Amazon.com has “jumped the gun” so to speak and shut down its affiliate program, the Amazon Associates Program, to associates who live in the State of North Carolina. Amazon.com is taking this unprecedented step of shutting down their affiliate program ahead of what they’re calling an “unconstitutional tax collection scheme expected to be passed any day now by the North Carolina state legislature (the General Assembly) and signed by the governor.”

I have received a copy of an email sent by Amazon.com to a member of the Amazon.com Associates Program who is a North Carolina resident:

We are writing from the Amazon Associates Program to notify you that your Associates account has been closed as of June 26, 2009. This is a direct result of the unconstitutional tax collection scheme expected to be passed any day now by the North Carolina state legislature (the General Assembly) and signed by the governor. As a result, we will no longer pay any referral fees for customers referred to Amazon.com or Endless.com after June 26. We were forced to take this unfortunate action in anticipation of actual enactment because of uncertainties surrounding the legislation’s effective date.
Please be assured that all qualifying referral fees earned prior to June 26, 2009 will be processed and paid in full in accordance with our regular referral fee schedule. Based on your account closure date of June 26, 2009, any final payments will be paid by September 1, 2009.

In the event that North Carolina repeals this tax collection scheme, we would certainly be happy to re-open our Associates program to North Carolina residents.

The North Carolina General Assembly’s website is http://www.ncleg.net/, and additional information may be obtained from the Performance Marketing Alliance at http://www.performancemarketingalliance.com/.

We have enjoyed working with you and other North Carolina-based participants in the Amazon Associates Program, and wish you all the best in your future.

Best Regards,

The Amazon Associates Team

In an effort to get more revenue for the State of North Carolina, the State has decided to pass legislation that would add a “click-thru tax”, a tax on sales that go through affiliates. So, if you are a website owner that provides “free content” on the internet and gain most of your revenue from affiliate marketing, you’re out of luck: the States, such as North Carolina, are starting to add taxes to your affiliate marketing efforts. New York has apparently already passed such a tax, and North Carolina’s affiliate tax is supposed to be on the law books soon.

I do believe, though, that Amazon.com’s shutting down North Carolina affiliates “jumps the gun” so to speak and it not warranted. The North Carolina tax on affiliate sales has not officially passed yet, and perhaps this is just an effort “not to have to pay” affiliates who have made them sales. No word on how many affiliates Amazon has in the State of North Carolina.

If you’re interested in following this there’s more information here and here and here and you can check the Performance Marketing Alliance for updates and what’s going on in other States.

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Zuberance, a Word of Mouth marketing company that provides an on-demand platform that enables B2B and B2C marketers to identify and mobilize their Advocates, generating leads and sales, is hosting a free webinar on June 24th (today) 11 AM Pacific Time about how to turn “word of mouth” into actual sales.

What is Word of Mouth Marketing?
Word of mouth is a pre-existing phenomenon that marketers are only now learning how to harness, amplify, and improve. Word of mouth marketing isn’t about creating word of mouth — it’s learning how to make it work within a marketing objective.

Word of Mouth is the number one influencer of business buyers’ purchase decisions, numerous studies have found. Word of Mouth has twice the influence of advertising, press coverage, and direct mail and email, according to a recent study of B2B Word of Mouth by Keller Fay, a leading Word of Mouth research firm. However, many business marketers are not yet harnessing the power of Word of Mouth to drive sales.

The Zuberance webinar will feature real-world case studies of how B2B companies are harnessing Word of Mouth to:

• Increase sales in a down economy
• Generated thousands of qualified leads
• Combat negative Word of Mouth

All attendees of today’s free webinar will receive a free white paper entitled, “Turning Word of Mouth into Sales Now for B2B Companies.”

Zuberance is a leading Word of Mouth marketing software company. Global 2000 companies and others are using Zuberance’s Word of Mouth marketing platform to identify and mobilize their highly-satisfied customers, driving sales. Headquartered in San Carlos, CA, Zuberance is backed by Emergence Capital Partners, the leading venture capital firm focused on early and growth-stage Technology-Enabled Services companies.

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comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), has released its monthly comScore qSearch analysis of the United States search marketplace. In May 2009, Americans conducted 14.3 billion core searches.

