I don’t know about you, but I use Gmail, Google Docs, Facebook, Flickr and a host of other social media platforms and “cloud based services” (like Google Docs).

I have hundreds of pages of documents and images located in the cloud and use these services constantly for both my business and for personal stuff (like my photo album and email).

The other day it occurred to me that I don’t have an easy way to backup these files (besides copying and pasting it all onto my hard drive), so I went searching… and stumbled upon a service called “Backupify”.

Cool thing about this service is that not only does it backup your Google Docs data, it also has a service that backs up your Flickr account as well as your Facebook Profile information. PLUS, it also backsup other information like your Twitter data, Blogger data (this is pretty huge), Linked In and Zoho profiles (pretty cool).

They even provide 1 GB of free storage for their “Social Media” backup service.

You can learn more about their service here: http://www.backupify.com/

Post from: Affiliate Internet Marketing

Backup Your Gmail, Facebook & More

Related posts:

1. Facebook Changes: Approval for Tags
2. Facebook – Press ‘Enter’ To Post Comment
3. Top 23 “Do Follow” Social Bookmarking Sites

One of the little “tricks” on Facebook was to “tag” a photo (or video) to drive traffic to your page. This is how it works (at the moment):

1. Find popular fan pages / personalities in your niche and “like” or “friend” them.
2. Upload a video (or photo) with a call to action, then TAG the image using the fan page / personality name.
3. Once tagged, it will notify all the fans (or friend) and show up in their news stream.

That’s the “trick” in a nutshell.

Now, Facebook is changing the rules.

You will now have to get permission by the page or the person you’re tagging to attach their name to the image.T This simply means that they must approve your tag before it becomes visible in their profile (stream).

This change along with some additional privacy changes are scheduled to happen this Thursday.

Post from: Affiliate Internet Marketing

Facebook Changes: Approval for Tags

Related posts:

1. Facebook – Press ‘Enter’ To Post Comment

Many people misunderstand the purpose of social bookmarking (from a niche marketing perspective) and think you get A TON of traffic by bookmarking all their pages…

In my opinion it’s a myth.

However, it does serve a very important purpose. Getting backlinks to your sites. Unfortunately Google does not count all backlinks because of the "no follow" rule. So, if you want your link to "count" (in Google) you want to spend your time setting up bookmarks with the sites that actually give you some "link love".

So, here’s a list of the Top 23 "Do Follow" Social Bookmarking Sites (by PageRank) that I came across that you can use for Social Linking purposes:

1. Furl – PR7
2. Backflip – PR6
3. Bibsonomy – PR6
4. LinkaGoGo – PR6
5. Mister-Wong – PR6
6. Raw Sugar – PR6
7. Spurl – PR6
8. Buddy Marks – PR5
9. Jumptags – PR5
10. MyJeeves / Ask – PR5
11. MyLinkVault – PR5
12. Xilnus – PR5
13. A1 Webmarks – PR4
14. Bookmark Tracker – PR4
15. Connectedy – PR4
16. Diigo – PR4
17. OYAX – PR4
18. MyVmarks – PR4
19. TeDigo – PR4
20. ez4u – PR3
21. MyPIP – PR3
22. SyncOne – PR3
23. Yattle – PR2

If I’m missing any or am mistaken, please let me know in the comment section below!

Thanks,

[tags]social bookmarking, social media traffic, social media marketing, web 2.0[/tags]

Post from: Affiliate Internet Marketing

Top 23 “Do Follow” Social Bookmarking Sites

Related posts:

1. My Top 37 Social Bookmarking Sites
2. Dominating the Search Engines with Social Media Networks
3. Hubpages Case Study Follow Up – Appear On The First Page Of Google

With the advent of Stompernet’s SMARTS program, Howie Schwartz’s Conversation Domination and Jack Humphrey’s Authority Black Book, leveraging the power of Web 2.0 / Social Media has "officially" gone mainstream.

As you know, I’ve used Web 2.0 for quite some time and a while back I created a "flow chart" to explain how I actually use Web 2.0 (in the ‘one’ forum I participate in on a regular basis). So I thought I’d share it with you as well.

