How to hide Facebook Profile from Indexing on Search Engines like Google

Google, Yahoo and Bing integrated the real time search results on their pages. Before that as well they were showing the facebook profile page of facebook users on their search results for certain keywords. If you want to hide your facebook profile (for some personal reasons) from indexing on search engines like google, Yahoo, Bing etc then you can use the Privacy Settings properly to control that.

Privacy Settings to avoid showing your profile on Search Engines

1. Login to your facebook account and go to the Settings tab at top – right corner of profile page

2. Select “Privacy Settings” from the dropdown

3. Select “Search” from the list of security options

4. Click on “Change Settings”, a popup will prompt asking for your facebook password

5. Enter you password and then uncheck the box “Allow Indexing” under Public Search ResultsYou should complete this settings changes just after creating your account as it is difficult to avoid showing your profile after indexing is done. Your profile indexing may take at least 5 – 6 days for completion, so remove the check under this period only.

How to hide Facebook Profile from Indexing on Search Engines like Google

Twitter Guide Book – How To, Tips and Instructions by Mashable

For those who are not yet using Twitter effectively (silly you!), here's a great guide:

"Twitter is a social network used by millions of people, and thousands more are signing up every day to send short messages to groups of friends.

But where's the user manual for Twitter? Where do new Twitter users go to learn about Tweeting, retweets, hashtags and customizing your Twitter profile? Where do you go if you want to know all about building a community on Twitter, or using Twitter for business? How can you find advanced tools for using Twitter on your phone or your desktop?

To answer all these questions and more, we've assembled The Twitter Guide Book, a complete collection of resources for mastering Twitter. Happy Tweeting!"

- Pete Cashmore, @Mashup

Twitter Guide Book – How To, Tips and Instructions by Mashable

So Is Twitter Any Good For Affiliates? | One Little Duck - Affiliate Blog

I’ve been using Twitter for a while now and having got over the initial excitement of reading what celebrities eat for breakfast, lunch and dinner and the gloating to Jude about getting a reply from Schofe, it’s down to the more serious business of using it as an affiliate. Is it any good? Is it any use? Is there any point?

Kieron recently blogged about network presence on Twitter, and whilst there’s advantages of them tweeting there’s in fact a lot more an affiliate can gain from Twitter. To understand why it can be useful for affiliates you have to know that we work full time and have several things on the go at once.

As Loquax takes up a lot of time, it can often mean content or ideas for other sites (which we like to do as a break from running a user and time intensive service) are lacking. Or we’ve overlooked content ideas sent in the usual emails that appear late Friday evening! With Twitter, however, we have a constant flow of news, information and ideas for content tweeting around all day and every day.

So why is Twitter useful for us?

For example Red Nose Day recently tweeted about their Digital Red Noses. A brilliant idea that fits nicely in with Donate To. Up goes content and our job is done! It may not be affiliate linked, remember not everything has to be, but it’s useful relevant up to date content and something we’d have missed had it not been on Twitter.

Similarly Firebox announced the launch of the cool new Airwolf Remote Controlled Helicopter – something we’d not get to know about for a few days (if ever) if the information popped up via email. As we have a gadgets blog – we can then add a bit of content and pop in an old Airwolf video just for good measure.

For competition side of things Twitter is also very useful! For example the guys at Web User tweet when they have new giveaways. That means we can react “on Tweet” and update our database and let our users know that there are new prizes for them to win. By following Web User, and others via Twitter, it actually saves us time doing some of the mundane work and freeing up more time to do useful affiliate marketing.

And let’s not forget the social element!

The big advantage of Twitter is the social side as it’s great to engage in a bit of banter during the day with others in affiliate marketing. The communal spirit that makes AM a special business is alive and tweeting. There’s no “rutting stag” arguments and it’s great to “chat” every now and then about anything and everything.

Of course Twitter won’t be for everyone, it’s perhaps too instant for part time affiliates for example, but if you’re like us and updating content day in day out it’s a very useful tool for keeping in touch with a wide range of subjects, websites, people and information services.

