Internet and Businesses Articles

Changing to a New Host? No More Worries!

2009-04-21T12:55:00.001+08:00

John's online business is expanding. His customers are increasing day by day. However, he feels very frustrated at the moment as he finds his website is 'down' about every 4th day. Whenever he calls up the support team of his web host, he gets the same old answer that his problem will be rectified soon. If the problems do persist it will surely hamper his business. He has been with his present hosting provider for the last year but now he feels he has to find a new web host as soon as possible because his present hosting package is also not able to meet up with his growing demands. This is not a one-off occurrence that has happened only to John, it happens with many people like him. Changing the web host might become a cumbersome task if John and other people like him don't know the correct procedure of doing it. So, let's have a look at the following easy and simple steps:

First of all, it's very important to have a backup of your website and everything related to it, like databases, scripts etc. It will be very helpful in case there is data loss because of any unforseen reason. Save at least 2 copies of everything and store them separately, so that you can work with one and the other one will function as a backup. You can take backup in various ways. One is by using software programs like a FTP program (e.g. Smart FTP http://www.smartftp.com/) for downloading data.

Now, the time is to look for a new web host that meets all your requirements and provides better technical services than your previous host. Since you have already been through the search procedure it won't take you much time to come across a reliable hosting company.

Once you have taken a new web-hosting plan and you are ready to upload your web pages, databases etc., check that you have received an IP number, FTP or FrontPage login, and password from your new hosting company. Now, upload all your files to the new server; you are just repeating the same procedure that you've done in the past when you uploaded your files for the very first time.

Only a few more steps more and you will be completely done. Before transferring your DNS servers over from your previous host to your new one, debug and test the new site from an individual IP number. Check that all the web pages exist, the links point to the right pages and that all your scripts are running. One important point which people always forget is their domain name expiration date. If you plan to move near the expiration date, it could cause you lots of problems. To be on the safe side, make sure that you have at least 3-4 weeks in hand before the domain name expires, or just renew it for another year.

To transfer domain name service to a new host identify registrar using "WHOis" lookup http://domreg-m6.net/domains/WHois.asp, verify registration of your domain name, identify the name server information for the host your are transferring to, and make changes in the DNS information at the registrar. During this DNS transition period new DNS information has to be propagated throughout the world's DNS servers. This propagation might take 2-4 days as an International root name server will firstly have to check all the various Domain registrars for updates, and then every ISP provider will update their DNS setting to show the new changes. Not only this, even Internet, i.e. Internet routers and caching engines have to update/clear its DNS cache as well. During this propagation period, you keep your old site running so that the visitors whose ISP provider haven't updated can still visit your website.

It's advisable that you don't cancel your old hosting service during the transition period, as you will need to check your mail from both the hosting providers, as some will direct e-mail to your old server whereas other Internet regions will send mail to your new server. After one or two weeks you can annul the account with your old host.

On the very first notion it sounds like a painful task to find a new web host and make all the necessary changes, but with the steps known, people like John will not find this procedure problematic. With so many automation software packages available, it has now become easier to switch over your web site from old host to new host. If both hosting providers have the same operation system platform, the procedure will become even simpler. But remember, the most important task in the whole host-changing scenario is to find a host that meets your requirements so that you don't have to go through this entire procedure again in the future.

Priyanka Agarwal
Hosting evangelist

Direct Sales and Your Corporate Website - A Creative Marketing Plan that Works!

2009-04-21T12:54:00.000+08:00

Creatively marketing your corporate site takes time in the set up but you will learn that building your customers isn't about marketing your products but getting your name and reputation into the minds of internet customers.

I have randomly chosen Watkins to design a marketing approach but you will see how to apply this concept to any direct sales company.

Now let's sort through the steps of developing your online marketing plan.

Become an expert.

Be an expert on your products, your corporate website, and your current and potential customers. If you don't see yourself as an expert about your products, your company... that is your first step.

Don't try to market or pay for advertising without knowing your products and the people that would love them!

When you are comfortable with the products you offer on your corporate website begin to brainstorm about how to connect your products to internet customers.

On paper list the different categories of products with a list of potential "markets"
you can target. You are ready to start your marketing plan itself.

Find your niche market.

In our example of Watkins, there is a potential market with women that are homemakers, enjoy cooking, love to entertain or create family memories with cooking traditions but remember men love to cook too.

There is a very wide range of the ages, the groups within that cook and entertain. By studying your potential customers, a theme will emerge.

Let's look at "cooking from scratch."

To know your customers, do this exercise:

Think cooking. Think old fashioned values. Think food and family traditions.

Where would they go on the internet for ideas, menus, recipes and more? Use search engines for your initial search to find a few solid popular websites. As most well built website have links within their categories, visit their links or resources to find other similar sites.

Look for homemaking, cooking, familiy focused and entertaining sites with message boards, newsletters and articles.

You are finally nudging closer to your niche market, your potential customers.

Once you have found a few websites that cater to your market, stop and study the sites. Read the articles and visit the message boards. Message boards often have posts asking for advice or recipes. Articles may have ratings by visitors which tell you more about what readers want to see. learn what kind of information your potential customers may be looking for, what they want to learn and do.

Sign up for the site's newsletter. You will learn a great deal from the newsletter. Read the articles, hints and ads in the newsletter.

Start writing.

Submit your articles, recipes and kitchen hints both to site owners that accept submissions but you can also contact the publisher of the newsletters too.

It's very important to remember not to write about your products Write about anything connected to the homemaking, cooking, entertaining site....keep your written article focused along the theme of the website you have found.

Your articles should reflect your knowledge, your passion whether it be crafts for kids or organizing a closet.

Sell outside the article.

You do not need to sell within the article or post. On the power of your words, your writing, they will learn about you, your business in your "resource box." When a reader enjoys your article, connects with your writing, they will feel compelled to click on your link.

You have made your first contact with your market through creative marketing.

This is your best marketing strategy for your corporate website. Continue to post ads on message boards that allow you to but often that serves you best with recruiting for your direct sale team.

Your products, whether it is Discovery Toys or Tupperware, are best presented online in your resource box as you build your reputation as fun, knowledgeable and credible. Over time and repeated exposure online, your name will become synonymous with your product and your company.

That once limiting corporate website will be the link between you and your customer. Your success with your business and corporate site will be based on creating a market for You.

Tammy Ames
Owner of Wahm Connections http://www.wahmconnections.com - Publisher of Wahm Connections Weekly Online. Send a blank email to wahmconnections-subscribe@topica.com to subscribe to her dynamic weekly ezine available in both email text or html online. Free weekly subscriber ads available.

7 Web Site Design Mistakes That Will Lose You Clients

2009-04-21T12:53:00.000+08:00

In today's world, a web site is virtually mandatory for any successful business. But there are web sites that will win you customers, and there are web sites that will lose you customers. Good design has a lot to do with which category your web site will fall into. But what is it that makes good or bad web site design? In my personal opinion, a good web site is one that's simple, informative and gives me a reason to come back frequently. That's what you should get from a good web designer/writer team. Bad sites, on the other hand, are complicated to use, slow loading, confusing or just plain annoying. Here's a list of my personal top 7 turn-offs as far as web site design is concerned:

1. Slow loading pages

Studies have shown that you have less than ten seconds to grab a visitor's attention. If your web page hasn't finished loading within that (very short) amount of time, you might as well forget about it. The main culprit I've found here are huge, slow-loading graphics, especially when they are embedded in tables. If large images are absolutely vital to presenting your business, compromise by adding thumbnails to the main page and allow the visitor to click on them to access the main image. Nobody minds a longer loading time, as long as it's them who can make that choice.

2. No contact information

As I've already mentioned in my article "Do's and don'ts of web site copy", one of my pet peeves is a web site that has no contact information accessible form the main page. If I can't get in touch with a company quickly and easily, chances are that I'll go to the competition. My advice is to have a whole page dedicated to contact information - address, phone, fax, email, and preferably a map of where you can be found (remember item #1, though - no huge graphics!) And please, don't use a graphic to display that information in a particularly clever way. I like to copy and paste that information directly from the web page to my contact management program. If I can't do that, you'll likely never hear form me - and all other customers who do the same!

3. Difficult to navigate

Don't try to be clever with navigational features. Simple text links or, if you prefer, quick-loading graphics are perfectly good means of allowing a visitor to navigate your site. Anything that requires interactive navigation, like menus that expand into sub-menus, sub-sub-menus and so on, is more an indication of a wrong information architecture than of a true need for complicated navigational features.

4. Non-HTML features

Don't get me started on this one. I've got a firewall on my computer, and my browser is set to block all those little nasty things that can mess with my PC. As a result I come across many a site that won't display or function properly, because it relies on features like JavaScript, Cookies, Interactive Headers or Java Applets. None of these are necessary to build a good web site, and unless you want your web site to lose you potential customers, you shouldn't use them. Or, if you absolutely have to, make sure that they are not integral parts of the web site!

5. Huge splash page

Another pet peeve of mine. As mentioned earlier, you have less than ten seconds to get your message across. Now guess how many visitors are going to wait longer than that just to watch a fancy animation? 'Nuff said.

6. Pop-up ads

A huge turn-off as far as I'm concerned. As a matter of fact, I've got a pop-up blocker installed on my PC, so if your web site tried to tell me something important via a pop-up window, I'd never even see it. If you feel that you have to use pop-ups, consider going for the less intrusive (and annoying) pop-under windows instead.

7. Sideways scrolling

Not everybody has a monitor with the same screen resolution as you, so make sure that your web site displays on monitors with a lower resolution without forcing your visitor to scroll sideways. It's a singularly annoying thing, and chances are that you'll lose those visitors very quickly. Or, if you have information in a column on the right side of your web site, it may simply never appear on the screen.

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Need online copy that gets results? Frauke Nonnenmacher is a copywriter who specialises in clear, informative and persuasive web copy. For more information, please visit her web site at http://creativecats.sectorlink.org/tracking.pl?article3
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Create a Favicon for Your Customers Bookmarks in Four Easy Steps.

2009-04-21T12:52:00.000+08:00

A favicon is a custom icon that sits next to your web site title in a persons favourite's menu when they have bookmarked your site, it is an easy way to create an 'eye drawing image' to ensure that people always see you link in their favourite's and should hopefully encourgae them to check out that 'great site that they haven't visited yet today!'

This is a quick guide that will provide instructions on how to create one for your site, it really is very easy and will help to create a extra tool to maintain your site in the customers mind.

All it takes is four easy steps...

1) Choose an image that you would like to use to represent your web site. Most people use a small version of their logo but you can use any image that you want. I would advise however that you choose an image that is reflective of your web sites theme and an image that will still remain recognisable when the size is dropped to 16 x 16 pixels.

2) Take your chosen image, which should be as high a quality as you can get, in .JPG or .GIF format and convert your image to the 256 color Web Safe Palette or the Windows 16 color format. This can very easily be done in most graphics packages and as a guideline I would say that the less colours you use the better so as to maintain image clarity and professionalism.

3) Using your graphics package, reduce the image down to 16 x 16 pixels, at this point you need to ensure that you preserve the image resolution. This is a key factor as a larger image that has been reduced can loose all clarity and just become a tacky blob, is this how you want your web site remembered? The key here is to keep perservering until you are happy with the finished icon and it is a great advertisement for the professionalism, and the theme, of your web site.

4) Once you are happy with your completed icon you need to save it as "Favicon.ico". This is the default name that web browsers, such as Internet Explorer, look for. This file then needs to be copied to the root directory of your web site and then whenever a customer bookmarks your site your image is cached and will display when they use their favourites menu.

This can very easily be tested by clearing your cache and re-bookmarking your site and 'hey presto' your new shiny, professional and eye drawing favicon will appear next to your site title and will also appear in the address bar of your browser.

This is just another simple trick that aims to get you 'thinking outside the box' when it comes to developing your website presence and reminding your customers to come and re-visit your web site.

Mike - Forum Webmaster at

Online Auction Trader - a community forum dedicated to developing you a sustainable, profitable and long term online income.
http://www.onlineauctiontrader.com/phpBB/index.php

Video Marketing Tips

2009-04-21T12:51:00.002+08:00

Video communication is an efficient means of reaching prospective customers, of promoting the presentation of your products or services. The use of videos on the Internet brings numerous advantages. It is a great solution with great impact on the visitor. It combines the advantages of "classic" TV advertising with the Internet's most important characteristic, interactivity.

The ad becomes thus more attractive to the Web surfer, who becomes more receptive to what you have to offer. Online marketing is therefore more cost effective than regular TV ads, simply because, on the one hand, it's less expensive to produce and disseminate, and on the other hand, it makes customer targeting a lot easier too.

A Definition

If we were to define the online video marketing concept, it would be as a marketing strategy used by companies in order to promote products and services, by making use of short, catchy, informative videos, with the purpose of inducing awareness to the prospective customers about the promoted products/services and enticing them into purchasing the above-mentioned products/services.

Characteristics of Online Video Marketing

It is common knowledge that nowadays people enjoy more to watch a screen (be it a TV's or a PC's) than reading. Information is delivered at a higher rate via images than through text.

The main advantage that Internet marketing videos have over the traditional, text format approach is that videos can get to the point much faster and waste less of the precious time of prospective customers. Instead of having the Web users go over some pages of text, trying to figure out the message that you're actually trying to convey, you can deliver the same message in a small percentage of that time in a more attractive and inciting manner.

When to Use Video

Marketing videos can be used when a company decides to promote, a bit more aggressively (in the good way), one or more of its products/services. They can help reach the prospects better, on a well-trodden path, that of visual advertising, laid before them by television. Given that more and more people nowadays turn to Internet in search of information, served hot and fast, Internet marketing videos come naturally to supplement the Web user's need for new, for useful, for sensational.

Advantages of Video Advertising

If you decide to use video in your marketing campaigns, it's a very good option. It is catchier than other types of advertising. It captures the Web user's attention easier and transports your message to prospects much faster than simple text.

A video ad can contain a demonstration of a product's use and usability. Add to that a human face and a very pleasant voice (or even a well harmonized combination of a woman's voice with a man's), and you can have your prospects wrapper around your finger. By using these techniques, the prospective customer can relate more to your company and to what you're promoting.

A Few Tips

It is important not just to take the video you made and put it in a video directory and just sit back and wait for it to bring you loads of prospects. The road to a nice result is similar to the regular Search Engine Optimization way. Bear in mind that videos are a gourmet dish for search engines, so it's best that you take some time and prepare it accordingly. Use the right ingredients, so to speak.

Today's technology offers you many opportunities to track traffic and analyze results. Take your time and make an effort (which will be rewarded in the end) to measure the impact that your videos have had on the prospects and to measure their performance. Search for tools that can tell you how much of your video was played before the visitor closed it, how many prospects actually decided to pay your site a visit after watching your video add on a different website, how many of these visits converted into sales, and so on.

Just because you have invested some time and effort in one or several videos, it doesn't mean that you should leave out content. It's still an important part of your business. Offer your visitors enough information on the site. Remember that marketing videos are meant to promote your business, to inspire Web surfers to visit your site and, luckily, convert into sales.

Many experts advise to use the videos on the first page. It's like handing out your business card. The first page recommends you, and we all know that first impression counts. Don't tuck your marketing video away, on some page that a visitor might not even get to. Make it visible. Anyway, give your site visitors the opportunity to skip your video. Maybe they're not in the mood for watching it, and the last thing you want is an annoyed visitor.

Read more free internet marketing articles

Copyright © 2007, http://www.avangate.com all rights reserved. This article was written by Adriana Iordan, WebMarketing Manager at Avangate. Avangate is a complete ecommerce provider for shareware sales incorporating an easy to use and secure online payment system plus additional software marketing services and sales tools.

This article may be reproduced in a website, e-zine, CD-ROM, book, magazine, etc. so long as the above information is included in full, including the link back to this website

Common Website Mistakes

2009-04-21T12:51:00.001+08:00

It used to be that simply having a website meant that your organization was ahead of the curve. Those days are long gone. Today more that ever, organizations need to fuel business and their bottom lines through savvy internet tactics.

What separates the savvy from the just getting by? If any of these symptoms are true of your organization or your website, you may need to rethink your strategy, or better put, start using a strategy in the first place.

Symptoms:

1. You cannot quantify your website’s traffic statistics even in general terms. This should be as common knowledge as your last year’s revenues or your mission statement. How can you make smart decisions about internet marketing dollars if you don’t know how much traffic you are getting?

2. Your website has not changed in any way in 6 months. If this is the case, it probably indicates that your site is not an active part of your marketing plan. Be careful not to neglect your site to the point that potential customers will be turned off by a lack of attention to detail.

3. Your site is not generating leads of any kind. Does your site provide an easy way for customers to contact you? Can they submit questions online? Are you in the habit of asking walk-ins “how did you hear about us?”

4. Your site is rarely, if ever, mentioned in meetings and planning sessions. This one is pretty self-explanatory. Is your site the big white elephant in the living room that nobody talks about?

If your organization displays any of the above symptoms, don’t despair. But do commit to doing something about it. Many times the best way to begin is to find sites that you do like and incorporate the best qualities of those sites into your own. Now get surfing!

Tony Valle is owner of Promethius Consulting, LLC, a website design and marketing firm. Learn more at http://www.promethius.com

E-mail SPAM: What's The Big Deal?

2009-04-21T12:50:00.000+08:00

It absolutely amazes me how many people over-react to receiving e-mail SPAM.

What is this obsession...this preoccupation with SPAM?

Where are our priorities?

When it comes to SPAM, many of us are ready to support the severest anti-SPAM legislation. Yes, we want to lock up all the spammers and throw away the key! Haven't we learned by now that inviting the government to get involved with anything is a recipe for disaster?

I personally receive a couple hundred e-mails every single day. Approximately half of that is SPAM. Want to know how I deal with the problem? I hit the "delete" button and just like that, no more SPAM!

And since I have high-speed cable access, it literally only takes me a few minutes to make a hundred uninvited SPAM guests disappear. No problem!

I don't let SPAM annoy me or upset me. And I certainly don't let it ruin my day.

When you let SPAM annoy or upset you, all you're doing is letting the spammers win. However, when you use the delete button, you win! You've got the power to delete. Why not use it?

What's so hard about doing that? It's certainly a lot easier on your emotional well-being than getting upset over the situation.

Simply view SPAM as one of those minor annoyances of every day life--like reality television shows, and learn to treat it as such!

About The Author

Dean Phillips is an Internet marketing expert, writer, publisher and entrepreneur. Questions? Comments? Dean can be reached at mailto: dean@lets-make-money.net

Visit his website at: http://www.lets-make-money.net

How To Make Money With MySpace

2009-04-21T12:49:00.002+08:00

MySpace is the biggest friend networking site in existence today. Millions of members have set up profiles to connect with friends, family, interest groups and so on. I won't get into the history of MySpace right now, but I will share some information with you that will change your life, and perhaps your wallet size.

The biggest obstacle with owning a site today is getting traffic to it. It can take a lot of time, effort and money to market your site and gain valued visitors.

With MySpace however, the visitors are already there... they just need to see your message.
I set up an account with MySpace a few months ago and joined various marketing, internet and ecommerce groups. I also added "friends" who belong to these groups. Currently I have around 27,000 people on my contact list who share the same interest as me - making money online.

At any given time, I can post a bulletin, send a message, post to my blog or update my profile with a link to my latest venture. The more friends you have on your list; the better. The reason for this is because if you have 27,000 available people to market to, you're also marketing to their friends and friends of theirs and so on once they view the others' profile.

Now for the challenging part - adding thousands of friends. Manually searching for and adding people in your target audience can take days or even months. Fortunately I've found a program that claims to be the Official MySpace Friend Adder. This program has been my most valuable marketing tool to use. You can easily add thousands of contacts within just a couple of minutes.

See you on MySpace!

Chris Jacobson is an Internet entrepreneur and freelance author who writes on various topics. His official website is http://www.MoneyMakingScoop.com.

What Do You Do at 2AM in the Morning?

2009-04-21T12:49:00.001+08:00

Maybe it’s just allergy season again, or I have too much on my mind. For whatever reason, I couldn’t sleep last night. I awoke with a headache and took a few aspirin. But I realized I needed to get up and allow the medicine to kick in. So I tried reading for a minute or so, but that wasn’t such a good idea as my pounding head told me. I tried the TV, but one can only watch just so many “Creatures of the Black Lagoon” on Nick-at-Night so I went on the Internet. In comparison, that was a fairly interesting diversion.

I understand that there are several time zones at work here. So it can be 5AM on the East coast and many people are up or even at work. But the majority of the country isn’t. I first stumbled over to Yahoo Answers where I like to read the questions. It gives me a nice overview of how the country is doing as a whole. It’s a bit scary, even during normal viewing hours. The grammar and spelling would lead one to believe I was back in the 3rd grade. Of course I can’t tell the age of the posers, but I would think they were mostly adults. There were plenty of questions being posed and asked as I watched and refreshed. Obviously, like myself, they had no early-morning life or were some type of Zombies. Ah, another great movie, but I digress.

I also enjoy wandering over to the various chat rooms to see what’s shaking. I used to go to the social club chats but realized that most of them were older men, pretending to be young guys, trawling for very young girls. The talk quickly turned to sex and quite graphic at that. It reminds me of the on-going MSNBC Dateline undercover sting run by Chris Hansen. He tapes various online predators as they come wandering into a trap as they are hoping to meet a 13 year old girl they’ve been chatting with. Chris and company have lured everyone from a company CEO to a Rabbi to military men, mostly married by the way, into their home-like setup. Once confronted and asked about what they intended to do with the minor girls, they all said “nothing.” It was amazing that they caught hundreds of men that came to this young girl’s house, condom in hand, with the intent to do nothing but have a conversation, a drink or a dunk in the spa. That’s the problem. They were caught and their life is now ruined. So I avoid those chat rooms like the plague.

But Ebay is always fun. There is always something being bid on at all hours. Art, coins, tools, books, junk and more junk. It never ends and you can browse around that site for hours. Amazon has lots of good stuff too, but it’s static. At least you can count down to zero on Ebay and see what sells for what. There are also tons of puzzle sites and online games to play against other online insomniacs. There’s plenty of trivia contests and poker. I could do a crossword or jigsaw puzzle to make the time fly. Heck I could even write an online article but what would be the fun of that? Oops.

The point, and I actually have one, is that the Internet is a boon to the “I can’t sleep” sector of society. It’s interactive and provides endless avenues of entertainment. It’s silent and unobtrusive so that it doesn’t have to disturb the other sleeping members of the household. I figured that, with all that time to kill, I might as well make myself useful. After writing a few articles like this one, I relatively bored myself enough to become drowsy and head back to bed. But it wasn’t a total loss. You got to benefit from my sleeplessness and read this article and I got to practice my typing, writing, and reasoning skills while in a semi-coma. How do you think I did? Not bad for a Zombie, huh?

Jeffrey Hauser was a sales consultant for the Bell System Yellow Pages for nearly 25 years. He graduated from Pratt Institute with a BFA in Advertising and has a Master's Degree in teaching. He had his own advertising agency in Scottsdale, Arizona and ran a consulting and design firm, ABC Advertising. He has authored 6 books and a novel, "Pursuit of the Phoenix." His latest book is, "Inside the Yellow Pages" which can be seen at his website, http://www.poweradbook.com Currently, he is the Marketing Director for http://www.thenurseschoice.com a Health Information and Doctor Referral site.

Social Bookmarking: Now and Then

2009-04-21T12:48:00.000+08:00

Social bookmarking is a process where people cooperate voluntarily to classify, share, and organize internet bookmarks through a public platform like a website. Users can search through the database of bookmarks. Each bookmark is classified with tags appended to them by humans. This is contrary to a search algorithm

A social bookmark is defined as an internet bookmark that was derived through a social bookmarking platform.

If a person wants to help organize a public collection of internet bookmarks, share his own bookmarks, and see what others are bookmarking in his sphere of interest, he needs to create a user profile at a social bookmarking site like del.icio.us. Since most bookmarks are classified according user-defined tags or keywords, the search results are nearly always on target. Real humans, not search engine spiders, understand the meaning of the content and define it in terms that other users are cognizant of. Furthermore, the human element ensures that few, if any, commercial sites will show up in the search results. Users crave content, and internet bookmarks are referred to over and over again because of the rich information and utility offered to the end user.

Social bookmarking sites like Backflip, Blink, Hotlinks, and Quiver were the former social bookmarking hot spots before the dot-com bubble burst. The market for social bookmarking was highly competitive, but the sites lacked a workable business model.

Since then, social bookmarking sites have grown in features, methodology, and new technologies that make searching, finding, and sharing much easier. After someone creates a free user profile, he or she can participate in any of the numerous activities inherent to most social bookmarking services. Users can view links categorically, randomly, or through searches. Users can rate, comment, take notes, import and export bookmark lists, create user groups, receive feeds and notifications of new links in topics they're interested in.

Automatic notification can serve a dual purpose. First of all, users filter out the best internet bookmarks and input them into the system. Second of all, you get immediate knowledge when this happens. You can then filter the ones you like, vote on them, and benefit from the work of others. You can stay on top of new developments in your hobbies, interests, and passions. It's like subscribing to a journal.

Everyone should benefit from social bookmarks, especially highly rates ones within the database system. These are the valuable bookmarks that focused communities of users agree upon as relevant, informative, and worthwhile.

Natalie Aranda writes about the Internet and the Web. Social bookmarking is a process where people cooperate voluntarily to classify, share, and organize internet bookmarks through a public platform like a website. Users can search through the database of bookmarks. Each bookmark is classified with tags appended to them by humans. This is contrary to a search algorithm:
http://reddit.com/user/driverain/
http://www.connotea.org/user/highland

How Important are Back Links?

2009-04-21T12:46:00.000+08:00

When setting up your website for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) on Google there are several factors you need to look at in order to obtain a high rank on their search engine. Of course your content and meta tags must be inline with positive density percentages and reciprocal links. Google then takes your website and performs a mathematic equation and places a numeric value on your website depending on one of the most important features, reciprocal or back links.

A back link and reciprocal link are identical. They both say the same thing to the Google engine, that your site should be ranked higher in the order because other people find value in what your website has to offer, thus they provide a link to your site. In turn, you keep a closed loop by reciprocating the favor to the other website by extending the same courtesy of a back link. Thus creating a solid network connection. Google likes to see interconnectivity and will reward your website well for planning it this way.

There are drawbacks to the equation. As things change a website that you are affiliated with may drop a hyperlink or a page may get accidentally deleted. When the Google robot goes through your website and finds a dead link it notes that you aren’t keeping good care of your website and punishes your web rank by reducing its point value. If you wish to know what your sites current point value is download The Google Toolbar and search for your website www.yourwebsitename.com in the box and perform a Google web search. Upon reading the full URL, Google will go directly to your site first thus pulling up your home page. There on the toolbar will be a page rank for your website between 1 and 10. 1 being a less visited and noted website and 10 a site that screams traffic 24/7.

Some of the individuals you share reciprocal links with may in fact scan all their links for continuity, should they receive a bounce back for a broken link on your website you can be assured you will receive an email from them. Keeping your website in balance with other sites you share links with will keep the Google engine happy. If you go off and add a company that is not Google friendly, meaning they have no back links you may also lose points.

Jakob Jelling is the founder of http://www.sitetube.com. Visit his website for the latest on planning, building, promoting and maintaining websites.

Abandoned by Google! Googlebot, Wherefore Art Thou Googlebot?

2009-04-21T12:42:00.000+08:00

As a search engine optimization specialist I often optimize existing web pages for small business clients, upload them to the site and see pages re-indexed by Google within a week. This only happens with existing business sites that have been online for a few years. Google seems to be updating their index as often as every other week at this point and older established sites that are already indexed seem to be re-crawled on that twice a month schedule on a fairly routine basis.

Two clients that hired me for recent work saw their rankings shoot to the top for a newly targeted search phrase in a weekend when I did optimization on a Thursday and they were ranked instantly by Saturday. Now keep in mind that this doesn't happen for everyone, only those that have been online for some period and already have significant content that simply needs tweaking and proper title and metatag information added. They usually have relatively good existing PageRank and do well for other RELEVANT search phrases already. I offer that warning only to avoid instilling false hopes in anyone hoping to achieve the same instant ranking boost overnight.

Those clients that do succeed in this way are often thrilled with the results accomplished in such short order. I'd love to be able to offer that type of ranking boosts to everyone, but some are more equal than others when it comes to easy, inexpensive SEO tune-ups that rev up your rankings overnight. Your mileage may vary.

WHY DO NEW SITES SUFFER?

What is going on with newer sites that don't get crawled for months? I've got a client, a newer attorney directory that offers tons of great information in the form of articles on specific areas of law, links to incredibly valuable and relevant legal sites and over 600,000 attorneys listed by practice area and state. Yet the site has not been re-crawled by Google for over 3 months! Now this would not be such a big issue for many sites, but this site is relatively new and we've optimized all the titles, tags & page text, created a complete site map and placed links to all these resources on the front page.

I know that the site is not being crawled because Google's cached copy of the front page shows it before we did the work four months ago, without the new links and without title tags. We've submitted the site by hand, (manually) once a month for three months via the Google Add URL page. http://www.google.com/addurl.html When the hand submission failed to get it re-indexed for four months, we submitted the sitemap page, which has not been crawled at all. Google shows only ONE page on this site, when in fact it has thousands of pages, a sitemap and dozens static pages!

Part of the problem is that this site must be dynamic, since a database of over 632,000 attorneys must be accessed, retrieved and served for any of those law firms searched for to be returned to the site visitor. Google warns owners of dynamic sites that Googlebot may not crawl dynamically generated pages with "?"" question marks in the URL. This is to avoid crashing the server with too many concurrent page requests from Google's spider.
http://www.google.com/webmasters/2.html#A1

The solution to this dynamic URL problem has been discussed widely in search engine forums and solutions have been bandied about including software provided by SEO's, URL re-write techniques for dynamic pages on APACHE servers http://www.alistapart.com/articles/urls/ and PHP pages http://www.stargeek.com/php-seo.php to generate search engine friendly URL's. Others recommend simply adding static HTML sitemap pages as alternatives for the search engine spiders. In this instance the client's developer simply said "I can't do that (PHP solution) on this server". So we resorted to putting up the static HTML sitemap pages with hard-coded

URLS to the main 54 pages of the site at http://lawfirm411.com/Law-Firm-411-sitemap.html This should get at least those fifty pages crawled by Googlebot, but Googles' spider appears not to be crawling this site at all. How do we know this? See for yourself by using the following query in the search box at Google: allinurl:www.lawfirm411.com where the result page shows ONE page in the results. If you try that query on your own site (replace your own domain name for lawfirm411.com), you'll see the results lists ALL your pages.

The site home page was crawled by Google four months ago, when they took their "Cached Snapshot" of the page. You can see this by visiting the Google cached page here: http://66.102.7.104/search?sourceid=navclient&;ie=UTF-8&q=cache:www.lawfirm411.com where the date of this snapshot is "Apr 20, 2004 07:42:19 GMT" and they haven't been back since. The page in that snapshot has none of the newly added links, an outdated title tag, and old content.

This problem is not unique to this site. One client we worked with two years ago had a dynamically generated, framed site! Those two site structures have always given search engines trouble. Their site was not crawled at all and only the front page showed up. Our solution was to create a second domain (owned by the client), which had static HTML pages that precisely mirrored the content of the client's framed, dynamically generated site. Guess what happened after Googlebot crawled the static site? Google indexed the framed site in full and then banned the static site from the index! Not an approach we advocate, but the one that worked for this client.

We're still searching for ways to get Googlebot back to LawFirm411.com before creating that new static site, but decided to share this odd experience with the SEO community before going to any extremes. Google provides over 70% of most search engine referred traffic to ALL of our clients and we realized we can't site idly by and see a major client languish because Googlebot didn't like what it found at the client site on the first visit four months ago. This issue dogs newer sites in other places as well. The Open Directory Project has also become notoriously slow in adding new sites to the directory and in this case, has not picked up this site even after 6 regular monthly submissions. The web playing field may have begun tilting toward older, established sites and away from new ones.

------------------------------------------------------------

Mike Banks Valentine is the SEO for http://www.lawfirm411.com

Contact him at http://www.seoptimism.com/SEO_Contact.htm

Improve Your Small Business Online at our Ecommerce Tutorial

http://website101.com/Free-Tutorials/index.html

Be Aware of Phishing Scams!

