then all the Google tools will be available to you.

Thanks

Thanks for watching, I hope you enjoy Google Tools, it's just one of a host of powerful tools you can get in Really Useful Web Apps, so please subscribe to our Twitter, Facebook or YouTube channels for more information about other updates, and subscribe to our RSS feed and email list on the main site for details on special offers and other exclusives.

In this post, I've listed some of the most successful posts from some of the most successful blogs on the web*. The blogs are a random spread from the Technorati Top 100, and the posts are usually not recent - they've become evergreen content due to the quality, popularity and excellence of the work.

What I hope you'll take away from this list is inspiration on how to create content that meets the same standard, and hopefully achieve the same levels of success that these posts have had.

In most cases, the popularity of the posts was based on the list some blogger's provide on their site of "Most Popular Posts," in other cases, the popularity was determined by the count of most Diggs from digg.com on the blog in question.

Without further ado ...

Techcrunch.com

Web 2.0 & Technology Company News @TechCrunch
(Note: A few of the most popular stories on Digg for Techcrunch were about Digg itself, which would biase the results and so these have not been included)

The Huffington Post

Politics (originally) @huffingtonpost

TMZ

Hollywood Entertainment @harveyevintmz

Mashable

Web 2.0 & Mobile @mashable

BoingBoing

Anything and Everything

LifeHacker

Self Improvement for Geeks @lifehacker

CopyBlogger

Copywriting for the Web @copyblogger

* This isn't in order of the top blogs on Technorati, nor does it include all of them. GizModo & Engadget cover very similar ground, as do Mashable and ReadWriteWeb, hence only one of each being included

Here's a video on integrating Twitter's new @Anywhere platform into your website, and why it will help drive traffic to you.

Enjoy