By Zac Van Zyl

Video is a premier sales tool that can be used to increase your website traffic and at the same time build credibility with your potential customers. What video does is, it will help you rank well in search engines and will also increase the quality of your websites usability. Now to do this could be a quite difficult task and also time consuming. Not anymore now it’s easier than ever to do this. Now you can add video to your website for various purposes such as, video sharing, Blogging, marketing and training etc. Read the full story

Popularity: 6% [?]

WordPress 2.5, the much anticipated latest release from the team at Automattic officially hit the streets on March 29^th complete with a radical overhaul of the WordPress “corporate” site as well.

Here are some of the cool features on the “inside” that make life a little easier, or at least more convenient. 

1.              The dashboard has been “widgetized” enabling you to customize what you see.  Of course there is the invaluable WordPress News, a feature displaying information about your posts, links, popular plugins and integrates with WordPress stats so you can easily see your traffic, latest visitors, etc.  This upgrade takes a little getting used to if you’re a hardcore WP user, but even after a few hours you’ll fall in love with the Web 3.0 design and functionality.

2.              Enhanced Search – WordPress 2.5 used to search only posts, it now searches pages as well which enhances search engine optimization and user friendliness by providing information to your visitors on your “static” content, not just your posts.

3.              Concurrent Editing – if you’re running a multi-author blog – for example a company site with several “administrators” who add/edit content, WordPress 2.5 “locks” the post or page so that the “2^nd person” can’t save edits until the “1^st person” is done – and let’s you know that someone else is working on it.  This is a handy addition, and reduces the “dude, I just changed that” factor!

4.              Tag Management ­ - no more widgets, it’s built into WordPress 2.5.

5.              WordPress Plug-in Upgrades – instead of the old, delete, replace method WordPress 2.5 features what they term “a few clicks upgrade” – depending upon the plugin developer, this is a very cool feature.  However, it depends upon your host as to whether it will work – should be good for most.  It might be a good idea to write down how you did any custom configuration on your plugin before upgrading.

Here’s a list of WordPress Plug-Ins that have been updated for WordPress 2.5.

Now here’s the two main WordPress Theme and design features.  Here’s a list of WordPress 2.5 Compatible Themes.

1.              TinyMCE 3.0 – for anyone who has used previous versions of TinyMCE as their visual editor for WordPress you might have had the occasion when stuff just didn’t come out the way you put it in.  TinyMCE 3.0 is supposed to have that fixed.  This is a boon for those WordPress users that don’t really want to do creepy coding to make double spaces work and the like.  And great for WordPress Theme Designers who go nuts “fixing” little problems for clients/end users who “want it to look like Microsoft Word”!

2.              Built-in Galleries – this is wicked cool.  If you use the multi-image upload to load up a whole series of photos, WordPress 2.5 has a new shortcut that allows you to add a WordPress Gallery by just putting in [ gallery] without the space in your post.  The shortcut code in WordPress 2.5 will display all of your thumbnails and captions with a link to a page where visitors and readers can comment on the image.  You can easily set up multiple galleries for use with different topics, categories, posts, etc.

There are some other cool options like how many columns and the size of the thumbnail for example that you can simply use.  The Codex has all the info you need.

So far we’ve had a good experience with WordPress 2.5 and this release is a real testament to the development team, the leadership and the community as a whole.  It just keeps getting better!

If you haven’t tried it out yet, it’s most certainly worth every second you spend, and since it’s open source, the price is right, the experience is invaluable, and the hits just keep on coming!

 Christopher Conlan is Managing Director of Kaboodle Ventures and has been working with WordPress for two and a half years.  Visit his blog at www.web30technology.com for more information, if you need help with a WordPress blog, search engine optimization, e-marketing strategy, or want to subscribe to his newsletter. 

Popularity: 62% [?]

By Connie Ragen Green

Blogging is a great way to increase your visibility online. You can set up a blog yourself and be on the internet with information about you and your topic in less than an hour. If you are going to set everything up yourself, Typepad is the best blogging platform to use. Here are 7 tips on how to get the most from your blogging experience.

Set up a blog on your niche topic as soon as possible. Typepad is easy to use and will cost you less than ten dollars a Read the full story

Popularity: 36% [?]

By Craig Andrews

When it comes to the evolution of blogging you really have to marvel at the brilliant advances in technology that have been made over the past two years. At one time, blogging involved little more than promoting prose text on the Internet. Now, prose has a little competition and it comes in the form of audio blogging, which is commonly referred to as podcasting.

Podcasting entails recording audio files of spoken commentary so as to create a sort of combination radio broadcast and Read the full story

Popularity: 60% [?]

By Sean Ray

If you can learn how to podcast for greater subscriber responsiveness, podcasting can be a significant advertising technique for your website.  Although many people seem to be unaware of what podcasting is, just think on the word itself.  It is a combination of iPod and broadcasting, and is basically a means of broadcasting to any digital media receiver.  It does not have to be an iPod. Read the full story

Popularity: 4% [?]

By Paul Majestyck

Social bookmarking is a technique by which internet users store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the internet with the help of metadata.