2009-04-21T12:41:00.000+08:00

If you use emails actively in your communication, you must have received various messages claiming to be from Ebay, Paypal and a number of banks. A recent email as if from U.S. Bank Corporation that I received contains the subject "U.S. Bank Fraud Verification Process" and in the body of the mail it says "We recently reviewed your account, and suspect that your U.S. Bank Internet Banking account may have been accessed by an unauthorized third party. Protecting the security of your account and of the U.S. Bank network is our primary concern. Therefore, as a preventative measure, we have temporarily limited access to sensitive account features. To restore your account access, please take the following steps to ensure that your account has not been compromised:". It continues with a link to a webpage, which looks very similar to original web page of the bank.

The misleading web site appears authentic with familiar graphics and logos. The wordings are professional right down to the legal disclaimer at the bottom of the page.

If you happened to be holding an account of the claimed bank, followed the instructions of the email and input your account, pin, password, etc. you are doomed. You just have handed over access to your account to a con artist, who, in a matter of days, will drain off all the money available in that account.

This new scam, which is proliferating in a very rapid pace, is called "Phishing". Phishing is a form of identity theft, where a con artist with the help of official looking email containing link to phony web pages capable of harvesting information, tricks an unsuspecting victim into divulging sensitive personal data. Scammers use these data to bilk victims out of their savings.

One of the most common phishing campaigns being waged has targeted users of Web auction giant eBay and its PayPal division with financial services giant Citibank serving as another popular target. However, recently, every major bank has been hit with this scam. Crooks send out huge amounts of emails with an expectation that some of these email address owners may have online access to their accounts at the bank.

The term "Phishing" is a deviation of the word "Fishing". In hackers’ lexicon, in many words, "F" becomes "Ph". The term derives from the fact that scammers use sophisticated bait as they "fish" for users’ personal information.

According to Gartner, a research firm, illegal access to checking accounts gained via phishing has become into the fastest growing type of consumer theft in the United States. Roughly 1.98 million people reported that their checking account was breached in one way or another during the last year and US$ 2.4 billion were defrauded from the victims!

Gartner also estimated that 57 million U.S. Internet users have received phishing emails and 3 percent of them may have fooled into revealing their personal sensitive information.

The Anti-Phishing Working Group has also spotted a dramatic increase in reports of phishing attacks in recent months. Since November, 2003 phishing scams increase by about 110 percent each month. In April alone, the group identified 1125 unique phishing scams, a sharp lift of 178 percent from the previous month.

MessageLabs, a company that watches phishing scams closely, has noted an even more dramatic increase in number of phishing emails. It claims to see phishing messages jump from just 279 in September, 2003 to a staggering 215,643 in March of 2004.

The scammers also started to use more sophisticated technologies in recent months. The latest generation of phishing scammers uses several methods to trick users, including pop-up graphics to mast the true web URL of the phishing site and the installation of Spywares and Trojans on victim’s computer. The perpetrators also take advantage of security bugs in web browsers, in which the URL in the address bar appears to be for one site but is, in fact, a link to a totally different site.

A new Windows worm under the name "Korgo" is able to infiltrate into victim’s system with a key logging Trojan, steal information that the victim input in web forms and secretly transmit to designated server. There are a number of variants of this worm and they are spreading rapidly. However, Microsoft in April came up with a patch to seal this glitch. Many computers without the patch are still vulnerable to this potentially dangerous worm.

A U.S. Treasury report provides consumers with steps to prevent and report phishing scams:

* Do not respond to or open any e-mail that warns that an account is about to be closed. Contact the company directly by phone and inquire of this e-mail.
* Do not submit financial information unless there is a symbol for a locked padlock on the browser's status bar. Also look for the https:// at the beginning of the Web address. If both of these signs are absent, the Web site is not secure.
* Always review your bank statement and credit card statements immediately upon receipt.
* Verify the domestic telephone number listed on the Web site through directory assistance or other reliable sources and call the number. Many phishing attacks have originated outside the U.S. and don't have a domestic number.
* Report suspicious activity or if you have been defrauded to the FTC and the FBI.
* Phishing e-mails can be forwarded to uce@ftc.gov. Complaints can be filed at www.ftc.gov. Phishing attacks can also be reported to the Internet Fraud Complaint Center at www.ifccfbi.gov.

Other cautionary measures you should take in order to protect yourself are:

* Since most of the phishing emails come through spam, get a spam filter and install on your computer.
* If you suspect a phishing attempt, report immediately to the bank. Every bank web site has a link or a toll-free number to report scams. Don't be ashamed if you were tricked into divulging account information. If you report it immediately, your account will be protected until you receive a new PIN.
* Change your password and PINs regularly. Banks advise that you use separate PINs and passwords for different accounts, that way if one gets compromised, your entire financial life won’t be revealed. - If you are a frequent user of EBay, download its Web browser toolbar, a small program that runs with a user's Web browser. It flashes red when the user visits a possible spoof site. The toolbar uses a database of spoof site URLs, submitted by customers and is updated quite often.
* Check your computer frequently for possible Trojan virus.

About The Author

Nowshade Kabir is the founder, primary developer and present CEO of mailto:nowshade@rusbiz.com, http://ezine.rusbiz.com , http://www.rusbiz.com , http://ezine.rusbiz.com/newsletters/newsletter31.htm

The Importance of Search Engine Marketing

2009-04-21T12:40:00.001+08:00

Business recognises the importance of SEO like never before. The growth in the search engine marketing field has been incredible, far exceeding most other industries. In the past achieving listings in search engines has been very much taken for granted by many businesses, being treated as less important as the standard marketing methods such as newspaper, television and radio advertising. With more internet consumers utilising search as their first options for finding a business of choice, search engine marketing has come to the forefront of marketing.

A few main advantages of search engine marketing over other marketing methods are:

1. The cost by comparison is quite low to perform search engine marketing over other forms of marketing. 2. Internet users are often much more qualified by the time they find your site as they have been searching for your specific service or product. 3. Your advertising is running seven days a week, twenty four hours a day. To attain this kind of exposure through any other form of marketing would blow any businesses marketing budget out the window.

The fact that SEO is a much cheaper form of advertising (and an extremely effective one) has not gone
unnoticed for many savvy businesses. Realisation that cost of acquisition is markedly cheaper means that many companies are directing increased resources from their marketing budgets towards search engine marketing campaigns.

In the search engine marketing game, Google is clearly the leader. Estimates vary as to how much of the market Google actually has, but most estimates are around 75%. This being the case; while it is important to focus on Google, Yahoo and MSN when optimising your site, the majority of focus should be spent on Google.

If you don't have a proper SEM strategy in place, or part of your marketing budget set aside for search engine marketing, I suggest that you seriously rethink your marketing strategy and look at the benefits that your company or business can achieve through having a strong presence in the search engines. You can be fairly certain that your competitors are either utilising search engine marketing, or seriously considering it.

Do you really want them having a competitive advantage over you with your business being left behind?

Andrew Seidel - SEO Specialist and Search Engine Marketing Consultant in Sydney, Australia: http://www.quantumwebsolutions.com.au/

Business: Deliver Information Safely

2009-04-21T12:39:00.000+08:00

Businesses that are not using feeds today, as part of their marketing and advertising plans, will soon do so, or should thinking of implementing them soon. Although this is a fairly new communications tool it is growing rapidly. The reason is that the information gatherer, consumers, etc., are or will be using readers to view information. The main reason is that information can be viewed with No Spam, No Junk Mail and No Viruses threats.

Don't worry, if you think you are behind the times, because you are not. People are just starting to get wind of the "Feeds Method" of gathering information. But if you prepare now, there's a good chance you may be well ahead of your competition.

The good news is that feeds are good for any size business, even if you don't have a web site. Companies such as ours, provides for any size business, online or offline, big or small, to get their information to their customers safely.

The big reason feeds are becoming so popular is that there is no transfer of information to the user's computer. Unlike e-mail there is no data sent to the user's hard drive. The user cannot be spammed or sent junk mail or download a virus using a feeds reader. The feeds reader user, your customers etc., controls the information they view.

Business finds it exciting because people will use the feeds reader to gather information and stay updated on products, services and information they have an interest in. Some businesses, that have been using mailing lists, have been frustrated in the last couple of years with the increase of Spam and junk mail filters. Many of their customers simple do not receive or read the messages sent because the filters read the mail as Spam or Junk Mail and most times deleted.

As well small, and home based businesses, can now get equal billing with the world's largest companies. On our site we list the smallest company with the biggest. It's up to the user which feeds they enter into their reader to view.

How It Works.

Consumers, or web surfers use a reader to view feeds. Let's say a consumer visits your web site and you have a feed for them to use if they wish. You would list the feed URL for them to copy and a small icon that indicates if it is an RSS or XML file etc. They copy and paste the feed URL into their reader and view you feed. The feed has one or more items. Each item has a title, such as "ABC Home Decor", a small description such as "Visit our store or web site to get 40% off all in stock furniture", and a link to the page you want your visitors to view on your web site or if you don't have a web site a page we would provide you.

The feed itself, which can contain one or many items, is a basic file. It is a RSS or XML file that is stored on your server or on ours. The consumer reads the file with a reader. The file is not a web page but similar to an e-mail message without the data transfer to the user's computer.

You can update the feed 24/7, thus having the most up to date information on hand for the viewer of the feed. Whether you run a large online or offline corporation, a small business in a small town, or a home business, you can update your customers and potential customers immediately and 24/7.

The Bottom Line.

Really you don't need to know how feeds work, unless you are going to do it yourself. Simply understand that feeds are an exciting new communication tool that anyone can use. They are safe, and can be updated in real time. Feeds are easy to add to readers and easy to implement on your web site or from your offline business. They are something you should seriously consider for your business.

About The Author

Bob Power has been an Internet entrepreneur for longer than he would like to remember. He is the president of Your Future Lifestyle a company that guides people on the relaistic way to create multiple streams of income online. Get our free eBook.

These articles my be reproduced exactly as shown above. No revisions or changes are permitted. http://yourfuturelifestyle.com/

7 Day Product Launch – What Can Go Wrong?

2009-04-21T12:38:00.000+08:00

There are a number of things that can go wrong when you are doing a 7 day product launch. In fact, it is my opinion that you should not try to do a 7 day product launch on your first product, do at least a 30 day launch, so that you have plenty of time to test things out first. And by product launch, I am including the creation of the product in my 7 days – so now you can see why I advise against it for the first time.

Again, there are many concerns with your first launch.

You might have trouble with your web hosting – be sure and test it out first. Find a way to send a ridiculous amount of traffic to it – upload a big pdf, then send it a lot of PPC or junk traffic, just to see if it will crash. Better to burn a little cash that way, than to lose the sales when it crashes during your big launch.

You may not be able to get an affiliate program up and running, and perhaps that you do not yet have a merchant account so that you can accept credit cards.

And yes, when I say 7 days, I mean aggressively write the book, write the sales page, create hosting, and affiliate account, and credit card processing – this is only something you can do if you are working this fulltime, and you have some experience, in my humble opinion.

And now you see that I am very aggressively promoting doing all of this in just 7 days. That is right, just 7 days. You see, when you are organized, and know exactly what you need to do, in what order, and on what day of the ebook launch, then it becomes much easier.

The only truly limiting factor when creating an ebook is the time involved to write and to do research.

One of the keys, then, to a 7 day product launch, is to write on a product about which you are familiar and use services you are familiar with for your web hosting, affiliate program and credit card processing.

Do you want to learn more about how I do it? I have just completed my brand new guide to article marketing success, 'Your Article Writing and Promotion Guide'

Download it free here: http://www.secrets-of-internet-success.com/ezrss.html

Do you want to learn how to build a big online subscriber list fast? Click here: http://www.secrets-of-internet-success.com/listbuilding.htm

Sean Mize is a full time internet marketer who has written over 9034 articles in print and 14 published ebooks.

Who Should Consider Starting a Paid Subscription Website?

2009-04-21T12:37:00.000+08:00

Before I identify who should be considering setting up a subscription website, it would be a good idea to define exactly what a subscription website is.

There are two inter-changeable terms; a subscription website and membership website. Most people don't differentiate between the two.

A subscription or membership website is a site which has a password protected member area. Visitors to the site have to register their details and usually make a payment before being issued with a password. The password gives them access to a member-only content. The content is usually text articles, but it can be applications, digital downloads or streamed video and audio clips.

In the traditional print world the subscription website can be compared to a specialist newsletter or magazine. But the internet has some major advantages over print. There are almost zero distribution costs, they can attract a global audience, they can be run from anywhere in the world, content can be archived in a searchable format and most importantly members are able to interact with one another creating a strong sense of community.

These advantages open up subscription websites to a huge number of individuals and organisations who otherwise would not be able to cost effectively sell subscriptions and distribute their information. A site with as few as 500 members can provide a good income for the editor.

Examples of individuals and groups who should consider the online subscription website opportunity are:

• Authors
• Publishers
• Consultants
• Celebrities
• Marketing Experts
• Musicians
• Hobbyists
• Public Speakers
• Personal Coaches
• Sports Coaches
• Business Owners
• Program and Course Developers
• Teachers/ Trainers
• Directors/Producers
• Talent Agents
• Fan Clubs
• Associations/Societies
• Songwriters
• Writers/Journalists/Editors
• Church Groups
• Sports Clubs
• Charities
• Alumni Associations

If you consider that there are over 50 million active blogs on the internet, many of these have a strong and loyal followings......... but they are making very little money from advertising. These are ideal candidates to convert to a subscription website so that they can start earning a proper living from their expertise.

Remember everybody has knowledge and expertise that is valuable to somebody.

Miles Galliford is the co-founder of SubHub http://www.subhub.com . He has been on the board of many successful internet companies since 1998. SubHub provides everything that an individual or organisation needs, from the technology platform to the know-how, to setup, run and grow a successful subscription website business. To read more articles about subscription website publishing, please visit http://www.subhub.com .

Adsense Secrets

2009-04-21T12:36:00.002+08:00

Pst! Wanna know some Adsense secrets? The only secret is that there are no secrets per se!

Do a search for Adsense secrets and you will be bombarded by a myriad of ads by trying to sell you the answers to making lots of money with Adsense.

Before you buy anything, my advise to you would be to do some research on a search engine and a bit of common sense. There are literally hundreds of forums where you can pick up valuable information, as well as hundreds of articles that have been written on the subject of Adsense.

Most of the answers are out there for you to find it you will put in a little bit of work. If you buy any of the ebooks available out there, you might find one little nugget of information that you may not have seen anywhere else, but I promise you: most of the time everything is out here on the Internet - all you have to do is search for it. Here are some of the search terms that I personally have used with great results:

increase adsense income

increase your adsense income

adsense experiments

adsense adsense tricks

adsense tips

What I can tell you from my own experience is this:

1. Ads at the top of the page and on the left of the page perfom better than any other ads. (Take a look at the "heatmap" from the Google link below)

2. Ads without background colour and borders perfom better than ads within borders with background colour.

3. Ads within content pages perform better than any other ads.

4. A search box on every page gives you another chance for earning Adsense income.

5. A blue link at the top of the ad, the ad in black, and the url also in black so that it blends in with the ad copy - also tends to perform well. A black url makes the link stand out and gives you a better chance of someone clicking on it.

Google has brought out some great Adsense optimization tips. You can read it here: Google Adsense optimization tips

Experiment with your settings and see which brings you the best results. Google's reporting has become a lot better in the last month or so, so you should instantly be able to see which ads result in better CTR.

To increase your site traffic, which obviously will increase your Adsense income, the best way to get traffic is to have fresh content at your site. Write your own articles and submit it to article directories like Go Articles etc. To find more article directories, just do a search for "free article directory submissions" on a search engine like Google.

Another way would be to publish articles by other authors that are relevant to your site content. You can find free articles all over the web by once again doing a search for e.g. "free site content".

Do this on a regular basis and watch your traffic (and your income) increase.

Joan Masterson is the owner of http://www.womenatwork.co.za - and http://www.set-4-success.com - sites that offers free work at home resources and information

The Secret to Adwords Success

2009-04-21T12:36:00.001+08:00

It seems at the moment that everybody is telling you that the easiest and quickest way to make money online is with Google Adwords and affiliate programs.

It sounds so easy. You join a programme, get a link, choose a couple of keywords, put up an ad and the money flows. Many have tried and many have failed.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s possible to make money this way and to be very successful. There are many people making $100’s per day from their Adwords campaigns. But those that are successful don’t follow the herd, they think for themselves.

As with all things in life the greater success is found on the ‘road less travelled’ which means if you do what everybody else is doing you will get the results that everybody else is getting. And the fact is that everybody else, or at least the majority, are trying maybe making a little money, getting disheartened and moving on to something else.

We need to be different.

So what does our average money maker do? First he goes to Click Bank and visits the ‘Money & Employment’ category and he selects one of the top 10 products. That is not bad strategy but maybe we should be a little different if we must sell in the making money online space then why don't we find excellent products that aren't available on Click Bank.

A little but a bit of work at Google will uncover a number of directories where we can find products to promote. Or better still why not find out who the top names are in the making money online space and search out their affiliate programs. Yanik Silver, Marlon Sanders & John Reese all operate their own affiliate programs & these guys also have excellent materials that will help you to sell their products.

But even better still we could target a totally different market. There are millions of people spending millions of dollars on things other than how to get rich products. Checkout these links to see what people are searching on this month.

http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html

http://50.lycos.com/

http://buzz.yahoo.com/overall/

Once our Money Maker (MM) has selected the same product to promote as everybody else he then chooses the same keywords as everybody else to bid on at Google. He will type those words into the Keyword tool at Overture or into Adwords Analyzer. Then he will have a big list of the same keywords as everybody else promoting that product.

Do you think there might be a little competition for these keywords? You think those words might be expensive to bid on? You betcha.

What we need to do is think a little differently whatever market we choose there will be competition and if there is no competition it probably means that nobody is spending in this market. We need to think ‘outside of the box’. We need to get inside the minds of the typical buyer of a product. We need to think what related problems they may be having what other things they will be searching for and we need to create our own keyword list.

Finally MM writes one ad, that will show for all his keywords. His ad describes the features of the product. We on the other hand will write an ad highlighting the benefits of the product. All those eyeballs will be attracted to our ‘sizzle, not the sausage’. We will include a call to action.

We will have multiple ad groups separated out into themes, our ads will be relevant to the keywords in the group and we will have two ads for each group so we can see what works and what doesn’t. We will test, test & test some more.

Our success will be found on the road less travelled.

There is still plenty of room in the Adwords pool as long as we are prepared to think for ourselves and not expect a free ride.

Copyright 2004 Darren Power

About The Author

Darren Power is the author of The Money Seed your step by step guide to making money online. You can pick up his free ebooks at http://www.themoneyseed.com. For further free resources related to this article visit http://www.themoneyseed.com/articles.

The Downfall of Podcasting

2009-04-21T12:35:00.000+08:00

I remember when I first learned about Podcasting. It was via blog entries in Chris Pirillo's blog and Leo Laporte's blog. Both class act internet enthusiasts and both had a hand in making podcasting what it is today. However podcasting has become more of a business venture than the fun audio sharing that it was when it started out.

There are a handful of people that have alienated the idea of podcasting. The idea that anyone can share audio not just the big time internet junkies. Take, for example, Kevin Rose, the one time tech television star that downgraded his career to online multimedia. He does two podcasts, which there is nothing wrong with, but it's the way that he presents himself and hounds users to subscribe.

There is nothing wrong with promotion. If you are just starting out promotion is a great way to get the word out, and maybe become the next big thing. But then there are people and organizations that over promote. Over promoting is when you are already popular and have a good following and then you keep plugging away and hounding users to watch or listen even more. A perfect example of this is Kevin Rose. Of his two podcasts, both are in the top 15 (This week in Tech, 4, Diggnation, 12). That's great for him, but lets look at a post in his blog that was just a few days ago (while both were still in the top 15).

"Help out diggnation and subscribe today:
If you use iTunes:
- Subscribe to the audio feed
- Subscribe to the video feed
Odeo:
- Subscribe to the odeo audio feed
iPodderX or other podcasting clients:
- Raw RSS feed"

"Help out diggnation…". Help Out! He's the number 12 podcast on iTunes and that's just not good enough. This is what I like to call greed. Greed to be better than everyone else, while not letting the little guy who's just starting out get some promotion.

If Kevin Rose wants to help out podcasting and not be a selfish person, he should probably promote on of his favorite podcasts, if he even ventures out of his own. Maybe he should get out there and listen to some more, some that aren't well know, that aren't in the top 15, that are maybe in the 100's. He may realize that there are some good podcasts that aren't overly popular. Then promote them on his site. He's got a good following he could get some people listening. Think of it as donating to the poor. You could just sit there in your mansion and suck up money while asking your maid to get you more hot tea. Or you could donate some money and feel good about yourself.

If you were to look in the archives of Kevin Rose's Blog you'd realize that never once has he promoted someone else's new feature or podcast, unless it was one of his "friends". All I hope is that someday Kevin Rose will realize that he's not the only human being on this planet; it wouldn't hurt the help the little guy.

Some reading this article, may be wondering why I'm only focusing on Kevin Rose. The main reason is that he has a huge outlet of power, which he can thank TechTV for, and he uses it to only promote himself. While on the other hand, Leo Laporte and Chris Pirillo tend to steer away from their online careers and give a little insight on their lives, and isn't that what blogging is for? While Leo and Chris may not promote the small guy, you won't see them promoting themselves.

By just glancing at Leo and Chris's blog you can see very seldom self promotion. Now compare them side by side with Kevin Rose's blog. His is all self promotion, nothing looking into the life of Kevin Rose, nothing that helps the little guy, all self promotion so he can be number one at everything.

While I have the chance I'll finish off my rant on Kevin Rose by pointing on one simple thing. On the podcast "Diggnation", which I'm not subscribed to and dislike, they take the first three minutes to discuss beer. I hope they realize that the majority, or if not the majority a large chunk, of their audience is under the legal drinking age. I do not believe that a podcast like this is the time or place for discussing alcohol.

Jacob Bodnar is a senior writer and webmaster of http://www.p2btech.com We writes technology and sports articles. This article originally premiered on p2btech.com in August.

Discover The Inside Works On Paid Surveys

2009-04-21T12:34:00.000+08:00

Making money and free paid surveys. Are you looking for free good paid surveys, or to take online surveys and earn extra cash, or even temp jobs to earn extra money? Online free paid surveys and focus groups are currently one of the easiest & fastest ways to earn money online, but whether you will make good money will depend on two things - your patience & discipline to complete the surveys on a consistent basis.

Basically, you get paid on a one-time basis by various companies to take a survey of your opinions about either a product, service, movie, or any consumer item you can think of. Usually people are telling you to keep your opinion to yourself, but now you can share it, and better yet, get paid for it! These companies either pay cash or give away free products for people to evaluate their products because they need legitimate, real-world opinions about how good or bad their products are.

These surveys are done ALL the time across a wide spectrum of companies and products, and it is very cost-effective for these companies to do them. So instead of pushing the product into mass production which may be a hit or miss, doing online surveys will be much cheaper & more accurate. The online paid surveys and trials market is a multi-billion dollar industry all on its own!

And as you see, earning money and free paid online surveys do go hand in hand. Because there will always be new products being rolled out by successful companies in order for them to remain competitive in their market space, there will therefore always be a steady flow of surveys that will pay people to evaluate their products.

This is how anyone can make a decent living if they wish to pursue this kind of online work full-time, from the comforts of their own home.

Get the latest in news, reviews and articles on online surveys and home businesses.
http://www.articledirectoryzone.com/online-surveys/money-and-free-paid-online-surveys.html
http://www.articledirectoryzone.com/home-businesses.html

Opt-In Lists for Events

2009-04-21T12:33:00.000+08:00

Opt-in lists for events are similar to the signing up for a newsletter. You ask people if they want to be notified when a special event or sale is happening. Although some may look at this as a permission to send junk mail, you can let them know that you are not selling your list to anyone and you will use it only for the stated purpose. Then do not abuse the privilege of having them sign up. Do not overwhelm them with sales and event notices—make sure that you schedule the notices and let them know when to expect them. As with a newsletter, you can tell them whether it will be daily, weekly, monthly, or otherwise. You should also inform them of the day to expect it.

I know that you do not commonly see much scheduling happening on the Web in general, but you will find that your clients appreciate your scheduling. It gives them a heads up when to expect the information so they are more likely to read it. You want them to read it and take action from what you send. In order to make this happen, schedule your mailings and make them exciting and enticing.

If people opt in, they will also want to have the option of opting out. Let them know at any time they can do so and give them a link so they can follow through. I have opted out of some lists with ease and others only with great difficulty. As you can imagine, I feel respect for the companies that make it easy and lose all patience for those that do not. Consider, too, that people change addresses, and they must have an easy way to opt out of the old address and opt in with the new one!

Bette Daoust, Ph.D. has been networking with others since leaving high school years ago. Realizing that no one really cared about what she did in life unless she had someone to tell and excite. She decided to find the best ways to get people’s attention, be creative in how she presented herself and products, getting people to know who she was, and being visible all the time. Her friends and colleagues have often dubbed her the “Networking Queen”. Blueprints for Success - Networking: 150 ways to promote yourself is the first in this series. Blueprints for Success Branding Yourself: Another 150 ways to promote yourself is planned for release in 2006. For more information visit http://www.BlueprintBooks.com

How to Increase Link Popularity

2009-04-21T12:32:00.000+08:00

Link Popularity refers to the number of links coming from other web sites to your web site (also called inbound links). The competition between search engines and webmasters has led the search engines to find new ways to measure the importance of a site. Google has been responsible for introducing link popularity as an important aspect in its algorithms. For instance, if Google reads your site and sees many inbound links from related web sites it interprets each link as a "vote" that your site is good and as a result gives you a boost in your ranking.

If you want to improve search engine rankings with link popularity it is important that the bulk of the inbound links that point to your site are coming from other quality sites; in this case quality is better than quantity because the search engines look at the page ranks of the sites that are linking to you – the higher, the better.

Do and Don'ts

Avoid Link Farms at all costs. These are sites that exist for the sole purpose of linking to other web sites without any regard to relevancy or quality, and in the world of linking, "more isn't merrier". In fact, Google has started punishing web sites that have link-farm pages so the reward is definitely not worth the risk.

Avoid links from non-related sites. Links from sites that have no relevance to your own site most likely won’t bring good results so if you have a health-related you shouldn’t be linked to a site selling power tools. The search engines can recognize "who" is linking to you and they tend to ignore irrelevant links. The links that you have pointing to your site must be quality, related links that belong to the same category.

Exchange links with popular sites. When you exchange links with other web sites make sure that the site is one that will be useful to your visitors. The rule of thumb is this: If your link to their site is useful to your visitors, then you can safely assume that a link from their site to yours will be useful to their visitors as well.

Linking Tips

1. Start by doing a search of your top keywords in the search engines. Visit the top 100 sites and choose the ones that best relate to yours. Then contact the webmaster with a personal note and tell him/her that you like their site and why. Let them know that you will be putting a link in your site pointing to theirs and suggest a reciprocal link pointing to you explaining how his/her visitors would benefit. It's also good to make suggestions on where on their site your link would be best placed.

2. You can also set up a link script on your web site. This is where visitors can go to automatically enter into an exchange with you by adding their link. Of course, you will need to approve the link and make sure that it is a site you want to be associated with before you accepting.

3. Look at the web sites of your competition. What sites are linking to them? Visit those sites and contact their webmasters.

4. When you exchange links with another site make sure that you use your keywords in the text of your link. Google gives a lot of importance to the link text itself. This will go a long way to helping the search engines determine what your site is about and relevancy.

5. Write and distribute articles and include in the author's resource box at the end of the article the information about you, your business and a link to your web site. When your article is submitted to the many article banks online an inbound link is created.

6. Post in forums that are related to your web site and use a signature file that contains a link to your site. Again, the content of the forum post must be related to your site in some way. Make sure that what you have to say is important to the discussion that is taking place.

7. Getting your site listed in as many directories as possible will also increase your link popularity. There are many directories where you can get your site listed for free but most of them have a fee. Don't forget to look for directories that specialize in your topic or category.

Written by Monica Villarreal. For more information and tips on how to build a popular website that humans and search engines love visit: http://www.websitedesigngenius.com

Do's and Don'ts for the Internet Marketing Newbie (Part 2)

2009-04-21T12:31:00.000+08:00

You are now reading Part 2 of my article the “Do’s and Don’ts for the Internet Marketing Newbie”. Part 1 covered the Do’s and this part will cover the Don’ts.

· Don’t throw your money away! Unless you have lots to throw away and can afford to buy whatever gets thrown at you. Budget yourself and keep within your budget. Only spend when you need to. You will come across plenty of sites that want you to spend your hard earned money for an internet marketing course, E-book, or piece of software guaranteed to make you money. Don’t fall into the trap. First investigate, ask questions from other marketers to see if they are familiar with the product and recommend it. That’s where the forums come in handy and are beneficial.

· Don’t believe all of the hype you will encounter. Example. BUY THIS SOFTWARE NOW! YOU ONLY HAVE TILL MIDNIGHT TONIGHT OR THE PRICE IS GOING TO DOUBLE OR EVEN TRIPLE. YOU’LL SAVE $200.00 IF YOU BUY RIGHT NOW! Don’t believe it, the price will be the same tomorrow and the next. Or here’s another good one. I’m only selling this to the first 50 people who visit my website. Yeah, right. I really believe that one.

· Don’t forget you are a potential customer to every marketer out there, so they will try to sell you their service or product to make money. Remember you are now a marketer and your purpose is to sell your service or product to others, not for you to buy theirs.

· Don’t get me wrong, some services or products are worth buying. You just have to figure out which are the right ones for you and your business. Remember you’re not trying to line someone else’s pockets. You’re trying to line your own.

· Don’t get frustrated and give up because things don’t happen right away. You have to have the mindset that you can do it and succeed. Granted you will have good days and bad days. Every accomplishment is a victory. Every defeat is a learning experience. No business is an overnight success.

· Don’t limit yourself and your thinking. Be willing to try different things and when you find the one thing that seems to work, build on it, but keep trying other things as well.

· You’ve had your business up and running for a couple of months and you’ve only made one sale. Don’t quit because you think it’s not working. Think in these terms instead. If you’ve made one sale, then you can make 2 sales, and if you can make 2 sales, you can make 3 sales and so on. Many of the top marketers on the internet today took years to find the formula that led to their success.

· Don’t believe that there is such a thing as an “auto-pilot” business. Like Ron Popeil’s rotisserie oven, SET IT AND GO. Just doesn’t work that way. I don’t care what you have heard or have read. You have to promote your business. You have to get your name out there and become visible so people can find you and what you’re offering. Just because you now have a website does not mean the masses will come in droves. There are millions upon millions of websites and probably at least a quarter of a million of them are selling the same service or product as you. The question is how are you going to get people to visit your website instead of someone else’s? Once they are there, what’s going to get them to buy from you or join your affiliation? So understand you are going to have to learn how to promote and sell your business and that involves work and time.

· Don’t upgrade your affiliation accounts until you can afford to do so. Many affiliate programs will try to pressure you into upgrading to a “Pro” account. Wait until you start making some money from your business first, then upgrade.

· Don’t rely solely on emailing to promote your business. Due to major Spam filters your message may not get through. Find all of the different ways to advertise on the internet like writing articles, exchanging links, click/surf exchanges, and Pay Per Click search engines. Use offline ways to advertise your business like newspaper ads, mailings, telemarketing, faxes and flyers. Put your website on a t-shirt and wear it!

· Don’t give up, persistence will pay off eventually.

Okay, I’ll stop there. I probably could go on and on and even write an E-book about this subject (that’s a thought). I think you get the idea about how to avoid the “Information Overload” headache and hopefully I have given you some substance for thought. The most important point is take one step at a time. Don’t rush it! And remember once a “newbie” always a “newbie” because you will be learning all of the time!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Debra enjoys collecting jewelry and gemstones. She operates a retail web site that sells wedding and bridal shower favors and gifts at http://favorsgiftsgalore.com
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Make Money From Forums

2009-04-21T12:29:00.000+08:00

If you have a website about a topic you enjoy, you can make money from discussion forums. Talk, post links to your site, get traffic. Traffic means money, right? If not, try different affiliate programs or Google Adwords. The worst sites should get a couple cents per visitor. Now here's how to talk and make money.

