You Think Message Dance Is Awesome, Check It Out Now!

I recently wrote a blog about MessageDance. Now I have even more information for you and how to take this great tool to a new level.

You now get to take advantage of MessageDance from anywhere and everywhere on your own blog.

What is Message Dance?

MessageDance began as a portable message wall, such as for comments, guest book entries, like your Facebook Wall.

In my first blog about Message Dance, you learned about the many possibilities of this new message aggregator which was used on Facebook and other social networks. You had the ability to use their new portable You Tube playlist which enabled you to share your videos across the social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace. You could use your MessageDance widget to share your updates via email or through MessageDance.com.

GREAT NEWS!

Well, the great news is that now they have progressed out of the message widget and moved up into the world of social media with a slew of sharing options which still include your You Tube playlists.

You are now able to join the world of blogging and use your MessageDance widget to display your blog posts.

You have a variety of ways to submit your blog posts; you can use Facebook message tool, Amazon, Iphone, YouTube, Gmail, Hotmail, Outlook, Yahoo, and your Google Reader! Wow, this is exciting!

You may be thinking yeah…this is just a blogging integration platform which uses the submission process, but you are not correct in that assumption. You are able to create a blog post from many media sites as well as email clients. MessageDance, however, can be your existing blog on two of the major platforms which are WordPress and Blogger. You will also be able to use their media attachment tool which will enable you to turn your content into an incredible rich media blog.

We know in this business that blogs are very powerful, which is why you see so many. If you are a social network user, I am sure you have a blog of some sort. Blogs are a conversation, and they keep us informed on the world and what’s going on. But as you know, this is a big job keeping it updated for your readers.

MessageDance has created a huge theme which allows its users to blog content from any social networking site they happen to be on. You get to take advantage of their blog posting capabilities from all the popular social networking sites.

Watch this great video on MessageDance and learn how simple it is to use.

So what you have now is no longer just a message aggregator, but an ever-growing broadcaster which can be used across a variety of networks. You will love the re-publishing tools which are totally automated.

Continue to watch MessageDance evolve and grow and watch your own viral marketing campaign grow right along with it.

No More Excuses, Now Anyone Can Convert Your Paper to iPaper

I came across this article as I was browsing some of my favorite blogs, and this immediately caught my attention. This is a site that is perfect for those who do not own a scanner or have convenient access to one.

Scribd now has a program they call Convert Your Paper to Ipaper…

which is a way for you to have all your paper documents scanned and published on the Internet, all at no cost to you..yes..you read that right….Totally FREE! All you need to worry about it getting the documents sent to them, then they take care of the rest.

How Can They Do This For Free?

They are able to offset the expense for scanning by the advertisements that are relevant to your documents.

Can You Have Any Type of Documents Scanned?

Scribd can scan almost any type of written document. They use a highly advanced scanning process which is provided by their partners, giving them the ability to scan about any document in high volumes. If you do have any questions however, they are easy to contact and ready to answer any of your questions.

Who is Scribd?

Scribd is a huge, digital library where you can publish your own original content. The focus of Scribd is to provide a way for those who have tons of documents sitting around their home or office, and to have a place to publish these documents for all to read.

What’s Their Plan?

First and foremost they are looking to save a lot of trees, which I am all for. They are also looking to utilize their space to service those who have some very important documents that were created long before the digital era. There may also be some documents that have been lost, out of print, or printed but now deleted. This provides a new life to documents that can be shared among many re-digitized and accessible to all.

The reason I am all for this and ready to support them is they are providing a great service at no cost to you. You no longer have to take the time scanning paper after paper, or the expense of purchasing a scanner, but just stick your documents in an envelope, send them off in the mail to Scribd, and before you know it, your documents are accessible to you on the Internet, never to be lost or misplaced again, nor taking up all that valuable space in your home or office.

Affiliate Programs and How They Can Boost Your Income

What Do You Know About Affiliate Marketing

As you already know, Internet marketing uses the Internet to market products as well as their promotion. You can be using this method to promote your own products or the products of others.

