Instead of an article, today I dish on what’s happening around the web and what my fellow bloggers are up to.

Hector G Cuevas – has a groovy ebook project which starts tomorrow, Tuesday 1/31. This is a 7 week course he is teaching aimed at those who want to create and sell an ebook. I’m joining in as part of a Super Blogga revamp and hope you are to. Let’s do it together. I created my book a few months back but want to overhaul and re-market it, this class should be a step in the right direction. Join me?

Ruth Ives – A fellow freelance writing blogger friend has a new book out today that has 67 content marketing strategies and it’s FREE to newsletter subscribers. Jump on it before she changes her mind and decides to charge for it.

Got A Kindle For Christmas? – Then you might be interested in my guest post over at e-Junkie where I profile 5 good Kindle books aimed at small business owners. Each book is available via Amazon and make great late night reads.

Guest Blogging Service – my popular guest blogging service is keeping me quite busy these days. Am trying to keep up with the many clients and orders coming in. This week I have three BIG orders which will keep me plenty busy till the weekend. Do you accept guest posts on your site or blog? If so, sign up to my private email list (sign up box is on my sidebar) so that I can contact you.

What are you up to this week? Share with me below.

Till next time,
Missy

Prediction 1: Tablet targeting takes off.

Mobiles weren’t targeted in the past for pay-per-click as the screens were too small for users to enjoy a full-screen user experience. However tablets will change this. People are using their mobiles as mini-computers more frequently and that makes pay-per-click in these areas an objective. IPads and Androids are being sold in their droves and Google introduced its new Adwords targeting campaign last week which gives advertisers a greater control in the tablet-using audience that they reach.

With tablets pampering our need to download data continuously, a specific agenda for tablet-targeting will be a necessary objective for pay-per-click marketers in 2012.

Prediction 2: Getting rid of ads

Ads slow down network performance times and are declining in use as people strip them from their content. Ad Block Plus, Readability and the Reader function in IOS 5’s Safari browser on iPhones and iPads all indicate that users don’t want ads littering up their screens.
The impact that the widgets will have is as yet hard to predict but indicators point to advertisers experimenting with new forms of promotion in the coming months.

Prediction 3: Transparency of PPC

The great thing about PPC is its utterly transparent. It literally screams: “I am a pay-per-click button and I’m not trying to hide anything.” This means it has accountability; you are paying for an expected return on your investment.

Google has cottoned on to link-spamming and has devoted considerable resources into eradicating this widely used SEO method. This means the tactics of UK SEO Consultancy’s are going to have to become cleverer in 2012 to raise websites into the top page rankings. However, PPC already toes the line, with tablets offering a new marketing avenue, 2012 could spell a good year for this advertising tool.

This is why it’s important to spend a large amount of time and effort dedicated to increasing traffic flow to your website. Here are five pointers to look into when trying to increase your hit rate:

1. Improve Your SEO – search engine optimization is the number one priority for any struggling or new online business, and if you have not already spent time and money on this, you should look into it straight away. The majority of most businesses’ traffic comes directly from organic search engine results, so if you are not appearing near the top of the search results in your niche, then this needs to be addressed.
2. Quality Content – Making sure that you site has quality content is vital for repeat business of any kind. It is worth hiring good quality content writers, unless you can provide high quality content yourself, in order to ensure that the wording sounds professional and is giving off the correct message.
3. Creating Backlinks – getting as many back links to your site as possible is always good for increasing traffic. It is surprising to see the amount of traffic that comes through to your site, from a quality link provided by a well respected site. This means spending time trying to circulate your name on forums, blogs and through social media avenues. You can use sites such as Fiverr and others to pay people to place quality back links on a range of sites.
4. Using Social Media – Using social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter could make a big difference to your traffic flow. If you can build up a large following on a social media site, placing one link to your site there could instantly reach thousands of people for free and in a number of minutes.
5. Analyze Your Stats – Using tools such as Google Analytics could really help you to identify key groups of people who are currently using your site, and this will help you to market more effectively in the future. Using Google Key Words searches is also very useful so that you can see what people are searching for on the search engine and also how many people are searching for those things.

This guest post was written by Abigail. She is a freelance writer and designer who built her own site using a professional website builder.

1. The Appeal Of Your Blog’s Niche

Your blog’s niche must interest you so that you’re motivated to keep it going, but the niche should have mass appeal as well. People, or at least your target audience must find your blog content useful, appealing, interesting and worth their time. Any product or service offering you put up should solve someone’s problem, make their lives easier or help then earn more money. If your blog has this quality, it’ll succeed.