Not convinced… well you can even Tweet the love of your life and get them to put the kettle on (that’s me in trouble now!).

So Is Twitter Any Good For Affiliates? | One Little Duck - Affiliate Blog

Online Viral Video Distribution List 2.0 viral-video-distribution-list.zip | Free Software Downloads

Submit Your Viral Video With The Online Viral Video Distribution List. This list contains all of the internets viral video sharing sites to distribute your video.

After creating your video you want to submit it to this list to get maximum exposure. To learn more about creating and submitting viral videos visit

Online Viral Video Distribution List 2.0 viral-video-distribution-list.zip | Free Software Downloads

Tweetbucks Brings Affiliate Fees To Twitter Users. Is That A Good Thing?

Talk of how to monetize Twitter, both from its founders perspective and a third-party point of view, is dominating conversation on the web these days. Tweetbucks, a startup founded by entrepreneur Chris Sukornyk, is hoping to make money for users of Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed through leveraging affiliate fees and CPCs from ads.

Here’s how it works. Tweetbucks has a database with thousands of online merchants that offer referral fees (or money you get from merchants when your advertisements of a product result in a purchase ), including Amazon, BestBuy, Barnes & Noble and Shoes.com. All you need to do is find a product on a retail site, enter it on Tweetbuck’s site, and the startup will automatically shorten (via Bit.ly) and convert it to an affiliate enabled link, referencing the site’s data base of online merchants that pay out affiliate fees. You can then add the link to in a Tweet, Facebook status update or FriendFeed message.
Every time people click your link and your recommendation results in a purchase, the online merchant pays a commission to you. For example, referral fees for Amazon’s Associates program hover around 6%, BestBuy pays out 3-4%, and CompUSA pays around 6%. Tweetbucks will take 30% of the money you earn through each referral leaving you with 70%. So if you send out a link via a Tweet to a Kindle being sold on Amazon for $359.00 and someone purchases the Kindle from the link, you will receive $15.12 and Tweetbucks will take $6.46. On the other hand, if your affiliate fee comes from a book on Barnes & Noble (which also pays out 6%) that totals $16.76, you will receive $0.70 cents and Tweetbucks will get $0.30 cents.

Tweetbucks also lets you earn money off of any non-retail site, by allowing you to enable a “custom ad-frame,” on a site you Tweet the link to. Tweetbucks displays an ad at the top of your destination page and you earn a variable rate (CPC) on every click. You can also customize this ad frame to include a hyperlinked logo of your choice. The compensation from this doesn’t seem to have as much potential as the affiliate fees; Sukornyk says returns are around $1 to $2 per thousand clicks.


Full article here
Tweetbucks Brings Affiliate Fees To Twitter Users. Is That A Good Thing?

Blogging Tips To Help You Make Money

Some people choose to blog in their spare to time to earn extra money online. Some do it simply as a form of self expression, in order to entertain both themselves and their readers. Others keep personal blogs and share them only with close family and friends. However, there are many more serious bloggers who choose to monetize their blogs, and generate a profit for themselves. Here we will discuss the ins and outs of blogging for money.

It’s very cheap to set up a blog in most cases. You can set up a free blog using Blogger or WordPress, or host your blog on your own domain by spening a little money. If you do this, make sure to install a free program such as WordPress to help administer and update your blog. Before you start a blog, you should think about what the blog subject will be based on. The most successful online blogs stick to a particular niche or topic. This way you can focus your audience for maximum earning potential. In addition to setting up your blog, you must work on promoting it to gain an audience. There are many different methods of promotion, but one of the best is posting on other blogs that are related to your niche. Once your blog is online and you have been posting for a period of time, then it’s time to start generating profits.

Trade Advertising – is an additional avenue one may use to monetize their blog. One method of blog monetization involves selling advertising space on your blog to businesses that are related to your niche. Some bloggers rent advertising space on their blogs for a set period of time.

Affiliate Marketing is a form of marketing where individuals promote a business in exchange for either a percentage of the sales they generate or a specified amount for each lead generated. For every blog user that clicks on the advertised links in your blog, you will receive some money for those clicks.