This is where we get into the affiliate programs and how they can benefit you financially by earning commission on the quality products you are promoting for others.

There are several avenues of marketing that you can use such as your website and web pages, personal blogs and Email Opt-in lists. You are going to promote the product with a squeeze page or promotional letter, In your letter, you will include an affiliate link which will contain the affiliate identifier.

With your affiliate identifier link, your visitors will click on the link, be sent to the product sales page or website, and with their purchase, you will be given a percentage of the sales price. This is very similar to sales in brick and mortar stores, however with an affiliate program, your part is very simple and self running. All you need to do is do the initial set up and optimize the traffic.

You need to realize though that Not All Affiliate Programs are the same, so choose wisely.

What you need to know and look for in choosing the right affiliate program:

1) Training and Support

Affiliate programs will usually provide training and support, which is crucial for those just starting out on Internet Marketing. This is so important as it will be the only way for you to become effective as well as profitable. You need to look for affiliate which offers sufficient training and the know how in selling their product. There are however, Internet marketers who have experienced great success in affiliates without the training and support, but wouldn’t it be nice to have that training and support?

2) Look for High Commissions

You are going to put in the effort to bring in the traffic to the affiliate product with your sales pitch, then directing the customers to the affiliate sales page, and for your well earned efforts, you will receive a percentage of the sale in form of commissions. As you look at the different Affiliate programs to market, look at the amount of commission they offer, some are hardly worth your effort.

The most popular site to promote affiliate programs is Clickbank. You will soon see that Clickbank is the largest online marketplace on the Internet. Clickbank places hundreds of thousands of products which are sold on a daily basis. There are some that pay up to 75% of the purchase price.

3) Affiliate Referral Programs

There are a few programs that will offer you a chance to recommend their affiliate programs yourself. This sill ultimately award you with a greater percentage of all the sales generated for the program you recommend. This is where your viral marketing techniques will come in effect, the more you recommend, the more money you will make.

4) Triple Combination; Affiliate Training and Support, Referral Commission and Product Commission

You will be happy to know that there are some programs out there that offer the best of all three worlds of affiliate marketing. You can have all of these with training to help you in your marketing efforts. A wonderful example of this is the Internet Marketing Center’s Affiliate program. With this combination, you can reap huge commission benefits.

You can make some good money with Internet marketing bringing you closer and closer to your goal of financial freedom. But remember, you need to be willing to put in the time and effort.

Have You Heard of Message Dance?

Another Great Way To Enhance Your Viral Marketing Strategy…

You may have heard of a new message site called MessageDance which was launched a few months ago. At first the site didn’t have a great integration option for multiple users, but they did have a great underlying concept as well as huge potential for its application methods used on a variety of web services.

Now, MessageDance announces some new feature updates that goes great with their added integration with Twitter.

Today, MessageDance is announcing a few more new feature updates to its service that go along nicely with its recently added Twitter integration. For starters, there’s a new portable YouTube Playlist. This lets you share videos with your friends across various networks, like MySpace, Facebook and Twitter. Updates can be displayed in your MessageDance widget, and it can be shared via email, or blasted to everyone, using the ever-handy “friends @ messagedance.com.” Images have been added too, along with documents, all for sharing purposes, through MessageDance’s expanding portal.

Will this approach work, or is this incorporating too many life-streaming tools into an existing third-party service? I imagine that such integration doesn’t hurt. It looks to compete, on varying levels, with social browsing, micro-blogging tools, ShareThis options present on blogs and websites, Box.net, and even Yahoo’s latest Life hub (which has yet to launch).

I think MessageDance is still finding the best way in which it can fit into social media as an accessible tool that makes sharing easy across the web, so the new features, many of which have been requested by users, should further MessageDance on its journey.

What’s Going On With Yahoo and Microsoft?

First, I want to let you know that Yahoo has rejected the unsolicited offer from Microsoft, which was a $44.6 billion dollar offer, however, according to the Times of London they report a possibility of Yahoo merging with AOL.

