If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. So that you can read the latest updates about Web2.0 tools, Making Money Online, Tips in SEO, Ajax and many more. Thanks for visiting ProgramimiCOM!

Link popularity is a common term that is used with internet marketing. It basically means how many links to your website from other sites on the internet there are. There are various ways to measure this and this article will help you make sense of them.

Link popularity is important to all webmasters. It determines where you rank on the search engine pages for your keywords and can be absolutely vital in getting that coveted number one space on Google! While other factors are included in the equation, link popularity definitely figures high on the list and you should do your best to increase your incoming link as much as possible.

First of all, if you just want to check and see how many other ranked sites are linked to you on any particular search engine, you can simply enter “link:” (minus quotation marks) followed by the URL of your website and hit Enter. This will quickly turn up a basic link popularity count for you and is a good indication of the number of links you have from other areas.

It is important to note that you will get different results from different search engines because each search engine ranks link popularity according the links that it personally knows about. So if a website that links to you has made it onto Yahoo’s list, but not Google’s, it will only appear as a link in your link popularity rating when you do a search on Yahoo. On Google, you will be at least one link down.

Also, there are filters that may prohibit backlinks from being counted toward your site. This can affect your link popularity rating as well, changing it from search engine to search engine. It can also change with time, as the search engines are constantly adjusting their filters and requisites for link popularity.

PageRank, by Google is a basic form of link popularity, ranking sites from 0 (no link popularity) to 6 (amazingly high link popularity) must be taken with a grain of salt because of the above. There are most likely many sites that link to you which are not yet listed on Google and have not been spidered. They will not show up on your PageRank number until Google has checked them and only then if they are not banned by the filtering system which is notoriously difficult to get through on Google.

There are special freeware and shareware programs such as Link Popularity Check 3.0.3. You can install these on your computer and check your link popularity at any point with the click of a mouse. Or, if you prefer not to download anything, you can find several link popularity counters online. Some can even be set up right on your website, to display your link popularity stats to the public. This is only recommended if you happen to have fairly high ratings, otherwise, you are simply advertising that you are not very popular!

Link popularity is fairly easy to check and it is worth keeping an eye on after any promotional campaign. This way, you can see which marketing techniques boost your ratings more and continue only with the successful ones.

• 0 Comments

No matter how brilliant your website design is, if it is hard to reach the content of your site then your site is as useful as an empty shell. Here are some tips to improve the usability of your website to ensure it serves its functions optimally.

The first method is to make sure the typography of your content is suitable. If you have large blocks of text, make sure to use CSS to space out the lines accordingly. The longer a single line of text is, the greater the line-height of each line should be. Also, make sure the font size of your text is big enough to read easily. Some sites have 10-pixel-tall text in Verdana font; while that may look neat and tidy, you have to really strain your eyes to read the actual text.

Make it easy for visitors to find content that they want on your site. If you have thousands of articles on your site and a certain visitor wants to find one single article from that pile, you have to provide a feasible means to enable visitors to do that without hassle. Be it an SQL-driven database search engine or just a glossary or index of articles that you have, providing such a feature will make sure your visitors can use your site with ease.

Ensure that your site loads fast if you do not want to lose visitors. Most internet users will leave a website if it doesn’t load completely within 15 seconds, so make sure the crème de la crème of your website is delivered to the visitors as soon as possible to retain their attention.

Last of all, test each and every link on your site before it goes online. There is nothing more effective in tarnishing your professional image than broken links, so be very careful about that.

• 0 Comments

• 1 Comment

Networking is a vital part of internet marketing, but one that is often overlooked. Working online, it is easy to forget that there are real live people out there who are interested in the same things you are and who are also struggling to get into internet marketing for their own businesses. By hooking up with these other business people, you can form a valuable networking community that in beneficial to all involved.

The best way to start networking is to join internet marketing forums. There you will find like minded webmasters who will be interested in forming liaisons. Also, those who are not appropriate for joint ventures or link sharing will probably have some excellent advice for you. Internet marketing forums are wonderful places to have your questions answered whether you are new to the game or not.

When networking with other internet marketing pros, don’t forget about joint venture partnerships. This is when two or more internet marketing webmasters get together to form a temporary partnership that is mutually beneficial. This might be teaming up to create an information product giveaway event, where everyone chips in a product and their opt in list, or it could simply be writing an e-book together. The choices are endless, really, but this is a form of internet marketing that should never be ignored.

