When you sign up with social network, you are only half done as far as getting traffic is concerned. For one, take the word “social”. By being social you will need to build on acquaintances and making friends. Why? For one, even if you have the option to invite friends, you can be assured that they may not necessarily know what the whole membership phase is all about, particularly when the time comes that they would need votes to boost the ranking of their sites so that they can gain attention.

Hence, it is all about growing your friends’ list but mostly composed of people who are already there even before you signed up and doing the same thing as far as sharing and bookmarking certain posts that you want to be pushed.

But make sure you don’t overdo it. Just like you, getting too many messages requesting for a bump. One thing you don’t want to happen is lose their trust and perhaps being called a spammer who mainly has nothing in mind but to build on his sites.

For sure, this is the main purpose of most people, particularly the ones who are trying to build on their websites. Traffic is important and building that traffic through social media is something that many have found as useful and handy. You can see it in most social communities. This is where most Internet enthusiasts hangout. This is where the untapped market is hanging out and so expect potential supporters to originate from there.

To some bloggers it may be a waste of time. But before you pass judgment and take a look at the page rank and the unique visitors that this blog gets. Composing a blog post may be too much for some people but just look at the future and see how it can benefit your blog. In the end, you may find that it is worth more than a couple of dollars and it stays there for a longer period of time.

In the world of vying for the best standing as far as optimization and social networking practice is concerned, it is about how high you can get. The higher you are the more visitors you get. That is the best way to gauge it. While others are paying for a service to help market their blogs or websites, here is a free opportunity to which it benefits you more than the actual blog looking for blog posts.

In a manner of speaking, it is the content that the blog owner is looking for. It is apparent that at times, you need a different personality when it comes to blogging. Guest blogging is a good way to do that and the reward comes with a simple link back to their site. Not a bad deal!

Social platforms were the rave last year and you would think that the big boys in the business would have made a lot of money dabbling in social media, right?  I sure did but I was wrong.  According to experts, social media did not produce the results that marketers were aiming for.  Clickz published a report stating this recently:

That is to say, creating campaigns for social platforms is hard work that frequently produces marginal results, and upbeat case studies are few and far between.

“Not many marketers have really cracked the code,” said Amy Auerbach, SVP and director of digital at Initiative. “It’s such a utility for Web users.”

Google is one firm whose efforts on social networking sites are “not monetizing as well as expected,” according to previous CFO George Reyes.

It’s not that they have not tried.  In fact, you see ads everywhere in social platforms like Facebook.  In fact, various firms have tried lots of tactics to get marketing in social platforms off the ground:

Reyes and co-founder Larry Page told investors back in January that the firm has done “lots of experimenting” with social network advertising. Google represents ads on MySpace, its own Orkut service, and numerous other properties.

“We have a huge amount of social networking inventory,” said Page. “It varies quite a bit how well we monetize, based on a number of factors, some of which we understand, some of which we don’t.”

This just goes to show how difficult it is to predict just how people will react to campaigns.  Personally, I like social platforms the way they are and the ads, so far, have not been bothering me at all.  At the same time, they are not catching my eye either.  Maybe that’s where they have work to do?

We have been hearing that if you want to earn or do business today, the money is in online advertising. This covers areas of advertising towards the Internet market as well as earning from online advertising. But while many enjoyed ease as far as earning from advertising programs like Google Adsense or affiliations with companies like Commission Junction, it looks like you have your work cut out for you especially if you are a new player in the online market.

Perhaps a different approach would be in order. Would you bank on image-based ads or text-link ads. Of the two, text-link ads has become the key towards success. But this would depend if you are able to hit and make use of the hot words over the web today. Many bloggers and content writers are creating a lot of content online these days but the riddle behind it all is knowing what words to use and relate them to the topics you want to blog about.

Also, add to the fact that telecommute jobs are saviors for people who have no jobs at the moment. All laid-off workers are looking for some form of income-generating scheme and whether they sign up with online companies or start their own online advertising revenue program, they can find the right one on the web with the right marketing approach.

