Has Twitter lost its shine?

Interesting thing about observing trends, you can watch move them through groups as a wave.   Let’s take twitter for example, it first became popular with the tech hip as a cool way to share just about anything, in 140 characters or less.   I loved twitter at events such as the Web2.0 expo, following the instantaneous commentary on the speakers, and of course knowing where the cool party was.

In the last six months, it’s become the latest must have tool for entrepreneurial marketing.  Talks about using social media for marketing your business have become a staple at business networking events.   And with good reason, MarketOutLoud filled seats for it’s marketing events with it’s facebook connections.   Some became social media divas.  For the savvy it’s been a great lead generation tool.

But twitter has recently become less fun to use, at least for me.  It seems like every day I get a follow request from someone that has less than 40 updates (boring!), or even worse, zero.   And people that I chose to follow, immediately DM’ed me with a tweet with a link to their product.  These get unfollowed really quickly.

On the other hand, facebook which I initially didn’t like much has become a better place to hang out, I have enough friends who post interesting things to catch my interest.   The walled garden aspect of facebook, derided with frustration by some, seems to keep the riffraff out, the quality connections in.

And surprisingly, teenagers, a group you would have thought been the early adopters, don’t use twitter either. As my son’s sniffs “my Dad uses twitter”.

So if you have never used twitter, is it safe to ignore it now?  Absolutely, not.  Twitter is still a major force to be reckoned with.  As evidenced by the recent Iranian election unrest, twitter is where the news breaks first.  Fast breaking events that grab broad interest is where twitter shines, and it can be an excellent way to search for news.   And there are influencers in the twittersphere that can direct significant traffic, if you want to play in the twitterspace for business reasons, at the very least find the ones in your industry to keep a pulse on your market.

And if you didn’t know what a DM was, it’s high time you figured it out.

6 Basic Proposals for Improved Blogging

If you have already taken the leap into the blogwagon, you have probably already discovered that creating free blog can only take just a few clicks. The frustrating part is you put a lot of time and energy into writing posts only to find that it seems as though no one is paying attention. If you are interested in learning to blog better, review these six helpful encouragements.

1. You should always check your spelling before you submit your post. If your posts are sloppy and full of misspelled words, people will think that you are not educated and probably won’t take anything you say seriously. Some blogging software sa comes with a spell check
options. If your blogging software does not come with any spell check feature, simply create your post in a word processing software and use the spell check there. edited work into the blogging software text area. This will allow you to post without spelling errors, which is highly recommended.

2. Keeping your free blog sites brief will help you retain any interested viewers. People don’t want to spend massive amounts of time reading text on. Try to stick to your point and keep it nice and short. A blog that is more than 500 or 700 words is just too much. If you need to carry on with the topic, consider creating another post that finishes your point.

3. If you want your free blog to be well-known and a success overall, consider writing in a more casual tone.Think of the writing as being a conversation you are having with a friend. Using humor and other personality characteristics in your writing will make people want to keep coming back to read your newest entries.

4. If you need to advertise on your internet marketing blog, consider doing so in a more subtle manner. Don’t take up your entire blog space with the advertisement. This can be a cheap way to get your work out there. It is noted however that blog readers can get annoyed quickly at advertisements on blogs.

5. You simply must be flexible with your post topics. Those blogs that cover only one type of thing may be popular with one specific targeted group of people. That is fine, if it is what you want. If you want to reach everyone however, you need to post on everything. Consider posting on current affairs, music, books, and other hot issues. When you post about popular things in the news, it will draw people to your site when they do a search on the web.

6. People who become fans of your free blog will likely be looking for a new post every few days. If you want to keep your free blog sites fresh and interesting, you should post often. They will be waiting for your new posts and will continue logging on as long as you provide them with new information.

Setup your own free blogs with revenue sharing and read more internet marketing articles at Henry Zeng’s internet marketing blogs.

Find out how to build website traffic to your blogs.

Why Do Social Bookmarking if you want added traffic?

When you find a website that you like and you want to go back to that site regularly, you don’t have to memorize its URL, you only need to bookmark it. Since people who find something valuable or useful often find themselves itching to share their discoveries, they refer the URLs to their friends and family. This spun off to become social bookmarking, and web searching has never been the same again. When it comes to internet marketing, many people are using social bookmarking to drive traffic to their websites.

Social bookmarking is that online habit of saving the URLs of websites to bookmark them by “tagging.” These days, instead of saving your bookmarks for your own reference, you can already sign up for an account in social bookmarking sites and store your finds there.

People now flock to social bookmarking sites to store, classify, manage, share, and search links. The bookmarks are tagged so they can easily be searched when they are needed. These tags are a means to organize things up, since the URLs will be labeled for easier reference to them in the future.

The URLs saved in a certain account in a social bookmarking site are public, but they can be set to be viewable to limited people in the network only, too. So, whenever you save a link and tag it, you are automatically letting other people in your network know about it and they can check if the site is interesting enough for them, then they tag it, too or rate it.