Ask for Contributions – If your blog readers value you blog, they may consider contributing to help pay your hosting and other miscellaneous fees. If your blog is popular enough you could consider making it private and charging a small membership fee to join.

Sell Your Products and Services – A great business model to help you achieve online success is to use your blog and market your own services, products, and tools. Blogging purely for entertainment is limiting yourself.

As we see interest in the blogosphere grow at a rapid rate, it is becoming more apparent that blogging can be an excellent source of income. Hard work and staying focused on your goals is the key to success. By making use of these four strategies, you too could become successful at blogging for money.

Blogging Tips To Help You Make Money

Internet Marketing: Tips for Beginners

For beginners, internet marketing can be a big challenge. Its theories and concepts are simple but the implementation and execution part of such concepts can be a little bit tricky and complicated. Even advanced online marketers can attest to this. In this article, we will give tried-and-tested yet basic tips to beginner online marketers. We will not only discuss each concept, we will aslo outline some of the most basic strategies to help business owners successfully launch their businesses online. We will tackle concepts such as website creation, ad banner placements, e-newsletters, email marketing campaign and search engine optimization (SEO).

Website creation is one of the vital elements of an internet marketing campaign. If you do not have a website or if your site is poorly designed, then it is highly advised that you consider re-designing your cyber soace to ensure proper marketing of your products. If web design is not your forte, you can purchase a number of software packages which make the whole process simple even for beginners. Or, you may also seek for professional web design services. This process is more worthwhile since with no doubt, he will be able to give you a functional, attractive and tailored design for your products. He can also incorporate added helpful features to your site.

Second – banner ads. One of the more popular online campaign techniques are banner ads. These are advertisements placed on top of the website. They may also be placed in other locations in a much smaller size. Banner ads include text and image which are used to entice internet users. In a click, the user is directed to the main website. This typeof advertising can be very effective especially when implemented with properly and when place in the right locations.

E-newsletters are another brilliant online marketing technique. These are emails sent out to recipients. The newsletter may contain various information like informative articles, useful quizzes, relevant advertising or just about any other information deemed to be of interest to potential customers. The good thing about e-newsletters is that they are hardly viewed as a marketing tool by customers despite the various links incorporated in it. Just make sure that you limit the volume of newsletters sent out. Otherwise, these can be detected as a spam.

Email marketing is another online marketing campaign. In this process, emails are sent to a group of individuals who may be interested in your products. As mentioned above, keeping the volume of sent out emails limited is highly essential to keep them from being detected as a spam. This can be achieved by sending emails only to users who have requested to be added on the mailing list. Offering relevant advice and other useful information which may interest the recipients will also be helpful.

The last and probably the most important strategy in online marketing is search engine optimization. Search engines determine the rank of websites according to relevance and quality for certain search terms. Most internet users use search engines to find websites on particular topics. This simply means that users are most likely to visit sites which rank well on the search engines. If your website ranks high especially if they happen to fall on the first page, you are more likely to generate traffic in your site.

About the Author:

If you need to earn some extra money with your ventures, visit our cash jobs site and learn to earn cash on internet ventures.

