3 Blog Squad Teleclasses this week

3 Blog Squad Teleclasses this week
Monday, June 23, 1:00 p.m. Eastern Time (10:00 a.m. Pacific) How to Get the Best Out of Your Blog: A 4-Point System to Get Found, Get Known and Get Clients Part 1 of a 4-Part Teleseminar series hosted by Adam...

Trap #4: The Trap of One Big Success
The 5 Traps of Internet Marketing that Can Derail Your Business Kathleen Gage, the Street Smarts Marketer, reveals the #4 Internet Marketing trap: you only need one really great product to make a lot of money. Success on the Internet...

C-level Execs Get News and Business Information Online
They prefer to access the Web rather than read the newspaper

The Internet continues to be the most influential and important source of business information for C-Level executives around the world, at 67%. This number has increased 37% since 2004. At the same time, C-Level executives, citing newspapers such as the Wall Street Journal as their main source of business information, has decreased 36% since 2004, reports The Center for Media Research.

The study was done by Forbes and Gartner and finds

• Senior Execs are using the web to research competiors and industry trends daily
• They're more likely to access the web than read a newspaper before going to work
• The majority of their media consumption in on the web
• They think that the web contains the most informative advertsiing

Well that dispels any idea that C-suite execs are still in the last century, technologically.  Yes there may still be those few dinosaurs whose secretaries print out their emails.. But by and large they're Net savvy and more of them are turning to the web for information each year.

If you want your information seen by the C-suite, you need a smart online PR strategy. And if you've despaired of ever getting ink in the Wall St Jouranl, tihs study shoud bring a broad smile to your face. You can reach that audience directly with your news - if you place it correctly into online news sites and news search engines.

Don’t make this Adsense mistake
One of the common mistakes that Adsense publishers make is using wrong labels above Adsense units. People think it’s a hot trick, but it’s really not. Google doesn’t like to see wrong labels right above Adsense ad units. let’s review Adsense’s TOS. Publishers may not label the ads with text other than “sponsored [...]

One of the common mistakes that Adsense publishers make is using wrong labels above Adsense units. People think it’s a hot trick, but it’s really not. Google doesn’t like to see wrong labels right above Adsense ad units. let’s review Adsense’s TOS.

Publishers may not label the ads with text other than “sponsored links” or “advertisements.” This includes any text directly above our ads that could be confused with, or attempt to be associated with Google ads.

TOS clearly states that publishers may not use labels other than “sponsored links” or “advertisements”. But as you may have seen already, people become creative when it comes to labeling their ad units. I’ve seen people putting, “Articles, Navigation, Books, and Latest News” as the title of the ad unit.

Usually Google sends out warning letters first if they think you are using a wrong label. Just be careful of what you are doing with it.

Making Social Media Content Work For You
Social media does have new rules, but some of the old rules apply too

Executing Social Media was a good conference.  Everyone participated in the sessions, so we got the benefit of some very smart people sharing ideas about what works and what doesn't.

There were two excellent keynotes:

George Wright from Blendtech spoke about how the Will It Blend campaign came about and why it has been so successful. The videos have had over 40 million views and sales are up 5X.

Peter Shankman woke everyone on day two with his energetic keynote about where all this social media sruff might be going.

Being wired and on the grid is a fact of life.  We have no privacy. Someone always has a camera or a laptop switched on and everything you do or say could end up online. What we do have is the ability to control what gets seen or found online.

His prediction is that we are moving towards a world where we have one tool that connects us and it's more about how we live our lives than the tools we use.

How can this be used to advantage by companies? Create PR stunts people will talk about and share.  Since everyone is now a citizen journalist with a camera and the means to publish, give them great content that is worth publishing. 

He did this for Harrah's. 

As a way to promote their new Water Tower, the Harrah's Resort Atlantic City gave away $1 million worth of free hotel rooms in four major East Coast cities, starting in New York.

They had a bevy of beautiful models painted in the Harrah's logo on Wall Street giving away room keys.  And it caused a storm of tweets and images, as well as mainstream media coverage.

LInda Zimmer made a great point in her wrapup - use best principles rather than best practices.  What worked for one company may not be the right stunt or content for yours.  Use the idea, but keep your target audience and end goal in mind..

Example:  If HerRoom.com did a similar stunt to promote the Undie Awards, I am sure they'd get just as much attention and coverage - but a ton of traffic from young Wall Street hot shots would not sell any bras. 

The old rule of the right message to the right audience still applies.  It's just a new channel..

 

YPN vs Adsense
David at his blog posted an interesting findings on YPN vs Adsense. He switched to YPN from Adsense for 10 days and shared his results with a screenshot. Very interesting read, please check it out. Making Money with YPN

David at his blog posted an interesting findings on YPN vs Adsense. He switched to YPN from Adsense for 10 days and shared his results with a screenshot.

Very interesting read, please check it out.

Making Money with YPN

Custom Content Is Your Best Bet
Last year 10% of audiences caught their favorite shows online.

Brands are catching on to the idea that they can create custom content and attract the right audience.  Where is this custom content being viewed?  Online. By the end of the year, an estimated 40% of programming will be viewed through the Web, says James McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research.  Internet advertising in the United States will grow eight times faster than the overall market, surpassing newspapers, cable TV, and broadcast TV by 2012, IDC predicted today. The Yankee Group expects the market to reach $50.3 billion by 2011, double the amount of 2007.

Marketers have found a new way to try to keep viewers from tuning out their ads: offer them online programming created by the marketers themselves, often with help from their advertising agencies, says The New York Times.

One way is to sponsor content that appeals to your audience - National Geographic's Dog Whisperer is virtually owned online by Petco, writes Brandweek.

Some brands are investing in their own channels and shows. What is called Advertorial in print has become advertainment online.

Chivas This is the LIfe has a channel on MSN.

BlendTec has made entertainment out of their product testing with the Will It Blend videos. Now they're doing co-branded content    

Just a year ago MySpace announced branded channels with custom content from National Geographic, The New York Times, Reuters, The Daily Reel, Expert Village, Flow, IGN Entertainment, Octane TV, Kush TV, Ripe TV, VBS TV, and Young Hollywood.

Sites like Kyte and FlexTubeTV allow you to produce your own branded content channel online.  This Is 50, is the online destination site for articet 50 cent.  It's part hip-hop/pop culture blog, part fan community, and part original content destination.

Heavy.com  aims at men ages 18-34, They offer an online dating reality series using partially user-generated content and a show that won a Webby Award for the sports category in Online Film & Video.

I's a no-brainer for travel and tourism sites. eMarketer projects Online travel sales in the U.S. sales will reach nearly $146 billion in 2010, up from nearly $127 billion in 2009 and $110 billion in 2008. Travel bookings surpassed offline bookings in volume for the fitrst time in 2007, according to PhoCusWright.  Any travel or tourism destination that is not using online video is missing a huge opportunity. Video is a major influencer in travel sales.

Have you thought about how you could use online video to build your brand, engage loyal customers and offer content that they want to watch and come back for?

.

Gartner Names Top 10 Technologies That Will Change The World
What is sauce for the goose... the advice to CIOs should be taken to heart by PR Managers

Dr. Jim Amderson posted in The Busines of IT blog about the Gartner Top 10 Technologies that they think will change the world in the next four years.

1. Multicore and hybrid processors
2. Virtualization and fabric computing
3. Social networks and social software
4. Cloud computing and cloud/Web platforms
5. Web mashups
6. User Interface
7. Ubiquitous computing
8. Contextual computing
9. Augmented reality
10. Semantics

Dr. Anderson says that 1 - 4 spell a sea change in IT departments.  "Uh, oh - can you hear your job going away?" he asks.

"What does this all mean, and more importantly what should a successful IT staffer (or CIO) do today? The key to your future success is to understand how IT is going to change and what you need to do to change with it."

#3 on the list is having a profound effect on PR and marketing departments. and I'd say that same advice applies:

The key to your future success is to understand how PR is going to change and what you need to do to change with it.

Social Media has given the PR industry much more insight into the fundamental aspects of relationship-building, says Todd Defren

Is this how PR should always have been?  Yes, indeed.  Social software and social networks are empowering the consumer and their voice is being heard - loud and clear.

Business Week updated their 2006 article on blogs and said when they wrote that story they missed an even bigger one:  social networks and social software.

"Social connectors are changing the dynamics of companies around the world. Millions of us are now hanging out on the Internet with customers, befriending rivals, clicking through pictures of our boss at a barbecue, or seeing what she read at the beach. It's as if the walls around our companies are vanishing and old org charts are lying on their sides."

And even if the social media bubble bursts—and Business Week predicts it will—they also predict that the power of social media to transform our businesses and society will only continue to grow.

Are you ready?

Ask, Ask, Ask: Using Surveys for Content Marketing
We recently asked a thousand readers what their biggest problems are when it comes to Internet Marketing, using SurveyMonkey.com. This a great way to get content ideas, stay in touch with what readers want, and develop programs and info products...

BlogPotomac: WaPo Dan Beyers talks about the future of the media
Media needs a new model of audience engagement

Dan Breyers, local business editor at the Washington Post, talks about how social media is impacting the media and how the paper is adapting.

He starts by reading a prediction that within 10 years there will be no more print media. And goes on to give his personal strategy as business editor.

 1.  Provide excellent content.

2.   Provide new ways for companies to engage with the audience. Offering access to the data and more indepth content about the companies

3.  Make it easy for people to use and share the information

This is definitely not your grandmother's newspaper. 

Take note, PR folk.  If this is where reporters and newspapers are heading, your media relations strategy will have to look very different too.

Hat tip to Geoff Livingstone for the video

WordPress 2.1 is ready
WordPress 2.1 is out for download. One of the important changes is in this version is that now it requires MySQL 4. Which means I have to upgrade my servers in order to test drive it. Download WordPress 2.1.

WordPress 2.1 is out for download. One of the important changes is in this version is that now it requires MySQL 4. Which means I have to upgrade my servers in order to test drive it.

Download WordPress 2.1.

Social Writing: Don't ignore networking sites
There's a lot of buzz online right now about whether or not one should use social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. Are these sites important for content marketing? You'll have to decide for yourself and for your business....

4 Keys for Content Marketing that Gets Results
How do you write good content for your web pages (blog, newsletters, articles, press releases, etc.) that also brings in clients and customers and makes sales? Let's face it, talking about how great your product and services are isn't going...

Social Networking Online: How to find out what you need to know
Are you puzzled by buzzwords like "web 2.0" and "social media?" If you're like me, you probably cringed when you started hearing the buzz about MySpace, Facebook and Twitter. At first you could ignore it because it was just for...

Download Firefox 3
Did you know that Firefox 3 is out? It’s a major release. I can already tell the difference in performance. It’s lightning fast. I haven’t had a chance to fully explore the new version, but I can already tell that it looks sleek. Firefox 3 is supposed to be more secure and [...]

Did you know that Firefox 3 is out? It’s a major release. I can already tell the difference in performance. It’s lightning fast. I haven’t had a chance to fully explore the new version, but I can already tell that it looks sleek.

Firefox 3 is supposed to be more secure and easier to use. You can test some of their improved security features on the Firefox 3 Release Notes webpage.

Download Firefox 3 now. You will love it.

Trap #3: The Trap of the Internet Guru
5 Traps of Internet Marketing that Can Derail Your Business In this video, I talk about how easy it is to fall for smooth marketing hype that promise you millions. Internet "gurus" don't always have the right answer for you...

Trap #5: The Trap of Manifesting by Meditation and Visualization
The 5 Traps of Internet Marketing that Can Derail Your Business Kathleen Gage, the Street Smarts Marketer, reveals the #5 Internet Marketing trap: it takes more than the Law of Attraction to be successful online. You have to get into...

Repeat the Benefits: Create a Placebo Effect
"Should I reinforce the benefits of my product on the thank you page?" One of our clients asked this question while we were reviewing his autoresponders and online content. Of course. While this may seem obvious and common sense, many...

WordPress 2.5.1
Upgrade your WordPress immediately.  WordPress just announced its version 2.5.1 today.  It includes a very important security fix and more than 70 bug fixes.  Here are some highlights of improvements : Performance improvements for the Dashboard, Write Post, and Edit Comments pages. Better performance for those who have many categories Media Uploader fixes An upgrade to TinyMCE 3.0.7 Widget Administration fixes Various [...]

Upgrade your WordPress immediately.  WordPress just announced its version 2.5.1 today.  It includes a very important security fix and more than 70 bug fixes. 

Here are some highlights of improvements :

• Performance improvements for the Dashboard, Write Post, and Edit Comments pages.
• Better performance for those who have many categories
• Media Uploader fixes
• An upgrade to TinyMCE 3.0.7
• Widget Administration fixes
• Various usability improvements
• Layout fixes for IE

One of the most annoying bugs in WP 2.5 was the media uploader bug.  It just wouldn’t work for me.  Uploading works fine, but once it is uploaded I can’t retreive it using the gallery menu.  WordPress 2.5.1 fixed some of the media uploader problems, but from my testing, it still needs improvements.  I can now upload and view the file fine, but I still can’t insert images to my posts.  I hope they get fix it quickly. 

If you want to learn more about WordPress 2.5.1 go to WordPress Blog. 

Relevant Content: Search Engine Bread Crumbs
On our 5 Traps of Internet Marketing teleclass yesterday, almost 1000 people registered and we got some interesting questions. Here's one: "What is the most important thing to do to get people to find your site when you cannot afford...

Free Stock Photos from Electronic Perceptions
Kathy over at the Electronic Perceptions is a real giver. She’s giving away free stock photos on her blog. You are free to use the photos marked as “Royalty-Free” under the terms defined. Please read the terms before you download them. One thing I would like to see is some free [...]

Kathy over at the Electronic Perceptions is a real giver. She’s giving away free stock photos on her blog. You are free to use the photos marked as “Royalty-Free” under the terms defined. Please read the terms before you download them.

One thing I would like to see is some free high-resolution stock photos. I know she can do whatever she wants to do with her photos, but I feel that she can attract more traffic to her site if she gives away high-resolution versions for some of her photo sets. That would be really awesome.

I highly suggest that you bookmark her blog. New stock photos are posted daily basis. Thanks Kathy!

Samples
Red and Green Tableware

Visit : Electronic Perceptions for Free Stock Photos

FilePub - free file hosting service
FilePub is a free file hosting service where you can upload any files up to 500mb per file. Allowed file types include : jpeg, jpg, png, gif, bmp, mp3, txt, avi, wmv, mpg, mpeg, doc, rar, and zip. It comes in handy when you need to share a big file or a big image on [...]

FilePub is a free file hosting service where you can upload any files up to 500mb per file. Allowed file types include : jpeg, jpg, png, gif, bmp, mp3, txt, avi, wmv, mpg, mpeg, doc, rar, and zip.

It comes in handy when you need to share a big file or a big image on your blog. You can save bandwidth and the web space if you host these big files outside of your web hosting server. FilePub is perfect for that. Read their terms of service before you upload your files.

How to upload a file
Click “Browse” and choose a file. Once the file is selected, just click “Click to Upload” That’s it!

Once the file is uploaded, you will be redirected to a folder. From there, you can either view the full version of the image or download it.

By the way the screen shots used in this post are hosted at FilePub. Here is another example of a uploaded file (2.16MB).

Visit: FilePub.com

Free Bonus Gifts

Free Bonus Gifts

24 Unforgettable Advertisements
Written by toxel Why should ads be boring? Check out this collection of unforgettable advertisements from around the world. Nissan Cube Advertisement Break Glass in Case of Adventure. [link] Nike Cars Advertisement Cars decorated as Nike kicks in Mexico. The front car carrying the ball. [link] BMW Advertisement “From up here, I can see BMW of Bridgeport” [link] Nescafe Advertisement This picture of a [...]

Written by toxel

Why should ads be boring? Check out this collection of unforgettable advertisements from around the world.

Nissan Cube Advertisement

Break Glass in Case of Adventure. [link]

Nike Cars Advertisement

Cars decorated as Nike kicks in Mexico. The front car carrying the ball. [link]

BMW Advertisement

“From up here, I can see BMW of Bridgeport” [link]

Nescafe Advertisement

This picture of a Nescafe branded building is from Venezuela’s capital, Caracas, and must be among the largest inflatables in the world. [link]

Nike Advertisement

Nestle Advertisement

Creative Nestle billboard advertisement. [link]

Mini Advertisement

Hopi Hari Advertisement

Fitness Company Advertisement

Shopping bags given away to customers when purchasing fitness accessories or nutritional supplements at the Fitness Company fitness centers. [link]

Skin Cancer Towel Advertisement

“Please take care this summer” [link]

K-Swiss Advertisement

McDonald’s Bus Stop Advertisement

Just what you want while waiting for the bus: that mouth watering, tantalizing reminder of how much you’d love to stuff your face with a 1,000 calorie burger only to be reminded later by your stomach it wasn’t the best decision you could have made. [link]

Woodland Shoes Advertisement

Powerful idea for a billboard. [link]

Outdoor Stunt by Goodyear

Lovely concept, but I think there’s something lost in translation in this outdoor campaign for Goodyear. The sign says:

(front) “Your vehicle has been towed. Call 0800 081-8181.”
(back) “For sticking on the roads.” [link]

FedEx Kinko’s Advertisement

When coming up with an ad campaign for FedEx Kinko’s, the innovative minds at advertising agency BBDO were inspired by the streets of New York. The agency installed oversized bottles of correction fluid, highlighters, and, in one case, an office lamp, on the city’s busy thoroughfares for a couple of days earlier this year. [link]

Peta Advertisement

The action is named ‘None of us would like to end up like this.. neither would other-than-human animals’ and it was done with four big foam trays, each of them containing a naked activist inside, and covered with a see-through plastic with a ‘Human meat’ sticker on it. The idea was to imitate the ‘meat’ trays we can find at the supermarkets and to show that we are also animals, just as other-than-human animals, we neither would like to end up there. [link]

Ravensburger Puzzles Advertisement

BIC Razor Advertisement

Bic developed this creative outdoor advertisement for their razors. The billboard is blank except for a small logo, but without it the advertisement might be missed and it acts as a good backdrop for the giant razor and cut grass. The only draw back is the constant trimming of the lawn. [link]

Mercedes Advertisement

IKEA Advertisement

Ikea on Wheels advertisement. [link]

Canon Advertisement

Creative Canon outdoor advertisement. [link]

Kill Bill Advertisement

LEGO Advertisement

Lego’s ad agency in Santiago (Chile) used cranes to hang giant Lego blocks. [link]

Discovery Channel Advertisement

ShareThis

iPodder.org : What is podcasting?

Add My Blog To Your My Yahoo! Page

American Red Cross Disaster Relief via Amazon

Google Chairman Optimistic about Entrepreneurial Trends

Internet Marketing Blog Directory

BlogRolled - Make Money with Your Blogroll
I saw this coming.  Now you can make money with your blogrolls with BlogRolled.  It works pretty much like Text Link Ads except the fact that it doesn’t require a script installation to display the links.  Your visitors and the search engines will have hard time identifying the paid links because of the way BlogRolled works. This is [...]

I saw this coming.  Now you can make money with your blogrolls with BlogRolled.  It works pretty much like Text Link Ads except the fact that it doesn’t require a script installation to display the links.  Your visitors and the search engines will have hard time identifying the paid links because of the way BlogRolled works.

This is how it works.  Once an advertiser purchases a blogroll link on your blog, you will be notified of the sale.  Then you will have to log-in to your blog and manually add the listing.  I like this semi-automated process.  Simple enough. 

Now, maybe because the service is still in early stages, I don’t see any blog links listed there for sale.  I don’t know their price ranges yet.  If the price is reasonable for both publishers and advertisers, this will be huge. 

Visit: BlogRolled

How To Make An Absolute Fortune in the Information Products Business by Shawn Casey

Keyword Tool

The Robert Collier Letter Book by Robert Collier

Visit the Book Publicity Gallery to see Documents and Photos of Successful Book Publicity Tours and Information.

Visit the Book Publicity Gallery to see Documents and Photos of Successful Book Publicity Tours and Information.
Visit this link for a whole gallery full of scans from the NY Times and Publisher's Weekly.

Getting Your Book on National TV - 8 Tips


1-2-All Email Marketing by Active Campaign
One of the tools that a self-publishing author must have is good email marketing software. I highly recommend 1-2-All which was developed by Active Campaign.

How to Launch Your Career as an Author, Get Your Book Published and Get Book Publicity: MP3 Audio
Find out how Arielle Ford has helped launch the careers and create bestselling books for Deepak Chopra; Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen, Chicken Soup for the Soul series; Neale Donald Walsch, Conversations With God; Debbie Ford, The Dark Side of the Light Chasers; and Dean Ornish, Love and Survival and many, many other notable authors. Visit www.EverythingYouShouldKnow.com for more details

Arielle Ford, Publicist biography
Arielle Ford has helped launch the careers and create bestselling books for Deepak Chopra; Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen, Chicken Soup for the Soul series; Neale Donald Walsch, Conversations With God; Debbie Ford, The Dark Side of the Light Chasers; and Dean Ornish, Love and Survival and many, many other notable authors.

Write a Book and Get Your Book Published: Subscribe to America's Most Successful Book Publicist's Newsletter Today
Sign up for the free HOW TO GET YOUR BOOK PUBLISHED and PUBLICIZED newsletter from Arielle Ford. In case you don't know Arielle by name, she's publicized hundreds of authors and books. 11 of which are #1 Bestsellers. Her clients include Deepak Chopra, Wayne Dyer, Neale Donald Walsch, Dean Ornish, Jon Gordon, Debbie Ford, Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen. Arielle has compiled a list of nearly every question a first-time or experienced author wants to know about publishing, publicity, building a platform and the book business. Every issue is jam-packed with answers to the questions that get your book published and you booked on radio, television, newspapers and magazines.

