Internet and Businesses Articles

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

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.

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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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 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

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

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

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.

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 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

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.

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

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

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/

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/

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.

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 .

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

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.

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.

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 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

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

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!

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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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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

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

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/

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.