With recent phenomena like Ron Paul raising 4.2 millions of dollars in a 24 hour period (that’s approximately 3 thousand dollars donated every second) and the plentyoffish.com creator making millions of dollars a year from internet advertising, everyone (even Hillary Clinton) is waking up and smelling the potential! Too bad Hillary’s party didn’t do their research on YouTube before posting a campaign video for internet enthusiasts without watching it first! Using the internet and social networking as leverage to spread your message is becoming a powerful tool in your company’s arsenal. Growth can spread more rapidly with the viral marketing effect and travel far and fast without the cost of using the traditional mass media.

What all of this means is, if you want to get your company or your name out there, you need to get started with social networking and using web2.0 services. Internet Marketing geniuses like Ed Dale and Brad Fallon are teaching everyone the importance of web2.0 with free courses like Thirty Day Challenge and paid programs like StomperNet. Joel Comm found the Next Internet Millionaire by creating the first internet marketing reality TV show (like an online version of the Apprentice). RSS feeds allow you to syndicate your message over video, audio, or text. In combination, these tools can accelerate the process of establishing yourself and they can give you significant amounts of traffic, allowing you to use that traffic and convert your visitors into buying your products!

To begin establishing your online presence, you need to start signing up on social networks. Like investing, diversifying your name and spreading it in as many places possible is a good ingredient to becoming established and driving people to your website. Services like Digg can send massive surges of traffic to your website (sometimes enough to crash your server!), while del.icio.us and stumbleupon can deliver loads of balanced traffic over a long time period. This helps people recognize your name and deliver targeted traffic. Below is the list of bare essentials with bunch of extras (over 100 in the lists), and aggregating services to help you keep track of them all.

The Essentials

1. Digg - Find great articles here. The community decides what stories make it to the front page of the website by digging (voting for) or burying (voting down) stories. If one of your blog articles makes it to the front page, you’ll see huge spikes in your traffic. Just make sure your server can handle the load from thousands of people visiting your website at the same time. Sorry, that means paying more than $2.99 for hosting!
2. del.icio.us - The original social bookmarking site. You bookmark pages you like with a description and list of relevant tags you create. Then you can network with people who have similar interests as you to share and exchange links that interest you. If you use this service a lot, you can even get the RSS feed for your newly bookmarked sites and put your recent bookmarks on your blog!
3. Technorati - The original blog aggregating service that allows you to syndicate your blog articles. This site takes all of the blogs on the internet, crawls them regularly, and feeds them to you on their site. It keeps account of who’s talking about who and gives sites an authority ranking based on the number of people talking about that blog on their own blogs. This is a great way to discover other bloggers with your interests and syndicate your own articles for everyone else to read.
4. BlogRush - A new, innovative way to rush people to your blog by syndicating your article headlines on other blogger’s sites. You get a widget that you put on your site and you get credits based on your amount of traffic, referral traffic, and other various variables. It’s a great way to drive targeted traffic to your site from other bloggers’ websites. In a way, it’s like free advertising that leverages your existing traffic to get ad space on other websites.
5. Twitter - A microblog even more informal than the Tumblr microblog, Twitter allows you to blog about everything you do. You can blog from your phone, house, car, airplane, taxi cab, movie theater…you get the point. You are limited to 140 characters per entry, and you just tell Twitter what you are up to at the moment. You can make friends and follow them to see what everyone’s up to at the moment. It’s strangely addicting, check it out!
6. Facebook - Many people think of Facebook as a time-wasting website you visit to keep up with your friends. While Facebook is great for keeping up with old friends, they are inventing new ways to get your business name out in the world using a popular social networking platform. Now you can develop software products purely for Facebook and even start making money from your facebook application!
7. StumbleUpon - StumbleUpon is an addicting service to find interesting and entertaining articles, videos, and photos on the internet. StumbleUpon is different because you are directed to different websites randomly rather than you choosing where you navigate. Of course, with SU comes a profile page where you can add friends and share links.
8. YouTube - It’s a lot easier to watch a video on something rather than reading a long article about it. That’s why video and audio will be a main ingredient to internet marketing in 2008. If you aren’t afraid to start video blogging or creating entertaining or educational videos, you should start. You can reach millions of people in days with this new platform and it’s a fun community to discover and learn through video.
9. A Social Network/Community of your choice. I am a member of the CodeIgniter forums for PHP/MySQL programming that uses their MVC php framework and I try to participate in there when I have time. I also always find awesome new stuff in different niche interests at 9rules.
10. An Aggregating Service - There are so many social networking, bookmarking, and article websites now that it’s really hard to keep track of it all. The popular ones that I use are MyBlogLog, Lijit, and FriendFeed. FriendFeed, for example takes the RSS feeds from all of the popular services like Digg, delicious, twitter, and youtube, and makes a news feed similar to the facebook feed. It’s a good way to have one RSS feed for everything you do online instead of one feed for each individual service. MyBlogLog takes your blog and social bookmarking services and makes a community out of your own personal internet presence. You can join communities that you like and network with other bloggers. Lijit does something similar and they both provide a widget for your blog that helps keep traffic stats from other community members.