Blogging is Publishing
I wish I could say that "blogging is publishing" was something that I came up with on my own, but that is not the case. However, I have been pondering on this phrase for a while and decided to write an entry on my thoughts.

BEA Book Expo America: Good for Independent Publishers?


BEA Info


Its Name is Zookoda
Zookoda is the new leader in professional email marketing for bloggers. It gives you better control on the look and feel of how your feed is sent to your subscribers. The program is similar to what you see in newsletter...

How to Get Your Book Published: Windows Media Video
Find out how Arielle Ford has helped launch the careers and create bestselling books for Deepak Chopra; Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen, Chicken Soup for the Soul series; Neale Donald Walsch, Conversations With God; Debbie Ford, The Dark Side of the Light Chasers; and Dean Ornish, Love and Survival and many, many other notable authors.

Getting in Newspapers . . . Easy for our clients


Will E-Publishing Become the New Leader?
Let the truth be told I am not a big supporter of e-books even though I wrote an entry earlier with regards to the advantages of them. Though I am not a fan, e-books are good for one thing, and that is establishing yourself as an expert.

Trap #4: The Trap of One Big Success

Trap #4: The Trap of One Big Success
The 5 Traps of Internet Marketing that Can Derail Your Business Kathleen Gage, the Street Smarts Marketer, reveals the #4 Internet Marketing trap: you only need one really great product to make a lot of money. Success on the Internet...

Write a Book and Get Your Book Published: Subscribe to America's Most Successful Book Publicist's Newsletter Today
Sign up for the free HOW TO GET YOUR BOOK PUBLISHED and PUBLICIZED newsletter from Arielle Ford. In case you don't know Arielle by name, she's publicized hundreds of authors and books. 11 of which are #1 Bestsellers. Her clients include Deepak Chopra, Wayne Dyer, Neale Donald Walsch, Dean Ornish, Jon Gordon, Debbie Ford, Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen. Arielle has compiled a list of nearly every question a first-time or experienced author wants to know about publishing, publicity, building a platform and the book business. Every issue is jam-packed with answers to the questions that get your book published and you booked on radio, television, newspapers and magazines.

How to Launch Your Career as an Author, Get Your Book Published and Get Book Publicity: MP3 Audio
Find out how Arielle Ford has helped launch the careers and create bestselling books for Deepak Chopra; Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen, Chicken Soup for the Soul series; Neale Donald Walsch, Conversations With God; Debbie Ford, The Dark Side of the Light Chasers; and Dean Ornish, Love and Survival and many, many other notable authors. Visit www.EverythingYouShouldKnow.com for more details

Trap #3: The Trap of the Internet Guru
5 Traps of Internet Marketing that Can Derail Your Business In this video, I talk about how easy it is to fall for smooth marketing hype that promise you millions. Internet "gurus" don't always have the right answer for you...

3 Blog Squad Teleclasses this week
Monday, June 23, 1:00 p.m. Eastern Time (10:00 a.m. Pacific) How to Get the Best Out of Your Blog: A 4-Point System to Get Found, Get Known and Get Clients Part 1 of a 4-Part Teleseminar series hosted by Adam...

4 Keys for Content Marketing that Gets Results
How do you write good content for your web pages (blog, newsletters, articles, press releases, etc.) that also brings in clients and customers and makes sales? Let's face it, talking about how great your product and services are isn't going...

Social Networking Online: How to find out what you need to know
Are you puzzled by buzzwords like "web 2.0" and "social media?" If you're like me, you probably cringed when you started hearing the buzz about MySpace, Facebook and Twitter. At first you could ignore it because it was just for...

iPodder.org : What is podcasting?

Trap #2: You Can Buy Web Traffic
The 5 Traps of Internet Marketing that Can Derail Your Business In this video, I talk about Internet Marketing Trap #2: You can buy website success. Not. It's a myth. Success on the Internet requires effort...the right kind of effort....

When Works Pass Into The Public Domain

American Red Cross Disaster Relief via Amazon

Million Dollar Product Creation Secrets just released!

How to Get Your Book Published: Windows Media Video
Find out how Arielle Ford has helped launch the careers and create bestselling books for Deepak Chopra; Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen, Chicken Soup for the Soul series; Neale Donald Walsch, Conversations With God; Debbie Ford, The Dark Side of the Light Chasers; and Dean Ornish, Love and Survival and many, many other notable authors.

Visit the Book Publicity Gallery to see Documents and Photos of Successful Book Publicity Tours and Information.
Visit this link for a whole gallery full of scans from the NY Times and Publisher's Weekly.

How to Get Your Book Published: Quicktime Video
Find out how Arielle Ford has helped launch the careers and create bestselling books for Deepak Chopra; Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen, Chicken Soup for the Soul series; Neale Donald Walsch, Conversations With God; Debbie Ford, The Dark Side of the Light Chasers; and Dean Ornish, Love and Survival and many, many other notable authors.

Arielle Ford, Publicist biography
Arielle Ford has helped launch the careers and create bestselling books for Deepak Chopra; Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen, Chicken Soup for the Soul series; Neale Donald Walsch, Conversations With God; Debbie Ford, The Dark Side of the Light Chasers; and Dean Ornish, Love and Survival and many, many other notable authors.

Adobe Digital Media Store - The Leading Source of PDF eBooks & eDocs! - Attention Publishers!

Trap #5: The Trap of Manifesting by Meditation and Visualization
The 5 Traps of Internet Marketing that Can Derail Your Business Kathleen Gage, the Street Smarts Marketer, reveals the #5 Internet Marketing trap: it takes more than the Law of Attraction to be successful online. You have to get into...

Add My Blog To Your My Yahoo! Page

1-2-All Email Marketing by Active Campaign

1-2-All Email Marketing by Active Campaign
One of the tools that a self-publishing author must have is good email marketing software. I highly recommend 1-2-All which was developed by Active Campaign.

Its Name is Zookoda
Zookoda is the new leader in professional email marketing for bloggers. It gives you better control on the look and feel of how your feed is sent to your subscribers. The program is similar to what you see in newsletter...

Blogging is Publishing
I wish I could say that "blogging is publishing" was something that I came up with on my own, but that is not the case. However, I have been pondering on this phrase for a while and decided to write an entry on my thoughts.

Four Marketing Tips for Self-Publishers
You may have already noticed that self-publishing is very time consuming. Most of your time is spent on marketing and publicity and very little time on writing.

Don’t make this Adsense mistake
One of the common mistakes that Adsense publishers make is using wrong labels above Adsense units. People think it’s a hot trick, but it’s really not. Google doesn’t like to see wrong labels right above Adsense ad units. let’s review Adsense’s TOS. Publishers may not label the ads with text other than “sponsored [...]

One of the common mistakes that Adsense publishers make is using wrong labels above Adsense units. People think it’s a hot trick, but it’s really not. Google doesn’t like to see wrong labels right above Adsense ad units. let’s review Adsense’s TOS.

Publishers may not label the ads with text other than “sponsored links” or “advertisements.” This includes any text directly above our ads that could be confused with, or attempt to be associated with Google ads.

TOS clearly states that publishers may not use labels other than “sponsored links” or “advertisements”. But as you may have seen already, people become creative when it comes to labeling their ad units. I’ve seen people putting, “Articles, Navigation, Books, and Latest News” as the title of the ad unit.

Usually Google sends out warning letters first if they think you are using a wrong label. Just be careful of what you are doing with it.

Free Stock Photos from Electronic Perceptions
Kathy over at the Electronic Perceptions is a real giver. She’s giving away free stock photos on her blog. You are free to use the photos marked as “Royalty-Free” under the terms defined. Please read the terms before you download them. One thing I would like to see is some free [...]

Kathy over at the Electronic Perceptions is a real giver. She’s giving away free stock photos on her blog. You are free to use the photos marked as “Royalty-Free” under the terms defined. Please read the terms before you download them.

One thing I would like to see is some free high-resolution stock photos. I know she can do whatever she wants to do with her photos, but I feel that she can attract more traffic to her site if she gives away high-resolution versions for some of her photo sets. That would be really awesome.

I highly suggest that you bookmark her blog. New stock photos are posted daily basis. Thanks Kathy!

Samples
Red and Green Tableware

Visit : Electronic Perceptions for Free Stock Photos

The Advantages of Creating Your Own E-Book
E-books have become more and more popular in the recent years. Although some people prefer a printed book in their hand, e-books are still in demand.

YPN vs Adsense
David at his blog posted an interesting findings on YPN vs Adsense. He switched to YPN from Adsense for 10 days and shared his results with a screenshot. Very interesting read, please check it out. Making Money with YPN

David at his blog posted an interesting findings on YPN vs Adsense. He switched to YPN from Adsense for 10 days and shared his results with a screenshot.

Very interesting read, please check it out.

Making Money with YPN

Will E-Publishing Become the New Leader?
Let the truth be told I am not a big supporter of e-books even though I wrote an entry earlier with regards to the advantages of them. Though I am not a fan, e-books are good for one thing, and that is establishing yourself as an expert.

WordPress 2.5.1
Upgrade your WordPress immediately.  WordPress just announced its version 2.5.1 today.  It includes a very important security fix and more than 70 bug fixes.  Here are some highlights of improvements : Performance improvements for the Dashboard, Write Post, and Edit Comments pages. Better performance for those who have many categories Media Uploader fixes An upgrade to TinyMCE 3.0.7 Widget Administration fixes Various [...]

Upgrade your WordPress immediately.  WordPress just announced its version 2.5.1 today.  It includes a very important security fix and more than 70 bug fixes. 

Here are some highlights of improvements :

• Performance improvements for the Dashboard, Write Post, and Edit Comments pages.
• Better performance for those who have many categories
• Media Uploader fixes
• An upgrade to TinyMCE 3.0.7
• Widget Administration fixes
• Various usability improvements
• Layout fixes for IE

One of the most annoying bugs in WP 2.5 was the media uploader bug.  It just wouldn’t work for me.  Uploading works fine, but once it is uploaded I can’t retreive it using the gallery menu.  WordPress 2.5.1 fixed some of the media uploader problems, but from my testing, it still needs improvements.  I can now upload and view the file fine, but I still can’t insert images to my posts.  I hope they get fix it quickly. 

If you want to learn more about WordPress 2.5.1 go to WordPress Blog. 

Classic Books Summed Up in 3 Lines (or Less)
Written by BEN JOSEPH 1984 WINSTON: Don’t tell the Party, but sex is way better than totalitarianism. EVERYONE: Surprise! We’re the Party. WINSTON: Oh, rats. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe C.S. LEWIS: Finally, a utopia ruled by children and populated by talking animals. THE WITCH: Hi, I’m a sexually mature woman of power and confidence. C.S. LEWIS: Ah! Kill it, lion [...]

Written by BEN JOSEPH

1984

WINSTON: Don’t tell the Party, but sex is way better than totalitarianism.

EVERYONE: Surprise! We’re the Party.

WINSTON: Oh, rats.

The Lion, the Witch

and the Wardrobe

C.S. LEWIS: Finally, a utopia ruled by children and populated by talking animals.

THE WITCH: Hi, I’m a sexually mature woman of power and confidence.

C.S. LEWIS: Ah! Kill it, lion Jesus!

Paradise Lost

ADAM: Paradise has arbitrary dietary restrictions?

DEVIL: They’re really more like guidelines.

GOD: Incorrect.

Moby-Dick

ISHMAEL: I’m existential.

AHAB: Really? Try vengeance.

ISHMAEL: I dig this dynamic. Can we drag it out for 600 pages?

The Great Gatsby

NICK: I love being rich and white.

GATSBY: Me, too, but I’d kill for the love of a woman.

DAISY: We can work with that.

Oliver Twist

OLIVER: Poverty ain’t so bad, what with all the Cockney accents and charming musical interludes.

ME: Thanks to movies, no books were read in the passing of this class.

PROFESSOR WATERMAN: You’re half right.

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Download Firefox 3
Did you know that Firefox 3 is out? It’s a major release. I can already tell the difference in performance. It’s lightning fast. I haven’t had a chance to fully explore the new version, but I can already tell that it looks sleek. Firefox 3 is supposed to be more secure and [...]

Did you know that Firefox 3 is out? It’s a major release. I can already tell the difference in performance. It’s lightning fast. I haven’t had a chance to fully explore the new version, but I can already tell that it looks sleek.

Firefox 3 is supposed to be more secure and easier to use. You can test some of their improved security features on the Firefox 3 Release Notes webpage.

Download Firefox 3 now. You will love it.

The new MarketingSyndrome.com
Thanks for visiting MarketingSyndrome.com. Over the last 3 years, I’ve been blogging about niche marketing and I had great time doing it. It was a great learning experience for me. I’ve learned great deal of blogging and communication skills along the way. Last year, I moved the main blog to a [...]

Thanks for visiting MarketingSyndrome.com. Over the last 3 years, I’ve been blogging about niche marketing and I had great time doing it. It was a great learning experience for me. I’ve learned great deal of blogging and communication skills along the way.

Last year, I moved the main blog to a subdirectory so I can do something else with the main domain. But I didn’t find a great use of the domain since. Just last month, I came up with an idea that I can transform it into a blog that talks about blogging :)

Because the niche marketing I do for living is closely tied to blogging, I’d talk about blogging as well. That way, I can finally fulfill the purpose of MarketingSyndrome.com. Now, my niche marketing blog will continue, but the main page will be transformed into a new blog. Old contents are already updated and I recycled as much as I could.

Thanks again for visiting my new blog and I hope to see many ideas evolve from my blog.

The Corporate Blogging Book
Stop what you are doing and run out to your local Barnes and Noble bookstore. Why? Because you need to have in your hand at this very moment The Corporate Blogging Book by Debbie Weil.

Podcast recommendation
I recently found a great marketing podcast whi is better than some of the paid seminars that I’ve listened to. Make sure to add this podcast to your bookmark! Enjoy! Internet Business Mastery

I recently found a great marketing podcast whi is better than some of the paid seminars that I’ve listened to. Make sure to add this podcast to your bookmark! Enjoy!

Internet Business Mastery

FilePub - free file hosting service
FilePub is a free file hosting service where you can upload any files up to 500mb per file. Allowed file types include : jpeg, jpg, png, gif, bmp, mp3, txt, avi, wmv, mpg, mpeg, doc, rar, and zip. It comes in handy when you need to share a big file or a big image on [...]

FilePub is a free file hosting service where you can upload any files up to 500mb per file. Allowed file types include : jpeg, jpg, png, gif, bmp, mp3, txt, avi, wmv, mpg, mpeg, doc, rar, and zip.

It comes in handy when you need to share a big file or a big image on your blog. You can save bandwidth and the web space if you host these big files outside of your web hosting server. FilePub is perfect for that. Read their terms of service before you upload your files.

How to upload a file
Click “Browse” and choose a file. Once the file is selected, just click “Click to Upload” That’s it!

Once the file is uploaded, you will be redirected to a folder. From there, you can either view the full version of the image or download it.

By the way the screen shots used in this post are hosted at FilePub. Here is another example of a uploaded file (2.16MB).

Visit: FilePub.com

BlogRolled - Make Money with Your Blogroll
I saw this coming.  Now you can make money with your blogrolls with BlogRolled.  It works pretty much like Text Link Ads except the fact that it doesn’t require a script installation to display the links.  Your visitors and the search engines will have hard time identifying the paid links because of the way BlogRolled works. This is [...]

I saw this coming.  Now you can make money with your blogrolls with BlogRolled.  It works pretty much like Text Link Ads except the fact that it doesn’t require a script installation to display the links.  Your visitors and the search engines will have hard time identifying the paid links because of the way BlogRolled works.

This is how it works.  Once an advertiser purchases a blogroll link on your blog, you will be notified of the sale.  Then you will have to log-in to your blog and manually add the listing.  I like this semi-automated process.  Simple enough. 

Now, maybe because the service is still in early stages, I don’t see any blog links listed there for sale.  I don’t know their price ranges yet.  If the price is reasonable for both publishers and advertisers, this will be huge. 

Visit: BlogRolled

WordPress 2.1 is ready
WordPress 2.1 is out for download. One of the important changes is in this version is that now it requires MySQL 4. Which means I have to upgrade my servers in order to test drive it. Download WordPress 2.1.

WordPress 2.1 is out for download. One of the important changes is in this version is that now it requires MySQL 4. Which means I have to upgrade my servers in order to test drive it.

Download WordPress 2.1.

$10,652.00 in Bonuses for Shawn Casey's "How To Make An Absolute Fortune..."

$10,652.00 in Bonuses for Shawn Casey's "How To Make An Absolute Fortune..."

Copywriting Course

Adobe Digital Media Store - The Leading Source of PDF eBooks & eDocs! - Attention Publishers!

Free Bonus Gifts

Examples of Really Good Bullets

8 Free Online Resources For Learning A New Language
Written by David DeFranza Perhaps the most useful skill you can carry is knowledge of the local language. It can open up a startling range of opportunities, ease the strain of logistics and planning, and allow you to develop a deeper connection with the place and, more importantly, the people you are visiting. With a little advanced planning, [...]

Written by David DeFranza

Perhaps the most useful skill you can carry is knowledge of the local language.

It can open up a startling range of opportunities, ease the strain of logistics and planning, and allow you to develop a deeper connection with the place and, more importantly, the people you are visiting.

With a little advanced planning, and an introduction to the basics, it can be surprisingly easy to pick up a language on the road.

A good phrasebook, and the dedication to use it, are the first steps to mastering a new tongue. Beyond that, an organized set of study materials can make all the difference between stumbling though a few disjointed commonalities and articulately expressing your ideas and opinions.

While most travelers understand this, who wants to buy and carry around a pile of language books? Fortunately, there are a number of excellent internet sites devoted to language study, most of them providing their services for free.

1. BBC Languages

The BBC offers comprehensive online courses in French, Spanish, German, Italian, Mandarin Chinese, Portuguese, and Greek, with slightly briefer introductions to several other languages.

This incredible, totally free, service is the best option for starting a new language from the beginning as the curricula are well designed, very complete, and easy to follow; all important features of a self-study program.

2. MIT OpenCourseWare

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has made a great effort to supply all of its course materials online for the free use of MIT students and the global internet community.

The Languages and Literatures department features courses in languages such as Chinese, Japanese, French, German and Spanish in addition to many interesting literature and culture topics.

While the usefulness of the materials provided varies depending on the course, they all include a detailed study plan to aid the self-learner in structuring a home course.

3. Internet Polyglot

The Internet Polyglot provides study materials for twenty-one languages. The unit-based materials available are ideal for a student already familiar with the basics of the language and interested in practicing specific areas and applications.

4. The Open University LeaningSpace

Similar to the Internet Polyglot, the LearingSpace provides unit-based study materials with a primary emphasis in French and Spanish.

5. Language Learning Podcasts

In the last few years, there has been an explosion of podcasts devoted to learning a language. These resources provide important sound cues and practical pronunciation guides, and are an invaluable tool for a self-study program.

To find podcasts, iTunes users can navigate to the “education” category of the iTunes Music Store. Other listeners can browse popular podcast databases like Odeo or The Podcast Directory.

A highlight of some of the more popular language podcasts includes Learn Greek, The French Podcast, ChinesePod, A Taste of Russian, and the Cherokee Language Podcast.

6. Madinah Arabic Language Course

For those interested in learning Arabic, the Madinah Course is the best online course available for free. Focusing on both spoken and written Arabic, this course takes the student from the first introductions through the advanced beginner level.

7. Livemocha

Livemocha is a social networking community focused on learning foreign languages. It provides free online courses in German, Mandarin Chinese, French, Spanish, and Hindi with plans to expand to other languages in the future.

In addition to the online courses, available from introductory to intermediate levels, Livemocha provides an active community of language learners and native speakers willing to work with you and give help when needed.

This community based approach makes Livemocha one of the most useful tools for the self-study of language.

8. Something Completely Different

Travelers interested in learning a more obscure, or even endangered language, should begin their research at the Ethnologue, an online database of all of the world’s 6,912 known living languages.

For more specific study, check out the Sanskrit Self Study program, an introductory course for learning Tibetan, Yucatec Maya language study materials, the great book Introduction to Zulu, or the Comparative Bantu Languages Dictionary.

Learning a new language requires time and dedication and can be a challenge no matter how good the tools available.

Still, these online resources are accessible anywhere you can find an internet connection and will make all the difference when trying to tame that new tongue, at home or abroad.

What are some your favourite online resources for learning a new language? Please share in the comments!

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Viral Marketing

Viral Marketing
Viral marketing describes any strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others... Published in HindustanTimes.com 13th S ..

The Slovenian Designer
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Trap #4: The Trap of One Big Success
The 5 Traps of Internet Marketing that Can Derail Your Business Kathleen Gage, the Street Smarts Marketer, reveals the #4 Internet Marketing trap: you only need one really great product to make a lot of money. Success on the Internet...

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Link popularity and link quality are important because all search engines consider them as a part of their ranking algorithms, says Puneet Mehrotra ..

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Social Networking Online: How to find out what you need to know
Are you puzzled by buzzwords like "web 2.0" and "social media?" If you're like me, you probably cringed when you started hearing the buzz about MySpace, Facebook and Twitter. At first you could ignore it because it was just for...

Trap #3: The Trap of the Internet Guru
5 Traps of Internet Marketing that Can Derail Your Business In this video, I talk about how easy it is to fall for smooth marketing hype that promise you millions. Internet "gurus" don't always have the right answer for you...

Ask, Ask, Ask: Using Surveys for Content Marketing
We recently asked a thousand readers what their biggest problems are when it comes to Internet Marketing, using SurveyMonkey.com. This a great way to get content ideas, stay in touch with what readers want, and develop programs and info products...