Search "forum" plus the topic of your site on Google or Alta Vista. For my first site, I searched "backpacking + forum" and in the pages of results I found several good forums. I also searched related topics like "hiking" too. You can also check about.com, and other sites that have forums on many topics.

Registration is usually giving your email address and choosing a password. Some forums allow guests to post without registering. Once registered, browse the forum topics, and post a response to anything, just to "learn the ropes".

Income From Discussion Forums

The point of posting in forums is to get readers to come to your web site. Sure it's fun to give advice and discuss things of interest to you, but that's secondary. With that in mind, do the following:

1. Always link to your site. If they don't allow any links, find another forum.

2. Don't "spam." Sales pitches will be removed. Offer honest advice, or express an opinion, then sign off with your name and the link to your site.

3. Ask for help from others. This is an effective and acceptable way to "advertise." Enter a topic like "Can I get some advice?" and post something like, "I just started a meditation site. If some of you would visit and tell me what you think, I'd really appreciate it." Have a link to the site. People love to help, and to give opinions, and they'll click on those ads while they're at your site.

4. Look at total "views." Many forums show the total times each "thread" has been viewed. When you see some with many more than others, get in on those, or start a new thread on the same topic. Go where the traffic is, and get some of it.

I didn't like the idea of forums until I made a few posts, and saw my traffic and revenue climb for days afterwards. That convinced me. Just be polite, offer some value to others, and always have a link to your site. Many other secrets of using forums are covered in my newsletter, but this should be get you started. Talk and make money today.

Steve Gillman writes on many money-related topics. To learn more, and to subscribe for FREE to "Web Site Optimization Secrets," go to: http://www.TheMoneyMakerSite.com

15 Easy Ways to Grow Your Subscriber List With Your E-Zine

2009-04-21T12:28:00.002+08:00

While there are seemingly endless ways to promote your e-zine and attract new subscribers, here's a list of my favorite 15. Which ones are YOU using?

Print this out and check those you already do, and note those you should "get a move on."

1. ___ 1. Tell your clients, associates, and friends. Send out one of your best issues (or your first issue) as a sample issue, inviting them to sign up if they like it. (Never sign anyone up without his/her permission.)
2. ___ 2. Put a signup form on your home page and every page of your Web site. No matter what page people may land on, this way they'll know about your amazing e-zine. Don't let them click away and lose them forever!
3. ___ 3. Use a pop-up or pop-under box on your site. Yes, they're irritating if abused, but I can tell you they work. Studies show pop-ups/unders can increase your e-zine signups by up to 10 times! Give it a try and test it. (Automatic popup creators like Ad Impact make it super easy.)
4. ___ 4. Offer a free goodie for new subscribers. We all get so much e-mail these days, that you have to work hard to get anyone's e-mail address. Offer new subscribers a valuable free article, report, resource list, e-book, etc.
5. ___ 5. Offer a free sample issue on your Web site or have one available by e-mail autoresponder. Some people won't sign up for anything until they can see it first.
6. ___ 6. List your e-zine in free e-zine directories. There are hundreds of these on the Web where people visit to search for e-zines on particular topics. Make sure you're here so you can be found! (One of the best is Charlie Page's Directory of E-zines)
7. ___ 7. Swap ads with other e-zines. Search online e-zine directories for other e-zines whose target readership matches yours, and contact their publishers. Swap at least three ads in a row for best results.
8. ___ 8. Buy ads in other e-zines. Again, search those directories for other e-zines whose target readership matches yours, and see their ad specifications and rates. Purchase at least three ads in a row for best results.
9. ___ 9. Plug your e-zine in your e-mail signature. After your usual contact information at the bottom of all your e-mails, be sure to include a two- or three-line plug for your e-zine.
10. ___ 10. Get published in OTHER e-zines. There are dozens of Web sites where other publishers visit to pick up free content for their e-zines. Why not post YOUR articles there for them to use? You get free exposure and plenty of traffic back to your site.
11. ___ 11. Do a co-op with other e-zine subscribers. You can cross-promote with other e-zine publishers on your own, or use an automated service such as Subscription Rocket (subscriptionrocket.com) which I used when I got started years ago.
12. ___ 12. Try a pay-for-subscriber service. These services advertise your e-zine for you and bring you subscribers automatically for as little as 10 to 30 cents apiece.
13. ___ 13. Announce your e-zine to all of the professional organizations and associations you're a member of. They usually allow you to make announcements in their newsletters or on their online bulletin boards.
14. ___ 14. Advertise your e-zine on the back of your business cards. In the text, be sure to tell people how they can sign up for your e-zine.
15. ___ 15. Become active in a few online forums where your ideal readers hang out. In your posts, position yourself as a resource in your area of expertise, and include a signature file that promotes your e-zine!

© 2005-2008 Alexandria Brown International Inc.

Online entrepreneur Alexandria K. Brown publishes the award-winning "Highlights on Marketing Success" weekly ezine with 36,000 subscribers. If you're ready to jump-start your marketing, make more money, and have more fun in your small business, get your FREE tips now at AlexandriaBrown.com

Sales Prospecting for Appointments by Email

2009-04-21T12:28:00.001+08:00

A few months into the job and Sabrina's cold calling sales prospecting techniques were getting her almost nowhere. She would call CIO's and CTO's all day, and speak to maybe one sales prospect if she was lucky. The gatekeepers and voicemail were screening her out. Sabrina was "following up" her calls with emails, but she rarely if ever heard anything back.

Sabrina asked for help to improve her sales prospecting skills. A salesperson for a silicon valley software company, Sabrina was tasked with calling on CIO's in Fortune 1000 companies. Her cold calling skills were a bit rusty, and she was under serious pressure from sales management to produce.

After a few weeks of working on these together, I got the following email from Sabrina:

"My email script has gotten another F1000 appointment! I sent it to an admin who forwarded it to a Senior Director who had his admin respond in 5 minutes that he wanted an appointment. They are right in our sweet spot so this is a very good thing."

If you've done any sales prospecting to big corporations, then you know how great Sabrina felt when she got this appointment. Sabrina has secured numerous VP level appointments using her new email technique.

How did Sabrina improve her sales prospecting?

First she asked for help.

Upon working together, I coached Sabrina to sell only to the sales prospects that were most likely to buy. Sabrina developed a customer profile to guide her sales prospecting efforts. She determined what type of sales prospect would be most likely to buy her product.

Next she worked on identifying the pains that motivate her ideal sales prospect to want to buy her product. This took some research. She spoke to other sales reps, marketing management, and most importantly customers to figure out why people buy her product.

Sabrina used this to craft a short but specific email message to her best sales prospects. It was real-world due to all of her research and her prospects responded to it. The likely buyers were ones who could feel the pain that the email talked about. Those sales prospects jumped up and asked for an appointment.

What can you do to improve your sales prospecting?

1. Develop an Ideal Customer Profile to guide your selling.
2. Identify the Buying Pains of your Ideal Customer.
3. Craft Email Messages, Phone & Voicemail Scripts showing you can eliminate your Ideal Customer's pain.
4. Proactively call and email your Ideal Sales Prospects to find the likely buyers.

© 1999-2004 Shamus Brown, All Rights Reserved.

Shamus Brown is a Professional Sales Coach and former high-tech sales pro who began his career selling for IBM. Shamus has written more than 50 articles on selling and is the creator of the popular Persuasive Selling Skills CD Audio Program. You can read more of Shamus Brown's sales tips at http://Sales-Tips.industrialEGO.com/ and you can learn more about his persuasive sales skills training at http://www.Persuasive-Sales-Skills.com/

Intranet Portal - Business Case ROI

2009-04-21T12:27:00.000+08:00

The days of easy money are over

In these post-dot-com days of the 21st Century, the hype attached to IT is well and truly over. The modern Board is deeply suspicious of large IT projects with questionable benefits and a long-term payback period.

The good news is that a world-class portal implementation has the power to completely transform your organisation and touch everyone, from the office of your CEO to the lady in the canteen.

First a little on Costs

Sorry, but the cost of the software is only a relatively small part of the overall bill; with other major costs in hardware, process change and integration activities. Your first (and major) portal project is (in terms of cost) more an infrastructure investment than it is an application.

As a rough rule of thumb (for a user base >10,000), budget for £250 per desktop to put in the essentials (including portal and content management solutions). If you are also integrating to (and exposing) your ERP or CRM systems, add £150.

Direct Benefits

Based on my experience, Direct Benefits (those that you can directly bake into line budgets and make an individual directorate accountable for realising) are only 20-25% of the total prize and will not generally cover the portal implementation costs by themselves. Direct benefits include reduced printing and distribution costs, decommissioning legacy intranets and FTE savings in operational areas (including IT development & support, Finance & Procurement ledger processing and HR employee services).

Soft Benefits include improved employee satisfaction, better communication and corporate belonging, the importance of which should not be under-estimated in your business case. After all, there is always an emotional, as well as a rational, reason for every purchasing decision.

However, the bulk of portal benefits are Indirect Benefits, where time saved in line areas leads to (for example) reduced call times in call centres, higher sales, faster time to market for new products, fewer failed projects and so on. Benefits realisation is the issue with such benefits. After all, you can't fire 10 minutes of a person a day! The time they have saved is real - ultimately saving cost and driving sales - but it cannot be readily tracked to either.

Making the Business Case: A 10 Step Approach

In the Business Case and ROI chapter of my (free to access) Intranet Portal Guide, I outline a 10 step approach to making the portal business case.

1) Seek External Legitimacy

Consider using a leading consulting firm to lend weight to the business case. They can bring with them experience (from having done it before elsewhere), a knowledgebase (of facts and figures about the benefits other companies have achieved) and a fresh perspective on your organisation, valued by executives.

2) Benchmark other Organisations

I have included in my guide details of public-domain benefit claims from early UK & US portal adopters, including British Airways, BP, Ford Motors Company, IBM, Bell South, Dow, Cisco and BT. Showing your Board that others have delivered real benefits lessens the feeling that their decision is a ‘leap of faith’.

3) Collect Hard Metrics

Direct benefits may be only 15-25% of your total benefits, so work hard to identify savings in Intranet & Collaborative decommissioning; Print, Postage & Distribution Costs, Processing Manpower reductions; and Third Party expenditure savings.

4) Use a Comprehensive Time Survey

In my guide, I suggest that you survey several hundred (representative) users to establish how much time per day they expect to save by using key portal functionality. This will help you to put a financial value on indirect benefits. I outline 10 sample questions and provide benchmark results you could expect to see.

5) Build a Wall of Benefits

When you are trying to build an ROI based on indirect benefits, you can expect those benefits to be challenged vigorously. By having literally hundreds of individual line items and a big overall total, you improve your chances of surviving the Finance ‘Red Pen’. In my guide, I outline 101 benefit ideas to get you going.

6) Link to the Strategic Agenda

Tie the investment closely to the Strategic Agenda of your organisation. If there is another key initiative currently grabbing all the attention at board level (e.g. CRM or ERP) then make sure your portal case complements, or ideally completes, that strategic picture. Use camouflage if necessary, as all is fair in love and war!

7) Identify 2-3 Killer Apps

That will focus the attention (and support) of key sponsors. Look for win-win apps, where the user loves using them but the provider department also extracts key benefits. For example, a self-service HR application where the employee can keep their details up-to-date easily and the company can reduce employee service heads.

8) Use a Cost Avoidance Argument

Your investment will reduce future project costs. After all, a portal is essentially a free infrastructure, a free user interface, a free user client with pre-built security & authentication and a free development framework. HP and others have saved up to 20% on development costs, post-implementation. You could too, so raid the budgets of other approved projects!

9) Consider Larger Scope

Could you make your case if you include internet and extranet in scope? An extranet allows you to securely expose part of your intranet to selected third parties, including B2B customers, suppliers, regulators and government agencies. The incremental cost is quite low, once your intranet platform is there, but the benefits can be large!

10) Use Innovative Phasing

Most companies budget on an annual cycle and are under huge pressure from investors to deliver short-term profitability. The bitter pill of portal costs might be easier to swallow if you spread the implementation over a two-year period.

Conclusions

Making the business case for a corporate Intranet Portal will not be easy. You will need all your reserves of patience, cunning and good old-fashioned hard work. Good luck and don’t forget to check my guide for more detail, help and tools.

About the author:

David Viney (david@viney.com) is the author of the Intranet Portal Guide; 31 pages of advice, tools and downloads covering the period before, during and after an Intranet Portal implementation.

Read the guide at http://www.viney.com/DFV/intranet_portal_guide or the Intranet Watch Blog at http://www.viney.com/intranet_watch.

With Courage and Patience, We Are Getting There

2009-04-21T12:24:00.000+08:00

Just how do we make the "e" in e-books stand for "easier"? Well, how about this? Let's scrap the existing digital rights management. Instead everybody in charge of administering DRM would be re-trained overnight as digital priests. They would certify "trustworthiness" to those seeking to download e-books.

Before downloads, customers would be visited by digital priests of their respective religious persuasions. With great pomp and circumstance, they would "pledge" not to forward their books to everybody in the world without compensating the authors and publishers. Break the pledge, and you'd find yourself in purgatory, hand-copying old encyclopedias.

Or maybe a totalitarian law would work instead. First-offenders guilty of unlawful content reproduction would have to wear a scratchy wool eye patch for one year. For a second crime, the patch would be now a mask. We could set up toll-free hot-lines and reward people for spying on their neighbors.

The Real Point

See my real point here? No easy way exists to loosen the DRM grip--this complicated issue can't be addressed with good old-fashioned guilt and fear. But e-book standards for DRM and formats would help. I am counting on the laws of capitalism, which always prevail. A demand will eventually be met with supply, and I'm hoping that the right set of standard will break from the pack and simplify the digital content landscape. That will be a blessed day. Microsoft, Adobe and Palm and the others now have their own special technology fee tacked on to the price of e-books. And that complicates merchandising. We e-book merchants would rather not have multiple cost structures for the same e-book.

Nor do we like consumers to be limited to books published in their chosen format or suffer multiple technologies just to enjoy a story. Nothing is more frustrating than having three different libraries on your handheld and forgetting where your recent fiction resides. I don't just hear customers complaints--I myself own a handheld.

Villains not

Who's to blame? I'm thinking nobody. Many authors and publishers break out in a cold sweat at just the mention of the word "Napster" and can you blame them? Their livelihood is at stake. They should, however, strive to better satisfy consumers desire for more content in digital form.

If a publisher has faith in their work, it's now accepted that expanding to e-book will deliver extra profit and drive hardback sales. Not all understand this. I still hear some authors express misguided fear that e-books will cannibalize their hardback sales. Publishing is not a zero-sum game, however--and that actually can be good. E-books add incremental value to the equation. Granted, companies tasked with encrypting content for them are an easy target, for they create the hoops through which we must jump. But the DRM heavyweights like Microsoft, Adobe and eReader are simply business people satisfying a need with existing technology.

No glass chin

Let there be no mistake, the future is bright for e-books--sales are on a steady rise. The industry took a couple of jabs during the Internet correction, but you'll find no glass chin here. More students are beginning to see e-books as an alternative for those pricey hardback textbooks. The computer savvy are learning the ease in pasting code directly from their favorite Java e-book manual, and there's even speculation that men are reading more romance as they no longer fear being seen with a floral book cover. Moreover, the Tablet PC is maturing, and the publishers are slowly but surely putting even more content in digital form. It takes courage, but we're getting there. Though it is a word often used in excuses, "patience" is needed by digital downloaders, me included.

Article by L. Scott Redford - scott@diesel-ebooks.com Scott is the President of Diesel eBooks with over 35,000 popular and professional eBooks organized by 50 categories. Visit the free download section at http://www.diesel-ebooks.com

Think All the Good Domain Names are Taken?

2009-04-21T12:23:00.002+08:00

Have you heard of the other tlds (top leve domains) such as: .free, .church, .video, .travel, .llp, .golf, .school, .agent and .love? There are many more too. Wait! Don't wretch just yet. I'll tell you why in just a minute.

If you look for a great domain name for very long you will learn how rare they are. Trying to find a one word dot com is a futile effort. The only exception to that is the occasional name that someone gives up. The problem with that is you must search a list of thousands (or tens of thousands) to find one and of course you must get there ahead of the next person. If you just have to have a one word dot com, be ready to shell out thousands or tens of thousands of dollars.

Then there are the dot net, us, cc, org and biz. Generally if you checked a dot com a few years ago you could find the net, org or biz equivalent. Not so anymore. Besides, the only one of these related to business is biz.

So why am I writing this you ask. First, though, think about it for a bit. I did that and realized it would be (is) great to have stockpick.free, camera.video, poem.love, game.video and loan.travel. Are you beginning to see what I mean? Don't you agree that these are somewhat better than allthefreeebooksyouwant.com or stopheretogetaloan.com.

The point being made here is "type in traffic" (people who go online and just type what they want in the browser). You could wait for years for someone to go to the internet and type in one of those dot coms.

Think again, though, about how many will be looking for toy.free or camera.video. What would it be worth to you to have 30 or a hundred or a thousand people searching for a video camera typing your name into their browser? Pretty obvious now, huh.

I told you not to wretch, now I'll tell you why. There is a wesite where you can get these tlds, and there are lots of them. They are at new.net. When you finish reading here go and see for yourself, but let me tell you two more things.

1. You need to download a plugin to view these sites (very easy)

2. 175,000,000 people already have theirs

Copyright 2004 Dean Walden

About The Author

Dean Walden is the owner of http://www.clikngo.us. If you find some value in this article please do some searches with us (clikngo is a ppc search engine).

Web Design and CMS - an Introduction

2009-04-21T12:23:00.001+08:00

A CMS -- or Content Management System -- is a system to setup and maintain content. And this articles focuses on systems to support the content of your website. The system provides you with standard functionality to setup a site, to use a database, to standardize new web pages, al by means of some prefabricated routines, modules and tables. As any other standardized system, a CMS delivers some standard functions which can be parameterized; you are flexible up to the space left from these parameters.

But when should you use such a system? There are some advantages and disadvantages to consider.

Standardized systems get build because many users face familiar (design) issues. We all need a Web Site, like most companies need some kind of a ERP (enterprise resource planning) system. First these systems are designed in house, like people build their own web applications. Then, specialized companies dedicate their time and focus on building a standard solution for common problems.

The solution a CMS provides is a default design and easy maintenance of a common Web Site. As many people require a space on the virtual world, a CMS could help them.

But first you need to know whether your case really requires a CMS. Although such a decision is not that hard, there are many advantages and disadvantages. If you take these into account your step to implement a Web Site with (if the advantages match your situation) or without a CMS is just one further down the road.

A good example of the environment where the CMS is used is the news agency. The journalist writes either content on a PC (workstation) at the office or off side on a PDA and through an interface this content is transferred to the CMS and merged with the rest of the content flow; some content takes only the webroad, other only the printed version and yet other takes both...

© 2006 Hans Bool

Hans Bool is the founder of Astor White a traditional management consulting company that offers online management tools. Have a look at some of our free management tools. http://www.astorwhite.com/

Should Bloggers be Helping Google Fix Their PageRank System?

2009-04-21T12:22:00.000+08:00

By now, most bloggers have heard the announcement that the Big 3 search engines - Google, Yahoo, and MSN - have united in support of a new tag that will supposedly combat comment spam. The new tag is a nofollow attribute that can be added to links. When added to links in comment tags, the search engines will ignore them.

An excellent discussion of this new tag and how it works can be found at Danny Sullivan's Search Engine Watch:
http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/050118-204728

Google announced the new tag in a 1/18/2005 post to their own blog: http://www.google.com/googleblog/

And Microsoft added their support to the new tag in this post: http://blogs.msdn.com/msnsearch/archive/2005/01/18/nofollow_tags.aspx

At first blush, anything that can help cut down the comment spam that most bloggers are daily subjected to would seem to be a good thing. It can be pretty upsetting to access your blog in the morning and find 50 junk comments with links to casino, adult, and pharmacy sites. If your blog has any PageRank, you can expect to find more of this garbage polluting your site every day. Fighting the spread of comment spam has become a necessity.

But after first cheering the proactiveness of the search engines, many bloggers have stepped back and taken a closer look and they don't like what they see. You can read a sampling of their thoughts at Search Engine Watch Forum:
http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=3797

Brian Turner's incisive article "New Nofollow Tag Cheers Bloggers but Fails Blogs" discusses some of the potential abuses of the new nofollow tag:
http://www.platinax.co.uk/news/archives/2005/01/new_nofollow_ta.html

And Jim Pryke's article "Bloggers Cheer Google As Their Search Rankings Plummet" makes it very clear that not only will this NOT stop comment spam. But it will actually hurt bloggers as a community:
http://netinstitute.com/archives/2005/01/20/bloggers-cheer-google-as-their-search-rankings-plummet

For an hilarious take on the new tag and how it will get abused, be sure to take a look at Link Condom: http://www.linkcondom.com

I have to agree with these bloggers that the nofollow tag won't even put a dent in the problem of comment spam. You have to realize that the comment spammers who cause the most problems are the ones who use automated bots to spread their spam onto every blog they find. The fact that they find a blog using the nofollow tag won't stop the bot from posting. If you have a popular blog, you'll still wake up every morning to find 50 casino/pharmacy/adult ads on your blog. You'll still have to spend the time deleting those posts to clean up your blog.

You see, the problem to bloggers isn't that those comment links pass PR. It's the fact that those spam posts make your blog look like garbage. Whether the links pass PR or not isn't the big issue for bloggers. It's the time it takes to get rid of unwanted comments and the detraction to their sites. The nofollow tag won't do a thing about that problem. You'll still have the problems, even if you use the tag.

Think about this: how effective have email filters been in stopping email spam? As most of us know, they've hardly done any good at all. Email spam becomes a bigger problem every day. Spammers really don't care if some of their emails are blocked. They just send more of it to compensate. The same will be true of the automated comment spam bots.

The fact of the matter is, there are already much better tools in most blogging software to fight comment spam AND save the time and effort of the blogger at the same time. There are already a number of plugins for WordPress, Moveable Type, and other blogs. There will undoubtedly be more in the future. These tools are already more effective at fighting comment spam than this nofollow tag will ever be.

What is unfortunate is that the people the nofollow tag will really hurt is bloggers themselves. Traditionally, bloggers have read and commented in each other's blogs. And these comments have added value. When I write an article for my blog, I love it when other bloggers take the time to add their insights on the topic I'm discussing. These comments add content to my site and continue the discussion. This is one of the reasons blogs are so easy to grow into topic-specific information-rich sites that are popular with readers. Unlike static sites, they offer two-way communication between reader and blogger. They become communities.

When someone adds this kind of value to my blog, I am more than happy to give them a link to their blog that passes PR. That will help them build the readership of their own blog, grow the community even larger, and add to the richness of the discussion. These are exactly the kinds of links that any webmaster should want on their site!

Adding a nofollow tag to comments can only quash this discussion. It can only discourage commenters with the most to contribute from taking the time to add to the discussion. After all, if the time I spend on another blog doesn't contribute to the growth of the blogging community as a whole or aid in the visibility of my own blog, am I going to spend as much time and effort doing it?

Anything that decreases the open flow of discussion currently enjoyed in the blogging community is a bad deal for bloggers.

The question that should be asked is this: why is comment spam so profitable? After all, if it weren't profitable, so many people wouldn't be going to such ridiculous lengths to do it.

The answer to this is obviously Google's link-heavy PageRank algorithm that forces webmasters to get every link they can to get their site's indexed and ranked. Most webmasters know that in order to get ranked in Google, they had better have a ton of links to their site.

That's the problem with PageRank as an algorithm. It encourages artificial linking between sites that no longer has any relevance whatsoever to the goal of providing good resources to visitors. Do we really believe that most reciprocal link directories provide a resource to our visitors? Not likely! If websites are real estate, reciprocal link directories are the slums, the seedy bars and tattoo parlors on the edges of polite society.

Whole businesses have sprung up as a reaction to PageRank. I'm talking about the link auction and link selling sites. Under the PageRank system, sites aren't being ranked by who provides the best content, but by who has the deepest pockets to buy the most links. Or, in the case of comment spammers, whoever wants to spread their bots all over the internet spamming blogs. This system has over time totally skewed the natural linking between sites that once dominated the internet - the very thing that Google's PageRank system is supposed to reward.

Ironically, blogs are one of the few places left on the web where linking is actually about providing good content to visitors and rewarding value provided on other sites. Bloggers as a group are the most likely to link to sites because of the content value to their visitors. Their links are very likely to be very topic specific. You don't find that on other sites. These are the kinds of links that I would assume Google would want to encourage through their PageRank system, not those junky reciprocal link directories or purchased links.

It would seem to me that the only effective way to cut down on comment spam and all the artificial linking techniques Google purportedly wants to thwart is not by making life harder for bloggers - the very people who link in the most relevant fashion. But at taking a second look at their own PageRank system and whether it is really serving the usefulness of their own search engine and the whole web in 2005.

For more tips and ideas on how to make money blogging, be sure to visit my "Why Marketers Should Blog" weblog at (what else) http://www.WhyMarketersShouldBlog.com

Banner Ad Tips and Techniques

2009-04-21T12:21:00.000+08:00

Banner ads can be a very effective and inexpensive way to get your market message out online, although they are probably not as effective as they were when they first debuted.

Like other forms of online marketing, you need to test and track everything that you do with banner ads.

Keep in mind that not all banner ads are created equal; some are much more effective than others. While smart placement of a banner will do some of the work, the ad itself needs to do some work, too. First, don’t just advertise your site in a general way. Instead, promote a particular product or service. Remember: People are protective of their time, and if they have to browse your site to find a product that interests them the chances are much lower that they will buy something than if they click through to your site because a particular product has caught their attention.

Be simple in your message, but dynamic in your design. Animated ads are more eye-catching than static ones, and ads with eye-popping color will do much better than bland ones. Keep the size of the ad small, though. If it takes a long time to load, most visitors won’t bother waiting and they will move on.

Lastly, place ads at the top of the page, so they are seen when the page loads. That will get more attention that an ad placed nearer the bottom, which would require the visitor to scroll down.

Using banner ads can be an effective and inexpensive way to get increased exposure for your site if you follow these tips.

Do you want to learn more about how I do it? I have just completed my brand new guide to article marketing success, ‘Your Article Writing and Promotion Guide‘

Download it free here: http://www.secrets-of-internet-success.com/articlewriting.html

Do you want to learn how to build a massive list fast? Click here: http://www.secrets-of-internet-success.com/listbuilding.htm

Are Autoresponders An Important Asset To Your Business?

2009-04-21T12:20:00.000+08:00

Autoresponders are an important asset to an Internet Marketer. When I heard that statement, I said, “Okay – great! What is it!” For all those new to the Internet arena, I’ll try to explain what autoresponders are, how they can be used, and how it can benefit your online business.

What Are Autoresponders?

Autoresponders automate the process of following up e-mail marketing leads. Email autoresponders are special email addresses that returns a message or set of messages in
response to any email that is sent to the autoresponder’s address. When your business is slow or just beginning you may be hesitate to use this tool. But be assured as your business grows, you’ll find a use.

Who Supplies Autoresponders?

Where do you get autoresponders? Well, they are as close as your web host. Yes, most web hosts have autoresponders – it is only limited by the number of email addresses your
host provides you. For example, my webhost allows me 100 email addresses. Thus, I have the opportunity, if I so wish, to create 100 autoresponders.

However, there is one small drawback to webhost autoresponders –you are limited only to one message per autoresponder, without the possibility of a follow-up email to your prospects.

But there are other avenues in which you can consider. Such as:

1. You can incorporate a free autoresponder. Freeautobots.com offers a free service -- that is free of advertisements, and supplies you with the server to store your leads on.

2. You can purchase the software. This software can be placed on your computer, or again, you can purchase an online service, and all your information will be stored on the server where you purchased the service.

As you can see there are advantages and disadvantages of each. And only you will know which will best fit your needs, circumstances, expertise and budget.

How Do I An Autoresponder?

When I heard the word autoresponder, I didn’t have a clue of how to use them, or if it was relevant to my business. Pretty green, wasn’t I. Well, an autoresponder can be a great automation tool to any business.

Let me give you some examples of the versatility of this tool.

1.Used by people who are away. They use it to notify the sender that they are away on vacation, their desk, etc.

2.Used as a business tool --

a.Gives responders business information – pricing

lists,resumes

b.Collect names and email addresses

c.Use for training

d.Give away free reports

e.FAQ (if appropriate)

f.Auto-send your article submissions

As you can see there are many uses, all of which, keeps you in contact with your visitors and/or prospective leads, and the promotion of your products, services and business. And,
as to free or paid – that assessment will be directly determined by the growth of your business – and of course, your budget.

To conclude, the use of autoresponders is only limited by your imagination and your ethics. Yes, ethics. Do not go crazy with this tool – it is to be used to help your business – so be aware of spam – and it’s dos’ and don’ts – and this tool will work for you.

To your success.

Vickie J Scanlon has a BBA degree in Administrative Management and Marketing. Visit her site at: http://www.myaffiliateplace.biz for free tools, articles, ebooks, how to info, affiliate opportunities, services and products – to meet your budget and needs.

The Ten Commandments of Using Streaming Audio On Your Website

2009-04-21T12:19:00.002+08:00

When it comes to placing audio on your website there are Ten Commandments you absolutely must follow. Break one of these Commandments and you can watch your website drive visitors away faster than the speed of sound. Fortunately, if you follow the Ten Commandments you can get people to stay at your website longer, inquire about your product or service more often, and even buy more of what you are selling. Doesn’t that sound good?

So without further ado, here are the Ten Commandments you must follow when placing audio on your website.

Commandment #1

Don’t set your audio to play automatically when people arrive at your website. Your visitors all have different computers with different speakers, some have the volume turned all the way up, some are already listening to music, some don’t even have speakers to begin with. If you start playing your audio automatically you risk losing potential customers. It’s much easer to leave a website or hit the back button then it is to search around for how to turn off your audio. One exception to this Commandment is the use of pop-up windows. Pop-up windows can be closed by the visitor yet they still leave them at your website. The same goes for exit pop-ups, these windows can be very effective at grabbing the visitors attention, although some people may not like it, it has proven to be very successful in some uses.

Commandment #2

Sounding like a Pro! You must have professional sounding audio on your site. Anything else will make you look like an amateur. If you are showcasing your own poetry, or telling a personal story, or marketing yourself, then you should use your own voice. But, if you are trying to sell something and your voice doesn’t quite cut it, then have a professional voiceover person record your audio. It will make all the difference. You can find a list of affordable voiceover professionals at www.web-audio-reviews.com/voiceover.htm

Commandment #3

When using audio to sell or promote, keep it short! Long audio messages have their place online and rarely are they on the main page of a website. Keep your messages short, concise, to the point, and easy to follow. This can make all the difference in your audio message. Try to keep your promotional audio message around 30 to 90 seconds. Commercials are only 30 seconds and get their point across very well, follow their lead and do the same thing.

Commandment #4

Be prepared! If you or someone else is recording your audio then write out a script. Write out a complete word for word script, practice it out loud and change it as necessary. If you just “wing it” then it will sound like it. Have others listen and critique your script before you record it. Fine tune your script by removing unnecessary wording, trimming down the overall length, and wording it for maximum impact.

Commandment #5

When recording your own audio, smile! It will come across in your voice. But remember, if you don’t sound like a pro even when you smile, then get one!

Commandment #6

Don’t overload your site with audio. If you have too many audio buttons to choose from most people will choose none. Whereas when you only have a few audio buttons on your website it will encourage people to listen to your audio message. A single audio button done right is usually enough to get your point.

Commandment #7

Use music! Using music in addition to your voice will make your audio sound 100 times more professional and engaging. Add some easy listening intro music that fits the theme of your site, even sound effects if done right can make a tremendous difference in the way your message sounds. Remember to use music that is royalty free or music you have rights to use. Placing your favorite Beatles song on your website could get you in trouble. You can find several royalty free music resources here. www.web-audio-reviews.com/royalty-free-music.htm

Commandment #8

Have a point! This may sound obvious, but many people place audio on their website just because they can and for no other reason. No one cares about how fancy your audio is if it doesn’t have much of a point to it. Have a purpose and reason for using audio.