Blog Platforms/Hosts:

1. Aeonity
2. Blog
3. Blogates
4. Blogetery
5. Blogger - Google’s blogging platform. There are many built in widgets but not much flexibility.
   
6. Blogr
7. Blogsome
8. Blogster
9. Bravenet.com/webtools/journal
10. Clearblogs
11. Easyjournal
12. eHow
13. Googlepages
14. Hubpages
15. Iseekblog
16. Myspace
17. Sampa
18. Squarespace
19. Thoughts
20. pbwiki
21. Wikispaces
22. Squidoo - A cool platform to create pages about anything you’re an expert at.
23. Stikipad
24. Tumblr - An awesome personal blog platform that Google likes.
    
25. Typekey
26. Livejournal
27. Socialogs
28. Wordpress - A great blog platform that BizWidgets is using until our own blog platform is released

Social Bookmarking and Submission Sites (like del.icio.us):

1. Sphinn - If you add a bookmark button on your blog besides digg and delicious, sphinn is also a good one.
   
2. Google Bookmarks
3. Furl.net
4. Diigo
5. Wirefan
6. Bibsonomy
7. Blinklist
8. Blogmemes.net
9. Bluedot.us
10. Myjeeves.ask.com
11. Simpy
12. Spurl.net
13. Netvouz
14. Folkd
15. Blinkbits
16. Bmaccess.net
17. Shadows
18. Smarking
19. Blogmarks.net
20. Plugim
21. Linkagogo
22. Mister-wong.de
23. Sk-rt.com
24. Webride.org
25. Connotea.org
26. Kick.ie
27. Thoof.com
28. Corank.com
29. Megite.com/discover
30. Metalz.info
31. Emodrama
32. Musigg.org
33. Screamfeed
34. Yample
35. swik.net
36. Backflip
37. Dotnetkicks
38. Jumptags
39. Fark
40. De.lirio.us
41. Explode
42. Relevantlogs
43. SocialPoster - An aggregating service so you can post to tons of bookmarking sites in one trip
44. SocialMarker - Another aggregating service so you can post to tons of bookmarking sites in one trip

News Article Websites (like Digg):

1. Upcoming
2. Propeller
3. Reddit
4. Indianpad
5. Newsvine
6. Slashdot.org
7. EZineArticles - Submit articles and get traffic to your own site

Social Networking and Community Websites:

1. Google Groups
2. LinkedIn - A professional networking service like Facebook, except for business professionals.
3. Flickr - a cool photo sharing community site
4. Last.fm - A music community that gives your iTunes music a feed that is syndicated on last.fm’s website.
   
5. Bebo
6. Friendster
7. Google Calendar
8. Jaiku - A microblog like twitter.
   
9. Pownce - Another microblog like twitter.
10. Jumpcut
11. MySpace
12. Plaxo
13. Metacafe - Video sharing community like YouTube but with less restrictions and ability to monetize.
14. Bumpzee
15. Orkut

Cool Extras:

1. eBay
2. Amazon
3. Alexa - A Traffic Ranking/Analysis website. Very cool.
   
4. Wikipedia - If you can find relevant articles to your blog or pages, Wikipedia articles have high page rank and can deliver traffic, just make sure your site is relevant before you add a link!
5. RSS Feeds - Use these to keep up with people and their blogs! Almost everything has an RSS feed you can subscribe to now.
6. Netflix
7. OpenID - Use one username and password for everything.
8. Second Life - A game where you have a second life. It’s truly changing how games work and you can actually make real money in this game.
   
9. Shelfari
10. Textamerica
11. The DJ List
12. Amazon UnSpun - A list ranking service.
    
13. Squidoo Plexodex - Another list ranking service.
    
14. 30 Boxes
15. Wakoopa
16. Wink
17. Zorpia
18. Taggly
19. Teenwag
20. Lipstick
21. Rawsugar
22. Hi5

Wow, that was tedious creating all the hyperlinks. I know I probably left a lot of cool services out, so feel free to add services you enjoy in a comment below.

