Search giant Google has acquired GrandCentral Communications for an undisclosed sum.GrandCentral lets users of its software combine all their phone numbers and voicemail boxes under one phone number so they can manage various phone features online. Once the user clicks on the number, GrandCentral calls the user’s designated phone and then connects it to the number from the address book.

Last week rumors of the acquisition swirled online.

At the time, a GrandCentral spokesman said he couldn’t comment on the rumors.

Google just made the announcement on its blog.

Source:
July 05, 2007
telecomasia.net
(InfoWorld Daily via NewsEdge)
Click here for details

FeedBurner will make a couple of announcements very soon as a direct result of its acquisition by Google. This means that Feedburner can now afford to offer more of its premium features for free.

TotalStats and MyBrand, both previously for-pay services, are now being offered at no charge. And with FeedBurner Stats PRO, you can see the number of people that have clicked on the individual content items in your feed, and also obtain the context of your Reach, which estimates the number of subscribers that interacted with your feed content, on a daily basis. MyBrand is also offered at the PRO level, and lets you in a sense, brand your feed URL (mysite.com/feed rather than feeds.feedburner.com/mysite).

Previous PRO customers will not be charged as of June 2007, and those that sign up for new Feedburner accounts will also reap the benefits of having these existing tools now offered for free, as indicated by the PRO badge next to their feeds.

Now you know why I love Google so much! Whenever they acquire a service-based company, very often than not, they will turn those paid services to free services for all after they acquired the company!

Check out the details here !

In part 1 of my “How To Track Traffic To Your Web Site” series, I have introduced to you Google Analytics. Now, I am going to introduce you to another popular and free service known as the StatCounter.

StatCounter is a free yet reliable, invisible web tracker, that provides highly configurable hit counter and real-time detailed web stats. You only need to sign up and insert a simple piece of code on your web page or blog and you will be able to analyse and monitor all the visitors to your website in real-time for free!

StatCounter is a fast, responsive, quick loading and reliable service. And it allows Invisible Tracking – so, you will see no ads on your web site.

StatCounter’s accurate real-time website statistics with detailed visitor tracking and analysis helps you to discover where your traffic are coming from!

Some of their key features include:

• Invisible or Visible Counter – your choice!
• Custom Summary Stats based on all your visitors
• Highly detailed Analysis of your pageloads
• Manage multiple sites from one account

• Discover:

- what keywords visitors use to find your site
- your most popular pages
- links used to reach your site
- what countries your visitors come from
- how visitors navigate through your site
- and much more!

• Email reports
• And MUCH more!

I am using StatCounter, in conjunction with Google Analytics to have a better understanding of the traffic coming to all my web sites and blog! You can try using it too!

To sign up, you can go to http://www.statcounter.com for more information!

There are many ways to track the traffic to the web site. Some of them are free, some are paid services.

Why do you want to track your traffic? The reason is simple: So that you can know where does most of the traffic to your web site is coming from, and you may want to spend on time on targetting the places that are bringing you the most traffic to give you the best results. Capitalise on the best methods and drop those ineffective methods after you have tested them out!

This is especially important if you are paying for your advertising and you want to make sure that you stretch your limited advertising dollars to the maximum for best ROI results.

Today, I will talk about Google Analytics, a free traffic tracking services from Google that is available to all advertisers, publishers, and site owners.

Google Analytics helps you find out what keywords attract your most desirable prospects, what advertising copy pulled the most responses, and what landing pages and content make the most money for you.

It is easy to use for novice marketers, while delivering all of the capabilities that experienced web analytics professionals expect.

Google Analytics helps to track all online campaigns, from emails to keywords, regardless of search engine or referral source.

It also has all the features you would expect from a high-end analytics offering. It provides tightly integrated AdWords support as well, so you can view AdWords ROI metrics without having to import cost data or add keyword tracking codes.

I am using this for myself as well and I love it, especially when it gives me information about where my traffic are coming from so that I can focus my time on what has been working for me. The best part of it is that Google Analytics is FREE!!

You can sign up here for Google Analytics.

A virus has been detected in a Grand Theft Auto mod video that’s being spread on YouTube.

While it’s still safe to view the video directly on YouTube’s website, following the external link posted in the video and downloading the subsequent “Grand Theft Auto” mod will infect your computer. The most recent video to carry the virus is called “Hood Life” and has surprised some with its ability to infect any computers at all, given the extremely poor quality of the video itself, leaving people to wonder why it’s being downloaded in the first place. It certainly doesn’t look like anything that would be remotely affiliated with the rather graphic video game.

