If you’ve been submitting your blog posts to places like Digg, Netscape, ShoutWire and the like, you know how time consuming it can be.

Now the same guys who wrote Authority Black Book have come up with a tool that drastically reduces the amount of time it takes to do Web 2.0 promotion.

Here’s what it does:

* Saves and automatically processes logins for several of the most high-traffic Web 2.0 news sites on the internet.

* Easily archive your stories (blog post) to make every submission extremely easy and gives you the ability to recall it later.

* With the push of a button, the software fills the forms on these sites so all you have to do is review and submit your story.

* Enter the content of your latest blog post one-time and submit to all of the sites individually for maximum efficiency.

The reason I’m even recommending it is because it’s completely white-hat, and will save you loads of time in syndicating your blog articles.

Check out the demo of the Web 2.0 Submitter here.

Michael Cheney, one of the most-respected names in Internet marketing, and the man behind the 6-Figure launches of AdSense Videos and 11 Days To List Profits, has unveiled a new video product titled “Michael’s Traffic Videos”. His new package promises to show you how to get boost web traffic (the holy grail of any webpreneur) and comes with 100,000 instant ad credits and a tailored Fast-Track To Traffic Action Plan.

He allowed us to post this interview and offer you a free 40-page E-book on traffic that Michael has written to help you avoid the Top 20 Traffic Disasters. In the interview below, the Adsense expert explains how, just like everything else on the Internet traffic changes very quickly. So, the methods of getting traffic change all the time and that’s where webmasters who don’t keep up with the trends get “caught out”.

Here’s the rest of the interview.

What do you mean by “caught out”?

Well people fall into the trap of thinking that just because they know one or two traffic generation methods that they are some sort of traffic master. In reality just because you know how to start a pay per click campaign or a little bit about search engines doesn’t make you anywhere near a traffic expert. I’m trying to spread the word that there is a massive array of traffic tactics that most people aren’t even aware of, let alone using or mastering.

Can you give us some examples?

Sure. Offline for example. You might immediately think that getting traffic is a purely online activity but the truth of the matter is that there are lots of things you can be doing offline to get people into your website. And it’s usually these sorts of areas that are being under-utilized and therefore there is less competition for that traffic as well.

So by offline you mean advertising offline?

Not necessarily. That is one method, yes, but I’m thinking of more creative ways to get people into your website. It all comes down to the fact that having asked people on my list it came as no surprise that most people want to know about free rather than paid traffic sources. I’ve had to become an expert in free ways of getting traffic in my time online.

What do you mean - I thought you were running a successful online business with lots of cash flow?

I am. But it’s not always been this way. When I first started out in 1995 I had nothing. No money to play with. Just my own initiative and imagination.

So are you saying you’re against paying for traffic online?

No. No I’m not saying that at all. What I’m saying is that, especially when you first start out, you always want to focus on the free methods. You get the traffic in for free, make some sales and then you can reinvest some of that money into paid methods of getting traffic. This speeds up the process.

So what particular offline methods are you referring to - can you give us some examples?

There’s one tactic I used that costs nothing to implement, is relatively quick and ended up getting me thousands and thousands of targeted visitors into my websites. When I’ve shared this tactic with other marketers at seminars they’ve started laughing and slapping their foreheads when they saw how easy it was. They were also embarrassed that they had failed to use this tactic. It was quite amusing.

So are you going to tell us what this method is?

No! (laughs) It’s in my course! I truly believe in rewarding those people that are most eager to learn so instead of giving away all my traffic tactics in interviews like this I’ve put some of them in an E-Book I’ve written. It is free though if people want to get it.

So how can people get hold of it?

It’s called “How To Avoid The Top 20 Traffic Disasters” and you can get it by going to Michael’s Traffic Videos - you’ll see it mentioned on that page.

What’s in it?

Well I really wanted to raise the bar on a free E-Book so I spent a lot of time creating it. It’s 40 pages long and stuffed with juicy content on what NOT to do when it comes to traffic. As far as I’m concerned too many people out there tell you what you should do but not what you shouldn’t do. That’s where this E-Book comes in.

So, if you’re serious about getting more traffic into your website (and if you’re reading this blog, you are!) you should go to Michael’s Traffic Videos and get that free E-Book.

Happy New Year, folks! I’m back from Goa and I’ll soon be posting some photos of my vacation on my Goa Beach site. This time I just visited my family so that my daughter could meet her cousins and be pampered by all my aunts. Also pigged out on Goan food so much that I HAD to make a New Year’s resolution to join the gym and work off all the holiday pounds.