Internet Marketing: Tips for Beginners

Improve Your Tweeting « tofollow.com

Free Twitter Tools â?? Improve Your Tweeting
I get about twenty messages the day upon Twitter about how we can â??grow my chatter following upon autopilotâ?�. The thing is, usually about each chairman revelation me this hardly has any followers. The law is thereâ??s zero we can unequivocally do to grow your following upon autopilot, it usually takes the little time as well as effort. There have been the little giveaway collection that can assistance however, as listed below.
TWEET LATER
Tweet Later is the most utilitarian Twitter module we have have have have use of of of of by far. The interface is horrible, yet we usually have to configure your Twitter options once as well as afterwards youâ??re done. After youâ??ve installed your Twitter comment in to Tweet Later, go to â??Accountsâ?�, â??List Accountsâ?�, afterwards â??Editâ?�. You should have during slightest the following dual options set-up.
Auto-follow: This will follow any one who follows we automatically. This is radically usually usual Twitter practice for marketers… if someone follows you, we follow them back. Most marketers upon Twitter have have have have use of of of of this function, that is how we will get your followers; when we select to follow someone as well as they have this choice selected, they will automatically follow we back, as well as we right away have the brand brand brand brand brand brand brand brand new follower. If we benefit supporters this way, itâ??s usually good to lapse the favour. Additionally, the some-more people we follow, the some-more expected someone is to follow you.
Auto-Welcome: we would additionally suggest checking this as well as regulating it. It serves as the good approach to begin up the review with brand brand brand brand brand brand brand brand new intensity leads. Send the elementary message… appreciate people for following you, as well as competence be ask them the subject to get the review started. Do no representation your commercial operation in your automobile acquire message. we get this all the time everyday, as well as we usually undo those messages automatically. Be rebuilt to be bombarded with such messages.
You will additionally see Auto-Unfollow here. we privately donâ??t have have have have use of of of of this (more upon unfollowing underneath “Friend or Follow” below).
Tweet Later additionally allows we to… Tweet Later. Go to â??Tweetsâ?�, afterwards â??New Tweetâ?�. You can write in as most Tweets as we similar to as well as how them published to your comment during your convenience we like. This approach we donâ??t have to lapse to Twitter via the day to post something new. Simply set up the couple of brand brand brand brand brand brand brand brand new Tweets in the sunrise as well as afterwards dont think about about it.
Full article here: Improve Your Tweeting « tofollow.com

Tweeting Your Way To The Top-Affiliate Corner

The Affiliate's Corner

Tell your contacts, your friends, and your followers about Tweeting Your Way To The Top and make money on each sale that comes through your personal affiliate link. For the first 50 affiliates that sign up I am offering 75% commission on all affiliate sales. After that, the affiliate commission will drop to 60%.

• Commissions are paid bi-weekly
• Links are custom genereated and emailed to you for security
• Banners and Text ads are ready made for you to use
• Highest paid commissions in the industry

Here's the link. Just replace "testaff" with your actual Chaya ID. (If you don't have a Chaya ID you can get one HERE...It's FREE!).

http://www.chayamarketing.com/affiliates/jrox.php?uid=testaff

Banners & Images.

Inside of your affiliate center you will find banners, text ads, email ads and more that you can use to promote this ebook to your contacts, friends, and followers on all of your social media sites and email lists.

Get started today and make money in a matter of a few clicks!

Tweeting Your Way To The Top-Affiliate Corner

Hot or Not? Affiliate Links in Twitter

Why can’t the cash just appear in my account and automatically replenish itself? Oh yeah, that’s why we work.

Back in March, I asked you all how essential twitter was to your blog… and mentioned I had been doing some experimenting with affiliate links in twitter. At the time, I didn’t really think much about whether it was ethical to use affiliate links, because I only tweeted things that I really loved. In the end, the experiment got sidetracked as the IFB relaunch came closer, I was lucky to tweet that I was still breathing, on occasion.

I didn’t think about the ethics until I read some recent articles about an affiliate backlash in twitter, some have figured out how to script automatic affiliate tweets, others reprimanded for recommending products they personally own with affiliate links (that’s rather extreme…but it happened).

Because of the conversational nature of twitter, the people who really love twitter want to keep the conversation authentic, leaving the business out. Using twitter as a marketing tool only devalues the network making the users wary of spam and distrustful of the network in general. I know I’ve been inundated with spammy tweeps so much so, it makes me dread going through my new twitter followers, because it takes so much time figuring out whether to follow or not. And the abundance of spammy tweets makes it more difficult to find the tweets from the people I want to hear from. So indeed, there is a point where money and marketing devalues a network.