Another vital part of internet marketing is forming a network of affiliates. If you have a product that lends itself to an affiliate program you should certainly consider it! Imagine an entire army of vendors selling your products! They can reach places that would take you months or even years to get into. This is internet marketing at its finest. And setting up an affiliate program doesn’t need to be a hassle if you go through a reputable website like Clickbank or ShareASale. These programs will help you get your networking with affiliates off the ground for a modest fee.

You can also start networking by looking at websites that are similar to yours, but not necessarily in direct competition. Write the owner and ask if they would be interested in doing a link share or even mutual reviews of each other’s website. This can be a great way to expand your internet marketing network as well as make new friends and get some reciprocal links, which allows you to tap into the other site’s visitors.

Just taking the time to get to know other internet marketing specialists is a form of internet marketing in itself. You are not only learning, but answering questions and forming business bonds that could be extremely useful to you in the future. Plus, by speaking with other webmasters, you increase interest in your website and if you have high quality content, someone from your new network might even link to you without being asked to! A mention on their website is even better and a full-on recommendation will send you loads of potential customers.

Internet marketing can be a bit tricky when you are first getting into it, but with a bit of networking skill, you can quickly learn what you’re doing and turn your website into a success.

• 0 Comments

Graphics can add a real nice touch to a website . . . or they can slow it down so much that no one will wait for the page to load! Webmasters designing new pages are forced to examine the pros and cons of web page graphics. As you plan your latest website project, will you use graphics or not, and if so, should you? Here we will look at both sides of the equation.

It all boils down to functionality. If you are selling paintings on your website, you will obviously need graphics, no two ways about it. The same goes for nearly any kind of product that could be featured graphically, such as books, stereos, etc. People like to see what they are buying, so you pretty much need to have pictures for these items.

However, if you are going to put photos of your products up, you should consider making them thumbnails for faster loading and make them clickable. Clients can then choose which one they want to see in more detail and click to see the full version. Since they know what they are doing, they won’t mind waiting a little extra time to see the product graphics.

Apart from purely practical use, should you use graphics on your website? That depends on what kind of graphics you want to use. You need to make the page easy to read and relatively fast to load. This rules out most giant graphics, such as photographic backgrounds, unless they are absolutely necessary.

If you do decide to use some reasonably sized graphics, you should try to limit the number per page. While a cute logo is fine, having little animals all over your sidebars and buttons can be not only distracting, but it also looks pretty unprofessional. Cluttering up your site with too many graphics is not generally a good idea, it gives a bad impression and if you are trying to sell something, an amateur look is not the way to go, no matter how fun it is.

When deciding whether or not to add graphics to your website, you should consider whether or not it adds quality to the page. Do you feel that your website will be represented through the graphic you are considering? Will it help sell your products? Is it going to convince the customer to stay when they might have thought about clicking away? If you find yourself saying yes to any one of the above questions, you have a good reason to be putting graphics on your site. Otherwise, you should probably forget about it and stick to a more simplistic look.

The decision of whether or not to display graphics on your website really is a personal one, but it can make all the difference in terms of sales and how many visitors actually stay on the page! If it takes too long to load graphics that you simply must have, try lowering the resolution a bit for faster loading times. Remember that people are impatient and will simply click away to another site if yours is too slow or too cluttered.

• 0 Comments

Offers for free stuff abound on the internet and many of them are completely legitimate. While it might be nice to get a free sample of mocha coffee or a free pair of baby booties, what do you really do with all that free stuff? Why not earn some cash with it?

Free samples are so prevalent online that you can literally order five or six things every day and be getting free stuff in the mail for a month! These samples are available for everything from coffee creamers to baby wipes and antacids. The idea behind them is to turn you onto the products so that you will begin buying them, but you can also turn free stuff into cash in your pocket by reselling it.

Let’s start with samples. If you package similar items together, you have the perfect “sampler kit” or gift basket. All you need is three or four related items and you are good to go. For example, you could get together some baby products, a sample of Dove soap, a couple mini packs of baby wipes, a formula sample and maybe even some talc powder or baby perfume. Put those all in a cute basket along with a bow and cellophane and you have the perfect newborn gift basket.

To create a sampler pack, you need items that are even more similar, like coffee. If you can get eight to ten different coffee samples, they can be packaged together in a neat little box, perhaps along with a mug or creamers and sold as a sampler pack. No one will ever know it was created from free stuff!

