Using the new networking site called "Twitter" can be helpful in keeping your clients, prospects and friends in touch with your new business ideas. It's free, simple and a very powerful tool to drive visitors to web pages, new articles, fresh blog posts and video releases.

Using Twitter is easy. After signing up, the site prompts you to enter a short 140 character 'blog' that asks the question: "what are you doing?" You can then send short announcements (called 'tweets') about any news you have to share. Not limited to personal news, you can write about:

* new blog posts
* new article submissions
* upcoming product launches
* seminar announcements
* marketing insights
* observations about articles or books you have read
* website updates
* and absolutely anything under the sun!

While Twitter is used mainly for friends and clients to keep each other updated about the progress of their day, savvy marketers will use the 'tweets' to inform their followers about all the above mentioned topics and more. The best part is that you can place clickable links in your 'tweets' that followers can click on to go to any site or page that you want them to. Because of the 140 character limit, 'tweets' need to be short, creative and long URL's can be shortened with the help of SnipUrl.com.

To add followers you simply follow someone else's 'tweets' and they will in turn follow you. 'Tweets' are posted immediately for all of your followers to read in a "top-to-bottom" scrolling page that can be easily added to your browser or desktop. Twitter has many great applications such as instantly adding your 'tweets' to all of your social networking (facebook, squidoo, myspace, etc) automatically from your Twitter homepage.

This is a great way to share information, services and products to a variety of clients, prospects, friends and the curious. There is no limit to how many 'tweets' you can post in a day and no limit to how many followers you can have. I saw one Twitter user with over 11,000 followers that have instant access to each and every one of his posts. Can you imagine what that could do for your business? It's time to start 'tweeting'!

As usual I'm not going to get into any deep theory here. I'm just going to tell you about a tested copywriting technique that works. You see and hear it everyday if you listen to the radio, or watch TV or read the newspaper.

Whenever you make a really great offer simply tell why you made the offer. You see it all the time:

"We're overstocked"

"The boss said we've done a lousy job this quarter and he wants us to move out these cars no matter what the price."

"Scratch and Dent Sale" "We've got several brand new washers and dryers that got scuffed up a little bit in shipment, so we can't sell them at retail"

I'm getting ready to do a sale of Ebooks as a funny spoof.

"We are overstocked on Ebooks and the boss says move em out" hahaha and guess what? I'll sell a ton of them.

I guess this technique works because if you didn't give the person a reason that you are discounting a product, they might think that you simply couldn't get rid of them because they are junk.

What if the only reason you are discounting is that you need the money? Then make up a tongue-in-cheek reason like:

"My wife/husband threatened to divorce me unless I cleaned out the garage of these 200 widgets. Please save my marriage and order my super 3 for 50 deal -- buy 3 and get 50 ---OK just kidding, but you can get 5 for the price of 3 and a thank you card from my husband/wife."

Always give them a reason why you are making a special deal and watch your sales soar.

Visit: GreatInternetMarketingTraining.com for more great techniques!

I want to recommend using www.digg.com, www.reddit.com and www.stumbleupon.com to help drive traffic to your websites. These are sites with a very high Google page rank with millions of members and views per week. These are considered social networking sites, but are structured a little differently than Facebook or Squidoo. Let's take a look at how we begin:

After signing up with Reddit, Digg and Stumbleupon, you can submit your URL of any page of your site that you need additional traffic to. When prompted, paste the URL of the page into the "Submit URL" form, add a title of the page and a short description. After posting, the information will be visible as a "teaser" headline with clickable active links that searchers can click on to read more information. Unlike a blog or article directory, instead of the visitor just reading the information you have posted, they have to "click out" to your URL to get the rest of the story. This system gives you an active backlink to your page from a high page-ranked site and also gives you an additional unique visitor to your page. Once the visitor is in your website, you have the chance to direct them to wherever you want them to go.

Unlike other social sites, Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon are governed by a "community" of users...real people rating and recommending your site to others. Because of the fresh material added daily, the search engines give these sites high positioning and you can get a large number of views in a short period of time. Any part of the "community" can bookmark your profile and any new information you post will send an alert to those users that you have posted new material.

And don't just submit your index page. Post URL's to any page that needs traffic including:

* your blog post
* sub pages within your main site
* pages to your article sites
* video pages such as YouTube and Revver.com
* one page sales letters
* affiliate sales pages
* side door and landing pages

"Community" social sites have been a regular part of our overall marketing practices and it needs to be a part of yours as well!

In my line of work most webmasters & website owners in general have a serious obsession with Google Page Rank & backlinking.

Apparently .edu & .gov domains are classed in a higher category compared to the usual .com, .net & .org this is because Google sees such links to be of a higher class & links that can be trusted.

To obtain a link from a .edu & .gov domain can seem like a serious task which is correct given this article by .edu webmaster which can be found at seomoz, the article is titled 10 ways to earn an .edu link.

Being me i like to find inventive ways to get such things without doing so much "Donkey Work"

If you are looking for .edu or .gov links, there are easier and free ways to find them when you’re willing to put in just a little time.

Start a google search string as below:

Search for .edu domains with a blog relating to your website keyword
site:.edu inurl:blog “keyword relating to your website”


Search for .gov domains with a blog relating to your website keyword
site:.gov inurl:blog “keyword relating to your website”


Where the word keyword appears, just type in the relevant keyword for your website and you will see numerous blogs with those .edu extensions appear. Substitute .gov for the .edu and you will find the sites with .gov extensions.

