Reviewer of Sites

Looking for a fun way to find others with similar interests on Twitter? You should check out Twiends, built by Dave Sumter of Webcandy fame.  He developed Twiends as a great way to build your Twitter community.  As he says, they “focus on making the introduction, and you focus on deciding who you want to be friends with in the long run. You get to choose who you friend and they get to do the same.  In saying that though, you will find that a lot people will follow you because you are on [Twiends]“.

So, if you are looking for more potential followers, sign up for Twiends!

Tags: Internet, Marketing, Social Bookmarking by reviews
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TagFoot is a fantastic new social bookmarking site that is currently in private beta.  However, you can sign up by clicking here.

TagFoot is similar to Del.icio.us, Digg, and  Squidoo, but has it’s own unique features. It is designed in the smooth and easy to use Web 2.0 format.  Currently, visiting the main page will only bring you to the video, but you can still sign up and take part.  Once the site is fully operational (out of beta mode), then the search engines will crawl and rank the pages.

The supports staff are super friendly and very rapid to work on issues or ideas that the users think up.

Another nifty fact is that they have a 50% Adsense Revenue sharing program. The links are also dofollow, so you not only get traffic from your friends, but get a good backlink.

• Import your existing IE and/or Firefox bookmarks (you can import all as private and change later)
• easily manage and access all of your bookmarks from any computer
• quickly share anything you find on the web with your friends
• share what you want, when you want, with whom you want
• tag all of your imported bookmarks so they are more easily found
• If you’re using Firefox, you can drag and drop links onto your sidefoot – onto a specific tag or section.
• tag your friends and you can send a message and/or share with that tag – everyone you tagged will get your message as opposed to you having to remember everyone’s member name. I use this when I post the Adsense articles – I share with “super users.”
• go to Amazon, find something you like and add it to your tagfoot wishlist. Watch as tagfoot scrapes the page and grabs all of the possible prices for you.
• Play with privacy settings. Add something to your wishlist that you want to buy for a friend, tag it with your friends name, and set it to private. You just created a private shopping list for that friend!
• It’s 100% free!

TagFoot Signup

This is the time to sign up so you can give them your feedback on what you would like to see!

Update: Tagfoot is now adding, not only Adsense revenue sharing, but also has plans for adding other ways of making money (along with being a part of a fun and growing community).  They are asking the members for input right now on other ways, such as Ebay, Amazon, Cafe Press and many more.

Read this:

Additional revenue sharing
Tuesday, October 07, 2008
So, we’ve got our Google Adsense sharing program setup and we’re thrilled so many have jumped on board. We’re now looking forward to getting tagfoot out into the wild so we can start making you guys (and us too) some real money. Until then, it’s going to continue to be pennies no doubt.

First, we need to quiet down the “messages overload” noise we spoke about last week – and we’re on that hard core right now. While we’re banging away on that, there are a couple of other things we can get into regarding moving to a public beta.

One of the most important, is making money.

Revenue sharing
We’ve got a ton of options beyond Adsense and we’re hoping some of you pros will help us whittle it down a bit. Here are a couple of ideas we’re tossing around that we think have the most potential – both keeping in mind the same type of impression based sharing we’re currently doing with Adsense.

1. Amazon
2. iTunes

Amazon
Your personal tagfoot wishlist can end up being a virtual treasure trove in more ways than you think. Not just a place for your friends to find stuff for you on your birthday, your wishlist can make you money all year round by driving traffic from your blogs, MySpace, Facebook etc.

It’s an easy setup. Simply pop in your Amazon affiliate ID, just as you did with your Adsense ID, and we’ll attach it to everything in your wishlist. Next, plug your tagfoot wishlist RSS feed into your personal blog, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, etc. and you’re done.

iTunes
The tubefoot is being used to play free music all day long right now by quite a few. We’re guessing it’s going to get hit pretty hard once word gets out. We can set up the tubefoot with a “purchase” link for each track – linking directly to iTunes.

Same drill – plug in your iTunes affiliate ID, we attach it to the tracks, members copy your tracks and potentially buy’em.

Let’s do this
We’ve got a couple of other ideas we’re throwing around but, we thought it best to hand it off to you guys at this point. We’d like to get most of this stuff solidified over the next couple of weeks so we have a chance at generating some holiday revenue for every one – let’s act quick.

1. What are your thoughts regarding the methods above?
2. What other options would you like to see us consider?

No holds barred.

So, if you want to be in on the discussion, NOW is the time to do it!  Sign up and make your ideas heard.

Tags: Affiliate, Social Bookmarking by reviews
57 Comments »

Have you heard of Share Your Expertise?

It’s a fantastic information sharing community that provides a way for members to post articles within their expertise.  It allows you to maintain your own blog, which you can then talk about your other sites or interests via your signature link.  It is dofollow, so your link will be followed by the search engines.  Unlike most other social article and networking sites, you can be part of a growing and fun community.

Right now there are 19 different ‘Channels’ in which you can post your articles or information.

Tags: Social Bookmarking by reviews
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I am now experimenting with making Squidoo lenses based upon lyrics of songs.  There are a number of benefits to their simplicity, including:

• The potential that you could rank higher is the way in which your lens is constructed and the fact that you could have more related content, thereby probably ranking higher in the SERPs than a competing page.
• You can add easily add the song’s Youtube videos and other content that is not included on other lyrics sites.
• Another benefit includes your including Amazon links to the album or MP3 single.

First, take a look at How To Make A Lyrics Lens.  He did a GREAT job describing how you can make one and the benefits of it.

My modifications include:

• Using the Amazon Spotlight module for the album
• Using the Amazon module for the singles (mp3 singles of just the one song)
• Adding a Blackbox module at the bottom, pointing to other related lenses
• Lensroll your related lenses together
• Adding a Flickr module and set it to a slide show (for the artist or band)

I just started and am already seeing good traffic.

