Dot Com Note

Is free email dying and the growth of blogs is slowing down? If the social networking using Facebook and Bebo has exploded in 2007, the year 2008 has started with the growth of a different type of communication medium. It is microblogging. Using short texts, and sometimes pictures and videos, you share your thoughts and actions. Its popularity is its simplicity. It frees you from hard thinking and wordy texts.

If you are comfortable sending text messages from your cell phone, you are ready for microblogging. However, instead of sending text message to one person, you use microblogging to broadcast to your social network.

Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pearbiter/566128230/

What are the tools available at your disposal for this new and exciting medium of communication? The last few years have seen the birth of a dozen microblogging sites to carter to your various needs.

Twitter is the leader of the bunch. As soon as you create an account, you are ready to publish your micro-contents using your web browser, cell phone, or the email client. You can also follow interesting people like artists, athletes, bands, politicians and check out their insights regularly.

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So you want to save a few hundred dollars but don’t want to give up your morning latte? While it is easy to preach how to cut your daily habits to save a buck, it is difficult to practice the same for most folks. However, there are other ways to cut your expenses without sacrificing your daily habits.

In today’s technology driven society, we spend a lot of money buying electronics gadgets and accompanying services to make our life easy. Sellers know that we have disposable incomes and they push many services that we absolutely don’t need.

 Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/cpchannel/123672666/

When you sign up for a cell phone service, they will try to push the loss-damage warranty for $5 a month. When did you last use that warranty to claim a new phone? In most cases you don’t need the service. In the worst case, if you loose or damage the phone, buy a cheap phone from eBay to carry you over till your contract expires.

If you are an occasional mobile phone user, get a pre-pay phone. Using a pre pay phone card that charges 10 cents per minute for talk time, you will be able save a few hundred dollars every year.

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Google search engine indexes images in your web pages. When someone uses Google Image Search to find images on the web, what chance does your website have to show up in the search results? If you know how to optimize images in your web pages, your images will have high rankings in the image search results. Using higly relevant and properly optimized images in your web pages will bring quality traffic from Google Image Search. Use the techniques described below for optimizing Google Image Search.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nikonvscanon/1348462114/

1. Use the alt attribute in the html img tag. This is the most important one. Use a specific keyword or a key phrase that identifies what the image is all about. If the image is a red rose, use the key phrase ‘red rose’, instead of rose or flower, in the alt attribute.

2. Use the title attribute in the img tag. The title attribute is what people see when they hover the mouse over the image. You can use the same text for title that you use for the alt attribute.

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What is the most important thing for the success of a web site? It is the traffic. However, driving thousands of people to your website may not turn that traffic into money for you unless that traffic is targeted to the type of products or services you are selling. If you are selling apples and your visitors are on the lookout for oranges, they will not change their mind to purchase your shining apples.

How do you drive targeted traffic? Don’t jump into the link exchange. The link exchange is very archaic, unproductive and may be damaging for a search engine ranking. Follow the techniques describe below for better results.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/poagao/172973533/

Publish an ebook with full of information that is beneficial to the visitors of your website. If you are selling apples, write an ebook describing all the health benefits of apples. Put your web address in the ebook and give it for free. Even if your accidental visitor is not looking for apples, she will be glad to get the free information. If your book is compelling enough, she will visit your site in the future to buy apples. We have already entered the age of freeconomics where the selling lies in giving away free stuff for possible sales in the future.

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2007 was the year of Facebook. According to people count statistics of compete.com, Twitter has registered a 1200% growth over the last 12 months compared to 119% increase for Facebook. While people are getting fed up with Facebook zombies and hugs, some have started realizing the value of Twitter.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lilbear/206262544/

Twitter is a one-to-many communication medium. People call it a micro-blogging tool because you can publish your mundane daily activities using 140 characters or less. You express your thoughts and actions and broadcast them using Twitter.

At first, it seems very childish. You may be wondering, “how can I express my thoughts and actions in only 140 characters? Why people will like to read my mundane daily activities? And what value does it provide to my readers?”