Please note the webmasters of these .edu & .gov domains will not accept your blog comments if they have no relation or meaning to the articles written. I suggest you stay on topic & do not spam.

I hope this helps for all you .edu & .gov backlink hunters.

Videos are getting very high search engine placement due to Google's new "Universal Search", which provides multimedia choices to the searcher, instead of just text or blog posts. Creating videos and hosting them for free on this list of sites will give you a search engine placement advantage in a very short period of time. This is a SEO strategy that you can't afford to miss!

www.vidilife.com
www.putfile.com
www.video.google.com
www.video.yahoo.com
www.youtube.com
www.videohost.com
www.flurl.com
www.photobucket.com
www.eyespot.com
www.motionbox.com
www.phanfare.com
www.pixpond.com
www.zippyvideos.com
www.veoh.com


submit URLs to Digg.com!!

Article Income Questions - What is the Fastest Way to Make Money with My Articles?


Q: What's the fastest way to create any cash once you have an article or two written?

A: I always love it when I get questions like this one because I can tell you have not bought in to the popular myth that you cannot make money with your articles.

Having said that, I would be remiss not to strongly caution you about something important to your long term success.

It's going to take many more that just two articles to really make the kind of money and get the kind of response I think you are talking about.

It's great that you are thinking about how to profit from your articles right here at the beginning. Just keep writing because the higher your article numbers, the higher all your other numbers will be.

One of the quickest ways to profit from your new articles is to turn them into "Action Articles." An action article is simply one of your articles to which you have added action questions. An action question is a question designed to get your reader to begin to take action right away.

For example, "which tip from this article can you implement right away" is a good action question.

I sell action articles on my sites all day every day for seven dollars. While I will not get rich seven dollars at a time, it is still a source of quick income. Another advantage to action articles is that it is a low priced item that people will spend without much thought at all, and now they have demonstrated buying behavior.

Buying Abandoned Websites by Tom Antion

I've been getting quite a few questions about the technique I mentioned on the ButtCamp TeleSeminar 2008 about purchasing abandoned websites which you found by searching for old copyright notices.

The first thing I'd like to mention about this is that this is a good technique to try to find websites you can buy cheaply that have some established incoming links. These sites also have an advantage of being up and running continuously which gives you a "longevity" boost in most search engines.

Finding a site that has been abandoned and purchasing it is not a guaranteed deal. You have to first locate one and then you must locate the owner and land a deal. It's somewhat like searching through flea markets to find a certain antique lamp you like. You might do quite a bit of searching to locate just the right lamp and then you still have to negotiate a deal on the purchase of the lamp.

Another thing to keep in mind is that there might be something inherently wrong with the abandoned site you've located. Maybe the old owner did some nasty search engine tricks and got caught. The tricks weren't bad enough to get the site banned altogether or you wouldn't have found it in the first place, but the tricks were bad enough that the search engine is making sure that site doesn't get a high ranking. The best way to determine that is to simply talk to the owner and get a feel for why they abandoned the site.

So how do you find the abandoned sites using the copyright notice method?

Almost all sites have copyright notices usually located at the bottom. If you search for a site that has an old copyright, it could mean two things. 1.)You found a possible abandoned site or 2.)the owner of the site has simply been lax in keeping up with the copyright notice. (I've been guilty of that myself)

To search for abandoned sites type in the search box at Google or whatever search engine you are using the following:

"copyright 2000" + [your keyword]

You can also copy the "©" symbol from the bottom of a website and try it this way:

"copyright © 2000" + [your keyword]

Don't forget to put quotation marks around the "copyright © 2000" phrase and to try different years.

Here's an example

I searched for

After sifting through many "2000-2008" copyrights I came across this site:

http://www.southbark.com/ The site looks updated to me, so it might be like number 2 above. The owner just never got around to changing the copyright. A simple call to the owner would tell me if that was true or not.

Here's a blog that the last posting was October of 2005 http://dogtrainingsite.blogspot.com/

Here's a guide "horse" site last updated in 2005 (keep in mind I did not spend lots of time looking closely at these sites to see if there was evidence of recent updating) http://www.guidehorse.org/

http://www.wagntrain.com/AboutUs.htm Last updated 2006

http://www.silver-dog.com/ Dumb music playing

http://www.threedevilskennel.com/ Last updated 2000

http://www.friendlyfido.com/ Last updated 2005

For this article, I limited myself to the first 100 sites that came up on Google under the keyword phrase "dog training". As I went through the later pages I found less and less professional looking sites many of which looked homemade. This can be a bonanza for you because homemade looking sites are more likely to have been started on a whim with no budget and then abandoned. So,I would keep looking as long as you can stand it.

After you locate your hot list, you could do a link popularity test at http://www.LinkPopularity.com to see if the site has any number of incoming links. Remember that's part of the reason to try to buy the site in the first place. . . When you buy the site you also buy the incoming links.

Start contacting the site owners either through contact information on the site or by doing a "who is" looking at some place like http://www.whois.sc

Well, that's the method. Yes, I know it's time consuming and tedious, but you could uncover some real gems that you can pick up for a song.