The premise of Skimlinks’ business strategy is the ease of transitioning from boring links to revenue generating affiliate links. Merchants gain access to over 17,000 affiliate programs, without the hassle of conducting negotiations or creating affiliate codes. Skimlinks automates and aggregates the entire transition process, allowing merchants to spend time on other business matters. The company provides merchants that participate in the program with pertinent information, such as what visitors click on a website and the products and services that they purchase.

WHY CHOOSE SKIMLINKS

Behind the Scenes

Skimlinks eliminates unsightly affiliate links. The company turns current product links into links that are virtually invisible to site visitors. The visitors trust the new links, because they know where the links will take them in cyberspace.

Strict Screening

Skimlinks does not just accept any merchant into its affiliate marketing program. The strict approval process guarantees a match between top notch merchants and over 17,000 affiliate programs.

Better Rates

Economy of scale allows Skimlinks to negotiate the highest commission rates for merchants. Compare the pay per click affiliate rates offered by Skimlinks with the rates offered by companies such as Amazon.com

Extensive Product Line

Skimlinks constantly adds new products to its already extensive line. Merchants track links on social networking website, monetize RSS feeds, customize WordPress blogs. Constant product innovation ensures the company has staying power.

Personal Service

In an era when customer queries sit in an email box for days, Skinlinks has established a reputation of providing superior customer service. Customer service ranks as high a priority as introducing innovative products. Merchants can contact Skimlinks with questions or issues any time of the day, on any day of the week.

Leading Technology

The underlying reason behind Skinlinks’ success is the patent-pending technology that drives Skimlink’s product line. The most impressive part of this technology is how affiliate links seamlessly integrate into merchant websites.

After six years of operation, Skimlinks has already climbed to the top of the industry recognition list. The company wins awards for its groundbreaking product launches, including awards one at the top affiliate marketing galas. Skimlinks won the 2010 Technology Genius Award, at the LinkShare Golden Link Awards ceremony.

Easy as 1-2-3

Applying to become part of Skimlinks’ affiliate marketing program takes only a few minutes. Complete a simple form and Skimlinks will immediately respond with a decision as to whether the company is a good fit for your business. Skimlinks looks for quality, original content, regardless if your business produces it in house or user generated.

If accepted, you can install Skimlinks in a matter of minutes. Obtain the JavaScript code and simply cut and paste it into the footer of your business website, blog, or forum. If you use vBulletin with your forum, Skimlinks offers a vBulletin plugin. The same goes for bloggers that use WordPress.

After installation, you can immediate access to the Publisher Interface. The Interface allows you to customize products settings, access reports, and utilize the myriad tools provided by Skimlinks. Spend some time navigating the Interface before using any of the features.

For business owners who want to spend less time micromanaging affiliate marketing programs, Skinlinks offers the most innovative products and extensive product line of any similar company. You can have a revenue generating affiliate marketing program up and running in a manner of minutes, while confident that you are part of a team that only accepts the highest-quality of merchants.

It Looks Outdated
The right design for a business website is mostly a matter of taste. Of course, this is subjective. What one person loves, another is bound to hate. There is no way to please everybody. Although, what can be agreed upon is whether a site looks outdated. The web is always evolving and businesses are expected to evolve along with it. If a website hasn’t been designed in over 5 years, it’s probably time for an update. An outdated looking website is unprofessional and may no longer be user friendly. Business websites should be redesigned very 3-5 years or so to keep it fresh. Content doesn’t need to be completely rebuilt, but it should be tweaked over time so that it is still current and accurate.

Decline in Conversions
Most businesses have peak seasons and slower seasons. It’s expected that many business websites will not convert at a steady rate all year long. However, if you see a downward trend in conversion (sales, leads, etc.) over a long period of time it could mean that your website is to blame.