After you’ve got your lenses out of WiP status (work in progress) add them to the following groups.

Lyrics Headquarters – add your lyrics lenses to groups, including this one

Here’s some of my current lyrics lenses:

Beck – Replica

Beck – Modern Guilt

Beck – Volcano

Beck – Orphan

Portishead – Hunter

Portishead – Silence

Constantines – Our Age

Constantines – Hard Feelings

Constantines – Trans Canada

Usher – Moving Mountains

Fleet Foxes – Your Protector

Tags: Affiliate, Marketing, Social Bookmarking by reviews
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Googles Sounds the Death ‘knol’?

First, what is Knol?

Knol is a Squidoo/Wikipedia-like social media site brought to you by Google. Currently in beta, it is supposed to be a haven for authors to show off their writing skills and portfolios. Google introduced it to a select group of people in December of 2007. Here what Google had to say about it:

It is a “free tool that we are calling “knol”, which stands for a unit of knowledge. Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it. The tool is still in development and this is just the first phase of testing. For now, using it is by invitation only. But we wanted to share with everyone the basic premises and goals behind this project.

The key idea behind the knol project is to highlight authors. Books have authors’ names right on the cover, news articles have bylines, scientific articles always have authors — but somehow the web evolved without a strong standard to keep authors names highlighted. We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content. At the heart, a knol is just a web page; we use the word “knol” as the name of the project and as an instance of an article interchangeably. It is well-organized, nicely presented, and has a distinct look and feel, but it is still just a web page. Google will provide easy-to-use tools for writing, editing, and so on, and it will provide free hosting of the content. Writers only need to write; we’ll do the rest.”

What effect will it have on the likes of Squidoo, Hubpages, and Wikipedia?

Since this is a Google project, you can expect a ton of money, advertising, and support once it is finally released. There are already sites out there trying to capitalize on Knol, such as knolstuff. There are also sites that appear to be trying to convince people to join their site instead, and knol isn’t even out yet. Hubpages asks visitors to not wait for Google Knol message; “Why wait for Google Knol? Write your own Wiki pages on HubPages and Earn.” I could see Knol cutting into the Hubpages and Squidoo potential users, as they do not have the name recognition, however Wikipedia is very well entrenched. I think there will be a lot of buzz on the internet, especially within the writer and blogger communities, but I do not believe it will kill most sites (that have an established community), unless they are not already fairly well known.

Tags: Google, Social Bookmarking by reviews
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DoFollow Social Bookmarking Sites

The following are Social Bookmarking Sites that provide dofollow backlinks to your site. As always, it is important to provide good content to these sites, as well as being relevant content to yours. Most importantly, we should not abuse or misuse these Social Bookmarking sites.

Are these really “DoFollow”? Read this to see other ways of blocking the spiders.

Ok, as I add new ones (or take away bad ones), then the number changes.

• Slashdot PR9
• Mister-Wong PR7
• Furl PR7
• Bibsonomy PR7
• Spurl PR6
• Unalog PR6 – Registration not currently available (thanks dauclair)
• Jumptags PR6
• Searchles PR6
• Plime PR5
• BlogHop PR5
• MyLinkVault PR5
• A1 Webmarks PR5
• ClipClip PR5
• Diigo PR5
• Listible PR5
• MyVmarks PR5
• Complore PR4
• OnMyList PR4
• Kapely PR3
  
• info4it PR3
• MyPIP PR3
• SyncOne PR3
• Yattle PR2
• Faves PR0
• UPCHUCKr PR0

NoFollow – How the attribute is being interpreted differs between the search engines. While some take it literally and do not follow the link to the page being linked to, others still “follow” the link to find new web pages for indexing. In the latter case rel=”nofollow” actually tells a search engine “Don’t score this link” rather than “Don’t follow this link.” This differs from the meaning of nofollow as used within a robots meta tag, which does tell a search engine: “Do not follow any of the hyperlinks in the body of this document”.

What is a good way to check if a link is Nofollow? Download Firefox

Install the Firefox SEOQuake Plugin from the tools page.

You may also like the DoFollow Forums List
*If you notice any changes or possible additions, please post a comment.

Tags: Link Building, Marketing, SEO, Social Bookmarking by reviews
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StumbleUpon is a wonderful thing. You can find all sorts of sites, pages, photos, videos, and games that would otherwise go unnoticed or not found when using your typical search engines. Use the Search in StumbleUpon and you can find gems of sites that you would very likely not find, as they could be buried deep into the pages of Google or Yahoo!.

Another benefit of StumbleUpon is the amount of traffic that can find your pages and sites. If you have something that you would like shared, you can add it to StumbleUpon when you or another stumbler discovers it and reviews it. From that point on that page, image, or video is on the StumbleUpon network.

This leads us to the next point.

Ways to improve your network of Fans:

1. Create a StumbleUpon blog and have thoughtful, entertaining, funny, or simply fun content.
2. Use the StumbleUpon PhotoBlog It! option to blog about a great photo that you have found. Do this by Right-clicking on the photo and choose StumbleUpon PhotoBlog It! Then comment on the photo you have found.
3. Join various groups, such as Stumblers, StumbleUpon, or StumbleUpon Tweaks and Tricks (to improve your StumbleUpon layout and add features!)
4. Read the StumbleUpon tweaks on The Prawn website.
5. Also, you can improve you chances of meeting other like minded people by adding various interests to your profile. There are tons of interests to choose!

Interesting Blogs to read about StumbleUpon:

Official StumbleUpon Blog

Tags: Adsense, Social Bookmarking, Traffic by reviews
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