Google’s websites continued to lead the US search market in April 2009 with 65.0 percent of the searches conducted, followed by Yahoo! (20.1 percent), Microsoft (8.0 percent), Ask Network (3.9 percent) and AOL LLC (3.1 percent). Here are the official numbers, as reported by comScore:

  comScore Core Search Report*
  May 2009 vs. April 2009
  Total U.S. - Home/Work/University Locations
  Source: comScore qSearch

                                   Share of Searches (%)
                                                         Point
                                                        Change
                                                       May-09 vs.
  Core Search Entity         Apr-09        May-09       Apr-09

  Total Core Search           100.0        100.0          N/A
  Google Sites                 64.2         65.0          0.8
  Yahoo! Sites                 20.4         20.1         -0.3
  Microsoft Sites**             8.2          8.0         -0.2
  Ask Network                   3.8          3.9          0.1
  AOL LLC                       3.4          3.1         -0.3

* Based on the five major search engines including partner searches and cross-channel searches. Searches for mapping, local directory, and user-generated video sites that are not on the core domain of the five search engines are not included in the core search numbers.

** May data does not include search activity at Microsoft Bing, which was launched on June 1. Microsoft Bing will be included with June qSearch data.

comScore says that “Americans conducted 14.3 billion searches at the core search engines. Google Sites accounted for 9.3 billion core searches, followed by Yahoo! Sites with 2.9 billion and Microsoft Sites with 1.1 billion.”

  comScore Core Search Report*
  May 2009 vs. April 2009
  Total U.S. - Home/Work/University Locations
  Source: comScore qSearch
                                    Search Queries (MM)
                                                       Percent
                                                        Change
                                                      May-09 vs.
  Core Search Entity         Apr-09       May-09       Apr-09

  Total Core Search          14,751       14,327           -3
  Google Sites                9,476        9,307           -2
  Yahoo! Sites                3,008        2,877           -4
  Microsoft Sites**           1,208        1,149           -5
  Ask Network                   563          555           -1
  AOL LLC                       496          438          -12

* Based on the five major search engines including partner searches and cross-channel searches. Searches for mapping, local directory, and user-generated video sites that are not on the core domain of the five search engines are not included in the core search numbers.

** May data does not include search activity at Microsoft Bing, which was launched on June 1. Microsoft Bing will be included with June qSearch data.

From what is noted above, these numbers do not include the new search engine “Bing” (bing.com owned by Microsoft), as we’re actually seeing a decrease in the numbers from April 2009 to May 2009. What will be interesting is next month’s report from comScore, which will show the true impact of Microsoft launching the new Bing.com search engine.

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Ask.com used their “proprietary core search technology” launched in the fall of 2008 and came up with 300 million Question and Answer pairs by crawling and indexing questions and answers from numerous and diversified sources across the internet. In other words, they aggregated all of the question and answer sites’ content into one large database. Ask.com gathered the data and then “applied its semantic search technology advancements in clustering, rephrasing, and answer relevance to filter out insignificant and less meaningful answer formats.”

I took a look today at this new database, asking a variety of questions. For example, I used their new question and answer database and asked, “what is search engine optimization?”.

The questions and answers are pretty clear to make out, indicated by a “Q” and an “A” image on the left side of the search results. I’m not exactly sure why some of the search results have additional link “See entire page >>”, and some of the search results don’t have that extra link. Seems kind of unnecessary, actually:

What’s interesting to note, though, that you would think that these questions and answers would be coming from true “question and answer” type of websites: which is not the case, however. It appears that Ask.com is also using content from other sites for this question and answer database. I don’t really have a huge problem with that, but it does appear that many of the results from answers are going to be inherently flawed or shall I say, “biased”. Ask.com’s question and answer database not only contains answers from Q & A sites like Yahoo! Answers and Wiki Answers, but the answers are coming from web pages that they have in their normal search database: like commercial websites. Commercial websites inherently are going to have a bias towards what they’re telling you, so I’m not at all convinced that they should really be included in a “question and answer” database. Take a look at this search result for the “what is search engine optimization” question:

Why should a web page from an “SEO Consultant” that is about “Why is Search Engine Optimization Important” show up in the search results for “what is search engine optimization?”. Wait. Maybe I just figured out the answer to how you can manipulate this Ask.com database: include page on your website that asks a question and then presents an answer.

But that’s not really that bad, after all. If you consider the fact that Google’s “define” feature also includes commercial websites in its results, but I believe those are actually manually reviewed and included only if a large glossary or dicitionary appears on your site. If you don’t know about the Google define: feature, on Google.com, you can use search for something like this and find definitions to terms or phrases:
define:search engine optimization

When you include the define: before your keyword phrase in a Google search, you’ll see search result that include definitions. That’s helpful. And, if you’re an SEO or website owner, you might be interested in the fact that putting a large glossary style list of definitions (a glossary, perhaps) on your site you have a chance of being manually reviewed and included in Google’s define feature, which really can bring some good traffic to your site.

But let’s get back to Ask.com’s new 300 million questions and answers. Should Ask.com be including commercial websites that only have one or two biased questions and answers on their site? Is that helpful for you?