Costly Updates
If you make many changes to a business website each year and are paying lots of money for these changes, since you can’t make them yourself, it’s probably time to analyze the cost of the changes against the cost of a redesign that incorporates an easy to use content management system. Of course, if you are going to invest in a CMS, it will be necessary to take the time to learn how to use it. If you only make a few changes a year, this investment may not be worthwhile.

Optimization Difficulty
If you are going to invest in an SEO campaign, it’s worth doing it correctly. This means that changes will need to be made to a website’s content, meta tags, and social sharing elements. The technical functionality of some websites makes it difficult to do so. If you aren’t able to easily implement website changes for SEO purposes, it’s worth investing in a website redesign.

The big story that Bloomberg broke was that the iPad3 will be equipped with a new high resolution screen and a faster next generation quad core processor compatible with the long term evolution [LTE] networks that Verizon and AT&T are laying out. This would possibly make the new iPad I mm thicker in size to accommodate the new CPU with more gigahertz of power and would double the screen resolution and the speed. The retina display feature that has already been introduced in the Apple iPhone4 versions would also be introduced in the next generation iPad

Apple today is far ahead of its competitors in the tablet segment with only Samsung’s Galaxy Tab and Amazon’s Kindle Fire providing some sort of competition to its market share. Analysts report that though both Samsung and Amazon are selling in the market, they are not making much money on the same. Others like HP TouchPad and Blackberry PlayBook have resorted to distress sales to keep selling.

Kindle Fire is said to be continuing for the fact that it has a hugely profitable books and music inventory of Amazon that creates a sizable after sales revenue stream and makes good losses in selling the tablet at $200. Samsung has an extraordinary cash flow from its sales of smartphones and gadgets, a strong hold in the components manufacture including the lucrative NAND flash memory segment and a growing share of the Asian market that helps it push its Tablet sales.

So why is Apple driving in rapid innovations in the tablet market that has seemingly no credible competitors.

The truth is Apple under Tim Cook is aiming for the bigger pie. Over the last 12 months it has effortlessly sold tablets to the corporate world that had been the exclusive domain of the Microsoft Intel duo since the early eighties. As per Forrester Research the pharmaceutical and the financial services industry have bought thousands of iPad tablets en masse making it a virtual standard business tool.

That has created an easy entry for Apple in the virtually closed corporate world. The early customers have now followed it up with orders for iPhone, the Mac desktop, the iPhone and the App Store platform to benefit from the Apple ecosystem. The iPad is the driving wedge for Apple’s entry into the corporate world and hence has become the hot bed of innovation for the world’s best technology company.

The following products will help your business enhance search engine optimization (SEO).

Advanced Link Manager

One key element to getting you business to rank on the all-important first search engine page is to find the most popular keywords that your customers use to contact your business. Keywords receive most of the SEO attention, but another SEO strategy may prove to be more critical for you attain than first results page ranking. It is all about establishing a linking program for your website.

Advance Link Manager is a revolutionary link management tool that provides a number of SEO benefits:

• Keeps track of incoming links, as well as the link activity on your competitors’ websites

• Allows multiple clients to connect remotely to the same database

• Create reports that Advanced Link Manager sends directly to customer inboxes

• All of the data collected from search engines is stored on your computer or server

• Register for Standard, Professional, orEnterpriselicenses

The most reliable SEO tool has caught the attention of SEO consultants throughout the world because of its proven features.

FEATURES

Analyze Domain Quality

Many business owners do not give their domain a second thought, but they should. Strong domain names contain some of the popular keywords that you try to integrate within your web pages. Analyze Domain Quality not only analyzes the quality of your business domain, it also analyzes the quality of business domain names that request a link exchange.

Webpage Analyzer

Perhaps the most valuable tool, Webpage Analyzer gives you an idea of your business website’s SEO. This tool also analyzes competitor websites, so you can take the best practices from your competitors and apply them to your business website.

