If you’re interested in promoting a product or service online, you need all the free IM  tools you can get!  Today’s featured tool is HubPages.  Here’s what I like about this self-promotional and monetizing tool:

1. It’s like a free article site except that you don’t have to give anyone the right to re-publish it elsewhere.  While other article directory sites can give you great backlinks, they can get you the duplicate content wrist slap because other sites are promoting your content.
2. It has great SEO potential with the ability to put your RSS feeds, your links and tagged photos plus get you indexed in search engines for your targeted key phrases.
3. You can earn money through ad sharing from HubPages via Google Adsense and other publishers as well as put various affiliate links in the pages.
4. HubPages has a social aspect as well with the community that posts there which can help you get more exposure for your hub!

The more you have in your marketing arsenal, the better.  Tools like these can help you get noticed, get subscribers and make sales!

Have a most outstanding day.

Dana Prince
Internet Marketing Blog
www.SeanSEO.com © 2008

Do you want to have more subscribers on Twitter?  Do you want to maximise your marketing impact in the Twitterverse? Your Twitter people, a.k.a your “Tweeps” are interested in following like minded people and / or very interesting people.  If you try to sign up with the sole purpose of link baiting, you’re not going to get very far with this tool.  In order to maximise the impact of Twitter for internet marketing you have to treat it like a social marketing tool that requires both give and take.

Here are some Twitter tips:

-Don’t push out a link in every Tweet. More than 75% of your Tweets should be interesting rather than product related.

-Do reply to your followers who ask you a question or comment on one of your statuses via the replies button. If you don’t check this and ignore those trying to converse with you, you’ll get ‘un-followed’.

-Tweet unto others as you’d have Tweeted unto you.  That means that if you want people re-tweeting you, do that for them. Social bookmark for them, tell your followers that @user is a great person to follow, etc.   Social media is very much a tool built on quid pro quo.

Happy Tweeting!

Have a most outstanding day.

Dana Prince
Internet Marketing Blog
www.SeanSEO.com © 2008

Should your domain name be your name? It’s a fair question. But what’s the answer?

Is it a good idea?

It can depend to an extent what kind of internet business you are in. If you are a writer then buying this kind of domain name is a good idea, since people will probably look up your name online to see where else your name has cropped up. If you have your own website linked to your name, then you will be found easily and you can then showcase your work to potential buyers.

But does the same apply to other internet businesses? Is a personal domain name rather vain, or is it a good idea?

Depends on the Website

In short, it can depend on the type of website and internet business you want to set up. Some people have attached their own person domain name to their blog, and in this case it can work very well because it is a personal thing. But what if you are establishing an internet business which sells computer supplies?

In this case your own personal domain name may be a little out of place, since people will be looking for a website address which highlights the type of business that is being run.

Perhaps the only exception would be if you use your surname as part of your business name. For example Joe Bloggs could run Bloggs’ Computer Supplies, and get that as a domain name.

In the end the basic rule of thumb is this – if your website is chiefly about you in some way then a personal domain name is fine. But if it is about your business then you might want to give it a miss and go for something more descriptive. Blogs can get away with it, even if they are promotional in some way, but regular websites don’t work well unless they are all about you.

Have a most outstanding day.

Sean Rasmussen
Internet Marketing Blog
www.SeanSEO.com © 2008

If you’re new to internet marketing it might be tempting to sign up with every affiliate marketing plan you can find. The problem with this is that until you know what you’re doing and are hitting pay dirt on a regular basis, you should probably stick with one or two affiliate networks instead of a bunch of individual affiliate programs.

Benefits of Affiliate Networks

You should consider deciding to focus on a narrow area so that:

a) While you get your feet wet, you only have to learn a specific set of rules instead of 10 different sets of rules based on different agreements. Keeping it straight can be tricky when you’re assimilating new info.

b)  You have one goal for your first payout.  If you sign up with an affiliate network, for instance, you might have a $100 payout level before you get your first check. Because you’ve got the opportunity to sell more than one product under that network, you’ll have more of a chance of hitting that payout level sooner. This is better than waiting for 10 different affiliate programs to add up to $100 each.  The sooner you get your first payment, the better!

c) Not all affiliate marketing programs are created equally and if you sign up with individual plans, you’re at their mercy if they change policies or go belly up before you get payout levels. When you sign up with an affiliate network instead, you’ll get the opportunity to get paid regardless. The network has the onus of paying you and it falls under their responsibility to chase for payment.

This doesn’t suggest you should never sell affiliate programs that are run independant from networks like Commission Junction, Pepperjam or others but suggests that when you’re first getting started, you focus on an affiliate opportunity with proven results before you dabble in foreign waters.

Have a most outstanding day.

Dana Prince
Internet Marketing Blog
www.SeanSEO.com © 2008

3 things you should use with blogging we talked about a magical traffic formula for your blog traffic.  There are things you need to do to your main blog site to get constant traffic but with each entry you write, you should do a few things to bring in extra traffic.

Today we’ll give you a few tips on coming up with your own formula to use each time you post a new entry.  You may choose to use some of the tools listed below or you may have some of your own but developing a routine (or several alternating routines) can help you get traffic each and every time you post a new blog entry.  These methods will improve your site’s SEO as well!

What’s the formula for getting traffic?

You have to do some blog SEO! While pinging services and search engine spiders will help you get some hits, you also have to devise your own traffic formula to get word out that your blog has got something new that people might be interested in. It can make the difference between a few hits and a lot of traffic with actual subscribers

After each awesome blog entry you write, encourage further traffic by doing a few quick things.

Here are some things you could do:

• Go to Twitter.com and update your status
• Sign up for a service like Ping.fm which will update multiple social services
• Give yourself a thumbs up on StumbleUpon
• Visit your friends at Plurk.com and tell them you’ve updated your blog
• Update your MySpace, StumbleUpon, Tumblr and Live Journal blogs and update those
• Use the bookmarklet Onlywire which updates several services for you
• Digg your post
• Submit your post to Yahoo Buzz
• If the entry is really a good one, you can get a lot of mileage out of it and write an article, Squidoo lens or Hubpage (or all three!) with resource box links to your new blog entry.

If you use Firefox and want to save some time, you could create sets of tabs with these sites home pages loaded so that you can simply write a blog and then open up a new set of tabs to perform the actions quickly and easily.

Have a most outstanding day.

Dana Prince
Internet Marketing Blog
www.SeanSEO.com © 2008