Many businesses like to use Web 2.0 sites to market their business because they are free. Not only are they free but it is a good way to get in front of a target audience. However, just because they are free doesn’t mean that marketing on Web 2.0 sites is easy. It takes time and dedicated consistency to make it work. Also, you need people to follow you at these sites.

There are tools to help you with Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace to acquire friends or followers. Although you will want a very targeted audience for your business message, these tools are very good to get an initial following for the purposes of social proof. Positive social proof is when someone comes to your Web 2.0 page and sees that you are to have a following which indicates this page is one to be taken serious. Negative social proof would be going to a page where there are no followers indicating that this page is not worthwhile.

On Twitter a business not only wants a number of followers so that your target audience would believe it’s worth following you. A business also would to show the target audience that the business is not doing the follow to be followed trend. That is where a Twitter page is following more people than they have following them. This is why I recommend Twiends. Twiends is the only tool I found with other options available to gain followers without having to follow others. It does have that component if one chooses, but it does have the ability to gain Twitter followers without having to follow others. There are a number of free options in Twiends to gain followers, but the quickest way to gain a good number of followers in a short period of time is the paid option.

Regardless if the business uses the free or paid options, Twiends will provide the social proof they need. Besides, Twiends has the ability to generate thousands of followers, that surely out of that large pool some will want to hear your business message.

With this economy on unstable ground, and with pundits offering forecasts which are all over the spectrum, most are stressed regarding their particular financial futures. Hearing about associates who’ve just lost their jobs doesn’t help. Neither does the office chat. With all of that uncertainty we have been seeing people searching for back-up means of making money. Many are getting interested in the category of what can be labeled “working from home jobs” to try and do this.

Before starting your own research for work you may conduct in your home office, consider precisely what kind work opportunities suit you, what your experience is, as well as your financial needs. One significant question you have to answer today and answer honestly: Could you work successfully without supervision? In case your response is not a resounding yes, then you either should forget about pursuing working from home jobs right now, or resolve to develop plenty of self-discipline right away.

When you have the above questions and matters resolved, prepare your resume. The standard guidelines and methods for effective resume preparation apply here, although you do need to concentrate on your capability to perform the possible tasks competently from your home.

In the event the work opportunities you are looking for involve freelancing your services to prospective firms, you will need to sign up at respected sites on-line which link up freelancers with the purchasers of your services. Don’t overlook the requirement to find out more about those sites; not all are free from lower than open and honest individuals. I likewise seriously encourage you only take projects on an escrow basis. What this means is the purchaser of your services must deposit the full sum of your project at the site at the time you consent to the work. As soon as you satisfactorily complete the project, the money already on deposit are sent to you. Hence, you will be protected from deadbeats.

There are also job opportunity boards where firms list work openings for actual employees who could work out of their places of residence. Many of these kinds of jobs belong to the categories of secretaries, bookkeepers, website creative designers, banner ad designers, cartoonists, proofreaders, authors, and translators. If you desire actual employment instead of become a freelancer, this really is one place that you should explore.

What to Avoid

Clearly, not every single work possibility you will discover on the internet is going to be legit. Below are a few pointers that will alert you to several of the things you ought to stay away from, or at the very least review very carefully.

Be cautious about websites that demand money for jobs or require you to buy kits and CDs. There are plenty of these websites on the web, and many look so legitimate that it is easy for an individual to fall for their assurances, particularly if that person may be desperate for income.

Do not fall for make money fast systems. Everyone knows that these types of schemes are just that, schemes. Sadly enough, individuals are taken in all of the time. You know the fact, jobs are jobs, and you still have to work hard on all of the working from home jobs you can discover.

Watch out for businesses that offer work, but never post their names along with other necessary details. Scammers typically guarantee astonishingly high wages for unskilled work. If you were an employer, would you pay such astronomically high income for menial labor? Obviously not. So why might anyone believe that some web company would pay someone several times what the project is really worth?

Conclusion

It really is tough to imagine any more critical asset than a person’s integrity. This means that you do not agree to freelance work that attempts to skirt around the law or that violates your ethics. You’ll not partner with any business that even hints that they desire for you to do so. You’ll complete all tasks in a professional and prompt fashion. Should you become an employee in one of the many working from home jobs that exist, you won’t abuse the fact that you are not in a regular place of work by becoming less than productive.

Best wishes in achieving your own vocational and cash flow needs!

