Google’s patent search system makes obtaining patent data fast and easy, and is free. In the past, obtaining patent data from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) was a painstaking and potentially expensive process. By scanning the over seven million patent documents filed with the USPTO, Google has made the process much easier. Here are the benefits of being able to search for patents:

Determine If Your Idea Has Been Patented

If you have a brilliant business or product idea, one of the first things you should do is make sure that no one else has already come up with and patented the idea. All you need to do is come up with a few keyword ideas to search for the patent. If your search doesn’t turn up any patents, then you have a good chance at being first to the market.

Look for Patents to Lease

If you need a certain piece of technology, but don’t want to spend the money in developing it yourself, one cost-effective alternative would be to lease the technology instead. Google Patent Search helps you determine who owns the right to certain technologies. As long as you can find the patent, you can also find who holds the rights to the patent, along with their contact information, and can then contact them directly to strike a patent leasing deal.

Research into a Specific Inventor

If an inventor you know has created several products that have caught your attention and you want to see what else they have invented, you can find all the patents by that inventor using Google Patent Search. Just click the “Advanced Patent Search” link next to the general search box and enter in the inventor’s name.

Find Inspiration for Product Designs

If you need some inspiration for a product you are designing, or are puzzled on a specific engineering challenge, you can look through past patent designs to see how previous designers tackled those issues. Past patents can be ripe grounds for finding inspiration and solutions. However, be careful as any idea that you want to patent or use commercially needs to be sufficiently different from any past patent so that it can be considered its own entirely different product. Never take complete ideas from someone else’s patent. Only use it as inspiration to come up with your own unique designs. If you absolutely need to use a design in someone else’s patent, consider leasing just that part of the technology.

These are some of the uses for Google’s Patent Search. With over seven million patents at your fingertips, you can now easily find just about any kind of information you need in relation to patents. From inventors to patent numbers to specific technologies, all the information is freely available.

Websites with a lot of duplicate content get penalized by search engines. After all, their goal is to find unique content, not content that is the same throughout the internet, or even the same throughout your website. Many webmasters will unknowingly have a lot of duplicate content on their website, often because of simple technical mistakes. Here is how to avoid duplicate content.

Where Does Duplicate Content Come From?

Perhaps the most common source of duplicate content is from archive-type pages. For example, if you run a blog, the main content is in your posts. But you also have your category pages and your archive pages. Each of your category pages has a 200-word snippet from the article as a teaser for viewers to see.

Unfortunately, that means a single page of your category pages has as much as 1500 words of duplicate content, copied straight from your articles. The same is true of your archive pages. And any given blog may have dozens of pages of category and archive pages. Less common sources of duplicate content include hiring unscrupulous outsourcers who copy and paste other people’s work, along with webmasters who republish other people’s articles with the original author’s permission (legal, but not good from a search engine optimization [SEO] perspective.) So how do you prevent duplicate content?

Learn to Use Your Meta Robots or Robots.txt

Your meta robots tag allows you to specify on a certain page whether you want the page indexed or not. If your page contains duplicate content, just tell the search engines not to index it. Robots.txt resides on your top level directory and tells the search engines which pages it can and can’t index. Basically, meta works on a single page and robots.txt directs the whole site. Learn to use both if you often need to block search engines out of certain pages. Learning to use meta robots and robots.txt is especially important if you are using HTML or PHP to build your site, rather than WordPress.

Using WordPress Plug-Ins

If you are using WordPress, a lot of the duplicate content issues can be remedied through plug-ins. Most of the SEO plug-ins will handle the major duplicate content issues for you. Make sure you get one that allows you to “noindex” your category and archive pages, as well as automatically make all your links canonical.

Scan All Content with Copyscape

If you regularly outsource content, get in the habit of scanning your content with Copyscape. Copyscape will scan the internet for copies of your content and report back to you if they have found any matches, along with how close the match was. Though you will seldom run into an issue with outsourcers copying content outright, if it does happen it could ruin your entire website; therefore, it doesn’t hurt to be careful.

Duplicate content is preventable. It doesn’t take a lot of effort to noindex the right pages and scan your content with Copyscape. Get in the habit of performing these two procedures and you will protect your rankings in the long run.

Webinars are one of the best marketing tools available to entrepreneurs. They are powerful instructing and communication devices and are easy to use, yet can have a powerful impact on your connection with your audience.

Let People Meet the Real You

It is one thing for people to read your writing in text form, yet quite another to see your face on video or to hear your voice on audio. One advantage of webinars is that they are unedited. Unlike a video product, where you can spend as much time as you want preparing it perfectly, the webinar will never look as smooth, but believe it or not, that is actually good. People get to know the real you, with no editing, through your voice and possibly visually, depending on how you set up the webinar.

The Benefit of Multimedia Presentations

Webinars take advantage of various media simultaneously. You have audio coming in from your microphone, and you may have video coming in from your webcam, but you also probably have a slide presentation or mind map presentation to lead your audience through. This helps add structure and flow to the lesson. In addition, you may have websites or live demos to show. You may have pre-recorded clips that are all a part of your presentation. Unlike text or podcasts, webinars gives you a whole range of different kinds of media to take advantage of.