Which search engines to target?
Some search engine ti

Domain vs. Subdomain
When you get ready to set up a professional blog, one of the first decisions you will need to make is if you want to use a domain, subdomain, or a free option, such as blogger.com. I recommend treating a blog just like any other website, especially when it comes to the hosting. Some hosting companies allow you to [...]

3 Blog Squad Teleclasses this week
Monday, June 23, 1:00 p.m. Eastern Time (10:00 a.m. Pacific) How to Get the Best Out of Your Blog: A 4-Point System to Get Found, Get Known and Get Clients Part 1 of a 4-Part Teleseminar series hosted by Adam...

The Next Big Thing
Embedded software, Wireless Net, P2P, Real time movies, and Medicare are some of the often heard phrases used to describe the next big thing on the ..

My Happy Crazy Life
It isn’t often that I come across a blog that I am so impressed by that I find myself wanting to tell everyone I know about it, but My Happy Crazy Life is definitely one blog that I want to share with others.    When I found this blog, authored by Amy Sue of the Zany Zebra, [...]

4 Keys for Content Marketing that Gets Results
How do you write good content for your web pages (blog, newsletters, articles, press releases, etc.) that also brings in clients and customers and makes sales? Let's face it, talking about how great your product and services are isn't going...

Trap #2: You Can Buy Web Traffic
The 5 Traps of Internet Marketing that Can Derail Your Business In this video, I talk about Internet Marketing Trap #2: You can buy website success. Not. It's a myth. Success on the Internet requires effort...the right kind of effort....

Marketing Trap #1: Make Money in Your Sleep
The 5 Traps of Internet Marketing that Can Derail Your Business Kathleen Gage, the Street Smarts Marketer, reveals the #1 Internet Marketing trap: you can make money while you sleep with little or no effort. Success on the Internet requires...

How to Survey Your Readers & Clients
I don't normally post on Friday afternoons, but if you use the Internet to market your business, you need to learn how to ask your people what their needs are. I posted this morning about our survey, but what's important...

Advertising Your Website
Yup, I admit it, I am a bit biased, but I think that one of the very best ways you can advertise your website is through the V7N. First, without a doubt, your site needs to be in as many high quality directories as possible. The V7N Directory is the one directory that I personally recommend the [...]

Split Run Testing
If you are a webpreneur, split testing is a definite recommendation. Not only it increases sales but also lets go of unnecessary graphics and copy. A ..

Trap #5: The Trap of Manifesting by Meditation and Visualization
The 5 Traps of Internet Marketing that Can Derail Your Business Kathleen Gage, the Street Smarts Marketer, reveals the #5 Internet Marketing trap: it takes more than the Law of Attraction to be successful online. You have to get into...

Offline Marketing Techniques
  Offline marketing is very similar to online marketing, either way, word of mouth is one of the best forms of advertising there is, but a huge part of that involves getting to know the people around you. Online, that might mean joining and actively participating in groups and forums. Offline that could be taking a sincere [...]

Content is King on a Website
Content can make or break a website. The power of the written word has been witnessed many a time. Products have become success stories, resumes trans ..

Tips for a New Website
It\'s not easy not easy to promote your website or get sales initially. Following the tips given in this column can at least give your Web site ..

Traffic Building And Finished Home Work

Traffic Building And Finished Home Work
One of the quickest ways to drive traffic to your site is to key in on a hot topic. If you have a site dedicated to why butter melts on summer days and then you place a series of supporting articles ... [Author: Scott Lindsay - Site Promotion - April 22, 2008]

Free Article Gets 1000+ Hits Daily
In trying to make the most of this influx of revenue sharing opportunities all over the web, the question I am asked the most is: "how did you know what to write about?" The short answer is, I need... [Author: Kerry Mulherin - Site Promotion - March 24, 2008]

Promoting Your Business On Facebook. Properly.
Of course the colossal media attention that Facebook has received - and it�s absurd valuations - coupled with the increasing number of member has certainly been a pull for all sorts of businesses to ... [Author: Simon Dance - Site Promotion - March 24, 2008]

What Are Pay Per Click Reports?
A pay per click report will inform you of how many visitors you have had to your website, what keyword they used to get there, and some monitor how long they were there. These reports can be daily, w... [Author: Derek Rogers - Site Promotion - April 28, 2008]

Blogging For Website Traffic
Nowadays, it seems that everyone and his cousin have taken to blogging. This form of online self-expression has slowly but steadily taken over the World Wide Web to become somewhat of a phenomenon in... [Author: Richard Legg - Site Promotion - April 24, 2008]

Get Website Traffic Thru �Tell-A-Friend Script�
One of the most important things that any website owner needs is a continuous stream of traffic to their site. As more and more websites compete for the same targeted traffic, webmasters have to cons... [Author: Richard Legg - Site Promotion - April 24, 2008]

How To Cash In On Pay Per Click Without Spending A Dime
If you want real visibility but don�t want the hassle of paying top dollar for PPC listen up � there is a quick solution. Its easy to forget that there is literally unlimited real estate when it come... [Author: Ted Cantu - Site Promotion - April 22, 2008]

7 Surefire Ways To Increase Your Traffic Starting Yesterday
Internet. Business. Profit. To fully integrate all of these words into a successful merging you will need another word. Traffic. Every article you will find about making your site or company successf... [Author: Terry Leslie - Site Promotion - April 28, 2008]

How to Launch Your Career as an Author, Get Your Book Published and Get Book Publicity: MP3 Audio
Find out how Arielle Ford has helped launch the careers and create bestselling books for Deepak Chopra; Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen, Chicken Soup for the Soul series; Neale Donald Walsch, Conversations With God; Debbie Ford, The Dark Side of the Light Chasers; and Dean Ornish, Love and Survival and many, many other notable authors. Visit www.EverythingYouShouldKnow.com for more details

Podcast recommendation
I recently found a great marketing podcast whi is better than some of the paid seminars that I’ve listened to. Make sure to add this podcast to your bookmark! Enjoy! Internet Business Mastery

I recently found a great marketing podcast whi is better than some of the paid seminars that I’ve listened to. Make sure to add this podcast to your bookmark! Enjoy!

Internet Business Mastery

Using Squidoo Lens For Building And Growing Traffic
I have been visiting allot of internet marketing forums and realized that one of the hottest topics around is Squidoo or Squidoo lens. Allot of Internet Marketers don't know what it is or how they ca... [Author: Anderson Josiah - Site Promotion - April 24, 2008]

Everything you wanted to know about Copyrights

Everything you wanted to know about Copyrights


The Next Big Thing
Embedded software, Wireless Net, P2P, Real time movies, and Medicare are some of the often heard phrases used to describe the next big thing on the ..

Write a Book and Get Your Book Published: Subscribe to America's Most Successful Book Publicist's Newsletter Today
Sign up for the free HOW TO GET YOUR BOOK PUBLISHED and PUBLICIZED newsletter from Arielle Ford. In case you don't know Arielle by name, she's publicized hundreds of authors and books. 11 of which are #1 Bestsellers. Her clients include Deepak Chopra, Wayne Dyer, Neale Donald Walsch, Dean Ornish, Jon Gordon, Debbie Ford, Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen. Arielle has compiled a list of nearly every question a first-time or experienced author wants to know about publishing, publicity, building a platform and the book business. Every issue is jam-packed with answers to the questions that get your book published and you booked on radio, television, newspapers and magazines.

The Robert Collier Letter Book by Robert Collier

All About GPRS
Dickens once said, \"never close your lips to those to whom you have opened your heart.\" Perhaps we can now say, \"never close your ..

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Arielle Ford, Publicist biography
Arielle Ford has helped launch the careers and create bestselling books for Deepak Chopra; Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen, Chicken Soup for the Soul series; Neale Donald Walsch, Conversations With God; Debbie Ford, The Dark Side of the Light Chasers; and Dean Ornish, Love and Survival and many, many other notable authors.

How To Make An Absolute Fortune in the Information Products Business by Shawn Casey

Free Bonus Gifts

American Red Cross Disaster Relief via Amazon

Viral Marketing
Viral marketing describes any strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others... Published in HindustanTimes.com 13th S ..

Content is King on a Website
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Visit the Book Publicity Gallery to see Documents and Photos of Successful Book Publicity Tours and Information.
Visit this link for a whole gallery full of scans from the NY Times and Publisher's Weekly.

Internet Marketing Blog Directory

How to write an effective copy
Finding just the right words to describe your product or service isn\'t as easy as it looks, says Puneet Mehrotra. Published on 12th October ..

Copywriting Course

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The Corporate Blogging Book
Stop what you are doing and run out to your local Barnes and Noble bookstore. Why? Because you need to have in your hand at this very moment The Corporate Blogging Book by Debbie Weil.

Web 2.0 Soap Opera: The 5 Deadly Traps of Internet Marketing
How can you avoid falling into costly traps when it comes to marketing your business online? If the Internet were a soap opera, Kathleen Gage suggests in would be called Days of Our Internet Lives. She asks why is everyone...

How 2 Emails Changed My Life Forever...
Pivotal Moments… I was thinking about something really scary last week. You see, I almost missed the boat with my business and I don’t want you to do the same. Over five years ago I was sitting at home down...

Add My Blog To Your My Yahoo! Page

Four Marketing Tips for Self-Publishers
You may have already noticed that self-publishing is very time consuming. Most of your time is spent on marketing and publicity and very little time on writing.

Marketing Blues? What's got you at the end of your rope?
Will you take our survey and tell us what your biggest challenges are when it comes to Internet marketing for your business? It takes 2 1/2 minutes only. You'd be doing me a great big favor. I'd like to know...

Trap #3: The Trap of the Internet Guru
5 Traps of Internet Marketing that Can Derail Your Business In this video, I talk about how easy it is to fall for smooth marketing hype that promise you millions. Internet "gurus" don't always have the right answer for you...

Social Networking Online: How to find out what you need to know
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I wish I could say that "blogging is publishing" was something that I came up with on my own, but that is not the case. However, I have been pondering on this phrase for a while and decided to write an entry on my thoughts.

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1-2-All Email Marketing by Active Campaign
One of the tools that a self-publishing author must have is good email marketing software. I highly recommend 1-2-All which was developed by Active Campaign.

Marketing Trap #1: Make Money in Your Sleep
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Trap #5: The Trap of Manifesting by Meditation and Visualization
The 5 Traps of Internet Marketing that Can Derail Your Business Kathleen Gage, the Street Smarts Marketer, reveals the #5 Internet Marketing trap: it takes more than the Law of Attraction to be successful online. You have to get into...

Web 2.0 Soap Opera: The 5 Deadly Traps of Internet Marketing

Web 2.0 Soap Opera: The 5 Deadly Traps of Internet Marketing
How can you avoid falling into costly traps when it comes to marketing your business online? If the Internet were a soap opera, Kathleen Gage suggests in would be called Days of Our Internet Lives. She asks why is everyone...

The Slovenian Designer
Recently I had the pleasure of seeing some of the work of a graphic designer, known as the Slovenian Designer. I was so impressed by what I had seen, that I decided to take a look through his blog. WOW! This is definitely a site worth spending some time on. Not only is he an extremely talented web [...]

Offline Marketing Techniques
  Offline marketing is very similar to online marketing, either way, word of mouth is one of the best forms of advertising there is, but a huge part of that involves getting to know the people around you. Online, that might mean joining and actively participating in groups and forums. Offline that could be taking a sincere [...]

My Happy Crazy Life
It isn’t often that I come across a blog that I am so impressed by that I find myself wanting to tell everyone I know about it, but My Happy Crazy Life is definitely one blog that I want to share with others.    When I found this blog, authored by Amy Sue of the Zany Zebra, [...]

How to Survey Your Readers & Clients
I don't normally post on Friday afternoons, but if you use the Internet to market your business, you need to learn how to ask your people what their needs are. I posted this morning about our survey, but what's important...

Marketing Trap #1: Make Money in Your Sleep
The 5 Traps of Internet Marketing that Can Derail Your Business Kathleen Gage, the Street Smarts Marketer, reveals the #1 Internet Marketing trap: you can make money while you sleep with little or no effort. Success on the Internet requires...

Advertising Your Website
Yup, I admit it, I am a bit biased, but I think that one of the very best ways you can advertise your website is through the V7N. First, without a doubt, your site needs to be in as many high quality directories as possible. The V7N Directory is the one directory that I personally recommend the [...]

Content is King on a Website
Content can make or break a website. The power of the written word has been witnessed many a time. Products have become success stories, resumes trans ..

Trap #2: You Can Buy Web Traffic
The 5 Traps of Internet Marketing that Can Derail Your Business In this video, I talk about Internet Marketing Trap #2: You can buy website success. Not. It's a myth. Success on the Internet requires effort...the right kind of effort....

Trap #5: The Trap of Manifesting by Meditation and Visualization
The 5 Traps of Internet Marketing that Can Derail Your Business Kathleen Gage, the Street Smarts Marketer, reveals the #5 Internet Marketing trap: it takes more than the Law of Attraction to be successful online. You have to get into...

Split Run Testing
If you are a webpreneur, split testing is a definite recommendation. Not only it increases sales but also lets go of unnecessary graphics and copy. A ..

Marketing Blues? What's got you at the end of your rope?
Will you take our survey and tell us what your biggest challenges are when it comes to Internet marketing for your business? It takes 2 1/2 minutes only. You'd be doing me a great big favor. I'd like to know...

BlogPotomac: WaPo Dan Beyers talks about the future of the media

BlogPotomac: WaPo Dan Beyers talks about the future of the media
Media needs a new model of audience engagement

Dan Breyers, local business editor at the Washington Post, talks about how social media is impacting the media and how the paper is adapting.

He starts by reading a prediction that within 10 years there will be no more print media. And goes on to give his personal strategy as business editor.

 1.  Provide excellent content.

2.   Provide new ways for companies to engage with the audience. Offering access to the data and more indepth content about the companies

3.  Make it easy for people to use and share the information

This is definitely not your grandmother's newspaper. 

Take note, PR folk.  If this is where reporters and newspapers are heading, your media relations strategy will have to look very different too.

Hat tip to Geoff Livingstone for the video

Custom Content Is Your Best Bet
Last year 10% of audiences caught their favorite shows online.

Brands are catching on to the idea that they can create custom content and attract the right audience.  Where is this custom content being viewed?  Online. By the end of the year, an estimated 40% of programming will be viewed through the Web, says James McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research.  Internet advertising in the United States will grow eight times faster than the overall market, surpassing newspapers, cable TV, and broadcast TV by 2012, IDC predicted today. The Yankee Group expects the market to reach $50.3 billion by 2011, double the amount of 2007.

Marketers have found a new way to try to keep viewers from tuning out their ads: offer them online programming created by the marketers themselves, often with help from their advertising agencies, says The New York Times.

One way is to sponsor content that appeals to your audience - National Geographic's Dog Whisperer is virtually owned online by Petco, writes Brandweek.

Some brands are investing in their own channels and shows. What is called Advertorial in print has become advertainment online.

Chivas This is the LIfe has a channel on MSN.

BlendTec has made entertainment out of their product testing with the Will It Blend videos. Now they're doing co-branded content    

Just a year ago MySpace announced branded channels with custom content from National Geographic, The New York Times, Reuters, The Daily Reel, Expert Village, Flow, IGN Entertainment, Octane TV, Kush TV, Ripe TV, VBS TV, and Young Hollywood.

Sites like Kyte and FlexTubeTV allow you to produce your own branded content channel online.  This Is 50, is the online destination site for articet 50 cent.  It's part hip-hop/pop culture blog, part fan community, and part original content destination.

Heavy.com  aims at men ages 18-34, They offer an online dating reality series using partially user-generated content and a show that won a Webby Award for the sports category in Online Film & Video.

I's a no-brainer for travel and tourism sites. eMarketer projects Online travel sales in the U.S. sales will reach nearly $146 billion in 2010, up from nearly $127 billion in 2009 and $110 billion in 2008. Travel bookings surpassed offline bookings in volume for the fitrst time in 2007, according to PhoCusWright.  Any travel or tourism destination that is not using online video is missing a huge opportunity. Video is a major influencer in travel sales.

Have you thought about how you could use online video to build your brand, engage loyal customers and offer content that they want to watch and come back for?

.

Gartner Names Top 10 Technologies That Will Change The World
What is sauce for the goose... the advice to CIOs should be taken to heart by PR Managers

Dr. Jim Amderson posted in The Busines of IT blog about the Gartner Top 10 Technologies that they think will change the world in the next four years.

1. Multicore and hybrid processors
2. Virtualization and fabric computing
3. Social networks and social software
4. Cloud computing and cloud/Web platforms
5. Web mashups
6. User Interface
7. Ubiquitous computing
8. Contextual computing
9. Augmented reality
10. Semantics

Dr. Anderson says that 1 - 4 spell a sea change in IT departments.  "Uh, oh - can you hear your job going away?" he asks.

"What does this all mean, and more importantly what should a successful IT staffer (or CIO) do today? The key to your future success is to understand how IT is going to change and what you need to do to change with it."

#3 on the list is having a profound effect on PR and marketing departments. and I'd say that same advice applies:

The key to your future success is to understand how PR is going to change and what you need to do to change with it.

Social Media has given the PR industry much more insight into the fundamental aspects of relationship-building, says Todd Defren

Is this how PR should always have been?  Yes, indeed.  Social software and social networks are empowering the consumer and their voice is being heard - loud and clear.

Business Week updated their 2006 article on blogs and said when they wrote that story they missed an even bigger one:  social networks and social software.

"Social connectors are changing the dynamics of companies around the world. Millions of us are now hanging out on the Internet with customers, befriending rivals, clicking through pictures of our boss at a barbecue, or seeing what she read at the beach. It's as if the walls around our companies are vanishing and old org charts are lying on their sides."

And even if the social media bubble bursts—and Business Week predicts it will—they also predict that the power of social media to transform our businesses and society will only continue to grow.

Are you ready?

Digital Future
Users see the Net as a more important info source than traditional media

80- percent of users 17 and older consider the Internet to be an important source of information, says USC's 2008 Digital Future Report ..

 68 percent rated it higher than TV, 63 percent preferred the Net to radio and 63 percent rated it better than newspapers as an info source.

The Digital Future Project also found that the social aspects on online communities is growing at a rapid rate

Membership in online communities has more than doubled in only three years. More than half of online community members (54 percent) log into their community at least once a day, and 71 percent of members said their community is very important or extremely important to them. Fifty-six percent of members reported meeting their online counterparts in person.

More than half - -55 percent -- say they feel as strongly about their online communities as they do about their real-world communities.

Just as the Internet is changing the way we communicate and interact, so it is changing how businesses should interact with their customers and stakeholders. 

The role of PR is shifting.

Find out where your audiences are online and make it easier for them to share ideas with you and with each other.

Domain vs. Subdomain
When you get ready to set up a professional blog, one of the first decisions you will need to make is if you want to use a domain, subdomain, or a free option, such as blogger.com. I recommend treating a blog just like any other website, especially when it comes to the hosting. Some hosting companies allow you to [...]

The Slovenian Designer
Recently I had the pleasure of seeing some of the work of a graphic designer, known as the Slovenian Designer. I was so impressed by what I had seen, that I decided to take a look through his blog. WOW! This is definitely a site worth spending some time on. Not only is he an extremely talented web [...]

Making Social Media Content Work For You
Social media does have new rules, but some of the old rules apply too

Executing Social Media was a good conference.  Everyone participated in the sessions, so we got the benefit of some very smart people sharing ideas about what works and what doesn't.

There were two excellent keynotes:

George Wright from Blendtech spoke about how the Will It Blend campaign came about and why it has been so successful. The videos have had over 40 million views and sales are up 5X.

Peter Shankman woke everyone on day two with his energetic keynote about where all this social media sruff might be going.

Being wired and on the grid is a fact of life.  We have no privacy. Someone always has a camera or a laptop switched on and everything you do or say could end up online. What we do have is the ability to control what gets seen or found online.

His prediction is that we are moving towards a world where we have one tool that connects us and it's more about how we live our lives than the tools we use.

How can this be used to advantage by companies? Create PR stunts people will talk about and share.  Since everyone is now a citizen journalist with a camera and the means to publish, give them great content that is worth publishing. 

He did this for Harrah's. 

As a way to promote their new Water Tower, the Harrah's Resort Atlantic City gave away $1 million worth of free hotel rooms in four major East Coast cities, starting in New York.

They had a bevy of beautiful models painted in the Harrah's logo on Wall Street giving away room keys.  And it caused a storm of tweets and images, as well as mainstream media coverage.

LInda Zimmer made a great point in her wrapup - use best principles rather than best practices.  What worked for one company may not be the right stunt or content for yours.  Use the idea, but keep your target audience and end goal in mind..

Example:  If HerRoom.com did a similar stunt to promote the Undie Awards, I am sure they'd get just as much attention and coverage - but a ton of traffic from young Wall Street hot shots would not sell any bras. 

The old rule of the right message to the right audience still applies.  It's just a new channel..

 

Advertising Your Website
Yup, I admit it, I am a bit biased, but I think that one of the very best ways you can advertise your website is through the V7N. First, without a doubt, your site needs to be in as many high quality directories as possible. The V7N Directory is the one directory that I personally recommend the [...]

My Happy Crazy Life
It isn’t often that I come across a blog that I am so impressed by that I find myself wanting to tell everyone I know about it, but My Happy Crazy Life is definitely one blog that I want to share with others.    When I found this blog, authored by Amy Sue of the Zany Zebra, [...]

Offline Marketing Techniques
  Offline marketing is very similar to online marketing, either way, word of mouth is one of the best forms of advertising there is, but a huge part of that involves getting to know the people around you. Online, that might mean joining and actively participating in groups and forums. Offline that could be taking a sincere [...]