Commandment #9

Tell people to listen to your audio! Just having an audio button on your website isn’t good enough. You need to tell people what they will hear, what it’s about, how long it is, and where to click to listen. Don’t assume people will figure it out on their own, people need to be told what to do online, and the same goes for telling them to listen to your audio. Also, by telling visitors the length of your message they won’t be afraid to listen to it because they will know how long it is. Research has shown that sometimes people will not listen to an audio message in fear that it may be too long. If it is a long message then tell your visitors so they will be prepared for an hour long audio message.

Commandment #10

Test your audio! Don’t just place audio on your website thinking it will increase sales. Test it out, get opinions from your visitors, friends, and family, and then do split testing. Find out if the sales are greater with your audio. If you don’t split test your site with different audio messages and without audio then you will never know if it’s helping or hurting your website.

To place streaming audio on your site, as well as find a wealth of information, voiceover professionals, hosting, tools, and more, visit http://www.web-audio-reviews.com

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Dropship Your Way To Ebusiness Success

2009-04-21T12:19:00.001+08:00

Q: I would like to start my own eBay business, but I really don’t want to invest in a ton of inventory until I can get a better handle on what might or might not sell. I read another column about dropshipping, but I’m still a little fuzzy on how the whole process works. Do you think using dropshipping is a good way to start an eBay business and if so, how do I get started?
-- Candace M.

A: Dropshipping is a topic that I first addressed in my column way back in April, 2003, which is decades ago in Internet years. But with the continuing growth of eBay and it’s positioning of itself as a viable way for anyone looking to launch an ebusiness, the topic of dropshipping is now hotter than ever. It is also now more misunderstood than ever.

Dropshipping has been around since Sears first started selling goods from its mail order catalogs over a hundred years ago. However, the idea of dropshipping still confuses many people who don’t understand exactly how the process works.

By definition, dropshipping is a method of selling and distributing goods wherein the distributor or supplier of the product (the dropshipper) ships the product directly to the end user (your customer) on the retailer’s behalf (that’s you).

The process of dropshipping involves three parties who take a product from manufacturing to market. They are a manufacturer, a distributor, and a reseller.

Let’s use a blue widget as a sample product to demonstrate the process:
Blue Widget Manufacturing (manufacturer): This is the company that manufactures blue widgets. Blue Widget Manufacturing does not sell directly to the public or supply the retailers who ultimately sell the blue widgets to the end user. They prefer to use distributors to handle the task of taking their blue widgets to market. Blue Widgets sells blue widgets by the truckload to distributors who pay $5 per blue widget.

A1 Distributing (distributor/dropshipper): A1 Distributing is the company that purchases blue widgets in bulk from the manufacturer and supplies them to resellers at a cost of $7 each. The distributor does not ship blue widgets to the reseller, but ships orders directly to the reseller’s customers as the widgets are sold.

Big Bob’s eBay Widget Store: Big Bob sells blue widgets to the public from his eBay store. Bob orders the blue widgets from A1 Distributing as he sells them (usually one at a time) and has A1 ship the blue widget directly to his customer. Bob sells blue widgets to the public for $10 each, which means that for every blue widget sold he nets $3.

How The Process of Dropshipping Works

Here are the seven steps involved in starting a dropship ebusiness:

STEP 1: Choose A Product To Sell

The very first step in any sales process is deciding what product to sell. There are many factors that should be considered before deciding on a product to sell, but for now let’s say that you decide to sell CD players on eBay.

STEP 2: Locate A Supplier Who Will Dropship For You

Using a research tool like Google, Thomas Register, or an industry-specific resource like The Ultimate eBay Dropship Power Pak, you search for and find a company who will dropship CD players for you. The company offers you a 35% mark up over cost, which means that they will supply the CD players to you for $100 each and you should be able to retail them for $135. You make sure that the dropshipper has a good stock of CD players on hand so you don’t end up selling a product that must be back-ordered.

STEP 3: Set Up An Account With The Dropshipper

You contact the company that can supply the CD players and set up a reseller account with them. This can often be done online or by phone, but some companies will require that you complete and return a reseller application to open an account. Some companies may also require a tax ID and business license.

STEP 4: Advertise The Product For Sale On eBay

Now that you have your supplier lined up and know that the product is in stock, it’s time to make a sale. You advertise the product using an eBay auction. Since you know what you must pay the dropshipper for the product, you know what the minimum amount you will take for the product. In this case you start your auction at $100 since that is your cost. If you are confident that you can get more than $100 for the product you can start with a lower price, but remember that if the product goes for less than what it costs you to fill the order, you will lose money. Also remember that the dropshipper will charge shipping, so you should figure that into your sale.

STEP 5: The Product Sells

Great news: your CD player sells for $135 and your customer pays you with a PayPal instant payment. I highly recommend that if you are selling on eBay you use PayPal or some other online processor to accept instant payments. This allows the customer to pay you faster, which lets you place the order with the dropshipper faster, which gets the product to your customer faster.

STEP 6: Place The Order With The Dropshipper

After your customer pays you, you should contact the dropshipper immediately to order the product on your customer’s behalf. The dropshipper then ships the order to your customer under your company name and address.

STEP 7: Follow Up After The Sale

This is where many new ebusiness people drop the ball. Just because your customer has paid you and you’ve placed the order with the dropshipper does not mean that you are out of the loop. Quite the contrary, if there are problems with the order you are the one that will be held responsible in the eyes of your customer.

Be proactive in your customer relations. Follow up with your customer to let them know that the item has been shipped. Offer yourself as the personal contact for any issues that may arise. This is also a great way to sell that customer more products. Invite them to check out your eBay store or website if you have one.

Many people are afraid to use dropshipping as a method of sales due to the horror stories that fill the Internet about unscrupulous dropshippers who take the money and don’t fill the orders, merchandise that is eternally back ordered, unscrupulous middle men posing as dropshippers, etc. Make no mistake, the dropshipping industry – like most other industries – does have its share of shady characters who would rob you blind given the chance, but there are also hundreds of honest dropshippers who can help you build a profitable eBay dropship business.

Dropshipping is a complex topic that can’t be completely addressed here. For that reason I have written a detailed report on dropshipping that is available to Entrepreneur.com readers for free. Small Business Q&A is written by veteran entrepreneur and syndicated columnist, Tim Knox. Tim's latest books include "Small Business Success Secrets" and "The 30 Day Blueprint For Success!" Related Links: http://www.smallbusinessqa.com http://www.dropshipwholesale.net

Make Huge Profits Even If You Have No Money, No Products, and No List

2009-04-21T11:48:00.000+08:00

Would you like to jumpstart your online or offline business without spending a ton of money?

Without a doubt, joint venture marketing is the most powerful secret to making money online or offline.

In its simplest form, you partner with someone else: You either sell their product to your customer base or they sell your product to theirs.

The true power of this lies in the fact that it's much easier to sell a product to an existing customer, rather than going out and trying to get another customer.

Here's the twist:

What if you could use joint venture marketing without having a product, very little money, and little or no customer list?

Let's see what one of the foremost authorities on joint ventures has to say about this unique use of the joint venture idea ...

Marc Goldman is a world-class authority on joint venture marketing, building a website that ranks in the top 6,000 most-visited websites. That's quite an accomplishment considering the millions of websites in existence.

What's more important though is that he's been using joint venture marketing since his first day in business in 1994.

In a recent interview, he offered this simple formula to quickly profit from joint ventures.

(Note: To access Marc Goldman's complete audio interview for fre^e, see end of article)

You simply perform the role of a Joint Venture broker--you bring together partners who can add value to what the other party offers.

For a great online example of this technique, suppose you find a great product on the Internet that you love ...

You could hook up the owner with other Internet marketers who have an existing customer base, and get a commission from the sales.

If the product has a two-tier affiliate program, you simply sign up as an affiliate. You automatically get commissions from the sales of the marketers you convinced to promote the product (who sign up under you).

If you're hooking the product owner up with marketers who have a huge customer base, try to negotiate a higher commission than the normal second level commission.

If the product owner currently does not have an affiliate program, simply approach the owner--make a proposal to get a specific commission on any sales from the partners you bring to him.

Having purchased Marc's Joint Venture Brokering Mastery Seminar, I can testify to the effectiveness of his techniques.

The broker idea works equally well offline ...

Just one case in point:

I joined up an owner of three dilapidated rental houses who just wanted to get rid of them with someone who wanted to buy some land to build a gun shop. Each party got what they wanted and, at closing, I received a check for $8,835.92 ... definitely a nice commission for only several hours' work and no money down.

With that in mind, go out today, have your best day ever, and keep your eyes out for people who you can help by bringing them together with someone else who can help them.

Of course, make sure you remember to get your slice of the profits ...

Rick Miller is a Certified Master of Web Copywriting and co-founder of List Crusade. For fre^e access to the entire interview with Marc Goldman, along with 51 other audio lessons from top Internet Marketing and Self Help Gurus--go to: http://www.scientificinternetmarketing.com/goldman

© 2004 Rick Miller. All rights reserved. Feel fre^e to reprint or forward this in its entirety to anyone you wish.

Choose A Host That Matches Your Home Business Needs

2009-04-21T11:42:00.000+08:00

With plethora of hosting companies offering services, choosing a good web host seems an intimidating task. The technical jargon is hard to decipher and that makes it difficult further. It is better to prepare beforehand and then search for offers rather than acting otherwise.

What is web hosting? If one compares the web to land hosing is the place where your office or website will be placed. Server is the computer which stores your website files and allows them to be viewed on clicking the link to your site.

With free hosting out of question for business and dedicated hosting being too expensive, shared hosting is the only and good option for home business. As the name suggests, in shared hosting your site is stored with many others unlike dedicated hosting which stores only your site.

Now let us discuss other features:

•Disc or Server space:

This is the space on hard disk of your server that will be allotted to your site. Without graphics a typical web page occupies 40 – 50 Kb. Now 1000 kb = 1 MB. Allowing space for graphics too and need for any future expansion anything between 50 -100 MB should be good enough if you are not running a flashy website. Many companies offer space up to 1 GB (1000 MB) but if you do not require, do not fall for the offer.

•Bandwidth:

A very important aspect and often overlooked. This is the amount of actual data that can be transferred from the web server that holds your website. It is directly linked to the number of visitors to your site. If you have 10000 visitors per month with few downloads you will require anything between 5 -6 GB per month. More downloads means higher requirement. As your business grows you will need more. For starting 10 GB should be good enough. That leaves you with extra margin.

•E- Mail aliases:

This lets you formulate an e-mail address on your site address e.g. anything@ your sitename.com where anything can be support, live support, help, info, subscribe etc. Anything! This makes your business look professional. Look for you needs but anything around 10 is good enough. Many companies offer unlimited aliases too.

•Watch for these too:

If you plan to accept payment on your side an access to SSL (Secure Socket Layer) encryption is must. If you want your site to be interactive you would need to install cgi(Common Gateway Interface). So better to look for a host who supplies you your own cgi bin.

If you wish to create your site in Microsoft FrontPage then check whether your host provides FrontPage extension. If you plan to run a site with database then MySQL should be a desired feature.

Your host should also provide you free access to your server. You should have free access to log files and statistics of the traffic your site receives. If your host offers referral programme it is better.

•Customer Support:

This matters a great deal to your business. You will need this help whenever you run in trouble. If your host is not supportive or is not prompt enough then it could mean loss in your business. See that you are provided a good and meaningful support. Send them a question or two. Study the response. Find out if they are available on phone in case you are in emergent situation.

Make sure that this service is free and they will not charge anything in name of customer support.

Finally, you will have to find what matches your business needs. Search before you settle for a deal. Narrow down your choice to a few prospective hosts. Look for their reputation. Ask them examples of sites hosted.

Check with their existing clients and find how satisfied they are. Most good business hosts are available between $ 15- 50 with few differences that could matter to the individual.

You can start small and upgrade later provided your host gives you this option. Select the one who allows you to expand if the need arises.

Just two words before you go. “Select carefully”

Copyright © 2005 Arun Pal Singh

Arun Pal Singh runs a successful business from home at http://www.homeforprofits.com He is also publisher and editor of Home for profits’ income course, a free newsletter with hundreds of tips for home business which can be subscribed by mailing to homeforprofits@getresponse.com

New Year's Resolutions: Is Improving Your Website One of Them?

2009-04-21T11:41:00.000+08:00

With the New Year upon us yet again, it's time to prepare for the successes of 2005. Did you watch with envy last year as your competitors dominated your industry? Do you think your site is doing just fine because no one has ever called to complain? Well here's some food for thought: 96% of all prospects will click over to your competitor if they encounter a problem on your website.

While you're resolving to get fit, quit smoking and pay off some debts, we're offering up some New Year's resolutions for your business. Learn how to ethically kick your online competitors to the curb!

Resolve to...

...Make Content & Relevancy a Top Priority

It is, after all, the information highway. People search the Web for information-so give the people what they want. If you want to generate qualified leads and produce more sales, then continually updating your website with new and useful content must be at the top of your priority list.

Search engines seek out relevant, up-to-date information when they rank sites for specific keywords and phrases. If you don't have timely informative content, you won't get a good ranking; and without a good ranking, prospects can't find you. But that's just the beginning of your online demise. Even if you manage to achieve a good ranking on the search engine results pages (SERPs), your content must intrigue visitors to return to your site regularly.

Studies reveal that online consumers take several passes at a website before making a purchase.

Website maintenance is time-consuming and it's easy to put unpaid man-hours on the back burner. But why would potential customers revisit your site if the last archived newsletter were dated two years ago? Or if your "Coming Events" page lists tradeshows held six months ago? They won't-they'll likely skip over to the competition in search of up-to-date information.

... Increase Your Site's Visibility & Improve its Performance

Once your website is updated (for the time being) with informative content, the next step is to implement some SEO solutions to gain higher search rankings. The purpose of these SEO techniques is twofold:

1. Create Awareness: Carefully selected keywords and phrases, worked seamlessly throughout your copy and in meta tags, will help your site gain higher placements in SERPs.

2. Increase Sales: Once prospects are on your site, savvy marketing writers will have used the power of persuasion in the copy to turn first-time visitors into loyal customers.

...Increase Your Return On Investment (ROI)

We cannot stress this enough ... in order for your website to be extremely effective, achieving an astounding ROI, you must have a detailed plan:

* Analyze your SWOT

Perform an in-depth analysis to compare the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) of your competitor's online presence to your own. A qualified SEO firm can enhance your site's usability and navigation, implement ethical optimization techniques, and provide eye-catching design.

* Evaluate your website development goals

It's never too late to write or re-evaluate your website's mission statement-not necessarily for publication, but rather to create your own benchmarks. This will help you set goals and concentrate your efforts on critical issues to achieve and exceed those goals.

* Know your audience

An old adage says: "you can't be everything to everyone." Fortunately, your website can be various things to various audiences. Success comes from having a clear understanding of your target market(s). By creating diverse navigation paths and reader-specific content-for buyers, vendors, job seekers or investors-your conversion rates will increase dramatically.

* Enhance website usability

Effective website navigation must flow effortlessly. If visitors cannot quickly and easily pinpoint the information they seek, they're very likely to leave your site and click to the competition.

An IBM study reveals that every dollar invested to increase usability earns $10-$100 in benefits, winning customer satisfaction and loyalty.

* Measure success and failure

Read your log files and tracking tools! Website traffic analysis is essential to accurately measure your site's performance. In-depth analysis will show you how to increase traffic, trace your search engine referrals, monitor link campaigns, and make necessary changes to achieve your desired results.

...Apply the Power of SEO

Your website has the power to be a highly effective marketing tool-but just because you built it doesn't mean they'll come. If you optimize it, however, they're much more likely to come ... and stay a while.

Anyone can learn search engine optimization and website usability. But if lack of time and interest is holding you back, enlist the help of website optimizers and SEO copywriters to complement your design team and ultimately increase revenue.

A word to the wise: ensure that the SEO firm you choose works strictly within the confines of best practices-safe and ethical search engine optimization strategies. Unethical SEO tactics may seriously harm your rankings, and even get your site banned from search engines altogether.

On behalf of Word Associates and U-C WEBS, we wish you a happy, healthy & profitable 2005!

~~
Nardo Kuitert is a Website Optimizer with U-C WEBS (http://www.u-cwebs.com/). A website is like a magnet; does your website pull visitors in, or push them away? A heuristic usability evaluation will provide you with a first step towards greater visitor conversions.

~~
Aimee Cremasco, Founder and Sr. Copywriter of Word Associates (http://www.wordassociates.ca/), produces compelling content to help websites achieve top search engine rankings & ultimately increase conversion rates. Wouldn't your site benefit from a content evaluation?

Are Web Templates Worth It?

2009-04-21T11:40:00.000+08:00

First off, I am a designer. Now you're thinking, here's this guy trying to convince me to hire a designer costing a few hundred to a few thousand dollars instead of buying a pre-made web template for about $60. Well, these days most companies don't have the money to invest in a costly web site and there are thousands of hungry web designers out there, plus now there are web template resources. These resources can equal great value and effectiveness for the customer as well as increased business for the web designer.

For the customer it is important to be prepared. They need to know what their website should look like, how it will perform, the ability to update and add to it easily, so as not to be held hostage by a design firm's technical code talk.

Now for the reality of web templates. There are hundreds of web templates and many web sites offering the same hundreds of templates. There are templates for a wide range of business types: from agriculture to wedding sites. Depending on the business category you may find 20 to 400 hundred different template packages to choose from. Most look quite good, but remember you may not be the only company that buys the template. There could be sites that look the same as yours unless you buy an exclusive on the design. The price for an exclusive design ranges from $800 to $3000, meaning you must be the first customer to purchase the template to be used only by you. On the other hand, prior to your purchase of a particular template, several customers may have bought that same template and can use it as well, and as a result will have made this template non-exclusive.

Ok, here is where I come in, as well as my fellow designers. The times for web site design are changing as competition grows daily, not just from low-cost template designs but from low-cost designers (will talk about that in more detail in another article). I am not going to list any particular template design company as there are only a few choice ones. Templates are an excellent resource to offer your customers as you are showing your willingness to work with them for reasonable costs. You can fine tune the design, whether it be graphic changes as well as text. As a rule, many companies do not have the software to perform modifications to the web site template or they have the software but not the time or expertise. The template is a good starting point and can save costs, but modifications are usually needed as one size does not fit all. This way the customer gets good value and you get new business.

Dennis Dadey (c) 2004

- About the Author -

Since 1997, Dennis Dadey, Chief Designer at IR Design, has been helping people with e-commerce applications. Find out more about IR Design at http://www.irdesign.com.

Video Production Explained

2009-04-21T11:39:00.000+08:00

Video is a powerful marketing medium with the ability to communicate concise, precise and controlled information with a positive effect. A well-constructed video fires the imagination, increases the energy level and ensure that all feel part of your event. It will engage the emotions, focus the attention and enable each individual to visualise his/her role as part of the team.

Videos strength lies in its simple ability to transport people to locations, illustrate concepts and convey far more than mere words, spoken or printed, ever can. Video is an effective and memorable way of communicating. Core messages and themes are reinforced using other forms of communication. Video footage has a long shelf life when used imaginatively in multimedia CD-ROMs, Websites, DVD and CD-Brochure formats.

Video has been revolutionised by the onset of digital shooting and editing. Shooting in broadcast quality used to involve cumbersome and expensive camera equipment, combined with analogue editing which required the copying of sections and consequent loss of quality with each successive generation. The process was time consuming, complicated and linear. Modern digital cameras are capable of shooting in broadcast quality. Editing is now carried out in a non-linear way on desktop computers; changes may be made at will, stored and reviewed at any time and in any order. The advantages are similar to those gained by using a computer word processor over that of a mechanical typewriter and carbon copy paper for duplicates. Not only is digital editing highly flexible, but the medium enables an ever-expanding range of graphical effects to be applied – without loss of quality or corruption of the original footage. In consequence, the costs associated with making and producing a video have dropped dramatically. What was once the preserve of the large, rich and expansive corporation is now available and affordable to a much wider market – with the consequent advantages that this provides to internal company communications and team building along with external advantages in the selling of products or services to your market place.
The stages required to produce a video vary depending on the style and content; generally:

* PRE-PRODUCTION involves briefing, research, location finding, administration, booking of facilities and writing a treatment outline (video content, description and approach to be adopted). After approval a shooting script including both narration and camera shots will be written.
* SHOOTING follows the approved script and involves a camera crew and a director going to location/s to interview participants and shoot footage to illustrate, illuminate and reinforce the script. If required studio shoots are undertaken where controlled lighting and effects are employed - a product demonstration, for example is typically shot in this way.
* POST-PRODUCTION includes recording of guide narration (using an edited script, which may change from the shooting script because of interviewee’s comments etc.). Footage is edited to the guide narration, graphic and video effects generated and music and titles added. The resulting edit master is then client approved and amended as necessary. A final “voice over” is then effected incorporating final changes. The final master tape is complete and ready for duplication.
* DUPLICATION is the transfer of masters onto the final format – which can be all or any of VHS, Betacam, Laserdisk, Digibeta, DVD, Mpeg, Avi and more. The final product is then packaged and presented in an appropriate way with print material for labels, inserts and sleeves.

James Hunter works for Status AV, one of the foremost video production companies in the UK. http://www.statusav.com/

Making Money On the Internet With Video Marketing

2009-04-21T11:38:00.002+08:00

It may seem daunting to most people, but like it or not, video is becoming a huge part of the internet. Nowadays, if you're not making money on the internet, it may be because you're not using videos as one of your main marketing tools.

Technology is scary to a lot of people, not to mention, exposing oneself online in a video for the whole world to see. That's why so many people shy away from learning what it takes to market a business using video – either they figure it's too technical for them, or they want to maintain their privacy.

That's precisely why you should think about making money from the internet with video. It's the things that people don't want to do that you should be jumping on as a new opportunity for you. In the internet business world, it's where you find holes, and gaps, and things that people don't want to do that you can start making real money online.

Video is becoming more and more like the written word, and will soon have the same tagging capacity as you find in articles and blogs that are carefully sprinkled with effective keywords.

In that sense, if you are looking to make money on the internet, you can expect the search engines to send heaps of traffic your way if you have keyword packed videos.

Videos are very effective in teaching people how to do things, and can probably establish more trust from someone thinking about buying one of your products or services if they can see and hear you.

Furthermore, just like sharing information via social networking sites from blogs and articles, and other information sites on the net, videos also have their social networking services that allow you to share your videos with others in your niche.

If you think you're in the dark about technology and will never have a clue how to use it, or how to make money on the internet with video, then have no fear! Any good video creation or syndication service will offer easy-to-follow training for setting up your first, and subsequent videos.

Much like article writing, you're not done with your videos after you've created them. You have to submit them to video syndication sites to spread them around the net.

If you've been involved in manually submitting your articles to the various article directories, you will realize how time-consuming and tedious this can be, and how much worse you can expect it to be for submitting a video file!

Luckily, just like article submission services, there are video submission services that can save you loads of time on your video uploads!

If you really don't want to venture into the land of video marketing, you can always opt for an equally popular podcast, or audio cast, so that the whole world only hears you, but doesn't have to see you. You can start making money on the internet just as fast with an effective podcast that you submit the same way as videos.

Just think about the results you could achieve by combining article writing with video marketing, and podcasting! Most people are familiar with YouTube, so if you visit their website, you will be able to setup an account, create your video, and start making money on the internet faster than you ever imagined!

Don't be fooled by the all the technological jargon out there. If you know how to work a digital camera, have a movie feature on your camera, or have ever used a camcorder, then relax! You are most of the way there!

Making money on the internet can happen for you, and tackling your fears about technology and starting a video or podcast marketing campaign can make your dreams come true, especially now when it's still relatively new!

Liane Bate owns a Plug-in Profit Site web business. Scared to show your pretty face in video? Get over it and start Making Money On the Internet! See also HonestMoneyMaking.com's Home Business Blog Tags: making money on the internet

Reciprocal Linking

2009-04-21T11:38:00.001+08:00

Do not pay anyone or any service to submit your website to major search engines.

They will just enter your site using software designed to do this, which is something you can do for yourself. This type of software is rather inexpensive; in fact many hosting services include this service.

Better yet, exchange links with other websites. Search engines 'rank' your site according to the number of hits it gets. You can improve your ranking by having your website URL posted on others.

When another website that has your URL on it is 'spidered' by a search engine, it will pick-up your site as well. If this other site has a high ranking, so will yours.

There are many methods to do this. One is reciprocal linking;

Go to a search engine and find websites that are similar to yours. Locate the email for the site's webmaster and send them an email, asking them if they would be willing to exchange links.

Set-up a separate page on your website to post the links of those who have given you their permission to do so. Make a link from your front page to this page so visitors have the option of viewing these other links. You can do this on your front page, of course, but there might not be room and it might be a bit distracting.

You may also want to set-up a page with a link that will allow visitors to submit links to your site.

You may wish to check these other sites, from time to time, to be sure the link exchange is truly reciprocal.

Before you do any of this, be sure your website is 'optimized' for search engines.

Again, do not pay anyone to do this for you. There are plenty of places where you can get this information for free!

Brian Beshore
http://www.howtobecomeamillionaire.us

Spamicide - Man Spammed to Death While Checking His E-mail

2009-04-21T11:37:00.000+08:00

Death by spam is now possible with a new device by Microsoft. The device when implanted in the user’s skull allows downloading of email directly into the brain. Niles Bookbinder, 37, an assistant working for Jon Hanson, author of Good Debt, Bad Debt was accidentally spammed to death Tuesday morning using a beta version of a new email device called, “MS Mind.” A Microsoft spokesperson said, “We don’t have all of the bugs worked out yet, but this is the first death we know of.” Mr. Bookbinder had unwittingly “unchecked” the spam filter in the MS Mind control panel. Without the spam filter, apparently Niles unleashed the entire world of spam into his "medulla interface" and was literally spammed to death. It’s likely the last words Mr. Bookbinder heard were, “You’ve got mail!”

Wireless Medulla Interface providers are popping up everywhere. Dr. Jack Kevorkian sees the new Wireless "G" Medulla cards as a real advance for him. With these systems, euthanasia supporters predict quick, painless death by simply bypassing the filters and downloading thousands of spam emails quickly. Kevorkian said, “I have been looking forward to killing patients by email.” Kevorkian expects his prices to be competitive with AOL. While it is not a victimless crime, it would be a crime without a knowable perpetrator. You would have no way of knowing whether your "loved one” was finished off by the breast enlargement, Viagra softabs starting at $2.99, or $ave $$$ now refinance emails.

A PETA spokesperson, Ima Chihuahua, said she found the idea disturbing because it could lead to so-called Spam Collars that would be used to kill pets as they aged, or "convenience" killings, such as when a young couple could not find a kennel on their way to Vegas or they simply change their minds about having a pet. PETA may be right. It has long been rumored that KFC has been testing the effectiveness of spamming chickens to death versus simply whacking off their heads. In earlier tests, chickens were forced to watch Gili and Ishtar until they simply cut off their own heads, but this experiment was discontinued because of the cruelty to experimenters.

Spamicide, accidental or not, will undoubtedly set off a bitter debate in America as Anti-Spammers and Right-to-Spam groups rally to raise money and jockey for political clout. George W. Bush seemed bewildered at this morning’s briefing. He looked to his press secretary and said, "Are we Right-to-Spam or Anti-Spammers?" Elsewhere, Jesse Jackson, finding it difficult to be Right-to-Spam said, "It should be the choice of the spammee. Spamicide should be legal, available, and rare." NEXT WEEK: Partial Spam Deletion. Should this barbaric practice be outlawed? Are thousands of viable spams being killed in spam filters, just before being downloaded? The debate continues...

Jon Hanson, is the author of "Good Debt, Bad Debt: Knowing the Difference Can Save Your Financial Life"

His web site is http://www.gooddebt.com

jon [at] gooddebt.com

For a bit of musical comic relief go to: http://myspace.com/hansondemo

Should You Join Myspace?

2009-04-21T11:36:00.002+08:00

Do you use the internet on a regular basis? If you do, there is a good chance that you have heard of websites such as FriendFinder, MySpace, Orkut, Classmates, or Yahoo! 360.
What do all of these websites have in common? They are all social networking websites. Social networking websites, over the past few years, have rapidly increased in popularity but until you have used one it is likely that you are left wondering why.
If you have used a social networking website before, probably you are already fully aware of their popularity and the reasons why they have become so for popular. There is just something about these sites that draws in millions of internet users. With a wide choice of different social networking websites available there is also a wide variety of different reasons for their popularity. One those reasons being the ease with which people can make themselves known on the internet.

Social networking websites are, for the most part, easy to use. Most are easy to navigate. In fact, many require little knowledge of the internet. In addition to being easy to navigate, social networking websites also make it easier to meet new people online. There are millions of internet users who would love to be able to make new friends online; however, that can sometimes be difficult do. Without social networking websites, you would have to connect with internet users, often in chat rooms, and learn about their interests before deciding if you would like to consider them your “buddy.” Social networking sites allow you to learn information about another internet user before ever having to make contact with them, users choose who they associate with, not strangers interrupting one's life.

Another one of the many reasons why social networking sites are popular is because many are free to use. In fact, the majority of social networking sites, such as MySpace and Yahoo! 360, are free to use. Despite being free to use, many websites require that you register with them. This registration will not only allow you to create your own profile or online webpage, but it will also allow you to contact other networking members and can provide a measure of security.
Although most social networking websites are free to use, there are some that are not. Classmates is one of those websites. Many of these subscription sites give you a free trial period or a free membership. That membership can be used to help you determine whether or not the website is worth paying for. What is nice about paid online social networking websites is that many can be considered exclusive. Since most internet users would not want to pay for something that they can get for free, most paid social networking sites are limited on the number of members they have. This may work out to your advantage because it tends to eliminate those who create fake and multiple accounts or aim to cause problems online.

Social networking websites are also popular because they come in a wide variety of different formats. Websites like Yahoo! 360 and MySpace focus on a wide variety of different topics. This means that just about anyone can join in. However, there are other social networking sites out there that are designed for smaller, special interest groups. The focus may be on a particular hobby, religion or political following. Most specialty social networking sites restrict the people that can join their network; thus, making your experience more enjoyable.
Finally, social networking websites focus on meeting new people, especially online, but over recent months, many have started including additional features only available to their online members. Many social networking members can now have their own free webpage, get free access to music videos, free blogs, and so on. Although social networking websites are popular enough to bring in members on their own, these additional features are, in a way, providing internet users with an incentive to join.

Mentioned above were a few of the most popular social networks that could be found online. Those networks included MySpace, Yahoo! 360, and Classmates. If you are looking for additional social networking websites, you should easily be able to find some by performing a standard internet search.

You can get free information about Social Networking from: http://socialnetworks.knowhow-now.com for articles, resources and information about MySpace, Orkut, FriendFinder and others.

The Streets of Sites Like MySpace

2009-04-21T11:36:00.001+08:00

Since everyone in the world is spending more and more time on the net social networks are what is needed, they are like neighborhoods on the net.

We all came from the Mayberry's of this world, little local communities but that has changed as more people are spending their free time surfing the web. Companies, clubs, and religious organizations can now have a social networking site of their own where members can interact with each other.

Hopefully these new sites will have better management than sites like MySpace. MySpace is becoming a place where people try the hand at marketing, no longer are they doing bulk email but instead you will find profiles of a lot of scum on sites like MySpace, I'm surprised there are not drug pushers on the sites yet. Spend some time looking at the profiles and you will find escorts, models, strippers, hookers, pimps, and blatant spammers abound on the MySpace community sites.

With the development of these social networking sites there is even a greater need for human editors to oversee the content that is being uploaded every second of the day. The only marketing we should see is in the forum where people post a great comment and then have links in their signature so we can find out more of who they are.

It is great that a community user can upload pictures and music of who they are and what appeals to them but I guarantee that I could see a much better private dance video on MySpace than I would ever get at a top level strip club.

I wonder if any politicians are posting on the MySpace site? I am not advocating a Net Nazi group that closely monitors what is posted but some intervention needs to be applied. Maybe a voting system like on of those social bookmarking services where visitors can rate the profiles they find.

Sites like MySpace can be a perfect place for advertisers to target their work. Focus groups can be expensive but on a site like one of these it would be very inexpensive to set up a poll or a topic of the moment where people can vote on.

