Merry Christmas! On the night before Christmas, StomperNet released a special “Scrooge” video. It’s pretty funny, but more important, it tells you how you can get the Stomper Scrutinizer software for free.

Free software makes a nice present!

Click here to watch the Scrooge video from the folks at StomperNet. When you get there, click the play list in the lower right of the video player to see ALL the Going Natural videos.

Andy Edmonds, the Chief Scientist of StomperNet, explains in more detail what foveal gaze tracking is all about, and how it can help you double your web site conversion rates here. To just get the free software, go here, but you’ll definitely want to watch the video first (Third Going Natural Video, second post, as of today).

You’ll be amazed to learn how humans’ eyes actually work when navigating web pages.  And even more importantly, how you can use this information to improve your web site conversion rate.

By applying  the science of foveal eye tracking (not as bad as it sounds) to all the pages in your web site click or sales funnel, you can often improve your conversion rate by 50%, 100% or even more.

Watch this free video (the third in StomperNet’s Going Natural 2.0 series) to find out how. The video was produced by StomperNet co-founder, Andy Jenkins, and StomperNet Chief Scientist, Andy Edmonds.  Click here to view.

Jason Forthofer, the Affiliate Manager for My Wedding Favors and Corner Stork Baby Gifts, has a great post about what kinds of affiliate links get the best results.  Based on actual results data, Jason’s tips reveal some clues about how to increase both your traffic and conversation rate with your affiliate links. If you’re an affiliate marketer, check it out.

He’s also got a great post about the use of video in affiliate marketing.

I like to think of core SEO strategy as divided into two parts.

First, much of SEO strategy involves understanding the “long tail” and building your site(s) to rank highly for less competitive phrases like “coolest guy on the planet” — or even “coolest guy” or “seo expert.” None of these phrases are very competitive. Cool, heh, but certainly not competitive.

On the other hand, you want to go after the big hits, too. The best keywords that really drive the traffic in your category. You have to pick your battles in whatever niche you’re in, but if, for example, you sell wedding favors, you want to go after the #1 spot for your #1 phrase — but only while you’re targeting the long tail at the same time.

I usually think of the Big Target as two words, but here’s an example of a product niche where only one word will do. Say you sell “treadmills” online. You can call them exercise treadmills, or portable treadmills, but if somebody’s looking to buy a treadmill, they’re probably just going to search “treadmills.”

And that one word is going to be pretty darn competitive. StomperNet member, Jeff Knize, is the owner of Treadmill World. I had a chance to talk to him the other day and came to find out that he’s now #1 on Google for the one word phrase, “treadmills.” It’s always funny when the internet entrepreneur, working from a home office, crushes the competitors which include the big company manufacturers of the products he sells.

Way to go, Jeff!

Run a search for treadmills — and look at all the companies paying (probably a few bucks each) for clicks for that keyword. They’re probably paying much more than a million a year to run those PPC ads. Think one of them would give Jeff a million in cash to be #1 in the free results? Think he’d take it?

StomperNet faculty member, Ed Dale, well known for his Dominiche strategy of buying and selling web sites, would be proud of this one.

Me too. And if you’re looking for a good holiday present, think treadmills.

Cool, mostly. First, the folks at Google created the “Supplemental Results,” but said the pages that got trapped there weren’t penalized, though that’s what it was, as a practical matter.

Then, they removed the label. Now, they’re removing the difference and will be searching both indices for all search queries.

Read about it straight from Google engineer, Yonatan Zunger.

In the early 1900’s, big companies often had a Vice President of Electricity. (Really.) Getting power was a big deal, and someone senior needed to be in charge of it. As electricity became easily available through the grid, these positions disappeared.

Fast forward 100 years, and one of Google’s biggest challenges is . . . electricity.

Now, Google is getting into the power business. Focusing on renewable energy, they want to produce a gigawatt of electricity (enough to power a big city), for less than the cost of power from coal, within a “years, not decades” according to co-founder Larry Page.

Unlike YouTube and pretty much every other video site around (I keep losing count), Free IQ doesn’t limit your videos to 100 MB or 10 minutes. There are no length or size restrictions on Free IQ. Oh, and it’s not just video. You can also host audios, ebooks, powerpoints — any kind of digital media product. For free.

Click to play the video below:

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

When it comes to search engine rankings and SEO, Duplicate Content is a topic that’s often misunderstood. Unfortunately, it’s a very important topic — if you have too much “duplicate content” you can get killed, particularly when it comes to your rankings on Google.

In this free video, my StomperNet co-founder, Andy Jenkins will show you the final word on Google’s duplicate content filter and what to do about it.

Free Video: Duplicate Content - Going Natural 2.0

It’s the second video in the Going Natural 2.0 series. Check it out and learn how to deal with duplicate content issues once and for all. Note: You might have duplicate content problems and not even know it. This free video will tell you exactly what you need to know.

After you watch it, visit www.stomperblog.com and leave a comment. And let me know what you think of Going Natural 2.0 (two videos so far) and anything else you’d like to know.

This is the power of small business. You’ve heard about the Micro Loan programs — people living in poverty are able to start a small business with a loan of less than $100.

Kevin Corcoran, a friend of mine, is a former McKinsey consultant and retired large company executive. Now, he spends most of his time working with an African nonprofit called Maji Mazuri that’s doing some amazing thing in a part of the world that needs all the help they can get.

Yesterday, he was in my office for a meeting and showed me how they’re using free online video to help get their message out. If you’re interested in entrepreneurism, venture capital, small business, etc., watch the video below about the micro loan program. It describes in detail how the programs actually works.

Kevin’s program operates with less than 1% administrative overhead. He donates all his time and all of the money they raise goes directly to the people who need it.

Kevin is not web savvy, but he made the videos while he was in Africa, and later wrote and recorded the voiceovers with a webmaster’s help. Then, the guy helping him added them to their web site and YouTube.

What other ideas do you have to help him raise money for this very worthy cause where a little bit of money really does a lot of good?

I suggested that they add a title to the videos on YouTube so viewers could go back to their own web site if they wanted more information.

If you would like to put one person in a business of their own, $70 would do it. They take PayPal at their web site but so far they haven’t really gotten many online donations. If you have any ideas or advice for Kevin you can email him at kevin [at] bradfallon [dot] com. Be sure to copy me: bradf [at] bradfallon [dot] com.

You can see their YouTube page here.