Top 10 Drinking Achievements Before You Die
Written by Mitch Martin Even booze hounds need to have goals in life so, I decided to come up with a list of the 10 things that every true drinker should accomplish before they die. Not every item on the list requires drinking massive quantities of alcohol. Once you have covered every item on this list [...]

Written by Mitch Martin

Even booze hounds need to have goals in life so, I decided to come up with a list of the 10 things that every true drinker should accomplish before they die. Not every item on the list requires drinking massive quantities of alcohol. Once you have covered every item on this list you will be a well rounded drinker who should have a shit-ton of good stories to tell. Personally I can put a check mark next to six of these so it looks like I still have some work to do. Figure out where you stand and then plan your weekends accordingly.

Case In A Day - 24 hours in a day, 24 beers in a case. Coincidence? I prefer to think not. You need to sit down with a couple of friends and a couple of cases and power through the day and the case. People that have never done this think it’s easy and the people that have, know it’s not. Added Difficulty: Keep a hand written journal of what you are doing each time you crack a beer. Bonus Points: If anything is legible after beer 17.

Run The Taps At A Bar… Conditions: must have 12 or more taps. This is pretty self explanatory. Belly up to the bar and order a single pint of every beer they have on tap one after the other. You are going to get to try a lot of new beers and chances are you will be piss drunk before the sun goes down.

Century Club - Pretty simple, 100 shots of beer in 100 minutes without puking. Much like the case in a day challenge people always think this is easy until they actually try it. 60 seconds starts feeling like 5 seconds once you pass the 70 minute mark.

Brew Your Own Beer - Yeah it might not taste that great and you will be “that guy” that makes all your friends try their shitty brew but every true booze hound has to give it a shot at least once.

Pub Crawl Conditions: 12 or more pubs covering at least 1 mile. There is nothing better than getting a big group of friends together on a sunny day and catching a buzz while going on a walk. A beer at each stop with a short walk in between and you will be primed for a night of debauchery.

Go To An AA Meeting at least once you should see how the other half lives. Learn a lesson from Charlie Kelly, throw out your beer before you actually get into the meeting. If you don’t somebody will rat you out.

Learn Something About Wine And I don’t mean memorizing the flavors of Franzia, Carlo Rossi or Charles Shaw. Go on a wine tour and actually pay attention (without pounding Busch Lights between wineries) or go to a multi-course meal where they pair a wine with each course and explain why they go together. The knowledge will pay off each and every time you take a lady out for a nice dinner.

Black Out Before Noon - Just once get out of bed at 9 a.m. and crack a beer instead of having your morning Tropicana. There are a finite number of years in life where you can get drunk before noon and not feel like a total douche about it the next day. If you are a college football fan then this is easy to accomplish. If beer isn’t your bag first thing in the A.M. then I would recommend a Boones Farm Strawberry Hill. It’s slightly fruity, high in booze and fan-fucking-tastic.

Oktoberfest in Germany - As someone who’s been there twice, trust me in terms of a unique alcohol experience, it’s pretty unparalleled. Any place where you can puke on the floor under your table, and one waitress jokes with you while she cleans it up and another brings you another beer is unique in my book. You haven’t lived until you’ve seen a girl throw up while making out with some dude so that it squirts out the side of their mouths. Gross but hilarious. -Mr. Wonka

Scotch - learn to drink scotch either on the rocks or neat. Much like golf, it is a pain in the ass to learn, but it will pay off in the business world. While you are at it, learn the difference between bourbon and whiskey so that you don’t look like a total fucking hayseed. If you really want to get a gold star on your chart learn the difference between a blend and single malt as well.

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Its Name is Zookoda

Its Name is Zookoda
Zookoda is the new leader in professional email marketing for bloggers. It gives you better control on the look and feel of how your feed is sent to your subscribers. The program is similar to what you see in newsletter...

Blogging is Publishing
I wish I could say that "blogging is publishing" was something that I came up with on my own, but that is not the case. However, I have been pondering on this phrase for a while and decided to write an entry on my thoughts.

Four Marketing Tips for Self-Publishers
You may have already noticed that self-publishing is very time consuming. Most of your time is spent on marketing and publicity and very little time on writing.

The Corporate Blogging Book
Stop what you are doing and run out to your local Barnes and Noble bookstore. Why? Because you need to have in your hand at this very moment The Corporate Blogging Book by Debbie Weil.

The Launch of WordPress MU
Have you heard the news? WordPress MU 1.0 is officially available to public at no charge. WordPress MU is a blog script that let you run a blog hosting service like WordPress.com. This is a great news for us the niche marketers. Things you can do with this powerful script is [...]

Have you heard the news? WordPress MU 1.0 is officially available to public at no charge. WordPress MU is a blog script that let you run a blog hosting service like WordPress.com. This is a great news for us the niche marketers.

Things you can do with this powerful script is up to your imagination. You can make a blogging hosting service for a particular niche market and use them to attract traffic to your main site. I’ve already registered a few domains around a couple of niche markets I’m involved in.

If you are technically challenged, ask for help at our niche marketing forum. I will help you there. I see great opportunities here. Don’t be late.

The new MarketingSyndrome.com
Thanks for visiting MarketingSyndrome.com. Over the last 3 years, I’ve been blogging about niche marketing and I had great time doing it. It was a great learning experience for me. I’ve learned great deal of blogging and communication skills along the way. Last year, I moved the main blog to a [...]

Thanks for visiting MarketingSyndrome.com. Over the last 3 years, I’ve been blogging about niche marketing and I had great time doing it. It was a great learning experience for me. I’ve learned great deal of blogging and communication skills along the way.

Last year, I moved the main blog to a subdirectory so I can do something else with the main domain. But I didn’t find a great use of the domain since. Just last month, I came up with an idea that I can transform it into a blog that talks about blogging :)

Because the niche marketing I do for living is closely tied to blogging, I’d talk about blogging as well. That way, I can finally fulfill the purpose of MarketingSyndrome.com. Now, my niche marketing blog will continue, but the main page will be transformed into a new blog. Old contents are already updated and I recycled as much as I could.

Thanks again for visiting my new blog and I hope to see many ideas evolve from my blog.

The Advantages of Creating Your Own E-Book
E-books have become more and more popular in the recent years. Although some people prefer a printed book in their hand, e-books are still in demand.

1-2-All Email Marketing by Active Campaign
One of the tools that a self-publishing author must have is good email marketing software. I highly recommend 1-2-All which was developed by Active Campaign.

Will E-Publishing Become the New Leader?
Let the truth be told I am not a big supporter of e-books even though I wrote an entry earlier with regards to the advantages of them. Though I am not a fan, e-books are good for one thing, and that is establishing yourself as an expert.

Don’t make this Adsense mistake
One of the common mistakes that Adsense publishers make is using wrong labels above Adsense units. People think it’s a hot trick, but it’s really not. Google doesn’t like to see wrong labels right above Adsense ad units. let’s review Adsense’s TOS. Publishers may not label the ads with text other than “sponsored [...]

One of the common mistakes that Adsense publishers make is using wrong labels above Adsense units. People think it’s a hot trick, but it’s really not. Google doesn’t like to see wrong labels right above Adsense ad units. let’s review Adsense’s TOS.

Publishers may not label the ads with text other than “sponsored links” or “advertisements.” This includes any text directly above our ads that could be confused with, or attempt to be associated with Google ads.

TOS clearly states that publishers may not use labels other than “sponsored links” or “advertisements”. But as you may have seen already, people become creative when it comes to labeling their ad units. I’ve seen people putting, “Articles, Navigation, Books, and Latest News” as the title of the ad unit.

Usually Google sends out warning letters first if they think you are using a wrong label. Just be careful of what you are doing with it.

Podcast recommendation
I recently found a great marketing podcast whi is better than some of the paid seminars that I’ve listened to. Make sure to add this podcast to your bookmark! Enjoy! Internet Business Mastery

I recently found a great marketing podcast whi is better than some of the paid seminars that I’ve listened to. Make sure to add this podcast to your bookmark! Enjoy!

Internet Business Mastery

FilePub - free file hosting service
FilePub is a free file hosting service where you can upload any files up to 500mb per file. Allowed file types include : jpeg, jpg, png, gif, bmp, mp3, txt, avi, wmv, mpg, mpeg, doc, rar, and zip. It comes in handy when you need to share a big file or a big image on [...]

FilePub is a free file hosting service where you can upload any files up to 500mb per file. Allowed file types include : jpeg, jpg, png, gif, bmp, mp3, txt, avi, wmv, mpg, mpeg, doc, rar, and zip.

It comes in handy when you need to share a big file or a big image on your blog. You can save bandwidth and the web space if you host these big files outside of your web hosting server. FilePub is perfect for that. Read their terms of service before you upload your files.

How to upload a file
Click “Browse” and choose a file. Once the file is selected, just click “Click to Upload” That’s it!

Once the file is uploaded, you will be redirected to a folder. From there, you can either view the full version of the image or download it.

By the way the screen shots used in this post are hosted at FilePub. Here is another example of a uploaded file (2.16MB).

Visit: FilePub.com

WordPress 2.1 is ready
WordPress 2.1 is out for download. One of the important changes is in this version is that now it requires MySQL 4. Which means I have to upgrade my servers in order to test drive it. Download WordPress 2.1.

WordPress 2.1 is out for download. One of the important changes is in this version is that now it requires MySQL 4. Which means I have to upgrade my servers in order to test drive it.

Download WordPress 2.1.

Free Stock Photos from Electronic Perceptions
Kathy over at the Electronic Perceptions is a real giver. She’s giving away free stock photos on her blog. You are free to use the photos marked as “Royalty-Free” under the terms defined. Please read the terms before you download them. One thing I would like to see is some free [...]

Kathy over at the Electronic Perceptions is a real giver. She’s giving away free stock photos on her blog. You are free to use the photos marked as “Royalty-Free” under the terms defined. Please read the terms before you download them.

One thing I would like to see is some free high-resolution stock photos. I know she can do whatever she wants to do with her photos, but I feel that she can attract more traffic to her site if she gives away high-resolution versions for some of her photo sets. That would be really awesome.

I highly suggest that you bookmark her blog. New stock photos are posted daily basis. Thanks Kathy!

Samples
Red and Green Tableware

Visit : Electronic Perceptions for Free Stock Photos

BlogRolled - Make Money with Your Blogroll
I saw this coming.  Now you can make money with your blogrolls with BlogRolled.  It works pretty much like Text Link Ads except the fact that it doesn’t require a script installation to display the links.  Your visitors and the search engines will have hard time identifying the paid links because of the way BlogRolled works. This is [...]

I saw this coming.  Now you can make money with your blogrolls with BlogRolled.  It works pretty much like Text Link Ads except the fact that it doesn’t require a script installation to display the links.  Your visitors and the search engines will have hard time identifying the paid links because of the way BlogRolled works.

This is how it works.  Once an advertiser purchases a blogroll link on your blog, you will be notified of the sale.  Then you will have to log-in to your blog and manually add the listing.  I like this semi-automated process.  Simple enough. 

Now, maybe because the service is still in early stages, I don’t see any blog links listed there for sale.  I don’t know their price ranges yet.  If the price is reasonable for both publishers and advertisers, this will be huge. 

Visit: BlogRolled

YPN vs Adsense
David at his blog posted an interesting findings on YPN vs Adsense. He switched to YPN from Adsense for 10 days and shared his results with a screenshot. Very interesting read, please check it out. Making Money with YPN

David at his blog posted an interesting findings on YPN vs Adsense. He switched to YPN from Adsense for 10 days and shared his results with a screenshot.

Very interesting read, please check it out.

Making Money with YPN

WordPress 2.5.1
Upgrade your WordPress immediately.  WordPress just announced its version 2.5.1 today.  It includes a very important security fix and more than 70 bug fixes.  Here are some highlights of improvements : Performance improvements for the Dashboard, Write Post, and Edit Comments pages. Better performance for those who have many categories Media Uploader fixes An upgrade to TinyMCE 3.0.7 Widget Administration fixes Various [...]

Upgrade your WordPress immediately.  WordPress just announced its version 2.5.1 today.  It includes a very important security fix and more than 70 bug fixes. 

Here are some highlights of improvements :

• Performance improvements for the Dashboard, Write Post, and Edit Comments pages.
• Better performance for those who have many categories
• Media Uploader fixes
• An upgrade to TinyMCE 3.0.7
• Widget Administration fixes
• Various usability improvements
• Layout fixes for IE

One of the most annoying bugs in WP 2.5 was the media uploader bug.  It just wouldn’t work for me.  Uploading works fine, but once it is uploaded I can’t retreive it using the gallery menu.  WordPress 2.5.1 fixed some of the media uploader problems, but from my testing, it still needs improvements.  I can now upload and view the file fine, but I still can’t insert images to my posts.  I hope they get fix it quickly. 

If you want to learn more about WordPress 2.5.1 go to WordPress Blog. 

Digital Future

Digital Future
Users see the Net as a more important info source than traditional media

80- percent of users 17 and older consider the Internet to be an important source of information, says USC's 2008 Digital Future Report ..

 68 percent rated it higher than TV, 63 percent preferred the Net to radio and 63 percent rated it better than newspapers as an info source.

The Digital Future Project also found that the social aspects on online communities is growing at a rapid rate

Membership in online communities has more than doubled in only three years. More than half of online community members (54 percent) log into their community at least once a day, and 71 percent of members said their community is very important or extremely important to them. Fifty-six percent of members reported meeting their online counterparts in person.

More than half - -55 percent -- say they feel as strongly about their online communities as they do about their real-world communities.

Just as the Internet is changing the way we communicate and interact, so it is changing how businesses should interact with their customers and stakeholders. 

The role of PR is shifting.

Find out where your audiences are online and make it easier for them to share ideas with you and with each other.

Making Social Media Content Work For You
Social media does have new rules, but some of the old rules apply too

Executing Social Media was a good conference.  Everyone participated in the sessions, so we got the benefit of some very smart people sharing ideas about what works and what doesn't.

There were two excellent keynotes:

George Wright from Blendtech spoke about how the Will It Blend campaign came about and why it has been so successful. The videos have had over 40 million views and sales are up 5X.

Peter Shankman woke everyone on day two with his energetic keynote about where all this social media sruff might be going.

Being wired and on the grid is a fact of life.  We have no privacy. Someone always has a camera or a laptop switched on and everything you do or say could end up online. What we do have is the ability to control what gets seen or found online.

His prediction is that we are moving towards a world where we have one tool that connects us and it's more about how we live our lives than the tools we use.

How can this be used to advantage by companies? Create PR stunts people will talk about and share.  Since everyone is now a citizen journalist with a camera and the means to publish, give them great content that is worth publishing. 

He did this for Harrah's. 

As a way to promote their new Water Tower, the Harrah's Resort Atlantic City gave away $1 million worth of free hotel rooms in four major East Coast cities, starting in New York.

They had a bevy of beautiful models painted in the Harrah's logo on Wall Street giving away room keys.  And it caused a storm of tweets and images, as well as mainstream media coverage.

LInda Zimmer made a great point in her wrapup - use best principles rather than best practices.  What worked for one company may not be the right stunt or content for yours.  Use the idea, but keep your target audience and end goal in mind..

Example:  If HerRoom.com did a similar stunt to promote the Undie Awards, I am sure they'd get just as much attention and coverage - but a ton of traffic from young Wall Street hot shots would not sell any bras. 

The old rule of the right message to the right audience still applies.  It's just a new channel..

 

Custom Content Is Your Best Bet
Last year 10% of audiences caught their favorite shows online.

Brands are catching on to the idea that they can create custom content and attract the right audience.  Where is this custom content being viewed?  Online. By the end of the year, an estimated 40% of programming will be viewed through the Web, says James McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research.  Internet advertising in the United States will grow eight times faster than the overall market, surpassing newspapers, cable TV, and broadcast TV by 2012, IDC predicted today. The Yankee Group expects the market to reach $50.3 billion by 2011, double the amount of 2007.

Marketers have found a new way to try to keep viewers from tuning out their ads: offer them online programming created by the marketers themselves, often with help from their advertising agencies, says The New York Times.

One way is to sponsor content that appeals to your audience - National Geographic's Dog Whisperer is virtually owned online by Petco, writes Brandweek.

Some brands are investing in their own channels and shows. What is called Advertorial in print has become advertainment online.

Chivas This is the LIfe has a channel on MSN.

BlendTec has made entertainment out of their product testing with the Will It Blend videos. Now they're doing co-branded content    

Just a year ago MySpace announced branded channels with custom content from National Geographic, The New York Times, Reuters, The Daily Reel, Expert Village, Flow, IGN Entertainment, Octane TV, Kush TV, Ripe TV, VBS TV, and Young Hollywood.

Sites like Kyte and FlexTubeTV allow you to produce your own branded content channel online.  This Is 50, is the online destination site for articet 50 cent.  It's part hip-hop/pop culture blog, part fan community, and part original content destination.

Heavy.com  aims at men ages 18-34, They offer an online dating reality series using partially user-generated content and a show that won a Webby Award for the sports category in Online Film & Video.

I's a no-brainer for travel and tourism sites. eMarketer projects Online travel sales in the U.S. sales will reach nearly $146 billion in 2010, up from nearly $127 billion in 2009 and $110 billion in 2008. Travel bookings surpassed offline bookings in volume for the fitrst time in 2007, according to PhoCusWright.  Any travel or tourism destination that is not using online video is missing a huge opportunity. Video is a major influencer in travel sales.

Have you thought about how you could use online video to build your brand, engage loyal customers and offer content that they want to watch and come back for?

.

links for 2008-05-26
InformationWeek - FriendFeed Good example of how the media is moving into Friendfeed. (tags: Journalism Media FriendFeed aggregation informationweek) Is FriendFeed Down? This site says it all. These guys know how to scale. (tags: FriendFeed Fun) YackTrack.com: Home Interesting tool...

Boomers, Gen X Driven to Distraction as Gen Y Just Copes
Over the past several months I have written extensively about The Attention Crash. There are some signs (at least among geeks) that it's worsening. Robert Scoble is, of course, the poster boy. Mike Elgan talks about curing the "Distraction Virus"...

Content is King on a Website

Content is King on a Website
Content can make or break a website. The power of the written word has been witnessed many a time. Products have become success stories, resumes trans ..

Traffic Building And Finished Home Work
One of the quickest ways to drive traffic to your site is to key in on a hot topic. If you have a site dedicated to why butter melts on summer days and then you place a series of supporting articles ... [Author: Scott Lindsay - Site Promotion - April 22, 2008]

How to write an effective copy
Finding just the right words to describe your product or service isn\'t as easy as it looks, says Puneet Mehrotra. Published on 12th October ..

Writing Articles For Affiliate Programs
Why write articles Writing articles can make your affiliate pages unique and drive more traffic from the major search engines, resulting in more sales. In some instances the merchant's affiliate pr... [Author: Nick Kaplan - Site Promotion - April 28, 2008]

Split Run Testing
If you are a webpreneur, split testing is a definite recommendation. Not only it increases sales but also lets go of unnecessary graphics and copy. A ..

Will We See an Apple TV SDK at WWDC? Eventually, Yes
The annals of technology history show us that typically a market takes hold when there are at least two conditions present: a) users who embrace a particular device, platform or tool and b) an open system that allows developers to...

Get Website Traffic Thru �Tell-A-Friend Script�
One of the most important things that any website owner needs is a continuous stream of traffic to their site. As more and more websites compete for the same targeted traffic, webmasters have to cons... [Author: Richard Legg - Site Promotion - April 24, 2008]

Your Checklist To Search Engine Optimisation Reports
The most important online marketing strategies that can help you be successful with optimizing your business on the web include building a plan, blogging, an email list, press releases, and much more... [Author: Derek Rogers - Site Promotion - April 28, 2008]

What Are Pay Per Click Reports?
A pay per click report will inform you of how many visitors you have had to your website, what keyword they used to get there, and some monitor how long they were there. These reports can be daily, w... [Author: Derek Rogers - Site Promotion - April 28, 2008]

Tips for a New Website
It\'s not easy not easy to promote your website or get sales initially. Following the tips given in this column can at least give your Web site ..

How To Cash In On Pay Per Click Without Spending A Dime
If you want real visibility but don�t want the hassle of paying top dollar for PPC listen up � there is a quick solution. Its easy to forget that there is literally unlimited real estate when it come... [Author: Ted Cantu - Site Promotion - April 22, 2008]

Here Is How You Can Save A Fortune On Pay Per Click Campaigns
Finally there is an alternative answer to expensive pay per click campaigns and getting your web site promoted. The good news is that you do not have to pay a fortune to get good visibility. You also... [Author: Ted Cantu - Site Promotion - April 22, 2008]

7 Surefire Ways To Increase Your Traffic Starting Yesterday
Internet. Business. Profit. To fully integrate all of these words into a successful merging you will need another word. Traffic. Every article you will find about making your site or company successf... [Author: Terry Leslie - Site Promotion - April 28, 2008]

7 simple steps to Keyword Mastery & Search Engine Ranking
Keyword Research has become an integral part of starting up your own business or growing your business (exponentially). Search engine marketing is here to stay for the long term, hence finding custo... [Author: Dave James - Site Promotion - April 26, 2008]

Free Article Gets 1000+ Hits Daily
In trying to make the most of this influx of revenue sharing opportunities all over the web, the question I am asked the most is: "how did you know what to write about?" The short answer is, I need... [Author: Kerry Mulherin - Site Promotion - March 24, 2008]

I Am a Small Business Owner, So I Don't Need a Web site
[NOTE: This article was written in response to actual conversations between small business owners and our Web design and development firm.] Hello. My name is Mr. Smallbiz Owner, and I own A Small Co... [Author: Wendy Suto - Site Promotion - April 26, 2008]

Blogging For Website Traffic
Nowadays, it seems that everyone and his cousin have taken to blogging. This form of online self-expression has slowly but steadily taken over the World Wide Web to become somewhat of a phenomenon in... [Author: Richard Legg - Site Promotion - April 24, 2008]

How To Increase Onsite Conversions - Leads, Sales, Etc.
A website that does not make conversions is a website that serves no business function. So let's talk about: What a website conversion is and how you can increase conversions across your business we... [Author: Mike Van Bergen - Site Promotion - April 25, 2008]

Promoting Your Business On Facebook. Properly.
Of course the colossal media attention that Facebook has received - and it�s absurd valuations - coupled with the increasing number of member has certainly been a pull for all sorts of businesses to ... [Author: Simon Dance - Site Promotion - March 24, 2008]

Inexpensive Tips For Getting Website Traffic
You can get a lot of website traffic without having to spend a lot of money. If you want to develop a busy and profitable website for your online business, there are a lot of techniques for getting w... [Author: Richard Legg - Site Promotion - April 24, 2008]

BlogRolled - Make Money with Your Blogroll

BlogRolled - Make Money with Your Blogroll
I saw this coming.  Now you can make money with your blogrolls with BlogRolled.  It works pretty much like Text Link Ads except the fact that it doesn’t require a script installation to display the links.  Your visitors and the search engines will have hard time identifying the paid links because of the way BlogRolled works. This is [...]