Microsoft’s $31 per share cash and stock deal where AOL merger looks to be more profitable for them. But Yahoo is concerned about convincing their shareholders that a merger with AOL is a good option.

Viral Marketing through Social Networks Still Going Strong!

Tomorrow the stats are to be released by comScore letting us know how the social networking sites are doing as far as traffic in the US, while the time spent on these sites is actually leveling off. MySpace shows a growth of 11.6% growth from year to year in unique visitors, and Facebook has shot up 78.6%, but the average amount of time spent on the site dropped 10.4%. The average amount of time that visitors are spending on Bebo is off 63.6% here in the US. But you need to realize that the US is a very small part of the social network market.

From the statistics gathered, the still seems that MySpace users are spending more time on that site than any of the other social networking sites. As of January, the average visitor was spending an average of 203.9 minutes on MySpace, which is a 13.7 increase when measured month to month, and Facebook visitors are spending 172.1 minutes, an increase of 1.6%, which is down from their high of 199.9 minutes in February ’07.

As you can see, their has been a significant decline on Facebook in the user minutes, which adds to a theory that the interest in these applications is starting to drop. However, there are some new Facebook-like additions like the friend news feed as well as photo galleries which seem to keep people on MySpace, while as Facebook prepares to launch its own platform next month.

More Numbers on the Social Networking Front!

YouTube has more than doubled in their visitor numbers just in the last year. There were 61.3 million viewer just in January ’08, with an increase in page views of 277%.

Flickr was up 88.5% with their number in visitors reaching almost 14 million. They were up 266% in their page views with 340 million in January.

Yahoo 360 is not doing as well, they dropped by 53.4% to 2.2 million. Their page views were also down by 54% to 52 million.

Facebook dropped in unique visitors by 2.3% from December. They have basically been flat in their numbers since August which was 33.7 million and January having 33.8 million.

It is plain to see that YouTube has benefited tremendously since they were bought by Google and have integrated their searches, whereas Flickr continues to grow under Yahoo. As you can tell, Yahoo 360 is not doing so hot, which is not a huge surprise. Yahoo has had an ever-shifting networking strategy which has not seem to find it’s happy place yet.

WETPAINT! Another great Social Networking Site For You To Check Out!

There are more and more social networking sites coming up, better to help you with your viral networking strategies. Wetpaint has some wikis that are becoming a great, fully functional social networking site. They have recently added Feeds, which by the way is a very important feature of any social networking site. This makes these sites communicative which is vital to it’s survival. These feeds include dashboard and friend updates, giving each user their own personal view of the happenings in their particular part of the world.

They offer some great friend invite options who can add to your wiki’s that you have created, making this an integral tool, focusing on the current trends going on in our social media. You have greater personalization with their custom profiles, photo gallery, and place to share media. This is a great tool to get your name and product out there even more. Social networking sites are a great way to build up contacts, friends, along with trust.

Features You Need To Be Focusing On!

This site has a couple of self-promotional features which you need to take advantage of. The first one is the ‘Promote My Site Wizard’, which is a way for users to find better SEO for their wikis.

The next feature is the option to offer Compliments to your friends. This is a great version of ‘poking’, and hopefully will be used as encouragement and support. You can actually collect and display these compliments as awards right on your profile, letting others know that you can be trusted and that others think you are great.

Here are some the features and Why Wetpaint?

• 100% free
• Simple to start
• Easy to build
• Fun to share

What is Wetpaint?

Wetpaint powers wikis, but unlike most wikis, which can be complicated, Wetpaint wikis are as simple as 1-2-3 , making it easy for anyone to start a free wiki that they can share with friends.

Who is using Wetpaint?

A better question might be “Who isn’t using Wetpaint? Wetpaint is perfect for almost anyone! This is for so many different uses and passions. Educators, gamers, technophiles, sports fans, and everyone in between is using Wetpaint.

