Google Wave was released to a select number of individuals on September 30th, and the buzz is overflowing. But what exactly is Google Wave, you ask? It’s something new, and it’s out to change the way we think and use email as we know it today.

Google Wave is a real-time communication and collaboration platform on the web. It’s an amalgamation of email, wikis, chat, social media, social networking and project management. It contains email, documents, images, videos, maps and more.Think of it as social email.

A few of the major features of Google Wave include:

• It’s real-time. You can see what others are typing as they type.
• It’s open source. Any code developer can add to the innovations.
• It’s on the move. You can embed a wave in your blog or website.
• It’s like a wiki. Anyone can edit any other person’s contributions.
• It’s playback, playback, playback. Anything can be played again, so that you don’t miss a beat of the conversation.

The bottom line is that Google Wave is for communication and collaboration. Think of any group or team environment, and you can probably imagine how Google Wave could be used to enhance planning, project management and getting things done. Think teams at work, or the local PTA or customer support. There’s really no limit.

There have been a wealth of articles and resources posted online in the past few days to help you understand Google Wave more clearly and make better use of the technology.

Want to know all about it? Want to know how it’s different and why it matters?

To that end, check out the list of resources below, all to help you leverage Google Wave for your business and your personal life. That is, as soon as you can get your hands on it. As mentioned, Google released the application to a select number of individuals for beta testing, and because it works better when multiple people in a group share information and data within the environment Google allowed those users to invite others to join. Look for Google to open access to Google Wave to everyone in the future. Stay tuned!

For now, enjoy the Google Wave resources below:

Google Wave Resources

• Google Wave Home Page
• About Google Wave (Google)
• Request an Invitation from Google
• Google Wave Screens and Video
• Google Wave Developer Blog
• How To: Get Started with Google Wave
• Mashable’s Google Wave Guide
• Google Wave: 5 Ways It Could Change the Web
• Google Wave Starts Rolling: Picks Up Over 100,000 New Riders
• Will Google’s Wave Replace Email – And Facebook

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Check out our latest blog posts on StartupNation.com, a site devoted to helping entrepreneurs, startups and small business owners build business and achieve success.

Our two latest posts are as follows:

The Mid-Year Website Checkup
(If you expect to get the most out of your website this year, you really can’t miss this!)

11 Reasons Your Business Needs a Blog
(If your business does not yet have a blog, read this!)

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Bing is here! Bing is Microsoft’s new search engine, just launched this week. It’s being promoted as a “decision” engine, helping searchers find relevant information in a more holistic, semantically-friendly manner.

The jury is still out.

Bing appers to be a good engine, and the engine results appear to be relevant. The most immediately noticeable feature is perhaps the categorization of searches, and these categories can be found on the left side of the page. Also, by moving your cursor to the right of the search result, little snippets of additional information from the website appear, and this is useful. Another nice feature is the visual display of the Image and Video tab results – rather cool.

However, in terms of innovation, Bing falls short. The features Microsoft is touting do not really raise the bar significantly, and some of them can already be found elsewhere online including Ask.com.

Overall, Bing is nice. It’s not revolutionary.

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Website Marketing NOW is a regular contributor of website and Internet marketing advice on StartupNation.com, a truly awesome site dedicated to helping entrepreneurs, startups and small businesses become successful through education, inspiration and community.

Several of our recent blog posts on StartupNation.com have been extremely popular, generating some of the highest page views among all the blogs on the site in 2009.

Based on the popularity of the blog posts, we thought you might find the content valuable and so are highlighting the most highly read posts here for you. Check them out!

• 15 Questions to Measure the Strength of Your Home Page
• The Internet Marketing Checklist for Small Business
• 19 Ways to Increase Your Website Conversions
• 5 Mistakes to Avoid When Designing Your Website
• 11 Reasons People Leave Your Website

Hope that you find the advice to be useful in taking your website and your Internet marketing to the next level. Happy Reading!

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In a recent study, it was found that the second most important factor in a website for men is speed, or load-time of the web pages. (First was ease of use – same as for women.)

Given the importance of load times, are you sure that your web pages are loading fast enough?

To confirm the speed at which your pages are loading, check out Site-Perf. It’s a super easy-to-use load-testing tool. Simply enter the URL you want to test, select a geographic destination for the server closest to you, and away you go.

If your web pages take more than a few seconds to load, consider taking corrective action, such as optimization of images, reduction of the number of images, simplification of the code, etc.

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Welcome to everyone arriving from BusinessWeek and BusinessWeek’s Business Exchange website!

We have lots and lots of website and Internet marketing content on the Website Marketing NOW blog, and we hope you find it to be extremely useful. Take a look around and enjoy!

For the rest of you arriving here at the Website Marketing NOW blog from other sources, we are thrilled to announce that BusinessWeek is featuring our very own Tom Now today as the Featured User of Business Exchange, BusinessWeek’s social news & networking website. Tom’s feature is appearing on both the main BusinessWeek site as well as the home page of the Business Exchange site.

Areas of Business Exchange in which Tom is highly active include:

* Internet Marketing
* Interactive Marketing
* Small Business Marketing
* Marketing Innovation
* Marketing Strategy
* eCommerce

We encourage you to check out Business Exchange. It’s a site with endless numbers of quality articles and blog posts, hand selected by the Business Exchange crowd itself. If you have not registered, give it a try.