I saw this coming.  Now you can make money with your blogrolls with BlogRolled.  It works pretty much like Text Link Ads except the fact that it doesn’t require a script installation to display the links.  Your visitors and the search engines will have hard time identifying the paid links because of the way BlogRolled works.

This is how it works.  Once an advertiser purchases a blogroll link on your blog, you will be notified of the sale.  Then you will have to log-in to your blog and manually add the listing.  I like this semi-automated process.  Simple enough. 

Now, maybe because the service is still in early stages, I don’t see any blog links listed there for sale.  I don’t know their price ranges yet.  If the price is reasonable for both publishers and advertisers, this will be huge. 

Visit: BlogRolled

The New Online Omnivores
Last weekend I attended Northern Voice, a bloggers' conference in Vancouver. The Tyee has now published my comments on the event: The New Online Omnivores.

Last weekend I attended Northern Voice, a bloggers' conference in Vancouver. The Tyee has now published my comments on the event: The New Online Omnivores.

Nielsen on Website Readers' Reading Habits
Via Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox: How Little Do Users Read? His summary: On the average Web page, users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average visit; 20% is more likely. The conclusion he draws: Unless you're writing for really dedicated readers with a strong interest in your subject, you should keep your text to no more than 100 words per page. I'd be interested in...

Via Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox: How Little Do Users Read? His summary:

On the average Web page, users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average visit; 20% is more likely.

The conclusion he draws: Unless you're writing for really dedicated readers with a strong interest in your subject, you should keep your text to no more than 100 words per page. I'd be interested in your reactions to his argument.

A Forecast from 1994
Long ago, I published a piece in a magazine called Infobahn about how politics and the internet might evolve together. Judge for yourself how accurate I was: NET PROPAGANDA: COMING SOON TO A MONITOR NEAR YOU One fine fall day in 1948, I joined the American political process: I walked down Lankershim Boulevard in North Hollywood carrying fore-and-aft posters urging the election of Harry S Truman. As a seven-year-old sandwich...

Long ago, I published a piece in a magazine called Infobahn about how politics and the internet might evolve together. Judge for yourself how accurate I was:

NET PROPAGANDA: COMING SOON TO A MONITOR NEAR YOU

One fine fall day in 1948, I joined the American political process: I walked down Lankershim Boulevard in North Hollywood carrying fore-and-aft posters urging the election of Harry S Truman. As a seven-year-old sandwich man, I had become a campaign mechanism—a way of reaching voters with a political message.

The age of the sandwich man, however, was fast ending. A few blocks away, a TV set stood in our living room. It carried little but Felix the Cat cartoons, Hopalong Cassidy westerns, and primitive variety shows, but as a medium it would change politics before I was old enough to vote.

Over forty years later, politicians have a new medium to deal with: the Internet. So far they are using it clumsily, treating it as an odd mix of print and TV. But just as they learned the lessons of television, they will learn how to campaign in cyberspace.

They’ll have their work cut out for them. Most sensible politicians, after lurking on the Net for a time, would prefer to campaign by throwing bottled leaflets into the Pacific rather than use the Internet.

Political discourse on the Net—at least in the Usenet newsgroups—is on a par with turf wars among the howler monkeys. Tribes of fanatics battle for control of newsgroups: gun nuts, anti-gun nuts, school voucherists, libertarians, semiliterate teenagers.

Some Netters can supply sustained, documented argument for their views, but no one else pays much attention. Instead the Net provides a steady diet of flame wars, newsgroup highjacking, and debates that digress from their original topics with dizzying speed.

It’s not just that so many denizens of the Net are barking loonies; that’s equally true of the general population. But too many Netters are still a demographically narrow slice of the electorate. They’re too young to vote, too broke to contribute to campaign funds, and too busy downloading pornography to care much about upholding democracy. Worse yet, the medium itself doesn’t encourage reasoned argument or the kinds of people who engage in it.

Well, earlier politicians learned to use new media or die. If they failed to adapt, their careers ended whether they were good politicians or not. (In Richard Nixon’s case, TV killed and resurrected him several times.) So the successful politicians of the early 21st century will indeed exploit the Net—probably more effectively than they have with television.

Most 1990s politicians, if they use the Net at all, treat it as an extension of print media. They have reason to do so. Most users see the Net as text: tiny, semi-legible words scrolling up their monitors. The resemblance to newspapers and magazines is there, however distorted. So politicians from Clinton on down have been pumping out electronic news releases, press-conference transcripts, and speech texts.

For a long time I was on one of Bill Clinton’s mailing lists. He sent me verbatim texts of every speech he made on education, welfare, and related social issues. He always began with a joke, and every joke triggered what the transcripts called (laughter). When I tried to unsubscribe, however, Clinton wouldn’t let me; the jokes and (laughter) and presidential eloquence kept coming.

Eventually I pried myself away, but not before I’d learned something about the Clinton administration’s attitude towards the Net. For all the yelling about the Information Superhighway, the metaphor at work was the small-town newspaper editor’s office. When you signed on to Clinton’s mailing list, you had little choice: you could pick social issues, foreign affairs, the economy—and that was about it. What you got was raw government-issue rhetoric.

A small-town editor, getting this stuff over the wire, would know how to adapt it. A presidential speech would undergo heavy rewriting and paraphrase, or supply a few excerpts for a local columnist, or fail to appear at all. The editor, knowing local readers, would present only as much of the speech as the readers could understand and respond to. Otherwise readers would start treating the newspaper like just another kind of junk mail with nothing to say to them personally.

Clinton’s releases ran into another problem, directly related to the medium of the computer screen: It doesn’t like long stretches of text.

A monitor screen packed full of writing is ugly and hard to read. Text works best on the screen when it’s short, even fragmentary—more like a caption than a paragraph. One-liners and bulleted lists can assert and describe, but they can’t really argue.

So no matter how funny the jokes in Clinton’s speeches, few Netters would trouble to scroll past the first screen or two.

The medium’s built-in hostility to text has evidently sunk in. More recently, Clinton and other politicians are trying to use the Net like TV itself. Thanks to interfaces like Mosaic and NetScape, computer users can now access home pages full of color graphics: the White House, the president’s smiling family, and so on.

But this approach limits the potential audience still more. To get these pretty pictures you need a big, recent computer and a fast modem (better yet, direct Net access), and you need to know how to use them. So the potential audience is a small group of affluent hobbyists, a few serious professionals, and some university students.

Even with snappy graphics, this kind of Net access is right back there with Felix the Cat on a 5-inch screen, or picking up Philadelphia on your crystal-set radio: Gee whiz, you can see the White House on your computer, even if the quality isn’t as good as on your TV. This kind of thrill has a short half-life.

Plenty of politicians are using the Net as an auxiliary postal service, receiving e-mail from their constituents and replying with boilerplate comments just as they do with snail mail. As a barometer of public sentiment, however, e-mail is dubious; again, the sources are few and demographically confined to a relatively well-educated and privileged social stratum. Only in a desperately tight race would Netters be likely to swing an election—assuming they all voted the same way.

A few politicos are venturing into cyberspace themselves. David Schreck, a member of the British Columbia provincial government, goes online to debate with local flame artists—but he’s on a local BBS, not the Internet, in such discussions. “I’ve been in touch with maybe four of my 27,000 constituents,” he says.

Granted that scores of lurking constituents may also read his comments as lurkers, he’s still right to describe his online activities as a hobby.

A Toronto candidate for city council, meanwhile, did go onto the Net even though the vast majority of his readers, living far outside his district, had no interest in his campaign. For his pains he suffered intense flaming and won only 4 per cent of the municipal vote.

So the Net at this point is an also-ran as a print medium. As a TV-like medium, it’s barely better than a test pattern. For all the millions reportedly joining the Net every month, it’s not really a mass medium, and therein lies both its weakness and its strength: it’s a medium for narrowcasting, not broadcasting.

A broadcast medium assumes (or imposes) common values among millions of essentially passive consumers. As a newspaper columnist, I reached over a quarter-million readers every week; a really inflammatory article might provoke two or three letters. Print is not interactive; neither are radio and TV, for all the popularity of talk shows.

But they are “public” in the sense that we share a sense of some kind of community with other consumers. Most of us watch TV with friends or family, or split up the paper and read it together at the breakfast table.

When we go on the Net, however, we go solo. The technology puts us a few inches from a monitor, and even if we’re in a computer lab we are on our own. We read highly public messages, but we do so in private; our responses, however public they may eventually be, feel private.

That’s one reason for the flame wars that keep breaking out. It’s a problem of “register”—finding the right words to talk about the right subject to the right person under the right circumstances.

When introduced to Queen Elizabeth, we don’t say: “Hey, Liz, great to meetcha, you look a lot younger than you do on TV.” When introduced to the 13-year-old who’s come to baby-sit, we don’t say: “I am deeply honored to make your acquaintance on this memorable day, your ladyship.”

Politicians making speeches on TV sound like pompous liars because they’re usually in an “oratorical” register suited to large groups of people within earshot. Franklin Delano Roosevelt scored politically with his radio-based “Fireside Chats” because he found the right register for what seemed like small-group face-to-face discussion with a mass audience. Ronald Reagan did something similar with TV, finding a register that worked on the small screen.

So if politicians are going to gain votes on the Net, they’re going to have to find a highly intimate register, reflecting the fact that millions of users are getting the message when they feel like isolated individuals, not like members of a larger group.

The Net, then, makes its users tough customers for a political marketer. You can’t spam the voters with a generic message; for every one you get through to, you anger a dozen others. You have to tailor the appeal as precisely as possible, on the basis of as much information as possible.

Doing a simple “finger” on every Netter wouldn’t help much. But it might well be possible to track significant numbers of users as they make their way through various newsgroups—especially if they post plenty of comments. If they hang out on alt.rush-limbaugh, that may tell you something.

But most Netters are lurkers, as passively unresponsive as most newspaper readers and TV watchers. Is a given lurker a Limbaugh fan, or a left-liberal onlooker morbidly fascinated by the group? Here’s where the medium’s interactivity offers politicians a big opportunity.

E-mail the Limbaugh posters with a political message. But don’t just sit back and wait for flames. Offer them (and the lurkers) some reward for responding with details about themselves: a slick little software application, for example, as a reward for filling out a questionnaire. Maybe it even comes with a Rush icon showing him with a halo or horns.

This gives you a start on establishing Net focus groups, which while small will reflect values of larger populations. Now the political marketers can begin to tailor their appeals more accurately.

Net culture, at this point in its development, is still hung up on the technology itself. Telephone and TV users don’t think much about the hardware they’re using, but Netters do. If appeals from politicians are technically slick, the subliminal message is that the politico is a happening dude, riding the electronic surf. (Not long ago, The New Yorker magazine was breathlessly reporting on how many of Clinton’s young staffers were running around with PowerBooks, as if that were reason in itself to endorse his policies.)

This attitude will change as millions of non-technical users move into cyberspace, but it will be a factor for several more years.

The appeals will also reflect the limits of the medium: not good for extended print, not great for video or audio, but combining elements of all of them. So Net propaganda will probably tend to look like a TV commercial: strong visuals, snappy sound bites, and minimal text.

But it will be aimed at a very small audience. The multimedia ad that comes to my computer may be strikingly different from the one that ends up on my neighbour’s. Part of the difference will be content: in the version I get, the candidate pushes commitment to excellence in education, while my neighbor gets promises of spending cuts.

More importantly, each ad will be personal. When I open up the e-mail message, I hear the candidate saying: “Crawford, I’ve got some news for you and your family.” What follows will offer more TV-style jolts than hard information, but it will also offer quick, easy interaction. A slide-show questionnaire: just point and click to register your views on gun control, abortion, illegal immigration. Then see how your answers stack up against the total so far registered. Want more information? Click again for more specific messages on those issues, the candidate’s personal resume, or a free, autographed copy of his latest speech or her last book.

This is personal campaigning on a level rarely seen these days, even among main-streeting small-town politicos. But it’s taking place in a medium that’s also very public. How do you avoid looking like a liar when Netters compare your different messages? In part, you just don’t openly contradict yourself, and while your message is personal it’s not very concrete. If glittering generalities are the stock in trade of public oratory, sweet nothings are the currency of this more intimate medium.

In other cases, the strategy will be to highjack public newsgroups, just as candidates often pack meetings with their own supporters. Even now, one or two people can take over a newsgroup and set its agenda by dominating the discussions, flaming opponents, and dragging every thread in the desired direction. A couple of dozen supporters should be able to dominate debate even more thoroughly.

None of this will be official, of course—just the natural behavior of ordinary citizens who happen to support the candidate.

Home pages, still relatively primitive, could become highly effective infotainment tools for politicians. A candidate could even create captive audiences: for example, he might donate computers to nursing homes, recreation centers, and libraries. Each computer would be already programmed to log on to the candidate’s home page, which would supply plenty of data on how the candidate has supported seniors, recreation programs, and libraries. It might also include software applications that would provide a running tally of the size of the national debt, or the number of seniors murdered in the last 24 hours.

Sometimes the computer might look and act more like a video game. Imagine two or three of them set up in an employee dining hall, offering entertainment as well as political information: a game, perhaps, in which the goal is to corner the candidate’s opponent and force him to admit how he voted on some crucial bill. Or guess how much your taxes have gone up since the incumbent took office, and if you’re within 10 per cent of the answer, you get an extra 15 minutes’ time on the computer. Too expensive to work? Maybe not, if the employer is willing to cover some of the computers’ cost as a campaign contribution.

Hackers and crackers could find themselves in a new golden age. Once upon a time politicians had to break into one another’s offices. Now they can get into one another’s databases. Lists of contributors and supporters would be there for the taking—and the burglars could also damage such lists or destroy them altogether.

Dirty tricks could get really dirty. Imagine a forged home page providing violent distortions of the candidate’s position and record, or campaign ads that really come from the opposition. Such “black propaganda” would be hard to fight; publicizing the forgery would only draw more attention to its lies.

E-mail bombings could flood the candidate’s server with thousands of junk messages, making it difficult or impossible to reach voters and staffers. A software giveaway, sabotaged with a virus, would infuriate potential voters. The same virus could also disable the candidate’s system.

Scurrilous rumors could travel the Net in seconds, as hard to stop as neutrinos but with much more impact. The candidate’s private e-mail could turn up in conveniently downloadable form at FTP sites outside the country.

All of these tactics would not only resonate in cyberspace but would gain enormous attention in other media. The dirty tricksters, with very little threat of punishment facing them, could be as nasty as they liked...while their political masters hypocritically complained about them and called for more controls over the Internet.

Despite these threats, politicians are likely to get into the medium for one reason: Other politicians. Hardware and software defenses will emerge to hold off the tricksters, and the first politicos to master the Net will enjoy a measurable advantage over latecomers. Mastery will come from recognition that this is not just electronic print or low-res TV, but a medium that can and should answer back.

Net propaganda can’t just hammer on voters who do nothing until election day. It has to provoke them into response after response, with each response helping to define the politician’s next step. Many of those provocations will be inane, patronizing or downright vicious. But for once the voters’ reactions may actually force the politicos to treat them like intelligent, informed citizens.

And for the politicians, that could be the Net’s most frightening threat of all.

Infobahn, Summer 1994

The 2007 List of Banished Words
It wouldn't be a new year without Lake Superior State University's list of banished words. I don't always agree with them, but they remind me to think carefully before using a popular new expression. It may already be a cliché.

It wouldn't be a new year without Lake Superior State University's list of banished words.

I don't always agree with them, but they remind me to think carefully before using a popular new expression. It may already be a cliché.

The Launch of WordPress MU
Have you heard the news? WordPress MU 1.0 is officially available to public at no charge. WordPress MU is a blog script that let you run a blog hosting service like WordPress.com. This is a great news for us the niche marketers. Things you can do with this powerful script is [...]

Have you heard the news? WordPress MU 1.0 is officially available to public at no charge. WordPress MU is a blog script that let you run a blog hosting service like WordPress.com. This is a great news for us the niche marketers.

Things you can do with this powerful script is up to your imagination. You can make a blogging hosting service for a particular niche market and use them to attract traffic to your main site. I’ve already registered a few domains around a couple of niche markets I’m involved in.

If you are technically challenged, ask for help at our niche marketing forum. I will help you there. I see great opportunities here. Don’t be late.

The Politics of Cyberspace
The Tyee has published my article Winning Cyberspace in '08. Excerpt: ... the sudden advent of interactive media has changed propaganda into a two-way street, a conversation, a screaming match -- and a rock concert. One-way media and interactive media are themselves interacting, creating a political environment unlike any before it. The campaign of Barack Obama is not just thriving in this environment -- it's defining 21st-century campaign politics.

The Tyee has published my article Winning Cyberspace in '08. Excerpt:

... the sudden advent of interactive media has changed propaganda into a two-way street, a conversation, a screaming match -- and a rock concert. One-way media and interactive media are themselves interacting, creating a political environment unlike any before it.

The campaign of Barack Obama is not just thriving in this environment -- it's defining 21st-century campaign politics.

Four Marketing Tips for Self-Publishers
You may have already noticed that self-publishing is very time consuming. Most of your time is spent on marketing and publicity and very little time on writing.

Food for thought for webwriters
Via The Korea Herald: Court fines two for Web libel against Lee. Excerpt: An appeals court has found two people guilty of libel against Lee Myung-bak when he was a presidential candidate last year, overturning lower-court rulings. A Seoul High Court judge has fined a defendant, surnamed Sohn, 500,000 won ($477) for posting messages denouncing Lee and his Grand National Party 17 times in September, the court said yesterday. In...

Via The Korea Herald: Court fines two for Web libel against Lee. Excerpt:

An appeals court has found two people guilty of libel against Lee Myung-bak when he was a presidential candidate last year, overturning lower-court rulings.

A Seoul High Court judge has fined a defendant, surnamed Sohn, 500,000 won ($477) for posting messages denouncing Lee and his Grand National Party 17 times in September, the court said yesterday.

In one message, he called Lee a "criminal" and described the GNP as a "department store of corruption."

In March, a lower court in Suwon acquitted Sohn on the grounds that he had never engaged in any political activities and that the internet has become a common means for citizens to express political opinions freely.

But the higher court ruled that he violated the election law, saying his messages go beyond a simple expression of opinions.

"The messages are clearly against Lee. The defendant is thought to have done so purposely considering he posted them 17 times. He appears to have been aware that his behavior could influence the result of the election," the court said.

Current law forbids the act of distributing documents, photographs and other materials aimed at influencing election results by supporting or opposing particular candidates and political parties 180 days prior to election day.

Civic groups criticize the law for restricting freedom of expression and political participation.

In a separate case, another high-court judge fined a defendant 800,000 won for criticizing Lee 30 times in messages on an internet message board, the court said yesterday.

Granted, the fines aren't serious—at least by North American and European standards. But if the same laws were applied to political blogs in the West, most countries could pay off their deficits with the fines extracted from bloggers.

Holiday Wishes
Christmas Eve is not yet here in North America, and when it arrives I'm going to be very busy. We have family and friends coming for dinner, so I won't have much chance to blog. But the first thing I'll do in the morning is to start a batch of pulla, a Finnish coffee bread that for decades has been our Christmas breakfast. You're welcome to make it yourself: Download...

Christmas Eve is not yet here in North America, and when it arrives I'm going to be very busy. We have family and friends coming for dinner, so I won't have much chance to blog.

But the first thing I'll do in the morning is to start a batch of pulla, a Finnish coffee bread that for decades has been our Christmas breakfast. You're welcome to make it yourself:

Download recipe_for_pulla.pdf

My old friend Merlin and I take this opportunity to wish you a very happy holiday and a new year full of surprises that make you laugh.

The Advantages of Creating Your Own E-Book
E-books have become more and more popular in the recent years. Although some people prefer a printed book in their hand, e-books are still in demand.

A US newspaper abandons print
Via Isthmus/The Daily Page: The end of an era in Madison, Wisconsin. Excerpt: Good luck, Cap Times. You'll need it. Converting from a six-day-a-week paid paper to an online news site is like jumping from a very high cliff into a very deep and mysterious pool. The paper might be killed. Or it might be transformed. One thing's for sure: The Capital Times that Madison has known for 90 years...

Via Isthmus/The Daily Page: The end of an era in Madison, Wisconsin. Excerpt:

Good luck, Cap Times. You'll need it. Converting from a six-day-a-week paid paper to an online news site is like jumping from a very high cliff into a very deep and mysterious pool.

The paper might be killed. Or it might be transformed.

