Viral Internet Links

Here’s a question I’ve been curious about lately: should marketers add blogging to their arsenal of marketing tactics? Will it help sell more products and services?

Or is it – as I suspect -- an utter waste of time? A pure vanity publication that won’t pay you back even one thin dime for your effort?

First, a definition. “A blog is an online journal,” explains blogging expert Deb Weil in her Business Blogging Starter Kit (www.wordbiz.com). “It’s called a journal because every entry is time and date stamped and always presented in reverse chronological order.”

The theory is that if you are an information marketer – or, if you publish information to establish your expertise in a niche industry or field – blogging should be part of your publishing arsenal.
According to Deb, a business blog is “a platform from which to lobby, network, and influence sales. It’s a way to circumvent traditional media and analysts. And blogging can be done instantly, in real time, at a fraction of the cost of using traditional channels.”

Now here’s my hesitancy in recommending blogs as a marketing tool: I have yet to find a single marketer who says that a business blog has gotten him a positive ROI, or return on investment.

I know plenty of online marketers who make millions of dollars a year from their Web sites and e-zines, for instance. But I’ve not seen a blog whose creator says that the time and effort spent on their blog has directly put money into their pockets.

“I would say that, with few exceptions, blogs are not yet direct income producing resources in and of themselves,” says blogging authority Paul Chaney (www.radiantmarketing.biz). “Their value lies in the fact that they help raise one’s stature relative to their respective field.”

In my observation, there are two major problems with blogging as a business-building tool.

The first is that most of the blogs I encounter are rambling, streams-of-consciousness musings about a particular topic of interest to the author, largely bereft of the kind of practical, pithy tips that e-zines, Web sites, and white papers offer.

As Deb says, reading the blog is like reading the author’s journal or diary. And unless you are a guru or celebrity whom others worship from afar, people are simply not going to flock to your blog to discover your latest thoughts on life.

The second problem with blogs is one of distribution.

With an e-zine, once the reader subscribes, he gets the e-zine delivered to him electronically every week or every month -- or however often you send it.

But with a blog, the reader has to go out and proactively look for it. And since your contributions to your blog may be irregular and unscheduled, he has no way of knowing when something new of interest has been added.

One big advantage of blogs, according to Paul Chaney, is that having a blog can help pull traffic to your Web site.

“The search engines, especially Google, love blogs,” says Paul. “You’d be amazed at how many of your posts will end up in the top ten returns. If search engine optimization is a concern to you, blogs are the best way I know to move up the ladder as well as increase your page rank.”

“I confidently predict that blogs will soon be a key piece of an effective online marketing strategy,” says Deb Weil. “Ultimately, they’re nothing more than an instant publishing tool, one that makes posting fresh content to the Web within anyone’s reach. No tech skill or knowledge required.”

And that’s another one of my complaints with blogs in particular and the Web in general: the ease with which people can post and disseminate content. “The best thing about the Web is that anyone can publish on it; the worst thing about the Web is that anyone can publish on it,” a computer magazine columnist once observed.

The problem is that there is already too much content, and we don’t want or need more. Analysis, wisdom, insight, advice, strategies, ideas – yes. But raw information, data, or content – no. And from what I can see, blogs serve up almost none of the former, and tons of the later.

Blogs are, by virtue of being a form of online diary, like diaries: rambling, incoherent, and more suited for private thoughts than public consumption.

If you have something of value to share, there are many better formats for doing it online than by blogging, including white papers, e-zines, and Web sites.

Even bulletin boards are interactive, so they have value by virtue of shared opinions, dialogue, and engaging conversation which may be listened to openly and publicly.

But most blogs seem to be the private idiosyncratic musings of an individual, without censure or editing of any kind. And the result is like porridge: a gloppy mess, tasteless, and not very satisfying.

Until that changes, I can’t see starting and maintaining a blog of your own, unless you are bored and looking for something to do, or require an outlet for self-expression. And if the latter is the case, well … why not just buy and keep a diary instead?