However, twitter gained the popularity, mostly because it’s usefulness as a marketing tool. For some, it may be a personal thing, not for everyone. I’m sure Oprah isn’t tweeting for personal reason, I’m not even sure it’s really her. Personally, only a small percentage of my followers are personal friends, as much as I love you all, the truth is, we know each other through the blog. Though I do make a great personal investment, my twitter presence isn’t necessarily personal, it’s more professional… though some of you may wonder about my professionalism after seeing tweet about the doggie washing machine.

Full article here: Hot or Not? Affiliate Links in Twitter | Independent Fashion Bloggers

Too much Tweeting will most likely hurt you | Raakesh.com

Avoid over Tweeting on Twitter

I noticed some people out there just enjoy tweeting so much that they actually fill up your homepage with their tweets. As a result you start missing out on other people's tweets. What do you do in this scenerio?

1. Send a Direct Message (DM) to that person and request him/her to tweet less.
2. Tweet about him/her tweeting too much so they get a hint.
3. Send out an email and bring this to their notice so that they reduce their tweets.
4. UNFOLLOW THEM.

If you are among the 9/10 people I am referring to, you will just select option 4 and unfollow the tweeters who tweet too much.

Why Unfollow?
Yes you are right in asking the question that why would people unfollow me if I tweet too much. The answer is because your tweets most likely are either irrelevant, not connected to your previous tweets, or simply repeats. In either of these situations your followers might take the decision to unfollow you.

If you are regular in tweeting and your quality of content is really high, you might not be at a risk of losing your followers but honestly, you need to give your followers a breather. Just like you don't want any one person to fill up your twitter homepage with their tweets about stuff that you are not very interested in hearing about every 5 minutes, your followers do the same.

As a good example, I follow @NatGeoSociety and they constantly talk about their shows. But we all know NatGeo has shows every half hour so if they want, they can really throw info about each show that's gonna be on next and create the hype, but they are considerate and will pick the best show of the day, and tweet about it at decent intervals. It not only keeps me as their follower, but also I do pay attention to what they talk about and eventually find myself sitting in front of the TV watching their outstanding shows. So the point here is that pick one topic, discuss it, don't overdo it, but just discuss it in a sober way and your audience will love you.

Alternatively, I unfollowed a couple of big names in the Internet Marketing industry because they would just keep repeating themselves or throw tweets one after the other and end up being 75% of my twitter homepage content. I can't let that happen, because I want to keep up to date with other content coming from other people I am following.

So over tweeting will hurt you because twitter users like me and you do not like to hear the same thing over and over again. This is not just a new twitter rule, but an understanding that this industry has respected since several years. For example all the news channels, news websites, etc are always on the constant lookout for new content to bring to you. They spend hundreds and thousands of dollars every day to bring you fresh stories, good content and non-repeat events. The reason is that we (the audience) demand fresh content. So by applying the same parameters to Twitter, you must deliver what your audience wants.

Avoid over tweeting and enjoy a smooth growth of followers. If you liked this article feel free to follow me (@Raakesh)

• 

Too much Tweeting will most likely hurt you | Raakesh.com

Gmail launched a feature that lets you import messages and contacts from other mail services like Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL.

http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/

In May, Gmail launched a feature that lets you import messages and contacts from other mail services like Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL. Google promised that the feature will be rolled out to all accounts, but it was only enabled in new accounts. The good news is that the feature is now available in all accounts and you can find it if you go to the "Accounts and import" tab from the settings page.

You may wonder if it's a good idea to use this service powered by TrueSwitch instead ofGmail's mail fetcher. Here are some differences between the two service:

* Mail importing saves to your Gmail account the existing messages from other accounts and continues to check for new messages only for 30 days. Gmail's mail fetcher downloads the existing messages and checks for new messages indefinitely.

* Mail importing saves to your account messages and contacts, while Gmail's mail fetcher doesn't import contacts (you can manually import contacts).

* Mail importing works for mail services that don't support POP3 (for example: the US version of Yahoo Mail), but the mail fetcher requires POP3. Mail importing supports a small number of popular mail services.

