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50 Social Sites That Every Marketer Should Know About
If you limit your online presence to advertising banners and blogging, you’re missing out. The Internet provides influential networking opportunities that permit users to effectively target their audience. Take advantage of these tools by asserting your online presence and reaching more potential customers.
Social-Media/Social-Bookmarking Sites
Share your favorite sites on the Web with potential clients and business partners by commenting on, uploading and ranking different newsworthy articles. You can also create a member profile that directs traffic back to your web site.
- Reddit: Upload stories and articles on reddit to drive traffic to your site or blog. Submit items often so that you’ll gain a more loyal following and increase your presence on the site.
- Digg: Digg has a huge following online because of its optimum usability. Visitors can submit and browse articles in categories like technology, business, entertainment, sports and more.
- Del.icio.us: Social bookmark your way to better business with sites like del.icio.us, which invite users to organize and publicize interesting items through tagging and networking.
- StumbleUpon: You’ll open your online presence up to a whole new audience just by adding the StumbleUpon toolbar to your browser and “channel surf[ing] the Web. You’ll “connect with friends and share your discoveries,” as well as “meet people that have similar interests.”
- Technorati: If you want to increase your blog’s readership, consider registering it with Technorati, a network of blogs and writers that lists top stories in categories like Business, Entertainment and Technology.
- Ning: After hanging around the same social networks for a while, you may feel inspired to create your own, where you can bring together clients, vendors, customers and co-workers in a confidential, secure corner of the Web. Ning lets users design free social networks that they can share with anyone.
- Squidoo: According to Squidoo, “everyone’s an expert on something. Share your knowledge!” Share your industry’s secrets by answering questions and designing a profile page to help other members.
- Furl: Make Furl “your personal Web file” by bookmarking great sites and sharing them with other users by recommending links, commenting on articles and utilizing other fantastic features.
- Tubearoo: This video network works like other social-bookmarking sites, except that it focuses on uploaded videos. Businesses can create and upload tutorials, commentaries and interviews with industry insiders to promote their own services.
- WikiHow: Create a how-to guide or tutorial on wikiHow to share your company’s services with the public for free.
- YouTube: From the fashion industry to Capitol Hill, everyone has a video floating around on YouTube. Shoot a behind-the-scenes video from your company’s latest commercial or event to give customers and clients an idea of what you do each day.
- Ma.gnolia: Share your favorite sites with friends, colleagues and clients by organizing your bookmarks with Ma.gnolia. Clients will appreciate both your Internet-savviness and your ability to stay current and organized.
Professional-Networking Sites
Sign up with these online networking communities as a company or as an individual to take advantage of recruiting opportunities, cross-promotional events and more.
- LinkedIn: LinkedIn is a popular networking site where alumni, business associates, recent graduates and other professionals connect online.
- Ecademy: Ecademy prides itself on “connecting business people” through its online network, blog and message-board chats, as well as its premier BlackStar membership program, which awards exclusive benefits.
- Focus: Focus is a business destination where business professionals can help each other with their purchase and other business decisions by accessing research and peer expertise. Most importantly, Focus provides open, quality information for all businesses that is freely available, easily accessible, and community powered.
- YorZ: This networking site doubles as a job site. Members can post openings for free to attract quality candidates.
- Xing: An account with networking site Xing can “open doors to thousands of companies.” Use the professional contact manager to organize your new friends and colleagues, and take advantage of the Business Accelerator application to “find experts at the click of a button, market yourself in a professional context [and] open up new sales channels.”
- Facebook: Facebook is no longer just for college kids who want to post their party pics. Businesses vie for advertising opportunities, event promotion and more on this social-networking site.
- Care2: Care2 isn’t just a networking community for professionals: It’s touted as “the global network for organizations and people who Care2 make a difference.” If your business is making efforts to go green, let others know by becoming a presence on this site.
- Gather: This networking community is made up of members who think. Browse categories concerning books, health, money, news and more to ignite discussions on politics, business and entertainment. This will help your company tap into its target audience and find out what they want.
- MEETin.org: Once you’ve acquired a group of contacts in your city by networking on MEETin.org, organize an event so that you can meet face-to-face.
- Tribe: Cities like Philadelphia, Boston, San Francisco, New York and Chicago have unique online communities on tribe. Users can search for favorite restaurants, events, clubs and more.
- Ziggs: Ziggs is “organizing and connecting people in a professional way.” Join groups and make contacts through your Ziggs account to increase your company’s presence online and further your own personal career.
- Plaxo: Join Plaxo to organize your contacts and stay updated with feeds from Digg, Amazon.com, del.icio.us and more.
- NetParty: If you want to attract young professionals in cities like Boston, Dallas, Phoenix, Las Vegas and Orlando Fla., create an account with the networking site NetParty. You’ll be able to connect with qualified, up-and-coming professionals online, then meet them at a real-life happy-hour event where you can pass out business cards, pitch new job openings and more.