Source: This article appears courtesy of Bob W. Bly's Direct Response Letter, at www.bly.com.

John Tanyishin is the developer of Work From Home Using Your Computer, providing you with work from home opportunities. He lives in Singapore and currently still a student but is looking actively for passive income. You can grab free ebooks here and receive tips as well and visit Go Articles




So What Exactly Is Link Building

To put it simply, link building is the process of getting links from other websites pointing to your website. The more back links your site has, the higher the link popularity.

When done effectively, it creates higher traffic to your website, increases page rank and allows you to rank higher in search engines.

However, link popularity alone doesn't guarantee that you will achieve high rankings in search engines but it is still a critical tactic to get your site indexed and get organic traffic.

There are different types of links that will require different methods of getting them.

Inbound links. These are the links that are appearing on other websites pointing to your site. They are also known as one-way, non-reciprocal links. Some of the common ways of getting them will be through directories submission, blogs, articles submission and press releases. Having high quality inbound links from relevant websites will give your website higher page rank.

Reciprocal links. This means having your website linking to others and the other websites will link to yours in return. They are also known as two-way links. There are many effective websites which provide services to help exchange links with others. Sometimes, they are in a form of automated service where you pay monthly or one-time fee and they help you do the dirty job. Another form will be providing you a community or platform where you trade links with other webmasters. Some experts have commented that this form of linking is of lesser value because major search engines have given lesser credit to it. The experts believe only to exchange links with relevant websites which have high page rank and avoid websites that have adult or illegal content.

Three-way links. This is a method which described in its simplest form will be having website A links to B, B links to C and C links to A. However, this type of linking is usually achieving by done through a third party which requires a fee. By getting your website handled by a reputable service, your website will be well taken care of. Sometimes, this process is automated and requires little effort. Your website will link to others but rest assured that these websites will not be linking back, if not it will be two-way linking. In this way, you are creating another form of one-way links but through a third party.



There are many other link building services available for you to explore but do take note that not all of them provides effective results and some of them may even cause you to be blacklisted by the search engines. Do find out more about them before engaging to their services.

Getting link building services can help you save effort, time and money, when used well it can help you achieve higher results with search engines. Some of the recommended services will be 3waylinks, linkvana and link machine.

The quality of links is important as well, having BBC or MSN pointing to your website carries more weight than links pointing from personal blogs. One way to determine whether the page carries enough weight will be from its page rank. Having a website of page rank 4 linking to your website compared to a website of page rank 1 means creating four times value to your site. So keep focusing on getting links from high page ranked websites.

Link building is a long term strategy to have your website rank higher on search engines. There is a program that you will love to use to see your link popularity, called link popularity check. Try searching for it. You will need to have constant increasing links pointing to your website.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR: A freelance writer who meticulously structured and maintained blogs just for you:A LIFE SO FAR AWAYand my other blog:OFW: THIS IS MY LIFE AND STORY Thank you for your valuable time. Follow my business & writings and you'll find what life's meant to be.

Photo Source: "seo by Stunning Group, on Flickr">

Author Resource: Ric Raftis is a keen author who runs No Bull Online Business Coaching and is also a Community Partner with Cagora. Find out more about http://cagora.weebly.com where you can build your community. Submitted By ArticleUnited.comArticle provided by - Published-Articles.com

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A strange title for an article perhaps, but there are remarkable similarities between the two. Here we intend to explore these similarities and some differences as well and provide a clearer perspective on what SEO is all about – or perhaps is not!

One glaring dissimilarity between SEO and religion is that with SEO we have indisputable proof that a god exists and that gods name is Google. Not only that of course, but there are several lesser gods like Yahoo, MSN and others. All these gods dictate the status of our sites on the glory scale according to our good deeds and also our sins.

It may also surprise some people to know that the Social Bookmarking sites like Digg are also gaining a religious following. They also have their own rules about how sites or articles will be rated in their system.