"Copying mail over usually takes a couple days, occasionally up to a week — but eventually it all arrives. And once it's done, you can forget your old account and enjoy having everything in one place," says Google, but I disagree. You'll import the old messages to your account, but after 30 days the service will no longer fetch new messages.

http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&ctx=mail&answer=117173

Importing contacts and mail

Print

If you're switching to Gmail from another email provider, importing contacts and messages from your old email account can help you make the transition without having to do a bunch of housekeeping.
To get started, follow the steps below. Before you dive in here, keep in mind that you'll need to have access to that email account for this process to work:

1. Click the Settings link.
2. Under the Accounts and Import tab, click the Import mail and contacts button.
3. In the new window that opens, enter the email address of the account you'd like to import contacts from. Click Continue.
4. Enter the password for your other email account and click Continue.
5. Select all the checkboxes that apply:
• If you choose to import contacts, the information in your contacts list in your old account will be imported to your Contacts section in Gmail.
• If you select the Import mail checkbox, your existing messages in that account will be imported to your Gmail inbox.
• If you want, you can also select the Import new mail checkbox so that messages sent to your old account for the next 30 days will be imported to your Gmail account. These messages won't appear in Gmail immediately once they're sent to your other account, but should update within a day or two.
• Finally, you can automatically apply a label to your imported messages to indicate that those were sent to your other account.
6. Click Start Import. The import will continue if you leave the Settings page or sign out of Gmail.
7. Your contacts and/or messages will be imported. It may take 24-48 hours before you see your imported messages, so don't worry if they're not there as soon as you click OK. You can check the status of your import by clicking the Accounts and Imports tab on the Settings page. Once the import is complete, you'll see a confirmation message at the top of your inbox.

Click here to see which email providers are supported

Awesome Gmail tip You Don’t Know about. Seriously.

Just about when I thought I got everything out of Gmail, I discovered my top favorite feature. We have published over 30 tools in Gmail RoundUp 1 and almost 80 tools and tips in Gmail RoundUp 2 but never mentioned anything similar to this one. Tribute for this one goes to my ‘I am not into computers‘ type girlfriend.

Let’s say that your email address is ‘GeorgeBush@gmail.com’, basically everything sent to any of the following email addresses will be forwarded to your primary email.

GeorgeBush@gmail.com G.eorgeBush@gmail.com Ge.orgeBush@gmail.com … … GeorgeBus.h@gmail.com

GeorgeBush@googlemail.com G.eorgeBush@googlemail.com Ge.orgeBush@googlemail.com … … GeorgeBus.h@googlemail.com

And that’s not all, you can place as many dots as you want, it can be even something like ‘G.e.o.r.g.e.B.u.s.h@gmail.com’ and you’ll still get it on ‘GeorgeBush@gmail.com’

Additionally, I just also found out that you can embed random text to your email ID using ‘+’ sign. That is to say ‘GeorgeBush+anythingyouwant@gmail.com’ can be used as your email address, as well.

Ok I got it. Now what ?

1. One email for every purpose

Instead of using different email addresses for various purposes (work, school, friends, etc.) you can use different variations of your Gmail and filter incoming mails by ’sent to’ address. For instance, all incoming mail sent to ‘Name.Surname@gmail.com’ can be put to folder ‘work’, messages sent to ‘NameSurname@gmail.com’ can be put to ‘friends’, ‘N.ameSurname@gmail.com’ can be used for newsletters, and so on.

2. Track/Block spammers

When signing up for some website, say thatwebsite.com, you can add thatwebsite to your Gmail user ID (eg. GeorgeBush+thatwebsite@gmail.com). This way you can block your subscription whenever you want and even identify those websites that distribute your email address to spammers.

UPDATE:

Hello folks, here is another EXCELLENT find for Gmailers. Download Gmail Cheat Sheet to learn and master keyboard shortcuts. You might be surprised how much faster you can get with them. Plus most are pretty intuitive so you won’t need to memorize them. You can download printable one page long Gmail shortcut sheet from here.

Awesome Gmail tip You Don’t Know about. Seriously.