Larger free stuff like baby booties and T-shirts can be resold online, on Ebay or Craigslist, for example. If you get together several T-shirts or other items that are similar, you can sell them on Ebay as a package deal, charging only a few dollars per item. Let’s face it after all, this was free stuff, so even a few pennies are pure profit!

Often, for free stuff that is actually worth something, like a necklace or book, you will have to do something in exchange. This might be signing up for an email newsletter or giving some kind of information, but there will be an exchange required. In most cases this is completely worth it since you can resell the item for a small profit.

To get really great free stuff, look for 100% rebates. This means that you actually buy the item, but with the rebate, the cost of the entire item is refunded, leaving you with high quality free stuff. You can find great rebates at places like buy.com, or search for them on Google.

Not only is it fun to get free stuff, but if you can also earn from it, what’s stopping you? Start ordering your free stuff today and in 4-6 weeks, you should have all the product you need to get your own free stuff business off the ground!

• 0 Comments

Using Wi-fi in public hotspots can be dangerous when packet sniffers are readily available. You’d want to encrypt and protect what you are sending and receiving over the network. Even at home if you don’t want people on the network logging your activity (for whatever reason) you would want to encrypt your traffic. An excellent way to do this is to set up a proxy over an SSH connection. You will need the following to do this (works for any platform):

• PuTTY for your platform (I use v0.59)
• A server that supports SSH (either set up at home or your web host)

That’s it! First set up PuTTY to connect to your SSH server but also set the following Tunnel settings:

• Source Port: 7070 (this number can be pretty much anything)
• Destination: localhost
• Select Dynamic and Auto

Then click Add and it should show up as D7070. Select Open and log-in. Your traffic can now be forwarded once you configure your applications to use the proxy.

In Firefox (2.x), go to Tools->Options->Advanced->Network->Settings and set the following proxy configuration:

• Manual proxy config
• SOCKS Host: localhost
• Port: 7070
• SOCKSv5 (or v4, doesn’t matter)

Then hit OK and you’re done. To make sure the proxy is working, you can go to a site that will display your IP address or location. You can also encrypt your BitTorrent traffic or your MSN connection by changing connection/proxy settings to point to localhost port 7070 using either SOCKS v4 or v5.

An easy way to switch proxy settings in Firefox is to install the Switchproxy add-on — change proxy settings with just a click. Enjoy your secure browser session!

• 1 Comment

You probably have one or two forums that you enjoy frequenting, where you read and post about issues relevant to you. Have you ever noticed that some forums just aren’t worth looking at because they are so slow moving? You could write a question and not get an answer for days! This is where a great business opportunity comes in . . . paid forum posting.

Basically, paid forum posting is just that, the forum owner pays one or more people to start new threads, keep older ones going and to basically maintain some movement in the forum. It is one of the easier online jobs you can get and if you join forums that are interesting to you, it can be useful as well!

There are two ways to go about getting a forum posting job. The first is to do it yourself. Find stagnant forums by doing a quick search on Google for the type of forum you are interested in. Go directly to page ten and continue from there. These are the less popular forums on that topic and the most likely to not have much activity.

Once you find a near-dead forum, write the administrator and let them know that you are available as a paid poster if they are interested. Offer to write quality posts, responses and start a minimum of two threads per day, for a fee. Although you can set nearly any price you wish, you will have a better response if you stick with the norm for forum posting which is between twenty and fifty cents per post.

To find a forum posting job with a company, do a search on a search engine like Google for forum posting jobs and you will come up with quite a few options. Check out two or three to see which ones pay the best and then ask on a forum or two (these sites often have their own) what other people think of the service. It is usually best to start with just one until you have an idea of how much work will come your way. Otherwise, you could end up with more jobs than you can comfortably do in a day!

You will be given assignments based on preferences and interests, usually. Any special instructions will accompany the assignment, along with how many posts you are expected to do each day. In general, you will be required to write high quality (not spam) posts that are at least 25-50 words long and spread over the different categories on the forum. Some forums will request four or five posts per day, with a couple of those being new threads and the rest replies, while others will only want one post every other day.

The nice thing about working for a company is that you can easily have up to 50 posts assigned per day without having to search for them. Although the pay is slightly less (usually between ten and twenty cents per post), you will be paid by the company, which means higher amounts in a shorter period of time. For example, you might earn only two or three dollars on each forum in a week, but the company will pay you the twenty-five dollars total from all the forums you worked on.

