The Ten Things Women Should Know About Men By Ayanna Guyhto

This scholarly fine written article reveals ten facts about men which women ought to know in order to help them better understand them and so improve communications and relationships between them.
By Ikey Benney, Creator of â??TMT Power Secretsâ?? System

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DiggBait 101: 8 Ways to Help You Get to Digg's Front Page

8 things you can do to improve the odds that your post will get dugg according to SEO Egghead.

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30 SEO Tips from the Matt Cutts Videos

Just the focused SEO tips for webmasters, extracted from hours of Matt Cutts videos. Quickly get at the stuff that will impact your web design and development strategy.

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10 ways to avoid outrageous hospital overcharges

Profit-hungry hospitals are overcharging consumers an estimated $10 billion a year. Some deliberately work to keep bills indecipherable. Here's how to fight back.

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Social Bookmarking For Traffic By Mark Daoust

A while back I wrote an article commenting on Yahoo's public declaration that they were effectively conceding to Google in the search market. The point of the article was that Yahoo was not necessarily giving up as a business, but rather focusing its efforts on more modern forms of search.

And what are these more modern forms of search? In a word, social networks which includes social bookmarking and variants on social bookmarking.

What is Social Bookmarking?

Social bookmarking is one of the flagships of Web 2.0. The basic concept behind social bookmarking is that when thousands of people get together, bookmark their favorite pages, and apply descriptive tags to each page that they bookmark, certain websites will rise to the top as being more popular.

The result of this is that surfers will be able to see what websites are currently popular among users.

The idea of social bookmarking seems to have been originated by Del.icio.us back in 2003. Just by visiting the front page of Del.icio.us you can see the social bookmarking in practice. On the right hand side of the page there is a column labeled 'Popular'.

These are websites that currently are receiving a lot of attention from users under specific keywords and phrases. These websites are listed under common 'tags' that users have given.

Article Tip:

Wikipedia gives a fairly good explanation of social bookmarking.

You can find that explanation at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_bookmarking

You can also goto Del.icio.us and try out the service which is a great way to learn about social bookmarking

Digging for the News

Del.icio.us is not the only Web 2.0 flagship that relies on the power of the collective people. Arguably one of the most successful Web 2.0 enterprises is Digg.


Digg is a news website which presents headlines from across the Internet. Unlike practically every other news website to date, however, Digg does not rely on editors to determine which news stories are worthy of their front page and which news stories they should ignore.

Rather, Digg relies on the input of their users.

The system behind Digg is simple. Registered users can navigate their way to "Digg for Stories". Here everyone can see all of the stories submitted to Digg.

If a user likes one of the stories, they simply click on the "Digg It" link.

If they do not like the story they can either ignore the story or report it as being lame, a duplicate story, or outright spam. If a story receives enough Diggs in a fast enough amount of time, it gets promoted to the front page.

The system seems to work fairly well. Digg has been smart enough to put into place anti-cheating devices which do a fairly good job of catching manipulators of their system. And if someone does break through these barriers, Digg users (often referred to as Diggnation) are usually pretty quick to point out the offending users.

Why Should I Care About These Services?

This is all fine and interesting, but you might be wondering why you should spend your precious time reading more of this article. The answer is simple: websites like Digg and Del.icio.us represent the opportunity to get a lot of new traffic as well as quality links to your website.

Digg and Del.icio.us offer the absolute best type of web traffic: viral traffic. Business owners know that the most reliable prospects are the prospects that come from the referral of someone else, and Digg and Del.icio.us offer just that.

In order to get seen on a large scale from any of these websites that rely on a community of users, your content must be good enough to meet the approval of enough people to warrant the elevation of your site to the front page. This, in effect, is like one great recommendation for your website.

So how much traffic are we talking about? Darren Rowse of ProBlogger.net noted that when a post of his reached the front page of Del.icio.us, he saw around 8,000 visitors that day from Del.icio.us alone.

This does not take into account all the bloggers and website owners who discovered his site from Del.icio.us, posted a link to it on their site or in a forum, which would in turn generate more traffic to his site.

Tech-Recipes, a relatively common website on the front page of Digg, wrote a great post on what the digg effect is like. The traffic numbers they post are quite astounding. From being featured in Digg, they regularly see 5,000 – 10,000 visitors per day.

This is not unusual either – websites that are featured in Digg are often subject to what has been dubbed the "Digg Effect". It is quite common, unfortunately, for a dug website to receive so much traffic that it brings down the server.