Just as religion is broken down into various sects or branches which all have their own variation of what they call the truth, the same exists for the gods of the search world. Religion calls their rules their dogmas. The search engines call theirs the almighty algorithm.

Oh no! Another dissimilarity. Religion is more than happy to give you access to their dogma so that you can follow it, build up good deeds and avoid sin. The search engines on the other hand are not. There is no more closely guarded secrets than the algorithms of the search engines and social bookmarking sites.

Now it is pretty common knowledge that there are some important good deeds that one must do in order to be considered a good webmaster and fall under grace with the search engines.

Such things as:-

1.Use a decent description in your meta tag
2.Make sure you use an applicable title in your head section
3.Use title tags, don't just make the font larger
4.Use bolded words to emphasize key words
5.Write for visitors and not for the search engines, in other words, naturally.

There are also some mortal sins that one can commit as well which may see you cast into the fiery pit of the supplementary index or de-indexed altogether. These are known as black hat methods and should be avoided at all costs. There have been hundreds of them over the years and the search engines have countered every one sooner or later. If you are building a site for longevity, then stay with proven white hat methods that will not end up getting you banned.

When preparing your site for SEO, ask yourself this question. Am I doing this to trick the search engines? The emphasis there is on the word trick. If the answer is yes, then forget it. It will not last and eventually cause you more pain than it is worth.

A classic example of this which you can see on many pages around the place that are trying to trick the search engines is where people have stuffed keywords at the foot of the index page in the same color text as the background, I.e. white on white. Are you serious? Do you really think that Google has a staff of thousands that read all these pages? Absolutely not! Text readers crawl the web looking at these pages and it is clearly evident to them what is going on. Result – mortal sin recorded.

A major similarity between religion and SEO is that there are any number of churches you can follow. This is a major problem for many webmasters because for every opinion on one aspect of SEO, you will find a differing one from another SEO church. There are however good people around that are worth listening to and I have my favorites. It will be up to you to find yours. Just weigh up what you are told carefully.

I will recommend one source of information you should watch and that is Matt Cutts. Matt works for Google and whilst he does not speak on their behalf, one would like to think what is posted in his blog is coming from a knowledgeable source.

In summing up, there are considerable similarities between SEO and religion because of the variety of opinions. Just as some religious organizations can get you into trouble, so can some SEO advisors. Stick with the basics when doing your sites and read as much as you can in order to find one or two SEO bloggers you feel you can trust. Remember, it is your site that is at stake here, not the SEO advisors, so protect it as much as you can.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: A freelance writer who meticulously structured and maintained blogs just for you:A LIFE SO FAR AWAYand my other blog:OFW: THIS IS MY LIFE AND STORY Thank you for your valuable time. Follow my business & writings and you'll find what life's meant to be.

Photo Source: "SEO by Mike Chudej, on Flickr">

Author Resource: Jayden Solle. For more information about search engine optimization and also SEO, click the relevant link. Article provided by Published-Articles.com



It seems as though search engine optimization is all the rage at the moment with online marketers. True, a lot of people make good utilization of things such as pay per click and e-mail marketing, but, in spite of whispers to the contrary, search engine optimization is not yet dead. I am going to share the large secret of search engine optimization with you.

The secret is really rather easy. Patience.

There is a saying that good things come to those who wait and that is so true for search engine optimization. The goal is to make the backlink building and traffic generation look natural. That needs time to work. Should you rush things you are just going to wind up getting your site penalized. Here are some steps and tips that will make it apparent why it takes persistence to accomplish efficient search engine optimization.

Don't build links too quickly. The idea that a great deal of hyperlinks will get your website ranked is correct, the issue is that too many hyperlinks too rapidly will get your site slapped. You have to try to keep the amount of hyperlinks you build every month as consistent as possible and do not be too industrious. Think about the number of articles as well as blog posts you would be able to post without having to use the various posting tools out there and then try to stick to that.