Forum posting can be a good way to get paid for what you enjoy doing anyway. So why not start looking for work in this area?

• 0 Comments

You have probably seen the ads for email reading programs. They claim that you can get rich by simply reading a few emails each day and hundreds of thousands of people sign up for these programs. Exactly how legit are these businesses? Can you really earn money by just reading an email or two?

The way email reading services work is that they offer clients a certain number of hits to their websites. The clients pay for this service and the site then turns around and pays people like you to receive emails which must be opened and have a specific link clicked on in order to qualify. You usually have to stay on the advertiser’s site for 30-60 seconds before your hit is counted and you will be paid.

In general, reading and clicking an email is not a high paid job. You end up getting somewhere between half a cent and 3 cents per email that you open, if you perform the requested action.

Even if you are willing to work for such low pay, you need to be aware that many of these websites are not as great as they might look at first glance. Apart from sending you an email or two a day, they are earning from you and all their other “workers” by doing less ethical things like sell your personal information and email address to other companies. Some of these sites also have spyware which will install itself into your computer and gather vital information like bank account numbers, passwords and any other useful and confidential content that you have stored on your hard drive.

Other email programs are set up to lure people in, but they never actually pay. So they are receiving money for all the hits they send to their clients, but not paying out to their workers. It is a nasty way to do business, but these sites tend to draw so many people that they will never actually pay, that they just keep going! By promising to pay $1 per referral (or more), they ensure that people continue to reel in fresh meat so they will never lack for workers.

However, it is possible to find decent email reading websites that will not do you damage or steal your personal information and that will truly pay you when they say they will. The best way to find these is to ask people. Avoid anyone who gives you a referral URL since their opinion will be biased. You should also ask to see proof of payment. This just means that the person commenting will send you a screen shot of his or her Paypal account with the amount credited and the name of the business paying, or a photo of a check if that is how the email program pays.

A pay to read email program that is worth checking out is one that pays and has a clear privacy policy which states your information will not be used by anyone except them, and for job-related purposes only. They should also be able to provide proof of payment for their workers.

• 0 Comments

It can be very confusing trying to figure out exactly what you need to do and buy in order to get going in ecommerce. There are a myriad of products out there that are quite different in prices, ranging from free to thousands of dollars and all of them claim to be the only way to really earn any money in ecommerce! While these products and information packages might be very useful, the reality is that you don’t have to buy a huge pile of things just to get started. That can come later, once you are established. So let’s take a look at just what you do need.

For any ecommerce venture, you will need a web presence. That generally means a website or possibly a blog where you can promote and sell your product. Ecommerce is all about selling, so you will need to design your website specifically for selling. That might mean hiring a good copywriter, especially if you aren’t a great writer yourself. This is no time to skimp on quality.

Obviously, in order to sell, you also need a product! The best products for ecommerce are information products like reports and e-books that can be easily and rapidly accessed online once the buyer has paid for them. You don’t even need to write or create your own product, you can get one that has resell rights and simply turn around and sell it to your own customers.

The disadvantage to selling someone else’s product in your ecommerce business is that you are not the only vendor, so if you are able to write your own e-book or develop your own product, you will have a leg up on the competition. If need be, you can hire a freelancer through a bidding site to do the work for you. This may cost a bit more, but you will end up with a higher quality product.

Once you have your product and your ecommerce website designed to sell that product, all you are missing is customers. You will need to build your traffic in order to sell your product. This can be done in a variety of ways, including free promotion such as article marketing and banner exchanges and paid methods like Adwords and the like. In general, the free methods work, but tend to bring in a trickle of visitors. If you have the budget, paid marketing is the only way to go! Take out a couple of Adwords ads and pay for a banner campaign or two and you will soon be swamped with visitors.

The last step in building your ecommerce business is to develop repeat sales. You will need to set up a mailing list, which is relatively easy. Sign up with an auto responder and have it collect people’s email addresses when they purchase your product. They will have to enter their email address in order to download the e-book or whatever it is that you are selling. Later, when you expand your product line, you can send them a notice letting them know that you have new products that they might be interested in.

These are the only things you really actually need in order to start in ecommerce. Anything else can be considered extra and a luxury. Ecommerce can be developed slowly as you have the time and money to do so.

• 0 Comments