Recent Direct Marketing News

Real estate search sites Zillow and Trulia are seeing big growth in traffic, despite the economy and its housing woes. Zillow saw a 67% increase in unique visitors while Trulia saw a 40% increase in uniques.

If you can access the mobile internet via your cell phone, then you now have access to newly optimized Google Mobile search. It reaches 38 different languages in over 60 countries.

If you're a celebrity or some other figure Bing has deemed "prominent," then searches for your name plus the word Twitter will turn up a few of your Tweets above the organic results. You can also search for a person's screen name, preceded by the @ sign.

Like many of you, I was saddened to learn on Sunday that Billy Mays died at the age of 50. My family has been watching the Discovery Channel series Pitchmen, featuring Mays and fellow pitchman Anthony Sullivan.

Get out your cameras, it's time for a couple of search-related contests. If you enjoy the large images Bing features everday on its homepage, now you have the chance to see one of your images featured on the brand spankin' new decision engine. Bing is holding a photo contest where the winner's image will be featured on Bing.com for a 24 hour period.

StatCounter made news fast and furious in Bing's first week when they offered up data showing Bing had surpassed Yahoo! in search. And now they're making a splash again by quickly releasing data for the whole month of June.

Overstock is the next company to drop affiliate programs in states considering or having passed affiliate nexus bills. While North Carolina, Rhode Island, and Hawaii affiliates are already seeing programs dropped by Amazon and Blue Nile, this time California affiliates are also getting the boot.

I've been attending SES San Jose every year since 2003. And each year a healthy proportion of attendees are attending their first search engine marketing conference ever.

Google has updated their Toolbar for the Internet Explorer browser to make language translation easier. Instead of manually copying and pasting text into Google Translate, the Toolbar now automatically detects if a language is different from the one set as your default.

YouTube is now allowing advertisers to incorporate a "Call-to-Action overlay" on their videos. With the overlay, advertisers can drive traffic to their sites where they can make purchases, sign up for email newsletters or whichever action an advertiser wishes.

If you are searching for a good current "real-time" example of how twitter can help publicize your cause celebre, look no further than the latest being tweeted out today by the likes of such "twitterers" as @wholefoods

Chris Crum at WebProNews.com has pieced together some very interesting pieces of information regarding Facebook, a former Googler and a new payment system.

This week, there are a couple of executive hirings in Silion Valley related to the search and social networking industries. First up, Penny Baldwin has been tapped as senior vice president, global integrated marketing and brand management for Yahoo! Is there any room left on her business card? That's quite a long title!

We've been tracking the affiliate tax debacle involving Amazon and the state of North Carolina. Now, affiliates in more states are being affected.

You only have a couple of weeks left to submit an entry to this year's Search Engine Watch Awards. The deadline is July 17, 2009.