Organize Projects

Does your business have dozens of clients that entail hundreds of projects? Does the staggering number of projects make it confusing to organize reports that you need to send to clients? Advance Link Manager presents an overview of all of your business projects, and you then assigned each project to a category. You will have all the important information that you need, such as creation date, last update date, and project assignments.

Custom Profile

You can use Advanced Link Manager to store custom profiles for each user. This allows you to store user preferences in separate files on your server. You choose API keys and email servers, which gives you the ability to manage what users can and cannot do with stored data.

Potential Referrers Wizard

Do you want to know who comprises your referrer list? Potential Referrers Wizard allows you to review any of the available search engines to look for referrers that already link to your website and potential referrer candidates. Link exchanges remain one of the best ways to build a linking campaign.

These are just some of the features and benefits of the Advanced Link Manager. Do not struggle with improving your website’s link popularity. Advanced Link Manager will help you manage your link building campaigns and turn your website into a search engine powerhouse!

Advanced Web Ranking

Research shows that 95% of all Internet searchers find what they are looking for on page 1 of the search results. Rarely is someone going to click to page 2 or 3 to find your business. Your business ranks high in search engine rankings by strategically integrating the most popular keyword throughout your website’s page content.

Advance Web Ranking provides you with the tools to create a website that ranks high across all search engines and across all Internet platforms.

• Provides SEO tools that help you effectively track and analyze your search engine rankings in real time.

• Analyze Google Analytics statistics to discern visitor tracking data and visitor behavior.

• Accurate, comprehensive link building tool

• Most accurate keyword research tools

• Report generation for keyword rankings

• Data stored locally on your computer or server

This web ranking application has acquired immense popularity because of its numerous features.

FEATURES

Track Website Rankings

Analyze your business website rankings for multiple keywords. You can also analyze what works for your competition. Pay attention to Google search engine results, since Google controls about two-thirds of the search engine market. Yahoo! and Bing trail in distant second and third place.

Professional Reports

Compiling keyword search result data is one thing. Organizing the information into coherent reports is quite another matter. Your clients want to read personalized reports that clearly convey your message. Advanced Web Ranking gives you the tools to create high-quality reports that will dazzle your customers.

Automate Reports and Updates

Advanced Web Ranking takes the stress out of having to adhere to a rigid schedule for creating reports and updates. You can now schedule updates and generate reports, even if you are away from your computer for leisure purposes. You control when your business disseminates information.

Research Keywords

Target keywords that you want optimized on your website. Then, research the keywords to ascertain popularity. Features such as Keyword Research Tool and Keyword Analyzer will suggest new keywords and suggest ways to enhance the placement of current keywords.

Optimization

Advanced Web Ranking’s Website Optimization tool allows your business to see the flaws in your optimization strategy and obtain valuable input on how to improve it. You can employ the same tool to conduct a competitor optimization analysis and comparison to your business website’s optimization strategy.

Go Global

If you run a business that has customers across a wide geographic range, you will be able to check your business website’s rankings using the proxy per project or Google Preview Search Engine tools. These tools enable you to send customers who live around the world reports and research prospective new markets for your business to enter.

Website rankings will continue to evolve at a dizzying pace. We already see the importance of local search ranking and the importance of mobile marketing. Use Advanced Web Ranking to stay ahead of the competition and abreast of the latest changes in SEO.

Advanced Web Stats

Would you go into a gunfight armed with only a knife? Then, why would you compete for a high search engine rankings for your business without the ability to analyze statistics that explain how your SEO strategy is working? Analyzing your visitor’s behavior is one of the most important factors that influence your online business. Advanced Web Stats is the most efficient tool for tracking performance and measuring success.

You will want to download Advanced Web Stats after reading about the software programs benefits and features:

• Track your visitor conversion rates

• Analyze transactions and revenue streams Advanced Web Stats’s ecommerce reports

• Receive notifications when website traffic significantly fluctuates

• Monitor individual visitors and their surfing behaviors

• Collects data from both JavaScript page tags and Web-Server log files

FEATURES

Distributed Scheduler

Do you want to automate scheduled tasks across multiple computers? Distributed Scheduler allows you to perform other tasks, while all of your scheduled tasks perform at the time that you designate. This feature uses one computer to parse logs or generate reports, while freeing up other computer resources for web reporting.