50 Tips To A User Friendly Website – Designing Interactive

Here is a list of 50 things that I keep in mind on every website that I build. Some of these are secrets I have acquired from the best designers in the world, and some of them are standard every day practices. Either way, these tips will improve your visitors experience on your website.

1. Clicking on the logo should take you to the home page;
2. Your logo/site title should be positioned in the top left of the page;
3. Duplicate your main navigational links in the page footer with links to additional, but less prominent pages;
4. Keep your navigation positioning consistent from page to page;
5. Don’t open links in a new tab/window, except PDF’s and embedded documents;
6. Highlight your current location in your navigation bar;
7. Use reasonable sized fonts (12px or larger);
8. Make sure font sizes are flexible (Use em’s or %, not px);
9. Sans-serif fonts are easier to read at small sizes;
10. Serif fonts are easier to read at large sizes;

Full list here: 50 Tips To A User Friendly Website – Designing Interactive

Facebook | Username

Starting NOW, you can choose a username for your Facebook account to easily direct friends, family, and coworkers to your profile.

To select your username, visit the link NOW:
http://www.facebook.com/username/

To learn more about usernames, visit the Help Center:
http://www.facebook.com/help.php?page=89

What is Affiliate Marketing? and why do you need to know?

Cool breif find more on his blog: Tourism Smart Marketing

You join a company's affiliate program and once you're approved, you get a special code that you include on all links you have to their site. When someone visits your site, clicks on one of your affiliate links, and then goes to the vendor and actually buys a product or service, you are paid a small commission.

For example, if you were to sign up as an Amazon.com Associate (Amazon calls their affiliates "associates") you can easily use its Associates area to search for a particular product and then be shown the exact code you need to embed an affiliate link on your own Web page or weblog.

This sales model might not seem earth-shattering, but it is estimated that affiliates accounted for a total of $6.5 billion in sales in 2005. That's a lot of commissions!

Remember, the beautiful thing about an affiliate program is that there's no salary to pay, no health benefits, no office to stock, no computer to buy. In fact, a company can double or even triple its affiliates without incurring any cost whatsoever. It's the sales version of "pay per click": affiliates are only paid when the transaction is completed, so there's no risk.

Unsurprisingly, a small number of affiliates generate the majority of sales just as one or two retail outlets will lead their corporations in sales. Indeed, a common figure you hear when you talk with companies that have affiliate programs is that 5% of affiliates generate about 95% of sales.

If you are a tourism business looking for a way to increase online bookings or sales, you should definitely be considering an affiliate marketing program. What better way to empower thousands of other Internet people to help you sell your service or product, and you only have to pay them when you get a new customer!

Tourism Smart Marketing :: Affiliate Marketing

New from Izea: Forget Pay Per Post, Here Comes Pay Per Tweet

Izea, the controversial company formerly called Pay Per Post, is well-known for paying bloggers to post articles about products. These "sponsored conversations" have had big-name advertisers like K-Mart and Sears funding the campaigns as well as big-name bloggers like Chris Brogan and Julia Roy writing paid articles. Despite the fact that many participants fully disclose their involvement when writing a sponsored post, Izea still has quite a few critics thanks to the bloggers who do not.

Now those critics will have something else to get up-in-arms about: Izea is planning a launch of a new ad platform called "Sponsored Tweets." And just like it sounds, this new spinoff will pay people to tweet.

According to an article on AdWeek, the Sponsored Tweets Twitter ad platform is set to launch in about a month, or so says Izea CEO, Ted Murphy. Already, the company has run promotions on Twitter like this one for Blockbuster where all the posts are marked with a #spon hashtag indicating the post is a paid tweet. Once launched, the Sponsored Tweets program will follow a similar course.
Murphy believes the community will be self-policing and the sponsored messages won't get out-of-hand since too many paid tweets could easily alienate a Twitter user's followers. And because some campaigns will pay based on the number of clicks a link receives, that's not something the pay-per-tweet participants would want to risk. (Other campaigns will pay a flat rate per tweet).
Izea isn't the only company using Twitter as an ad platform - the pay-per-tweet service Magpie has also been running campaigns for some time. However, on Magpie the companies whose sponsored messages were being tweeted out weren't necessarily the ones buying the ads - it was outside affiliates. Of course, that only came to light after we revealed some of the participating company names in a blog post back in April. Still, the set up there is arguably much more spammy than with Izea who plans to work directly with advertisers.
The only question now is how big will the backlash be this time around? Is this a better or worse idea than paid blog posts? Will you immediately unfollow anyone whose posted a tweet tagged #spon? Or only if they go overboard? Share your thoughts in the comments.