Now both Del.icio.us and Digg users do not tend to be very active users. This has been pointed out by more than one person. Typically they do not click on ads, they do not comment on blogs, and they do not register for an account with you.

But the name of the website marketing game is always going to be free exposure, and social bookmarking services like these are great ways to get a lot of free exposure for your website. In addition, these sites will often have secondary and tertiary effects which you may not be able to link back directly to your initial exposure on them.

I'm Sold – Where Do I Sign Up?

So you are now sold on just how great it can be to be featured on sites like Del.icio.us and Digg. The natural question to ask here is how do you get featured on these sites.

I am pretty sure the answer I am about to give is going to be one that you do not like as it is a tired phrase:

You need good, unique content.

Sound familiar? If you follow SEO at all, you undoubtedly have been told that good, unique content is the best way to get to the top of the rankings. The same thing holds true, but even more so, for social bookmarking websites.

In order to be featured on these sites, your website does not have to meet the approval of an automated bot that is scouring the web for information.

Instead, your website needs to meet the approval of actual human beings who are going to look at your website, determine whether they like it or not, and then tell you the honest truth.

In the past, web pages that have been successful in being featured may have had the following traits:
- They are usually unique
- They often have useful content, such as a tutorial
- They may contain breaking news or an exclusive report
- They are sometimes particularly humorous
- It may be free content for downloading (free wallpapers have done well with Digg)
- It will rise to the top naturally – without manipulation

After I wrote the article on Yahoo I received an email asking how one would optimize their site for social bookmarking services.

The response to that would have to be simple: optimize your site by offering some great, free content that anyone can access.
A Word to the Wise – Don't Cheat

As a quick sidebar, it is important to note that those who try to cheat the systems usually find themselves worse off than they were to begin with. It is very tempting when dealing with a system like Del.icio.us and Digg to try and manipulate the system to artificially get your website to the top.
The problem with this is simple: if you do succeed in manipulating the system, but do not have the content to really deserve a featured placement, you will undoubtedly turn off more visitors than attract. If your content is deserving of a featured placement, it should rise there naturally.

Social Bookmarking – The Future of Search?

The point of the article which I referenced above was not to state that Yahoo was washed up, but rather that Yahoo was on the cusp of a new Internet and a new form of search.

They recognized that Google would not be beat in the search market; however, this does not mean that they can not beat Google by creating a market more effective than search.

Social bookmarking is already becoming a very effective way for experienced web surfers to find the latest information on a particular subject. Do you want to see some of the latest videos to become popular? Just goto http://del.icio.us/tags/video and you can see what others are discovering and bookmarking as valuable.

Want to find some rather obscure guide on Ruby on Rails? Lookup the common tags for Ruby on Rails and search through these resources.

Social bookmarking has the great ability to reach where search engines cannot: by using viral marketing and popular opinion, social bookmarking has the ability to discover what is important before any bot can spider the site and rank it among the thousands of sites available.

Granted, social bookmarking will never replace search completely, but as it grows in popularity, web users are quickly discovering a whole new way to discover web pages that they would never discover otherwise.

So take the time today to examine Digg and Del.icio.us. Take a little more time to find new social websites like Digg and Del.icio.us (they are popping up all over the place) and learn what seems to make users on these sites click.

Social technologies are here to stay, and they are only going to grow in popularity. Right now is a golden opportunity for you to gain great exposure for your website if you simply learn how to use these services.

About The Author
Mark Daoust is the owner of Site Reference. http://www.sitepronews.com/archives/2006/mar/22.html
This article may be reprinted as long as all links are active, including a link to the article's original location which can be found at Site Reference.

Online Media Planning 101: What You Need To Know

By now, everyone knows the Web is for real.

Online purchasing is already up 33% in 2006 and online advertising is expected to grow more than 30% this year.

But if you ask most marketers about online media planning, you’re likely to get a confused look, followed by "we’ve heard of it, but don’t know much about it."

Despite the rapid growth in online advertising, very few marketers have experience or insights into online media planning. There’s a reason for that.

But before we look at today’s environment, let’s take a quick look back at traditional media planning.

It used to be much simpler to advertise. You could reach 80% of U.S. consumers by advertising on primetime, network-syndicated TV. Outside of TV, Radio and Local or National Print Ads, advertisers didn’t have a lot of options. Nor did they need them as they could reach most of their audiences through these media outlets.

Today, such mass reach requires a much broader strategy as consumer preferences for media have exponentially widened.