- Craig is a former college instructor in business administration and enjoys writing on sites such as Stay at Home Jobs and Money Talk Daily

When trying to make money online you have to be where the people are. From that point you can direct them to where you want to go or to do what you wanted to do. With the advent of Web 2.0 it is all about getting people to sign up and follow you. MySpace and Facebook has friends. Twitter has followers. Each has techniques and tools available to help acquire the following in any area.

Twitter I like because of its simplicity. Acquire a number of followers and the monetize that following. The more targeted the audience the better, but this is not always possible. It’s easy for the Make Money Online gurus to acquire thousands of Twitter followers when they have tens of thousands of blog subscribers. But the small guy will have a difficult time building a list of any significant size. It can be done but it will take a lot of time and energy that would be better used elsewhere.

So, a good method is to acquire a massive following using online tools. This is where I recommend Twiends. Twiends is a service that has thousands of people who will follow other people based upon a point system. Rather than following a bunch of people hoping they will follow you back, you can get a lot of followers who incentivized by the system’s points. Then they can use those points to get their own followers. Twiends is great because there is both a free option and a paid option. The paid option is obviously were you paid to get points for followers. The free option has a number of actions one can take to acquire points including following others.

There are different good Twitter follower tools but most are some form of follow to get followed model. Twiends is the only system that has options you can use to get followers without having to follow others. Visit now!

If you are like me in the MMO world, the bread and butter of SEO is finding dofollow sites to put links. Linking building all day everyday. And when you find them you love them, and get to work putting out links. If the site is an article site, you put up articles. If it is a blog, you put up comments. If the site is bookmarks, you put links. Then you do it again for your next site. After awhile you have a dofollow list of sites and a system for SEO. Here is where things can go wrong, many sites for whatever reason switch to nofollow. This makes dofollow lists obsolete after a time.

Your List

Recently, many of my favorite sites have gone nofollow. Here’s the thing, they will not tell you they have gone nofollow. Unless, you follow that site’s blog or something, there is no way that you will hear that the site has gone nofollow. Meanwhile, you are wasting a lot of time putting up links on a site that is still on your dofollow list. For me that means Xanga, A1Articles, and a number of social bookmarking sites have absorbed my work and not given me a return. Some only start nofollow at a certain time (like Xanga), meaning my past work is still dofollow, but others everything is suddenly nofollow (like A1Articles). All past work is now nofollow.

Other People’s List

I get so frustrated that dofollow lists do not keep up with their sites. Understandably, most dofollow lists do not maintain the list as a main source of revenue, but just as a traffic grab. So, they have people submitting sites, they get reviewed, and then placed on their list. Unfortunately, the sites do not get a check-up. The site switches to nofollow and nowhere in their mind is a thought to notify this dofollow list or directory of the change. Therefore, dofollow lists get outdated quickly and seeming can wind-up 50% nofollow. Do not follow any list blindly.

The best thing to do is download a dollow link highlighter to your browser and keep it on. It is annoying, but if you are a professional SEO/MMO person, then it would be a necessity. Just make sure the highlighter captures both rel=”external nofollow” AND rel=”nofollow”. I was using a popular link highlighter that was not finding the rel=”external nofollow” and that had me wasting my time. Try googling the Quirk SearchStatus, it does me a good job.

One of the components used for SEO is bookmarking submission. Adding URL’s of pages one would like to be indexed and hopefully gain some link juice. As we all know that when it comes to linking building there are two routes- getting a lot of links from a lot of sources or work to get a few prime high ranking links. Don’t know if one is easier than another, but I do know only the lotta link method can be automated. That automation is adding links to blog comments, trackbacks, directories, rss sites, ping sites, and yes, bookmarking submission sites to build the hundreds of links needed. Automation cannot put links on high-ranking relevant sites.

However, as it regards bookmarking submission it is good to be smart with the lotta link method. The first thing to attend to is opening one’s own account with each site. Paid submission services will is their accounts, which is fine as far it goes. But I find that they do nothing to help make sure those accounts get crawled or get any PR. With your own account you can do a few things to get your profile, link lists, and rss feeds to get crawled by the search engines. This is why you are doing this in the first place after all. You wants your accounts crawled often and get as much PR as possible. Not saying to spend lots of time on it, but give the accounts plenty of links elsewhere to direct spider traffic to the bookmarking links. You can see how I tried adding juice at darrylnoble.com

About Spurl Bookmarks
About MyLinkVault Bookmarks
About A1WebMarks Bookmarks
About Buddymarks Bookmarks
About LinkaGoGo Bookmarks
About Oyax Bookmarks
About Stumpedia
About PostOnFire
About Trailfire

Also recommend using the site’s add a link toolbar buttons for bookmarking submission. This is a free and fast way to add links, rather than trying another tool. Drag the add a link button (or link) to the toolbar of you browser. Then get to the page you want to submit and go down the row of add a link buttons for different sites. Takes me maybe a minute per page to add URL to all my counts. Usually, the only thing I have to do is add tags (copy and paste) and decide which folder/category to put the link in.