Article relevance as well as quality is likewise essential. I am sure you have noticed the articles that are posted by many people in which the grammar is so shocking that you can barely make out what is being said. These articles don't get indexed well and so they do not get click-through very often because they are of such low quality. Be sure that whoever writes your articles for you speaks English really well and can write relevant content articles. This will make it easier to get the content articles published and will also improve your site traffic though individuals really liking the article and clicking right through to your website rather than writing you off. Writing or sourcing content articles like this every month will take time.

Focus on quality rather than quantity. Quantity is a great thing, but quality is way better. A hyperlink from a page with a page rank of 6 will count more than 10 links from pages without any ranking. So, by all means, build links from pages which have no ranking simply to boost the numbers a little, however make sure that you get as much as possible from high ranking pages as well. Finding the high quality webpages to obtain links from takes time.

As you can see, doing search engine optimization properly will take time as well as patience. Do not try to rush things. You will only do your site's online reputation harm. It's because of things such as this that the very best search engine optimization companies will offer you a contract that covers a period of a year or so. They would like to make sure that they do not get your site slapped.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: A freelance writer who meticulously structured and maintained blogs just for you:A LIFE SO FAR AWAYand my other blog:OFW: THIS IS MY LIFE AND STORY Thank you for your valuable time. Follow my business & writings and you'll find what life's meant to be.

"Top 20 wordpress plugins that you don’t miss by honeytech, on Flickr">
Source: Petrona Alexon. To learn important hints about Blog Writing and even on Website Design, see this website and Published-Articles.com




WordPress has become the most popular platform for blogging and website creation and is used by millions to create and launch their sites. One of the many benefits of using WordPress is the huge assortment of plugins available to be installed, so many that, at times, it is impossible to know which plugins to use on your site.

Properly created WordPress plugins will provide a vital function for your site while running in the background and not using too much disk space and memory. Almost all of the top plugins run automatically, meaning you set them and leave them alone, although some of the plugins that post content or fix errors need attention. We are going to look at some of the better free plugins that should be a part of each WordPress site that you create.

1) Akismet. This free plugin is usually installed automatically when you install WP, but if not, be sure to add it to your site. Akismet will provide a valuable spam filter for your site, blocking the attempts by spammers to post worthless comments or reviews in an attempt to piggyback your site for back links. Make sure you have an Akismet API and install this on every site you own.

2) Google XML Sitemap. This handy plugin will notify the major search engines of new postings on your site and help get your site indexed and ranked. Simple to install and requires no maintainance.

3) W3 Total Cache. Recommended by most hosting services, this caching program will dramatically speed up the loading of you site when visited by a viewer. Google has said that it is factoring loading speed into its rankings, so make sure you install this plugin and use it properly.

4) SEO Friendly Images. Adding pictures to your posts and pages is important both visually and for ranking, and this plugin helps to make your images SEO and WordPress friendly. A great set-it-and-leave-it-alone add-on.

5) SEO Smart Links. While there is a premium (paid) version of this plugin, the free version works fine for almost every site. You put in a few keywords and website links (yours or others) and this program will automatically post the links in your articles or pages.

6) CBNET Ping Optimizer. Did you know that WordPress pings key RSS sites every time anything changes on your site? This can be good and bad. If you make a lot of changes on your site, creating a lot of pings, you may get tagged as a spammer. This plugin allows you to put a limit on how many pings per day can be made.

7) Cystats. Okay, this doesn't speed up your site or perform any repairs, but it does give you great information regarding who visits your site, where they came from and how many robot spiders have visited your site. This is a wonderful tool to have to find out how well your SEO efforts are doing to drive traffic to your site.

Are there more good free plugins? You bet, around 999,999 but we don't have the time or desire to review all of them. These six are a good starting point for building a WordPress site, are easy to install and use and, best of all, are free. Check them out, read more about them and decide if you should be using them on your website.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: A freelance writer who meticulously structured and maintained blogs just for you:A LIFE SO FAR AWAYand my other blog:OFW: THIS IS MY LIFE AND STORY Thank you for your valuable time. Follow my business & writings and you'll find what life's meant to be.