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User Centric used eye tracking technology to capture 21 participants’ eye movements as they completed two informational and two transactional search tasks, each in Google.com and Bing.com.

The two search phrases that were used during this eye tracking study:
Learn about eating healthy
Book a last minute vacation

User Centric used eye tracking technology to capture 21 participants’ eye movements as they completed two informational (e.g., “Learn about eating healthy”) and two transactional (e.g., “Book a last minute vacation”) search tasks in each engine.

According to User Centric, “Preliminary findings revealed comparable amount of visual attention on organic search results and top sponsored links across both search engines. Sponsored links on the right, however, attracted more attention on Bing than they did on Google. On average, across all four tasks, 42% of participants looked at Bing’s sponsored links on the right; by contrast, only 25% of participants looked at Google’s right rail links.”

When it came to the amount of attention paid to the organic search results, Bing and Google did not differ: users spent an average of seven seconds looking at the organic search results. They were both about the same amount of time spent.

During a search, 90 percent of users tested looked at the “sponsored links”. User Centric also reports that during “transactional searches” (searches that involved someone buying something or searches related to completing a transaction), “participants would spend more time looking at the sponsored results on top (~2.5 seconds) than they did on informational searches (~1.5 seconds).” But, on the Bing.com search engine, participants of the study spent more time looking at the paid links (sponsored links). About 42 percent paid more attention to the sponsored results on Bing. About 25 percent on Google.

More details of the study are here on the User Centric site.

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What is TopCoder?
From the site: “The 2009 TopCoder Open (TCO) is a world-wide programming and graphic design tournament that is open to all TopCoder members 18 and older, who are in good standing, and meet all other eligibility criteria. There are nine different tracks of competition as part of the TCO: Algorithm, Architecture, Assembly, Component Design & Development, Marathon, Mod Dash, Specification, and Studio Design. Taking part in the TCO09 gives you the opportunity to showcase your programming and/or design skills up against some of the best in the world.”

And they give away some great prizes, I might add.

So, here are this year’s winners:

Algorithm Coding Champion $10,000 Prize: Bin Jin, TopCoder handle crazyb0y, of Shanghai, China. Jin, a student from Changzhou High School, also won this year’s 2009 TopCoder High School International tournament.

  Algorithm Finalists
  crazyb0y, China * (winner)          Im2Good, Norway
  Petr, Russian Federation            syg96, Russian Federation
  SnapDragon, Canada                  UdH-WiNGeR, Russian Federation
  lucasr, Argentina                   marek_cygan, Poland

Marathon Competition Champion $10,000 Prize: Andrey Lopatin, TopCoder handle KOTEHOK, of St. Petersburg, Russian Federation.

  Marathon Finalists
  KOTEHOK, Russian Federation * (winner)       maniek, Poland
  AlexanderL, Ukraine                          jdmetz, USA
  nhzp339, China                               prober, China
  Psyho, Poland                                roma, Ukraine
  wleite, Brazil                               zibada, Russian Federation

Mod Dash Champion $10,000 Prize: Ninghai Huang, TopCoder handle PE, of Beijing, China.

  Mod Dash Finalists
  PE, China * (winner)              ShindouHikaru, Philippines
  cucu, Argentina                   enefem21, Indonesia
  saarixx, Ukraine                  Margarita, Ukraine
  will.xie, China                   Yeung, China

TopCoder Studio Champion $15,000 Prize: Dale Napier, TopCoder handle djnapier, of Brisbane, Australia.

  TopCoder Studio Finalists
  abedavera, Indonesia                      djackmania, Indonesia
  djnapier, Australia * (winner)            Elizabethhee, China
  foxyhu, China                             oton, Indonesia
  mahestro, Venezuela                       oninkxronda, Philippines
  sweetpea, Indonesia                       Tricia_Tjia, Indonesia

Architecture Champion $10,000 Prize: GuanZhuo Jin, TopCoder handle Standlove, of Hangzhou City, China.

  Architecture Finalists
  Standlove, China * (winner)        argolite, Canada
  Ghostar, USA                       AleaActaEst, Canada
  the_best, Ukraine                  saevio, Romania

Assembly Champion $10,000 Prize: Pablo Wolfus, TopCoder handle pulky of Buenos Aires, Argentina.

  Assembly Finalists
  pulky, Argentina * (winner)           oldbig, China
  PE, China                             pinoydream, Philippines
  retunsky, Russian Federation          BeBetter, China

Design Champion $10,000 Prize: Olexiy Sadovnikov, TopCoder handle saarixx, of Dniepropetrovsk, Ukraine.

