Archive for December, 2009

The face of the internet is changing and for many sites it will be time to make massive changes or face extinction, advertising and good content will not be enough to guarantee survival it will require a  lot more effort on the part of site owners in order to maintain traffic numbers and positioning on the search engines.

It will be important that site owners and webmasters ensure that evey piece of content on their sites is also registered on as many social networks as is humanely possible, the greater the saturation of pingbacks from the social networks the better they can expect their sites to perform, of course this means tons of extra work.

SEO and site submissions will fade in importance replaced by social bookmarking and good marketing practices, various forms of advertising will still be a strong influence in a sites prominence on the internet but without the addition of social linking sites will suffer badly in the coming year.

Socializing your site will entail a little more than simply installing one of the many social bookmarking scripts though, site owners and webmasters will need to establish a strong presence within each network, building friendships and groups of followers, these are extremely important as these same people will be the driving force behind your sites promotion and the root source of your sites traffic, initially you will need to establish your self within the network and it is a good idea during the first few weeks to post often but avoid any direct advertising of your sites, many networks will only allow advertising is certain locations and it is imperative you stick to their rules or face being banned.

When joining a network it is always a good idea to use your real name over an alias and where possible a photo of yourself (I suggest a good clear head shot photo over a full profile as it allows viewers to look into your eyes and establish a sense of trust).

Avoid making outlandish claims and avoid conflict at all costs, you can still prove your point with out getting nasty and gutter talk will upset more than just the person it's aimed at, be polite at all times and remember you are trying to build respect and trust, it will pay off in the long run as people begin to see you as a pillar of the society.

Once you have established your self within these communities it's time to look at ways you can promote your sites, my favourite is to include links within my signature as this will be seen in all areas of the network and in most is not deemed to be against the rules.

There are 4 main traffic areas in most social networks where you need to be very active these are

• The Network Forums.
• The Network Article section
• The networks Groups
• The Networks Blogs

Most networks also have a classified section however i would not waste time or money there as people generally visit a social network to meet people and gain information not to visit the classifieds (would you go to the swim pool to do your grocery shopping ?).

Posting articles in a social networks article system or blog system needs to be done right in most cases you will be allowed to use some html and this is very handy as it will enable you to put links to relevant articles on your sites within these postings, forums and group areas are normally controlled more rigidly and posting of links is generally frowned upon so you will need to rely on your signature to get people to your sites.

Performed correctly social bookmarking will rocket your sites value and turnover, it will expose your products and services to millions of users and with the launch in 2010 of Googles Caffeine search system and personalised search will see it gain page 1 on a regular basis across a much wider range of queries, You will be seen as an authority figure in your field and could even see approaches from other companies wanting you to feature on their pages and in their publications.

As a webmaster your New years resolution should be to become hyper active as a social networker and Survive the coming Netquake.

Alternative business is a term to break the mindset falsely given to the home based business industry because of the minority of Internet users that practice fraud and scams.

Alternative business start ups are seeing a huge spike as millions of unemployed professionals have taken their skills online in a tough economy and tight job market. With over 10% unemployment in the United States alone the most experienced workers, true experts in their industry, are finding it hard to gain employment over college graduates that offer new direction at a lower salary.

I am just such a person. I have over 16 years of business management experience and have been marketing online since January 2003. I don't have a college degree but have made a range of employers millions of dollars in income due to my real world experience. My experience though will come in handy to someone starting out in management and business promotion though, so there is opportunity still to be found even if not in employment in my chosen profession.

So how are older and more experienced experts making a move to online business?

The biggest trends I am seeing online are in:

• Former executives and managers offering consulting services online on a per project fee basis.

• Industry experts from all levels building for profit blogs and sharing tips and strategy from their years of experience with their readers, and earning money through selling advertising, using affiliate programs, and through PPC Publisher programs such as Google Adsense or Bidvertiser.

• E-book, video, and audio training courses. Experts are becoming self publishers at the speed of light and beginning to create complete training systems in their niche industry in the form of well written manuals, video training, and audio book formats and selling through such channels as Amazon, E-bay, Click Bank, and PayDotCom.

• Displaced sales professionals and stay home moms and dads are also turning to affiliate marketing and selling other expert's products to add extra cash to make ends meet.

• Still others prefer to accept some degree of retirement and have opted to become online business start up investors, angel investors, and silent business partners.