- Networking For Professionals: Networking For Professionals is another online community that combines the Internet with special events in the real world. Post photos, videos, résumés and clips on your online profile while you meet new business contacts.
Niche Social-Media Sites
Consider linking up with one or all of these social-media sites to narrow down your target audience. You’ll find other professionals, enthusiasts and consumers who are most likely already interested in what you have to offer.
- Pixel Groovy: Web workers will love Pixel Groovy, an open-source site that lets members submit and rate tutorials for Web 2.0, email and online-marketing issues.
- Mixx: Mixx prides itself on being “your link to the Web content that really matters.” Submit and rate stories, photos and news to drive traffic to your own site. You’ll also meet others with similar interests.
- Tweako: Gadget-minded computer geeks can network with each other on Tweako, a site that promotes information sharing for the technologically savvy.
- Small Business Brief: When members post entrepreneur-related articles, a photo and a link to their profile appear, gaining you valuable exposure and legitimacy online.
- Sphinn: Sphinn is an online forum and networking site for the Internet marketing crowd. Upload articles and guides from your blog to create interest in your own company or connect with other professionals for form new contacts.
- BuzzFlash.net: This one-stop news resource is great for businesses that want to contribute articles on a variety of subjects, from the environment to politics to health.
- HubSpot: HubSpot is another news site aimed at connecting business professionals.
- SEO TAGG: Stay on top of news from the Web marketing and SEO (search-engine optimization) industries by becoming an active member of this online community.
General Social-Media Sites
The following social-media sites provide excellent opportunities for you to advertise; promote specials, events or services.
- Wikipedia: Besides creating your own business reference page on Wikipedia, you can connect with other users on Wikipedia’s Community Portal and at the village pump, where you’ll find conscientious professionals enthusiastic about news, business, research and more.
- Newsvine: Feature top employees by uploading their articles, studies or other news-related items to this site. A free account will also get you your own column and access to the Newsvine community.
- 43 Things: This site bills itself as “the world’s most popular online goal setting community.” By publicizing your company’s goals and ambitions, you’ll gain a following of customers, investors and promoters who cheer you on as you achieve success.
- Wetpaint: If you’re tired of blogs and generic Web sites, create your own wiki with Wetpaint to reach your audience and increase your company’s presence online. You can easily organize articles, contact information, photos and other information to promote your business.
- Twitter: Is a social networking and microblogging service that allows you answer the question, “What are you doing?” by sending short text messages 140 characters in length, called “tweets”, to your friends, or “followers.”
- Yahoo! Answers: Start fielding Yahoo! users’ questions with this social-media Q&A service. Search for questions in your particular areas of expertise by clicking categories like Business & Finance, Health, News & Events and more. If you continue to dole out useful advice and link your answer to your company’s Web page, you’ll quickly gain a new following of curious customers.
Job Sites
If you want to secure high-quality talent during your company’s next hiring spree, you’ll need to maintain a strong presence on popular job sites like the ones listed below.
- CareerBuilder.com: Reach millions of candidates by posting jobs on this must-visit site.
- The Wall Street Journal’s CareerJournal: The Wall Street Journal’s CareerJournal attracts well-educated professionals who are at the top of their game. Post a job or search résumés here.
- CollegeRecruiter.com: If your firm wants to hire promising entry-level employees, check CollegeRecuriter.com for candidates with college degrees.
- Monster: Post often to separate your business from all the other big companies that use this site to advertise job openings.
- Sologig: Top freelancers and contractors post résumés and look for work on this popular site.
- AllFreelance.com: This site “offers self-employed small business owners links to freelance & work at home job boards, self-promotion tips” and more.
- Freelance Switch Job Listings: Freelance Switch is the freelancer’s online mecca and boasts articles, resource toolboxes, valuable tips and a job board.
- GoFreelance: Employers looking to boost their vendor base should check GoFreelance for professionals in the writing, design, editing and Web industries.
- Yahoo! Hot Jobs: This site is often one of the first places that job seekers visit. Post open opportunities and check out informative articles and guides to gain insight on the hiring and interviewing process.
- Guru.com: Build your company’s repertoire with top freelancing professionals by advertising projects on this site, otherwise known as “the world’s largest online service marketplace.”
How To Monetize Your Blog In 5 Easy Steps
It’s no secret that one of the hottest internet marketing trends nowadays is blog marketing. Practically everywhere we look, we are told to “monetize our blogs. You may think it’s easier said than done, but I have compiled this short list of 5 ways to start your Blog Marketing journey.
These 5 basic components of a blog can be utilized to make money. This article will break down each component so that you can turn your blog or passion into a money maker.
1) The header
The header is arguably one of the most important blog marketing components. Your header is the name of your website, which should contain the keywords you are targeting. The more relevant your header is to your keyword, the more relevant traffic you will get.