E-Commerce

You receive an overview of your ecommerce traffic and specific parameters, such as revenue streams, transaction types, and conversion rates. Ecommerce allows you to discern how many times each visitor comes to your website before making a purchase. This tool gives you an idea of the effectiveness of your online sales pitch.

Analyze Website Performance

You can analyze visitor behavior over selected periods of time. This feature comes in handy during holiday periods and special promotions. See what website content your visitors consider valuable. Develop goals for your website and track what marketing campaign brings more revenue.

Track Each Session

Using the Track Individual Sessions feature, you apply custom filters to produce a relevant sample of your website traffic. This feature provides insights into how your visitors interact with your website. You set limiters on the number of sessions to track and what categories you want to monitor.

Privacy

Protect your business website against viruses and malicious software. With Advanced Web Stats, you have security and privacy because the data you create is stored on your servers. You install, configure, and manage your data security in-house. Choose which employees can review reports and what reports you allow them to review.

Five ways for using Facebook and Twitter Trends to find your next blog topic

Identify

Customers often provide the precursor to what will be hot over the next year. Either they discuss something they saw or something that they think “is cool.” The key for your business is to get ahead of the trend and make it your own. If you discern a trend before it becomes trendy, you can write about it in a blog. By detecting a trend and then writing about it, people will see your business as a leader in offering new products and services.

Facebook and Twitter provide the best venues for you to learn about pending trends. Moreover, schedule regular visits to TagDef, which is a portal that tracks trending topics. TagDef also allows your business to search for keywords related to your product and service mix. Your business must spots trends before they become apparent to other businesses in your industry.

Questions

Social media websites, such as Twitter and Facebook, allows your business to identify the questions people ask about your products and services. You can answer the questions by addressing each one on your website’s blog. If you sell sporting goods, you may find on social media websites that people want to learn more about lightweight tents. You can produce a short blog that addresses all facets of purchasing a tent.

Social networking search tools also determine the specific type of information that people seek. Your business can identify tweets or Facebook posts that include highly sought after industry keywords. In the case of tents, you can search for tweets or posts than mention “lightweight tents.” Moreover, search through messages and compile a list of those that ask questions relevant to your business niche.

Study

Facebook and Twitter provide a bounty of marketing research information. Yet, you can find your next blog topic by simply measuring the effectiveness of past advertising campaigns. If you see the same Facebook and Twitter advertisements running every week, then you have stumbled upon potential topics for your blog. These advertisements perform well, which means the target audience likes the information provided. Track the ads that frequently run on Facebook and Twitter. Record specific ad text, link addresses, and images to identify patterns that make the ads a success. If you discern prevailing themes to the text, images, and link addresses, then your business can compile a list of potential blog topics. Utilize social media analytic tools and study the information to identify the hot-button issues.

Test a Blog Topic

If you are not sure of a potential blog topic will attract a vast audience, then utilize Facebook and Twitter by testing different topics with tweets and posts. Monitor responses to your communications and compile a list of the most popular topics. If you want to run a blog about the best camping spots in the United States, then you would broach the topic on a Facebook Wall or tweet via twitter. The response level that you receive will determine if you follow through with a blog about the topic.

Polls

Polls are not just for politicians. The key to finding a popular blog topic is to discover what matters most to customers. Testing a topic, studying information to find a popular blog topic, and identifying frequent questions can lead you to your next blog topic. However, why not go straight to the source and poll your followers.

Social networking websites give you direct access to your customers. Enhance this direct connection by asking questions, such as “What product do you need more information on?” Followers who feel that you have engaged them are more likely to read about topics that concern them.