And while you are there, check out Tom Now’s profile page, filled with links to many useful articles, blogs and online information.

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Are you doing all that you can to protect your trademarked and branded terms online?

Ensure that other websites do not use your trademarked or brand terms in their domain names. Mark Alert by Domain Tools enables you to monitor the Internet, and anytime someone registers a new website domain name that uses one of your identified trademarks or brand terms, you will be notified by email.

So, for example, let’s say you own the trademark “ABCWidget.” If someone registers a new website domain containing the term “ABCWidget” (e.g., www.ABCWidgetWorld.com, www.ABCWidgetGuide.com, www.ABCWidgetNew.com), you would be notified immediately.

This enables you to take corrective action in a timely manner to proactively prevent potential damage to your brand.

Supported top level domain (TLD) extensions of this service are .com, .net, .org, .biz and .info.

There are actually quite a number of potential uses of this tool. For example, beyond trademark and brand monitoring, you can potentially track generic product names related to your products or services. This, obviously, would be more for general online competitive intelligence rather than any type of protective purpose. Regardless, this could be useful depending on how competitive and saturated your market is.

Check out Mark Alert by Domain Tools and keep your trademarks and brands safe.

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Your small business website produces mountains of data about your site visitors and prospective customers. To maximize your website results, you need to be leveraging this data to your marketing advantage.

To that end, here are three important website measurement trends. Once you understand them, it would behoove you to define a way to leverage these trends in the coming year to fuel the growth of your business.

Website Integration with Lead Capture and CRM

Look for integrated analytics solutions in the coming year. For example, solutions from companies such as Infusionsoft and GoodBarry combine customer relationship management and email marketing with web analytics.

Eyetracking

A typical web analytics program provides you with click maps (which links receive the most click-throughs). Heat maps demonstrate where your site visitors’ eyes focus on the page. Going beyond this, look for eyetracking solutions such as that from Eyetools to catch on in popularity this year. With eyetracking, you can see exactly how your users are navigating through your website, irrespective of their click behavior. This gives you tremendous insights into the value of different layout options on your web pages.

Attribution

Do you know where your website visitors and new orders are coming from? Typically, analytics packages track conversions to the last click (e.g., from a banner ad or a search result). Look for solutions in the coming year, such as that from ClearSaleing, that enable you to see the relative value of each marketing touchpoint along the way to a sale.

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Microsoft adCenter released results this week of its online survey of small businesses. Although the majority of small businesses have a website presence, the lack of paid search marketing campaigns among these companies is extremely surprising, if not shocking.

The survey included 400 small-business owners in the US, with findings that 59 percent of small businesses with websites do not use paid search marketing, and of those, 90 percent have never even attempted it. Remarkably, if not laughably, a full 73 percent would prefer to do taxes rather than attempt to start a search marketing plan.

How can this possibly be? Why are so many small business owners terrified of search marketing?

The Microsoft website lists a number of reasons for the cautious attitude, including:

* Nearly nine in 10 (89 percent) feared keywords may become too expensive.
* Eighty-one percent questioned if paid search marketing is the best use of their marketing budgets.
* One quarter of respondents believe paid search marketing is too complex.

Website Marketing NOW strongly recommends that small businesses implement a multifaceted marketing plan. As part of that, small businesses should at the very least test the viability and profitability of a paid search marketing campaign as part of their overall marketing mix. Paid search marketing offers the small business a number of benefits, including the ease and immediacy of launching a campaign, the tracking of granular campaign results and the ability to test/refine/re-launch continuously based on ongoing results.

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When companies look to improve results of their website, often they first think of redesigning the site.

However, there are many less extensive, more targeted approaches to increasing website results. One aspect of websites that is usually overlooked is the online form. However, this is a customer engagement page. It is a customer conversion page. It is a prime opportunity for your business to increase its lead-generation and/or sales rates.

And testing changes to your online forms is much easier, faster and less costly than attempting to redesign your entire site. Therefore, it is much easier to achieve a positive ROI on your investment.

With the above in mind, Website Marketing NOW is providing you with the following Top 10 Tips for improving your online form results:

*Top 10 Tips*

Highlight the Benefits!
What’s in it for the prospective customer? Make the benefits of form submission absolutely clear to site visitors. This is the single most overlooked aspect of online forms, and easily fixed.

Keep it Simple!
Keep your form brief and to the point. Remove all unnecessary fields. The fewer fields, the higher your conversion rate.

Clarify Your Privacy Policy
Build trust by including a link to your privacy policy. Test the placement of the link above and below your online form.

Trust Elements
Build trust by including "trustmarks," such as those by the Better Business Bureau, McAfee, Verisign, etc.

Provide Context
If you have multiple online forms within your website, with a small amount of text clarify the purpose of each form just above it. This ensures that the right submission gets into the right hands in the shortest amount of time.

Clarify Required Fields
If certain fields are required for submission, make that clear.

Clear the "Clear" Button
It’s too easy to accidentally clear one’s data. Remove this obstacle to conversion.

Allow Feedback
Regardless of how many pre-defined fields you have, empower your prospective customers to provide free-form feedback.

Progress Indicator
For online forms that span multiple pages, include a progress indicator so that prospective customers know exactly where they are in the process.

Strong Calls to Action
Include clear and strong Calls to Action in line with the context of the form. For example, "Download Now."

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