Jeffrey has over 2 decades experience in the business world. When he writes he blends his unique wit and humour into every article which if you read his blog you can see all of his many works. http://www.nosugarcoating.info/

Secrets of Tagging and Social Bookmarking in 2007

2009-04-21T11:35:00.000+08:00

Uses of Tagging and Social Bookmarking in 2007

Social bookmarking has become an immense force for both in internet marketing as well as www world. There are a few bookmarking sites out there but for the purposes of using them for internet marketing we are going to focus on a few of the more popular such as Del.icio.us, Furl, Digg, Spurl, blinklist, reddit, yahoo, google, newsvine, socializer, Magnolia, Stumble upon and the one which everyone love, Technorati.

Let me give you a short and simple definition of what is social bookmarking? Simply, it is a way for people to bookmark their favorite places (i.e. their favorite websites) online instead of on their own personal computer. The main difference in this method is that instead of having your favorites sites saved in folders on your own PC you have saved them online under certain 'tags' or 'tagging' or simply 'keywords'. In addition you can also set multiple tags for an item. For example if it were a jokes site you may have 'funny jokes, blonde jokes, free jokes, short jokes, political jokes, cartoon jokes etc.'

Now you have a basic understanding of social bookmarking, so moves onto tagging. Tagging is an act of bookmarking a site or a web-page with one of the services and a tag is nothing but a keyword. Here are some samples that you are into 'horticulture' and you find a really great site on 'horticulture', you could 'tag' that site with the tag of 'horticulture' as well as others and then share the page from your chosen bookmarking service with others. This is the way that tagging is used by the general public to share sites with each other.

When it comes to the use of social bookmarking and tagging for web promotion or internet marketing you can place tags on your on site which are then crawled and placed in the social bookmarking directories and search engines and you can also tag on your own 'authority site network' that you have created or associated on one or more of the services which is a method strongly espoused by Sean Wu of Tag and Ping.

To utilize the tagging on your own site or blog you will need to use a blogging platform such as Movable Type, Wordpress, or Blogger. I can not recommend using Blogger for business purpose due to their censorship. Blog have a built in functionality which allows you to on the alert the major blog directories of new posts when you create new one. And the whole process is referred as 'pinging'. You can place your tags like:

[a href='your url' rel='tag']Internet Marketing[/a] (instead of <> & "",I used here []& '') Or like this: [a href='your url' rel='tag']website promotion[/a] which will link back to page for website promotion.

Now, once you have done this and you publish the post it will notify or 'ping' the social bookmark services and article directories that you have set up in your admin area. The benefit of doing this is that it gets you high PR backlinks from right sites which will greatly help in the PR of your own site.

Remember before tagging the popular keywords because that you will have more competition from other bloggers. My suggestion is to mix up high competitive

key-phrases along with the longer phrases so that your blog will stay more visible.

And place this code in your head tag especially for yahoo so that when crawlers visit your site, they find rss feed properly. Place this HTML tag between your part of your web page

In conclusion, there are few tips important to understand:

1. It is important to remember that mix up high competitive key-phrases along with the longer phrases so that your blog will stay more visible.

2. It is suggested to use this technique completely SEO ethical way and use your tag properly.

Babul Paul

http://www.netprophetsglobal.com

The Link Swapping Trap

2009-04-21T11:34:00.000+08:00

If you want to make money on the web, you must get traffic to your website. If you want to get traffic to your website, you must have a high rank in google's search results. Google ranks websites based upon the number of links that point to the site.

Many novice webmasters believe they can trick Google into giving their website a high rank by swapping links with other webmasters. One reason they believe this, is because "wanna-be" web marketing "experts" keep spouting that trash.

It's only partially true that Google ranks websites based upon the number of links that point to the site. Google uses a highly sophisticated page ranking formula that keeps changing and evolving all the time. Google caught onto the link swapping trick years ago.

Novice webmasters put all their link swaps on one gigantically long page referred to as a "link farm". When Google's robot finds a link farm, their ranking formula penalizes the websites listed in the link farm. If Google finds the same site listed in many link farms, they remove that site from their search engine.

Just about every week I get an email message saying "I placed a link to your website on my website. Please put a link to my website on your website. Here's where you can find your link on my website" ... followed by a link to a single webpage containing hundreds of links ... a link farm.

I usually reply to such a message with a request to remove the link to my website from their webpage. The novice webmaster often responds with a message of pure astonishment. Link swap requests have become so common lately that I have been responding by clicking on the "Delete" button.

Every webmaster that wants to swap links has a website with zero traffic. Even if Google didn't penalize websites for being listed in a link farm, why would I want to send traffic away from my website to a website that can't return any traffic?

Not only are these novice webmasters not experienced in the way of the web, they seem inexperienced in the way of the world. The first rule of the universe is "you never get a free lunch". If you want your website to rank high in Google, you have to pay them. If you can't afford to pay them, you have to do the work.

It's hard work to get traffic to your website. There is only one method I know that works: put valuable, original content on your website. Other websites, blogs, and forums will post links to the valuable content on your website, not with a link swap, but as a resource to their audience.

When someone places a legitimate link to valuable content on their webpage, the webpage has low link density. Google's page ranking formula gives the page a high score. If a link to your webpage is found on a high scoring webpage, that raises the rank of your webpage.

On the other hand, a page with a high link density, with hundreds of links and little other content, gets a negative score from Google. If a link to your webpage is found on a webpage with a negative score, that lowers the rank of your webpage.

Don't try to scam Google by swapping links, and don't cooperate with foolish webmasters who think there is a "free lunch". If you want to get a higher ranking in Google, resulting in more traffic to your website, there is only one way - good old fashion hard work.

Permission is granted for the below article to forward, reprint, distribute, use for ezine, newsletter, website, offer as free bonus or part of a product for sale as long as no changes are made and the byline, copyright, and the resource box below is included.

Copyright(C)2004 Bucaro TecHelp.

To learn how to maintain your computer and use it more effectively to design a Website and make money on the Web visit techelp.com To subscribe to Bucaro TecHelp Newsletter visit http://bucarotechelp.com/search/subscribe.asp

Creating Search Engine Friendly Web Sites

2009-04-21T11:33:00.000+08:00

With tons of competition and copycats online, you need a trustworthy search engine expert to help you tackle the competition and outdo your competitors in internet sales. There are many ways to go about killing the competition online and as long as it is honest work by your search engine guy, your web site will reap profits from it.

Millions of people use search engines to find products and services online and many global companies grew from merely having a web site and search engine expert. To be precise, there are about 20 web pages added to the web every second. 85% of internet users use search engines to search for products and services online. With so many websites, how are your potential customers able to find your products and services?

-- Benefits of search engine optimisation --

1) Generate online sales and revenue

2) Advertise products and services globally

3) Greater market capitalisation of products

4) Create and establish brand name

5) Tap potential internet markets

Natasha works in Definite Web Designs Australia, providing SEO consultancy to Australian and US businesses.

(http://www.definiteweb.com)

Web and Computer Security

2009-04-21T11:31:00.000+08:00

Well, if that would have been said to me by my father when I was 2 years of age, I would have understood. But when today, my own computer tells me that when I am 34, I wonder why I spent $1500 on my computer hardware and software just to enjoy the (un-realized) benefits of this great and revolutionary information technology?

Today’s cyberspace is hazardous. None of today’s PC users can claim that they never had a computer virus issue or a PC security breach. Now, if you count today’s number of PC users worldwide, they will soon be 1 billion by 2010 according to analysts. When I see all the computer viruses, infections, trojans, and what not around me, and compare it with the 1 billion innocent computer users around the world, I simply feel sorry not only for those billion users but for myself too. But again, as a common user myself, I must admit it was not all doomsday for the whole industry since 1987 when I started to use computers. So, as a responsible member of this great IT revolution, I must share some of the best tips and tricks that I learned to use to make the minimum room for productivity on my computer.

Please note this is a tutorial for someone who has basic know-how of computer usage. For those who are newbies, I would recommend asking a local expert’s help before trying anything out mentioned in this tutorial. In that case, make room for payment from deep pocket. For your own convenience, print this tutorial for step-by-step instructions.

Whenever my computer is infected, I act on any of the following options;

1. FORMAT HARD DISK: I back up all of my data on a CD-Writer if it is still accessible. And then format the whole hard disk drive and re-install each and every application.

2. USE SOFTWARE: I exhaust all anti-virus and other software options. This is usually my first priority as compared to formatting the whole computer hard disk drives.

Now, let me explain both options in detail;

PRE-REQUISITES: Make sure you have a CD-Drive (Writer), empty writable CDs, Windows OS CD (bootable) that contains files such as Format.exe, Scandisk.exe, FDisk.exe, and Attrib.exe files. Microsoft Office CD, Anti-Virus CD, GoldenHawk CD Writing Software in DOS (copy2cd.exe and cdtools.exe), Serial Numbers of your License, Driver CDs of Motherboard, VGA, Network, Sound and Modem devices. Optionally, download (using www.download.com or www.tucows.com) these software from any Internet Café when your own computer is inaccessible and save it on a CD so that you can use it anytime for security purposes;

Golden Hawk DOS based CD Writing Software

HTech Fireman Windows based CD Writing Software

Driver Genius Pro

Partition Magic

AVG AntiVirus

SpywareBlaster & SpywareGuard

Spybot Search & Destroy

Ad-Aware

IE-SpyAd

ZoneAlarm

HiJackThis & CWShredder

I have intentionally avoided mention of many commercially good and more friendly software’s mention here as I wanted everything to do FREE without any additional costs apart from the usual OS licenses. For your own convenience, you can research Google or Yahoo search engines find further information about such commercial software and their availability / pricing.

1. FORMAT HARD DISK

I know it is painful and surgical type of solution, but sometimes, it is the ONLY solution left after exhausting all of our efforts to revive our computer machine after a virus attack. Follow this procedure;

Booting Up: Try booting your computer normally first and see if you can login easily. If you can’t or your computer hangs up, try holding F8 key when starting Windows and you will get the Safe Mode. Even if you don’t get the Safe Mode, don’t worry.

Power up your computer and press DEL key or F2 key to login your CMOS. In CMOS, go to Boot Preferences and make CD Drive as boot drive as your first boot drive and change the hard disk drive as the second boot drive. If you don’t see your CD Drive in the boot-up options, your CD Drive is not properly installed. Check the connectors or ask your CD Drive provider for instructions to install the CD Drive. Now, when your CD Drive is ready, insert your Windows OS CD in the CD Drive and restart your computer machine. When prompted, select the option “Boot from CD with CD Option”. When you get the prompt, Notice the CD Drive letter that was allocated to your CD Drive when it installed the CD Driver. It is usually D: drive or the last drive letter depending on the number of your partitions. Note it down as it is the actual drive letter where you will have to type a DOS command like d:

You should now be able to run all software utilities such as Format, Scandisk, FDisk or Windows Installation Setup.exe files. Right now, simply make sure they exist by typing a DOS command dir at the CD drive letter. If you don’t find it with this simple directory command, use dir/s filename to search the file. For example, to search fdisk.exe file, type dir/s fdisk.exe.

BACKING UP YOUR DATA: Before formatting your hard disk drive, please make sure you have proper back up of your critical data files such as Microsoft Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc files on a CD or any other media for backup that you have access to. In this tutorial, we assume you have a CD-Writer installed for taking backups on Writeable CDs. Their capacity is usually 700MB or less. Here, you should seriously consider using Zipping software like WinZip or WinRAR.

VIA WINDOWS: If you can luckily login to your Windows OS, you should run the CD-Writer software such as HTech Fireman to back up all of your data on an empty CD. If you don’t know how to do it, read their user manual for detailed instruction set. If you can’t access your Windows OS, read on.

VIA DOS: Some of the files that you wish to make back-up, may be hidden. To un-hide them, use attrib *.* +r +s +h.

Now, use the software from Golden Hawk file named as copy2cd.exe to backup your data files or directories on a writeable CD. Before using this command, make sure you are in an appropriate path on the computer such as E:/ where the actual file copy2cd.exe file resides;

Copy2cd c:data*.* f:

Here we assumed that f: is a CD Writer drive. Now, repeat the same for all of your files to back up. When finished, run cdtools.exe command i.e. cdtools f: to finish by selecting option “Disc Finalization”.

If you can’t back up your data using the above-mentioned procedure, either ask an outside expert’s help personally or via internet. If all fails, forget your data forever and carry on installing a new OS as mentioned in this tutorial.

Backing up Your Drivers: An interesting tool to mentioned here is a software that automatically backs up all of your drivers of CD, modem, sound card, vga, usb, printer or just about anything that is currently installed on your system. But this software works only in an operational windows OS, and not in DOS. It is a good and time-saving practice to keep a backup of all of your drivers on a CD by using such a software. Its name is Driver Genius Pro and it is commercial software, not a freeware.

USING FDISK: You may skip this option and go straight to Formatting Hard Disk option, if you wish to use other useful partitions that may contain your data. Before going ahead with this option, Make sure there is no useful data left on your computer to be backed up. This option will delete all of the computer partitions and create new ones.

i) Boot up your computer using Windows OS CD.

ii) Run this command
fdisk

iii) Press option 3 to delete all current partitions.

iv) To create a new partition, select option 1 and select Y to answer the maximum size question by the program.

v) Next, select option 2

vi) Press Esc key to quit and restart your computer to

See the URL http://www.compguystechweb.com/troubleshooting/fdisk/fdisk_scr.html for detailed instructions alongwith screenshots. Now, that you have created the primary partition, you can continue to format the newly created partition. There is a very user-friendly but commercial software called Partition Magic by PowerQuest to manage your partitions easily after installation of Windows.

FORMATTING HARD DISK: Now that you have created new partitions, It is time to format them so that you can start installing Windows. This is how you make your C: drive usable by your Windows OS for installation. Boot up your computer with Windows CD and type format c: command at the prompt. When prompted for maximum size, press, YES. After complete processing you will be presented with the successful report about the formatting of the C: drive. Select your new drive name and press ENTER to finish.

INSTALLING WINDOWS: Microsoft has made it very easy for a newbie to install a completely new OS on a newly formatted partition. It is all wizard based and you simply have to click NEXT each time whenever asked a question. Boot up your computer from the Windows CD and select Start with CD Option. When on DOS prompt, change to the CD Drive that it just created which is usually d: if you have only one partition C. Now type command setup.exe to start the windows installation process.

During installation, make sure you properly name your PC as per your preferences and select your regions and Time zone. When finished, the computer will re-boot and during next re-boot it may ask some drivers of your Sound Card, VGA, Network, or other devices attached. Provide the requisite driver CDs and locate the paths of the appropriate drivers. If you are not sure, leave it like that and press NEXT to ignore. When your windows installation is complete, you can install Microsoft Office, setup internet connection and start using it as normally as you would. Please make sure you install all the security software such as anti-virus, anti-spyware, adware, and other software as mentioned in the next section.

2. USE SOFTWARE

Installing Anti-Virus: Download free AVG Antivirus software and install it. Make sure you get its free key from their website by registering. This software is not auto-updated for critical viruses and for an auto-update version, you will have to pay. If you wish to pay, we would recommend world’s most popular brands Symantec, McAfee and Trend Micros instead. No matter what Anti-Virus software you install, make sure you enable its Auto-Protect feature for automatic protection of your computer’s resources and in-coming or out-going emails from any virus attack. Some software even allow you to setup silent detection and destruction without any disturbance to your work. Further, they are auto-updated via internet at the regular interval that you setup. Hence, you can rest assured that whenever a security threat is spread all over the world, your software will automatically download the requisite updated version and install its defense on your computer.

BROWSER SECURITY: To setup your browser (Internet Explorer on Windows) for maximum security against the usual threats, follow this procedure;

i) Start up your browser

ii) Go to IE > Tools > Windows Update > Product Updates, and selected Security Updates to be automatically updated. Microsoft releases patches and security patches from time to time to make sure your system's security is up-to-date.

iii) Now, go to Internet Options/Security/Internet, press 'default level', then OK. Now press "Custom Level." In the ActiveX section, set the first two options ("Download signed and unsigned ActiveX controls) to 'prompt', and 'Initialize and Script ActiveX controls not marked as safe" to 'disable'. Now you will be asked whether you want ActiveX objects to be executed and whether you want software to be installed. Sites that you know for sure are above suspicion can be moved to the Trusted Zone in Internet Option/security.

If you use another browser such as Firefox or Netscape, see their documentation on how to securely set it up against any such internet threats.

Installing Anti-Spyware: Spyware, adware, browser hijackers, and dialers are some of the fastest-growing threats on the Internet today. By simply browsing to a web page, your computer may become a victim. You can install SpywareBlaster and SpywareGuard to effectively guard your computer from such internet threats.

It includes Fast Real-Time Scanning engine for known spyware and heuristic/generic detection capabilities to catch new / mutated spyware and Download Protection along with Browser Hijacking Protection in real-time.

Simply download the software (free) from their website and install it on your system. Make sure you download its latest update too or enable its Auto-Update feature to be updated automatically in the background. Now, when you are ready, run the software to check the spyware on your computer. When spyware are found, it reports accordingly. Press "select all", then press option "kill all checked". Although it won't protect you from 100% spyware, But it is a very important extra layer of protection.

Next, install another software that is called Spybot Search & Destroy. It works exactly like SpywareBlaster, but it never hurts to have a double layer of spyware detection alongwith Spybot R&D.

Installing Anti-Adware: Adware is a common term used to describe potentially dangerous websites and scripts that do data-mining, aggressive advertising, Parasites, Scumware, selected traditional Trojans, Dialers, Malware, Browser hijackers, and tracking components. There is a very good software called Ad-Aware available to scan and remove such nuisances from your system.

To start using it, simply visit Lavasoft USA website and download its free non-commercial version of Ad-Aware Personal Edition. Run its setup program and install it. When prompted, ask it to scan your computer. If there are any adware found, it is detected and removed automatically by Ad-Aware. Run this software on a weekly or daily basis, if possible to keep your system clean.

In addition to the Ad-Aware, Internet Explorer comes with a very handy tool that allows you to block specific sites that may carry well-known advertisers, marketers, crapware pushers to the Restricted sites Zone. If you had to input 50000+ of such sites manually yourself, it would takes years. Luckily, there is a software that does it all automatically and it is called IE-SPYAD. Once you merge this list of sites and domains into the Registry, the web sites for these companies will not be able to use cookies, ActiveX controls, Java applets, or scripting to compromise your privacy or your PC while you surf the Net. Nor will they be able to use your browser to push unwanted pop-ups, cookies, or auto-installing programs on your PC. It is not an ad blocker. It will stop top unwanted crapware from being installed behind your back via "drive-by-downloads"; prevent the hijacking of your home page.

This Restricted sites list is based in part on info from: discussions in the SpywareInfo Forums and other forums that specialize in crapware removal major crapware reference sites: doxdesk, cexx.org, Kephyr.com, PestPatrol and SpywareGuide.

To start using it, simply download it from their website and run its install.bat file. Make sure you run its update as well soon after its installation.

INSTALLING FIREWALL: A firewall software acts as a defense shield against hackers, intruders, and blocks access attempts to your computer. ZoneAlarm is a professional firewall software that works in a stealth mode automatically and makes your computer invisible to anyone on the Internet.

Download it from ZoneLabs website and run its setup for installation. I recommend you use its Express Settings which automatically configures your most commonly used software like browser, chat messengers, ftp software to access internet, while blocks every other internet traffic in real-time. If any software or service tries to upload or download any data, it pops up an alert whereby you can allow or disallow such internet traffic.

Computer Slow Down: It is very common to see many complaining about their computer slow-down. The fastest and easiest cure is using Windows’ built-in Defragmenter utitlity that you can find in Startà Programs à Accessories à System Utitlities à Disk Defragmantor and run thorough defragmantation. It will take a while before it ends.

If your system’s performance does not improve after running defragmantation utility, consider scanning your computer via a software utility called HiJackThis which you can download and install on your system. Use this tool carefully as it is intended for advanced users only. HijackThis is a tool, that lists all installed browser add-on, buttons, startup items and allows you to inspect, and optionally remove selected items. The program can create a backup of your original settings and also ignore selected items. Additional features include a simple list of all startup items, default start page, online updates and more.

CWShredder is a utility for removing CoolWebSearch (aka CoolWwwSearch, YouFindAll, White-Pages.ws and a dozen other names). This tool will find and destroy all traces of the CoolWebSearch (CWS) hijacker on your system including redirections, IE slowdowns, start page changes, un-authorized addition of sites in IE Trusted Zone, and blocking access to IE options or setup.

Download CWShredder from their official website only as there is a similar named virus/trojan on the loose at various websites which you may accidently download and install, hence become more infected than being cured instead. When it is installed successfully, run the software to scan your local machine. Select the fix button & it will get rid of everything related to CoolWebSearch. Close ALL other programs & windows, including IE, before running CWShredder. Reboot after doing this.

I know there is still a lot left, but as I wanted to keep this tutorial as brief as possible, hence I covered only the critical elements here. I am sure you will have fewer breakdowns (if not ZERO0 and more productive hours on your computer. I would recommend you to setup all the software’s auto update and auto-check options to free your time for more productive things than just playing hide and seek with spywares, adwares or viruses. Happy and safe computing!

This article is submitted by Kashif Raza http://www.networkingtutorials.net

How Effective Is It?

2009-04-21T11:30:00.000+08:00

Search Engine Marketing is possibly the most credible form of advertising!

In the majority of cases, for a search engine user to find your website they need to go into their favourite search engine and type in keywords for what they are looking for. Due to the accuracy of results provided by search engines these days, there is a very good chance that an internet searcher will find the type of business they are looking for within the first two pages of their favourite search engine, especially if they are using Google, Yahoo or MSN.

When a business uses television advertising, newspaper advertising, or any other type of form of advertising,
they are targeting a very broad range of consumers, and many viewers of these mediums have no interest in the product they are viewing. There are advantages to this; after all if an advertisement is well designed, it may create a need (or want) in consumers which will entice them to go out and buy that product or service. Television advertising is the best medium for creating needs that weren't previously there as television stimulates the consumer through both visual and sound to capture the consumers' attention; a main reason why television advertising is so expensive as a marketing option.

Unlike most forms of marketing, the internet gives you the opportunity to provide considerable information to the consumer.

If your website is well organised and laid out, with out overwhelming the consumer with too much information, it can provide the information needed to sell your product or service.

The information on your website should cater both for the people looking for a brief overview of what you offer, as well as a more detailed overview for those people that like to drill down into detail. Unless your website is purely an information website where people want to spend considerable time reading through everything, then you should avoid going into lengthy detail. If you have too much information, people will often lose interest altogether and will likely close your website and start looking at your competitors.

I strongly recommend that if your website is not bringing in the business that you would like, you make it a priority to have a professional company like Quantum Web Solutions analyse your website and give you advice on how to improve it, and start generating more business for you.

Why is this so important? Because in today's ever evolving internet market, more and more consumers trust the internet and search engine results before other advertising mediums to bring them the product or service they desire. If you are not positioned well, then you are missing out on valuable business.

Andrew Seidel - SEO Specialist and Search Engine Marketing Consultant in Sydney, Australia. http://www.quantumwebsolutions.com.au/

How To Display RSS Feeds on Your Website

2009-04-21T11:28:00.000+08:00

This article is intended as a guide for webmasters who want to display automatically updated content on their website in the form of RSS feeds. In this article I will cover the easiest method to implement using javascript for displaying RSS on websites to create additional dynamic content. This will allow you to display headlines from syndicated content around the web on your website.

RSS to Javascript.

By far the easiest method is to use client side javascript to parse and display the headlines on your site. To achieve this all you need to do is cut and paste some HTML or javascript code into the web page where you want the RSS feed headlines to display.

To achieve this there are several sites that offer a free service that will allow you to select a few options to choose your feed source and display formatting parameters. You will then be presented with some javascript code that you can cut and paste into your website.

Now before I give you the address of the sites that offer this service freely there are a few points I need to clarify with you. Although you will achieve your goal of displaying dynamic content on your site in a few short minutes there are some downsides to this method.

Javascript is not search engine friendly.

As you may or may not already know, javascript is not visible to search engine spiders. They will not see the RSS feed you have parsed into your site and so this will not benefit you if you are doing this to better your search engine rankings.

You are using a third party service.

The second potential downside is that although the javascript is on your site you are actually calling a script on another server. This could lead to a couple of potential problems. If the server is busy it will mean the news feed will take longer to display on your site. The other point is if the third party server fails or disappears altogether then your feed will not be displayed at all.

In summary there are a few downsides, but if you do not code and want some feeds on your site quickly then this is the way to go. Ok, so now you understand what is involved here are the links to the sites that provide the free RSS to javascript service. All you need to do is follow the on site instructions.

* Feed2JS: http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/feed/index.php?s=build
* RSS2HTML: http://www.rss2html.com/step-1.php
* RSS-to-Javascript: http://www.rss-to-javascript.com/p/138.html
* FeedSweep: http://www.howdev.com/services/feedsweep/create_adv.asp
* RSS Xpress Lite: http://rssxpress.ukoln.ac.uk/lite/include/?t=1

Allan is the webmaster at http://www.newsniche.com an RSS resopurce for webmasters. Learn how to use RSS to attract and retain visitors to your site.

Product Launches – How to Be Successful

2009-04-21T11:27:00.000+08:00

Product launches can be so much fun and very successful when they are done correctly, and of course when people are expecting a new release or a new ebook from you.

One of the keys to a successful product launch is making sure that people, either your affiliates or your subscribers, are aware well in advance that you have something new coming along.

That way they can prepare, if they are affiliates, and so that anticipation is developed if they are your subscribers.

With the idea of a product launch, you are going to be thinking along the lines of the entire process of birthing an ebook, not just the writing of it. You are going to need to write the ebook, of course, but you will also need a web site or web page, and be able to accept mastercard and visa, and of course create an affiliate program and find joint venture (JV) partners to promote it for you.

There is of course so much more to a product launch than just writing the book itself – and you have to be aware of it all to really do the best job and time it all right.

So to do a product launch successfully, you need to have a broad overview of everything you need to do to get the ebook not only written, but available for mass distribution.

Although everything you will do can be done one step at a time, there are several things that cannot be done at the last minute.

You must prepare your web pages, your credit card processing, and your affiliate program well in advance. You should also begin creating and writing your sales copy well in advance, preferably as you are writing the ebook or creating another medium of information.

Do you want to learn more about how I do it? I have just completed my brand new guide to article marketing success, 'Your Article Writing and Promotion Guide'

Download it free here: http://www.secrets-of-internet-success.com/ezrss.html

Do you want to learn how to build a big online subscriber list fast? Click here: http://www.secrets-of-internet-success.com/listbuilding.htm

Sean Mize is a full time internet marketer who has written over 9034 articles in print and 14 published ebooks.

How to Write a Guaranteed Clickbank Best Seller

2009-04-21T11:26:00.000+08:00

This article has no fluff, it's BS free and if you are offended by hard nosed truth, do not read any further. This article will show you how to write a book that makes the Clickbank Bestseller list, no if's or but's about it, it just is.

So what is the best way to write a Clickbank best seller?

What is the one thing buyers want to read about online at just about any cost? The answer is pretty simple really and you will kick yourself for not thinking about this before hand, but what people really want to read about in an ebook is....

HOW TO MAKE MONEY WITH THEIR HOBBIES!

That's right. People want to know how to make money with their hobbies. Everyone wants to be able to turn their hobbies into a full time income or even get them to pay for themselves. Some people have really expensive hobbies and would pay quite a lot of money to find out how they could off set the costs of their hobby some how.

People also love the idea of being able to go to work everyday doing something they love. Making money with what they love doing in their spare time is something these people will pay through the nose to find out how to do and you can cash in on that with your own ebook.

Here is an example Clickbank product that targets the Golf market:
http://www.golfmoney.com

Is this product a Clickbank bestseller? You better believe it is. Would this sort of idea work for any hobby or passion? You better believe it again. These books will sell and sell like hot cakes no matter what the market or what economic conditions are in play. This is a timeless business idea.

Now all you have to do is write the ebook, which I will talk about in part two of this article.

Six Figures In Six Months: Learn How To Turn Small Niche Information Products Into A Six Figure Income Online

Go to: http://www.profitableniches.net

Sign Up To My Free E Course Above To Learn How To Create Your Own Empire Of Small Niche Information Products Quickly And Easily

The Truth About Google Adsense

2009-04-21T11:25:00.002+08:00

Make $$$$ with Google Adsense! Top Paying Keywords! $100 per click!

You have seen these headlines, right? Are they real? Can one person clicking on you Adsense links really earn you a $100? Maybe, maybe not. Most of the top paying keyword lists are a big crock of S**T! There is no doubt that the adsense program is one of the most successful marketing programs ever created. And yes webmasters are making money with Google Adsense but how much and how are they doing it is the real question.

There are too many scam artists who are trying to rip you off with some so called "top paying keyword list" Don't fall for it! Yes some keywords are worth $5 $10 $50 or even a $100 because that is what the advertiser is willing to pay Google to display those ads. It doesn't mean that is what you are going to make. Think about it, if a company is willing to pay $100 per click don't you think they are going to be watching the numbers pretty close. For that price they want highly qualified leads not thousands of people clicking on it and running up there tab. 1000 clicks at $100 each is $100,000. Now if that company gets $500,000 in business, fine but if they get $500 in business for that return then as the Donald says "someone will be fired!"

In the course of building several websites and using Google Adsense I made several discoveries. I put together a crappy little website and that crappy little website earned me $100 in a month. Not big money but pretty surprising since I didn't have that many visitors. Don't believe the screen shots showing you making hundreds a day and thousands a week. It could happen but those screen shots have been altered to inflate the income. Putting these discoveries into use on other websites have proven they work. There is no reason you can't make a $1000-$3000 a month over a period of time. I am not going to kid you. It takes work but once you get the ball rolling you will see your income rise. It is one thing to sell you a list of "top paying keywords" its another to tell you how to set up your websites and how to drive traffic to it.

There are steps anyone can take can take to increase their adsense earnings such as learning about the why the best placement for your ads is above the fold, what colors work best and how easy it is to match them to your site, but it can take lots of trial and error or you can learn from someone who has already tested it out. For example did you know--Why you don't need thousands of visitors to your website (you might be surprised) and how only 2 or 3 visitors a day can actually make you more money than 1000 visitors. You should learn why you want to make your visitors click and move on and why you shouldn't care that they don't stay. This is the exact opposite of every article you have ever read about creating "sticky" sites.

Yes there is money to be made with google adsense and top paying keywords can make you more but don’t get ripped off by paying too much for some “magic list”. There is no free lunch.

TJ Smith is a writer and the creative force behind several websites. His report “The Truth About Google Adsense” has been helping website owners increase their adsense income substantially. It can be ordered through http://www.borgstar.net

Per Click - Do They Know Something We Don't?

2009-04-21T11:25:00.001+08:00

I have utilized pay-per-click (PPC) advertising since its inception about two years ago. With PPC, the advertiser is only charged when a person actually clicks on their link. The amount you actually pay for each click is referred to as the cost-per-click (CPC). I've got to admit, I was pretty leery at first. But since then I've watched the price of certain search engine keywords skyrocket in excess of $10 per click! The big question isn't how much it costs per click but how many clicks does it take to get an acquisition. I've often asked myself, why would so many companies pay that much money for one single, measly, push of the index finger? The answer is simple - it just works!

HOW TO JUSTIFY $10 PER CLICK

The advent of PPC advertising has changed Internet marketing forever. It represents a free market in much the same way as eBay -- controlled by a natural supply and demand relationship. For a keyword phrase such as “debt consolidation,” the top five advertisers are willing to pay cost-per-click charges of $10.01, $10.00, $9.99, $7.00, and $6.97. My first reaction was, something has to be wrong with this picture - it just can't be! So I looked at the “life insurance” phrase, where the top five range from $7.00 to $3.50. Then there are drugs like “Xenical” that range from $6.76 to $6.74. There are many more examples where the cost-per-click exceeds $6.00, $7.00, or $10.00, but you get the point.

The fact of the matter is that while PPC advertising can work quite well - it can also be a flat out failure. When companies are willing to pay more than $5.00 per click, you can be pretty certain that they have figured out how to make it work - otherwise they wouldn't pay those prices.