Now for those of you who don’t know what a Wiki is;

-A wiki is a type of website that anyone can easily edit and help grow through collaboration. You can add text, photos, videos of your own or that you like, add polls, anything that you want to share with others.

-You do not need to be a techy to build a wiki website, Wetpaint makes it totally easy to do. The other great thing about this is other people can contribute to your website, making it grow quickly.

-You will be able to track every change and addition to your wiki page, allowing you to remove any content that you don’t want to keep.

-If you are in a group with a common interest, or would like to form a group, this is a great way to start You can use this as your central headquarters for the group, where everyone can share and add their own ideas, photos, experiences, etc…This will allow all of you to always be on the ‘Same Page’.

How Do I Set Up An RSS Feed?

Have you seen this symbol? If you read blogs, or visit websites, I am sure you have. RSS represents REAL SIMPLE SYNDICATION or Rich Site Summary (they both mean the same thing), which is a way for you, if you have an interest, to get new information, news, and anything else regarding that topic without having to surf through pages and pages on the Internet.

An RSS page is generated in XML which you are not able to see, but can be seen by the RSS Readers or Aggregators.

How Does RSS Work and What are RSS Newsfeeds?

When you find a blog that you enjoy reading, or a website, they offer a “news feed” where you are able to get their information on a regular basis sent directly to your “News Reader”. This is totally free for you and will be displayed right in your web browser, desktop, or homepage.

If you have seen the stock tickers which are giving you information in real time, allowing you to see what the stocks are doing without going to a website for the a information; this is how the RSS Feed works, delivering the information to your computer as it happens.

Do You Need RSS?

Well, let’s look at the advantages of an RSS Feed and then you get to decide if you need it or not.
This saves your email inbox from getting unlimited newsletters,
You never need to go and get the information,
It is being sent to you without taking up valuable email storage space.

How much easier is it for you to have the newspaper delivered to your front door versus going to the store each morning to get it. This is virtually the same thing, you are having the news you are interested in delivered to you instead of you going out to find it.

An Example:

Let’s say you want to get as much information on viral marketing as that is what you are focusing on at the moment, you will take some time, search out some websites, and when you find something you like and want to stay up on, you simply click on the RSS, and this information will be delivered to you as it comes available. The other way would be to bookmark the page, then go to it every day to see if there is anything new you would be interested in. You will have to wade through all the unwanted information to find what you are looking for. Look how much time and energy you save when you use the RSS Feed option.

How Will RSS Work For You?

There are so many ways this can work for you, there is no one answer. I am going to give you a simple answer allowing you to get RSS Feeds the easiest way possible. Remember however, this is not your only option, just a simple one.

The easiest way is to have it sent to your homepage of your browser.

For instance, I use Google’s homepage and I have RSS Feeds sent directly to my homepage that I have set up for that particular genre of information.

Because I am a writer, I have a page dedicated to writing helps, topics, articles, and I have all of these sent to that home page via RSS. Now, if you have an RSS newsreader (aggregator), you can have it sent there as well. I actually use both. I have my Google Reader where I have RSS Feeds sent to that I don’t read on a regular basis. The more crucial information is sent to my homepage.

If you are wondering about whether you have a newsreader or not, I would guess that you do and not even know it. If you have Yahoo, MSN, Google or Hotmail, you have a reader. Let me help you set one up…We will use MSN as our example.