Build Trust with Two-Way Conversations

Instead of just “teaching at” your audience, with a webinar you can also see in real time what kind of reactions your audience is having to your materials. In some set-ups, this takes the form of questions that participants can send in. You pick and choose the best questions and answer them right then and there.

In other set-ups, there will be a chat room visible to both participants and the organizer. You can pick topics and questions right out of the chat room and address them live. A lot of connection is built when the audience can see you addressing their concerns in real time. They know you are really listening. Adding a two-way conversation to your toolbox can help improve your connection to your audience.

High Sales Potential

Finally, webinars are powerful sales tools. At the end of an informative, exciting and connected webinar, your listeners are going to be exceptionally receptive to a sales offer. Make them a great offer and you will see a rush of sales come in instantly.

As you can tell, webinars are great for building trust and credibility, which benefits your brand in the long run. In addition, they can also help you bring in more sales immediately. They take a little bit of time to set up the first time around, but once you have done your first webinar, it is very easy to repeat the process.

You own a website and may even give advice there or share information of some kind. Whatever you are doing, if you are not using it to make money, then there is an untapped market waiting to be yours.

Website Traffic

This involves people visiting your website. What you want to count are your unique visitors, people who visit for the first time. Repeat visitors are great for sales but to gain interest, the more people who visit, the better.

In order for a business to make money it needs traffic. These people will do something for you on your website that will enhance their life and make money for you. There are a variety of ways to do it, but for any method you use to be cost effective, you will need traffic.

One way to gain traffic is to have a focus. This is your niche. This will determine which traffic comes your way and if they are going to buy whatever you decide to offer on your website.

Now, turn your attention to your content. That is why your traffic is there in the first place. If you haven’t already, optimize it for a wider readership. This involves targeting certain keywords in your articles, blog posts, headers and picture text. Not only will your content get ranked higher for those keywords, but your website also will. If you haven’t done so already, register your website with the major search engines.

Monetizing Your Website

Now that you have made a few tweaks to gain more focused traffic, you are ready to start making money with your website. Here are some ways you can get the job done.

* Pay-Per-Click (PPC) – This basically means that you are posting ads that people will click on. Whenever someone clicks on that ad, you get paid. Depending on who you are using for your service, there are other ways to do this besides just the click-through rate. One you can start with is Google AdSense.

* Banner Advertising – This is a way to get noticed. If you have a good fan base and have networked with others in your business niche, this can work for you. Sell advertising space at the top of your website. You can also sell on the sides, but keep in mind that the top half of your webpage is where people’s eyes tend to gravitate.

* Affiliate Marketing – You not only advertise for others and sponsor their products, but you also get access to lots of helpful tools so you can do just that. Earn commissions on your click rate as well as sale rate depending upon how the affiliate program is set up.

* Paid surveys – Companies will pay you to offer surveys to your visitors. Each time one of them takes the survey, you get paid.

There are many other ways to monetize your website but this is just the beginning. Once you have started, try other ways to make your expertise work for you.

From launching a new product to refining an existing business, surveys can help get you the data you need to make informed decisions. With the right kinds of data to determine who your customers are and what they want, you will be able to make informed decisions that result in happier customers and increased profits.

Determine Your Customer’s Demographics

How old is your average buyer? Are they male or female? Are they married or single? What is their annual household income? What are their hobbies? What are their other interests? What country do they live in? This kind of data is invaluable when it comes to writing your marketing.

For example, the kinds of colors that work well when targeting college students are different than when targeting those over age forty. The kind of wording and copy is also drastically different. If you know who your demographic is, you will be able to use demographic-targeting advertising such as Facebook ads or direct mail to reach them. There are so many benefits to knowing exactly who your customers are. Unfortunately, there is often no way to find out without asking them, and a survey is the ideal way to do so.

Identify Future Products

What aspects of your current products do they like and want to see more of? What kinds of products would your customers like to see in the future? What are problems in their lives that aren’t being solved yet? Instead of launching products that you think are good ideas, a much more profitable and risk-free method is to first determine what your customers want and then create it for them. If your customers know that by completing a survey you help serve them better, they are usually happy to oblige.

Evaluate Your Current Performance

Did they like your product? When did the package arrive? How many rings did they have to wait before customer service picked up? Unless you ask, you will never know what your customers are really thinking about your product. Even if you could improve your product easily, you won’t know what you need to change without getting feedback. Remember that people love to be heard. They love giving their opinions and are usually more than happy to take three to five minutes to answer a few questions, especially if they are already a customer.

As you can tell, there are many different ways to use surveys to help guide your business. You can use surveys to figure out who your customers are, to figure out what they want in future products and to gauge how well your business is currently doing. Don’t be shy about asking. The more feedback you have, the more you will be able to help your customers solve their problems.