THE SELECT FEW

I have seen many situations where PPC will work for one company but not for another in the same industry, using the same keywords. Large and small companies will venture in, bid for a week or two, and then drop out -- never to be heard from again. Some will come in, drive the prices way up then drop back out to obscurity. The select few who are successful have found the secret -- a combination of patience, determination, creativity, keyword selection, management and analysis. They do the math, every day - they manage the bids, every day - they look for new keywords, every day - they analyze the results, every day. It takes a great deal of work to figure out how to make PPC advertising deliver results, and the ones who have are now benefiting - every day.

WHAT IS THE COST OF AN ACQUISITION?

In order to determine if your PPC advertising is justified, the first thing you need to understand is your current acquisition cost - what does it now cost to acquire a new customer or order? It's amazing how few companies know what their cost of acquisition is. To keep it simple, take your total advertising expenditures and divide it by the number of new acquisitions (orders or customers), that should give you a rough estimate of your cost per acquisition. Similarly, after running a PPC campaign for a month, you take the total advertising expenditures divided by the number of acquisitions. Of course, these raw numbers are not burdened by administrative costs, but they still provide an apples-versus-apples comparison.

I have managed PPC campaigns where the average cost-per-click was $0.40 and others where it was $5.00. The key question remains: how many clicks does it take to get an acquisition? If the cost for each click is $0.40 and it takes 200 clicks for an acquisition, then the acquisition cost is $80.00. If the cost for each click is $5.00 and it takes 10 clicks, the cost of the acquisition is $50.00.

FINDING THE GAPS

Two key points are crucial: (1) how much does it cost to get an Internet acquisition compared to traditional methods? and (2) what is the value of a new customer? In some businesses a new customer is worth $1,000, while in others, only $10. Typically, the cost-per-click reflects this value, but since the market is still very small, there are significant gaps. Remember the “debt consolidation” keyword phrase above? The difference between the first and last cost-per-click was about 30%. On the other hand, there is literally no difference between cost-per-click rates for the keyword “Xenical”. From this you may conclude that there is a lot more competition for “Xenical” then there is for “debt consolidation”. The opportunity is between the gaps in the 30% differential example.

The bidding market for keywords is still so new and untapped that it's rare to have more than three competitors fighting over a specific phrase. The gaps in keyword cost-per-click charges such as “debt consolidation” are the norm and represent tremendous opportunities still available in this media. Right now they are plentiful, and for those few people who take the time to understand this important marketing tool, the time to act is NOW!

About The Author

Neal Lebar has proven that Internet marketing can generate returns far greater than traditional media. For more information, visit http://www.innovate-inc.com or e-mail nlebar@innovate-inc.com

2 Ingredients Your Podcast Is Missing and Why Using Them Will Increase Subscribers

2009-04-21T11:24:00.000+08:00

Launching a podcast can be a fun adventure. You're able to bring your voice, your rant and your thoughts to the world without having to go through editors, segment producers or other filters.

Although you may have great content, you may be missing the mark when it comes to adding a little pizazz to your podcast. Interviews with experts, monologues on an issue you're passionate about and energizing music are all equally liked by listeners. However, if your podcast lacks intrigue, it will sit in a podcast directory with no downloads and very little subscribers.

Because I just launched a podcast, I wanted to ensure that I'm on the right track. So, I asked some other podcasters on what makes a great podcast. While they agreed that it's an awesome marketing tool, they disagreed on the two ingredients that could make or break the popularity of your podcast - the use of humour and the presence of personality.

One podcaster, Donna Papacosta, president of a communications company in Oakville, Ontario and who hosts a podcast herself, suggests that when communicating with a business audience, leave the humour out.

"For a B2B podcast, I would skip the humour. People want content that is relevant to them," says Papacosta.

However, Penny Haynes, CEO of Georgia-based company that teaches people how to create their own podcasts through a virtual course, disagrees. She doesn't think your podcast should be dry and stiff, no matter who's your target audience.

"Everyone has their own ideas and tastes regarding programs, but I love a little humor. A little bit of someone's personal side can add a lot to it," says Haynes.

Paige Eissinger, who hosts a computer call-in radio show in Missouri, says that she is immediately attracted to podcasts that inject a little humour.

"The worst people in the world to do business with are the ones who are humorless and I sure wouldn't listen to their podcasts," says Eissinger.

"I don't mean that you should have a ready joke for all your B2B podcasts, just that if your message lends itself to humor, take advantage of it. Don't pass up a witty remark just because 'It's business'," says Eissinger.

Being witty is one thing, but being silly can really turn off a listener. Just ask Papacosta, who's not afraid to unsubscribe from a podcast if it turns out to be a total dud.

"I've hit the stop button on many a podcast because of content I deemed stupid or a waste of my time," says Papacosta.

At the end of the day, it's a podcaster's personality that will win many fans and garner tons of downloads.

"Content [of a podcast] is important, but surprise, surprise - personality wins out," says Haynes. "When it came down to a choice between great content and great personality, personality was the winner."

Haynes recounted a podcast where she shared her thoughts and feelings about celebrating the one-year anniversary of her business. She was surprised by the response of her listeners.

"They loved it, as it made me 'real'. They felt invited and involved in my private world," says Haynes.

Eissinger can relate. One of her favourite podcasts is hosted by a man who has a southern accent. Although she learns a lot from his podcast, she's a sucker for his accent and in her mind, this lends alot of personality to his podcast.

"His content is great and very relevant to my business, but [his Texan] accent grabs me every time," says Eissinger.

While spontaneity, humour and personality can add some sizzle to a podcast, Angelo Cerase, a Toronto-based financial advisor who has a list of podcasts he enjoys listening to, draws the line when a podcaster lacks focus in their program.

"I really, really, really hate it when a podcast has the author going on and on about absolutely nothing, without a real plan or script of what he was going to say," says Cerase.

"A little 'useless' filler is welcomed in a podcast, it makes the person on the other end seem more human. But too much is, well, too much," says Cerase.

Having a great mic, snazzy music and earth shattering content is not enough. You need to inject a little bit of humour and personality into your podcast to really get people to subscribe to your feed week after week.

Special thanks goes out to the members of the Podcaster Central Network who contributed their comments for this article. If you want to learn more about how to create, publish and host a podcast, join Podcaster Central by clicking here: http://podcastcentral-network.ryze.com.

Copyright 2005 Leesa Barnes. All Rights Reserved Worldwide.

Leesa Barnes teaches insider tips on how to use podcasts to open doors, generate leads and make more-money. Leesa has helped hundreds of businesses worldwide make money podcasting using her simple seven step process. If you want to learn how to generate an income using a podcast, visit http://www.leesabarnesbooktour.com to download 2 free chapters of Leesa's book, Podcasting for Profit.

All The Secrets They Didn't Tell You About Online Paid Surveys

2009-04-21T11:23:00.000+08:00

Nowadays there are more and more schemes out there, especially on the internet that promises people the chance to make a lot of money and within a short period of time. Let me tell you this, online paid surveys cannot be classified as one of these schemes. In fact if you think you are going to make a lot of money undertaking online paid surveys, then think again.

What Do They Involve?

Online paid surveys are everywhere on the internet as most companies are looking to pay consumers money to tell them exactly what they want. This enables these companies to save millions of dollars that could be lost if they released the wrong product of service to the public. Therefore if there are so many companies doing these online paid surveys, it means you have a greater opportunity of taking part in more of them and of course making more money for yourself and the best thing is, they're easy!

Most surveys take anywhere from 10-30 minutes and involve simple questions that are usually multiple choice, therefore when answering each question all you have to do is check the response that is most relevant to you and your situation. How easy is that!

You're probably thinking "so can I just mark in any response without reading the question to speed up the process?" The answer is yes, with shades of grey. If you show signs of marking a faulty survey, that company may prevent you from taking part in more online paid surveys in the future. So my advice is to be honest and read the question, it doesn't take very long and it may mean the difference between you getting more surveys in the future or not.

How can I get Started?

Getting started is easy, there are thousands of online paid survey sites on the internet so the simplest thing you can do is run a search on any search engine for online paid surveys and bookmark all the best sites. This however can take a lot of time, so your best chance is to sign up with a membership with an online paid survey directory. These sites have a listing of all the best online paid survey providers on the internet so all the research is done for you. They also give you a description of what each site is all about and how much they pay, as well as many other things. Remember, getting the most surveys, means you have to get in before anyone else does so make sure you give yourself the best opportunity. Good luck!

If you want to learn more about Paid Surveys including free information, reviews and much more, or you want to join our free weekly newsletter then please visit paid surveys (Recommended) or for more free articles all about paid surveys visit Paid Survey Blog: http://www.paidsurveyinspector.com/

Name Squeeze Pages - What Are They and Why Do You Need Them?

2009-04-21T11:20:00.000+08:00

There are many terms that are used in the Internet marketing world. Some are confusing, and some are simple. Some are simple but made to sound confusing. Name squeeze page how to information is a relatively new term, but it’s a technique that has been around for quite some time. Name squeeze page how to information is one of the first steps used by successful marketers for lead generation. Without leads, sales cannot be made – but getting good leads these days can be hard work – unless you know how to use a name squeeze page.

You’ve surely heard of opt-in lists. If you haven’t, an opt-in list is an email list of people who have agreed to receive information from you in their email inboxes. If you send them commercial email messages without that permission, you are spamming them – and that is against the law now. However, if you have their permission, you are not spamming them. They have the option of unsubscribing from your list anytime that they want to, and you must honor any remove requests that you receive.

An opt-in list is gold to an Internet marketer, and this is the end result of name squeeze pages. A name squeeze page is a webpage on your website that is intended to get the name and email address of visitors to the page. Now, there are many scripts that you can use to collect information about your visitors without them knowing about it, but this is not ethical, and in most cases, it violates the spam laws and privacy laws that are in effect.

To make an effective name squeeze page, you want to provide information that interests your readers and makes them want to be directed to more information, or to receive information via email. The visitor will be required to provide their name and email address for this information. This also works well when you have a freebie to give away, such as an ebook or free report. You can require the visitor to enter their email and name, and agree to receive information from you in the future in order to get the free download.

These names and email addresses that your name squeeze page collects can be added to your mailing list. You are now free to email them your newsletters and offers. But you should mail responsibly. Email good information or product reviews to your list, as opposed to spammy type advertisements. If you are mailing what appears to be spam to your list, you will lose a lot of subscribers in a very short time – and all of your efforts will be wasted.

Creating a name squeeze page is not hard. You just need some copy on the page that will make the visitor want to sign up. Of course the page needs to have a sign up form, and the HTML code for such a form can be obtained from your autoresponder service. Using an autoresponder service that requires double opt-in subscribing is highly recommended. The confirmation page that the person sees after confirming the subscription through email should redirect the visitor to the information that they are seeking, or to the free download that you are offering.

Name squeeze pages how to information is popping up all over the Internet. This is happening because this technique works. Internet marketers are using name squeeze pages on a regular basis to build massive opt-in lists. If lead generation is important to your business, you need to get your name squeeze pages up and working for you as soon as possible.

Jason is a successful Internet Marketer, and posts regularly on his Adventures In Internet Marketing blog (http://www.adventuresinim.com/). Take a minute right now to sign up for his newsletter (http://www.jasondevelvis.com/) for more great information!

Build Better Link Popularity with Syndicated Articles

2009-04-21T11:19:00.000+08:00

There are many schools of thought on how to build strong backlinks to a Web site. Some webmasters build reciprocal links, while others register their site in many directories. Still others do both of those, and rent links as well. But one method used by a growing number of webmasters is that of building link popularity through the syndication of original articles. Syndicated articles are becoming increasingly popular because article syndication builds permanent links from many different, topically related, keyword rich pages. There are several steps one can take in order to ensure that an article is syndicated as much as possible, and that the links from those syndications are of the highest quality.

1) Write High Quality Articles

The amount of syndication an article receives is directly proportional to the demand for that type of article. Higher quality articles will prove more valuable to webmasters looking to reprint articles. Perfect spelling and grammar are requisite in order to ensure the widest syndication possible. Webmasters will be more inclined to reprint well-researched and well-written articles. Most articles are not of the highest quality, so a higher quality article will stand out significantly.

Articles should be more than simply a place to put a link in a resource box. The goal of article writing should be to make the article itself interesting. An interesting article can be syndicated on websites with high traffic and PageRank. Increasing article syndication will cause the link in the resource box to be copied by many Web sites.

In addition to building more links with higher quality articles, webmasters will find that quality content articles will result in an immediate traffic increase to a site. An article that is appealing to readers will naturally attract a large readership. The more readers an article has, the more likely those readers are to click on the link in the resource box.

2) Manually Submit to Related Sites

Another technique used by many webmasters to increase an article's syndication is to submit articles to related sites. The best syndications and links come from quality sites in a specific niche, not simply article banks. For example, there are many Web sites that will only accept business-related articles. Any webmaster of a business-related website looking to build link popularity should write an article concerning business and submit it to these sites. Potentially, other business sites could take note of a high quality business article and syndicate it on their sites (which are all related under the unique subject of business). Doing this will build topically related links which can improve a Web site’s search engine rankings dramatically.

3) Write a Compelling Title

Articles have to be interesting in order to get the readers to scroll down to the resource box, or inspire webmasters to reprint the article on their Web site. The best way to draw a wide variety of readers is to have a compelling title. Catchy titles and sometimes even controversial titles can draw more readers. Coupling a compelling title with a high quality article is an excellent way to attract readers specifically looking for articles to syndicate.

Article topics should also be interesting. If a website is focused on a specific subject, an article about an interesting element of that subject will be syndicated more than a general article. For example, there may be hundreds of available articles about mortgage refinancing, but how many articles focus on ways financial advisors will try to manipulate someone seeking to refinance?

4) Stay Organized

Time should be taken when finding article sites to submit to. There are many Web sites that have large lists of article sites that accept submissions. A good technique is to submit articles to all of the article sites in a list and check later to see if those articles have been syndicated. Searching for the title of the article submitted in quotations on Google will show where exactly it has been reprinted. Backlink searches on MSN and Yahoo! can also be helpful. Building a solid list of verified article sites can help maximize article syndication and also time efficiency.

Some article sites only accept submissions via e-mail. Some SEOs shy away from e-mailing articles because it is more time consuming and often involves the creation of a biography and picture submission. E-mail submission article sites however are often more inclined to only reprint articles of high quality, and thus these types of sites' articles are often widely syndicated.

5) Write a Killer Resource Box

The heart and soul of a syndicated article is its resource box. The anchor text and link destination of the links in the articles should be varied. Varying anchor text will help avoid penalties in search engine rankings and create higher-value links. Often changing the resource box after submitting to each site proves beneficial. An article about dogs with the anchor text "dogs" should be varied with anchor text like "puppies" for the other article submissions. Using technology such as latent semantic analysis, search engines will notice "dog" and "puppy" as related words, but will not penalize the site for having unnatural links (e.g., if all of the links used "dog" as anchor text). This same effect can be achieved by varying the link target. Linking the first half of the article submissions to page A, and the second half to page B will avoid penalties from search engines like Google. Articles are a proven way to get links, but if a new site suddenly acquires 100 links to the same place in a short time, search engines might penalize it.

Article submission is a great way to get high quality links from topically related sites. The more effort and care given to an article that is submitted, the more syndication potential an article has. Compelling titles, high-quality content, and interesting topics will all improve the syndication of an article. Varying backlink text and destinations can also help avoid heavy penalties from search engines. Some SEOs believe that only traditional directory submissions and link swapping are effective methods of building links. I, however, am a firm believer in the power of a well-written article to deliver a large number of topically related links to any fledgling site.

Scott Hawksworth works for Andy Hagans Link Building ( http://www.andyhagans.com ) as a link popularity building campaign manager. See http://www.andyhagans.com/link-building.php for more information.

Online Marketing: Math or Myth?

2009-04-21T11:18:00.000+08:00

The numbers are supposed to be big in online marketing, but are they significant in the online marketing of music? Clearly, we need someone with 'Net experience to set a few things straight. Scott Meldrum is a businessperson and musician with a dry wit and a background in bulk mail. Oops, excuse me, direct response advertising. He's also the man called on by major labels when they want to brand an artist and reach millions of fans via the Internet.

Beginning with Papa Roach in 1998 and continuing with such platinum-selling artists as Avril Lavigne, Dido and Jennifer Lopez, Meldrum's Long Beach-based firm, Hype Council, is one of the prime marketing weapons utilized by the world's largest entertainment companies.

Taking center stage for a Monday evening presentation by NARIP (National Association of Record Industry Professionals) at the Beverly Garland Hotel in Los Angeles, Meldrum began with some facts about the Internet. Does that sound a bit dull? It wasn't. His presentation quickly revealed things about the 'Net that should be known by every marketer (that's you, if you or your artists are selling music online).

THE GLOBAL AUDIENCE FOR MUSIC.

Most Internet users (nearly a majority of them) are between the ages of 30 and 49, far older than many in the audience thought. And for those of us who believed that the USA had the highest percentage of Internet users, it was a surprise to learn that we're only sixth. (Of course, in raw numbers of users, the USA has by far the most people.)

Fully 40% of the USA's 177 million 'Net users go online for music (more in some other nations). Look at it another way: if you put your music on the Internet, you have a potential audience of some 70 million. And with total Internet users currently at 404 million, that translates into a worldwide potential audience of 161 million people.

The problem is: how to reach them. They are wildly segmented in terms of music genre; they only want to be contacted under certain sets of circumstances; and they need to have a safe, secure, and easy way to make purchases.

Fortunately, "The Internet is still a new medium," Meldrum asserts, "and there are tremendous opportunities for people in the business of selling music."

Some of those opportunities are being wasted, however, through poor Web site design. Meldrum revealed the biggest errors made in creating or maintaining a Web site. . .

TOP 5 MISTAKES OF WEBSITES:

1. Mistaking creativity for functionality. "Don't try to put everything on your front page. Organization is the key. Lead your fans to the most important things." That's what menus are for, so don't hide them. "How many times have you gone to a site that looks interesting, but you have no clue how to navigate it? People don't have time to waste figuring it out. Make it easy for them."

2. Burying the offer. "Links to buy the CD should be available at almost every page on your Website. Many Websites challenge, almost dare visitors to find the product, let alone buy it."

3. Ignoring fans. "Many artist Websites have a registration feature, but it is not prominently displayed. When you are not selling albums at your Website, you need to be collecting email registrations." This builds a fan base where you can sell an album now and more in the future.

4. Not giving fans what they want. "Make your music accessible. Offer a few full streams of your songs. Make a download available in exchange for an email registration. You will win more fans and sell more CDs giving your music away than you will by not letting your potential fans really listen before they buy."

5. Failing to design with bandwidth in mind. "Ever been to a Website and forgot why you were there before the page fully loaded? Getting people to your site is hard enough. Losing them because they got tired of waiting for your page to load is a waste of everyone's time and energy."

CONSIDER OTHER OPTIONS:

Websites are a necessity, but don't overlook other ways of reaching out to potential fans on the Internet. Banners can be bought or traded. Emails can be sent (be mindful of the CAN-SPAM law; see below for link). Marketing can be done on search engines. You can join or participate in message boards and blogs (web logs). And the latest advancement in music marketing involves social networks such as MySpace.

RECOMMENDATIONS:

Meldrum had many specific suggestions for attendees, including:

* use Google for research

* check out MySpace.com

* target your audience

* simplify your Website

* give away some songs

* interact with your audience often

"You can send emails in text or HTML format. With HTML (hyper text markup language), you can include pictures and graphics. They look nice, but we get twice the 'open rate' with text emails."

THE BOTTOM LINE ON WEBSITES:

"To your online fans, you are your Website. If they love it, they will love you, and will be eager to follow your careers. Take all the great things about you, your talent and your message, and translate to HTML. Keep it simple, easy-to-navigate and informative, and you will have a highly-effective marketing channel for your music."

Sources for more info:

http://www.narip.com

http://www.hypecouncil.com

http://www.scottmeldrum.com

http://www.spamlaws.com/federal/108s877.html

http://www.wilsonweb.com/wmt5/viral-principles.htm

http://marketingterms.com/dictionary/blog/

http://www.google.com

http://www.myspace.com/thegman

# # #

Scott G (The G-Man) writes and produces radio commercials from G-Man Music & Radical Radio. With albums on Delvian Records, iTunes, Amazon, and many other online stores, he also composes music that is played in clubs, on college radio stations, and on commercials. A member of NARAS (the Grammy organization) and NARIP (National Association of Record Industry Professionals), he writes about music, advertising, marketing, communications, advertainment, and digital distribution for the Immedia Wire Service and MusicDish.com. Samples of his songs and commercials are on his site at: http://www.gmanmusic.com

Forum Signatures to Build Back Links - Helping Your Search Rankings

2009-04-21T11:16:00.000+08:00

Building Backlinks! There are several ways to build backlinks. We have discussed Directory Submissions, Article Submission, & Press Releases. The next simple easy and free way to get a back link as well as free traffic is the Forum Signature Tags.

Forums that do get indexed in the search engines create individual pages per thread. Your hyper linked signature tag is now a back link.

If you are a member of any forums throughout the Internet, fantastic. They are usually very informative and helpful. If you are not a member in any forum, find one that interests you and join.

Most Forums allow a user to add a signature tag line to their posts. Usually in the member’s area of most forums, you can edit, add and create a forum signature.

When creating your signature tag it is best to use your real name. Also use a hyper linked URL and briefly describe your service or product. An example of a good signature tag would be:

The Authors Name

“Your Product line description in less than 10 words”

www.yourwebsite.com

Your signature tag can also be an Alt text hyperlink to create a keyword target backlink.

For Example:

The Authors Name

“ Your Product line description in less than 10 words”

This entire phrase would be a hyperlink.

Your Product line description in less than 10 words

Each post that you make in a forum is now a back link to your site. Remember though not to spam and that your behavior in a forum can be extremely profitable or detrimental based on your attitude.

When posting in a forum, remember that you are in a public arena. If you are helpful, courteous, friendly, kind and post intelligently you will get traffic from people clicking on your signature tag besides the backlink. If the above does not describe you, then maybe you should avoid the benefits of a hyper linked signature tag ?

Forums allow individuals to build trust and familiarity that is normally not present through the Internet. As trust grows, people will click on your signature tag and will purchase your product or service.

Edward Charkow is the webmaster for http://www.nichesitespecial.com and seotactics.info - reprint rights are granted as long as this resource box remains intact.

Three E-Zine Alternatives You May Not Have Considered

2009-04-21T11:15:00.002+08:00

After my live talks, I always get a few people who say to me, "You know, publishing an e-zine sounds great, but I just don't think I have the time to do it on an ongoing basis." Or, "I'm not sure if I'll have enough content to publish an e-zine."

If this is your case, you may want to consider one of these e-zine alternatives. These can still help you achieve your goal of establishing credibility, staying in touch with your prospects, and capturing your Web site visitors.

For the first two alternatives, you'll need an e-mail autoresponder. This is like a fax-on-demand system that sends out e-mails automatically when others request them. (I recommend QueenCart.com, which has a 30-day trial for $3.95.)

The great thing about autoresponders is that you can set the timing of a series ahead of time. For example, you can schedule message 1 to go out immediately once a person signs up for the list. Message 2 could follow two weeks later. Message 3 would follow two weeks after that. Get the idea?

ALTERNATIVE 1: THE "EVERGREEN" NEWSLETTER

If you don't foresee yourself writing fresh new content every week or month that you publish, why not make your newsletter "evergreen"?

This means that you write all your content ahead of time, and none of it can be time-sensitive. That is, it should be just as relevant today as it would be a year from now.

Evergreen e-zines are brilliant and easy to do. Here's how it works: Suppose you want to publish a short tip every week. That means you'd need 52 tips for a year's worth of content. Once you had these written, you'd just set them up on your autoresponder and tell it when you want them sent out. (For this example, it would be day 1, day 7, day 14, etc. -- each reader would get a message every week.)

It's important to realize that when you use a sequential autoresponder, these are sent as a SERIES. That means everyone who signs up goes through the series in order, no matter when they sign up. For example, let's say you publish a weekly tip like in the example above. If I sign up today, I start with tip #1. And in 10 weeks, I'll be on tip #10. But if Suzy Q signs up 10 weeks from today, she starts with tip #1 just like I did. Get it?

[BONUS TIP: You don't have to write your entire series before you begin! Just stay one tip ahead of the first person who signs up for your series. : )]

ALTERNATIVE 2: THE MINI E-MAIL COURSE OR REPORT

These are very popular right now. You simply create several e-mails' worth of content to spread out over a certain amount of days, and set them up on your autoresponder.

Many sites offer 7-day courses or reports, and quite frankly, many of them are awful. So here's a chance for YOU to stand out. Make sure yours offers really useful or interesting content that's more helpful than salesy.

For example, say you're a small business coach. You could offer a course called "5 Ways to Make This Your Most PROFITABLE Year Ever!" Just sit down and list the 5 ways, then write a few paragraphs of copy under each.

Then write one final sales message that you'll add on to the end of the series as the 6th message. This should be a friendly invitation encouraging the reader to call you for a consultation, buy your book, sign up for your workshop, etc.

Paste all the messages into an autoresponder series, set the timing to what you want (e.g. every day or every few days), and voila -- you've got an e-mail course!

ALTERNATIVE 3: PROMOTIONS ONLY

If you offer products on your site that don't lend themselves well to creating related content, just offer what you've got!

Give your visitors the chance to receive special offers that will save them money at your site. The trick to high sign-up rates is to make them feel as if they'll be part of an exclusive group. Use words like "special, exclusive, limited, VIP, first looks, discounts, savings, club, and members-only."

For example, one site that I frequent sells discounted designer clothes and handbags. (Hooray!) During my last visit, they invited me to sign up for "discounts, exclusive offers, and first looks." I jumped at the opportunity!

Don't underestimate your visitors' interest -- many of them WILL sign up for e-mail offers if you politely extend the invitation and make them feel special.

Just make sure not to overdo your messages to this crowd. Keep your blasts to a maximum of once a week. Otherwise your readers will get irritated and may unsubscribe.

© 2003-2008 Alexandria Brown International Inc.

Online entrepreneur Alexandria K. Brown publishes the award-winning "Highlights on Marketing Success" weekly ezine with 36,000 subscribers. If you're ready to jump-start your marketing, make more money, and have more fun in your small business, get your FREE tips now at AlexandriaBrown.com

Save Time By Creating Email "Signature Templates"

2009-04-21T11:15:00.001+08:00

If you're like me, there are certain types of email that you send out regularly that follow a set form (client follow up notes, meeting notes, email article submission, etc). These can be irritating to have to recreate from scratch every time, but the tried and true method of creating a seperate document-file template, then sending that out as an attachment, may not always be appropriate. For example, email-based article submissions generally accept only plain text in-message formatting and require rigorous adherence to detailed submission guidelines involving the placement of bylines, the structure and length of the article body and the arrangement and length of bio-boxes and other inclusions - any deviation from which will result in a refusal of submission. Aggravatingly enough, these submission requirements are often so completely different from one submission site to another that it is difficult if not impossible to keep them straight without an entire set of templates.

To get around these and other problems, consider using the signature option in your emailer program to create individual email "signatures templates" for these commonly sent and repetitive emails. Using the above example of an email article submission email, I might create a "signature template" that looks something like this:

Title

Byline

Body (single spaced, 60-65 characters per line, no html)

Bio-box (no more that 3 sentences, no more than 2 links)

For a client follow-up or team meeting follow-up email, it might look something like this:

Client (or team member) Name

Date of Meeting

Summary of Meeting

Comments

Action Steps

Next Meeting Agenda

Once the "signature template" is complete, simply save it under a descriptive name ("articles-to-go submission" or "client meeting") and it's ready to use next time you're ready to send an email. Just insert the signature, then type around or over the contents as appropriate. Keep in mind, also, that you can add more than one signature to an email in most emailer programs, so using one of the above "signature templates" does not preclude your adding a standard business signature at the end of the email, as you would normal do.

I'm sure that if you think creatively and look at the emails you send out on a regular basis, you'll find many examples for which a simple "signature template" can save you time, trouble and annoyance. How many ways can you think of to use this time-saving trick?

(c) Soni Pitts

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Soni Pitts is the Chief Visionary Butt-Kicker of SoniPitts.Com. She specializes in helping others reclaim "soul proprietorship" in their lives and to begin living the life their Creator always intended for them.

She is the author of the free e-book "50 Ways To Reach Your Goals" and over 100 self-help and inspirational articles, as well as other products and resources designed to facilitate this process of personal growth and spiritual development.

Intranet Project Names - Some Ideas

2009-04-21T11:14:00.001+08:00

"What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other word would smell as sweet."

In this famous quote from Act II of Romeo and Juliet, Juliet tells Romeo that a name is an artificial and meaningless convention, and the fact he is a Montague and she a Capulet (warring families) means nothing to their love.

However, there is some strong evidence from the UK's Cranfield University - and elsewhere - that the name one gives a project does have a marked impact on the behaviour and motivation of the people involved. It may surprise you, but the name you give to your Intranet Project could well be the most important decision you make in the early stages of mobilisation!

The Direct Approach

There is an argument in faour of naming your Intranet Project the - wait for it - "Intranet Project"! Often, so-called "secret squirrel" names (where one has to ferret out from colleagues what Project Banana is all about) serve only to create an unnecessary air of mystique (fit only for secret M&A projects). They can also serve to be divisive, by separating 'people in the know' from people outside the immediate project audience.

The functional approach

A functional name focuses on what the intranet does (e.g. search, find, access). This enjoys the same benefits as the direct approach, but affords one a little more poetic license. What about names like "Project Connect" or "Project Gateway", which serve to signal the core "must have" requirements for the project?

The conceptual approach

There is a problem with the direct or functional approaches; Research from Cranfield has demonstrated that people on projects tend to be very heavily influenced in their actions by the name of the project itself. If you call your project the Intranet project, it is a working intranet (i.e. the technology) that you will get. If your ambition was something much more visionary, such as a wholly new way of working for your people, you are likely to be disappointed!

The conceptual name targets what is achieved by the functionality, rather than the functionality itself. For example, if your company name was BigCo and your purpose was seeking to get everyone in the company working together, you could call the project "Project OneBigCo" or "Project Unity". For the aforementioned new ways of working objective, you could use "Project Future Workplace".

The abstract approach

The abstract approach deals with how the project makes people feel. For example, "Project Bliss" (for happiness), "Project Wizard" (for magic) or "Project Pulse" (for fast-pacedness). Although one world usually fails to capture all you are trying to achieve with an Intranet Portal, this approach can prove highly effective (particularly where counter-cultural).

If all else fails

Nothing grabbed you so far? Well there is no saving you, then! I suppose there are always the standard fallback options: names of greek or roman gods, names of planets, names of birds and names of dances. These have the added value that - if you spawn follow-on projects in a sequence - you have ready-made logical follow-on project titles. Incidentally, "Project Mercury" would be my recommendation for planets or gods (as Mercury was the roman god of communications).

For more ideas on project names, why not check out my presentation in chapter 10 of my (free to access) Intranet Portal Guide.

About the author:

David Viney (david@viney.com) is the author of the Intranet Portal Guide; 31 pages of advice, tools and downloads covering the period before, during and after an Intranet Portal implementation.

Read the guide at http://www.viney.com/DFV/intranet_portal_guide or the Intranet Watch Blog at http://www.viney.com/intranet_watch.

How to Create Your Own Info Product

2009-04-21T11:13:00.000+08:00

In the last article we talked about why informational products are the best type of products to sell online. An informational product can be a digital book (known as an e-book), a digital report or a white paper, a piece of software, audio or video files, a web site, an ezine (electronic magazine), or a newsletter.

Any product that's informational, instructional, or educational in nature can be considered an info product.

If you missed the last article you might want to un-line your birdcage long enough to read it first so that you have a thorough understanding of what we'll be discussing this week, which is how to create your own info product.

As covered in detail last article, here are a few of the reasons why information is the best product to sell online:

· It's fast to create, fast to market

· There's no inventory to stock

· The startup costs are low

· You can automate the sales and delivery process

· There are no shipping and handling charges

One of the best things about information products is that you don't need a product designer or a manufacturing plant to crank out the goods. You also don't have to spend months and months doing product development.

If you have a computer and a word processing program you have everything you need to create a best-selling info product in a very short amount of time.

Great, you say, but I'm no writer. How the heck can I get into the information business? The good news is you don't have to be a great writer to create a great info product. If you don't have the ability to create the product yourself there are several avenues you can take to info product success.