2. The Quality Of Your Blog’s Content

Original content refers to content that you’ve personally authored, not copied, worked over and reposted. Present a fresh perspective with your writing and even if the topic is not-so-fresh, people will still want to read it. Unless they’re utterly depraved, normal readers don’t like profanity, bad writing, lack of punctuation and random sentences. Be respectful of your reader’s intelligence along with their needs and wants while gearing your content to grab their attention. You’ll not only rank high with your readers, but with Google as well!

3. The Time And Effort You Invest In Your Blog

Any reader can tell the difference between a sloppy post and one that you’ve invested time in. So before uploading your post, take a few minutes to review each line and determine you’re not coming across as impatient, bored or angry. If you’re not satisfied with the tone of your post, put it away for a while and get back to it later. Keep uploading quality and original content regularly and watch the traffic grow. The older your blog gets, the greater your chances of obtaining quality organic traffic via Google’s Google Page Rank (PR) site ranking.

4. Credible Information

If you’re making a point, look for relevant statistics and proofs that you can add to your story. Create a References section at the bottom of your post and put in links to everything from old posts to reports. This not only shows that you’ve spent quality time getting your post together, but that you truly care about the quality and credibility of the information you’re presenting.

Some aspects of credibility you can use are awards, certificates and qualifications of individuals and research bodies. You can use graphs, testimonials and endorsements to add credibility to business logic. Use a logical flow of information and argument to emphasize important points. Add personal stories or anecdotes to make a post more interesting. Insert case studies and examples when talking about technical things.

5. A Person To Person Writing Style

You’re not writing for a robot, but for a person. Don’t forget that; write your posts the way you’d want them if you were a reader. Don’t try funny things just to rank higher in search engines. List a set of attributes for your ideal target audience. Pretend that a person, X, has these attributes and give him or her a name. It’s to this person that you’ll be writing. Make this person’s reaction and approval your main goal.

6. Provide A Call To Action

Readers respond well if, at the end of a compelling piece of post, you provide them with a call to action. This is a good way to take advantage of their currently motivated state. Provide social media content sharing buttons, ask them to opt-in for your email list and so on. A simple call to action is providing a link to a related post, prompting the reader to check it out. Or, at the end of a post, you can provide a free report containing related facts.

7. Paint Pictures With Words

Use richly evocative language to paint vivid pictures in your reader’s mind. When you read a good book, you’re literally transported into the shoes of the characters. You have to achieve a similar effect with your blog. If you’re not Shakespeare, don’t worry; use powerful language, scientific, technical, and authoritative and clear, depending on the type of post you’re writing.

8. Liven Up Your Post Using Graphics

A picture speaks a thousand words. Using evocative graphics, pictures and even infographics can liven up your content. However, be careful not to use too many of these, making your reader scroll down pages in order to read your content fully. Use graphics cleverly, to highlight parts of your content or to express intellectual humor. For example, if you’re convulsed at disbelief over someone’s recent behavior, a cute cartoon with rolling eyes can put a smile on a reader’s face.

This article is offered by Dean. He is an internet marketer and freelance writer and writes about topics related to conversion rate optimization, landing page optimization and ROI.

Can I do it? Can I write and publish TWENTY GUEST ARTICLES in FIVE DAYS. I have a few key advantages such as seniority (I’ve been blogging since 2007), membership in guest blogging communities, an active Twitter user with a decent following, spend an ungodly amount of time online and know how to find good sites to guest post on.

So am turning this guest article order into a personal challenge of sorts.

But that’s still a lot of articles to write and get published in such a short amount of time.

What do you think? Will I be able to pull this off. Could you? Weigh in below in the comment area.

Cheers,
Missy

p.s. Do you accept guest articles on your site? If so, leave the name and URL below in your comment please. I can weave any angle on my articles, so as long as your blog is a PR2 or above, your niche might do. Just leave the name and URL to the blog below.

Wish me luck! Lol.

However I would go a step further and say that you not solely focus on web marketing, as this could minimize the overall picture, but study marketing in general. One of the fun aspects of marketing is that thinking “outside the box” is required, this is what I most love about it. So don’t just read “web marketing” blogs, but marketing blogs in general. With this in mind, consider it a personal challenge to take your blog from zero visitors to a hundred a day via a good marketing plan. (or whatever other challenge you seek to implement) For some good reading on the topic, we have compiled what we believe are five GOOD blogs for web marketers.

1. Inc.com Online Marketing Blog – one of my fave blogs on the topic of marketing. They cover online marketing from A to Z, but don’t solely focus on this sub niche. Great tips and ideas are found here and surely an hour or two on this site, will get your juices flowing and breathe new life into whatever web plans you have.