Despite the change, media planning fundamentals remain the same - reach the right person at the right time with the right message. Online media offers today’s marketers an unparalleled opportunity to achieve these goals in an efficient, measurable way.

We define "online media planning" as the process of determining where, when and how to advertise online, based on your target audience, objectives and budget. The market for online media planning is relatively new, growing quickly and changing rapidly.

While purchasing TV and Radio spots is widely understood with pricing that is somewhat static, the online media world is like a lot the Wild West - lacking structure, standards, transparency and efficiency. It’s broad, deep and dynamic.

In other words, it’s hard to get your arms around it if you aren’t able to dedicate substantial resources to it.

Despite some of the challenges of advertising on the Web, very few companies can afford NOT to do it. There’s no denying that the Internet has changed the way we all conduct our daily lives.

So if you want to deliver your message to your target audience at the right time and in the right place, you need to be advertising online.

While search engine marketing (both and natural and pay-per-click) is a no-brainer, there are only so many relevant keyword searches conducted on any given day.

If you are targeting local (vs. national) audiences, the reach provided by search engines can be very limited. Lastly, Search Ads are normally geared to attract clicks, not build your brand.

So if search engines alone do not provide the volume of traffic or brand awareness you need to achieve your marketing objectives, you must find other ways to reach prospective customers. This is why the demand for targeted, online advertising is growing rapidly.


When you start the process of researching online ad buys, you’ll quickly find that it’s a pretty daunting task, especially if your ad budget is limited.

Not only is there a universe of media outlets, but there are also many different types of interactive media. Below is a summary to help you better understand the market.

Types of Media Outlets:

Media buys can be made from a variety of media service companies, such as:

- Portals

Aggregators of content, email and IM, such as Yahoo, MSN and AOL.

- Web sites

Such as Chron.com, NickJr.com, MySpace.com and CitySearch.com.
- Ad Networks

Media companies that serve ads across hundreds or thousands of sites, such as Value Click, FastClick, ContextWeb, Advertising.com and Vendare Media.

- Affiliate Networks

Networks of small sites; each site select ads it wants to serve.

- Search engines

Such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL and Ask.com.

- Email lists

Owned by companies such as Venture Direct and Net Creations.

Types of Media:

When making ad buys, several types of online media are available, such as:

- Text ads on Web sites
- Text ads in email newsletters
- Banner ads on Web sites
- Banner ads in email newsletters
- Rich media (interactive ad units)
- Dedicated email advertisements sent by third parties to their opt-in lists.

Types of Pricing:

When making ad buys, there are three primary pricing models, including:

- Cost per thousand impressions (CPM)

How print ads are sold, based on reach.

- Cost Per Click (CPC)

Made popular by Google, these are ads where advertisers are only charged when a visitor clicks on their ads.

- Cost Per Action (CPA)

Commissions paid when a visitor takes a desired action (e.g. registers or makes a purchase).
Once you get your arms around the selection of outlets, the various types of media and how deals are structured, you need to figure out where to advertise, what types of ads to buy, and how much to spend on each.

This is where experience and expertise in online media is critical. While the specifics for each campaign will vary, some basic principles apply.

- Define your target audience(s).
- Define your objectives: Branding, Direct Response or a combination.
- Define metrics for measuring success.
- Determine your budget and timeline.

Once defined, select the types of outlets and media based on pricing and available budget.

To do this, you’ll need not only a broad understanding of which types of media and outlets work best given your audience and objectives, but you’ll also need an analytical framework to put it all together. This usually requires a complex spreadsheet or database model to capture the data and manage the process.

Like most things, the devil is in the details, and success comes from doing the little things right.

This is why most companies outsource their online media planning to interactive agencies such as Spur Digital. As with other aspects of your business, if it’s complex and requires specialization, and it’s not one of your core competencies, it’s usually best to hire someone to handle it for you.

About the Author: Steve Latham is the founder and CEO of Spur Digital, a leading full-service interactive agency based in Houston, Texas. To learn more about Spur Digital’s online media planning services please Contact Us.

How Super Affiliates Choose Their Top Affiliate Program By Detlev Reimer

You will certainly have heard about success stories from affiliates who are making their living just by selling products which they haven't even created themselves... How did they know which affiliate program to promote?

Going after the money or your interests?

When you're promoting affiliate programs, you have two choices: Either you can decide to promote popular items which are very likely to be sold as there is a huge level of interest (a lot of competition also) or you can promote something you really like, something that is related to your hobbies and interests.