Co-author with a writer

In my opinion, expert knowledge is much harder to come by than great writing skills. If you are an expert on a subject that people will pay to learn about, you just need a good writer to take your expert knowledge and put it in a salable form.

I know many subject matter experts who can't write their names in the snow and many excellent writers who don't have the expert knowledge required to create an informational product that will sell. Co-authoring can be a match made in Heaven if an equitable co-authoring arrangement can be made. Co-authoring means that you both get credit for creating the product and share in the revenues.

If you are an expert on a topic, but not a writer, find a writer to co-author the project with you. Conversely, if you're a writer without specific knowledge, find a subject matter expert and partner with them to create the product.

Hire a ghost writer

A ghost writer is someone who will write the ebook for you anonymously, with the writing credits going solely to you. You supply the expertise and guidance and the ghost writer puts it in a readable format. You can hire ghost writers on an hourly basis or for a flat fee, depending on the scope of the project.

There is no shame in using a ghost writer to put your thoughts to digital paper. You don't really think all those pro athletes and Hollywood actresses can write 300 page books now, do you?

Publish a directory

Can't think of a subject that you're qualified to write about? Try compiling a directory. A directory is nothing more than a listing of specialized information that you target market to a particular segment of the buying public. For example, my company publishes a dropship and wholesale industry directory that is a listing of company names, addresses, phone numbers, and website addresses. I simply have someone research the industry and compile their findings in a directory format, package it nicely, and sell it online for $27.

Sign on with an affiliate program and sell their info products

There are thousands of companies that sell informational products and most have affiliate programs that you can sign on with. Becoming an affiliate basically means you become a reseller of the company's products. You promote the product, you make the sale, the company delivers the product, and you earn a commission.

The key to creating a successful info product is this: the information must be worth far more than the price of the ebook itself. If you're charging $27 for your product, it must give the buyer many times that price in perceived value.

I asked info product expert Jim Edwards, co-Author of "How To Write and Publish Your Own eBook in as little a 7 Days" for his advice on how to create a killer info product.

Here are Jim's Top 5 Tips:

· Niche It - Make sure you are targeting a highly defined niche audience... don't try to sell to everyone. You can get a lot more money showing life insurance agents how to find more customers to buy $250,000 policies than you can trying to sell a product on generic sales skills improvement.

· Hit Their Pain - Make sure your info product hits a painful problem that members of your target audience will do just about ANYTHING to solve. The more intense the pain, the more they're willing to pay to get rid of it.

· Give Them A Taste - Give people a taste of what you offer in your info-product by giving them a sample. Just like the wholesale clubs get you to buy tater-tots in a 50 lb. bag by giving you one to try, you can induce people to buy your information by letting them read the first chapter or listen to the first few minutes of an audio.

· Entertain Them - People hate to be bored. Increase the power of your product by adding humor, drama and other entertainment elements that make them want more and more. This will not only help with future sales to satisfied customers, it will also keep your refunds down and increase word of mouth advertising.

· Keep it Evergreen - Don't make the mistake of creating a product that hits a fad or a fleeting market. Create info-products that can be updated with very little effort. This allows you to create a product once and keep the sales rolling in for years (literally) to come!

Tim Knox, Entrepreneur, Author, Speaker, Radio Host
Founder, The Insiders Club, Giving You The Power To Start Your Business Today
http://www.theinsidersclub.com
Bestselling Author of: "Everything I Know About Business I Learned From My Mama"
http://www.timknox.com

Making Money from Parked Domains

2009-04-21T11:12:00.001+08:00

Let me tell you a true story. A friend of my who likes to collect domain names was describing a few that he had acquired. While he has a wide range of domains in various categories, these particular domains were all related to web hosting.

Some of the domain names were similar to existing web hosting company names (or derivatives of web hosting company names). Others simply had ‘hosting’, ‘host’, or a related term in the domain itself.

So my friend and I were talking and he said something like, “Yeah, it’s a shame – if only I had the time to develop some content for some of these domains then I might make some money form them”. It turns out that he had no content on any of the domains – just parked pages, or no content at all. When I investigated the domains, it turned out that there was a small but steady traffic stream that visited these domains. Some simply typed in the domain, others apparently found the domain through a search engine that had categorized the parked page.

So I suggested the following to him – why not use a service that will take the domain as is – with no content whatsoever – and suggest search options that generate revenue for each click? He took my advice, grudgingly I might add, and guess what? He made $50 the first month from just a few of his domains.

He was so excited that he asked what he might do to further increase his revenues from his domain names. I suggested that he use his parking pages (these can be customized with some hosts) to test banners from affiliate programs with the highest paying hosting companies. He placed only three banners at the top of his pages – with a brief description of the company’s product offerings taken straight from their web sites. This also proved to be a great success – and his revenue stream increased.

My friend has since invested some time and energy in monetizing his other domains. He has either pointed the domains to a pay per click search engine, or listed affiliate links on almost every domain. This has turned a lackluster domain speculation business into a profit generating pay per click and affiliate business that requires almost no effort to maintain. Needless to say, my friend has taken my out to lunch a couple of times since then.

If you have parked domains and what to try getting paid for search results on those pages, check out this service offered by Sedo (there are others out there as well):

http://www.sedo.com/services/parking.php3

Good luck in transforming your parked domains into cold, hard cash!

About The Author

Derek Vaughan has been actively marketing on the Internet since 1995. Mr. Vaughan has marketed products at the Walt Disney Company as the online marketing manager of ecommerce for ESPN.com. Mr. Vaughan is also the founder of Cheap Hosting Directory - a web hosting review site. Mr. Vaughan holds degrees from both the Indiana University and Purdue University. He has also received a Master of Business Administration degree from the Owen School at Vanderbilt University. Cheap Hosting Directory - http://www.cheaphostingdirectory.com - is a part of TechPad Agency's network of web hosting portals.

Content Management Systems for Improved Marketing Results

2009-04-21T11:10:00.000+08:00

Introduction

The growth of Internet has placed before the surfer or an online shopper the problem of plenty -usually referred to as ‘information overload’. Website owners are faced with the challenge of website visibility, be it the surfer (including customers) or the search engines – online information must be continually reviewed and updated so that both of them have access to an up-to-date version. Hence out of this necessity, was born a need for online Content Management Systems (CMS). A CMS includes the system and processes whereby information is created, managed, published, and archived by one or more persons.

So what exactly is a CMS ?

CMS is generally used to publish new and frequently updated information. Examples of frequently published information include:

• Press releases

• Newsletters

• Events Schedule

• Specials

• Product updates

An online Content Management System can be as simple as an online HTML editor (like TinyMCE), or as complex as an enterprise solution like Documentum or Reddot. It’s important to choose an online content management system that suits the business needs of an organization. CMS today are scripts or software modules that usually perform the following functions:

• Creation of a structured website

• Facilitate online content management which includes adding / deleting / editing of content by business users

• Facilitate access rights for online content management

• Using content templates render consistent output

What are the advantages of an online Content Management System ?

Online content management has following advantages over conventional methods:

• Decrease Costs

- Content Creation : Content creation is less costly as business users can directly contribute information online without going through an IT specialist for authoring process.
- Online Content Management: Managing information is less costly as content is maintained by the company personnel and standard processes are automated. Common tasks like checking for dead links and archiving old pages are done transparently by the CMS.

• Reduced time overheads

- Reduced time for development: Just upload the CMS software to your web server and install and you are ready to go.
- Time Sensitive Operations: An online content management system improves the speed of publishing the content online. E.g. Publishing news ahead of the competition brings a first-mover advantage, attracting additional visits to the site.

• Empower the user: Empowering the business user involves making better use of information and putting control in the hands of content owners, thus facilitating online content management from anywhere, anyplace.

• Content Accessibility: Since most online content management systems follow the laid down standards, content accessibility is in multiple formats. Content is generated automatically to various outputs like standard HTML, printer friendly HTML, PDF, and XML.

• Updated content gets back customers: A frequently updated site using online content management system will have fresher content thus encouraging customers to return, resulting in increased revenue opportunities.

• Audit Trail: The audit trail, available at both the user and content level, provides a history of content changes. And thus ensures full accountability among the business users.

• Presentation Consistency: CMS present the content using well defined templates. These templates provide a mechanism for maintaining a consistent look and feel.

• Improved Search Engine Visibility: When content is updated frequently, search engines index your website pages as often.

Amod Puranik is an IT Consultant and Web Developer, with over 9 years of experience in Web Development. He can be contacted for more info / consultation on the subject.

Just Tag It!

2009-04-21T11:06:00.000+08:00

Tags - Revolutionary or Just Folly?

Just another trend or something else?

Trends happen overnight! Some catch on fast and explode very quickly into our every day use.

Most of these trends you can ignore as silly folly or at the most fine amusement. Anyone remember pet rocks, Farrah Fawcett hairdos, or last year's killer fashions?

Others, you have to pay more attention to: cell phones, digital cameras, mini-sites, optin lists, or email.

Right now, there's another trend you should keep your eye on: 'tags'.

What are tags? And why should you care about them?

Tags are a way of sorting and linking all that information in blogs and RSS Feeds. It groups together all the information on one particular subject.

It's a democratic 'search engine' for blogs.

Think of a 'tag' as a 'keyword' to be used in blogging and RSS Feeds (Feed tags are still in the works).

Tags have hit the radar lately because Technorati, which indexes 4.5 million blogs, started sorting blog posts by using tags.

They have created a folksonomy, drawing tags from different sources, mainly Flickr.com which sorts or groups pictures and from del.icio.us -- where you create a tag when you bookmark a page.

Or if your blogging software has categories -- this will be recognized by Technorati as a tag.

If you want to create a 'tag' it's very simple; just place this code in your blog:

<*a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Computers" rel="tag">Computers<*/a>
(remove asterisks in actual code)

and you will have created a tag for computers.

A tag makes it easier and faster to find information on your favorite subject. It gives you a cross section of real views and opinions floating in the ether.

There are some inherent problems in this system; will the posts grow so quickly and so large -- it's like 'finding a needle in a haystack' or will you have to dig thru a lot of muck to find the scattered diamonds. Or maybe a ranking system will be put in place but this goes against the 'democratic code' of blogging.

Regardless, the traffic and marketing potential of 'tags' could be very beneficial to those who use it to their advantage.

A marketer with a product to introduce or promote could aggressively target tags as part of their advertising budget. As blogging increases in popularity -- it's something to watch!

As a website owner -- tags could be a great source of targeted traffic. And the keyword here is 'targeted'.

It's the kind of visitor you want coming to your site or blog. It can only lead to a better quality visitor. Similar to a visitor coming from the major search engines. One that is really searching for your information.

The next big question, how will marketers exploit these tags to make a few bucks? Everyone knows that's coming!

Will we have a 'tag search engine' that can rival the quality of a Google or Yahoo? Or do we need one?

As with any new trend -- you never know how it will play out.

Some interesting questions have yet to be answered:

Tags are basically keywords for blogs -- but as everyone knows the quality of links to these tags are not all equal. Will someone step in and rank these or will they remain democratic?

Just how will tags work for building content or links to your site? How will the search engines use these tags? How will marketers and advertisers exploit the potential of all this content and the content's viewers?

Will we have tag-spamming? (Just what we need another form of spamming!) Someone flooding these tags with thousands of links to get traffic or sell a product.

Not to hype it too much but there's a real 'we're entering unknown territory' feeling with blogging and RSS lately. Heady days for those keeping a close watch on the events unfolding. There are countless applications probably already in the works for tags!

It could be the start of something big or it could just fizzle.

In any case -- keep your eyes peeled to that cursor! There's probably a tag on the end of it!

This trend may just offer more than fine amusement.

----

To Create a blog within minutes - visit this link:
RSS Report and Create Blog Guide
Copyright © 2005 Titus Hoskins of bizwaremagic.com.
This article may be freely distributed if this resource
box stays attached. Visit http://www.bizwaremagic.com
for more simple solutions to your online marketing tasks.
----

Banner Exchange Program

2009-04-21T11:04:00.002+08:00

How do you find a banner exchange program? That’s the easy part. Just a simple web search will bring up a host of options. Once you choose a site, usually the process is straightforward. Don’t just go with the first program you come across, though; each one will have its strengths and weaknesses. Some programs focus their attention on logical banner placement rather than others and some specialize in sites that contain a particular subject matter. One thing to which you need to pay particular caution is whether the exchange program charges a fee. Most don’t, but in some cases you’ll get a better exchange ratio (in other words, you’ll have to post fewer banners on your site per one of your banners that is posted) if you pay a fee.

Generally, for every banner you agree to display, the exchange gives you a piece of HTML code that instructs the visitor’s web browser to bring up a banner from the exchange program’s server. In doing so, the banner exchange program can change which banners are on which sites and they can track the success level of particular banner ads on specific sites – information they use when pairing sites with relevant advertisers.

The upside to joining a program like this is that your site gains exposure on a variety of other sites for free. The downside is that you don’t have much control over where your ads appear and what ads you will end up displaying on your site. That means you run the risk of not being particularly fond of what ends up on your site or where your site ends up being advertised.

Do you want to learn more about how I do it? I have just completed my brand new guide to article marketing success, ‘Your Article Writing and Promotion Guide‘

Download it free here: http://www.secrets-of-internet-success.com/articlewriting.html

Do you want to learn how to build a massive list fast? Click here: http://www.secrets-of-internet-success.com/listbuilding.htm

How To Use Email Autoresponders to Boost Customer Loyalty

2009-04-21T11:04:00.001+08:00

Your e-commerce website relies on its customers to become returning customers in order to develop a successful business. The question you might be wondering, however, is how to make your customers become loyal to you and return. There are plenty of ways you can increase customer loyalty, and the use of email autoresponders is but one.

*Automatically Send E-mails

When you have an email autoresponder, it sends an e-mail immediately to any individual that clicks yes to receiving e-mails and additional information from your company. Since the autoresponder automatically does this it eliminates any problems by human error like forgetting to send an e-mail, typing the address wrong, waiting too long, and other similar errors. The autoresponder sends an e-mail immediately to the address that was given, and it frees up your time to focus on other things, knowing your customers and potential customers are receiving the information they need.

*Saves Time

Since your autoresponder has been sending out e-mails and generating interest you know that when you receive an e-mail from a potential or past customer that they are primed up enough about the product or service and already have a interest without you having to sell them on it. Therefore, you receive customers when they are ready to talk which increases your success rate, and you won’t waste time on customers who are not interested. Not to mention the amount of time you'll save by not having to personally send e-mails over and over and over again.

*Reminders

Of course if you are using an autoresponder you are sending out e-mails to your customers about a variety of products and services in the normal series of 7 e-mails. However, if you really want to boost customer loyalty to your products don’t forget to send out an eighth e-mail that reminds the recipient about your product and that they still have time to buy. This e-mail should only be a reminder and nothing pushy. It should only be sent to those individuals who did not already sign up for your product or service.

*Stay in Touch

Another way to keep your customer loyalty and keep them buying from you is to stay in touch. No, this does not mean you should send them e-mails every week. If you do this you risk annoying a lot of subscribers and ultimately getting unsubscribe requests. Instead, simply keep in touch every month or so with new offers and products. Your target market can’t buy from you if they do not know what you are offering. Also, in these e-mails be sure to offer discounts and bonuses. When you do this you give people yet another incentive to do business with you!

Michael Turner reveals step-by-step how you can increase search engine traffic in his free 7 part mini-series. Grab it now at http://www.powertraffictactics.com/

Teleseminars, Audio Downloads, Podcasts: Listen Up So You'll Learn and Earn More

2009-04-21T11:03:00.000+08:00

Internet Marketers love audio. You can’t blame them. They used to have to spend weeks, or even months, writing an ebook to have something to sell. Now, they just pick a hot topic, interview an expert for a couple of hours with the recorder turned on, and Bam! They’ve got a hot new information product.

The audience for these products seem to love audio too. It’s certainly quicker than reading a book. Because it can be produced more quickly, information can be more timely. One late summer day in 2005, Google changed how it ranked AdWords. That same night a teleseminar on the subject drew thousands of listeners.

Audio is Great Except for One Problem

Audio looks to be a perfect medium for online learning and communication except for one thing. A lot of folks don’t know how to listen very well. Not the kind of listening you need to do if you’re going to learn something.

Check with participants right after a teleseminar ends and they say they learned a lot. Ask them about it a few days later and most report they’ve forgotten exactly what it was they learned. That’s true whether it’s a seminar, a podcast, or even an audio download. Even when they have the file, most people don’t listen more than once.

Listening to learn and to retain is actually a skill that has to be developed. It’s not hard. You just have to know a few tricks. Once you do you’ll be able to hang on to the key parts of what you hear. You’ll remember new knowledge so you can apply it to your own marketing and business efforts. You’ll start listening to learn and earn more.

5 Tips For Honing Your Listening Skills So You Can Learn More

Prepare. Give some thought in advance to what the speaker will talk about. Try to determine what you know and don’t know about the subject. That way, when the presentation starts, you’ll be ready to pick up on those areas you don’t know as much about. Download and review any material provided in advance. If you have time, search for related material online and scan to get more background on the subject.

Focus. Once the speaker starts, concentrate. That’s actually not as easy as it sounds. Our minds think 4 times faster than a presenter speaks. That’s why it’s so easy to find your mind wandering while listening. Three quarters of the time your mind is twiddling it’s virtual thumbs! You’ve just got to keep bringing your attention back to the subject. Also, make sure you eliminate distractions. Instead of gripping a phone handset, use a speakerphone or headset. If you’re attending a seminar, make sure to sit where you can see and hear clearly.

Find Your Purpose. Determine both before and during the presentation what makes it important TO YOU. It needs to have a purpose – a concrete, vivid reason. You won’t have much motivation to listen without one. If it turns out you can’t find a purpose, stop listening. Go on to something that uses your time more effectively.

Look for Patterns. Visualize the patterns of organization in what’s being said. It will help you remember key points. Patterns are easier to recall than isolated facts. For example, how does the speaker begin and end each topic? With a brief summary of the main idea? What about details or examples? Are they used to make certain points? Can you easily see the relationship between the points presented? It’s likely you’ll find more organization in prepared speeches and seminar presentations than teleconferences, particularly interviews. But presenters almost always start with some idea of structure even if they drift off course. Do your best to find it.

Take Notes. It’s true what they told you back in school. Taking notes enhances listening and recall. When you take notes, though, don’t go overboard with detail or they just become another distraction. Tie them to the patterns and structure you find. Not everything is equally important. Be selective. Think of your notes in terms of review. The one thing that really helps recall is what almost no one does: review notes after the presentation and in the future.

Listen Well and You’ll Learn and Earn More

Listening to learn is a skill you have to develop. You’ve just seen five tips that will help. Once you do you’ll be able to more easily remember what you hear in teleseminars, podcasts and audios. You’ll remember new knowledge so you can apply it to your own marketing and business efforts. You’ll start actively listening and you’ll learn and earn more.

Ronald A Murphy is a Copywriter and Graphic Designer specializing in Direct Response and Internet Marketing. Murphy writes and designs sales letters, direct mail packages, inserts, web sales pages, direct email, newsletters for marketing, Internet articles, white papers, and other sales focused materials. He provides expertise to clients serving financial, business, technology, health, opportunity and fundraising markets.

For more information on copywriting and marketing, visit his site at RAMurphy.com. There you can subscribe to his newsletter, R A Murphy’s Copywriting and Design Tips. You can also read Murphy's Blog on Copywriting and Design for Internet and Direct marketing at RonaldAMurphy.com.

Copyright 2005 Ronald A Murphy. Permission to reproduce this article in any form is freely given so long as the text and this credit box stays as is without modifications.

Real Estate Auction Action - Buying A Home At Auction

2009-04-21T11:02:00.002+08:00

Due in part to the popularity of the U. S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)'s home auction program, more potential homebuyers than ever are buying homes at auction. Homes for auction aren't limited to just HUD, however. Many government entities auction homes for payment of back taxes, and some homeowners even auction their homes on eBay.com!

Homebuyers considering buying a home at auction should take some steps in advance to help them with their bid price, and even whether to bid at all on a specific home. There will always be a degree of risk when buying a home this way, but with a little diligence, potential homebuyers could save a lot of money buying in this manner.

Before the auction, you should have your financing arranged, and have enough cash on hand or in your bank account to cover a deposit on your purchase. You need to check the features, location, condition, and ownership history first. Afterwards, be sure to learn what the property is worth by looking at sales of comparable properties in the same area. Compare homes with the same number of rooms is possible, but be sure to allow for price differences due to pools, decks, carpeting, window treatments, etc.

At the auction itself, resist the temptation to get into a personal bidding war, just "to beat out the other guy". Have a set price limit and stick to it. Other houses will come along, and you don't have to win the first auction that comes your way.

You should know that the price of a home at auction is typically the loan balance (if foreclosed), plus any back taxes owed, plus legal fees and other expenses in foreclosing the property. This will typically be the opening bid amount, and the price will go up from there. Even so, it's possible to get a great deal in an auctioned house, with a little research and planning first.

Also, know that you probably won't be able to get an inspection, and are buying the home "as is". If you can't do any needed repair work yourself, or can't hire it done within your budget, you may not end up getting such a bargain in the end.

About The Author

Jakob Jelling is the founder of http://www.cashbazar.com. Visit his website for the latest on personal finance, debt elimination, budgeting, credit cards and real estate.

Affiliate Marketing - Join in on the Success of the 2nd Wave

2009-04-21T10:57:00.000+08:00

What do I mean by '2nd Wave'? Let me explain:

Can you remember the good old days when affiliate programs first came into existence in the mid to late 1990's? Everybody jumped in with two feet and put up dozens of affiliate links on their site with no real thought to what they were doing. We then wondered why we didn't make any money - not any real money that is.

The same thing has happened with the launch of other new industries in that the initial craze and hype got out of hand but when things quietened down people thought things through, put together business models and now succeed big time within that industry. The good news is that we, as affiliate marketers, can learn from these industries through their first and second phases.

A Definition of what a First and Second Wave is

The first wave is the pioneering stage, the launch of a new industry. There is lots of excitement and hype with most people now knowing what they are doing. There are many failures and very little profits during this period.

The second wave is the exciting phase. It has already come to light within phase 1 that there is potential within the industry. People put together long-term business plans and even ordinary people like you and I can succeed in a big way. Hence, wave 2 is when the real wealth is created.

Industry Examples of their First and Second Waves Let's take a look at some examples of industries in their first and second waves and the success they have achieved for thousands of people who were in the right place at the right time:

Video Cassette Recorders (VCR): Remember the first VCRs? They were huge, very expensive and not many people could afford one. In 1972 Phillips were the first to launch a VCR for home use but it didn't appeal to the consumer market. Only a few hundred were sold.

Second wave: VHS introduced their version of the VCR in 1977 which was more appealing to the public. Prices came down and soon the average household had one. Today, DVD players are now replacing them and huge profits are being sought in this industry.

Personal Computers: In 1976 Apple launched the first PC, quickly followed by IBM with Microsoft's DOS operating system in 1981. These PCs were slow, expensive and always seemed to crash.

Second wave: Dell and Compaq introduced new design PCs, and Bill Gates and his Microsoft Empire launched 'Windows 1.0' in 1985. As a result of this boom thousands of millionaires were created in a single decade.

The 1st and 2nd Wave of Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing: The first wave of the Internet and the affiliate marketing business lasted between approximately 1996-2003. All the initial hype about the World Wide Web and making money from selling other people's stuff grew within this period. Affiliates give no real thought to their sites and put up dozens of affiliate links. Not many affiliate marketers made any real money to talk of and not many of these sites are in existence today.

Second wave: From 2003 onwards the initial hype has died down and with the introduction of new wave technology and software, means that it is now easier for the average webmaster to build a successful and useful website business to succeed long-term with big profits.

So What Does This Mean For Today's Affiliate Marketer's?

You are now caught up at the beginning of the 2nd wave of affiliate marketing. You are in the right place at the right time - use this to your advantage now... today... Here are some reasons why:-

· The online shopping industry is growing at a phenomenal rate

· More and more people are buying online

· The competition with affiliate sites is still relatively low as compared to what it will be like in the future

In order to get ahead of this ever-increasing competitive industry, you need to think of affiliate marketing as a business. Even go as far as writing a business plan out for your affiliate business. You need to understand that in order to get ahead of your competition and even get to the top of the search engines, you need to build a business platform for long-term success. You must think of yourself as a publisher of informational content first, then an affiliate marketer second. This is the 'key' to the success of the second wave of affiliate marketing. Let me repeat it again 'you must think of yourself as a publisher of informational content first, then an affiliate marketer second'.

Summary

Realize that the Internet is still in its infancy and that you are here in the right place at the right time. This could only happen once in your life, so jump on it straight away. The first frantic phase of affiliate marketing is over and we have entered the new and exciting second phase, which is where the 'real' wealth is created. Remember, Bill Gates and his Microsoft Empire came into existence within the second phase of the personal computer industry - the rest is history!

Claire Bowes is a successful freelance writer and owner of many successful affiliate marketing websites. Read how Claire built her money-making affiliate sites at http://www.website-business-solutions.com

The 14 Point Web Hosting Checklist

2009-04-21T10:21:00.000+08:00

How To Select A Web Hosting Company

When starting out, it is easy to overlook some of the most important factors when selecting a web host while paying too much attention on great features which you may not need at the start.

For example, most new webmasters judge a web host by the amount of disk space they offer. The thinking is generally, the more the better. There are many other factors to take into consideration. Each factor can be weighed up according to the features each specific web hosting company offers. Each company may also offer several different plans. The features from plan to plan may also differ.

Don't rush

Some deals may look good at first but if one feature that is important according to your needs is missing, then that deal may not be so good in your opinion. This does not cast a value judgment on any particular web host. The deal in and of itself may be good for me for example but not for you. So do your research and compare different companies and plans until you weigh up all the factors that are important to *your* needs.

What factors do I weigh up?

Tech Support - I don't know about you, but I like the feeling of knowing that support is available when I need it. Test different companies before you sign up by sending them an email with a question or two. If they respond quickly, this is a good sign.

Uptime - The more uptime they guarantee, the better. 99% uptime is the minimum acceptable standard. I look for 99% plus guaranteed uptime.

Disk Space - Decide how much disk space you will require. A web page with one logo does not take up much web space at all. Calculate how big your web site is in relation to the disk space alloted.

Bandwidth - This factor is usually overlooked until the bandwidth limit is reached. If you go over your alloted bandwidth, you will get a hefty bill. If you are running a site with lots of downloads, or a site with lots of images such at a photo post site, your bandwidth will be a lot higher than a site with mainly text.

CGI Bin - This is now standard with good hosting companies. If you do not have access to your own CGI Bin, you cannot install scripts and programs.

Perl - If you do not have Perl, you cannot run Perl Programs. Many good scripts that you buy or get for free are written in Perl. In my opinion, it would be a limitation not to have the latest version of Perl installed.

SSL - If you intend to accept credit cards orders directly from your website, you will need Secure Socket Layer included in your plan. This is one of those easily overlooked features. You might sign up for a plan that looks attractive for whatever reason, then down the track, you might discover that you need this feature. If it is not included in your plan, you might be gob-smacked if the extra monthly charge is $10.00. To use this feature you need a merchant account. There is no need to make this a priority if you have no merchant account because you can use a third party credit card processor.

SSI - Server Side Includes are great if you want to spend minimal time updating your site. Here's how it works. My site contains SSI's. The left and right nav menus and the little search engine in the left nav menu are "included" with an SSI command in the master page template. If I need to update one of the nav links, there is no need to edit all the pages that contain the menus. I just edit one file which contains the menu HTML and upload it to my site. It's awsome.

MySQL - What scripts are you going to run? Some programs require a MySQL database to run. I had this problem with a particular web host. They wanted to charge me $10.00 per month for a MySQL database. WOW. I just took out a new plan with another hosting company for under 10 bucks a month and 5 MySQL Databases are included in the price. Say no more.

PHP - Many new scripts and programs require PHP support. Again, this feature can be a $10 extra but most good hosts offer it standard. Imagine if you do not have PHP support but the latest new free Toplist, Blogging script or Shopping Cart requires PHP. Again, this feature is almost standard these days.

CubeCart is an example of a free Shopping Cart Script that requires PHP and MySQL: http://www.cubecart.com/site/home/

Domain Name - What's the point in buying web space if you cannot point your own domain name to the site? Some companies will help you register a domain name but you should compare prices and learn how to register your domain yourself. This way you are in control of your domain name if you ever change hosts.

FTP Access - Unlimited and unrestricted FTP access to your site is essential. You will need an FTP program to transfer files.

Control Panel - Not all control panels are the same. Some are easier to use than others. Some control panels the learning curve is steep while others are easy. If you select a plan where you cannot preview your control panel before you buy, you can always use the 30 day money back guarantee to get out if you are not happy. If they are not offering a working demo of the control panel, maybe they are not proud of it. In my experience, I have always been disappointed with the quality of the control panel when a demo was not available.

Statistics Program - A good stats program is handy if you want to keep an eye on how many visitors you are getting, where they are coming from, referrers, top entry and exit pages and so on. Some companies offer excellent stats programs as standard while others offer basic stats but you have to pay extra for advanced statistics. If you find a good hosting deal but the stats program is a bit basic, why not email the company and ask if they can install AWStats before you sign up. AWStats is an excellent FREE advanced statistics program: http://www.awstats.org

The author, Ed Zivkovic is based on the Gold Coast in Australia. Ed writes and publishes home business and webmaster articles at http://www.ezau.com and enjoys going to http://www.gold-coast-beaches.com.

What and How to choose the Right Keywords for Mega Traffic

2009-04-21T10:20:00.000+08:00

Keywords in Search Engine Optimizing and Search Engine Marketing are the building blocks and foundation of your website on the search engines. If your foundation is weak or poorly put together your webpages won't have much to be based upon for the engines to rank with.

Therefore, careful consideration is of utmost importance when choosing your keywords for your webpages, and so if you choose and target the wrong keywords, all your efforts will be wasted.

When having chosen your keywords, you could be in one of two scenarios: You were able to get a top 10 position in a major search engine and were very excited about the traffic that flooded in, or You got a top 10 ranking, but only a few visitors trickled in to see your site.

Whats happened?

Well, in the first scenario, the person selected a keyword or phrase that was very popular and chose correctly, and lots a people searched on it, rather the other person optimized his/her page for a keyword phrase that not many people searched on, therefore received very little traffic.

So the million dollar question is then: How do you know how to choose the right ones to optimize your website for?

I'll first mention a few ways in which to choose your keywords wisely and then ways to see how popular they are.

1. Think in terms of your customer, put yourself in your customers shoes, what would your customer search for to find you? and
2. Focus your keywords into short, 2 or 3 word phrases (Studies show the majority search for 2 or 3 word phrases)

You can use the above tips in conjunction with the following tools.

http://www.nichebot.com https://adwords.google.com/select/main?cmd=KeywordSandbox http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion

The above sites will be very useful, in choosing your keywords, so use them to your advantage.

The overture tool, shows the phrase and the number of times a keyword phrase was searched for in the preceding month, while the Google Tool is used for adwords, although I myself and know of others that still use it for general keyword knowledge, and the nichebot site is very useful and a knowledgeable tool for "spotting" the niche words that are being searched for.

Ideally, you want to target keywords and phrases that are searched with some frequency, and that are specific to your Web site, but less competitive, or put another way, think and choose popular keywords that your competitors have overlooked, and which are still popular.

The best thing to try to do is to target multi-word keyword phrases that give you the highest quality leads. For example; if your targeting "software" don't just optimize your page for that word "software" chose a focused niche phrase to target, think in terms of "childrens software" or "educational software",... get the idea?

Think focus?

Also, a small addendum I saw recently on Webposition.com; "...If you take the time to target the RIGHT keywords,[...]you'll be ahead of 99% of the world and you'll be generating more traffic with less effort. Work smarter, not harder is what we always say!"

To sum up,... put yourself in your customers shoes when choosing our keywords, what do you want your customer to search for so they find you online, and input that into a 2 or 3 word phrase, while using the above tools to assist you in this process.

This article was written by Burke Ferguson of AltaCanWeb.com. Burke holds both a BSc. degree in Computer Science as well Certification in Search Engine Optimization and Marketing Strategies. He also regularly publishes The ACE! newsletter, in which he shares his experience, methods, and knowledge with others. Burke can be contacted by his main website AltaCanWeb.com or The ACE! ezine.