I came back to this nice, insightful article by Rohit Bhargava of Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide, in which he take a stab at predicting the Top 7 Marketing Trends for 2007. I’ve paraphrased his points to reflect my own take on these predictions.

1. Corporates become more human: We’ll continue to see more “corporate bloggers” and more touch points for customers to interact with the true personality of a brand. Social media will play a bigger part in overall marketing strategy of corporates. The launch of sites like Sunsilk Gang Of Girls by HLL, clearly targeting their female audience, is evidence that the trend is even catching on in India in a big way.

2. Marketing with Widgets: Offering a free tool or widget has bcome an accepted marketing technique for marketers looking to offer a quick introduction to their service, or those seeking to create an online connection with customers.

3. SEO Is Dead! Long Live SMO!: It’s official, people. SEO is dead! Even hard-core black-hat SEOs now admit that their SEO practices are earning diminishing returns, and that SEO must evolve into what is being described as Social Media Optimization. SMO involves building traffic through blogs, tagging, social bookmarking and creating buzz online, moving far beyond linking strategy and smart SEO into the marketing mainstream. Hooks to allow site visitors to easily share and bookmark content may become more commonplace than those ubiquitous “email a friend” links, notes Bhargava.

4. AutoTagging and AutoSorting: In 2007, we will see more solutions like this that offer autotagging, autosorting and the next extension of this technology … auto recommendations, where new content of any format can be recommended and people can find new content more easily.

5. Social Bookmarking or Human Filtered Search: The exponential increase in the amount of content online, thanks to blogs and video sharing sites will continue to lead online users to search beyond the algorithm for new ways of finding information. Social bookmarking involves people sorting content on the web, creating their own groupings and sharing that with others.

6. Contentcasting via RSS feed: Contentcasting, spurred on by the now ubiquitous use of RSS, and the growing number of online users that have taken to RSS feeds in a big way. This includes videoblogs, audio podcasts, and frequently updated content in any area of the site - from a blog to a newsroom.

7. Online Identity Shifting: Having and sharing your identity online is hot right now. The appeal of sharing our lives with those we care about - through blogs, photos, videos, podcasts - will continue to represent a force in driving more people towards social media.

Within these online representations of self, brands and products will continue to play a large role. People will talk about products they like and don’t like - they will share brand experiences, and they will even become brand ambassadors for products and services that they care about. In this world where individual lives are shared online, there will be huge oopportunities for marketers in 2007, concludes Bhargava. I concur.

Tags: online marketing; seo; search engine optimization; blog; blogging; social-media; web 2.0; podcasting; public relations; social media optimization; tags; tagging; folksonomy; RSS

I wanted to share a brand new site to help you leverage the power of Web 2.0 (social networks, bookmarking sites) to bring new traffic to your websites.

Web 2.0 Secrets is a 6-week teleseminar series detailing every single trick, tactic and technique the experts use to drive a massive amount of free visitors to their sites every single day… and how you can do the same.

In it you’ll learn how to capitalize on the blazing fast growth of Web 2.0 companies like Myspace, Technorati, Digg and others to instantly attract an unlimited supply of new prospects and customers to your websites for free.

Listen to this audio interview on Web2Secrets.

Although it may seem like a distant memory, there was a time when people relied primarily on human-compiled directories to navigate the internet. These directories tried to categorize information to make it accessible to users.

The inherent human bias in the process, combined with the rapid growth of the internet, however, made the directory model an ineffective way of cataloguing all of the web’s offerings. Soon, search engines based on programmed algorithms and utilizing robot web crawlers began to displace the traditional directory.

Although internet commerce was still in its infancy, those who benefited the most from the transition to search engines were the people who saw the trend developing and who made an immediate effort to capture great placement in search engine results. Search engine optimization pioneers were able to grab substantial market share in a field devoid of well-organized competition.

Today, various search engine weaknesses are leading many users to seek out yet another means of finding information Social Bookmarking. They’re relying on social bookmarking services with increasing regularity as their tool of choice. The millions of people using social bookmarking services including Technorati, Del.icio.us, and others are proof that this is the “next big thing.”

Although the growth of blogs has spurred the increased use of social bookmarking services, the phenomenon is actually much richer and more nuances than that. The success and likely massive future growth of social bookmarking isn’t just a matter of blogs being hip. It’s based on the very reasons why people use the Internet and continues to grow as an alternative means of information organization.