Hopefully, you’re already familiar with Social Media sites on some level… from free Blogging platforms such as Blogger.com and WordPress.com (which started this "revolution"); to Social Networking Sites like MySpace and FaceBook; to Content Sharing Sites, like EzineArticles, Squidoo and HubPages, and Social Bookmarking sites like Del.icio.us, Reddit, Digg, Propeller, Stumbleupon etc. (some would argue that Digg, Propeller, Stumbleupon and similar sites are Social Voting sites).

So, what’s the big deal about social media?

I personally think that the main benefit to these properties is that they contribute to "organic" traffic that is not dependent on Search Engine Results. In addition, you also get to take advantage of the sites’ authority, which means more search engine traffic and more backlinks to your site (depending on whether they use "dofollow" or not). In other words, there are two parts to the Social Media equation: Social Media Traffic Generation and Social Media Linking.

So, you might be wondering, what’s the advantage of using sites like Blogger, Hubpages, Squidoo and WordPress.com?

All of these are considered authority sites and can rank very well in the search engines provided you build them "properly" and more importantly add some new content to them on a "regular" basis.

In terms of Blogger, they have a lot of pull with Google Blog Search as well as organic search engines and if you create the "right" type of content, you can rank on the first page of Google almost immediately (depending on competition of course). It is also very user friendly in terms of setup, ad integration (particularly Adsense), and is quite easy to "tweak". The downside of building blogs with Blogger is that Blogger controls your site… and they are often very "delete" happy (I’ve had a couple of dozen blogs deleted by them…).

As for WordPress.com… they are similar to Blogger in that you host your blog with them (except they don’t in my experience have the habit of deleting blogs like Blogger). Their interface is easy to use and ranks well in the search engines. The upside of WordPress is that they have an active user community that likes to read other people’s blogs… and you can get quite a bit of free traffic just from using "tags" in your posts. However, they are not very user friendly with Ad integration and if you’re not careful, you could be in breach of their TOS.

Which one do I start with, and is one better than another?

Squidoo and Hubpages can both drive quite a bit of traffic and they both use "do follow" in their links, which means you can leverage these sites to drive traffic to your "money site(s)" much in the same way you would use EzineArticles (or other article directories). The pages you build on these properties are also better suited for a more narrow niche (or product), rather than broad niches.

Blogger and WordPress.com are "traditional" blogs and is a great resource for posting either snippets of articles from your money sites, or independent articles with anchor text links embedded in the article pointing to a particular page on your money site.

I generally use all of these properties to support my main money site, whether it’s an opt-in page, sales page, content site…

There are obviously no "rules" as to how you use leverage Web 2.0. I personally use them to build a "mini net" of properties to "dominate" a niche term… and funnel traffic and link power to my money sites. So, you could potentially set up something like this:

NOTE: This is just an illustration of how you can setup one type of a mini net and the sites listed are just some of the sites I may use.

As you can see, the chart flows from the "less" important web 2.0 properties down to Blogger / WordPress.

The most important thing to know is that you should not get stuck in a pattern. In other words, you can for instance switch the positions of Blogger / WordPress with Squidoo / Hubpages or other "authority sites" and gain similar (or better results). 

Let’s talk about some of the biggest mistakes people make when creating these networks:

1. Try to focus on too many keyword phrases at once
2. Give up after creating one blog /lens / hub for one topic
3. Not bookmarking ALL content (be sure to use different bookmarking sites for different sites)
4. Trying to use just ONE account for bookmarking / blog creation (I would personally recommend that you open multiple accounts, ten or preferably more, with each service to avoid footprints and patterns).
5. Using reciprocal links between different properties

One of the biggest "secrets" to success with this tactics, is to actually create multiple pages spread across you network for just ONE long-tail keyword phrase. In other words, the whole network above should be for ONE phrase. Then you rinse and repeat for the next keyword phrase.

Also, learn to use and publish your RSS feeds. This will save you A LOT of time when updating your web 2.0 properties.

I’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences on the topic…

To your success,

[tags]conversation domination, authority black book, stompernet smarts, stompernet, jack humphrey, web 2.0 traffic, social media traffic[/tags]

Post from: Affiliate Internet Marketing

Dominating the Search Engines with Social Media Networks

Related posts:

1. 8 Unique Ways to Make Money Through Social Media Networks
2. Is Web 2.0 Working For You?
3. My Top 37 Social Bookmarking Sites

This is fresh off the press and is a case study that has been active since January 2nd, 2008.

This time I’ve chosen to tackle WordPress.com.