2. Small Biz Trends – this is a multi author blog on topics of interest to small business owners, as such included is marketing. Lots of solid tips can be found at Small Biz Trends, whether you seek ideas or simply need inspiration for a new web project, this site will help you. A must in your RSS feed.

3. Entrepreneur, The Daily Dose – this would be my second favorite blog for web marketing and marketing in general. Perhaps you need a spitfire course on Google Plus, or maybe you never signed up for Facebook and now are playing catch up – The Daily Dose from Entrepreneur.com should do the trick.

4. Social Media Examiner – for those who need a good education on social media marketing, this is the go to site for you. Everything social media is covered here including how to sign up for your social network of choice, how to best use it, ways to get the best out of it, why monetize, ways to grow your presence and followers, ideas and tips on marketing your blog through social media and loads more. My advice is to visit the site and then perform a search on whatever social media tips or info you seek. The results returned should yield plenty of material for you to immerse yourself in.

5. Entrepreneur’s Journey – a well rounded site on entrepreneurship and of course this would entail the category of marketing as well. The site digs deep into profiles of successful web entrepreneurs and how they achieved their success including the marketing plans and strategies they have used to achieve their web nirvana.

If you have yet to visit any of the sites and blogs above, we recommend you pay them a visit today and get started on GOOD web marketing info, tips and ideas.

Let us know what are some of your personal faves below in the comment area? Did we miss an obvious one, let me know.

This guest article comes courtesy of an online drag and drop website builder provider.

It is so important to blogging that if you can’t succeed in social networking then you probably won’t succeed in blogging either. Leaving comments and trackbacks-in other words, participating-is an essential part of social networking. So here are some tips to succeed in the social networking arena.

1. Make friends to increase your traffic

Friends are at the heart of social networking, and this is also a valuable part of viral marketing. Generally speaking, the more friends in your network, the greater will be your visibility in promoting.

2. Use blogs to increase your traffic

Remember that blog commenting is a form of network marketing. Most blogs will allow you to post comments and link your site to your name. Whether the comments are follow or nofollow, if your comments are insightful, other readers of the blog may click your link to visit your site.

3. Attach a face to your name

Gravitar is a web-based service (which means it works equally well for Mac or PC users) that allows you to attach an avatar such as your photo to your e-mail address. Many of the blogs you comment on the will recognize this avatar and include it with your comment.

This will be a good opportunity to get your comments posted and more people clicking on your link. Why? Because most spammers don’t take the time to do this. Besides, it’s called social networking, after all. You will be much more social when you put a face to your name.

4. Take full advantage of your profile page

Be sure to fully fill out and customize your profile page. This can greatly increase the visibility of your content. On your profile page, you can link to your other social networking profiles as well as to your personal projects. This accomplishes two things: it increases the number of backlinks for SEO purposes and allows readers of your profile to visit your other pages so you can get more friends.

5. Remember that content is king

Nothing is more important in drawing traffic than content. If you write about interesting subjects and you do it frequently, you will greatly increase your success on the social networking sites. Don’t know what to write about? People seem to like lists. Or you can check Digg.com to see what kind of posts get the most diggs.

6. Provide clip art and screensavers to increase traffic

If you have some talent in this area, then you might try creating clip art, infographics and screensavers. Offering these for free can increase your traffic.

7. Post videos to your profile pages.

Remember that different people have different learning styles. Some people like to read while others prefer watching videos. It is not difficult to create videos for the social networking sites.

Your Mac or PC has a webcam built in. All Macs come with an excellent program called iMovie which is great for the quick creation of videos. You can even repurpose some of the articles you have written by throwing a few images into iMovie while you provide narration by reading the article.

Finally, be sure that you join a few of the more popular social networks. These memberships can feed on each other. As your network on any one site grows, you can invite your friends to join you on the other sites. This can start a chain reaction which will have them inviting their own contacts, and so on. This is viral marketing at its best, so be sure to take advantage of it.

Guest post by: Timothy Arends. You might get the impression that the Mac is the forgotten stepchild of the Internet marketing industry. But did you know that some of the top names in Internet Marketing use Macs? Visit http://www.internetmacmarketing.com/blog and get a FREE 75-page ebook that covers everything you need to know about running your Internet business using a Mac, iPhone and iPad.