  Design Finalists
  saarixx, Ukraine * (winner)             argolite, Canada
  bramandia, Indonesia                    caru, Italy
  gevak, Russian Federation               Indemar, Romania
  Mafy, Romania                           nicka81, Russian Federation
  Standlove, China                        Pops, USA

Development Champion $10,000 Prize: Yanbo Wu, TopCoder handle assistant, of Adelaide, Australia & China.

  Development Finalists
  assistant, China * (winner)           Hacker_QC, China
  hefeng, China                         iKnown, China
  morehappiness, China                  myxgyy, China
  romanoTC, Brazil                      velorien, Romania
  Orange_Cloud, Russian Federation      EveningSun, China

Specification Champion: Piotr Paweska, TopCoder handle AleaActaEst, of Toronto, Canada.

  Specification Finalists
  AleaActEst, Canada * (winner)        MiG-29, Russian Federation

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Pay particular attention to the website that’s reportedly the Aldi home page:

This MediaPost article is about how Aldi Foods recently “released a study showing that Aldi shoppers spend up to 26% less than those who shop at discounters like Walmart, and up to 37% less compared to those who shop at traditional supermarkets.” That’s great news, since I actually would like to see Aldi’s come into our area and start offering an alternative to Walmart. But wait.

Is that MediaPost graphic claiming that the home page of Aldi’s is a Parked Domain Name?

That’s right, take a look again at it. Rather than doing some simple research by Googling Aldi to get the facts right, the image used in the story is a graphic/screen capture/thumbnail image of Aldis.com, a domain name that is not owned by Aldi Foods.

I find this very embarrassing, on two fronts:

First, there to be a lack of attention to detail by the author and the editor at MediaPost. The image of the parked domain name, aldis.com, and the image of clouds on the website makes it horribly obvious that this is NOT the Aldi Foods website. Furthermore, it appears that the graphic was resized and therefore someone had to have looked at the photo.

In a world where us online writers and bloggers are begging for respect, this is does absolutely nothing for our credibility. In fact, I’m trying to decide if I should continue to keep up my subscription to MediaPost and read anything that they have to say in the future. Yes, it’s that bad.

Secondly, and, more importantly, I’m very concerned over the fact that Aldi has not taken the steps to protect their online brand. They do own Aldi.com, but they need to realize that the term that their customers use to refer to the company and their stores is “Aldi’s”. Apparently the phrase is searched on Google at least 33,000 times every month. Not only should they own Aldis.com, I would also expect them to own the domain name Aldis.de.

By the way, if you’re not familiar with the process, there is what is called a “domain dispute policy”, officially called the “Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy) or “UDRP” for short. If you believe that someone else owns a domain name that you have a right to own then you can file a UDRP request and have a third party officially decide if it should be turned over to you or not. In this case, I recommend that Aldi file a UDRP and take over the Aldis.com domain name and redirect it to their own site.

This reminds me of the case of Federal Express. Some of you might be too young to remember, but FEDEX wasn’t always “FEDEX”. A while back, FEDEX was actually “Federal Express”. And that was their brand…everything had “Federal Express” on it, even their planes. But the public continued to call the company “FEDEX”. After a period of time, they changed their name to “FEDEX”. In the case of Aldis.com, I believe that the company would have a case towards owning the domain name aldis.com. The current owner of the domain name doesn’t appear to be using it from anything other than owning the name for monetary gain from the typos.

In this case, MediaPost has failed. I would fully hope that at some point they take the time to update the graphic on this blog post and dismiss it as a mistake and a lesson learned. By not taking the time to fully do your research and show the proper graphic on an otherwise well-written and timely article, you’re definitely losing your credibility with me.

UPDATE: After several people have pointed out this article on MediaPost, it looks like the Media Post folks have finally updated the article and included a new screenshot of the real Aldi Foods website. Now if only Aldi would recover the aldis.com domain name….

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As a blogger, online marketer, writer, and a shameless self-promoter, I am always on the hunt for content and ideas for creating online content. I totally agree with whoever coined the phrase, “content is king”. I have to admit that sometimes I get writer’s block or, as I like to call it, “promoter’s block”. Whatever you call it, sometimes you just need a place to start, a place to enter a keyword phrase to get started. I finally found that place, called KeywordSmash!, a free keyword research tool that lets you search every major online keyword research and content source you could imagine. And yes, it’s completely free to use.