This particular case study actually came about by accident, and although WordPress.com did NOT pay me directly I still got "free" money from WordPress.com

Let me explain.

I am currently beta testing a new page generation script for a friend of mine, which uses RSS feeds to populate parts of the page (to give it fresh relevant content). And while I’m all for using RSS, I don’t particularly like to "give away" traffic to the links back to the originator of the feed… I really look at these more as a "leak" in my sites than anything else.

I decided that instead of giving away traffic to competitors’ RSS feeds, I’d rather create some blogs on WordPress.com and post some articles on each that I could pull RSS feeds from. This way I could control my own traffic and minimize "leakage" and provide my page with 100% relevant content.

By the way, in case you’re not familiar with WordPress.com, it is a "hosted" version of WordPress, as opposed to a WordPress blog that you host on your own server, and is similar to a Blogger blog in that it’s a free service where you can create as many blogs as you wish. I personally chose WordPress.com because: 1. it’s free; and 2. it creates xml feeds, while Blogger creates an atom feed which was not compatible with the script I was using (unless I passed the atom feed through a service such as FeedBurner).

But I digress.

Once I created a handful of these WordPress sites I noticed that some of them started receiving traffic immediately, which was quite curious.

So, I decided to test it. 

I built a WordPress.com site on a very narrow topic, actually a product range (brand / model) in the "kitchenware" category. Sorry, I don’t want to reveal the product / niche as I’m still doing independent testing on a specific monetization model.

These are the actual results over the past week:

As you can see, this past week I’ve had 361 views (this does not include my own visits to the blog) spread over 4 blog posts. It might not be very impressive, but what’s really surprising and cool about these results is that I did no marketing of these pages, whatsoever…

Zip, Zilch, Zero, Nada…

All I did was post the content and went on my merry way.

I’m sure you’re thinking… "There’s got to be a trick to this."

Actually… no.

So what exactly did I do?

1. I created a blog called xyzreviews.wordpress.com. (replace xyz with product name of choice)
2. Then I named the blog: "All About XYZ", with a tagline like: "The Best XYZ Info Online".
3. I changed the sidebar widgets (go to Presentation -> Widgets) to include only: Recent Posts and Links.
4. All of my Post Titles had the product name in it.
5. As you can see under "Totals", I only have 4 blog posts. I did not write a single "unique" article All the posts are repurposed content, i.e. PLR articles I’ve had on my hard drive for a LONG TIME! I uploaded each article "as is", no re-writing or editing of the articles. Again, I wasn’t really worried about duplicate content when creating these blogs since I was originally going to use these blogs solely for RSS feeds.
6. Once I copied the article over, I proceeded to use a sub-headline (the first sentence of the article) using my product name. Each sub-headline was bolded and used as an anchor text link that linked to an affiliate product.
7. I bolded and italicized several instances of the product name (as well as synonymous words). I also sprinkled some anchor text links throughout the article that pointed back to the affiliate product.
8. I made sure to tag each post using the "Tags" area (this is located just below where you post content). For tags I used the product name, the brand name, the product name + review (e.g. xyz reviews). As you can see above, I only used 6 tags, which I used for every blog post.
9. Click Publish!

That’s it! There were no other tweaks to the codes, templates… anything. Also, there was no other monetization to the site besides the links to my affiliate product page.

Note: When using this method, it is important that you create blogs around products in demand. Otherwise nobody will care to search the tags…

This simple exercise netted me $42.76 in commissions from CJ.com this week (that’s $6 a day for those that are counting). Not bad considering it took me less than 15 minutes to create and publish. By the way in case you’re wondering, this is not an anomaly. I’ve been able to recreate four other blogs that have experienced similar results.

So, where did the traffic come from?

Believe it or not, more than 90% of the traffic came from the tags I placed in Step 8. The rest came from search engines (long tail keyword searches).

Just imagine what WordPress.com could do with some promotional activities…

So, if you have been slighting WordPress.com in your marketing activities, perhaps it’s worth another look.

[tags]wordpress.com, web 2.0, blogging, blog marketing, case study, affiliate marketing, internet marketing[/tags]

Post from: Affiliate Internet Marketing

Free Money From WordPress.com

Related posts:

1. 9 Reasons Why You Need To Use WordPress
2. How to Make Money with Zero Dollars
3. 8 Unique Ways to Make Money Through Social Media Networks