Click here for full story…

Here is a trick on how to insert YouTube video into your WordPress blog! Cool stuff!

See the video here…

Like it? Leave your comments! I spent 10-12 hours online these days playing with all these Internet Marketing stuff! Show me some appreciation, will you?

AdSense has announced that they are expanding the previously closed beta Referrals 2.0 program to be available to all AdSense publishers. This newly expanded Referrals is going to take a while for publishers to get their heads around but the basics of the expansion are that now instead of only being able to recommend and earn money from a handful of Google related products that you’ll now be able to refer your readers to thousands of products on a CPA basis (ie you get paid when your reader takes some action specified by the advertiser (like buy something).

Check this out:

http://www.problogger.net/archives/2007/06/29/adsense-launch-referrals-20

Great post! That is why I love Firefox so much! It is so easily expandable!

Check out:

http://mashable.com/2007/06/19/social-networking-firefox

I will cover social networking and bookmarking sites in details later in my traffic generation series on my blog. Do bookmark my site!

Derek from Internet Marketing Center is offering a limited number of the Internet’s best selling home study course “The Insider Secrets to Marketing Your Business on the Internet!” for only USD$2.95!

For only $2.95, you will get 30 days to test-drive the exact same wealth-building system that Derek and his company have used to generate $60,000,000 in sales!

You will have 30 days to review their 800-page Internet Marketing “bible” and see first-hand all the valuable techniques that they have packed into the course!

This is a great chance to take advantage of this time-sensitive and limited trial!

WARNING: This $2.95 trial will only be available until July 10th, 2007! So you will need to grab it quickly if you want to try it out before it’s too late!

PS: As part of their offer, they are also giving people a 30-day trial membership in their exclusive Internet Entrepreneur Club. You will be able to exchange information and learn from 100s of experienced online entrepreneurs. Plus, you can ask all the questions you want – and get personalised advice from Derek’s team of Internet marketing experts within 24 hours or less!

PSS: This Is The Exact Blueprint A Stay-At-Home Mom With Two Small Kids Used To Go From Nowhere To More Than $300,000+ PER YEAR!

Don’t deprive yourself of an opportunity, just check out the web page over here, you got nothing to lose to review it! But you may potentially lose something else in your life by casting this aside. To your life’s success!

Yours Truly,

Donald Lim

In my subsequent series of “How To Generate Traffic to Your Web Site” posts on my www.donaldlim.com blog, I will elaborate further on the various free methods that I have written in Part 1 of How To Generate Traffic to Your Web Site.

Today, I will talk about generating traffic via blogs. Other than posting on your own blogs to create a following of readership for your own blogs, you can actually leverage on other blogs, especially popular ones, to increase traffic to your web site.

First of all, you may ask: How do I find blogs to post? Read on to find out:

There are many ways to do this. I will outline a few of them below (note that they are not exhaustive):
1. Go to www.technorati.com and find blogs to post based on the topic that you are in. Use keywords to search for relevant blogs that you wish to locate and post.
2. Go to blogsearch.google.com. As usual, enter keywords to search for relevant blogs that you wish to post to.
3. To find more blog directories to locate more blogs, go to google.com and enter “blog search” as your keywords and you will be presented with a listing of blog directories. You can then use this to find the relevant blogs that you are looking for!

Secondly, you may ask “What do you do at other people’s blogs?”. These are some of the things you can do when you find other blogs relevant to what you are doing:

1. You can learn to appreciate what other bloggers are writing or doing, and give your comments on their blogs to show your appreciation or feedback.  Most of the time,  you will be asked to enter your name, email address and web site address. Assuming that your comments are not moderated by the blog owners, your approved comments will appear on their blogs and this gives your web site some online exposure.  Imagine your comments are appearing on a very popular blog, how do you think you will benefit from their traffic?

2. If you like something that you saw on a blog, you may post some good resources in return to share with the blog owners and their community, or even your own contents that you have produced if you sincerely and honestly believe that it will be of benefit to other people as well. In my own experience, I posted a special e-report online to share with many blog owners and it was downloaded by many people online.

3. You can ask for a link exchange. If you find a similar blog to what you are doing, you can politely ask for a link to your web site. You can reciprocate by putting a link back to their blog. Doing this will be beneficial to both of you as this provides exposure of each other’s blog to the other party’s community.

Start doing the above steps today and be consistently about it. I am sure you will increase more traffic to your web site.

I welcome your comments below. Or you can subscribe to my newsletter if you want to be informed of the latest tips and techniques that I am using to produce results for myself.