2) Tag line
The one sentence that lies below the header. Once again, make sure it has some important keywords, and make it relevant to your blog. All this boosts SEO ranking.
3) Sidebars
Text ads, banner ads, links to your own products, affiliate links, JV product links, and Google Adsense are great ways to earn extra income. These ‘links’ are essentially your online 24/7 sales force promoting your products.
4) Blog posts
The title of the blog post is extremely important. Make sure it contains the main keywords you are targeting. The body of your blog post should also contain the main keywords on the first sentence of the first paragraph and also the last sentence of the last paragraph. This is to increase search engine rankings and relevancy. The more traffic you get to your blog, the higher chance of you monetizing. Also, at the end of each blog post, create a call to action link.
5) Pages
We want our readers to stay on our blog as long as possible. We can achieve this by having a lot of unique, useful content on our posts and pages. Pages are a good way to increase a reader’s time on a blog and decrease bounce rate (people who leave immediately after entering your blog). Some good examples of pages include an About Us Section, Contact Us, Submit A Story, Categories and many others. Get your readers interacting with you so you can establish a bond or relationship with them and make them your lifelong readers.
These are 5 simple ways you can monetize your blog. For even more in-depth tools and tactics, visit Blog TV Network.
HOW TO MAKE MONEY ONLINE FREE – PAYPAL PAYOUT + PROOF -
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Make Money On The Net With Vic Hutchinson
There are many successful ways to make money on the Net with Vic Hutchinson as your mentor. You may ask, why would I choose Vic Hutchinson as a mentor over all of the other knowledgeable so-called Internet “gurus”? The obvious reason is that his Internet marketing methods and products SELL and his students are having amazing success using his creative, state-of-the-art (mostly free) SEO strategies to get highly targeted traffic to their blogs, sites, and affiliate products.
As a little background on Vic, he is an ex-Marine from Georgia, whom at the age of 40, has made his fortune online through years of hard work, his creative Internet marketing genius, and his “never quit” attitude. He struggled at first in Internet marketing, like many of us, but found his first big financial successes in the “how to” marketing niche. He soon became well-known in the Internet marketing world as a force to be reckoned with because of his uniqueness and pure genius in creating and promoting killer products. After 11 years of doing his own successful marketing, he “came out from underground”, as he says, and launched his highly rated Internet marketing tutorial product, The Tank Method, making money for thousands of his students. The Tank Method is a mere $21, which is a steal for what the buyer will learn from it.
For those of us who are fortunate enough to be Vic’s students, he is a breath of fresh air in a sea of sharks (that is a play on words, because he is an avid ocean fisherman) with his laid-back, easy-to-follow, tell-it-like-it-is, humorous training videos. He has a heart of gold and gives half of all of his earnings to feeding hungry children. Sometimes he does a little “rambling” in his training about other things in life, which are usually very valuable, motivational, and thought-provoking to his listeners, but he soon gets back onto the subject of his true love, which is sharing his marketing knowledge with others so that they can also make money on the Net.
Another reason why Vic has very loyal students is that he always over delivers in his content to us, teaching us effective marketing “twists” that most gurus would never reveal in their expensive e-books. Vic’s most recent gift to the online marketing community is his Invasion of the Blogs on Blog TV. This is a “must have” training course for anyone who wants to make money online blogging, learn Vic’s expert SEO secrets on getting to the first page of Google, and gain other valuable Internet marketing information from a true expert.
Anyone that’s searching for a new perspective to Internet marketing online or is new to online marketing can learn it all from Vic. He puts his heart and soul into all of his video trainings, and you will be hooked from your very first video. Thanks for all that you have taught me, Vic, and for helping me to make money on the Net with your inspirational, effective training.
Posted in How To, People
Tagged Blog, Boot Camp, Clint White, Home Based Business, Marketing and Advertising, Opportunities, traffic sources
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Are You Being Careful With Shortened Links
Tinyurl started the movement years ago, and now URL shortening services are all over the place, from social bookmarking sites to mainstream media sites which have their own shortening engines.
In a culture that is moving more toward 140 characters at a time, those shortening services are rather useful (especially the ones that let you track the statistics). Like almost everything else, shortened links have some drawbacks. Besides sometimes being slow, you also can’t see where the link is pointing. With a lot of malicious users in internet land, you can imagine the security risks. There are websites that will try to inject malware in your system as soon as you visit it. Others that will try to set special filters in your Gmail account and so on.
If you want to be safe, click on shortened links only if you trust the person that created them. If for some reason you don’t know if a link is legitimate, use a URL un-shortening tool. There is a tool that I have used a lot called Sucuri.net and it will reveal the real URL behind the link. It also checks with Google and SiteAdvisor to make sure the website is safe to be visited. Oh, and did I mention that is is FREE. Enjoy!!
