This guest post is written by Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg and the cofounder of Revision3 and Pownce. Kevin, who has over 88,000 followers on Twitter (making him the second most followed after President Obama), also “bloggs” at kevinrose.com. He is an investor in Twitter.

Ten Ways To Increase Your Twitter Followers:

1. Explain to your followers what retweeting is and encourage them to retweet your links. Retweeting pushes your @username into foreign social graphs, resulting in clicks back to your profile. Track your retweets using retweetist.

See the other 9 from the link below.

As an SEO, my fear is that some cunning paid search guru is going to steal my clients business before searchers get to my handiwork. So now I have to optimise earlier words. The early word gets the worm?

What this means is targeting across the keystrokes in linear fashion from first letter until the search is either complete or a relevant result set presented.

So my first target is to advertise next to 'sky'

My second target is to advertise and optimise my site to 'sports'.

Spaces now matter though it may take a while to understand how we target them. Maybe a URL .... /sport_/.

It will be a boon for paid search as 'sky' and 'sport' are great opportunities to get in first now.

It presents challenges for SEO as we have to broaden to a new long tail of shorties.

Winning the linear targeting, or preferential phrase battle is going to be a key new strategy for paid search and SEO in the coming months.

The evolution of search: How Google Instant works

The immediate impact is a lot more search results and a lot more ad impressions. For the past decade, Google has been training users to conduct more specific searches in more natural language and, over time, queries have gotten longer. But now, users are being presented with results from the very first letter. A specific query like "men's work boots size 10" yields dozens of top natural results (Mapquest, Mets, Menupages, Men's Wearhouse, Men's Workouts, etc) as the query is keyed in.

The question is how distracting these results are to the searcher's original intent and how that impacts clicks and conversions. "You usually get to finish your thought," said Kevin Lee, CEO of search-marketing firm Didit. "This has the potential to distract people from what they were looking for and take them in a completely new direction."

Here are 10 places you can find blogs to guest post on. No matter the niche you’re in, I promise you’ll find a blog to guest post on.

• Look on Invesp: This blog ranking directory provides a lot of insight on different blogs in different niches. It was on this site that I learned that Seth Godin has over 450,000 RSS subscribers. I don’t think he accepts guest posts though so don’t rush to contact him. Visit Invesp’s blog rank directory to see if you can find a blog that’ll be interested to accept a guest post from you.

• Alltop: If you think there are no blogs in your niche to guest post on, guess again. AllTop is a news aggregator site that covers a diverse range of niches. I’m sure you’ll find some blogs there to guest post on so check them out.

• Blog Ad networks: Sites such as AdvertiseSpace, BlogAds and BuySellAds (for creative industry) makes it easier for you to identify big blogs by sharing some stats with you. These are great places to look for blogs that accept guest posts.

Print ads are hardest to execute because of the lack of space and freedom. Within a limited domain, you need to effectively place your message to the target audience. Hence, minimalist and conceptual print ads are helpful in serving the cause perfectly. In a print ad, less use of graphic design can yield more substance to the copy. This is where the services of a talented graphic designer come in handy.

The Facebook Insights dashboard will help you answer some of these questions. As defined by Facebook, “Insights provides Facebook Page owners … with metrics around their content. By understanding and analyzing trends within user growth and demographics, consumption of content, and creation of content, Page owners … are better equipped to improve their business with Facebook.”

So what’s the best way to use this relatively new tool? We’ve outlined some steps below that should have you measuring Facebook engagement in no time.

As part of our continuing series to help you in developing compelling content, today we provide you a list of the top 11 online resources to help you improve your writing skills.

The Elements of Style – there is no better resource for writers than William Strunk’s classic. I have a well-thumbed hard copy, but this online version covers the writing bases.

100 Useful Web Tools For Writers – Whether poet, biographer, journalist, blogger or technical writer, you’ll find a helpful tool in this list.

Problogger – Darren Rowse is one of the best, most successful bloggers on the planet. Problogger provides advice on everything from writing good headlines to how to come up with story ideas...

click below for full list

Every business needs new customers, but don't ever forget that your easiest and most predictable source of new revenue is right under your nose: It comes from the loyal customers who already know your company.  Acquiring new customers is expensive (five to ten times the cost of retaining an existing one), and the average spend of a repeat customer is a whopping 67 percent more than a new one.

This perhaps answers that question, “Was it something I said?” Qwitter emails you when someone unfollows you and lets you know what your last tweet was when they stopped following.

word-of-mouth marketing is about getting your customers, followers, or fans—whatever you want to call them—to love your brand so much that they’re going to ultimately advocate for it and spread the word on your behalf, so you don’t have to invest a lot of money.

And social media marketing is just a subset of that, which is leveraging these social media tools to do the exact same thing. Is that what I hear you saying?

Andy: Exactly. Social media is a great tool. I’m a huge user and fan, but it only applies to the online half of word of mouth. Even if you look at the online half, there are probably more recommendations happening by email than Twitter or all the other social media put together.

At the end of the day, brands today live a decentralized, if not fragmented, existence. The brand "home" has line-extended itself into a network of smaller residences and rented apartments -- or what we might call "brand stands" -- all primed for meeting and interacting with the consumer at various stages in the purchase, loyalty or advocacy cycle. A Facebook fan page is a classic brand stand.

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A smart website feeds and refreshes the brand stands. It anchors the brand database, arguably the most coveted asset, and sets the tone and standard for the brand's ethos and attitude about feedback, expression and service. Put another way, it establishes that first critical (often unforgettable) impression. A great website also smartly syndicates, re-circulates and curates social content from the brand stands.

In a seamless "just in time" distribution network, content is refreshed from the website's wholesale supply network. There are some variations to this, of course. YouTube, a de facto hosting and syndication platform increasingly popular to brands, mimics this hub-and-spoke model, but brands still control the primary distribution network or original video content.

I recently reviewed hundreds of startup pitches at Capital Factory, an early stage accelerator program for tech startups. Of those, almost none had unearthed 10 people willing to say, “If you build this product, I’ll give you $X.”

Think about that: Hundreds of people were ready to quit their day jobs, burn up savings and risk personal reputation - all without identifying ten measly people actually willing to pay for what they’re peddling. Short-sighted, no?

Put simply: If you can’t find ten people who say they’ll buy it, your company is bullshit.

Aren’t you sick of every startup blogger on Earth badgering you about this? Steve Blank says “get outside the building,” Eric Ries says “seek validated learning,” Sean Ellis says “seek product/market fit,” Drew Houston says “the only way to learn on a $0 budget is to talk to people.”

I say “find ten people who say they’ll buy.”

Attention marketers: Within the next few weeks, you may be recasting your entire green-marketing strategy.

Right now on the desks of Federal Trade Commissioners is the new set of so-called Green Guides that are used by the FTC to guide enforcement of existing laws. They are the first environmental-marketing guidelines in 12 years and could radically reshape how far marketers can go in painting their products, packaging or even corporate images green.