How To Attract People To Your Web Site and Leave Their Contact

2009-04-21T10:19:00.000+08:00

If you have a website, you want your visitors to stay longer on your website and get more sales. Here are 10 ways you can do to improve it.

1. Give people a free subscription to your e-zine. Almost everyone is publishing a e-zine nowadays so it's important to give something extra with the free subscription. You could offer a free gift or advertising when people subscribe.

2. Provide your visitors with free content. Your content will be more attractive to your visitors if it's up-to-date or original. You could also offer people the option to reprint the content in their e-zine or web site.

3. Offer a free online directory. The directory could be full of interesting ebooks, e-zines, web sites etc. If people find your directory to be a valuable resource they will visit it over and over.

4. Give your visitors a free ebook. You could also include your own ad in the ebook and allow other people to give it away. If you don't want to take the time to write one, you could ask other writers permission to use their articles.

5. Hold free online classes or seminars. They could be held in your web site's chat room. The idea of "live" information will definitely entice people to visit your web site. You will become known as an expert on the topic.

6. Give visitors a free entry into your contest or sweepstakes. The prizes should be something of interest or value to your visitors. Most people who enter will continually revisit your web site to get the results.

7. Let visitors download free software. It could be freeware, shareware, demos etc. You could even turn part of your site into a free software directory. If you created the software, include your ad inside and let other people give it away.

8. Offer free online services or utilities from your web site. They could be search engine submitting, copy writing proofreading etc. The service or utility should be helpful to your target audience.

9. Give free consulting to people who visit your web site. You could offer your knowledge via e-mail or by telephone. People will consider this a huge value because consulting fees can be very expensive.

10. Give your visitors a free membership to your online club. People want to belong to something, why not your online club. You could also give away a free e-zine for club members only.

The smart way is to get your visitors's name and email address even they do not buy anything from you at first visit. You can put a form on your front page and offer some valuable freebies to let them sign in. Then you can follow up with them with more emails about your product and your company.

Julia Tang publishes "Smart Online Business Tips" Newsletter which helps people to start, run and grow Internet businesses. To get tips, tactics, reliable business opportunities and promotional tools, plus over $200 free bonuses, you can visit http://www.best-internet-businesses.com

Peer to Peer Internet Video Broadcasting

2009-04-21T10:18:00.000+08:00

Unlike standard television broadcasting, there are a limited number of viewers that an Internet television station can accommodate. These limitations are determined by the amount of bandwidth the network media server has available. A popular Internet television station would require large amounts of bandwidth to provide the broadcast to a large viewing audience.

Peer to Peer (Commonly referred to as P2P) broadcasting allows viewers using specialized software to re-distribute the media broadcasts. This eliminates the need to utilize costly centralized media servers to distribute the broadcast and results in cost savings for bandwidth consumption.

Any size business or group can establish an effective media broadcast presence without the huge costs normally associated with Internet broadcasting. Using this method, only a few data streams are required for a global Internet broadcast distribution.

P2P Internet broadcasting provides extremely bandwidth friendly results and can support a virtually unlimited number of users. This method also provides effective security against Denial Of Service (DOS) attacks which can cripple a centralized server network architecture.

There are both commercial and non commercial options that offer P2P broadcast ability for Internet television.

This article will cover free open source software.

Open source is an initiative that allows people to have access to the source code of software. This is the actual nuts and bolts that allow the software to operate. This initiative also allows people the ability to redistribute and or modify the source code thus allowing improvements and adaptations of the software.

Peercast

Peercast is a P2P media broadcast application that is available for the Windows, Unix and Mac operating systems. It is compatible with Shoutcast, Icecast and Windows Media streaming protocols.

The software was originally designed to use Gnutella as a basis for broadcast distribution. The software now uses a hierarchal topology for media broadcast distribution. This new method provides greater scalability and more data organization.

Broadcast station data is collected by the YP directory. This data is continuously updated by individual broadcasters. Listeners / viewers (client software) provide the connection points between themselves, the broadcasters and others.

Each broadcaster has the option of including a digital signature to enable media broadcast authentication. This will prevent their broadcasts from being hijacked and replaced with alternative material.

The following video codecs are supported by Peercast: VP3, VP6, Theora and WMV. It can also be used for audio broadcasting and can be configured to use several audio codecs. The software can be used to broadcast individual static media files as well.

Hardware network routers use Network Address Translation to provide internal IP addresses for computers within that network. Traffic flowing through NAT must be converted from internal IP addresses to external IP addresses. P2P traffic routing through NAT usually requires software port forwarding to bypass NAT. Peercast is NAT friendly software and requires no special port forwarding.

A plug-in is available for the popular Winamp media player. (Winamp versions 2.x and 5.x) This can be installed and used by clients to easily receive a Peercast station.

The Peercast network provides a real time online station directory of current broadcasters. (http://yp.peercast.org)

The main Peercast client must be installed to broadcast using this P2P network.

Additional resources

Peercast Frequently Asked Questions: (http://www.peercast.org/wiki/wakka.php?wakka=FrequentlyAskedQuestions)

Peercast Help : (http://www.peercast.org/help.php)

Peercast Community Forum : (http://www.peercast.org/forum)

FreeCast

FreeCast is a Java P2P broadcast application. Users must install the Java Runtime Environment, which is available for the Windows, Unix and Mac operating systems. It is compatible with the Icecast streaming protocol.

The software has a internal audio and video player applet that can play both the Ogg Vorbis open source audio codec, and the Theora open source video codec. It can also be configured to use the Java Web Start feature for automatically loading and launching. This enables a "one click" approach for web based end users.

Each broadcaster has the option of including a digital signature to enable media broadcast authentication. This will prevent their broadcasts from being hijacked and replaced with alternative material.

FreeCast uses a hierarchal method of media broadcast distribution. Each broadcaster acts as a central node with listeners / viewers receiving data from them and relaying to other listeners / viewers.

Icecast and JRoar media streaming server software can be used with FreeCast. In addition, Ezstream can be used with both JRoar and Icecast to source both Ogg Vorbis and Theora files. This software is a command line utility and is available for Windows and Unix operating systems.

FreeCast is continuing software development that will allow its deployment across networks that interact with network routers that utilize Network Address Translation (NAT). Port forwarding is currently required to accommodate NAT routers.

A real time station directory is currently not available or supported.

Additional resources:

FreeCast : (http://www.freecast.org)

Theora : (http://www.theora.org)

IceCast : (http://www.icecast.org)

Dave Childers is a freelance Internet broadcast consultant, writer and the webmaster of http://www.scvi.net, the Winamp TV / NullSoft video information website.

Tune In to Video Marketing

2009-04-21T10:17:00.000+08:00

Is your product or service visually appealing? Do you offer workshops? If so, consider making videos to highlight your business on your website. It's not as hard (or expensive) as it once was.

Video marketing can range from a clip of a seminar, a tutorial, a demonstration of your services, to a commercial.

Tips:

* Your video should fit with your business image and target market.

* Know your niche.

* Provide something of value (even humor has value). Just like in all marketing, you want people to pass your information around to others in their network.

* Ensure that your website's name is prominently displayed throughout the video. You want people to be able to find your business easily (if they aren't watching the video on your website).

* Offer your video in both low-fidelity and high fidelity options. Lower fidelity takes up less space on the screen (smaller), grainier, and monaural (and is quicker to download).

* If you'll be offering the video for viewing on your website, offer both QuickTime and Windows Media formats.

* Allow your videos to be downloaded to your client's computer (not just viewed in the browser).

* Consider uploading the video to free video sites such as YouTube and Google Video.

I have recently been involved in two (online) video projects:

The first project was shot using a (unattended) digital camcorder on a tripod. I transferred the raw footage to a Macintosh computer using MediaFork and edited it with iMovie HD. During the editing process, I titled, compressed and reduced the high-definition video in size. Total out-of-pocket expense: $69.99 (iLife '06). With no marketing budget, on the first day, there were over 500 viewings of videos on YouTube alone. It has generated significant web traffic, inquiries, and sales.

The second project was shot on a makeshift set with green screen backdrop (to insert a digital background). It was shot using a professional video camera, a stereo MP3 recorder, and 3 floor lights. Total out-of-pocket expense: over $2000 (set + rentals + camera man + director + editing). This project is still in production.

Jay Hamilton-Roth is a creative business marketing consultant who specializes in helping startups get established, growing established companies and helping teams work together to solve their problems. He publishes a free monthly newsletter (Creative Business Ideas) with quick and useful marketing tips. Contact him at http://www.ManyGoodIideas.com

Aim At The Bullseye And Your Online Home Business Will Prosper

2009-04-21T10:15:00.000+08:00

Traffic is one thing, but targeted traffic is everything.

You have no doubt seen dozens of offers similar to "10,000 hits per hour driven to your website!". This type of website traffic is completely untargeted and will undoubtedly result in a very low conversion ratio. It's basically "throw it up against the wall and hope something sticks". The big incoming numbers give the illusion of progress, but you will achieve better results with a lower volume of highly targeted traffic.

I speak from experience because in the early days of developing my home business, I went for the big numbers instead of focusing on targeting prospects. It took me a while to appreciate the importance of targeting (quality) instead of just going for the big numbers, but it was a lesson well learned.

Exchanging links has been an important part of generating website traffic for quite some time, but the vast majority of people looking to trade links don't understand that just wildly swapping links with any willing webmaster is not the way to go.

For the last few years, most webmasters have been in a "pleasing Google" mode since Google had such a dominant position. Now that challengers are emerging, most notably Yahoo, MSN, and Ask Jeeves, the search engine ranking landscape is becoming much more complicated than just marching to the tune Google played.

Many website owners seem to be of the opinion that the sole purpose of exchanging links is to try to improve the search engine ranking position of their website. While it is true that links pointing to your website can help your search engine ranking, the reason for obtaining inbound links goes far deeper than that.

In my opinion, the targeted traffic that relevant links pointing to your site will bring can be as important as the traffic that comes to your website from people using search engines. This is where linking philosophy comes in. If you limit yourself to exchanging links only with websites that have a theme highly relevant to your own, the traffic you receive from those links will be far more targeted (valuable) than traffic you might receive from links with websites that have nothing to do with your theme.

Not only do highly relevant links bring you more highly targeted traffic, but they also play a "customer satisfaction" role for visitors to your website who arrived there as a result of a search engine query. If someone arrives at your website after performing a search for, lets say "work at home" and then finds your website full of links to a bunch of off topic sites (Viagra, online casinos, hotel reservations, sports betting, etc, etc) the impression is often not favorable and may actually drive your visitor away before they consider whatever it is that your website itself is offering.

Keep your eye on the bullseye and develop highly targeted traffic by having good content on your website and exchanging links with highly relevant sites that also offer good content. Remember, traffic is one thing, but targeted traffic is everything.

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This article is freely available for reprint provided that the resource box at the end of the article is left intact and the article is published complete and unaltered. If you are using this article on a website or e-book, please make sure that the link in the resource box is live or clickable.

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Kirk Bannerman operates a successful home based business and coaches others seeking to start their own home based business.

Visit his website at Legitimate Home Based Business for more details. http://www.business-at-home.us/

CAN-SPAM Basics

2009-04-21T10:14:00.000+08:00

I. BACKGROUND

The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act) establishes requirements for those who send commercial email, spells out penalties for spammers and companies whose products are advertised in spam if they violate the law, and gives consumers the right to ask emailers to stop spamming them.

The law, which became effective January 1, 2004, covers email whose primary purpose is advertising or promoting a commercial product or service, including content on a Web site.

A "transactional or relationship message" – email that facilitates an agreed-upon transaction or updates a customer in an existing business relationship – may not contain false or misleading routing information, but otherwise is exempt from most provisions of the CAN-SPAM Act.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is authorized to enforce the CAN-SPAM Act. CAN-SPAM also gives the U.S. Department of Justice the authority to enforce its criminal sanctions.

Other federal and state agencies can enforce the law against organizations under their jurisdiction, and companies that provide Internet access may sue violators, as well.

II. WHAT THE LAW REQUIRES

A. It bans false or misleading header information. Your email's "From," "To," and routing information – including the originating domain name and email address – must be accurate and identify the person who initiated the email.

B. It prohibits deceptive subject lines. The subject line cannot mislead the recipient about the contents or subject matter of the message.

C. It requires that your email give recipients an opt-out method. You must provide a return email address or another Internet-based response mechanism that allows a recipient to ask you not to send future email messages to that email address, and you must honor the requests. You may create a "menu" of choices to allow a recipient to opt out of certain types of messages, but you must include the option to end any commercial messages from the sender.

Any opt-out mechanism you offer must be able to process opt-out requests for at least 30 days after you send your commercial email. When you receive an opt-out request, the law gives you 10 business days to stop sending email to the requestor's email address. You cannot help another entity send email to that address, or have another entity send email on your behalf to that address. Finally, it's illegal for you to sell or transfer the email addresses of people who choose not to receive your email, even in the form of a mailing list, unless you transfer the addresses so another entity can comply with the law.

D. It requires that commercial email be identified as an advertisement and include the sender's valid physical postal address. Your message must contain clear and conspicuous notice that the message is an advertisement or solicitation and that the recipient can opt out of receiving more commercial email from you. It also must include your valid physical postal address.

III. PENALTIES

Each violation of the above provisions is subject to fines of up to $11,000. Deceptive commercial email also is subject to laws banning false or misleading advertising.

Additional fines are provided for commercial emailers who not only violate the rules described above, but that also:

A. "Harvest" email addresses from Web sites or Web services that have published a notice prohibiting the transfer of email addresses for the purpose of sending email generate email addresses using a "dictionary attack" – combining names, letters, or numbers into multiple permutations

B. Use scripts or other automated ways to register for multiple email or user accounts to send commercial email

C. Relay emails through a computer or network without permission – for example, by taking advantage of open relays or open proxies without authorization.

The law allows the U.S. Department of Justice to seek criminal penalties, including imprisonment, for commercial emailers who do – or conspire to:

A. Use another computer without authorization and send commercial email from or through it

B. Use a computer to relay or retransmit multiple commercial email messages to deceive or mislead recipients or an Internet access service about the origin of the message

C. Falsify header information in multiple email messages and initiate the transmission of such messages

D. Register for multiple email accounts or domain names using information that falsifies the identity of the actual registrant

E. Falsely represent themselves as owners of multiple Internet Protocol addresses that are used to send commercial email messages.

Glen Littlejohn, Esq. http://www.mortgagemarketingtsunami.com

Where To Find A MySpace Friend Bot

2009-04-21T10:13:00.000+08:00

MySpace friend adders have become a great tool in maximizing the MySpace experience. Since MySpace has become popular, so has the importance of having tons of MySpace friends. This can benefit the causal MySpace user, the MySpace Music artist, and even the web publishers and marketers that use MySpace as a stepping stone toward success. Now MySpace friend adders have gone even further by adding other MySpace abilities to their programming. The possibilities are endless with a MySpace friend adder. But you have to make sure you choose the right one.

Most casual MySpace users find that having a lot of friends can help boost their social life or even their fun on the internet. But we all know how tedious and boring adding friends can be. This is where the right MySpace friend adder can be helpful. Overnight you can have 500 new friends to get to know. Not only are they on your friend list, but with the new technology in MySpace friend adders, you can message, comment, or even send a bulletin to all of them automatically. This technology is so helpful everyone, especially the MySpace Music artist and the web publisher.

The ability to mass communicate is essential to being successful through the public. What better than being able to add 500 potential sales or potential fans every day automatically? By the end of the week, you can have almost 4000 new people to communicate with, and we all know that that number can almost double by just word of mouth. Imagine turning just ¼ of these people into sales each week. This can be some incredible marketing if done properly. The best part that is that it's all automatic, so instead of taking your time doing all of the leg work adding friends, get yourself a automatic MySpace friend adder.

MySpace automatic friend adding technology is making MySpace better and better each day. Don't be left behind with a handful of friends, let everyone know who you are with just a push of a button and make your MySpace experience the best it can be.

Now before you jump on Google and start searching for one, you have to make sure you know what you are looking for. Adders like FriendAdder and FriendBlaster are the best there is right now, but they each have their advantages.

FriendAdder is a great program that allows you to market your product, service, event, or band. Marketing with FriendBlasterPro through MySpace accounts is the cutting edge way to advertise to a large audience and being cost effective at the same time.

FriendBlaster This program actually sends real friend requests to real users. No more entering captcha security codes! This programs bypasses all of that hassle! The built in browser lets you navigate wherever you want and import the friends on that page. This allows full range of myspace search functions.

How to Use Social Media I

2009-04-21T10:12:00.000+08:00

In order to make the best use of all opportunities to promote your online business, it is important that you learn how to use social media. The term appears at first sight to be one of those that are used by marketers to cover some form of advertising technique designed to screw the public through the use of such outlets as TV and radio. However, while the term may be unfortunate, the way they operate is going to sweep the internet by storm. That storm has already begun.

People who use social media tend to be of the younger generations, and they use them to share experiences, information and generally communicate with people they would otherwise never have had the opportunity to contact. An Australian can discuss her latest video with a British guy who is considering buying it, and an American kid can explain some PS3 cheats with a Chinese youngster who doesn’t even know what PS3 means.

It is a means for people to communicate with one another about any subject under the sun from law to chemistry and train-spotting to drug taking. Examples of sites they use are MySpace, YouTube and Tickle. There are rarely barriers to the exchange of information and communication is by means of blogs, podcasts, forums and occasionally direct emailings. Even Wikipedia is an example of a social medium in that the public are able to make additions to it, and edit the content. It is a database of all knowledge supplied by every contributor.

There are a number of commonalities that make social media what they are. Generally, though not always, there is the opportunity to contribute to the site through the provision of content or feedback. Normal media, such as radio, TV and the press are generally associated with the provision of information in a one-way manner, whereas social media involve two way communication between individuals and groups of people, and even lead to the formation groups that have a common interest.

So what forms do these media take? If you examine the two words social and media in the context in which they are used in the term social media, the word social refers to a community or group of people, and media to methods of communication. The most common communication techniques used online with respect to social media are those that allow interactive mass communication such as blogs, which are the most common for of social media.

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How to use it to promote your website

2009-04-21T10:11:00.002+08:00

A quick definition of social bookmarking ...It is a website where you can post your favorites and access them from any computer with an Internet connection. It is also a way to drive traffic to your website or blog.

Another use of social bookmarking is for research. You can go to del.icio.us and enter a search tag and find the sites that other people have tagged for that term. This way you are tapping into the research that many others have done before you.

This article will concentrate on using social bookmarking to drive traffic to websites.

We previously used the term "tag". Just what is that? A tag is the word or term that you would use to search for the topic on a search engine. On most of the bookmarking sites, it is a single word separated by spaces. This makes it difficult for the search terms that are multiple words.

It seems there are several ways that people are creating multiple word tags. Some are just running the words together "retirementjobs". Some are using hyphens between words "retirement-jobs. And some are using periods between words "retirement.jobs".

Experiment with this and see what works best for you. Just remember to try these different combinations when you are searching tags.

There are many social bookmarking sites (I read the number of approximately 75 during my research) with del.icio.us being the "gold standard". If you want to create traffic to your site, you should post your web pages on each one of them...I thought that might slow you down. You say to yourself - "Self doesn't have time to post to all of those sites".

Well, enter technology to save the day. A site has been created named www.onlywire.com that helps automate this task. It will distribute your post to 13 bookmarking sites. It actually lists 16 sites, but Maple is being closed down and Jots and Linkroll would not accept registration.

In order to use Onlywire, you must go to each bookmarking site and register with a user name and password. Once you have registered in all the sites on which you want to post, go to Onlywire and enter the user name and password in the input box for the particular bookmarking site.

Next, to make it easy to tag a page, Onlywire has a link tool that you can drag to your link tool bar on your browser. When you are on a page and want to send it to all your bookmarking sites, click on the icon for the Onlywire link. You will be asked for your Onlywire user name and password. The Onlywire page will open with your desired page URL in the input box. You add the tags that you want for the page, enter a comment if desired, and click the enter button. At the speed of the Internet, your page has been bookmarked on as many sites as you have listed in Onlywire.

Just consider the implications of this. Each time you add a page to your site, you post it on Onlywire. Onlywire sends it to the thirteen bookmarking sites and thirteen more links to the page (and to the website) appear on the Internet. You know that the search engines use links to a website as a factor in ranking it. This is a great multiplier to do this.

The other implication is that people actively use the bookmarking sites to find information. This will create traffic to your site.

When I discovered Onlywire, I set up an account and listed the bookmarking sites on it. I then entered every web page in retirement-jobs-online.com (RJO) as a favorite. Within a day, I started to see hits on the RJO website from some of the social bookmarking sites so it works quickly for driving traffic. The increase in the search engine ranking will take time.

Some might say that this borders on SPAM, but consider that some people have a favorite bookmarking site and only use that site. You want to make certain that your information is available to them and posting to multiple bookmarking sites is the way to do this.

Onlywire is not the most intuitive site on the planet so here is a short video about it and how it works. Click the link below to view the video.

http://www.boomer-ezine.com/Videos/V1I39Video/Click-to-Play.html

John V. W. Howe is an entrepreneur, author, inventor, patent holder, husband, father, and grandfather. He has been involved in entrepreneurial activities for over 40 years. He founded http://www.boomer-ezine.com and http://www.retirement-jobs-online.com to help Boomers (baby boomers) become entrepreneurs when they retire.

What's The First Thing Your Prospects See When They Visit Your Website?

2009-04-21T10:11:00.001+08:00

I just reviewed a new website and I'm in shock. Or, maybe, I'm just depressed about my failure to convince people to do what I tell them so they can make money.

I'm not talking about complicated marketing strategies. Most websites, marketing and the like, fail on the basic stuff.

For example, this webmaster wants to sell products. He wants to make money online. He's got a bunch of good products at great prices. I know this because he told me. No one else knows this after visiting his website. He's kept it a secret.

Let's go back to the basics and see if your website passes these simple tests ...

What is the purpose of your website? If your immediate answer is anything other than "to make sales," I hope you don't own a business website. Otherwise, let me pound this into your brain:

You are in business to make sales. That's where the money comes from.

When people visit your main page, what's the first thing they see? If all I see is a nice long message about what a great guy you are (who cares?) and how you want to run a good business (I hope so or you should not be in business) and if I have any questions, I can send you an email (I knew that anyway) and how you look forward to doing business with me (of course you do, that's why you have this website), what's the point?

I came to your website in response to an ad or a referral so I'm looking to buy something. Why are you wasting my time? I want you to sell me the product. Take my money.

Pick any large retailer that does big business on the Internet. What's on the front of their website? Pictures of stuff to buy. Links to buy more stuff. They want your money. They are relentlessly working to get it.

Go to my website for "Mining Gold" at: http://www.ipcgold.com/ad/100/CD3839 and read the first thing you see.

You can't miss it. I made it large - bold - and incredibly obvious. I make you an offer to invite you to do business with me. I lay out all the information in a carefully ordered flow.

No wasted words. No extraneous links. No stories about my family vacation. No comments on the World Cup. This is a site for business.

I'll have well over 200,000 unique visitors this month and I want to capture their attention immediately.

Recent stats show the average time spent viewing a web page was 52 seconds. But, how long do you spend viewing a web page when you either get bored or can't quickly find what you want?

You've taken your own small business idea and put it up on the web to make money. Don't be afraid to let people know you are running a business and don't be afraid to ask for their money.

If you can only remember one thing from this message, remember this:

If you're going to spend money to promote your website, you'd better make sure people know what to do when they arrive.

Yours in success,

Shawn M. Casey

Internet Millionaire Shawn Casey's "Mining Gold On the Internet" is one of the best selling Internet books with over 85,000 copies sold. In "Mining Gold", Shawn reveals the same step-by-step strategies he uses to create millions in Internet sales => http://www.ipcgold.com/ad/100/CD3839 Benefit from Shawn's 7 years of Internet experience and learn from someone who has actually made millions online.

Fixed Point of Reference

2009-04-21T10:10:00.000+08:00

According to author Frank Peretti, "A fixed point of reference for human beings is always something that is found outside themselves. It has to be something to which we can always come back. If we try to haul our point of reference around with us, we have lost it because it has been moved and we can never refer back to it." He tells a story of being in a dark room with only a chair. As long as the chair stays put, it can be used as a point of reference. If it gets picked up and carried around, it no longer serves that function, because it isn’t where it used to be.

In our personal lives, having God as a fixed point of reference means that whenever we need guidance, we can turn to the Bible for advice and know that the advice we get today will not change tomorrow or next week or next month or next year. God is the same yesterday, today, and forever, and He is our "fixed point of reference." The rules stay the same; the Ten Commandments have not changed. There are still ten of them and they have not weakened into "suggestions." AND, God still makes the rules.

In the world of internet marketing, the search engines make the rules. Internet marketers spend countless hours and dollars designing their web sites to please the search engine "gods" in order to get a high ranking and bring in traffic which results in sales. The problem with that is the search engines are like the chair that doesn’t stay put in the darkened room. The rules keep changing. People who have invested everything to make a web site pleasing to the search engine "gods" suddenly have the rug pulled out from under their feet, and find themselves not only unranked, but in some cases actually banned! Their web sites didn’t change. Their marketing strategies didn’t change. Through no fault of their own and without any warning, the rules changed, leaving them high and hung out to dry. They then scramble to change their sites, change their strategies, spend megabucks to advertise, do anything to regain the income that was stripped from them. Of course, there is no guarantee that the same won’t happen again. And again. And again.

To chase after this kind recognition doesn’t make any sense to me. I just cannot see spending all of my time and energy and efforts chasing after an erratically moving target that I may never catch, or that may be jerked away whenever I get close. Either way, I have no control over the outcome. Therefore, the search engines can do whatever they want whenever they want. If this site finds favor in their eyes, great. If not, oh well. I will pursue as many other ethical ways to increase traffic as I can, but will not live and die by search engine ranking. Right now, I am exploring link exchanges and banner exchanges, as well testing the waters by placing occasional inexpensive ads here and there. I will investigate other methods as I become aware of them. I will post what works and what does not work.

One thing I have found that definitely does NOT work is "old" outdated advice. The world of e-books and free-bee give-aways is just clogged with stuff written several years ago. It may have worked then but it doesn’t work now. Why do you think they are giving it away? Some times they tell you (in yellow high-lighted capital letters) that it’s worth $XXX, but even though people think they are crazy, they will let you have it for $XX.95. That way, they still make money off of it, but you won’t. They are counting on you not figuring that out until the money is out of your bank account and safely tucked away in theirs. Save your money. Scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page, and look at the copyright date. Unless it was just a couple of months ago, don’t bite. They don’t give away the new stuff, and they don’t let you have it for cheap, either. That’s why and how they make so much money.

Sandi Moses has been involved in internet marketing since November, 2003. Visit her sites at http://www.123iwork4me.com http://www.123-home-based-business-works-4-me.com

Dialing Up a Scam: Avoiding the Auto-Dialer Virus

2009-04-21T10:08:00.000+08:00

For many, the daily walk to the mailbox evokes mixed feelings: The glee that your favorite monthly magazine – or a friend’s hand-written letter (quite a surprise in the e-mail age) may be waiting is countered by anxiety of how many bills the postman left you.

Now, imagine coming across your phone bill, thicker and heavier than normal. When you open it, instead of “statement stuffers” from the phone company’s marketing department, the bill is dozens of pages long ending in a one-month total of almost $5,400.

A quick glance at the details reveals hundreds of calls to the same 1-900 number. “A mistake,” you insist. After all, you're the only person in the house and you have never called a 900 number before. Actually, this is no mistake. In this true story, the homeowner had fallen victim to one of the oldest computer scams around: the "Auto-Dialer" virus.

How Did This Computer Security Nightmare Begin

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What is an “auto-dialer”? Some time ago, the phone companies came up with a feature that allowed merchants to reach a broader range of customers by allowing consumers to make payments via your phone bill. If you did not have a credit card, you just dialed a 900 number, connected by voice or modem (for Internet sites). Every minute you used the service, you were charged a fee ranging from $1 to $5 or more per minute. At month’s end, the charge appeared on the phone bill. Many services were legit: Consumers called weather, horoscope and gambling services offering this feature. But many merchants sold expensive phone or online adult content.

How Did An Auto-Dialer Get Installed

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But how did $5,400 in charges end up on the person’s phone bill? Although many of these services require the user to physically dial the number or connect to the online site by instructing the modem to dial the number, this can happen without the user’s knowledge. In the above case, the person’s computer was infected with an auto-dialer virus. Somewhere during his Web travels, he connected to a site that popped up a rather confusing message instructing him to "Hit OK" to make the message go away. What this person didn't know was he was agreeing to download,install, and execute an adult content auto-dialer.

Behind the scene, the auto-dialer installed itself, checked for the presence of a modem and dial tone, and then proceeded to dial an overseas 900 number over and over again. Even though the person surfed using an always-on broadband Internet connection, the modem remained so he could send and receive faxes. One problem: When he wasn’t using the modem, it remained plugged into the phone jack. Why should he have unplugged it? It's not like it could hurt anything, right? Wrong.

How To Protect Yourself

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Unfortunately, there is no single solution to avoid these types of malicious acts. A short list of protective measures would include:

1) If you no longer need a modem in your computer, remove it. Or at least disconnect the phone line from the modem;

2) Install anti-virus software such as Trend Micro or Symantec's Norton Anti-Virus. Many are designed to prevent this kind of malicious software, or “Malware.” More importantly, make sure your subscription for new virus patterns is current and configured to automatically download and install updates;

3) Install and regularly run Adware protection solutions such as LavaSoft's Ad-Aware or SpyBot Search & Destroy;

4) And do not, under any circumstances, blindly hit “OK” to pop-ups or similar annoyances without first making sure what you are agreeing to.

This tale is not fiction; in fact, it happens frequently, to businesses and consumers, kids and adults. But even the least savvy among us can thwart such an attack. A neighborhood teenager recently avoided potentially thousands in fees when an auto-dialer was downloaded and installed. How? She had unplugged the modem.

About The Author
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Darren Miller is an Industry leading computer and internet security consultant. At the website - http://www.defendingthenet.com you will find information about computer security specifically design to assist home, home business and small business computer users. Sign up for defending the nets newsletter and stay informed and empowered to stay safe on the Internet. You can reach Darren at mailto:darren.miller@paralogic.net or at mailto:defendthenet@paralogic.net
URL
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http://www.defendingthenet.com/NewsLetters/Auto-Dialer-Newsletter.htm

Search Engine Marketing Inspiration From Inside the Box

2009-04-21T10:03:00.001+08:00

You've seen it action for as long as you can remember. Sometimes your in awe in what you see other times your simply bored with it and decide to focus on something else .

You've been getting marketing lessons even before you decided to start your own business.

But because you expect it to be there regardless and it's as common now as the air you breathe you may or may not have picked up on some of these valuable lessons .

Be warned...this style of marketing , credibility building , online link building and branding may not be for every one at this time but do add it to your long term to do list for your business plans .

I promise you it will be well worth it and it will do wonders for your bottom line .

So just what is this over looked gold mine ?

It's called reporting , the box I'm talking about is your television and you know where to go when you want the latest news .

Quick brand test...

When you want to watch the news what channel do you turn to?

Yup , they've done a good job at branding and earning the amount of trust you've given them.

Think about it , do you have the time to go all the places and get this news first hand for yourself?

Do have the money to spend to go to far away places to get the cross country and over seas news you receive?

Guess what , your not the only one.

In your niche market are their offline events that others want to go to but can't afford to go or simply dont have the time?

How many of those people do you think would love to hear your report...to hear what all they had to miss this time ?

Some of these same people will buy from you, link to you, tell others about you.

This is a great way to enhance your natural search engine marketing efforts and boost your over all credibility level.

So...when ever you get the chance start going to offline events and be the trusted reporter your target market turn to with out having to think twice where to go to when they want their fill.

Your content will start showing up all over the net therefore increasing your link popularity , dont forget ezine owners who will email your content to there list and word of mouth buzz spreading through out different forums.

When you go to these events dont forget to take some pictures with some of the main keynote speakers . This will do wonders for your credibility as well.

Jermaine Tabor an SEO Specialist provide advanced Seo Training via his newsletter that you can apply to your site/s right now to boost your rankings in major search engines . http://www.seotradesecrets.com/