"You can have brilliant ideas, but if you cannot get them across, your ideas will not get you anywhere." -Lee Lacocca.

It is a well-known fact that businesses need marketing to survive. No matter how good is your product or how excellent is your services or ideas, you need to reach out to masses in order to generate sales, otherwise you will get to nowhere. The importance of marketing was also highlighted by the CEO of Nike, Phil Night who once said that, "The most important thing we do is market the product. We have come around to saying that Nike is a marketing-oriented company, and the product is our most important marketing tool". -Phil Knight, CEO Nike.

As we all know that, products and services changes with demand and so does the marketing techniques. Previously print media, radio and television were considered to be the sources of marketing but now with the advent of internet, online marketing is flourishing day by day and is becoming the fastest and the inexpensive source of sharing information almost everywhere around the world. As internet is evolving as a social web site with interactive communication, internet marketing has gained popularity. Various statistics reveal that online advertising has grown to be worth tens of billions of dollars annually, in just a few years. According to a report published by Price Water House Coopers (PWC), that in the year 2006, 16.5 billion US dollars was expected to be spent on online marketing in the United States. Also in UK, the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) reported that, internet marketing has flourished in recent years becoming a multi-million pound industry.( Source: www.iabuk.net).According to a study by the IAB and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) , spending on online advertising in the UK might reach to 1 billion pounds for the first time, fuelled by increased use of broadband.

These figures advocate the growing importance of internet marketing as also reaffirmed by David Silverman, Partner, Entertainment and Media Practice, PricewaterhouseCoopers, who said that: "The latest results reaffirm the internet's growing importance for marketers to integrate online advertising into their overall media plans."

This is the reason why companies are constantly engaging in adopting various successful internet marketing strategies in order to reach out to their target markets and Article Marketing is one of the most effective of all. This book is dedicated to impart you with an in depth information about Article Marketing. If you want to become a successful online marketer and want to stand out of your competitors through incorporating effective article marketing tactics than this book is essentially worth reading for you and will help you explore what is article marketing, its importance, its scope, its benefits, how to create an effective article strategy and employ valuable article marketing tactics and much more. But before getting into much depth, first let's have an introduction about article marketing and how it is associated with viral marketing another online marketing phenomenon.

What is Article Marketing?

Article marketing is a form of online marketing that companies incorporate to advertise products and services to the potential market. The term article marketing is not novel to us, although its form has been changed prominently. Traditionally article marketing was done through print media as it was the only medium of mass communication. Companies or businesses in an effort to increase their customer base used to supply useful content in the form of an article to leading newspapers free of charge. Newspapers in turn publish these articles and in return prints the companies contact information with the article. For example visa consultants may submit an article on the latest visa regulations and newspaper might publish this article with the name and contact information of the visa consultants. Hence it is a win-win situation for both the players.

Today with the internet revolution, article marketing has taken the form of internet article marketing. Companies today in order to market their services and products to the customers and to create brand awareness are engaging in article marketing activities via various online article directories like ezine and many others. By posting their articles in various article directories and linking articles with pages of their own websites companies can generate leads for their businesses in order to flourish. Some online marketers often in order to maximize their online article marketing campaign results try to submit their articles to multiple article directories.

Importance of Article Marketing

As we have mentioned earlier that internet is becoming a wider source of communication. This fact is in itself sufficient to manifest the growing importance of online article marketing. Companies today are widely launching article marketing campaigns to develop more and more leads for their business.

Before exploring more about article marketing, it is essential to mention that, the success of article marketing hugely depends on the strategies used by a marketer to develop and run an online article marketing campaign and as internet is becoming more and more of a social medium, Viral Marketing is becoming essential for any type of online marketing campaign including article marketing. Marketers who want to market their products and service via creating and publishing articles online should implement effective viral marketing campaign to enhance the affectivity of their article marketing efforts.