Try to use the same username on all of the services. This can help search engines know that the username is really you. Also, add avatars, fill out personal information, post pictures, and add friends! This will help expand your online presence and people will feel more welcomed at your profile pages. They will be more likely to add you as a friend and you will stand out from other users who don’t have profile pictures or information attached to your username’s profile.

Also, make sure you have a tracking service like Google Analytics or StatCounter so you can keep track of what parts of your website that your visitors like, and you can figure out what’s bringing traffic to your blog and what’s not.

A few years ago a new client approached our agency with a marketing challenge. The client wanted to launch a new concept to the marketplace, and wanted to do it entirely by word of mouth. So we wrote our briefs, called our meetings, gathered the brain trust…and we met, and met, and met. Finally, we had a plan: we were going to apply our marketing wizardry to the college market, because after all, what better way to spread the word than through students who were wired in to the latest and greatest ways to get the word out?

So we met and we met and we applied our proven marketing methods, gathered our thoughts and dumped them into a slick, clever PowerPoint preso (in case you’re not cool enough, that’s a cool term for presentation). Man, are we cool.

So the big day came around…we were going to unveil our cool preso to our group of college interns — including my two sons who are in college — we were just gonna blow them away with our plan…after all, we’re the marketing mavens…the experts who know everything, right?

So the group assembled in our formal conference room. The lights dimmed, the projection system fired up, our preso flew onto the screen with our objectives and our strategy  and our goals and our expected outcomes…slide after slide, wipe after fade, surely this had to blow them away, didn’t it?  When the preso was over, the lights came back on, the marketing mavens lined up around the room like colonels and generals checking out their troops. “So what do you guys think?” we asked them.

“I thought you went to college.” one smart ass kid said (I think it was my son). And the comments went downhill from there.

Lesson learned: relevance…if it sounds too good in a meeting, we’re probably just talking to ourselves.

This is a 5 step list in a nutshell what Ed Dale teaches with the 30dc method:

1. Find a corner of a niche market gaining entry using keyword phrases. For example, ‘weight loss fad book’, ‘psych yourself skinny’, ‘organic weight loss’, etc. This way, you learn which phrases are untapped but profitable and which ones won’t get you anywhere.
2. Write articles on these niche markets to see if there is monetary potential.
3. Start selling an affiliate product, such as an e-book or physical product about your niche market.
4. As soon as the magical number of 200 unique visitors a day is reached (roughly 1 sale a day for every 200 visitors; for a $14.95 book with a $7 commission that equates to $2,555 a year), develop your own informational product, an e-book, physical book, software package, newsletter, etc…
5. An extra $2,555 a year is nice, but creating your own product will give you around 95% profit in the long term, the 5% being the cost to write the informational product.

• Selling your own product at 95% commission ($14.20) equates to $5,138 a year
• This is only based on 1 sale a day. increasing this to just 3 sales a day will make you $15,564 a year from a few weeks of work. Once this becomes an established business, you can move on to other business ventures.

Using this business model you can create a 6 figure PASSIVE income from a few weeks of work in particular niche markets.

Why is passive income good?

• Wikipedia definition: An income stream falling into this category is one where money is received usually on a regular basis, without continuing effort. This does not mean no effort at all; most passive income streams require great effort to start with.
• Good for a retirement plan, since you are creating money from nothing your savings aren’t trickling away. You are creating value from nothing and basically inventing money.

I hope you enjoyed the article, comments are appreciated!

Why?

Before my time, Microsoft introduced Windows as a revolutionary new platform for developers make everyone’s lives easier. Apple came out with their aesthetic, remarkably easy interface that made (almost) everyone want a new Mac.

It wasn’t long before these big companies like IBM, Xerox, Microsoft, HP and of course Apple knew what was coming down the train tracks. These revolutionary new personal computers were going to change everyone’s life.

And they did. Bill Gates became the richest man in the world and Steve Jobs continues to lead the technology industry with their classy products.

So where does Facebook come in?

Microsoft and Apple have maintained their operating systems for many years now and will continue to dominate that market. There are a few new systems that pop up, such as Linux and Ubuntu, but the two that will always be there are Windows and Mac. BUT as you may know, we are going through a rapidly changing era where the internet is transforming business, medicine, law, and daily life! The transformation of web2.0 technology enables us to entertain ourselves with YouTube, read news stories from hundreds of different sources, and outsource business projects to other companies for cheaper than ever possible. We can meet our future husbands and wives online and write on our friends’ virtual walls on Facebook and MySpace.

