Here is an article from Harvard Business:

Understanding Users of Social Networks — HBS Working Knowledge

“For one thing, findings show that people don’t click through on advertising on social networks. “A good analogy is to imagine sitting at a table with friends when a stranger pulls up a chair, sits down, and tries to sell you something while you are talking to your friends. You will not get far with a strategy like this.”

Well worth having a look at the rest of the article – based on serious research rather than “here’s my next great idea to make a million”

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A large team of staff over at Google have been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search.

“It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits under the hood of Google’s search engine, which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences.”

If you would like to try it out the current beta for yourself, here is the link

http://www2.sandbox.google.com/

More information at the Google WebMasterCentral Blog.

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clipped from www.site-reference.com To be Great and an Easy Sell Your Product Must Have These 5 Essential Character Traits 1. It must solve a problem. If it doesn’t fix, mend or alleviate a nagging pain, problem, condition or situation—why would people want it, much less buy it? There must be a strong, recognizable and somewhat measurable or appreciable benefit to owning and using your product. 2. It must have mass appeal. 3. It must be unique. 4. It must offer instant gratification. 5. It must be demonstrable. You can show why your product or service is superior to your competitors by creating tables.

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clipped from www.guardian.co.uk From uncles wearing skinny jeans to mothers investing in ra-ra skirts and fathers nodding awkwardly along to the latest grime record, the older generation has long known that the surest way to kill a youth trend is to adopt it as its own. The cyberworld, it seems, is no exception. The proliferation of parents and teachers trawling the pages of Facebook trying to poke old schoolfriends and lovers, and traversing the outer reaches of MySpace is causing an adolescent exodus from the social networking sites, according to research from the media regulator Ofcom. The sites, once the virtual streetcorners, pubs and clubs for millions of 15- to 24-year-olds, have now been over-run by 25- to 34-year-olds whose presence is driving their younger peers away.

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clipped from ezinearticles.com Internet marketing tools are essential if you are going to compete in the ultra-competitive online business world. This is a message that you will hear often. Much of online marketing, if we are honest, is tedious, repetitive and mind-numbing. If you have spent several hours submitting to directories, entering the same information, and filling in CAPTCHA after CAPTCHA, you will know what I mean. It isn’t just directories. There are articles to write and submit, blog posts, commenting in forums, creating and uploading videos. You then need to capitalize on this through social bookmarking.

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clipped from www.ideas-for-marketing.com If you ever visit any of the article sites and search for an article on virtually any topic, the chances are you will be swamped with articles – many of which appear to be saying pretty much the same thing. How many articles do we actually need with “5 Top Tips for Saving Money” or “Secrets of Top Chefs”. The problem is, there is no way to distinguish quality from dross. Since so much of search technology is based on keywords, the article that is likely to appear at the top will be the one that has the best keyword optimization or whose author has got most of his mates to vote for it.

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Ideas-for-Marketing takes your privacy seriously. This privacy policy describes what personal information we collect and how we use it. See this privacy policy primer to learn more about privacy policies in general.

Routine Information Collection

All web servers track basic information about their visitors. This information includes, but is not limited to, IP addresses, browser details, timestamps and referring pages. None of this information can personally identify specific visitors to this site. The information is tracked for routine administration and maintenance purposes.

Cookies and Web Beacons

Where necessary, Ideas-for-Marketing uses cookies to store information about a visitor's preferences and history in order to better serve the visitor and/or present the visitor with customized content.

Advertising partners and other third parties may also use cookies, scripts and/or web beacons to track visitors to our site in order to display advertisements and other useful information. Such tracking is done directly by the third parties through their own servers and is subject to their own privacy policies.

Controlling Your Privacy

Note that you can change your browser settings to disable cookies if you have privacy concerns. Disabling cookies for all sites is not recommended as it may interfere with your use of some sites. The best option is to disable or enable cookies on a per-site basis. Consult your browser documentation for instructions on how to block cookies and other tracking mechanisms. This list of web browser privacy management links may also be useful.

Contact Information

Concerns or questions about this privacy policy can be directed to paul.taylor@gmail.com for further clarification.

This privacy policy was generated by the Privacy Policy for WordPress plugin.

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Forums can be great!

• members self-select and by definition are part of your target market
• they can be self-sustaining as members interact with each other
• lots of opportunities to test product ideas and get feedback
• happy customers ‘sell’ for you in the forum
• regular returning traffic
• on-going opportunities to sell or generate advertising revenues

Sounds perfect! The reality, of course, is slightly different. The internet is littered with the withered remains of failed forums. And in amongst the detritus are the weeds – the forums with thousands of automated SPAM posts, soulless ghost ships.
Forums require hard work, good timing and – most importantly – interesting content.
Here are a few tips for using forums in your marketing:

• don’t launch too early – ensure that there is already a reasonable level of traffic to your site; people need to see that a forum is .alive’
• recruit moderators – identify at an early stage people who have knowledge and enthusiasm – and then look after them
• start slowly with a few categories – and provide help for new joiners
• promote your forum – on your website, blog, web 2.0 media, social bookmarking – and encourage your members to do the same
• ensure that your forum is search engine friendly
• get involved – respond quickly, ask questions – encourage others to register and post
• be an active moderate to prevent ‘flaming’ – being passionate is OK, being insulting is not
• include forum posts in your newsletters – and vice versa
• watch out for ‘troll’ – people who will try to lure members to other forums

Good luck!

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Backlinks to your site are very important in boosting your search engine ranking. Naturally you will link your own sites together.

But are you wasting your time? Links from sites with the same IP C-block are downgraded by the search engines because these links are less likely to be content-related links and more likely to be links purely for SEO purposes.

What’s a C-Block Address

IP addresses are the internet’s equivalent of zip codes. For our purposes, we can think of an IP address as being in the format AAA.BBB.CCC.DDD. For example, 192.168.222.001. Web sites hosted with the same host will normally have the same C-block – ie the first 9 numbers will be the same: 192.168.222.

That’s pretty much all we need to be concerned about  in this context. What it means is that when you link together two of your sites that have the same C-block, Google will downgrade the importance of the link.

Which means that linking between your own sites on the same web host is of little value. If your sites have low Page Rank this may not be too much of an issue. However, if you have high ranking sites, what a waste.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t stop there. If you link too much between your sites on the same C-block, you may be penalised as a spammer. But it gets worse. If you are on the same C-block as a nasty spammer, the entire C-block may be penalised.

So what can you do?

Spread your sites around good quality hosts! Remember that many resellers may be selling you space on the same C-block as your other sites.

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Technorati Profile

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