Here are some example XRIOT bookmarking accounts.

XRiot On Spurl
XRiot On MyLinkVault
XRiot On A1Webmarks
XRiot On Buddymarks
XRiot On LinkaGoGo
XRiot On Oyax
XRiot On Stumpedia
XRiot On PostOnFire
XRiot On Trailfire

Any business is presented with the challenge of getting known. It must announce to the world that its doors are open to the world, ready for business. On the Internet that means getting listed in the search engines, so the people looking for a solutions will find one’s business offerings toward that solution. Consider the time and money invested in building an Internet presence, one’s place in the search engines should be of paramount importance. That can only happen by using the search engine’s spiders to the business’s advantage. A spider is a program that follows the links on web pages as they spread out to make up the World Wide Web. They follow links to others pages, make a record of the content, and then travel to the next pages using the links from that page.

Another way search engines gather information on websites is to allow website owners to manually submit their pages for placement. Though this would seem the quickest way to get a website listed in search engines, it may not be the optimal way to get a search engine to visit your website. Submitting manually is giving your website to search engines without context. With spidering a search engine can know the popularity of a new site, which pages are important, and the context of the site (subject manner). The search engines know this by how many links are sent to which pages, how many different sites are linked to the site, what the text is being used to reference the website (the anchor text in a link), and the subject matter of the webpage linking to the website (does the subject matter relate to each other?).

So, getting spidered and getting links go hand in hand. There are things to know about search engine spiders that will make getting listed easier. Start linking building with high traffic, frequently updated websites. These web sites get spidered more often, even if not daily. Meaning that a web site will be used placed in a search engine quicker this way, than the thousands of sites submitted cold to search engines everyday. Article directories are a good source to build links from sites that get spidered often.

Another thing to know is to attend to the business’s website sitemap. A sitemap is a single, plain webpage that lists every other page on the website. It gives the search engine spiders a single source to collect that website’s content. That single source also let’s spiders know when new pages have been added, keep it updated. Also, list on every page of the website a link to the sitemap so spiders can find it (visitors use it too). Most web sites list the sitemap at the bottom of the pages along with the terms and conditions, privacy statements, etc.

Knowing about the search engine spiders will help get a website listed more rapidly. Thereby, getting more traffic to a new website sooner.

People have profound misconceptions about home businesses and Internet businesses. People have it in their mind that a home business is lazing about in pajamas watching soap operas, occasionally making a phone call. Likewise, people consider an Internet business as easy because everyone knows how to surf the web and click a mouse. Then when the two are combined into a single business as an Internet home business, they think what could be easier or simpler?

What they don’t realize is that it is still a business and heavy work is required. True, the Internet is 24/7 and one can be online at home in any attire, but the effort is still required.

The primary focus of an Internet business will be getting traffic, without it there is no Internet business. Getting eyes onto a web site is no easy task; there is heavy competition and a jaded public. There are expensive ways to get traffic like Pay Per Click programs or email list programs, but that traffic ROI is marginal at best. The business’s goal should be in getting organic traffic that comes from being the primary website listed in the search engines. It has been stated that forty percent of search engine result traffic goes to the number one listed result.

This organic search engine traffic is gold because visitors come to a site without their guard up. If visitor click an obvious advertisement to get to a site, they are interested in that site but they are also cautious. If visitors click a search engine result to get to a website, they are interested but less guarded to what they are seeing. Their visit is more voluntary. Also, organic traffic is free traffic.

But like anything in life, what is worth having is not easy to attain. Getting ranked highly in search engine results is not easy. The search engines look at many factors of relevant websites before returning results. Some of those factors new websites will have no control over, so no sense worrying. Best advice is to focus on the factors that a new website can impact.