Now how is this any good to you if your maintaining an internet marketing business site or a website that promotes and sells products and services? If you have great contents posted in your blog or in any other venues online, you can bookmark these to let the others know about it. Just utilize the most appropriate category in the social bookmarking site when tagging. Posting in the right category is important so that you will be able to get a captured audience.

Bookmarking helps to drive traffic to your site, which is what every site owner aims for. Once you get to the first page of the search results or if your link gets rated high, then you get that huge opportunity of being “checked out” by the other people in the network who could view the link.

How important is social bookmarking to an ordinary browser? Aside from helping get organized, social bookmarking sites like Digg, Reddit, or Stumbleupon help people find the information they need much faster and more accurately, than if they do the same search on a search engine like Google, Yahoo, or MSN.

It is faster because there are categories that they can go to for filtered searching. That means only the most related links will be displayed in the search results page. What’s more, with the rankings, rates, or number of visitors indicated in each bookmarked link, people would be able to tell instantly if the contents of that specific link would be useful or interesting.

Compared to the hit-or-miss kind of search you get from the search engines, what you get from these social bookmarking sites are more relevant to what you need.

Business Online And You!

Tips for Promoting Your Home Business Website – PART1 (Read PPC Classroom 2 to learn more)

Do you have your own home based business? Do you have a website for it? If so, then you need to promote the website for your home business to bring in even more business. There are a few tips for promoting your home business website that will bring you more customers.

One way to promote your home business website is to list it with the search engines. A search engine is an internet directory that is designed to make your website easier to locate and easier for a potential customer to access it. Each search engine listing will include a link to your website. If your website does not get listed within the top twenty of the major search engines, then chances are that your website will rarely be seen. Since a recent survey showed that between 84% to 92% of internet users the world over use search engines to find what they need, you will definitely want to take advantage of this tool. You can also get instant traffic with PPC. Learn more by reading PPC Classroom 2. The top three search engines to be listed in are MSN, Yahoo, and Google.

Another way to promote your business website is via RSS feeds and blogs. A blog is just a short way of say Web Log. Blogging is just basically uploading text onto the same place on the internet daily, weekly, monthly, or at least on a regular basis. The best people to blog are people who write because it is their passion. You can hire someone to do this for you or you can do it yourself. There are many websites on the internet that are dedicated to web logs.

Have you ever went to a website and see a banner at the top of the page advertising another website? This is another form of promoting your business website. You can create a banner with a simple paint program, like Photoshop. If you want to animate it, there are animation programs out there, too. There are many banner exchange websites online that will allow you to place your banner on their website. Banner exchanges are pretty easy to participate in; however, these types of exchanges most likely will not let you pick and choose who you want to trade with.

Another way to advertise your home business website is by opt-in mailing. Bulk emailing is the practice of sending mass quantities of email to lists of unqualified email address. This is considered spam and is considered to be in bad taste. If you send unsolicited email to people that do not want commercial email, you will run the risk of ruining the reputation of your business and getting into trouble with your ISP. It is best for you to use targeted direct email. This means that you will be sending your email to people that have approved or opted in to receive this type of email. There are many websites on the internet that provide this type of service for you and are definitely worth checking out. Also you could have a look at PPC Classroom 2, Pay per click can definitely help you send targeted traffic to any website almost instantly.

Basic Blogging and your own place online

People will always have their own opinions about something. The great thing about self-expression these days is that anyone can be able to get themselves published through the Internet. Just start blogging and you have your own place in the World Wide Web, which can help you rant all you can, share your knowledge, share your life, or just simply to share your thoughts. People trying to make a living off internet marketing also tend to try blogging to gain an audience and make money.

A blog is a short reference to web log, which can be likened to a diary or journal. The major difference is that this one is for the public’s eye. If you have something in mind that you want to share to the whole world, you can do so through your own blog.

There are a host of media one blogger can use like articles, images, video clips, or digital photos in making one’s blog more interesting. The blog can be about certain topics on which the blogger has a lot of brilliant ideas about. Any one blog can be a host to many links to whatever the author of the blog finds useful or interesting online.

Blogs can be about some mom’s adventures with taking care of her baby and other kids. Others may be about travel adventures, gadgets, movies, shopping, or tutorials of sorts. There are many ways one can make use of blogging. What’s best about this is that one can sign up anytime for an account for free.

Blogging has become very popular that there may be thousands upon thousands (or even millions!) already floating around the Internet now. Many of those that have become popular have visitors that regularly go to their sites for updates. These sites often have very good site traffic that could earn them some income off internet marketing.

Blogs have already existed as early as the mid 1990s but it is only recently that people have begun to embrace its potential. These days, blogs are considered mainstream media, which business-minded people use to do marketing, and which many people use for spreading informative articles like news.

Since people have found blogs, people have found ways to monetize them. If you are already established as a blogger and your site is fetching really good traffic regularly, then you may have already started to employ Internet advertisements to your web pages.