In a social bookmarking system, internet users save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share. These social bookmarks are generally public, and can be saved privately, shared only with specified people or groups, shared only inside certain networks, or another combination of public and private domains. Only the allowed people can view these social bookmarks sequentially, by category or tags, or via a search engine.

In definite terms, social bookmarking is a user-defined taxonomy system for bookmarks. Such Read the full story

Popularity: 52% [?]

By Robert Lavoie

Have you ever wondered if what you know about marketing on Facebook is accurate? Consider the following paragraphs and compare what you know to the latest info on marketing on Facebook.

Using Facebook as an Online Marketing Tool

Social networking websites are becoming more and more popular each day. Websites like these are primarily used as a social utility that will enable people to connect with other people. With Read the full story

Popularity: 3% [?]

By Davion Wong

Social bookmarking sites are getting tons of traffic and attention from the search engines these days. As an affiliate marketer or webmaster, this is a good opportunity for you to bookmark your websites at high PR authority sites. This will boost your search engine rankings and get you a lot more traffic than you can Read the full story

Popularity: 3% [?]

By Andy Eliason

Facebook.  All the cool kids are doing it.  Are you?

For advertisers, it’s a hard market to pass up.  So many people in one place at one time.  Marketers see something like this and it’s as if their dreams have come true.  It’s got that glowing, shiny exterior that seems to say: come to us.  We have numbers.

Numbers are important in a marketing campaign.  You can’t manage what  you can’t measure.  However, in the Facebook world some of those numbers have gotten them in trouble.  The reason being that in recent times Facebook introduced a new advertising platform.  A platform that gathered numbers that not everyone was comfortable parting with.

Numbers and demographics.  Demographics tell advertisers who and where their potential customers are.  When millions upon millions of users register their personal information on a social site, all of the sudden demographic research becomes far easier than it has ever been before.

But fail to notify your users or give them an opportunity to completely opt out of the platform, and there will be a huge backlash of opinion.  In the space of a month the site can go from “have you tried that out yet” to “remember when everyone liked it?”.

Online advertising propels online development.  We all understand this, and, to a point, we all we’ve come to accept this.  So much so that we barely even notice it anymore.

Here’s a quick thought experiment.  Did you check your email this morning?  Do you check it everyday?  It’s a fairly common practice.  Were you aware that there were advertisements all around your message?  We all know they’re there.  Flashing, pretty colors or creative titles in bold text.  They’re always nearby… just in the periphery of our vision.

Now, do you remember a single one?  Do you even remember what they were selling?

My guess is that you probably don’t.

Online advertising is the epitome of the in-the-moment selling.  If the pretty colors or particular text catch your eye then and there, you might just click on it.  But that means the truth is there’s as much reliance on pure impulse as there is on demographics.

Facebook is the latest in a line of platforms that are trying to deliver the opportunity to receive targeted advertising.  Isn’t that nice of them?  We’re going to use your personal information to deliver targeted advertising, because we have to advertise, so it might as well be for things you’ve given us hints that you actually like.  Oh, and we might sell your information to others, so they can share in this opportunity.

But at least we’ve been given the opportunity to receive ads we want to see.

Wait.  Ads we want to see?

Personal information being used to determine out likes and dislikes?

Let’s face it.  No one wants advertisements.  And rolling out an advertising platform and touting it as something beneficial to a user base isn’t fooling anyone.  And in the wake of the backlash from this platform, Facebook has changed some of its policies and made it easier to opt in or out of the program.

So what about regular online advertising in social mediums like this?  Is it effective?  Do the demographics reduce the dependence on impulse?  Or are the users of social sites so intent on the content that advertising doesn’t even register with them?

Studies have shown that the tendencies of the common user lean toward that last option.  Click rates per page views on Facebook (and other social sites) are extremely low.

It seems people are too busy with socializing to even give into impulse clicks.

Does that mean you don’t need to consider social media in your online advertising campaign?

Not at all.  While there are arguments flying around about the staying power of Web 2.0 applications and whether we’re on the verge of another bubble bursting, that is irrelevant to the current discussion.

In the here and now community works.  Advertisements may not, but advertising isn’t your only option on these networks.

Community works because users feel like you have their interests in mind, rather than just your own.  Community is about communication, and that might be the best advertising you could hope for.

Andy Eliason is a writer at [http://www.main10.com/]Main10, an Internet marketing and [http://www.main10.com/development.php]development firm.  His company works with [http://www.main10.com/advertising/online_advertising.php]online advertising to develop strategic marketing solutions.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Andy_Eliason http://EzineArticles.com/?How-Does-Facebook-Figure-Into-Your-Online-Advertising-Campaign&id=868505

Popularity: 12% [?]

By Matthew Loop
It has 50 million active members and is adding two hundred thousand new ones a day. Over five thousand applications have been created for it just since May of 2007. After an epic battle with Google and Yahoo!, Microsoft won the right to pour two hundred and forty million into it, bringing its total value up to fifteen billion.

What is it? It’s Facebook, the hugest potential opportunity for internet marketers who need to keep up to speed with Web 3.0 and the semantic web explosion. Read the full story

Popularity: 61% [?]