So how much money are they making and how hard is it starting a Alternative Business?

Starting a online business is pretty easy but success takes effort and ethics. The money varies based on exactly what approach you use and also depends on if you are an affiliate or a program author. The most successful are finding a path to Internet millions and the least successful are supplementing that unemployment check with few extra dollars each month. Your mindset also dictates success. A home business is a real business and requires time and often money. You see free to join programs and others touting free advertising etc.. but there are in reality only a few methods to gain targeted visitors and convert sales and they require real effort and research or at least a small investment .

The most lucrative Alternative Business or Home Based Business enterprises seem to be coming from the development of targeted training memberships sites, and from e-book series authors who have a line of products and a team of affiliates working to help promote and sell their multi-part courses. They will write a new step in the system every month to two months expanding on the first book or audio and if the information is good they can see each new release exceed $100,000 in sales using popular affiliate management services like Clickbank mentioned above or running their own in house affiliate system like we do at My Viral Business.

Our own business model provides tools, supplies, training, and advertising for Alternative Business. We have a developing online store with website scripts, templates, themes, and training manuals for starting a home based business. We also provide low cost hosting services and through ISEDN have begun offering sponsored keyword targeted search engine advertising for less then $4 a month across more the 400 search engines and directories including our own Easy Search Live and directory network.

Important rule of thumb: Affiliate programs offering real products of value are a good move that is often free to get started. Joining a membership site with no product of value is not. Counting on all those free sign ups to upgrade and pay you is a pipe dream especially if you yourself have not taken the upgraded membership. Again all programs you want to join offer a real product of value because those that don't are illegal in most countries. Cash Gifting sites are Ponzi schemes, they are illegal no matter what the site says, and no one online becomes a millionaire in 30 days. Come on now, you have lived long enough to use your brain and live in reality.

Regardless of your skill set and interest the first step to turning your experience into alternative business profits is to get your feet moving forward. Bookmark this blog to get articles and ideas on how to start, run, or improve your online business and add our feed to your favorite RSS feed reader today.

Andy Anderson

My Viral Blog

2010 will go down in Internet history as the year SEO died, with the looming release of Googles Caffeine and Personalised Search the death bells are sounding for what has been the backbone of Internet life.

Meta data and code structure will become almost redundant under the new systems as sites are positioned on their traffic numbers and content popularity, traffic figures will be determined by the use of google analytics primarily and while the numbers can be artificially inflated by the use of traffic exchanges and surf bars it should be noted google will discount this traffic and possibly penalise sites found using these methods.

Site owners will be encouraged to use good Marketing , Advertising and Social bookmarking methods to deliver traffic, For SEO companies this means changing their operations away from on page optimization techniques over to Search Engine Marketing and Social Marketing Optimization, In some cases it will mean complete re-training of their staff to encompass the new requirements.

The new system may also see the demise of the page rank system as we know it with sites being ranked on their position in the results rather than on their code structure,meta data and content.

The reshuffle will certainly upset some site owners as they lose their coveted page 1 positions replaced by sites that have good followings in the social area but have had very little SEO performed, it's not all gloom and doom though caffeine and personalized search will prove a fairer system for site owners.

Site structures will also change as site owners realise that using a blog based cms offers a fast track into the new Search results, sites using scripts like wordpress will find meeting the new requirements a breeze thanks to the scripts adapability and ability to encompass social bookmarking, these sites are also much faster to load and certainly much easier to maintain and keep up to date.

certain SEO aspects will still be required like keywords,descriptions,alt tags and titles but using a blog based script allows the site owner to manage these without having to pay an expert, adding and updating site content is also much easier requiring only basic knowledge and the ability to use a wysiwyg editor which is normally built into the script.

So why has Google decided to kill off SEO, well as the demand for greater speed and delivery of information grows it has seen the need to change how we access that information and how we find the sites carrying it, the Search algorithms have grown more and more complex over the years and still struggle to deliver relevant material, SEO has been largely a game of guesswork between seo companies, webmasters and Google which further corrupts the results delivered to the public, under the new system much of the guesswork is gone companies will have a clear understanding of what they require to gain good positions in the search results and their regular users will play a big part in how well their site performs, results will become more relevant for the user based on their surfing habits and we should see an increase in overall speed as sites become more user friendly.