New from Izea: Forget Pay Per Post, Here Comes Pay Per Tweet

Web Design and Web Development Forums - Webforumz.com (Web Design Forums)

Webforumz.com is an education based community supporting web designers, developers and those who are new and learning.

If you are a designer, developer, learning web design or are thinking about a career in web design then you have come to the right place.

Register for free now to access more information and to participate in discussion and debate.

Web Design and Web Development Forums - Webforumz.com (Web Design Forums)

Kick ass web tools to help launch your next web business into success | Refresh San Diego

What do you think are the best web tools to use for a web project? Sure you can do it on your own, but there are thousands of online tools to use for planning, development, testing and beyond. We thought it would be a good idea to have many of them on one page to refer to instead of searching around for hours online. This list is only a fraction of the sites available to help create a successfull web campaign.

Comment on the sites you like and why (or Digg it).

Concepts – Creativity - Research
http://faveup.com/ - Logo ideas
http://99designs.com/ - Get artists to design a logo to your liking.
http://www.domaintools.com/ - Registering domains, look ups, with a list of domain registrars cheaper than $9.
http://StumbleUpon.com – Creative ideas on many topics if you just can't think of one on your own. Inspirational.
http://smashingmagazine.com - Excellent content and a bunch of cool freebies.
http://www.coolwebsiteideas.com/ (maybe not so cool)
http://www.dailybits.com/11-undiscovered-website-ideas-to-steal-and-make-you-rich/
http://webmastercourse.com/articles/101/personal/
http://www.google.com/insights/search/# - See what people are searching for on Google
http://www.associateprograms.com/articles/63/1/Where-to-get-ideas-for-a-niche-website **

Kick ass web tools to help launch your next web business into success | Refresh San Diego

Top Tweeting Tips for Twitter

Using Twitter more Effectively

These days it seems that you can't escape stories about the latest social networking phenomenon, Twitter. With all the hype and celebrity endorsements, lots of people are asking “how do I use Twitter?”.

There are plenty of sites out there that will tell you how to use Twitter, but not so many to warn you of the pitfalls.If you take a minute to learn from this list of Twitter tips then you'll be Twittering away with the best of them.

•  
• DO watch what you say.Unless your updates are protected, anyone can see what you are currently Tweeting. Bear in mind the story of the girl who Tweeted her way out of a job because a hiring manager read her thoughts on the position she interviewed for.
• DON'T use it as another chat client.No one wants to see their screen full of irrelevant Tweets from a conversation they're forced to eavesdrop on.
• DO retweet other people.This can be a very good way to build up a following of like minded People.
• DON'T constantly self promote.Okay, we get it - you have stuff to sell.Twitter is by no means one way traffic - interact!
• DO follow users back, but….
• DON'T be offended if not everyone follows you back.Users with thousands of followers are unlikely to see your Tweet through the hundreds of other tweets anyway.
• DO be funny, entertaining, informative and creative with your tweets.
• DON'T use the auto-DM feature. This is the Twitter equivalent of spam and a faceless “hi – thanks for the follow” is impersonal and off-putting.
• DO use it to ask other people for help. Once you have a reasonable following you’ll find it easy to find answers to your questions quickly.
• DON’T twit anything if your message is going to exceed 140 characters.Spreading messages over multiple tweets is just going to confuse and annoy the people who are following you.

These handy hints should be enough to start you off. If you are likely to spend a significant proportion of your online time on Twitter then there are plenty of guides on the net telling you how to use Twitter effectively.

Top Tweeting Tips for Twitter