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by Daryl Daughtry

The term “content” when used by Internet Marketers refers to written words, audios or videos. Incorporating content in your website can help you generate more traffic in a number of ways.

How Does Content Help You Get More Traffic? Search engines love website that offer valuable content. No matter what type of site you have, you can leverage this to increase the traffic to your website. Whether you have an online store, a forum, or a blog, you can add content to generate traffic.

Also, visitors just plain love sites that offer free content. Personally, if I go to a website that is just a storefront, I may be hesitant to buy. However, if I come in and click around a bit and get to know more about the owners and their products, I may just pull out my wallet.

Plus, content makes websites “sticky”. This means that, if a visitor comes to a website and finds good information (in any format), they are more likely to return than if they just land on a sales page.

How can you Add Content to your Website? 1. Add articles to your website. You can use a mix of your own unique content, free reprint articles and Private Label Rights (PLR) articles.

2. Add a blog. If you don’t want to add articles directly to your site, then create a blog where you can talk about your products or services and list special offers. You can add articles to your blog, or simply chat and showcase specials and uses for your products and services. Establish yourself as an expert and people will come back for more.

3. Tweak your product descriptions. This is a simple way to increase the content on your website (and, possibly, increase sales). Just add more text to your product descriptions in your storefront - be more descriptive, and you’ll be providing more content.

4. Ask for comments and feedback. No matter what kind of website you have, incorporating comments from others can help make your website more valuable.

5. Add testimonials. Simple and effective, testimonials not only make your site appear more trustworthy, but they also add content for search engines.

6. Archive your newsletters. If you publish a weekly newsletter, archive your previous issues on your website.

7. Add audio. It’s simple and easy to record and publish audio online now, with services that do everything for you. Interview someone or have someone interview you. Include your interviews on your website for added credibility and information for your visitors.

8. Frequently Asked Questions. Keep track of the customer service questions you receive, and answer them on a FAQ page. You’ll add content and spend less time answering repeat questions from your potential clients.

by rumblepup

BAMF. No, I’m not talking about the tape company. That’s BASF. Even though this little bitty blog of mine is open to all comments and all forms of expression, when I started to type out the words for one of my favorite acronyms, Mrs. Rumblepup gave me the stink-eye, and let me tell you, Mrs. Rumblepup’s stink-eye would send city devouring demons running and crying like little girls who just had their favorite Hello Kitty pocketbook ripped apart by a 7 foot crack fiend on steroids.

But I digress.

BAMF. That pretty much sums up the marketing Bad Ass (I did get the first two words in, neener, neener, neener) that is Mr. Brian Mark.

Brian Mark is a marketing animal. Well, you pretty much have to be a marketing animal when you run a show like http://www.toolbarn.com. Go ahead, check it out. I’ll wait.

Just a tool website you say?

Did you look at the PR?
Did you check out the backlinks?

That’s right. We’re talking about an Internet 500 company. What’s that, you say? Well, there’s the Fortune 500, and there’s the web equivalent of the Internet 500. Why is that impressive? Well, just imagine this; How many successful e-commerce sites do you know of? A whole bunch is an adequate statement. Heck, you might even run one. Ok, and the web consists of millions of web sites, of which, a great many are e-commerce or merchant sites. Somebody like Internet Retailer makes an exhausting search on the TOP 500 of these in terms of revenue, and the site Brian Mark runs is IN THERE with Abercrombie and Fitch, and Fossil.

Are you catching my drift here? Toolbarn.com is mentioned in the same company as Apple Computer and Target for darn sake. Just take a look at who is on the list of Top 500’s to see what I’m talking about. That takes some marketing know how, and Brian Mark is full of marketing know how.

I heard it leaks out of his ear on some occasions.

A regular speaker at SES, he’s known for great SEM and fantastic PPC marketing campaigns. PPC alone gives me hives to try to figure out, but he has figured them out.

He’s damn proud of his machines too. Whenever he gets a new box in the Computer Room, with childlike abandon, he plays with it, then runs and tells everybody the cool new toy he’s got. Sometimes he doesn’t even play with it first, just runs and tell the computer geeks amongst us about the cool new box they’re installing right now, just to make the pocket protector crowd heave a collective “whooooaaaa.”