One thing's for sure: The Capital Times that Madison has known for 90 years will be gone. Online publishing is a fundamentally different proposition for both journalists and readers. Experts consider it a classic disruptive technology that reorders daily life for just about everyone it touches and destroys what was thought to be a durable economic model for the eclipsed technology.

Newspapers won't die off as quickly as slide rules did when calculators were introduced, but the changes under way are so epochal you'd be foolish to believe anyone who speaks confidently of what publishing will be like in 10 years.

"Nobody knows anything," as veteran screenwriter William Goldman famously said of the secrets to successful movie-making. The newspaper business is even more in the dark as to how it will make its next buck.

Meanwhile, via the Editor & Publisher website: Steep Decline at NYT while WSJ gains. Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine also comments on the Madison metamorphosis.

A lot of journalists are becoming webwriters, but they don't necessarily like the idea, according to this post by Amy Gahran on Poynter.org. And a lot of webwriters, whether they know it or not, are becoming journalists.

Podcast recommendation
I recently found a great marketing podcast whi is better than some of the paid seminars that I’ve listened to. Make sure to add this podcast to your bookmark! Enjoy! Internet Business Mastery

I recently found a great marketing podcast whi is better than some of the paid seminars that I’ve listened to. Make sure to add this podcast to your bookmark! Enjoy!

Internet Business Mastery

50 Open Source Resources for Online Writers
Via Job Profiles.com, a list of 50 Awesome Open Source Resources for Online Writers. They include various free word processors and reference tools. I can't vouch for any of them, but it might be worth the time it takes to download some and experiment a bit.

Via Job Profiles.com, a list of 50 Awesome Open Source Resources for Online Writers.

They include various free word processors and reference tools. I can't vouch for any of them, but it might be worth the time it takes to download some and experiment a bit.

Will E-Publishing Become the New Leader?
Let the truth be told I am not a big supporter of e-books even though I wrote an entry earlier with regards to the advantages of them. Though I am not a fan, e-books are good for one thing, and that is establishing yourself as an expert.

Blogging is Publishing
I wish I could say that "blogging is publishing" was something that I came up with on my own, but that is not the case. However, I have been pondering on this phrase for a while and decided to write an entry on my thoughts.

Reading Obama
The Tyee has published my article Reading Obama, a review of his book The Audacity of Hope. It should have some interest for webwriters, whatever their politics.

The Tyee has published my article Reading Obama, a review of his book The Audacity of Hope. It should have some interest for webwriters, whatever their politics.

Generating Revenue Through Advertising

Generating Revenue Through Advertising


Keyword Tool

Why a Book About Blogging Fails
A few months ago I got a review copy of Blogwars, by David D. Perlmutter. Of course I was delighted, and I started to read it at once. Then I put it down. Today, facing a serious reading shortage, I picked it up again and made a real effort to get into it. It hadn't improved, but these stupid machines have taught me that we learn more from our mistakes...

A few months ago I got a review copy of Blogwars, by David D. Perlmutter. Of course I was delighted, and I started to read it at once.

Then I put it down.

Today, facing a serious reading shortage, I picked it up again and made a real effort to get into it. It hadn't improved, but these stupid machines have taught me that we learn more from our mistakes than our successes.

So what's wrong with a book by a highly successful writer and professor of journalism, on the subject of political blogs and their growing impact on American life?

Put briefly, it's a print-on-paper document that needs to be more like web text.

A major design problem
I can't blame Perlmutter for the design of his book, but design is a major problem. The body text appears in a reasonably legible serif font. But the paragraphs are absurdly long, and subheads appear rarely. When they do, they're cramped boldface, barely legible—with underlines.

Now, I've been telling my students since the mid-1990s that you don't underline boldface text. Robin Williams made that simple point in 1995 in The Mac is Not a Typewriter.

Worse yet, the book includes excerpts from blogs using vast swathes of sans serif text, much of it in italics (see pages 144-147 for a really bad example).

You can get away with sans serif in short paragraphs with short lines, but not in lines of 17 to 20 words—not on screen, and not on paper.

Much of Perlmutter's text offers some interesting observations on the effect of political blogging in the 2004 US presidential election. But by failing to exploit the style of effective web text, he effectively muffles himself and undercuts whatever he's trying to say about this medium.

How web text is changing print text
When I started to teach webwriting in the late 1990s, I tried to draw a distinction between the habits of print readers and those of online readers. As one who started reading print on paper in 1947, I'm very habituated to it indeed.

But Perlmutter's book has taught me that the web is actually changing all our reading habits. Short, concise web text, well laid out, has an impact we don't get over. When we go back to print on paper, we're too impatient to put up with long sentences and long paragraphs.

Some of my favourite political bloggers, like Glenn Greenwald, still haven't learned that. His posts are long, with endless paragraphs and tedious patches of italic quotations.

A blog like Power Line, whose politics I find regrettable, at least presents itself in short, well-designed paragraphs. (But Power Line should keep its text columns narrower, and use a serif font for body text.)

Greenwald is influential despite his print-oriented text. But he'd more influential if he turned his long-winded paragraphs into short, punchy statements.

Power Line doesn't persuade me, but at least I get its point in a hurry. And I recognize that its authors are trying to make their text readable.

I hope David Perlmutter does a new edition of Blogwars, preferably in time for the fall election. But I hope he gets an editor and a designer who know how to create a print analog of a website, so his readers will understand what he's trying to tell us.

When governments don't understand the web

When governments don't understand the web
Between school and a book and other blogging, I've been neglecting this site. But this afternoon I posted an item on my H5N1 blog that has a lot to do with webwriters' problems: When governments don't understand the web.

Between school and a book and other blogging, I've been neglecting this site. But this afternoon I posted an item on my H5N1 blog that has a lot to do with webwriters' problems: When governments don't understand the web.

The Branding of Barack Obama
Here's a fascinating article in Newsweek that web writers and editors should ponder: Why the Obama "Brand" Is Working. It's an interview with designer Michael Bierut. Excerpt: How else is Obama's design different than what has come before--or what rival campaigns are doing? He's the first candidate, actually, who's had a coherent, top-to-bottom, 360-degree system at work. Whereas, I think it's more more common for politicians to have a bumper-sticker...

Here's a fascinating article in Newsweek that web writers and editors should ponder: Why the Obama "Brand" Is Working. It's an interview with designer Michael Bierut. Excerpt:

How else is Obama's design different than what has come before--or what rival campaigns are doing?

He's the first candidate, actually, who's had a coherent, top-to-bottom, 360-degree system at work. Whereas, I think it's more more common for politicians to have a bumper-sticker symbol that they just stick on everything and hope that that will carry the day.

The thing that sort of flabbergasts me as a professional graphic designer is that, somewhere along the way, they decided that all their graphics would basically be done in the same typeface, which is this typeface called Gotham.

If you look at one of his rallies, every single non-handmade sign is in that font. Every single one of them. And they're all perfectly spaced and perfectly arranged.

Trust me. I've done graphics for events --and I know what it takes to have rally after rally without someone saying, "Oh, we ran out of signs, let's do a batch in Arial." It just doesn't seem to happen. There's an absolute level of control that I have trouble achieving with my corporate clients.

Then if you go to the Web site, it's all reflected there too--all the same elements showing up in this clean, smooth, elegant way. It all ties together really, really beautifully as a system. 

Is Obama's stuff on the level with the best commercial brand design?

I think it's just as good or better. I have sophisticated clients who pay me and other people well to try to keep them on the straight and narrow, and they have trouble getting everything set in the same typeface. And he seems to be able to do it in Cleveland and Cincinnati and Houston and San Antonio. Every time you look, all those signs are perfect.

Graphic designers like me don't understand how it's happening. It's unprecedented and inconceivable to us. The people in the know are flabbergasted.

Meanwhile, over at Salon, we get an intriguing analysis of the candidates' logos.

A Forecast from 1994
Long ago, I published a piece in a magazine called Infobahn about how politics and the internet might evolve together. Judge for yourself how accurate I was: NET PROPAGANDA: COMING SOON TO A MONITOR NEAR YOU One fine fall day in 1948, I joined the American political process: I walked down Lankershim Boulevard in North Hollywood carrying fore-and-aft posters urging the election of Harry S Truman. As a seven-year-old sandwich...

Long ago, I published a piece in a magazine called Infobahn about how politics and the internet might evolve together. Judge for yourself how accurate I was:

NET PROPAGANDA: COMING SOON TO A MONITOR NEAR YOU

One fine fall day in 1948, I joined the American political process: I walked down Lankershim Boulevard in North Hollywood carrying fore-and-aft posters urging the election of Harry S Truman. As a seven-year-old sandwich man, I had become a campaign mechanism—a way of reaching voters with a political message.

The age of the sandwich man, however, was fast ending. A few blocks away, a TV set stood in our living room. It carried little but Felix the Cat cartoons, Hopalong Cassidy westerns, and primitive variety shows, but as a medium it would change politics before I was old enough to vote.

Over forty years later, politicians have a new medium to deal with: the Internet. So far they are using it clumsily, treating it as an odd mix of print and TV. But just as they learned the lessons of television, they will learn how to campaign in cyberspace.

They’ll have their work cut out for them. Most sensible politicians, after lurking on the Net for a time, would prefer to campaign by throwing bottled leaflets into the Pacific rather than use the Internet.

Political discourse on the Net—at least in the Usenet newsgroups—is on a par with turf wars among the howler monkeys. Tribes of fanatics battle for control of newsgroups: gun nuts, anti-gun nuts, school voucherists, libertarians, semiliterate teenagers.

Some Netters can supply sustained, documented argument for their views, but no one else pays much attention. Instead the Net provides a steady diet of flame wars, newsgroup highjacking, and debates that digress from their original topics with dizzying speed.

It’s not just that so many denizens of the Net are barking loonies; that’s equally true of the general population. But too many Netters are still a demographically narrow slice of the electorate. They’re too young to vote, too broke to contribute to campaign funds, and too busy downloading pornography to care much about upholding democracy. Worse yet, the medium itself doesn’t encourage reasoned argument or the kinds of people who engage in it.

Well, earlier politicians learned to use new media or die. If they failed to adapt, their careers ended whether they were good politicians or not. (In Richard Nixon’s case, TV killed and resurrected him several times.) So the successful politicians of the early 21st century will indeed exploit the Net—probably more effectively than they have with television.

Most 1990s politicians, if they use the Net at all, treat it as an extension of print media. They have reason to do so. Most users see the Net as text: tiny, semi-legible words scrolling up their monitors. The resemblance to newspapers and magazines is there, however distorted. So politicians from Clinton on down have been pumping out electronic news releases, press-conference transcripts, and speech texts.

For a long time I was on one of Bill Clinton’s mailing lists. He sent me verbatim texts of every speech he made on education, welfare, and related social issues. He always began with a joke, and every joke triggered what the transcripts called (laughter). When I tried to unsubscribe, however, Clinton wouldn’t let me; the jokes and (laughter) and presidential eloquence kept coming.

Eventually I pried myself away, but not before I’d learned something about the Clinton administration’s attitude towards the Net. For all the yelling about the Information Superhighway, the metaphor at work was the small-town newspaper editor’s office. When you signed on to Clinton’s mailing list, you had little choice: you could pick social issues, foreign affairs, the economy—and that was about it. What you got was raw government-issue rhetoric.

A small-town editor, getting this stuff over the wire, would know how to adapt it. A presidential speech would undergo heavy rewriting and paraphrase, or supply a few excerpts for a local columnist, or fail to appear at all. The editor, knowing local readers, would present only as much of the speech as the readers could understand and respond to. Otherwise readers would start treating the newspaper like just another kind of junk mail with nothing to say to them personally.

Clinton’s releases ran into another problem, directly related to the medium of the computer screen: It doesn’t like long stretches of text.

A monitor screen packed full of writing is ugly and hard to read. Text works best on the screen when it’s short, even fragmentary—more like a caption than a paragraph. One-liners and bulleted lists can assert and describe, but they can’t really argue.

So no matter how funny the jokes in Clinton’s speeches, few Netters would trouble to scroll past the first screen or two.

The medium’s built-in hostility to text has evidently sunk in. More recently, Clinton and other politicians are trying to use the Net like TV itself. Thanks to interfaces like Mosaic and NetScape, computer users can now access home pages full of color graphics: the White House, the president’s smiling family, and so on.

But this approach limits the potential audience still more. To get these pretty pictures you need a big, recent computer and a fast modem (better yet, direct Net access), and you need to know how to use them. So the potential audience is a small group of affluent hobbyists, a few serious professionals, and some university students.

Even with snappy graphics, this kind of Net access is right back there with Felix the Cat on a 5-inch screen, or picking up Philadelphia on your crystal-set radio: Gee whiz, you can see the White House on your computer, even if the quality isn’t as good as on your TV. This kind of thrill has a short half-life.

Plenty of politicians are using the Net as an auxiliary postal service, receiving e-mail from their constituents and replying with boilerplate comments just as they do with snail mail. As a barometer of public sentiment, however, e-mail is dubious; again, the sources are few and demographically confined to a relatively well-educated and privileged social stratum. Only in a desperately tight race would Netters be likely to swing an election—assuming they all voted the same way.

A few politicos are venturing into cyberspace themselves. David Schreck, a member of the British Columbia provincial government, goes online to debate with local flame artists—but he’s on a local BBS, not the Internet, in such discussions. “I’ve been in touch with maybe four of my 27,000 constituents,” he says.

Granted that scores of lurking constituents may also read his comments as lurkers, he’s still right to describe his online activities as a hobby.

A Toronto candidate for city council, meanwhile, did go onto the Net even though the vast majority of his readers, living far outside his district, had no interest in his campaign. For his pains he suffered intense flaming and won only 4 per cent of the municipal vote.

So the Net at this point is an also-ran as a print medium. As a TV-like medium, it’s barely better than a test pattern. For all the millions reportedly joining the Net every month, it’s not really a mass medium, and therein lies both its weakness and its strength: it’s a medium for narrowcasting, not broadcasting.

A broadcast medium assumes (or imposes) common values among millions of essentially passive consumers. As a newspaper columnist, I reached over a quarter-million readers every week; a really inflammatory article might provoke two or three letters. Print is not interactive; neither are radio and TV, for all the popularity of talk shows.

But they are “public” in the sense that we share a sense of some kind of community with other consumers. Most of us watch TV with friends or family, or split up the paper and read it together at the breakfast table.

When we go on the Net, however, we go solo. The technology puts us a few inches from a monitor, and even if we’re in a computer lab we are on our own. We read highly public messages, but we do so in private; our responses, however public they may eventually be, feel private.

That’s one reason for the flame wars that keep breaking out. It’s a problem of “register”—finding the right words to talk about the right subject to the right person under the right circumstances.

When introduced to Queen Elizabeth, we don’t say: “Hey, Liz, great to meetcha, you look a lot younger than you do on TV.” When introduced to the 13-year-old who’s come to baby-sit, we don’t say: “I am deeply honored to make your acquaintance on this memorable day, your ladyship.”

Politicians making speeches on TV sound like pompous liars because they’re usually in an “oratorical” register suited to large groups of people within earshot. Franklin Delano Roosevelt scored politically with his radio-based “Fireside Chats” because he found the right register for what seemed like small-group face-to-face discussion with a mass audience. Ronald Reagan did something similar with TV, finding a register that worked on the small screen.

So if politicians are going to gain votes on the Net, they’re going to have to find a highly intimate register, reflecting the fact that millions of users are getting the message when they feel like isolated individuals, not like members of a larger group.

The Net, then, makes its users tough customers for a political marketer. You can’t spam the voters with a generic message; for every one you get through to, you anger a dozen others. You have to tailor the appeal as precisely as possible, on the basis of as much information as possible.

Doing a simple “finger” on every Netter wouldn’t help much. But it might well be possible to track significant numbers of users as they make their way through various newsgroups—especially if they post plenty of comments. If they hang out on alt.rush-limbaugh, that may tell you something.

But most Netters are lurkers, as passively unresponsive as most newspaper readers and TV watchers. Is a given lurker a Limbaugh fan, or a left-liberal onlooker morbidly fascinated by the group? Here’s where the medium’s interactivity offers politicians a big opportunity.

E-mail the Limbaugh posters with a political message. But don’t just sit back and wait for flames. Offer them (and the lurkers) some reward for responding with details about themselves: a slick little software application, for example, as a reward for filling out a questionnaire. Maybe it even comes with a Rush icon showing him with a halo or horns.

This gives you a start on establishing Net focus groups, which while small will reflect values of larger populations. Now the political marketers can begin to tailor their appeals more accurately.

Net culture, at this point in its development, is still hung up on the technology itself. Telephone and TV users don’t think much about the hardware they’re using, but Netters do. If appeals from politicians are technically slick, the subliminal message is that the politico is a happening dude, riding the electronic surf. (Not long ago, The New Yorker magazine was breathlessly reporting on how many of Clinton’s young staffers were running around with PowerBooks, as if that were reason in itself to endorse his policies.)

This attitude will change as millions of non-technical users move into cyberspace, but it will be a factor for several more years.

The appeals will also reflect the limits of the medium: not good for extended print, not great for video or audio, but combining elements of all of them. So Net propaganda will probably tend to look like a TV commercial: strong visuals, snappy sound bites, and minimal text.

But it will be aimed at a very small audience. The multimedia ad that comes to my computer may be strikingly different from the one that ends up on my neighbour’s. Part of the difference will be content: in the version I get, the candidate pushes commitment to excellence in education, while my neighbor gets promises of spending cuts.

More importantly, each ad will be personal. When I open up the e-mail message, I hear the candidate saying: “Crawford, I’ve got some news for you and your family.” What follows will offer more TV-style jolts than hard information, but it will also offer quick, easy interaction. A slide-show questionnaire: just point and click to register your views on gun control, abortion, illegal immigration. Then see how your answers stack up against the total so far registered. Want more information? Click again for more specific messages on those issues, the candidate’s personal resume, or a free, autographed copy of his latest speech or her last book.

This is personal campaigning on a level rarely seen these days, even among main-streeting small-town politicos. But it’s taking place in a medium that’s also very public. How do you avoid looking like a liar when Netters compare your different messages? In part, you just don’t openly contradict yourself, and while your message is personal it’s not very concrete. If glittering generalities are the stock in trade of public oratory, sweet nothings are the currency of this more intimate medium.

In other cases, the strategy will be to highjack public newsgroups, just as candidates often pack meetings with their own supporters. Even now, one or two people can take over a newsgroup and set its agenda by dominating the discussions, flaming opponents, and dragging every thread in the desired direction. A couple of dozen supporters should be able to dominate debate even more thoroughly.

None of this will be official, of course—just the natural behavior of ordinary citizens who happen to support the candidate.

Home pages, still relatively primitive, could become highly effective infotainment tools for politicians. A candidate could even create captive audiences: for example, he might donate computers to nursing homes, recreation centers, and libraries. Each computer would be already programmed to log on to the candidate’s home page, which would supply plenty of data on how the candidate has supported seniors, recreation programs, and libraries. It might also include software applications that would provide a running tally of the size of the national debt, or the number of seniors murdered in the last 24 hours.

Sometimes the computer might look and act more like a video game. Imagine two or three of them set up in an employee dining hall, offering entertainment as well as political information: a game, perhaps, in which the goal is to corner the candidate’s opponent and force him to admit how he voted on some crucial bill. Or guess how much your taxes have gone up since the incumbent took office, and if you’re within 10 per cent of the answer, you get an extra 15 minutes’ time on the computer. Too expensive to work? Maybe not, if the employer is willing to cover some of the computers’ cost as a campaign contribution.

Hackers and crackers could find themselves in a new golden age. Once upon a time politicians had to break into one another’s offices. Now they can get into one another’s databases. Lists of contributors and supporters would be there for the taking—and the burglars could also damage such lists or destroy them altogether.

Dirty tricks could get really dirty. Imagine a forged home page providing violent distortions of the candidate’s position and record, or campaign ads that really come from the opposition. Such “black propaganda” would be hard to fight; publicizing the forgery would only draw more attention to its lies.

E-mail bombings could flood the candidate’s server with thousands of junk messages, making it difficult or impossible to reach voters and staffers. A software giveaway, sabotaged with a virus, would infuriate potential voters. The same virus could also disable the candidate’s system.

Scurrilous rumors could travel the Net in seconds, as hard to stop as neutrinos but with much more impact. The candidate’s private e-mail could turn up in conveniently downloadable form at FTP sites outside the country.

All of these tactics would not only resonate in cyberspace but would gain enormous attention in other media. The dirty tricksters, with very little threat of punishment facing them, could be as nasty as they liked...while their political masters hypocritically complained about them and called for more controls over the Internet.

Despite these threats, politicians are likely to get into the medium for one reason: Other politicians. Hardware and software defenses will emerge to hold off the tricksters, and the first politicos to master the Net will enjoy a measurable advantage over latecomers. Mastery will come from recognition that this is not just electronic print or low-res TV, but a medium that can and should answer back.

Net propaganda can’t just hammer on voters who do nothing until election day. It has to provoke them into response after response, with each response helping to define the politician’s next step. Many of those provocations will be inane, patronizing or downright vicious. But for once the voters’ reactions may actually force the politicos to treat them like intelligent, informed citizens.

And for the politicians, that could be the Net’s most frightening threat of all.

Infobahn, Summer 1994

Mediated Cultures
Thanks to the colleague who sent me the link to this very interesting site: mediatedcultures.net @ kansas state university. It's a showcase of the "Digital Ethnography Working Group" at Kansas State University, and it offers some dramatic examples of web communication...especially the "Explorations of Mediated Culture" video. The links on the main page are worth exploring.

Thanks to the colleague who sent me the link to this very interesting site: mediatedcultures.net @ kansas state university.