The best thing is to combine the best of both worlds by promoting a product which is in demand but which interests you as well. For example products related to golfing are very popular and there are a lot of keywords related to that area. And if you are a golfer yourself, you will have no problems finding topics to write about on your site.

You could write about how to improve your golf swing or where to find the best golf equipment or you simply explain golfing rules. That's up to you.

Whatever you decide, make sure you do your keyword research. The best tool I know of to find related keywords to your main keyword is an online tool called WordTracker. With this tool, you'll find dozens if not hundreds of related words and phrases together with an analysis for the profitabililty in the search engines. It even shows you how often people have searched for these combinations.

I'm using the suggestions from WordTracker myself now to create highly targeted and optimized affiliate sites!

What are the most important facts before promoting any affiliate program?

1) There must be a demand for the product the merchant is offering. You can check this by visiting Overture.com and see if any sellers are bidding on keywords related to the product you want to offer.

2) The commission must be substantial in itself. If you're promoting a $5 item then you need to make a lot of sales and it can be as difficult as selling a high ticket item. Make sure it's worth it. Commissions of 50% would be desirable (mainly digital goods) but for high ticket items even just 20-45% will do it.

Personally, I would not promote anything that offers me a commission lower than $15 per sale.

3) You should be able to reach someone at the company if you have any questions related to the product. After all, if you don't know enough details, how are you going to sell these items to your customers?

4) The sales letter must be convincing enough to get people to buy the product. Put yourself in your customers' shoes and ask yourself: Would I buy the product myself when I was visiting this page? Moreover, the sales letter has got to have enough testimonials included. This will boost your conversion ratio.

5) There should be a money-back guarantee for the product being sold. If the affiliate program owner doesn't offer this, then you better search for something different to promote...!

6) Physical address and contact info should be visible on the site.

7) The affiliate program must offer realtime statistics so you can see how many visits you are converting into sales. If you are using an affiliate network like ClickBank or Commission Junction, be sure to use tracking links for your ads to be able to check the number of visitors.
Where to find those profitable affiliate programs?

There are several dozens of affiliate program directories and these places are the first choice for affiliate marketers to look at when searching for new products to promote. Typically, the best known directories will be searched first, like Alan Gardyne's AssociatePrograms.com or Chuck McCullough's AffiliateMatch.com.

Another way to find the most profitable affiliate programs is by searching in regular affiliate networks like the before mentioned ClickBank (for digital goods) and Commission Junction (mainly physical goods).

Conclusion:
Most super affiliates will look in affiliate program directories to find their top performing affiliate program. If the product owner offers a fair share of the profits (for physical goods around 5-20% and for digital goods about 35-75%), the super affiliate will choose the one which offers him the highest payout when the points 1-7 of my list above are okay with the merchant.

About the Author
Detlev Reimer

AffiliateTurbo: Submit your Affiliate Program to 43 Affiliate Directories in 1 Hour! A Quick and Easy Way to add Hundreds of Affiliates to your Affiliate Program. Download a DEMO: http://www.affiliateturbo.com/. Subscribe to my Web Money Tips at http://www.internetmarketing-success.com/

STOP Affiliate Commission Hijackers By S. Denise Hoyle

Some affiliate industry experts and concerned webmasters have recently been voicing their opposition to a number of popular free software downloads that divert commissions away from sites actually providing affiliate traffic into the pockets of the software providers.

The software, known in affiliate circles as thief-ware, pirate- ware, steal-ware and parasite-ware, is made by close to 20 companies and is used by dozens more. Thief-ware is typically installed when a user downloads free music or file swapping software, and the consumer is generally not clearly informed that by downloading the free software they are allowing their computers to be electronically marked.

Thief-ware allows future purchases via affiliate links to be overwritten and makes them appear as if they were made through the software provider's links when they are not, and it continues to redirect commissions on all subsequent sales - even if the software is uninstalled.

Companies who provide the diversion software include Morpheus, LimeWire, Kazaa, TopMoxie and BearShare among others.

The software has reportedly been downloaded by tens of millions of Internet surfers, and the makers contend that they're doing nothing wrong since users agree to their terms when they download the free software.

Amazon.com obviously disagrees with the practice since they recently terminated Morpheus for violating its policies - great news for their 800,000+ affiliates. However other large affiliate companies, such as Commission Junction (cj.com), are so far refusing to take sides in the battle because the diversion practices have not yet been found to violate any laws.