A type of website or part of a website called Blog. An individual will write the regular entries of commentary, description of events. The entries are normally displayed in reverse-chronological order. Blogs are allowing their visitors to leave comments via widgets on the blogs. Varieties of blogs are there. Other blogs linked by typical blogs. Microblogging is another type of blogging featuring very short posts. An ongoing diary of an individual is the most common blog.

To improve the quality of blog, we can post quality content in our blogs. We can reviews the post twice before submitting it. Guest poster can give new ideas and better content for your blogs. By add some blogging friends one can promote the blog. We can improve our blog by clean up your feed reader. A best way to reach new audience by writing the guest posts for other blogs. It is the best blogging tips. A tool called open site explorer aims to provide the practical information to help bloggers to improve their ranking in the search engine. Any one can use this tool for free and it provides enough information to help to start the blog. Right domain name finding also will improve the popularity of your blog.

To get the search engine traffic you spend a little time to search your keywords because the keywords grab the attention of your readers. Better option of choosing low competitive keywords is the best option, if you are a new blogger. For extra revenue bloggers need a site search page or search widget. There is no need to spend money for buying readers. These fake readers will not increase blog traffic and readers count. These kinds of readers visit your blog just for money so avoid getting such type of traffic. Instead of buying links, we can do blog comments and exchange links. For our blog we can design a Logo.

The basic knowledge person can do it easily. Most of the blogs are simply just for fun and express one's views to all. The real source of income called fun blogging. Purchasing reviews is the best way to bring targeted traffic and readers to promote your blog. Promote your blogs on a monthly or pay per click basis, the another way called banner advertising. A good way to promote your blog is press release. Sponsoring blog contests or conducting contests in your blog is the latest way for quick blog promotion. Hiring a person for blog posting will save more time and get more traffic.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: A freelance writer who meticulously structured and maintained blogs just for you:A LIFE SO FAR AWAYand my other blog:OFW: THIS IS MY LIFE AND STORY Thank you for your valuable time. Follow my business & writings and you'll find what life's meant to be.

About Active Search Results

Active Search Results (ASR) is an independent Internet Search Engine using Active Search Results Page Ranking Technology (ASR Ranking) with Millions of popular Web sites indexed. ASR has its own spiders visiting Web sites daily that are submitted to ASR and crawlers that index other popular Web sites on the Internet. Active Search Results does not depend on nor utilize any other search engines or directories for its search results. All search results are contained within Active Search Results' indices and databases.

Active Search Results was launched in August of 2009 by its founder and CTO Mark McLellan. As of April 2010, Active Search Results has gained a Google PageRank of 4 and as of December 2010, Active Search Results has gained an Alexa Traffic Rank of 2,990. Mark McLellan has been designing IP networks and Internet websites for over 20 years and launched his first search engine in September of 1997.

Mark McLellan holds a BS in Computer Information Systems from Goldey-Beacom College, Wilmington, Delaware and a MS in Computer Science from West Chester University, West Chester, Pennsylvania. He has also earned the following industry certifications: Novell Certified Netware Engineer (CNE), Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer Plus Internet (MCSE+I) and Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA).

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER: ACTIVE SEARCH RESULTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: A freelance writer who meticulously structured and maintained blogs just for you:A LIFE SO FAR AWAYand my other blog:OFW: THIS IS MY LIFE AND STORY Thank you for your valuable time. Follow my business & writings and you'll find what life's meant to be.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: A freelance writer who meticulously structured and maintained blogs just for you:A LIFE SO FAR AWAYand my other blog:OFW: THIS IS MY LIFE AND STORY Thank you for your valuable time. Follow my business & writings and you'll find what life's meant to be.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: A freelance writer who meticulously structured and maintained blogs just for you:A LIFE SO FAR AWAYand my other blog:OFW: THIS IS MY LIFE AND STORY Thank you for your valuable time. Follow my business & writings and you'll find what life's meant to be.