KeywordSmash is pretty simple to use. Enter a keyword phrase and it lets you choose a category, such as:
- Offers (sites where you can make money)
- Keywords (keyword research websites)
- Trends (what people are talking about)
- Demographics (Google Insights, Compete.com, Alexa data, etc.)
- Ads (pay per click ads)
- Social Media Sites (what people are talking about on the social media sites)
- News (Google news, Yahoo! news, etc.)
- Discussions (forums, message boards)
- Articles (article sites)
- Images (pretty pictures)
- Video (videos)
- Public Domain (Wikipedia content, US Gov content, Creative Commons)

After you pick a source (or several sources), click on the “search” button and it will automatically find content and related content for you from those sources. For example, I recently used the tool to search for the keyword phrase, “search engine optimization”:

I clicked on the “news” button for all of the latest news on search engine optimization. This way, I was able to quickly and easily find all the latest news articles on that topic. If I was writing a blog post or had a blog about search engine optimization, then I would probably mention what’s going on today in the search engine optimization industry.

Let’s take this a bit further, though. Let’s say that we really do have a search engine optimization blog and want to write about that topic. First, go to KeywordSmash! and enter the phrase. You might first click on the News tab and see what people are talking about. You might mention and link out to other news articles. That could be one blog post for your blog, perhaps even a daily blog post. Updating your blog on a regular basis will get readers and the search engines coming back every day for more content.

Next, let’s do some keyword research to find out about other topics that are related to search engine optimization that you could write about. Check the keyword research for the phrase “search engine optimization” and you’ll see what people are searching for. You might even write about one of those keyword phrases that you find, maybe write one article about each keyword phrase.

Trends are also very helpful for content ideas, on KeywordSmash you can search these all at once, with one keyword phrase and one click:
- Google Trends
- Google Insights
- Blogpulse
- Twitter “twist” (this is way cool, especially if you have a Twitter account like I do)
- SEOmoz
- Yahoo! Buzz
- AOL search
- eBay Research Labs

If you look for your keyword phrase, you’ll quickly see what people are really talking about this month, this week, and even today. Certainly if you’re a blogger then you will get plenty of ideas of what to write about (or blog about). Sure, you could go on over to Twitter and look at the “top trends” and write about something, but why not take it one step further and really do some research to see where the traffic is?

If you’re not actually selling something right now (you’re not an online business or you’re not writing for an online business) then you might want to use the “Offers” search at KeywordSmash!, which lets you search for offers from these companies:
- ClickBank
- Pay dot com
- Aff Spy
- Offer Vault
- Associate Programs
- Affiliate First
- Affiliate Scout
- Affiliate Seeking
- Amazon.com

You first have to sign up for these services and become an affiliate to get your affiliate code number or “affiliate ID”, but they’re generally free to sign up. The idea is that you write a blog post (or an article, or put a page on your site) about a keyword phrase or a topic and then you “mention” a related offer that your readers might be interested in. If they click on your link and visit the site and purchase something then you make money. Some bloggers write all day long and include “affiliate offers” in their blog posts, getting you to purchase something so they can make money from their blogs.

However you end up using KeywordSmash!, I’m sure that you’ll find it useful, just like I did. I have a few ways that I’m using it to help me in my daily marketing activities, and I’m sure if you try just one keyword search you’ll be hooked on it just like I am.

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Let’s say that you’ve written a great blog post and you want it to “stand out from the crowd” so to speak… and have a chance of other people finding out about it, right? Especially if it’s a very timely blog post with some sort of breaking news or something that you think can “go viral” or get others to link to it and talk about it, maybe even on Twitter.

Along with Twitter, Digg, Reddit, and other social media websites, Google’s blog search can even bring in some great traffic to your blog. And it’s a great source of links: many bloggers use it to find other blog posts to link to when they’re doing their research for a blog post. Did you know that Google recently updated their blog search algorithm? You might take note of something that Google’s Jeremy Hylton recently said: “One important changes is that we’re processing new links much faster, so the post that breaks a story and gets a lot of links is more likely to become the lead story.” So, just like I’ve been saying for a while now, the first to get the marketshare of links is going to be the winner in the long run, not only in blog search but also in the organic search engine rankings.

So, after you’ve written the perfect blog post, here is how to promote the perfect blog post, in several pretty easy steps:

1. Go on over to your Twitter account and tweet about it. Tell others that you’ve just written a new blog post. Tweet something like “New blog post: How to Promote Your Blog Post http://tinyurl.com/r478xa. If you’ll notice, I’ve included a link directly to the blog post. I like to tweet about the new blog post because it’s really kind of a courtesy tweet to all of my followers. If you give them a “heads up” and a link directly to the blog post, there’s a chance that someone might want to submit it to one of the social networking sites.

2. Go to Mixx.com and submit it. It’s important to get your blog post indexed quickly and to get a link to it quickly, as soon as possible after you post your blog post to your blog. I prefer to add it to Mixx because mixx.com is one of the few social bookmarking websites that do not use the “nofollow” tag. Links supposedly “count” there, and the link will get crawled pretty quickly.