Some of the companies who provide the software, including LimeWire and Morpheus, say that they have provided "fixes" for the software so affiliate commissions are not inadvertently overwritten. The "fixes" supposedly allow users to choose whether to support their software provider, or in some cases earn a "rebate" or "reward" for themselves by making purchases through affiliate links and allowing the links to be overwritten with the provider's code.

Although the debate over the legality of diverting affiliate commissions continues, most webmasters who spend a great deal of time and effort fine-tuning their sites with content to attract users say the practices are unethical at best, and at worst outright theft.


There is little at this point that webmasters can do to halt the practice of hijacking commissions altogether, other than voice their opinions to companies they are affiliated with and take steps within their own web sites to curb the theft.

To protect the affiliate links in your web site, and stop commission thieves in their tracks, you can disguise all of your affiliate links so they appear to be links to other pages within your site by creating a "redirection URL" for each of them. To do this, simply create a new web page that looks like this:



Replace "affiliate_url" with your actual coded affiliate URL, and remove the periods at the beginning of each line that are used here for demonstration purposes. Now you will advertise your disguised affiliate links by directing visitors to your new URL:
www.yourdomainname.com/redirection_page.html

Until there is some kind of consensus and perhaps action taken on the issue, the best way to fight back against commission hijackers is to protect your site as best you can, and inform your affiliate partners of how thief-ware hurts the small companies and sites that help make the Internet great - and depend on their affiliate income to survive.

About the Author S. Denise Hoyle is President and co-founder of affiliatesifter.com, an affiliate directory site devoted to providing links, news and information of interest to webmasters and affiliate program managers. (c) Copyright 2002, S. Denise Hoyle. All Rights Reserved.

Work Those Affiliate Programs and Make Some Cash!

So you've joined your first affiliate/associate program and slapped that big old banner on your site. All you have to do now is sit back and wait for the bucks to come rolling in. Not so fast there, Bucky...there's a lot more to making money with affiliate programs than that. If your best effort is going to be that banner, don't plan on retiring any day soon.

As with everything else online and off, what you get out of an activity is equal to the effort you put into it. So if you want to make some serious cash with those programs you're joining, you're going to need to promote them. There are a variety of methods you can use. Here are a few that I've used with success:

My first suggestion to you is to join only those programs that relate to the theme of your website. Make sure they're a "good fit" with your site and that they pay out "healthy" commissions. A $2.00 bounty is hardly worth the work involved to earn it, like:

Weaving the URL's throughout your site. Make sure you weave the URL's throughout your site or devote whole pages to their topic.Don't just use banners, use alternatives like text links within your pages. Banners have become so saturated online that a lot of folks tend to ignore them,not to mention the extra weight they add to your pages.

Most programs you join will give you a variety of ads to use in your promotion efforts, but for best results you really should be creative and write some of your own. All too often I see the same old advertisement repeated over and over online until I want to scream. A little creativity stressing the benefits of your product will take you a lot farther then canned ads that 10,000 other affiliates are using.

Make a habit of scanning discussion boards and look for any opportunity to answer a question or give advice using your affiliate link. At the least, make the link a part of your signature line and use in your e-mail correspondence and newsgroup postings.

If you publish your own ezine, make sure you keep a list of text ads for all of the associate programs you participate in and pick two or three to put in your newsletter every time you publish. If you've purchased the product yourself, a personal endorsement will pique your subscribers' interest and motivate them to click through. Your subscribers trust you, so don't recommend something you don't believe in.

Don't forget about placing your ads in other ezines that cater to your target audience. There are plenty of inexpensive newsletters just waiting for your ad copy. Say an ad cost you 10.00, and from that ad you make three associate sales that add up to $100.00. That's a pretty nice return on your investment.

One trick that has worked well for me over the years is placing my associate links in e-books that I've written. Since the books are given away for free there's no telling how many people will see those links and possibly make a purchase.

If your book is well written and popular you could stand to make some decent revenue from the associate programs that you've placed in it.

Associate programs really are a great way to make some cash online, but a banner alone is not going to do it. Start promoting your "special link" every chance you get....and you'll be rolling in the dough in no time at all.

Merle http://www.EzineAdAuction.com "Where some of the BEST Deals in Ezine Advertising are Made" Buy & Sell Ezine Ads in a live auction setting! Publishers sell off your excess inventory and Buyers pick up some Fantastic bargains. Go now.