Check out how Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama is broadcasting all the meeting schedules, caucus and primary results, informational and inspirational messages for volunteers to take actions.

If you are a blogger, you can tell your Twitter followers using some teasing information about an upcoming blog article before you publish it on your blog. This will create anticipation and desires.

If you are selling something on the web, you can use Twitter to publish hot sales for your Twitter followers. This will give you an idea which poroducts are hot sellers so that you can stock them before you announce the sale to everybody using other medium.

You can publish cool tricks and tips that you just read in a blog about personal development, productivity improvement, money saving ideas, etc. to your Twitter followers.

You can run a quick survey by asking a short question.

You can follow thought leaders, industry luminaries, artists, athletes and other interesting people in Twitter to gain insights on diverse topics.

For right now, I am using Twitter to follow Barack Obama. If you are not careful, Twitter can be a huge time waster.

Caroline has published an authoritative Twitter Guide. It is pretty large but very thorough.

Who has the time to read a 400 page SEO book? I know lots of you don’t. At least I don’t have. We all want to make money, not read for days. Even after reading for days, there is no guarantee that we will understand every thing and retain the important points. So, I have boiled down a 400 page SEO book for you to read, absorb, and retain in 60 seconds.

Phote credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/carlcollins/330671914/

1. For each web page, use a specific key phrase that describes the theme of that page.

2. Use the key phrase in an H1 tag (only one H1 tag per page).

3. Some where in the content of the page, use the key phrase only once and make it bold using a STRONG tag.

4. Use the key phrase in the TITLE tag.

5. Use the key phrase once in META description tag.

6. Put an image and use the key phrase in title and alt attributes of the IMG tag.

7. Use at least the width attribute of the IMG tag.

8. Turn the key phrase into a hyphenated word and use it for the image file name.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/fugitive247/989525384/

StumbleUpon is a second generation website that allows its users to discover interesting web pages and sites without doing a search in a search engine. You install a tool bar in your browser and channel surf the web by clicking a button on the tool bar.

You sign up at StumbleUpon website and list your interests. When you click on the surf button in your browser tool bar, you are randomly directed to a webpage that matches your interests. If you like the contents or the website offerings, you can tag the page and give it a thumbs-up. If you don’t like it, simply ignore the site or give it a negative vote, a thumbs-down, if you feel the site has employed some trickery to draw your attention.

You can also use the StumbleUpon tool bar for social bookmarking. When you find a new and interesting webpage, you can tag it and share it with others. Click the Send to button in the StumbleUpon tool bar to send the webpage you are on to a friend in your StumbleUpon network.

It is possible to get a massive amount of traffic from StumbleUpon. If you have an interesting or useful article, blog page, or an entire site, you can include it in StumbleUpon. If lots of StumbleUpon users thumbs up your page, you will get a large amount of traffic in a very short time period.

Besides a sizable number of thumbs-up by StumbleUpon users, there are other factors that help drive traffic to a site in StumbleUpon. The number of StumbleUpon friends, the type of friends and their profiles, the number of sites you have stumbled, and the number of reviews you have gotten in the past all determine traffic volume to your site. Another factor is the broad tagging of your article by other StumbleUpon users.

What are the other benefits of being stumbled besides a short-time traffic surge? Your website will get exposure and many visitors will comeback regularly. If your site is a blog, you will instantly increase your reader base. You will also get numerous backlinks from other StumbleUpon users who run websites.

To increase the repeat visits by StumbleUpon users, your site should have a professional design, in-depth contents, richly blended ads, and a memorable URL.

StumbleUpon users like video, humor, and web 2.0 sites. However, the monetization potential from StumbleUpon users using affiliate or contextual ads like Google Adsense is very low because these users are very fickle and want to click to the next site using the StumbleUpon button in their tool bar.

Like any social network, your goal should not be to use the system for driving traffic only to your site. Stumble other high quality and useful sites for others to benefit from information you posses. Develop a good online social network using StumbleUpon, share websites with others and have fun.