OK, so I know about web2.0, what about Facebook?!

This last spring of 2007 Facebook launched its developer platform, unleashing web developers to create their own online software programs enhancing user profiles on facebook, providing more content and entertainment while in the process making lots of money! Everyone wants software to be interactive these days. In the U.S., I can say that most of everyone I meet has broadband internet access. Businesses can’t work without e-mail, internet access, and instant messaging. People can’t sit on the computer for 18 hours out of the day without internet access. The wave of the new internet has brought so many opportunities and there is still a lot to come. Instead of programming a game to play against a computer, we now have Wiis, X Box 360s, and computers that rely on your connection to the internet as a necessity to play. People want interactiveness, and they’ve got it with web2.0.

Web2.0 allows for mass collaboration, information sharing, and social networking at an overwhelming pace. In order to keep up, you almost can’t stay off the computer learning the new stuff for a day!

With that, I would like to say: If you haven’t joined facebook, do so. You will have a blast, especially if you know people already on it. If you are a developer, check out the developer platform and get to know it. It just may provide a new business opportunity!

Thanks for reading, comments are welcome!

The guys over at Thirty Day Challenge have come up with some great ways to research niche markets using FREE online tools. These tools are:

• Google Search
• Google Trends
• Free Keywords @ WordTracker.com

They are simple yet they can determine almost EXACTLY how much traffic you can expect with a particular product and keyword phrase you are going to use in your website. I could try to explain how to use these tools, but I am just going to let you watch some video tutorials instead. There are three parts to the tutorial and the first link is a podcast, not a video.

Part 1

If you are unfamiliar with the terms they are using but still interested in what these guys are talking about, Sign up for the Thirty Day Challenge. It’s a free online course on how to start making money online.

I don’t know why he uses the graphic search term that he does, but it is very useful information if you can get past that part. And that’s step 2 to building your online business!

Finding your Niche Market.
Write down a list of business ideas related to popular items you see when you walk around the mall or retail stores, what ads you see in magazines and what you like to read on the internet. Do this for at least a week until you have a significant list of innovative ideas. Try to avoid psycho markets such as “making money online,” “how to make money in real estate,” “get rich quick,” “weight loss programs,” etc. These markets are over-saturated and would be extremely difficult to penetrate. If you have had an idea for a while and been wanting to start a specific business online, read magazines or web sites pertaining to your business interest.

Familiarize yourself with Web2.0 Technologies.
I spent an entire summer researching social networking, web 2.0, Apple, web design and marketing. There is a LOT to learn. For this reason, I have compiled a list of basic things you should absolutely learn before starting your own internet business in my article, Online Marketing: How to Stay Current in 2007. Learning these tools will not only help you with business but they are a new fun way to keep in touch with friends and family, stay more organized, and meet new people. Although all these new technologies could keep you occupied for an entire month, try to just dip your feet in the water and get accustomed to these new tools. You will learn how to utilize them later.

Thanks for reading. Come back for Step 2 to Building your Own Online Business soon!

There are a lot of new technologies out there such as blogging, podcasting, social bookmarking and networking, search engine optimization, internet marketing and web2.0. I have been researching these technologies about 40 hours a week this summer to understand how everything fits together. Now, I want to share what I compiled. It’s a basic laundry list and doesn’t go very in depth, but there are a lot of excellent resources in this guide. If anyone has anything to add, please comment!

I. Website ad planning, placement, and analytics:

A. Conducting market research in your company’s field will provide relevant ways to reach potential clients. Some free market research tools/directories from the leaders in the online industry:

1. Google Trends: Find the top trends in the world - what people are searching for most
2. Ebay Pulse: Find what people are buying or looking to buy
3. Google Groups: Find what people are talking about relevant to your industry
4. Technorati: Find the top company/personal blogs
5. Alexa: See what websites are growing fast in the world
6. WordTracker: Free keyword generator/lookup for your industry

B. Using Google Adwords for relevant advertising for your target audience. Google is the best at matching a target audience to what they are looking for and you pay for clicks to your website, not impressions.

C. Tracking your website traffic and source of visitors, whether organic (by search engine using keywords or by referring sites) or by paid advertisements with Google Analytics. This tool also integrates seamlessly with Google Adwords.