Social Networking is certainly getting a lot of attention these days and apparently everyone is aware that it also includes the moniker survival of the fittest. BlogRush has gone down along with millions of subscribers who have been using it and apparently that is not the last. With that said, would it be wise to invest and put up a site that can become another social networking scheme for people who invest and live largely online?

Criboo, for its part could care less. It is another social networking site that has been put up. It is not different from the usual sites we see online and for sure, it will get its share of interested users. As far as establishing itself, the factor here is the number of years and of course people who would endorse it. There are already a lot of sites that have become established but that doesn’t mean a new player is not welcome to try it out.

If you visit the site now, it may look like an ordinary WordPress blog setup. Obviously, they are still working on their site design, being in its beta version at the moment.

It may look as if it has a long way to go but that is the way most sites do it. You have to start somewhere and as far as Criboo is concerned, one small step could become a big one if they push all the right buttons. Care to try it out?

Criboo.com provides a special technical solution that makes it possible for all members to see what other online members are doing in the community. This requires a lot of bandwidth and might slightly slow down the community.

Even the social networking community has its share of closing down. BlogRush, a free service that helps improve the traffic in most blogs has announced that it is closing shop. So that is one traffic generating site down and while everyone has looked upon the Internet as a something that would perhaps take the mind off the real world issues, analyzing their closure can be both good and bad.

But between the two, it is a bad day for the blogging world. Especially for blogs who have remained loyal to it, you cannot help but wonder how traffic to your site will be affected. Apparently, one has to think, how would other free blogging services fare as well. There are quite a number of them and apparently if this were to happen, then why not them?

Traffic is important in driving in visitors. Certainly, it seems that many blog are bound to suffer, especially the ones that are not optimized. But then again, there are other online marketing techniques to turn to and that can be easily remedied.

So for all people who have the BlogRush codes installed, it would be best to start taking them down. At least you can now look forward to better loading for your site since BlogRush may have altered this a bit before.

Besides, there are still a lot of other social network building services you can turn to. There is Entrecard, BlogCatalog and the traditional feed and RSS subscription services.

Compete has just released a list of the top moving sites of 2007.

From the social platform genre, we have CafeMom, LinkedIn, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Squidoo, Webkinz, Six Apart, and WordPress, among others.

Are there any surprises in this list?

The only one that surprises me is LinkedIn, which has never appealed to me although obviously this viewpoint is not shared by the masses.

The one that is the least surprising? Webkinz.com.

If you hang around children below the age of 10 you have certainly heard about Webkinz. It’s a membership site for children that incorporates real-world products and educational learning tools and just plain kid-type of fun. The first time I heard about Webkinz, I thought–”Those folks are geniuses!” Seems like they’re making money on so many levels with that operation and have found a way to bridge an online membership site with products sold in stores.

What do you think–are you surprised by any of these results either on the upswing or downswing of popularity?

Just a warning--be careful when surfing that list of sites in the red and green table–I just went to an innocent looking one trying to see what it was and got an eyeful Yeah, now I see there’s a little warning there, but somehow missed it at first glance. Definitely NSFW!

Via: TechCrunch

Sometimes you get some comments which from very beginning you know they are spam. It is because spam bots used certain words inside them and in many cases – a lot of those words. You can’t ban then entirely because some of real people still use those words – maybe not in that amount – but still. Here where WP Spam Hitman comes in. It allows you to write as many words or regular expressions you want and set a number from which you are pretty sure that some comment is a spam.

Then it checks every comment/trackback/pingback and count how many hit point that comment gets (so for instance – how many usually-spam words it contains). If a comment gets enough of those hits – certain action will be performed.

You can simply delete the message and never think about it again. You can also mark it as spam or throw it into moderation.

Go get it.

Go get it.

Profy has finally launched our very own blogging platform in alpha. We have been developing it here in Russia for more than a year now and the alpha release is a very important step. We were sitting and waiting nervously for the first reviews after the embargo was lifted and I think I will post links to some of the first reviews here to cordially thank all the bloggers.Crenk was the first to break the story though I was a bit disappointed to see our press release almost unchanged. But you need to stick to using language from press releases when you want to break news and be the first.