3. Make a list of alternative headlines (titles) for your blog post. This is extremely important, especially since Google has been cracking down on duplicate content more and more. They’ve even been looking at the social bookmarking sites. If the same title appears on 12 different social bookmarking sites, with the same exact description, would you count every single site as a link to the blog post? Probably not, it’s a form of duplicate content. I prefer to make at least 5 different titles of the blog post, all of them different than the actual blog post itself. So, for this blog post, here are some possible titles:
Promoting the Perfect Blog Post
Promote Your Blog Post
Promoting a Blog Post
How to Promote Your Blog Post
Promote Your Blog Post after Writing It
Always Promote Your Blog Post

Later on, when you promote your blog post on different social bookmarking sites and mention it to others, you’ll need to make sure that you use a different title or “headline”. You never know which version will catch someone’s eye, and you don’t want to be caught for “duplicate content”.

4. Make a list of alternative descriptions. Just like the title or headline of the blog post, you will need a unique description for your blog post when you submit it to the various social bookmarking sites. You can use an excerpt from your blog post (usually it’s about 2 or 3 sentences long). Make some longer than others, though, and that you’re using different ways to describe your blog post. If you can sum it up in one sentence, that’s great. Some social bookmarking sites let you submit longer descriptions than others, so having a very long one and copying and pasting some of the text and removing other sentences might help. I usually use notepad to write the descriptions, and I always make sure that I am not using “quotes” or ‘apostrophes’ in the description because those characters can get messed up pretty easily.

5. Make a list of appropriate tags. Many social bookmarking sites will allow you to add a few tags to the submission to categorize it. If you’re wanting it to rank well later on for a certain keyword or keyword phrase, then make sure you include that phrase in your list of tags. I prefer to use a few generic ones like “business”, “internet”, and “blogs” and then a specific tag that includes a keyword or keyword phrase.

6. Once you have your list of alternative titles and descriptions, you have a few choices. If you really want the blog post to have a chance of “going viral”, then you need to start working your network. Hopefully before now you’ve networked with several of the top “social nerds” out there, and they hopefully owe you a favor. Contact them and ask them if they wouldn’t mind submitting it to (a specific site). I usually ask different people to submit it to a site. I’ll ask one person to submit it to Digg, someone else to submit it to Reddit, etc.. It’s also very helpful for them if you include the URL, title, description, and tags so they can simply “copy and paste” it. This all ensures that they all won’t submit it with the same title and description.

If you aren’t expecting the blog post to “go viral” on the social media sites, then you might consider just submitting it yourself to as many different social bookmarking sites yourself. Whatever the case, promoting it on as many social bookmarking sites as possible is going to get more links to it: which will help the blog post rank better in Google blog search as well as Google’s organic search engine rankings. Web pages always tend to rank better in the organic search engine rankings when they have links going to them.

7. Use a site like Social Poster or Social Marker to help with the submissions. I prefer to use Social Poster since it helps me fill out the forms and has most of the social networking sites I prefer to submit to, but I do use Social Marker from time to time, as well.

8. Submit your blog post to these social sites, using different titles and descriptions, not necessarily in this order:
- Digg
- Propeller
- Reddit
- Del.icio.us
- Stumbleupon.com
- Indianpad.com
- Technorati.com
- Diigo.com
- Wirefan.com
- Simpy.com
- Folkd.com
- Blogmarks.net
- Corank.com
- Megite.com/discover/
- Facebook.com (not for ranking purposes but for ’sharing’ purposes)
- Mixx.com
- Dropjack.com
- A1-webmarks.com
- Buddymarks.com
- Jumptags.com
- Bx.Businessweek.com
- Sphinn.com

There are certainly a bunch of others to submit to, or ask your friends to submit to, and some are appropriate for certain categories of blog posts (for example, Sphinn is good for SEO, Internet Marketing, Social Media “how to” articles), while Business Exchange is great for business-related articles.

9. Promote your blog post by linking to it. Not only can you get social bookmarking links to it, you might consider writing another blog post somewhere else and linking over to your original blog post. Certainly that would be easier if you have more than one blog, but you could also ask other bloggers that you know to link over to it or see if they’ll accept a “guest post” (most will if you ask them), and it could be a follow-up to your blog post or even on a related topic. Again, you’ll want to use the social bookmarking sites to get some links to that blog post that then links over to your original blog post.