We would argue that there’s a “slight” learning curve, while others claim it’s easy as pie to use and manage. Let me clarify WordPress is easy to use and manage, however to reap it’s full benefits, a complete newbie to online technology would be a tad lost. It took me roughly a few months to learn it well enough to get by, and about a year (or two) to truly deeply learn all its wonderful nooks and crannies. As I stated in a previous article one of the BEST ways to learn WordPress is via another blogger that already uses it. And knows it well.

But assuming you know it well enough to get by, below are five types of sites you can build with the popular and FREE CMS known to many a blog owner as WordPress.

1. Personal Blog – if you’re a real estate agent, hair dresser, mechanic or of any other professional background WordPress is great for creating and setting up your personal blog. This could be information about yourself, your skills, certification, licenses, etc. You could use it as a resume of sorts when looking for employment or simply as your placeholder online.

An example of a good personal blog built on WordPress is the site of real estate agent Ribeezie otherwise known as Ricardo Bueno. Notice how he uses the platform to establish himself as an authority in his field, this is how it’s done, take notes and see if you can emulate what he’s been able to do with his personal blog.

2. Company Site – whatever type of business you operate you can be sure someone has already used WordPress to make a website in your niche. You can hire the task out, you can try and do it yourself however the key takeaway is that with WordPress anything is possible including your company site.

An example of a cool and easy company site built on WordPress is the site of Extreme Tan and Smoothies based in Florida. For those who spend a good deal on Twitter and or social media might recognize this site as belonging to Extreme John who I easily could have used as an example of a good personal blog for number one above.

3. eCommerce – with an ecommerce plugin, just about any type of online shop can be created using WordPress. Can you create an Amazon.com size store? Well I highly doubt that as an online shop of that magnitude would require some sort of custom cart and many other custom enhancements. But assuming you’re not out to build the next Amazon.com, then WordPress would fit your needs just fine. And do so quite well.

An example of an e-commerce site built using WordPress is Chopper, an online shop for skateboarders. The site sells clothing, shoes and other assorted merchandise aimed at those who skate. It’s a nice looking site with built-in cart functionality and a fully operational shop.

4. Landing Page – a landing page is essentially a one page site that is used for a laser focused purpose such as collecting email leads, selling a product and or other single purpose. Many who use WordPress for their landing pages use it for email capture and or for selling a single product such as an ebook.

An example of a landing page site built using WordPress would be the Probloger Book page where noted blogger Darren Rowse sells his book. It’s simple and created using WordPress.

5. Portfolio Site – this is what a website designer, a freelance photographer and anyone who creates a visual service for a living would use to showcase their work, skills and talent for all to see. As a website designer you naturally would link to and highlight the various websites you’ve created over the years. As a photographer you would link to and display your most noted and celebrated photos for prospective clients to view and so on.

Your turn to speak? Leave a comment below and show us examples of good portfolio sites built using WordPress and do include a link in your comment. We look forward to your good picks.

As you can see from my examples above, WordPress is quite robust and comprehensive. It’s pliable enough that you can create just about any type of website imaginable. This is why it’s the CMS of choice among many web professionals.

Guest article from Richard of Broadband Expert, a high speed internet service provider.

Let us know what you think and if you have any of the books profiled?

Twitter Icon Pillows

Whether you’re going for a modern look or really want to throw your guests off by placing these adorable Twitter icon pillows on your Victorian sofa, you can’t lose with these. Made of fleece and the recognizable light blue Twitter logo is front and center.

Hash Tag Necklace: Always Trending

This hash tag necklace takes trending to an entirely new level. Laser cut from mirrored acrylic and available with a chain or black cord, this is the perfect gift for the fashionable Twitter junkie.

Twittering Love Birds: For Your Wedding Cake

You know it’s going to happen someday – your crush is going to tweet you back. And in a flurry of thousands of messages in 140 characters or less, there will be wedding bells in your future. What better way to pay homage to your love story than these adorable twitter bird wedding toppers?

Tattoo Socks: All of the Shock Value of a Tattoo without the Regret

You’ve spent nights toying with the idea of permanently professing your love of all things twitter with a tattoo. Just in case future you will regret it, these socks can cure your urge. Great for a fun social media tweeps event or a silly night out with the girls.

A True Measure of Love: Twitter Greeting Cards

When you spend 140% of your time furiously tweeting every thought that crosses your mind, you may occasionally offend friends and family. Make it up to them with this sweet non-tweet. Because even though you don’t always act like it, we all know you love them more than Twitter…right?

We heart Twitter and if you do too, any of these products will tickle your fancy. Feel free to share any of your personal favorites in the comment area below. We look forward to seeing your ideas.

Guest article by Car Rentals, a cheap car hire service provider based in the Uk.