It's a showcase of the "Digital Ethnography Working Group" at Kansas State University, and it offers some dramatic examples of web communication...especially the "Explorations of Mediated Culture" video. The links on the main page are worth exploring.

Holiday Wishes
Christmas Eve is not yet here in North America, and when it arrives I'm going to be very busy. We have family and friends coming for dinner, so I won't have much chance to blog. But the first thing I'll do in the morning is to start a batch of pulla, a Finnish coffee bread that for decades has been our Christmas breakfast. You're welcome to make it yourself: Download...

Christmas Eve is not yet here in North America, and when it arrives I'm going to be very busy. We have family and friends coming for dinner, so I won't have much chance to blog.

But the first thing I'll do in the morning is to start a batch of pulla, a Finnish coffee bread that for decades has been our Christmas breakfast. You're welcome to make it yourself:

Download recipe_for_pulla.pdf

My old friend Merlin and I take this opportunity to wish you a very happy holiday and a new year full of surprises that make you laugh.

Nielsen on Website Readers' Reading Habits
Via Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox: How Little Do Users Read? His summary: On the average Web page, users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average visit; 20% is more likely. The conclusion he draws: Unless you're writing for really dedicated readers with a strong interest in your subject, you should keep your text to no more than 100 words per page. I'd be interested in...

Via Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox: How Little Do Users Read? His summary:

On the average Web page, users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average visit; 20% is more likely.

The conclusion he draws: Unless you're writing for really dedicated readers with a strong interest in your subject, you should keep your text to no more than 100 words per page. I'd be interested in your reactions to his argument.

Not quite getting it
Via The New York Review of Books, an attempt to explain Blogs. It's a long article, mentioning ten books about blogging, but this is the author's key misunderstanding: Bloggers assume that if you're reading them, you're one of their friends, or at least in on the gossip, the joke, or the names they drop. They often begin their posts mid-thought or mid-rant—in medias craze. They don't care if they leave...

Via The New York Review of Books, an attempt to explain Blogs. It's a long article, mentioning ten books about blogging, but this is the author's key misunderstanding:

Bloggers assume that if you're reading them, you're one of their friends, or at least in on the gossip, the joke, or the names they drop.

They often begin their posts mid-thought or mid-rant—in medias craze. They don't care if they leave you in the dust. They're not responsible for your education.

Bloggers, as Mark Liberman, one of the founders of the blog called Language Log, once noted, are like Plato. :-) The unspoken message is: Hey, I'm here talking with my buddies. Keep up with me or don't. It's up to you.

Much of the article is a calm, patient explanation of what blogs are, intending for people who sincerely don't know. Both the quote above and that calm, patient explanation seem to me serious misunderstanding about writing for the web.

The review, Sarah Boxer, assumes that her readers need this background about blogging because they don't know anything about it. She assumes that bloggers don't provide this background because they've all already got it.

For some teenage blogger writing for an audience of six or seven, the background may indeed be there. But for anyone trying to gather and disseminate serious information through a blog, the background is always doubtful.

On my blog Writing Fiction, I see that a striking number of my visitors arrive on the site after googling "How many pages in a novel?" Whether or not they've written a novel, that question means they're novice novelists. They lack the exformation of more experienced writers.

Similarly, people visit my bird flu blog, H5N1, with wildly different levels of knowledge about the subject. Some are officials with the World Health Organization, others are epidemiologists, and most know nothing at all except that bird flu is supposed to be bad.

Apart from assuming a basic level of English reading ability, I don't expect anything from my readers. For both blogs I have to find some way to bring the newcomers up to speed without boring the experienced visitors. I really do feel responsible for my readers' education, and I don't want to turn anyone away.

So on H5N1 I provide an introductory page, showing the new visitor what's on the site. Currently, I'm also providing definitions of Indian words like lakh, crore, and panchayat, because they keep turning up in Indian newspapers' reports on bird flu.

On Writing Fiction, I keep responding to comments to the "How Many Pages" post, which I originally made three long years ago. I also provide a link to Write a Novel, a self-guided online course containing the basic materials now lost in the archives of Writing Fiction. (Look for it in the Writers' Resources list.)

Some blogs, like some graduate courses, can assume a cozy familiarity with little-known material. Shared exformation creates an intimate atmosphere, a feeling of belonging that newcomers may not share. If anything, they'll feel deliberately excluded.

But most webwriters, whether serious amateurs or professionals, can't afford to think about the happy few who share our private jokes and roomed with us in college. We have to reach as many people as possible, and to provide something useful for each of them.

So we have to write in simple, clear language. We have to format our material for easy navigation and response. We have to think about our visitors' needs, not our own egos. That, it seems to me, is the exformation that Sarah Boxer doesn't yet have.

50 Open Source Resources for Online Writers
Via Job Profiles.com, a list of 50 Awesome Open Source Resources for Online Writers. They include various free word processors and reference tools. I can't vouch for any of them, but it might be worth the time it takes to download some and experiment a bit.

Via Job Profiles.com, a list of 50 Awesome Open Source Resources for Online Writers.

They include various free word processors and reference tools. I can't vouch for any of them, but it might be worth the time it takes to download some and experiment a bit.

Reading Obama
The Tyee has published my article Reading Obama, a review of his book The Audacity of Hope. It should have some interest for webwriters, whatever their politics.

The Tyee has published my article Reading Obama, a review of his book The Audacity of Hope. It should have some interest for webwriters, whatever their politics.

Domain vs. Subdomain

Domain vs. Subdomain
When you get ready to set up a professional blog, one of the first decisions you will need to make is if you want to use a domain, subdomain, or a free option, such as blogger.com. I recommend treating a blog just like any other website, especially when it comes to the hosting. Some hosting companies allow you to [...]

The Slovenian Designer
Recently I had the pleasure of seeing some of the work of a graphic designer, known as the Slovenian Designer. I was so impressed by what I had seen, that I decided to take a look through his blog. WOW! This is definitely a site worth spending some time on. Not only is he an extremely talented web [...]

Digital Future
Users see the Net as a more important info source than traditional media

80- percent of users 17 and older consider the Internet to be an important source of information, says USC's 2008 Digital Future Report ..

 68 percent rated it higher than TV, 63 percent preferred the Net to radio and 63 percent rated it better than newspapers as an info source.

The Digital Future Project also found that the social aspects on online communities is growing at a rapid rate

Membership in online communities has more than doubled in only three years. More than half of online community members (54 percent) log into their community at least once a day, and 71 percent of members said their community is very important or extremely important to them. Fifty-six percent of members reported meeting their online counterparts in person.

More than half - -55 percent -- say they feel as strongly about their online communities as they do about their real-world communities.

Just as the Internet is changing the way we communicate and interact, so it is changing how businesses should interact with their customers and stakeholders. 

The role of PR is shifting.

Find out where your audiences are online and make it easier for them to share ideas with you and with each other.

Gartner Names Top 10 Technologies That Will Change The World
What is sauce for the goose... the advice to CIOs should be taken to heart by PR Managers

Dr. Jim Amderson posted in The Busines of IT blog about the Gartner Top 10 Technologies that they think will change the world in the next four years.

1. Multicore and hybrid processors
2. Virtualization and fabric computing
3. Social networks and social software
4. Cloud computing and cloud/Web platforms
5. Web mashups
6. User Interface
7. Ubiquitous computing
8. Contextual computing
9. Augmented reality
10. Semantics

Dr. Anderson says that 1 - 4 spell a sea change in IT departments.  "Uh, oh - can you hear your job going away?" he asks.

"What does this all mean, and more importantly what should a successful IT staffer (or CIO) do today? The key to your future success is to understand how IT is going to change and what you need to do to change with it."

#3 on the list is having a profound effect on PR and marketing departments. and I'd say that same advice applies:

The key to your future success is to understand how PR is going to change and what you need to do to change with it.

Social Media has given the PR industry much more insight into the fundamental aspects of relationship-building, says Todd Defren

Is this how PR should always have been?  Yes, indeed.  Social software and social networks are empowering the consumer and their voice is being heard - loud and clear.

Business Week updated their 2006 article on blogs and said when they wrote that story they missed an even bigger one:  social networks and social software.

"Social connectors are changing the dynamics of companies around the world. Millions of us are now hanging out on the Internet with customers, befriending rivals, clicking through pictures of our boss at a barbecue, or seeing what she read at the beach. It's as if the walls around our companies are vanishing and old org charts are lying on their sides."

And even if the social media bubble bursts—and Business Week predicts it will—they also predict that the power of social media to transform our businesses and society will only continue to grow.

Are you ready?

Offline Marketing Techniques
  Offline marketing is very similar to online marketing, either way, word of mouth is one of the best forms of advertising there is, but a huge part of that involves getting to know the people around you. Online, that might mean joining and actively participating in groups and forums. Offline that could be taking a sincere [...]

Custom Content Is Your Best Bet
Last year 10% of audiences caught their favorite shows online.

Brands are catching on to the idea that they can create custom content and attract the right audience.  Where is this custom content being viewed?  Online. By the end of the year, an estimated 40% of programming will be viewed through the Web, says James McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research.  Internet advertising in the United States will grow eight times faster than the overall market, surpassing newspapers, cable TV, and broadcast TV by 2012, IDC predicted today. The Yankee Group expects the market to reach $50.3 billion by 2011, double the amount of 2007.

Marketers have found a new way to try to keep viewers from tuning out their ads: offer them online programming created by the marketers themselves, often with help from their advertising agencies, says The New York Times.

One way is to sponsor content that appeals to your audience - National Geographic's Dog Whisperer is virtually owned online by Petco, writes Brandweek.

Some brands are investing in their own channels and shows. What is called Advertorial in print has become advertainment online.

Chivas This is the LIfe has a channel on MSN.

BlendTec has made entertainment out of their product testing with the Will It Blend videos. Now they're doing co-branded content    

Just a year ago MySpace announced branded channels with custom content from National Geographic, The New York Times, Reuters, The Daily Reel, Expert Village, Flow, IGN Entertainment, Octane TV, Kush TV, Ripe TV, VBS TV, and Young Hollywood.

Sites like Kyte and FlexTubeTV allow you to produce your own branded content channel online.  This Is 50, is the online destination site for articet 50 cent.  It's part hip-hop/pop culture blog, part fan community, and part original content destination.

Heavy.com  aims at men ages 18-34, They offer an online dating reality series using partially user-generated content and a show that won a Webby Award for the sports category in Online Film & Video.

I's a no-brainer for travel and tourism sites. eMarketer projects Online travel sales in the U.S. sales will reach nearly $146 billion in 2010, up from nearly $127 billion in 2009 and $110 billion in 2008. Travel bookings surpassed offline bookings in volume for the fitrst time in 2007, according to PhoCusWright.  Any travel or tourism destination that is not using online video is missing a huge opportunity. Video is a major influencer in travel sales.

Have you thought about how you could use online video to build your brand, engage loyal customers and offer content that they want to watch and come back for?

.

How to Get Your Book Published: Quicktime Video

How to Get Your Book Published: Quicktime Video
Find out how Arielle Ford has helped launch the careers and create bestselling books for Deepak Chopra; Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen, Chicken Soup for the Soul series; Neale Donald Walsch, Conversations With God; Debbie Ford, The Dark Side of the Light Chasers; and Dean Ornish, Love and Survival and many, many other notable authors.

Why Your Car May Soon Be Driving Digital Advertising
Photo credit: Really Simple Syndication by Shira Goldling The following is also my column this week in Advertising Age. If you think there's already enough to distract you in your life, just wait. With Americans spending 100 hours a year...

Write a Book and Get Your Book Published: Subscribe to America's Most Successful Book Publicist's Newsletter Today
Sign up for the free HOW TO GET YOUR BOOK PUBLISHED and PUBLICIZED newsletter from Arielle Ford. In case you don't know Arielle by name, she's publicized hundreds of authors and books. 11 of which are #1 Bestsellers. Her clients include Deepak Chopra, Wayne Dyer, Neale Donald Walsch, Dean Ornish, Jon Gordon, Debbie Ford, Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen. Arielle has compiled a list of nearly every question a first-time or experienced author wants to know about publishing, publicity, building a platform and the book business. Every issue is jam-packed with answers to the questions that get your book published and you booked on radio, television, newspapers and magazines.

Arielle Ford, Publicist biography
Arielle Ford has helped launch the careers and create bestselling books for Deepak Chopra; Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen, Chicken Soup for the Soul series; Neale Donald Walsch, Conversations With God; Debbie Ford, The Dark Side of the Light Chasers; and Dean Ornish, Love and Survival and many, many other notable authors.

American Red Cross Disaster Relief via Amazon

American Red Cross Disaster Relief via Amazon

Keyword Tool

Adobe Digital Media Store - The Leading Source of PDF eBooks & eDocs! - Attention Publishers!

Link popularity and tools for link building
Link popularity and link quality are important because all search engines consider them as a part of their ranking algorithms, says Puneet Mehrotra ..

Google Chairman Optimistic about Entrepreneurial Trends

Everything you wanted to know about Copyrights


Microsoft Announces New Search Engine - opens war for Internet dominance

All About GPRS
Dickens once said, \"never close your lips to those to whom you have opened your heart.\" Perhaps we can now say, \"never close your ..

The Next Big Thing
Embedded software, Wireless Net, P2P, Real time movies, and Medicare are some of the often heard phrases used to describe the next big thing on the ..

Content is King on a Website
Content can make or break a website. The power of the written word has been witnessed many a time. Products have become success stories, resumes trans ..

Examples of Really Good Bullets

A Few Positions Have Opened up at Content Site Builder

How to write an effective copy
Finding just the right words to describe your product or service isn\'t as easy as it looks, says Puneet Mehrotra. Published on 12th October ..

Million Dollar Product Creation Secrets just released!

Internet Marketing Blog Directory

Internet Audiences Growing: How Will You Respond?

Free Bonus Gifts

Generating Revenue Through Advertising


How To Transfer Tapes

When Works Pass Into The Public Domain

Add My Blog To Your My Yahoo! Page

The Robert Collier Letter Book by Robert Collier

BEA Info

BEA Info


Better Business Blog Writing Class: Lessons for readers from your story
I love teaching blog writing because I always learn so much preparing for the class. And even afterwards, I'll be reading something and think, "Oh, I need to show the class this paragraph: it's a perfect example of such-and-such!" This...

Getting in Newspapers . . . Easy for our clients


BEA Book Expo America: Smart Strategies for Independent Publishers


Getting Your Book on National TV - 8 Tips


4 Ways to Boost a Business Blog: new free report
The Blog Squad releases our free report today: Better Business Blogging: 4 New Concepts for Getting Spectacular Results. This is a great way to review your business blog for 4 key elements we call the CODA Blogging System: The CODA...

Arielle Ford, Publicist biography

Arielle Ford, Publicist biography
Arielle Ford has helped launch the careers and create bestselling books for Deepak Chopra; Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen, Chicken Soup for the Soul series; Neale Donald Walsch, Conversations With God; Debbie Ford, The Dark Side of the Light Chasers; and Dean Ornish, Love and Survival and many, many other notable authors.

Google Chairman Optimistic about Entrepreneurial Trends

How to Get Your Book Published: Quicktime Video
Find out how Arielle Ford has helped launch the careers and create bestselling books for Deepak Chopra; Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen, Chicken Soup for the Soul series; Neale Donald Walsch, Conversations With God; Debbie Ford, The Dark Side of the Light Chasers; and Dean Ornish, Love and Survival and many, many other notable authors.

Will E-Publishing Become the New Leader?
Let the truth be told I am not a big supporter of e-books even though I wrote an entry earlier with regards to the advantages of them. Though I am not a fan, e-books are good for one thing, and that is establishing yourself as an expert.

A Few Positions Have Opened up at Content Site Builder

Blogging is Publishing
I wish I could say that "blogging is publishing" was something that I came up with on my own, but that is not the case. However, I have been pondering on this phrase for a while and decided to write an entry on my thoughts.

BEA Info

BEA Info

Blogging is Publishing

Blogging is Publishing
I wish I could say that "blogging is publishing" was something that I came up with on my own, but that is not the case. However, I have been pondering on this phrase for a while and decided to write an entry on my thoughts.

All About GPRS
Dickens once said, \"never close your lips to those to whom you have opened your heart.\" Perhaps we can now say, \"never close your ..

Your Checklist To Search Engine Optimisation Reports
The most important online marketing strategies that can help you be successful with optimizing your business on the web include building a plan, blogging, an email list, press releases, and much more... [Author: Derek Rogers - Site Promotion - April 28, 2008]

The Next Big Thing

The Next Big Thing
Embedded software, Wireless Net, P2P, Real time movies, and Medicare are some of the often heard phrases used to describe the next big thing on the ..

Generating Revenue Through Advertising


Link popularity and tools for link building
Link popularity and link quality are important because all search engines consider them as a part of their ranking algorithms, says Puneet Mehrotra ..

Blogging is Publishing
I wish I could say that "blogging is publishing" was something that I came up with on my own, but that is not the case. However, I have been pondering on this phrase for a while and decided to write an entry on my thoughts.

Content is King on a Website
Content can make or break a website. The power of the written word has been witnessed many a time. Products have become success stories, resumes trans ..

BlogRolled - Make Money with Your Blogroll
I saw this coming.  Now you can make money with your blogrolls with BlogRolled.  It works pretty much like Text Link Ads except the fact that it doesn’t require a script installation to display the links.  Your visitors and the search engines will have hard time identifying the paid links because of the way BlogRolled works. This is [...]

I saw this coming.  Now you can make money with your blogrolls with BlogRolled.  It works pretty much like Text Link Ads except the fact that it doesn’t require a script installation to display the links.  Your visitors and the search engines will have hard time identifying the paid links because of the way BlogRolled works.

This is how it works.  Once an advertiser purchases a blogroll link on your blog, you will be notified of the sale.  Then you will have to log-in to your blog and manually add the listing.  I like this semi-automated process.  Simple enough. 

Now, maybe because the service is still in early stages, I don’t see any blog links listed there for sale.  I don’t know their price ranges yet.  If the price is reasonable for both publishers and advertisers, this will be huge. 

Visit: BlogRolled

1-2-All Email Marketing by Active Campaign
One of the tools that a self-publishing author must have is good email marketing software. I highly recommend 1-2-All which was developed by Active Campaign.

FilePub - free file hosting service
FilePub is a free file hosting service where you can upload any files up to 500mb per file. Allowed file types include : jpeg, jpg, png, gif, bmp, mp3, txt, avi, wmv, mpg, mpeg, doc, rar, and zip. It comes in handy when you need to share a big file or a big image on [...]

FilePub is a free file hosting service where you can upload any files up to 500mb per file. Allowed file types include : jpeg, jpg, png, gif, bmp, mp3, txt, avi, wmv, mpg, mpeg, doc, rar, and zip.

It comes in handy when you need to share a big file or a big image on your blog. You can save bandwidth and the web space if you host these big files outside of your web hosting server. FilePub is perfect for that. Read their terms of service before you upload your files.

How to upload a file
Click “Browse” and choose a file. Once the file is selected, just click “Click to Upload” That’s it!

Once the file is uploaded, you will be redirected to a folder. From there, you can either view the full version of the image or download it.

By the way the screen shots used in this post are hosted at FilePub. Here is another example of a uploaded file (2.16MB).

Visit: FilePub.com

Its Name is Zookoda
Zookoda is the new leader in professional email marketing for bloggers. It gives you better control on the look and feel of how your feed is sent to your subscribers. The program is similar to what you see in newsletter...

How to write an effective copy
Finding just the right words to describe your product or service isn\'t as easy as it looks, says Puneet Mehrotra. Published on 12th October ..

Free Bonus Gifts

Free Bonus Gifts

A Few Positions Have Opened up at Content Site Builder

FilePub - free file hosting service
FilePub is a free file hosting service where you can upload any files up to 500mb per file. Allowed file types include : jpeg, jpg, png, gif, bmp, mp3, txt, avi, wmv, mpg, mpeg, doc, rar, and zip. It comes in handy when you need to share a big file or a big image on [...]

FilePub is a free file hosting service where you can upload any files up to 500mb per file. Allowed file types include : jpeg, jpg, png, gif, bmp, mp3, txt, avi, wmv, mpg, mpeg, doc, rar, and zip.

It comes in handy when you need to share a big file or a big image on your blog. You can save bandwidth and the web space if you host these big files outside of your web hosting server. FilePub is perfect for that. Read their terms of service before you upload your files.

How to upload a file
Click “Browse” and choose a file. Once the file is selected, just click “Click to Upload” That’s it!

Once the file is uploaded, you will be redirected to a folder. From there, you can either view the full version of the image or download it.

By the way the screen shots used in this post are hosted at FilePub. Here is another example of a uploaded file (2.16MB).

Visit: FilePub.com

iPodder.org : What is podcasting?

Adobe Digital Media Store - The Leading Source of PDF eBooks & eDocs! - Attention Publishers!

How To Transfer Tapes

Free Stock Photos from Electronic Perceptions
Kathy over at the Electronic Perceptions is a real giver. She’s giving away free stock photos on her blog. You are free to use the photos marked as “Royalty-Free” under the terms defined. Please read the terms before you download them. One thing I would like to see is some free [...]

Kathy over at the Electronic Perceptions is a real giver. She’s giving away free stock photos on her blog. You are free to use the photos marked as “Royalty-Free” under the terms defined. Please read the terms before you download them.

One thing I would like to see is some free high-resolution stock photos. I know she can do whatever she wants to do with her photos, but I feel that she can attract more traffic to her site if she gives away high-resolution versions for some of her photo sets. That would be really awesome.

I highly suggest that you bookmark her blog. New stock photos are posted daily basis. Thanks Kathy!