During the earlier days of doing ads online, probably the most popular forms of advertising were in the form of banners and pop-ups. But since so many sites are now online, and people have grown tired of being disturbed when they are reading or browsing, the way businesses advertise through blogs or websites has changed, evolved, or adapted.

When you have ads in your blog, you will be able to get some commission from the providers whenever your visitors click on the links. This can be tracked and you get paid depending on the policies set by the merchant or ad provider.

Blogging will continue to be that great medium for people to express themselves, but it will most likely grow even more into this medium for people to promote products or services, for free.

Internet Marketing Can Be Made Easy

Imagine learning exactly what you needed to know to succeed.

The well known motivational author Anthony Robbins reveals in his book “Unlimited Power” the importance of modeling successful people in order to create your own successful life.Modeling someone good at what you want to learn allows you learn in hours what it might have taken the expert years to learn.

Successful people realize that they do not need to know everything about a topic in order to succeed in marketing it. By leveraging the abilities of your employees or partners it becomes easy to create a level of success that is mind blowing.

When you apply modeling to internet marketing, you can overcome the steep learning curve, and create success quickly by learning the steps that work for experienced marketers.

Occupy the City is using this approach to level the fields of both network marketing and internet marketing. All members have access to incredible training put together by internet marketing experts.

The broad vision of these experts and the power of people working together for common goals, is enabling us to optimize all of our sites, and get on the coveted first page of Google.

Internet Marketing Techniques for Success

If you have looked into internet marketing to build your business only to get overwhelmed by all the tasks that you have to do, you can see how a community can help.

If you have tried your hand at network marketing but found that too much time was wasted with cold calls and face to face meetings, the internet marketing approach is what you were missing.

As a member of Occupy the City you can learn how to optimize your blog posts, articles and any Web 2.0 property for the best results.

Topics of internet marketing

• Use of free Web 2.0 properties such as Squidoo, Hubpages, and other Blog networks.
• Using social bookmarking for site promotion.
• Promotion of and by our network marketing blogs.

All members benefit by the coop approach to advertising. PPC (pay per click) campaigns are developed by the sales team, as well as email marketing.

The support of this network marketing community is amazing. There are mentors for motivation, and in addition any member is available for private messaging through the forum.

Success with any new business does not come overnight. One of the things that is great about this network marketing community is that there are no get rich quick claims. Everyone is working together to create a solid network marketing business that will continue to grow and provide residual income for all of the members.

This realistic approach is what will create our long term success. All members are reminded that to build a business online takes a minimum commitment of ten hours a week to create individual success as well as success for all. All members are encouraged to keep learning about internet marketing techniques and sites to widen the exposure of the public to this network marketing community.

Thinking of building a business online? Learn the what to avoid as you build your business, and please consider what our network marketing community has to offer.

A Beginners Guide To Social Media Marketing

In the past few years, Social Media and Social Media Marketing have become buzz- words. This is due to the popularity of sites like MySpace, Digg, etc. The social media have two components – user generated contents and the ability to form networks of friends for sharing contents.

In sites like MySpace and Facebook users create their profile pages and use texts, pictures, and videos to embellish the pages. They can then share those contents with others in their friends’ network, or the social network

In sites like Digg, YouTube, Flickr users submit a summary of news articles, pictures, videos and they vote on the contents submitted by others. Popular contents are featured on the homepage and it drives massive amount of traffic to support your Internet Marketing.

There are many variations of the two models described above, including a combination of the two.

Using the social media sites to promote your product or services (or a website) is called social media marketing. There are two types of traffic you get when your content becomes popular in a social media site.

The primary traffic or the direct traffic comes from the site where it becomes popular. For sites like Digg, it can be huge and your site should be ready to handle the surge in traffic without crashing.

When your site becomes popular in a social media site, people talk about your site and the post that becomes popular. They will put a url to the content. The secondary traffic or the indirect traffic flows from those url long after the surge due to the primary traffic is over.

So, what are the benefits of primary and secondary traffic from the social media sites? The primary traffic exposes your site to people who have no other means of knowing about your existence. Some of those visitors will become regulars to your site if you are providing something that they want on a regular basis.

The greatest benefit is the natural url to your site given by others because they want to discuss your offering. Natural urlfrom a large number of relevant sites improve your search engine rankings and organic search traffic.

Social media & Internet Marketing lets you expose your site to a large group of people. If your search engine traffic has leveled off, shifting your focus to the social media marketing and becoming successful in that will take you to the next level in search engine traffic.

The only other alternative for increasing your search engine traffic is Internet Marketing & pay per click advertisement. If you are already running a PPC campaign, you can continue your PPC campaign through out the year to sustain increased traffic from search engines at a cost.

Social media marketing is free and making your site popular a couple of times in a year is enough to sustain increased traffic through out the year.

bloggers revolt against AP

The A. P. (Associated Press) took a very strict position with bloggers quoting it’s new articles.  Essentially the position is “don’t”.   Check the techcrunch post on the topic. Wonder what this means for digg?