Finding the next blog topic for your business does not have to be a guessing game. Facebook and Twitter provides a wealth of information that will direct you in the right direction.

Mason elaborated that unlike Google or Facebook, Groupon is an operation based sales and marketing company whose on field presence with local commerce is more important than cyber presence.

“We talk to thousands of merchants on a daily basis, so that is a huge human component” said Mason explaining that his was a complex hybrid company whose technology and human components of business model was not easy to replicate as some may think. He said that his company believed in local commerce and was involved in bringing the customer to the door-step of the local stores. It was just the reverse of taking the store to the customer as in e commerce and needed a lot of human involvement.

Mason said that the complexity of his business model had made early cash rich competitors like web giants Google, Facebook, Opentable and Yelp quit the field. Growing to a subscriber base of 150 million in just 3 years is not easy. However that could happen only because it was supported by an interesting supply chain of offered products with verified inventory levels. This needed a large field presence or human component that has justified his large sales team of 10,000 employees.

Mason surprised all by claiming that 70% of the staff was employed outside the US. He said that ultimately his goal was to change the way people shop locally, and give more buying power to consumers as well as help stores manage their inventory levels in a better way. Now with dozens of goods being added daily across many categories like travel and shopping, his company was increasingly playing the role of a curator making the demand find the supply instead of being only a dealmaker.

The US Government has in past advised against curtailment of Twitter accounts of Somalia’s radical Islamist groups and also put pressure on cutting of support to Julian Assange the beleaguered Wiki leaks Chief whom it plans to prosecute.

India, the world’s most populous democracy had its information minister Kapil Sibal ranting against Google, FB and Twitter following highlighting of several mega corruption scandals in the social networks. He has now issued formal directives to the websites to cut off the content that is politically and communally offensive. British Prime Minister David Cameron threatened to black out Twitter, Facebook and Blackberry during the infamous London riots last year. The French and the German have been practicing selective blackouts without announcements on a regular basis against Islamist preachers that creates no ripples in the media.

Dictatorships like Libya, Syria,  Saudi Arabia,Iran, Venezuela, Congo, Korea and China have traditionally imposed censorship though other than China no one has been able to really enforce discipline on the web. China resorts to both defensive measures like blocking and aggressive initiatives like hacking to force compliance. Google reluctantly agreed to abide by China’s laws before its annual license renewal in July 2010 after a seven month long resistance last year.

During this seven month standoff Google lost its entire network of Adsense agents in mainland China to rival search engine the Chinese language Baidu. Today Baidu is much bigger than Google in China and controls major part of the searches and dominates the local ad market. Google lost more than a third of its market share and its valuation during the 7 month scrap.

Twitter lost its China market to the local homegrown equivalent of the micro blogging site Sina Weibo following Twitter’s ban in China in early 2009.Now the Chinese version has a following of 100 million local users against a Twitter’s global following of 175 million users. Considering that China is today the fastest growing global market place with 600 million empowered urban consumers in its population of 1.4 billion, it has the capacity to make or break markets.

The China market is too huge to lose for Google, Facebook or Twitter. So the Social media websites are planning to follow Google way and adhere to local laws. If Google can compromise to re-enter China then why should not Twitter or Facebook?

Iconic US corporations Ford Motors, Abbot Laboratories, Kraft Foods, Nike or even Wall Street Banker Goldman Sachs would have a lower valuation than Facebook after its IPO. Last  week the world’s largest commodity trader Glencore and the 4th largest global mining group Xstrata started talks for an $80 billion merger.

The merger valuation will make the two Swiss based commodity and mining  giants with physical presence in over 60 nations bring together assets of over $100 billion worth of coal, oil, wheat, cotton, nickle, copper, that the two companies have accumulated over the last 5 decades.

The assets against liabilities seem fairly balanced and moderately priced in the case of Glencore-Xstrata merger as they seem in any other global company.   Not so in the case of social media upstart Facebook whose share hype at its proposed IPO will give it a possible valuation of $100 billion, much higher than many of the Forbes Fortune 100 companies some of whom have been in business for over a century .