I have a lot of respect for Brian, ‘cause we have similar backgrounds. Coming from an artistic background, he started out doing graphic design and computer graphics, and he up and decides to learn something simple, like UNIX, runs a few IT departments here and there, and then gets into web design and promotion.

See, just like me, except he’s good at it.

Word on the street is that if anybody knows the algo it’s him. I’ve even heard some rumors that he’s on a first name basis with the algo, and invites it over for cookies and beer all the time.

Running several successful blogs, several successful sites, speaking at SES, and joining the maverick team of Top SEO Consultants has made Brian Mark somewhat of a celebrity marketer amongst the “little train that could” crowd, and a respected professional amongst ALL CROWDS. I’ve had the pleasure of being called a numb-nut by him and then being taught a finer wisdom that he can drop on you like a ton of bricks.

So you know I had to ask him some rumblepup questions.

When I asked him if I could, he said yes. Then he gave me a cookie.

…

How did he know I wanted a cookie right there and then?

He’s a BAMF marketer, that’s why.

Full article

by Robert Lemos

The digital denizens of Second Life could be forgiven for thinking they were in the wrong world last Sunday.

For about two hours, the virtual landscape of Second Life filled with golden rings and the distinctive two-tone ding of Sega’s popular Sonic the Hedgehog games. The rings’ listed creator was the fictional “Dr. Robotnik,” a character from the Sonic games. However, the deluge of rings was not some form of cross promotion, but a viral attack of self-replicating objects, known less than affectionately as “grey goo.”

Full article

By Mark Alexander Bain

As an Excel user, you may have looked at OpenOffice.org and found that it doesn’t support Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), the Microsoft Office macro language. If you’ve spent years building hundreds of Excel macros, the fear of losing them all could keep you locked in to Office. If so, it’s time to look again; Novell has taken OpenOffice.org’s source code and create a version of its own that supports Excel VBA.

Novell’s Noel Power is the developer in charge of introducing Excel VBA interoperability into OpenOffice.org Calc. He says that the interoperability is achieved by:

• allowing Excel VBA macros to run natively within OpenOffice.org;
• providing a compatibility object model;
• continuously improving the compatibility model by identifying and implementing the most useful and widely used APIs;
• extending the symbols available to ooo-basic to include the compatibility API; and
• modifying the core ooo-basic runtime to handle Excel VBA syntax.

Download Open Office 2.0.4

Full Article

Three million Britons have been issued with the new hi-tech passport, designed to frustrate terrorists and fraudsters. So why did Steve Boggan and a friendly computer expert find it so easy to break the security codes?

Six months ago, with the help of a rather scary computer expert, I deconstructed the life of an airline passenger simply by using information garnered from a boarding-pass stub he had thrown into a dustbin on the Heathrow Express. By using his British Airways frequent-flyer number and buying a ticket in his name on the airline’s website, we were able to access his personal data, passport number, date of birth and nationality. Based on this information, using publicly available databases, we found out where he lived, his profession, all his academic qualifications and even how much his house was worth.

Full Article

Blake Ross helped make Firefox one of the biggest open-source success stories ever. Just wait until you see what he’s up to now

With his newest venture, he’s doing mom and dad their biggest favor yet. Two days before the black-tie event, dressed in T‑shirt and jeans in an Italian restaurant owned by his uncle, Ross plugged in his laptop and prepared to unveil, for the first time to any member of the press, his next big thing. Just as with Firefox, Ross began this project by asking himself one simple question: What’s bad about today’s software?

The answer, he and his programming partner, Joe Hewitt, decided, resided in the gap between the desktop and the Web. “Right now, people want to shuffle around content,” he says, “but the world’s fused together by a collection of hacks.” Something that should be simple, say, getting photos from a digital camera onto the Web, is a Sisyphean task for most people. “Step back and ask, ‘What’s wrong with this picture?’” Ross says.

The problem, according to Ross, is there’s no simple, cohesive tool to help people store and share their creations online. Currently, the steps involved depend on the medium. If you want to upload photos, for example, you have to dump your images into one folder, then transfer them to an image-sharing site such as Flickr. The process for moving videos to YouTube or a similar site is completely different. If you want to make a personal Web page within an online community, you have to join a social network, say, MySpace or Friendster. If you intend to rant about politics or movies, you launch a blog and link up to it from your other pages. The mess of the Web, in other words, leaves you trapped in one big tangle of actions, service ­providers, and applications.

