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.

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!

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.