The largest impact that a business can have on driving traffic from search engine rankings is to work the article directories. Known as article marketing, writing content relevant to a website’s page that it wants ranked highly in the search engines is vital. Submitting that content to article directories has a number of advantages for search engine rankings. It gives the search engines context for the webpage, letting the search engine know the subject matter that is recommending that web site. It also has the advantage of allowing a couple of links that can be given the anchor text of the submitter’s choosing (helping capture the lead for desired search engine keywords). Additionally, the article can be taken and replicated on other web sites, thus multiplying the number of links in cyberspace. Finally, with those links traffic can be garnered directly from the article directory.

Like many in MMO I started using Ezine Articles for SEO link juice and on that regard I think it does its job. After being in the SEO/MMO game this long I have heard all the positives about article or bum marketing. As I am consider a new direction with article/bum marketing I wanted to revisit my history with Ezine Articles.

I downloaded my csv file of number of views, clicks, and the like to see what story the numbers tell. There are plenty of articles, in different categories, and over a period of time. What I did was develop two new numbers that I thought were of interest- views per click and days per click. View per click was checking to see how many views it took for each article before a new click is generated. Days per click is how many days an article is up before it generates a click. Now, I understand that most clicks will happen when an article is new or when SEO kicks in to generate some keyword traffic. But this was an overall review.

What I was interested in was traffic and not SEO juice. Essentially what I found was that on average I get one click per article per month. Also, that I get a “homerun” about 10% of the time, meaning articles that just leap out of the averages. But it was that one click per article per month that was interesting. Now, that is a number I can use.

See, it takes me about 30 minutes to an hour to write a decent 300 word article. I also can outsource with my favorite writer at a penny word and an article would cost me about $3.00 for 300 words. So, a click would cost me $3.00 for the first month. Relatively expensive, but when some Google adwords run between $1-2 a click and get no SEO juice, it is not that much more expensive. But consider it over 12 months, that would be 12 clicks at a quarter a click.

These are important numbers as all my sites are content sites. Not sales sites or sales pages, so conversions are a function of huge traffic. Meaning that a quarter a click is expensive as an average value of a site visitor is between a penny to a dime, depending on the site. On the other hand if I were serious about article/bum marketing I would be using EzineArticles to drive targeted sales traffic to a sales page/site. So, in some instances, depending on what I was selling and my conversation rate, $3.00 would not be that much and a quarter would be downright cheap.

Of course these figures are based on outsourcing 300 word articles at a penny a word. For the past few months I have been doing the writing, as I have not invested in outsourced articles. So, the numbers would be readjusted for what I think my time is worth. That would make the per click rates much higher as I would probably rate my time at two cents a word, so essentially double what was figured at a penny a word.

One of my biggest frustrations is when I hear people in MMO say they will ad/increase monetization to their blog “after I gain subscribers/visitors.” This is the same mentality of those people who get into business but don’t want to be pushy salesmen. Somehow, there is an accepted fallacy that if one doesn’t push their offerings, people will be so thankful for not having a pushy salesmen they will remember and come back to the buy from the person that wasn’t pushy. While a very few people may come back to the not so pushy person, the introverted salesman will be losing twenty sales in the meantime.

It is not so much that one has to be pushy, but one has to give people the opportunity to buy. Being online, that means having adverts posted on one’s site. I really don’t see the big deal (what? maybe 80-90% of web sites we visit have advertising on them), but I see many people post online that they don’t want to put ads on their site, yet they want to make money online. This is hilarious as most of these blogs/sites are about making money online. You want to make money, you have to have advertising on your site(s).

One of my favorite MMO bloggers is Caroline Middlebrook. Caroline had issues with advertising too, but as she is blogging full-time, making money is an imperative. She measured her stats against online guru John Chow. She found although John Chow had ten times the visitors, he had thirty times the revenue. Between you and me, Caroline has the much better content. Her content is never fluff, always on topic and straightforward about MMO. Yet, John Chow with his humorous posts and noodle shots surpasses her income based upon ratios.

Reason is John Chow has advertising everywhere. I counted he has seventeen graphic advertisements, and nine text advertisements on his pages. He has all this without any of it seemingly too spammy, no more so than any other site. For those that worry about advertisements on their sites, his blog grows continually.

Ultimately, if one is trying to make money online, do it. Waiting for someday to happen, that day will never arrive. Advertisements are opportunities for you to make money, so you need plenty of them. Without them, no one can bring you money to your site.

Yesterday I tried the Affomatic plugin for eBay.  Pretty cool.  Today, I work with the Amazon Search plugin by Andy Maloney.  Let’s see how it works for Native American movies.  A possible plug for my Native American Humor web site.

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