This new user-driven means of categorizing and ranking resources is fluid, flexible, non-hierarchical, democratic and GROWING. It defies our usual expectations about how people can find products and services online.

Millions of people are abandoning traditional search engines and directories in favour of social bookmarking services. Marketers who ignore this trend do so at their own risk. Not learning about social bookmarking is nothing short of surrendering to a changing online world.

Those who “get it” will undoubtedly prosper. Those who don’t might just find themselves expending more and more effort competing for a shrinking portion of the search engine pie. What makes matters even sweeter for those in the know is the fact that successful mastery of the social bookmarking scene has search engine advantages, too.

For more information check out The Complete Guide To Social Bookmarking.

As I explained in my article here, one of the most important differences between businesses (or articles) that succeed and those that fail is the ability to understand what their audience wants, and give it to them the way they want it.

Accurate market research is the foundation of a successful business. Any search marketer worth their salt knows that market research is the basis of a good search marketing strategy. The Digital Point keyword suggestion tool is one of my favourite tools for conducting quick market research and creating lists of keywords to target.

It’s also recommended by Wendy Boswell, About.com’s guide on Web Search, who puts the reasons for conducting market research in simple, succinct terms here:

In order to create a searchable site, you must know who you are writing for. Your target audience knows what they want and what they are searching for, and you must know what that is before you can deliver what they want.

For researching and writing articles, simple tools should suffice. But when you’ve put advertising dollars on the line, the quality of your research becomes paramount to your success.

Customer profiles, surveys and focus groups are essential tools in the marketer’s store, but asking the right questions of your audience, and making sense of the data gathered, is an art by itself.

It was only after I listened to some audios by a guy called Glenn Livingston, that I began to gain an understanding of the nuances of conducting good market research. Glenn was recommended to me by Perry Marshall, who states that he’s “reduced marketing to a nearly exact science.”

He’s developed a system that shows you how to use market research to dramatically multiply existing profits, and how to save ridiculous amounts of time and money entering new markets by finding out exactly where the “bulls eye” is before you invest your marketing dollars, and even before you ever develop a product. This is seriously good stuff, and I urge you to check out his ideas here.

But market research is just the start of a good marketing strategy. It takes more than that to attract the kind of audience you need on the internet. Wendy recommends you remember these three things when developing your target audience internet marketing strategy:

Do your research. Don’t automatically assume that what you search for is what your audience searches for.

Get involved. Man is not an island. Network with people in your field or industry to truly understand what might be in demand, and then you can target your audience accordingly.

Write good content. Easier said than done, but I guarantee that the more time you spend researching key phrases and writing thoughtful content, the more people will be able to find your content.

Read more about market research strategies here

How to Research Your Business Idea (Entrepreneur.com)

Market Research for Small Business on a Shoestring: Surveys and Focus Groups (StartUpNation.com)

Market Research Basics and Terminology (Elance.com)

If you want to learn more about how social media is going to influence the future of internet business, check out this podcast of Dave Fish, CEO of IMN, interviewing Paul Gillin, founding Editor-in-Chief at Tech Target, who is currently working on a book titled “The New Influencers: A Marketer’s Guide to Social Media.”

Some takeaways from the interview:

Small is the New Big (that’s the title of Seth Godin’s new book). The future of media is in small markets. Small communities, engaged people who are really interested and who want to interact with other people who have similar interests and those are very good people to get your message in front of.

Smart marketers will target communities either by demographics or by interest and identify the areas where they can reach those people. For example, MySpace is dominated by teenagers, and the MySpace model is going to be taken into many other smaller special interest communities in the coming years, and marketers should really be tuned into where that’s happening in their area.

It is important to be direct. Deception is considered uncool in blogging and in social networking. Fake blogs and false communities are bad for business. It’s better to be open about your commercial role as a sponsor rather than infiltrate a community under the guise of a participant. It’s best not to try to deceive people because once they find you out, your name will be mud forever.

There are communities developing in many B-to-B areas; marketing is one example. Companies are interacting with each other using social media tools, but they’re doing it out of public sight, through extranets and intranets.

Web 3.0 will be the Video Web. YouTube is the poster child in that area, but there are many other sites coming about. Web 4.0, or whatever follows the video, is going to be driven by this small community trend - a devolution of the MySpace model into hundreds of small, special-interest communities.

youtube; Myspace; social networking; web 2.0; web 2.0; Blogging; Marketing; social media; Blogs;

Sick of internet marketing JVs and squeeze pages? I just found this neat little email thingy that creates a self-destructing email address for you. Here’s how the 10-minute email works.