1. Go to My.Msn.com and sign in. If you don’t have an account on one of these browsers I have mentioned, set up an account now. You can do this with Yahoo, Google, or MSN in a matter of minutes.
2. Once you have signed in,you will see information such as weather, news, sports, stocks, local information and ads. This is your selection page, you can move things around, add or delete, making it tailored to your needs and interests. It is simple to move them, just click and drag from the top right of the subject area, moving them, using the minus (-) symbol in the top left area. If you delete one by accident, no worries, you can add them back anytime.
3. Now in the top left area of the screen, you will see “Welcome”. You are going to add this content below your name, with four choices (Tabs) to assist you. The “Search” tab is the default tab, and from that point you will see your four options. If you know the web address (URL) for a sites newsfeed, enter it there. The three tabs remaining let you browse by subjects and names of companies. You just click on the box that you want.
4. With Yahoo, you will notice that there are already some news feeds available listed as “Top Stories” from Reuters, along with “Politics”, “World News”, and “Business”. You will notice a big yellow box in the center above these stories giving you clear instructions on how to”Add Content”.
5. Next you will click on the “Add Content” link bringing up a search box which allows you to “search content” about your subject or topic.
6. Type in your search phrase, search, and you will be presented an array o results. When you see something that you like, click “Add” next to it. Once you have made your selections, click “Finished” up on the top right of the page.

Now you have added RSS Newsfeeds to your MSN or Yahoo homepage.

As you scroll down your “My Yahoo” page, you will see the headlines you have just added. You can rearrange them in the order you want. If you decide you don’t want a particular fee any longer, then simply delete it.

How Do You Customize Your Own RSS?

You may know a particular RSS Feed you would like and don’t need to “find” it. This is very simple to do. On most pages you will see a small orange box that says XML, News Feeds, or RSS Feed. You then click on that button, and a set of instructions will come up on that page. You will be given an option to choose that Feed to appear in your Aggregator or your homepage. There are some that allow you copy and paste the “news feed URL” and paste it into your news reader.

If you are worried about the code, don’t be, you are just looking at the “feed code” which is the specific URL of the news feed.

This is such a great and convenient way to get the news updated and on a regular basis. My favorite reader is Google Reader, it is so simple to use and navigate.

Below are the Top 7 RSS Readers in order
1.RssReader
2.SharpReader
3.Pluck RSS Reader
4.NewsGator
5.FeedDemon
6.FeedBucket
7.NetNewsWire (Mac OS-X only)

Here are the Top 7 Web RSS Feeds/Aggregators (these require a personal account)

1.Google
2.My.Yahoo
3.NewsGator Online
4.Feedster
5.Bloglines
6.My.MSN
7.My.AOL

So What Do You Think About the New Blogged.com ?

This week, Blogged.com launched providing us with a fantastic online directory for every blog in the world. You already know that there are a lot of search tools such as technorati which is great providing you real-time content an any topic you are interested in, but Blogged.com works like a catalog revealing not only only topic content, but the entire blog itself with all of its content.

Here is a list of some blogs you can find:

1. Society (19,363)
2. Entertainment & Recreation (16,717)
3. Personal Blogs (9,115)
4. Technology (7,793)
5. United States (7,192)
6. Business (6,548)
7. Art (6,319)
8. Family & Home (6,285)
9. Culture (6,027)
10. Internet (5,553)
11. North America (5,507)
12. Books & Literature (4,272)
13. Government (4,089)
14. Politics (4,081)
15. Religion and Spirituality (3,890)
16. Sports (3,381)
17. Humor (3,324)
18. Travel (3,302)
19. Computers (3,127)
20. Education (3,087)

Blogged.com has a number of feedback tools and ratings that are found throughout the site. You will find bogs that will discuss a particular topic on a regular basis, which would be to your advantage when you focusing on a particular niche or solution on your blog.

This as mentioned before, works as a Blog Catalog, whereas Technorati works an Internet search engine that competes with Google and Yahoo and which focuses more on image thumbnails more than the blog results. Blogged.com is focused on the web user to find blogs on any topic. Mashable found that this site is a great way to bring the blogs and websites to the typical consumer, allowing them to find even greater amounts of information. This will help the bloggers to become more on the forefront in viral marketing.

In the case of viral marketing, right now this site works well as search and discovery tool. You will find some great tips to help you take advantage of this forum and using this as a self-promotion tool. You need to create a profile, list of blogs that you visit. You are basically becoming a personal recommendation service, which will increase your reader audience and bookmarking. Go to Blogged.com, sign up, get your blog on there and market yourself.