Samples
Red and Green Tableware

Visit : Electronic Perceptions for Free Stock Photos

More from Google CEO, Eric Schmidt

Keyword Tool

Podcast recommendation
I recently found a great marketing podcast whi is better than some of the paid seminars that I’ve listened to. Make sure to add this podcast to your bookmark! Enjoy! Internet Business Mastery

I recently found a great marketing podcast whi is better than some of the paid seminars that I’ve listened to. Make sure to add this podcast to your bookmark! Enjoy!

Internet Business Mastery

Top Internet Marketer Carl Galletti has a birthday this Thanksgiving

Internet Marketing Blog Directory

Its Name is Zookoda
Zookoda is the new leader in professional email marketing for bloggers. It gives you better control on the look and feel of how your feed is sent to your subscribers. The program is similar to what you see in newsletter...

Visit the Book Publicity Gallery to see Documents and Photos of Successful Book Publicity Tours and Information.

Visit the Book Publicity Gallery to see Documents and Photos of Successful Book Publicity Tours and Information.
Visit this link for a whole gallery full of scans from the NY Times and Publisher's Weekly.

FONTs for Windows and Macintosh

FONTs for Windows and Macintosh

Making Social Media Content Work For You
Social media does have new rules, but some of the old rules apply too

Executing Social Media was a good conference.  Everyone participated in the sessions, so we got the benefit of some very smart people sharing ideas about what works and what doesn't.

There were two excellent keynotes:

George Wright from Blendtech spoke about how the Will It Blend campaign came about and why it has been so successful. The videos have had over 40 million views and sales are up 5X.

Peter Shankman woke everyone on day two with his energetic keynote about where all this social media sruff might be going.

Being wired and on the grid is a fact of life.  We have no privacy. Someone always has a camera or a laptop switched on and everything you do or say could end up online. What we do have is the ability to control what gets seen or found online.

His prediction is that we are moving towards a world where we have one tool that connects us and it's more about how we live our lives than the tools we use.

How can this be used to advantage by companies? Create PR stunts people will talk about and share.  Since everyone is now a citizen journalist with a camera and the means to publish, give them great content that is worth publishing. 

He did this for Harrah's. 

As a way to promote their new Water Tower, the Harrah's Resort Atlantic City gave away $1 million worth of free hotel rooms in four major East Coast cities, starting in New York.

They had a bevy of beautiful models painted in the Harrah's logo on Wall Street giving away room keys.  And it caused a storm of tweets and images, as well as mainstream media coverage.

LInda Zimmer made a great point in her wrapup - use best principles rather than best practices.  What worked for one company may not be the right stunt or content for yours.  Use the idea, but keep your target audience and end goal in mind..

Example:  If HerRoom.com did a similar stunt to promote the Undie Awards, I am sure they'd get just as much attention and coverage - but a ton of traffic from young Wall Street hot shots would not sell any bras. 

The old rule of the right message to the right audience still applies.  It's just a new channel..

 

Microsoft Announces New Search Engine - opens war for Internet dominance

Internet Marketing Blog Directory

Internet Audiences Growing: How Will You Respond?

How To Make An Absolute Fortune in the Information Products Business by Shawn Casey

Digital Future
Users see the Net as a more important info source than traditional media

80- percent of users 17 and older consider the Internet to be an important source of information, says USC's 2008 Digital Future Report ..

 68 percent rated it higher than TV, 63 percent preferred the Net to radio and 63 percent rated it better than newspapers as an info source.

The Digital Future Project also found that the social aspects on online communities is growing at a rapid rate

Membership in online communities has more than doubled in only three years. More than half of online community members (54 percent) log into their community at least once a day, and 71 percent of members said their community is very important or extremely important to them. Fifty-six percent of members reported meeting their online counterparts in person.

More than half - -55 percent -- say they feel as strongly about their online communities as they do about their real-world communities.

Just as the Internet is changing the way we communicate and interact, so it is changing how businesses should interact with their customers and stakeholders. 

The role of PR is shifting.

Find out where your audiences are online and make it easier for them to share ideas with you and with each other.

Add My Blog To Your My Yahoo! Page

The Slovenian Designer
Recently I had the pleasure of seeing some of the work of a graphic designer, known as the Slovenian Designer. I was so impressed by what I had seen, that I decided to take a look through his blog. WOW! This is definitely a site worth spending some time on. Not only is he an extremely talented web [...]

$10,652.00 in Bonuses for Shawn Casey's "How To Make An Absolute Fortune..."

The Robert Collier Letter Book by Robert Collier

American Red Cross Disaster Relief via Amazon

Frank Kern Audio and PDF Leaked to Public

Here Is How You Can Save A Fortune On Pay Per Click Campaigns

Here Is How You Can Save A Fortune On Pay Per Click Campaigns
Finally there is an alternative answer to expensive pay per click campaigns and getting your web site promoted. The good news is that you do not have to pay a fortune to get good visibility. You also... [Author: Ted Cantu - Site Promotion - April 22, 2008]

Promoting Your Business On Facebook. Properly.
Of course the colossal media attention that Facebook has received - and it�s absurd valuations - coupled with the increasing number of member has certainly been a pull for all sorts of businesses to ... [Author: Simon Dance - Site Promotion - March 24, 2008]

Get Website Traffic Thru �Tell-A-Friend Script�
One of the most important things that any website owner needs is a continuous stream of traffic to their site. As more and more websites compete for the same targeted traffic, webmasters have to cons... [Author: Richard Legg - Site Promotion - April 24, 2008]

Blogging For Website Traffic
Nowadays, it seems that everyone and his cousin have taken to blogging. This form of online self-expression has slowly but steadily taken over the World Wide Web to become somewhat of a phenomenon in... [Author: Richard Legg - Site Promotion - April 24, 2008]

Magnetic Sponsoring Made Simple
MLM Traffic Formula Update Welcome to all of the new friends and magnetic sponsoring bootcamp and video tutorial takers. We have a lot of info to share with you so here we go. Also, if you no longer... [Author: bob spiro - Site Promotion - April 25, 2008]

How To Increase Onsite Conversions - Leads, Sales, Etc.
A website that does not make conversions is a website that serves no business function. So let's talk about: What a website conversion is and how you can increase conversions across your business we... [Author: Mike Van Bergen - Site Promotion - April 25, 2008]

The Ultimate Guide to Succesfull Interet Marketing and Site Promotion
OK, I'm hot. I'm not complaining because back in the winter when it was the very opposite of hot, I swore I wouldn't complain when it got hot. The fan on my computer seems to have a brain of its own ... [Author: Dan Jondron - Site Promotion - March 26, 2008]

Free Article Gets 1000+ Hits Daily
In trying to make the most of this influx of revenue sharing opportunities all over the web, the question I am asked the most is: "how did you know what to write about?" The short answer is, I need... [Author: Kerry Mulherin - Site Promotion - March 24, 2008]

Writing Articles For Affiliate Programs
Why write articles Writing articles can make your affiliate pages unique and drive more traffic from the major search engines, resulting in more sales. In some instances the merchant's affiliate pr... [Author: Nick Kaplan - Site Promotion - April 28, 2008]

Inexpensive Tips For Getting Website Traffic
You can get a lot of website traffic without having to spend a lot of money. If you want to develop a busy and profitable website for your online business, there are a lot of techniques for getting w... [Author: Richard Legg - Site Promotion - April 24, 2008]

7 simple steps to Keyword Mastery & Search Engine Ranking
Keyword Research has become an integral part of starting up your own business or growing your business (exponentially). Search engine marketing is here to stay for the long term, hence finding custo... [Author: Dave James - Site Promotion - April 26, 2008]

Viral Marketing
Viral marketing describes any strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others... Published in HindustanTimes.com 13th S ..

Link popularity and tools for link building
Link popularity and link quality are important because all search engines consider them as a part of their ranking algorithms, says Puneet Mehrotra ..

Beginner�s Guide To Free For All Sites (FFA's)
For those of you who don't know what an FFA site is, it's basically a website where you can post a link/add to your website for free. Generally it is also posted to many other sites at the same time ... [Author: Valerie Garner - Site Promotion - April 28, 2008]

Michigan SEO Is Dead � Long Live Rebel Marketing
Getting good SEO these days is like getting a good hair stylist. Every online marketer thinks they got the magic touch. Price is always the bottom line factor. The customer tries to save �a few bucks... [Author: Ted Cantu - Site Promotion - April 22, 2008]

How to write an effective copy
Finding just the right words to describe your product or service isn\'t as easy as it looks, says Puneet Mehrotra. Published on 12th October ..

I Am a Small Business Owner, So I Don't Need a Web site
[NOTE: This article was written in response to actual conversations between small business owners and our Web design and development firm.] Hello. My name is Mr. Smallbiz Owner, and I own A Small Co... [Author: Wendy Suto - Site Promotion - April 26, 2008]

What Are Pay Per Click Reports?
A pay per click report will inform you of how many visitors you have had to your website, what keyword they used to get there, and some monitor how long they were there. These reports can be daily, w... [Author: Derek Rogers - Site Promotion - April 28, 2008]

7 Surefire Ways To Increase Your Traffic Starting Yesterday
Internet. Business. Profit. To fully integrate all of these words into a successful merging you will need another word. Traffic. Every article you will find about making your site or company successf... [Author: Terry Leslie - Site Promotion - April 28, 2008]

Making Social Media Content Work For You

Making Social Media Content Work For You
Social media does have new rules, but some of the old rules apply too

Executing Social Media was a good conference.  Everyone participated in the sessions, so we got the benefit of some very smart people sharing ideas about what works and what doesn't.

There were two excellent keynotes:

George Wright from Blendtech spoke about how the Will It Blend campaign came about and why it has been so successful. The videos have had over 40 million views and sales are up 5X.

Peter Shankman woke everyone on day two with his energetic keynote about where all this social media sruff might be going.

Being wired and on the grid is a fact of life.  We have no privacy. Someone always has a camera or a laptop switched on and everything you do or say could end up online. What we do have is the ability to control what gets seen or found online.

His prediction is that we are moving towards a world where we have one tool that connects us and it's more about how we live our lives than the tools we use.

How can this be used to advantage by companies? Create PR stunts people will talk about and share.  Since everyone is now a citizen journalist with a camera and the means to publish, give them great content that is worth publishing. 

He did this for Harrah's. 

As a way to promote their new Water Tower, the Harrah's Resort Atlantic City gave away $1 million worth of free hotel rooms in four major East Coast cities, starting in New York.

They had a bevy of beautiful models painted in the Harrah's logo on Wall Street giving away room keys.  And it caused a storm of tweets and images, as well as mainstream media coverage.

LInda Zimmer made a great point in her wrapup - use best principles rather than best practices.  What worked for one company may not be the right stunt or content for yours.  Use the idea, but keep your target audience and end goal in mind..

Example:  If HerRoom.com did a similar stunt to promote the Undie Awards, I am sure they'd get just as much attention and coverage - but a ton of traffic from young Wall Street hot shots would not sell any bras. 

The old rule of the right message to the right audience still applies.  It's just a new channel..

 

Copywriting Course

Adobe Digital Media Store - The Leading Source of PDF eBooks & eDocs! - Attention Publishers!

Internet Audiences Growing: How Will You Respond?

Internet Marketing Blog Directory

9 Mind Blowing Flash Animations
Written by R J Evans How Do They Do That? Flash animation still represents the cutting edge of internet animation. Here are 9 of the best on the net at the moment. Whether you are new to flash or a seasoned professional, these sites will make you sit back in wonder: 1. Bird on a Journey A little bird [...]

Written by R J Evans

How Do They Do That? Flash animation still represents the cutting edge of internet animation. Here are 9 of the best on the net at the moment.

Whether you are new to flash or a seasoned professional, these sites will make you sit back in wonder:

1. Bird on a Journey

A little bird flies on his way home to his lady, avoiding some pitfalls on the way. This brilliant animation combines drawing and photography to stunning effect, together with a weird and wonderful soundtrack.

2. Drum Machine

If you love oriental music - and drums - then you will love this animation. Seven Japanese drummers deliver the goods in this beautifully constructed piece of Flash. The skill and time that went in to this beggars belief!

3. Online Shopping

Be patient with this one. At first glance it looks like just another website that offers you household goods to buy. But hold on a second - didn’t that mug on special offer just fall over! That’s just the beginning of the fun - a joy to watch!

4. Icon War

These desktop icons decide that they don’t like each other any more. War breaks out! Who will be the ultimate winner as icon fights icon! Oh, the humanity! Extremely entertaining flash animation.

5. Kaleidoscope

This is an amazing pattern generating piece of flash animation. You can choose from lots of different varieties and the patterning effect follows your mouse around in a myriad of colors and shapes. Inspirational!

6. Silhouette Sounds

A single silhouette becomes several then becomes many, with each producing a different sound to produce a tune. Fantastic black and white animation that is eye catching and very, very different!

7. Doorway

All the guy wants to do is get through the door! Unfortunately, there are lots of things that do not wish to grant him passage. Superb European style flash animation you will want to watch again and again.

8. Falling Dude

Superbly irritating but extremely watchable, this animation has a roughly drawn boy falling, and falling - oh, and then falling some more! You will love it!

9. Jackson Pollock

Ever seen a Jackson Pollock painting and thought “I can do that!” Well, here is your chance! Let your mouse do the walking as you produce works of art that the Saatchis will be after in no time at all!

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Gartner Names Top 10 Technologies That Will Change The World
What is sauce for the goose... the advice to CIOs should be taken to heart by PR Managers

Dr. Jim Amderson posted in The Busines of IT blog about the Gartner Top 10 Technologies that they think will change the world in the next four years.

1. Multicore and hybrid processors
2. Virtualization and fabric computing
3. Social networks and social software
4. Cloud computing and cloud/Web platforms
5. Web mashups
6. User Interface
7. Ubiquitous computing
8. Contextual computing
9. Augmented reality
10. Semantics

Dr. Anderson says that 1 - 4 spell a sea change in IT departments.  "Uh, oh - can you hear your job going away?" he asks.

"What does this all mean, and more importantly what should a successful IT staffer (or CIO) do today? The key to your future success is to understand how IT is going to change and what you need to do to change with it."

#3 on the list is having a profound effect on PR and marketing departments. and I'd say that same advice applies:

The key to your future success is to understand how PR is going to change and what you need to do to change with it.

Social Media has given the PR industry much more insight into the fundamental aspects of relationship-building, says Todd Defren

Is this how PR should always have been?  Yes, indeed.  Social software and social networks are empowering the consumer and their voice is being heard - loud and clear.

Business Week updated their 2006 article on blogs and said when they wrote that story they missed an even bigger one:  social networks and social software.

"Social connectors are changing the dynamics of companies around the world. Millions of us are now hanging out on the Internet with customers, befriending rivals, clicking through pictures of our boss at a barbecue, or seeing what she read at the beach. It's as if the walls around our companies are vanishing and old org charts are lying on their sides."

And even if the social media bubble bursts—and Business Week predicts it will—they also predict that the power of social media to transform our businesses and society will only continue to grow.

Are you ready?

How To Make An Absolute Fortune in the Information Products Business by Shawn Casey

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Podcast recommendation

Podcast recommendation
I recently found a great marketing podcast whi is better than some of the paid seminars that I’ve listened to. Make sure to add this podcast to your bookmark! Enjoy! Internet Business Mastery

I recently found a great marketing podcast whi is better than some of the paid seminars that I’ve listened to. Make sure to add this podcast to your bookmark! Enjoy!

Internet Business Mastery

Which search engines to target?
Some search engine ti

BlogRolled - Make Money with Your Blogroll
I saw this coming.  Now you can make money with your blogrolls with BlogRolled.  It works pretty much like Text Link Ads except the fact that it doesn’t require a script installation to display the links.  Your visitors and the search engines will have hard time identifying the paid links because of the way BlogRolled works. This is [...]

I saw this coming.  Now you can make money with your blogrolls with BlogRolled.  It works pretty much like Text Link Ads except the fact that it doesn’t require a script installation to display the links.  Your visitors and the search engines will have hard time identifying the paid links because of the way BlogRolled works.

This is how it works.  Once an advertiser purchases a blogroll link on your blog, you will be notified of the sale.  Then you will have to log-in to your blog and manually add the listing.  I like this semi-automated process.  Simple enough. 

Now, maybe because the service is still in early stages, I don’t see any blog links listed there for sale.  I don’t know their price ranges yet.  If the price is reasonable for both publishers and advertisers, this will be huge. 

Visit: BlogRolled

iGoogle to Get Ads This Summer, Is Google Reader Next?
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Why Your Car May Soon Be Driving Digital Advertising
Photo credit: Really Simple Syndication by Shira Goldling The following is also my column this week in Advertising Age. If you think there's already enough to distract you in your life, just wait. With Americans spending 100 hours a year...

WordPress 2.5.1
Upgrade your WordPress immediately.  WordPress just announced its version 2.5.1 today.  It includes a very important security fix and more than 70 bug fixes.  Here are some highlights of improvements : Performance improvements for the Dashboard, Write Post, and Edit Comments pages. Better performance for those who have many categories Media Uploader fixes An upgrade to TinyMCE 3.0.7 Widget Administration fixes Various [...]

Upgrade your WordPress immediately.  WordPress just announced its version 2.5.1 today.  It includes a very important security fix and more than 70 bug fixes. 

Here are some highlights of improvements :

• Performance improvements for the Dashboard, Write Post, and Edit Comments pages.
• Better performance for those who have many categories
• Media Uploader fixes
• An upgrade to TinyMCE 3.0.7
• Widget Administration fixes
• Various usability improvements
• Layout fixes for IE

One of the most annoying bugs in WP 2.5 was the media uploader bug.  It just wouldn’t work for me.  Uploading works fine, but once it is uploaded I can’t retreive it using the gallery menu.  WordPress 2.5.1 fixed some of the media uploader problems, but from my testing, it still needs improvements.  I can now upload and view the file fine, but I still can’t insert images to my posts.  I hope they get fix it quickly. 

If you want to learn more about WordPress 2.5.1 go to WordPress Blog. 

FilePub - free file hosting service
FilePub is a free file hosting service where you can upload any files up to 500mb per file. Allowed file types include : jpeg, jpg, png, gif, bmp, mp3, txt, avi, wmv, mpg, mpeg, doc, rar, and zip. It comes in handy when you need to share a big file or a big image on [...]

FilePub is a free file hosting service where you can upload any files up to 500mb per file. Allowed file types include : jpeg, jpg, png, gif, bmp, mp3, txt, avi, wmv, mpg, mpeg, doc, rar, and zip.

It comes in handy when you need to share a big file or a big image on your blog. You can save bandwidth and the web space if you host these big files outside of your web hosting server. FilePub is perfect for that. Read their terms of service before you upload your files.

How to upload a file
Click “Browse” and choose a file. Once the file is selected, just click “Click to Upload” That’s it!

Once the file is uploaded, you will be redirected to a folder. From there, you can either view the full version of the image or download it.

By the way the screen shots used in this post are hosted at FilePub. Here is another example of a uploaded file (2.16MB).

Visit: FilePub.com

The Next Big Thing
Embedded software, Wireless Net, P2P, Real time movies, and Medicare are some of the often heard phrases used to describe the next big thing on the ..

Free Stock Photos from Electronic Perceptions
Kathy over at the Electronic Perceptions is a real giver. She’s giving away free stock photos on her blog. You are free to use the photos marked as “Royalty-Free” under the terms defined. Please read the terms before you download them. One thing I would like to see is some free [...]

Kathy over at the Electronic Perceptions is a real giver. She’s giving away free stock photos on her blog. You are free to use the photos marked as “Royalty-Free” under the terms defined. Please read the terms before you download them.

One thing I would like to see is some free high-resolution stock photos. I know she can do whatever she wants to do with her photos, but I feel that she can attract more traffic to her site if she gives away high-resolution versions for some of her photo sets. That would be really awesome.

I highly suggest that you bookmark her blog. New stock photos are posted daily basis. Thanks Kathy!

Samples
Red and Green Tableware

Visit : Electronic Perceptions for Free Stock Photos

Content is King on a Website
Content can make or break a website. The power of the written word has been witnessed many a time. Products have become success stories, resumes trans ..

Split Run Testing
If you are a webpreneur, split testing is a definite recommendation. Not only it increases sales but also lets go of unnecessary graphics and copy. A ..

Visit the Book Publicity Gallery to see Documents and Photos of Successful Book Publicity Tours and Information.

Visit the Book Publicity Gallery to see Documents and Photos of Successful Book Publicity Tours and Information.
Visit this link for a whole gallery full of scans from the NY Times and Publisher's Weekly.

1-2-All Email Marketing by Active Campaign
One of the tools that a self-publishing author must have is good email marketing software. I highly recommend 1-2-All which was developed by Active Campaign.

Its Name is Zookoda
Zookoda is the new leader in professional email marketing for bloggers. It gives you better control on the look and feel of how your feed is sent to your subscribers. The program is similar to what you see in newsletter...

How to Launch Your Career as an Author, Get Your Book Published and Get Book Publicity: MP3 Audio
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You may have already noticed that self-publishing is very time consuming. Most of your time is spent on marketing and publicity and very little time on writing.

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Blogging is Publishing
I wish I could say that "blogging is publishing" was something that I came up with on my own, but that is not the case. However, I have been pondering on this phrase for a while and decided to write an entry on my thoughts.

Will E-Publishing Become the New Leader?
Let the truth be told I am not a big supporter of e-books even though I wrote an entry earlier with regards to the advantages of them. Though I am not a fan, e-books are good for one thing, and that is establishing yourself as an expert.

Add My Blog To Your My Yahoo! Page

Add My Blog To Your My Yahoo! Page

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links for 2008-05-24
Tumblr and SEO: A Case Study in Rapid Response Great example (using me) of how to monitor and respond to issues. (tags: tumblr friendfeed PR) Loic: "I do not get 30 comments on a post of my blog that often....

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