Ross’s answer is named Parakey. As he describes it, from a user’s point of view, Parakey is “a Web operating system that can do everything an OS can do.” Translation: it makes it really easy to store your stuff and share it with the world. Most or all of Parakey will be open source, under a license similar to Firefox’s. There are differences between the two projects, however. Although Ross plans to incorporate the talents and passions of the free-software community, he’s building Parakey around a for-profit business model. And he’s leading the charge with a simple battle cry: “One interface, not two!”…

Source

by Glenn Haertlein

Perhaps you’re on a tight budget and you don’t want to pay big bucks for Microsoft Office. Or maybe you have to collaborate on a project across several platforms–more than just Mac and PC–and you need a versatile office suite that allows you to do this. Or maybe you just plain don’t like Microsoft Office! Whatever the reason, if you’re in search of a free alternative to Microsoft Office, the best place to turn is “open source” software.

What is open source? Put simply, open source refers to programs whose source code is available to the public free of charge and open to changes and modification. On the surface that sounds dangerous. Couldn’t anybody just hack into the code and riddle it with viruses and spyware? Yes, but it is highly unlikely. Open source programs are the work of a large community of programmers who take their work and their reputations seriously. Of course an unscrupulous hack might try to sabotage an open source program, but given the peer review that reputable open source programs undergo before they are officially declared stable makes this virtually impossible.

Open source software makes for a family of programs that is incredibly dynamic and diversified. Upgrades, improvements, and even user-requested customizations are fast-paced compared to those in the commercial, closed-source market–not to mention free in most cases. Some examples of open source software include Linux (an operating system), OpenOffice (an office suite similar to MS Office), and Joomla (a web development program). All of these programs are incredibly robust and enjoy a large community of contributors, which translates into LOTS of free customer support.

So much for the introductory crash course into open source software! What about the free alternative to Microsoft Office? Of the available free titles, perhaps the best is OpenOffice available for free from www.openoffice.org. OpenOffice is a full-featured office suite that will allow you to do everything that MS Office does without the hefty price tag. It can even use and create MS Office files and Adobe .pdf’s. That said, you need to understand that OpenOffice is NOT MS Office. By that I mean that OpenOffice has its signature characteristics-and quirks. For instance, it has an unusual way of handling graphics in Writer, its word processing program. Its way of cropping graphics is not as intuitive as it could be, but it’s a small price to pay, given how powerful it is. Stride for stride, OpenOffice is every bit as good as (some would say better than) its Microsoft counterpart.

Below is a list of the programs included in OpenOffice, and the MS Office equivalent:

• OpenOffice: Writer - Word processor = MS Word
• OpenOffice: Impress - Presentation software = PowerPoint
• Calc - Spreadsheet = Excel
• Base - Database program = Access
• Math - Creates mathematical functions = ?
• Draw - Creates vector graphics = ?

When you download OpenOffice, you have a number of options besides just which operating system you want to use it on. OpenOffice is available in a number of developmental stages, also known as builds. If you’re a software developer up for a fulfilling challenge, the latest build may be exactly what you want. The latest builds are works in progress, have the latest innovations, and require a programmer’s expertise to perfect.For the rest of us, the latest build is probably not the best thing. The latest builds may have the latest innovations, but that also means they will be the ones most prone to crashes and bugs. If you want OpenOffice ready-to-use, download the stable version. It’s like buying the current model year car as opposed to buying the concept car. Sure the concept car is cool and will turn a lot of heads, but you don’t know if all the bugs have been worked out yet. The current model year car is still cool and still turns heads, and you can be sure it’s reliable. The stable version is the download that OpenOffice.org promotes by default. With it, you’ll get the latest and greatest available to the average user, and you’ll save yourself a lot of frustration.

OK, so OpenOffice is cheap (read free) and robust, but is it easy to learn, and is it practical? Yes. MS Office users should have few problems transitioning into OpenOffice; and its multiple platform availability makes it ideal for collaborative efforts. OpenOffice is available for Windows (2000, NT & XP), Linux, Solaris, Mac OSX (including Mac Intel), Linux PPC, and FreeBSD.

So, if you’re simply looking for a Microsoft Office alternative, looking to collaborate across several platforms, or just trying to save a few bucks, OpenOffice is an efficient and cost-effective tool worthy of your consideration.

Download OpenOffice.org 2.0.4
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