10. Tell friends about it, even those who don’t use social bookmarking sites or Twitter. We all have our list of friends that aren’t techno nerdy internet geeks that hang out online all day. Send a quick note to your list of contacts, like your brother, sister, mother, father, aunt, uncle, neice, nephew, neighbor, everyone that you know has an email address. And don’t forget your best asset here, the relative that always forwards those pesky emails to you, the emails like “don’t microwave water” and “how cute is this puppy” emails. If you’re really observant, you’ll notice that when people forward those viral emails to all their contacts, they never “blind carbon copy” (BCC) people, they will just forward to everyone they know, leaving everyone’s email address there so everyone can see everyone else’s email. Harvest that list and send out an email to all those people, telling them that you’ve just written the perfect blog post. If you’re lucky, they will send it to everyone they know.

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2. 6 Ways to Get Nearly Instant Links to your Web Site It seems a
3. KeywordSmash Free Keyword Research Tool Launched As a blog

comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, has released its monthly list of consumer activity on the top 50 web properties in the USA. They do this every month, and it’s based on data from their comScore Media Metrix service.

Some of the most notable drivers of traffic to certain websites include the swine flu concerns that people had (i.e., www.cdc.gov), and the rise in popularity of Twitter and Facebook. Apparently since Spring is here now we’re also going to home improvement related websites. April 2009 also saw an increase to tax-related websites, mainly because of the April 15 tax deadline in the USA.

Google’s web properties continued to be the most visited web properties in April 2009, with more than 155 million visitors, followed by Yahoo! with 149 million visitors and Microsoft with 126.5 million visitors. Facebook.com climbed one spot in the ranking to number eight on the list with 67.5 million visitors.

Here is the data for April 2009:

Table 1

  comScore Top 10 Gaining Properties by Percentage Change in
   Unique Visitors* (U.S.)
  April 2009 vs. March 2009
  Total U.S. - Home, Work and University Locations
  Source: comScore Media Metrix

                                             Total Unique Visitors (000)
                                                                   Rank by
                                                                    Unique
                                           Mar-09  Apr-09  %Change Visitors

  Total Internet : Total Audience          192,173 192,875     0     N/A
  CDC.gov                                    2,371   5,736   142     214
  CHINAONTV.COM                              2,674   6,300   136     185
  Move Network                               7,002  13,191    88      77
  Twitter.com                                9,313  17,001    83      56
  MLB.com                                    6,860  12,497    82      87
  Betawave Partners - Partial List           3,972   7,145    80     163
  Hollywood.Net - Hollywood Online Network   4,821   6,850    42     169
  teen.com Network                           5,495   7,806    42     145
  World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE)        3,774   5,086    35     236
  Wikia Sites                                3,638   4,892    34     239

  *Ranking based on the top 250 properties in April 2009.

I am actually kind of surprised about how much change we’re seeing chinaontv.com and WWE, I know that WWE is popular, but how is it that increased that much from March 2009 to April 2009? Can someone enlighten me? Was there some new event going on?

  Table 2

  comScore Top 10 Gaining Site Categories* by Percentage Change in Unique
   Visitors (U.S.)
  April 2009 vs. March 2009
  Total U.S. - Home, Work and University Locations
  Source: comScore Media Metrix

                                          Total Unique Visitors (000)
                                          Mar-09    Apr-09   % Change

  Total Internet : Total Audience        192,173   192,875        0
  Community - Teens                       19,947    24,142       21
  Business/Finance - Taxes                18,311    20,585       12
  Social Networking                      124,406   139,781       12
  Real Estate                             43,924    48,357       10
  Entertainment - Music                   86,817    95,511       10
  Community - Home                        27,161    29,857       10
  Retail - Computer Software              34,346    37,685       10
  Retail - Flowers/Gifts/Greetings        28,356    31,019        9
  Online Gambling                         11,670    12,754        9
  Gaming Information                      40,637    44,370        9

  Table 3

  comScore Top 50 Properties (U.S.)
  April 2009
  Total U.S. - Home, Work and University Locations
  Unique Visitors (000)
  Source: comScore Media Metrix

                                          Unique
                                         Visitors
  Rank        Property                     (000)

