It’s April and We Are Nobody’s Fool…

If You Were Browsing the Web On April Fools Day, You May Have Seen These…

April Fools Day is always at great day because you can play all types of pranks on your buddies, but with the Internet, it can be a blast! I did some looking around and I found some great information about one of the largest gaming industries and the pranks they played. This company would be none other than Blizzard, the top gaming industry on the web. According to Shack News, Blizzard Entertainment posted quite a few hilarious pranks on their website. One of the most popular of their spoofs was “PC MMO World of Warcraft will hit Atari 2600 in the form of World of Warcraft: The Molten Core.”…This was a very clever, and yes, extremely funny and entertaining bit of advertising. You feel like you are back in the early days of Pac Man again. If you have not checked it out, you need to do it soon.

Are You A Fan of Guitar Hero?

Another one of my favorites was Blizzards news of bringing you a Guitar Hero type character to the amazing new expansion to World of Warcraft called Wrath of the Lich King, along with its plans to marketing a pinata that can be a bit dangerous for any child, even adults for that matter. This is a Pinata that you would never allow your child to swing at. Remember folks, this was only a joke.

Ever thought of living on Mars?

Here Richard Branson, founder of Virgin along with Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin will be breaking a new frontier in the greatest adventure of our lifetime, a first for all to witness, The Adventure of Many Lifetimes; the first human colony to ever live off of this planet, the first to live on Mars. This was great; they even had a test you could take to see if you would qualify. Who knows… it could happen!

And finally, the greatest one of all, at least if you are as fed up with the whole political race as I am…the Hillary and Obama Deathmatch as seen here on ESPN’s website. It’s just too bad there wasn’t something that exciting really happening. According to the information on this website, Hillary and Obama would be able to settle the race by winner taking all, the loser heading home with his or her head hanging low, with a good ole deathmatch. There would have been several events which is officiated by Ron Paul, the Libertarian candidate. Check out the website for the cool challenges that could have happened.

Leave it to the Web to make April Fools Day a fun one, and I can only imagine what they will come up with next year.

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.

What NOT To Do!

I came across some information that I thought was quite interesting that you and I can both benefit from.

We are constantly focusing on all the things we need to be doing to be more successful. We all want to be noticed by our customers, partners, increase our brand awareness, gain more leads and contacts, and of course generate more opportunities for our business to grow.

You and I also know that the best way to do this is through SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

I have talked a bit before the importance on reputation, how important it is to gain the trust of our readers and clients, how our reputation effects viral marketing, whether it be for good or bad. If you are doing some things that will bring about negative publicity, you may find yourself banned from Google as well as facing some legal issues in the future. So, in this blog, I am going to be going over a few Don’t s, the ‘black hat methods’ to stay away from, no matter how innocent you may think they are.

You don’t want to be on the odds with Google or your clients. A good reputation takes a long time to build, but a bad reputation can spread like wildfire in a day.

There are many who debate the ‘black hat vs white hat’ strategies. But in my opinion, it doesn’t matter the name you give it, there are things that are just not a smart idea and need to be avoided.

These methods have a common denominator and that is trying to trick the search engines and changing search results.

If you have any inclination that it may not be ethical, or that if being looked at by the human eye, could be detected, then don’t do it.

Below, I will give you a list of the Don’t s and Avoid if at all possible;

1. Link Farms

We both know the biggest influence on your search rankings is the amount and quality of links coming into your Web page. Link Farms are a group of Web sites that have been created for one purpose and that purpose is to create a high number of links to a website. What’s wrong with this? Well, for one, these links are not “real”, which in turn, changes or distorts the search engine ranking.

2. Generating and Duplicating Content

Content is king. The search engines love great content, and they like it updated on a regular basis. This takes time, money and energy on your part. There are those who try to trigger the search engine spiders from a particular website by taking Web content from other sites or some auto-generated content and publishing it on their own site.

If you are doing this, you are risking your business. If you don’t think Google knows about this, they do, and they have been pretty good at finding out what is computer generated content versus “real” content. And if you are using content from other Websites without their permission, you are in violation of copyright laws as well as it being totally unethical. Again, remember you reputation is on the line.

3. Have You Heard of Keyword Stuffing?

This is just as the name applies, using a given keyword over and over hoping that the search engines *will pick it up. This was made known to Google and other search engines many years ago, so nothing new to them, but yet, it still continues to be popular.

4. What About Cloaking?

Cloaking is when you deliver different Web content to the search engines than what is being delivered to the people searching the web. The reason this is done is to send search engine spider content for SEO ranking on one term, but sending totally different content to the readers.

As you can see, this is a choice that needs to be made as you are marketing your blogs, products, websites, etc…Do the right thing!

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