Is your blog multi-browser compatible?
As blogger’s and more importantly marketers, we want visitors to our sites to get the full effect of our blogs and sites.
If you’re like me and a lot of other blogger’s, your browser of choice is FireFox. When we designed our blogs or websites it probably didn’t occur to us to test our sites on other browsers. Should we load our site on a different browser, it is probable that some unpleasant surprises will appear.
Most websites are based on Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), a method that allows blogger’s to have more manageability over the appearance of the pages, making sure everything is consistent throughout the site.
Unfortunately not all browsers infer CSS commands the same way, creating discrepancies such as misaligned sidebars, overlapping text and the like. The only way to solve the problem is to test your website on the many different browsers that people might use to access it.
Installing a version of every single browser out there would be time consuming, to say the least. What if you could find a service that takes screen-shots of your site in different browsers and report them back to you?
That is exactly what Browsershots.org does. And best of all, it’s FREE!! All you have to do is type the URL of your site, select the browsers you want to test and wait a few minutes to see the screenshots. The service includes all the versions of IE, Firefox, Safari and Opera and you can even select different screen resolutions. Give it a try and let me know what you think.
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What is a Favicon and Why You Need One
Favicons (an abbreviated version of favorites icon), also known as a website icon, shortcut icon, url icon, or bookmark icon are the little icons that show next to bookmarks and in the address bar of most browsers. In our world on online marketing, impressions matter, especially first impressions. In order to make our self hosted blog stand out in the crowd, the use of a picture or logo in the browser is, well, impressive!! It is a good way to brand your site and increase it’s prominence in your visitor’s bookmark menu.
In this video I will show you in just a few steps how you can add a favicon to your blog. The address to create your favicon is: http://tools.dynamicdrive.com/favicon/ . I’ve also included some written instructions to help guide you.
- Go to http://tools.dynamicdrive.com/favicon/
- Click on Browse – select photo or logo from your hard drive.
- Look it over to see if you like it, if not, choose another one, but if you like it, click on down load.
- Then click on “save file” (remember where you save it on your hard drive)
- Log into the dashboard of your Word Press blog, click on media, add new.
- Upload the favicon to your library from where you saved it on your hard drive.
- Now go back to the favicon generator site and copy the code at the bottom.
- Go back to your blog dashboard and click on editor under the Appearance tab.
- On the right, click on “Header” and scroll down until you find </head>
10. Open a blank line right above </head> and paste the code from favicon generator and click “update file”.
11. Now go back to your blog dashboard library and click “edit” on the favicon you uploaded. Copy the file URL name.
12. Go back to Appearance, Editor, Header and find the code you pasted earlier. Paste the favicon URL inside the quotation marks ( “ “ ) in the line of code.
13. Click update file and see what happens.
I hope you enjoy this and leave me some comment love!!
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What Marketers Should Know About Google Analytics
Here is a look at what marketing questions Google Analytics answer and what I should do with this information? I’ve compiled a list of eight key marketing questions about the stats and how to to get a handle on them, and some follow-up questions to ponder.
Here are some helpful links before we start, these include basic definitions, how to install Google Analytics tracking code, and an intro to Google Analytics.
1. How do I know if traffic to my website growing, declining or idle? What are the trends?
Focus on visits per period vs. last period and absolute unique visitors per period vs. last period. In other words… are numbers of visits and unique visitors growing, steady or declining? Do I see spikes when I run various campaigns and promotions? Trends are more meaningful than absolute numbers.
2. Are visitors finding my site useful? What are the trends?
Focus on average page views and time spent on site. Are users engaged while on my site?
3. Who are my visitors? Where do they live? Are they new visitors or returning?
Focus on Map overlay and new vs. returning Where do my visitors resonate from geographically? Should my content be custom-made to modify the appeal? Which group is growing faster, new or returning visitors?
4. What pages of my site are most useful to visitors?
Focus on top content and content by title. What are the most repeatedly visited pages? What can I change to make those pages more useful, easily reached or attention-grabbing?
5. From what pages do visitors exit the site?
Focus on Top exit pages. What are my top exit pages? Are they clicking outbound links, and do I want them to?
6. What traffic sources are driving visits to my site?
Focus on Traffic Sources Overview Percentages. What traffic sources are growing over last period, and why? Are other blogs linking to my site? Are my paid ads campaigns working better than last period? What about links from Social Media Sources? Is off-web promotion increasing direct traffic?
7. What other websites are referring visitors to my site?
Focus on Referring sites. Which referrers are bringing visitors who stay on the site the longest? View the most pages? These may be the best sources of high-quality prospects.
8. Which keywords are driving traffic?
Focus on Keywords and phrases. What popular keywords bringing visitors to my site? Are those keywords in my site’s metatags? What keywords are NOT driving traffic?