      Total Internet : Total Audience     192,875
   1  Google Sites                        155,319
   2  Yahoo! Sites                        149,118
   3  Microsoft Sites                     126,452
   4  AOL LLC                             107,469
   5  Fox Interactive Media                87,830
   6  Ask Network                          73,491
   7  eBay                                 72,899
   8  FACEBOOK.COM                         67,481
   9  Wikimedia Foundation Sites           65,461
  10  Amazon Sites                         62,730
  11  Apple Inc.                           54,550
  12  Glam Media                           54,485
  13  CBS Interactive                      53,473
  14  Turner Network                       49,719
  15  Viacom Digital                       47,911
  16  New York Times Digital               47,316
  17  craigslist, inc.                     46,469
  18  Weather Channel, The                 40,160
  19  AT&T Interactive Network             33,670
  20  Adobe Sites                          33,081
  21  Comcast Corporation                  32,776
  22  Verizon Communications Corporation   32,648
  23  Wal-Mart                             32,515
  24  Superpages.com Network               29,225
  25  Answers.com Sites                    29,062
  26  Demand Media                         28,492
  27  The Mozilla Organization             27,958
  28  Disney Online                        27,180
  29  Target Corporation                   26,961
  30  Bank of America                      26,736
  31  WordPress                            26,567
  32  Time Warner - Excluding AOL          25,714
  33  Gorilla Nation                       25,142
  34  Photobucket.com LLC                  24,939
  35  Expedia Inc                          24,283
  36  AT&T, Inc.                           24,009
  37  United Online, Inc                   23,996
  38  Everyday Health                      23,668
  39  CareerBuilder LLC                    23,506
  40  iVillage.com: The Womens Network     22,596
  41  NBC Universal                        21,671
  42  WebMD Health                         21,605
  43  Gannett Sites                        21,558
  44  ESPN                                 21,384
  45  JPMorgan Chase Property              21,264
  46  Monster Worldwide                    20,299
  47  Weatherbug Property                  20,293
  48  NetShelter Technology Media          20,164
  49  Shopzilla.com Sites                  20,061
  50  Real.com Network                     19,904

  Table 4

  comScore Ad Focus Ranking (U.S.)
  April 2009
  Total U.S. - Home, Work and University Locations
  Unique Visitors (000)
  Source: comScore Media Metrix

                                                   Unique
                                                  Visitors
  Rank    Property                                  (000)    % Reach

      Total Internet : Total Audience              192,875    100.0
   1  Platform-A**                                 176,455       91%
   2  Yahoo! Network**                             167,129       87%
   3  Google Ad Network**                          164,518       85%
   4  ValueClick Networks**                        160,307       83%
   5  Specific Media**                             158,012       82%
   6  FOX Audience Network**                       149,249       77%
   7  Yahoo! Sites                                 149,118       77%
   8  Google                                       148,511       77%
   9  24/7 Real Media**                            147,668       77%
  10  Traffic Marketplace**                        143,519       74%
  11  Tremor Media - Potential Reach               141,971       74%
  12  Microsoft Media Network US**                 139,674       72%
  13  Tribal Fusion**                              138,274       72%
  14  Casale Media - MediaNet**                    137,884       71%
  15  interCLICK**                                 134,834       70%
  16  YuMe Video Network - Potential Reach         134,608       70%
  17  Turn, Inc**                                  134,028       69%
  18  Adconion Media Group**                       133,498       69%
  19  CPX Interactive**                            130,370       68%
  20  Collective Network by Collective Media**     129,808       67%
  21  ADSDAQ by ContextWeb**                       123,534       64%
  22  Platform-A Video Network - Potential
       Reach                                       121,949       63%
  23  AudienceScience (formerly Revenue
       Science)**                                  121,001       63%
  24  Burst Media**                                116,727       61%
  25  Digital Broadcasting Group (DBG) -
       Potential Reach                             112,646       58%
  26  MSN-Windows Live                             111,783       58%
  27  AOL Media Network                            107,469       56%
  28  BrightRoll Video Network - Potential
       Reach                                        99,911       52%
  29  Undertone Networks**                          97,053       50%
  30  AdBrite**                                     91,033       47%
  31  YOUTUBE.COM                                   89,697       47%
  32  Pulse 360**                                   82,574       43%
  33  Vibrant Media**                               80,779       42%
  34  Centro - Potential Reach                      75,551       39%
  35  NNN Total Newspapers: U.S.                    74,415       39%
  36  Ask Network                                   73,491       38%
  37  Adify**                                       73,467       38%
  38  Kontera**                                     72,870       38%
  39  Monster Career Ad Network (CAN)**             72,225       37%
  40  MYSPACE.COM*                                  70,954       37%
  41  FACEBOOK.COM                                  67,481       35%
  42  ITN Digital - Potential Reach                 66,578       35%
  43  TattoMedia**                                  63,379       33%
  44  MSN.COM Home Page                             57,753       30%
  45  IAC Ad Solutions                              57,650       30%
  46  EBAY.COM                                      56,319       29%
  47  Glam Media                                    54,485       28%
  48  AMAZON.COM                                    52,058       27%
  49  NNN Top 25                                    50,644       26%
  50  Business.com Network                          48,692       25%

  Reach % denotes the percentage of the total Internet population that
  viewed a particular entity at least once in April. For instance, Yahoo!
  Sites was seen by 77 percent of the nearly 193 million Internet users in
  April.

  *  Entity has assigned some portion of traffic to other syndicated
     entities.

  ** Denotes an advertising network.

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