By clicking on the link below, you will be given a temporary e-mail address. Any e-mails sent to that address will show up automatically on the web page. You can read them, click on links, and even reply to them. The e-mail address will expire after 10 minutes.

Why would you use this? Maybe you want to sign up for a site which requires that you provide an e-mail address to send a validation e-mail to. And maybe you don’t want to give up your real e-mail address and end up on a bunch of spam lists. This is nice and disposable. And it’s free. Enjoy!

Well, it looks like list-building just took a blow. Especially the sneaky kind! I can just imagine all sorts of other people using this - terrorists, spies, perverts who signup on dating sites.

Via Michael Campbell

Adotas has a nice article by veteran PR executive,David Parmet, on why advertisers should bet their money on social media, as opposed to traditional media.

Besides the usual reason that the internet, and social media in particular, provide you with a targeted and engaged audience, one that you know is relevant and paying attention, he also discusses some interesting ways to pitch bloggers, and how you can support a traditional media campaign by targeted social media outreach.

Especially, if you have a limited advertising budget, you might want to try diving into social media to spread your message, he notes. Check out the article “Sock it to ˜Em Socially” here.

Methinks the easiest way to build a list nowadays is to write up a report and name it “The Death Of”, followed by whatever-it-is they’re talking about.

A while ago, it was Scott Boulch’s Death of Adsense report and now Mike Filsame’s written a new report titled, The Death Of Internet Marketing. Yawwwn!! I can just see another one on it’s way titled “The Death of Google Adwords.”

So what do I think about the latest report? Well, though well-written, you’ll find it says little that’s new. Especially if you’ve been keeping your ear to the ground and are aware of the changes that have been taking place online. And you don’t do that by confining your reading to newsletters from your favourite IM gurus.

No, you gotta read the mainstream marketing newsletters, like Marketing Vox, IAB Smartbrief, and if you live in India, Agencyfaqs and Aloo Techie. These are essential reading for smart internet marketers.

So what does the latest report state that we already know?

1. Internet marketing is saturated

Yeah, duh-uh!! I mean, aren’t we just soooo sick of getting the same old mails from all the lists we’re subscribed to? Too many gurus, too many products, too many JVs, too few clickthroughs. Little surprise then that I’ve unsubscribed from most of them. And opted out of doing JVs altogether.

2. The NICHE is where the money is

And that’s supposed to be news? At least he gives due credit to the book that started it, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More, in which Chris Anderson revealed how “countless niches” are market opportunities for those who cast a wide net and de-emphasize the search for blockbusters. As I said in a previous post, the reason I got out of the IM niche is that I prefer to work in a few good niches that I’m passionate about, creating a great resource around that niche. I hope you have the good sense to do the same.

3. Web 2.0 is the new internet

User-generated content created by online communities (blogs, wikis, social networks, forums) is crucial for a business to grow online . These websites pull in loads of repeat traffic through unique content and viral marketing. YouTube is the most cited example. (While you’re there check out the video my brother made of my 2-year old nephew, Shane, banging away on his Dad’s drum kit. Ain’t he adorable?!)

Few people have the vision to understand how important it is to create an online community around you or your business. I hope you’re not one of them. I recommended this strategy to a client of mine almost a year ago, advising him to create a social networking site around his niche. We started with great enthusiasm but other priorities killed the initiative.

However, I did end up learning a lot about how social networks function and got the opportunity to test out some scripts. If you do want to start your own social networking site, the software I recommend is the AlstraSoft E-Friends online social networking software. It’s one of the best scripts I’ve tried. Of course, you’ll need a programmer to customise it for your site. And don’t start another “me-too” network. Try something new. Create a community around a niche no one has discovered.

As for me, I’ve spent the better part of the last six months nurturing a lively community of single women on the Ryze business nework, since I didn’t have the time or resources to start my own networking site. I’ve also started a blogging portal where I share revenue with bloggers whose blogs I help promote. I also share my take on spiritual and relationship issues with readers on my Soul Kadee blog.

And you know what? I LOVE what I do! Because it allows me to help people in so many ways. And for me, being of service is what my life is all about.

Going back to Mike’s report, he does go on to give some good ideas for creating businesses that will generate loyalty with customers and affiliates, as well as some important tips for keeping your business out of trouble with the authorities. And since the Death Of Internet Marketing report is free, I suggest you read it (and help Mike build his list while you’re at it ;-), of course).

Tags: the long tail, web 2.0, user generated content, Online Community, YouTube