II. Use of social networking sites to build online presence.

A. Facebook: An online networking website now open to companies
B. MySpace: An online networking website open to anyone
C. LinkedIn: A growing online community for companies
D. Delicous: A community bookmarking website
E. Digg: A newspaper where top stories rise to the front page
F. Netscape: A community bookmarking website
G. Twitter: A SMS (cell phone text messaging) news website

III. Using (free) Web2.0 sites to market your company through new media. All of the following are ways to let the community know what you are up to. Building a subscriber base to your blogs, podcasts, press releases, etc. can drive traffic to your website and keep the community informed. Providing RSS feeds also makes your company news accessible to mobile devices.

A. YouTube Videos/Podcasting

1. Essential to marketing in 2007 providing media for mobile devices (cell phones, iPhones, iPods).
2. Provides a free way to promote through audio/video.

B. Blogs

1. Blogs are the fastest growing way to market your company online.
2. They are easy to set up and build dramatic website traffic quickly.
3. Provide current information for readers and content for search engines.
4. They are the easiest way to increase your search engine ranking.

IV. Staying current with webinars, message boards and RSS feeds.

A. Thirty Day Challenge: An online marketing course with cutting-edge, unprecedented ways to market online.
B. Message Boards: Discuss topics in your industry with other companies like yours.
C. Google Reader: Stay current by subscribing to news, company press releases, blogs, podcasts, etc. who provide RSS feeds.
D. 9Rules: Blog Aggregator/Community Message Board/Blog.

Finding ‘Slayerment’ on the Digg home page a few days ago, I browsed the site and found some really great articles about web design to which I can relate.

His posts about web design are very easy to read and entertaining most of the time. Check out his article that was featured on Digg, 12 ways to turn your Web 1.0 site into a Web 2.0 site.

The challenge starts on Wednesday, August 1st, 2007.

So far, I have learned about some great new tools for your website, some I haven’t even heard of before. If you haven’t already, sign up now! Catch up on the blogs, podcasts, video podcasts, and do a little research on the websites he mentions in the videos such as Facebook, Technorati, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Digg, delicious, and Flickr. I don’t know how to use every one of them to their full advantage, but I think everyone’s in for a treat on Wednesday!

Thirty Day Challenge Sign Up

1. Learn XHTML. Make sure your pages are XHTML transitional or strict. This will help with your visibility to search engines and cross-browser compatibility.
   1. XHTML Tutorial by W3Schools
2. Learn CSS. With CSS, you can start separating content from appearance and CSS is more cross browser friendly than tables. One thing to avoid while programming with CSS is to use too many nested divs. If you start using too many, it’s kind of pointless to start using CSS rather than tables in the first place. If you are just learning CSS, Apple released a small tutorial on building (mostly) css websites.
   1. CSS Tutorial by W3Schools
   2. Apple: Web Content
      1. Apple: Web Design Best Practices
3. Use friendly URLs. For example, bizwidgets.biz/blog or bizwidgets.biz/contact. Try to stay away from long URLs with a bunch of data in them. If you use PHP, a framework such as CodeIgniter helps you do this.
   1. CodeIgniter
4. Use a tracker such as Google Urchin to keep track of your visitors and their habits at your website. You will identify bottlenecks and user-favorite pages. You can use Google’s PageRank to identify your search engine visibility.
   1. Using Google to Promote Your Business
   2. Google Rankings
   3. Google Urchin/Analytics
5. Keep page sizes low. Most people are on broadband these days, but they will notice if your pages are very large and take a long time to load. The same goes for search engines. If your site has a lot of images, movies, or javascript libraries, try to condense them or remove as much as you can. I use mootools for javascript in my websites because it is compact, object-oriented, and fully featured.
   1. MooTools
6. Keep navigation simple. I would say no more than 10-15 site-wide navigation links. Google says the more options you give someone, the worse their choice will be.
7. Use a blog if you can make it relevant to your business. This will greatly increase your traffic.
   1. WordPress
8. Your website should convert users to do something. For example, if you are selling products, your site should be easy enough for the user to order a product online or give you a call.
   1. Creating a Website for Your Service Business
9. Learn about SEO (search engine optimization). I am learning every day about building websites that rise to the top of google with their PageRank system. You can submit an XML sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools to enhance your visibility.
   1. Free XML Sitemaps
   2. Google Webmaster Tools
   3. The 80/20 Of Search Engine Marketing Part 1

This will be an ongoing article and I will post new tips and links when I come across them for help with these topics.

Need a Custom Design for Your Website?

Outline2Design appears to be a great place for custom design.

Any tips, links or comments will be greatly appreciated.