Given the strong credentials of the Wall Street Bankers falling over each other to underwrite this issue it is quite possible that Facebook IPO pulls off this massive fraud on gullible investors. After all lead under-writer’s Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan Chase and Bank of America had pulled off the massive US housing mortgage over-valuation scam worth over a trillion dollars for nearly two decades before the 2008 collapse which destroyed Lehman Brothers and caused the global banking industry melt down.

Unlike the US housing mortgage scam, Facebook’s $100 billion valuation can be controlled easily because only a small amount of the promoter’s holdings are being diluted and the net exposure for the global banks will not exceed $5 billion. The under-writing fees on the other hand will lead to millions of dollars that the Banks will share between them as profits.

Not so for the investors. The risk is entirely theirs because Facebook is devoid of any credible asset base or a sustained revenue track record  or any other reliable valuation criteria. Facebook had posted its first profit of $1 billion last year on a revenue base of $3.7 billion, a tenth of  internet search giant Google.

Credit rating agencies in the US  normally do not step in to warn investors,unless there is a bond issue. Not even the media or non-profits are warning investors though the Facebook growth curve is tapering off in mature markets like the US and Canada. It added just 3 million users to its north American user base of 179 million in the last quarter of 2011 as against 7 million in the previous quarter. Will Facebook manage to meet investors expectations in view of its hyped IPO valuation?

What you may have trouble with is what to write about in your blog.

With that in mind, I’ve brainstormed 67 blog ideas to get your creative juices flowing. What you write about in your blog will of course depend on your type of blog, your industry, whether you’re selling products or services, whether you have a local walk-in establishment, and a number of other factors.

When you browse through this list, remember that most blogs should have a wide variety of blog post types rather than always sticking with the same ones. While it’s fine to announce a new product or service on your blog, if that’s all you do, it could get pretty boring.

I’ve put the types of information into a few different categories to make it easier for you to scan for the type that might interest you. So without further ado, I give you 67 ideas for blog topics that could interest your target audience:

Upcoming events:

1. Classes, seminars, conferences, webinars (and why you should attend).
2. Special events (wine tastings, 5-course dinners, open houses, etc.)
3. Introduction to new products or services.
4. Important company announcements (as long as this isn’t all you do).
5. Free stuff you’re giving away.
6. Special offers, discounts, coupons.
7. Gift ideas.

Contests or other promotions:

8. Photo caption contest.
9. Holiday theme contest.
10. Product naming contest.
11. Logo design contest.
12. Send in a video contest.

Tutorials, product support and how-to guides (in the form of text, videos, or infographics):

13. How to set up your products.
14. How to choose your products or services.
15. How to use your products.
16. How to fix your products.
17. How to assemble your products.
18. How to clean your products.
19. How to protect your products.
20. How to know if you need a particular product or service.
21. How to get the most out of your product or service.
22. Explain the subtle differences between your products (and/or those of your competitors).
23. Answer reader and customer questions.
24. Conference session summaries.

Show your expertise:

25. Do it yourself: For example, how to create a Title tag, how to unclog a toilet, how to file your taxes.
26. Provide your thoughts on industry news.
27. Take an opposite stand on an important industry topic.
28. How to avoid making mistakes (in whatever it is you do).
29. Industry myths.
30. Show both sides of an industry debate and provide your opinion.
31. Discuss industry trends.
32. Discuss the results of tests you’ve performed relating to your industry.
33. How to be a better…whatever.
34. How to avoid…whatever.
35. How to protect yourself from…whatever.
36. How to survive a…whatever.
37. How to recover from a…whatever.
38. How to become a…whatever.
39. How to create a…whatever.
40. How to change your…whatever.
41. How to calculate your…whatever.
42. How to beat…whatever.
43. How to improve your…whatever.
44. How to make your…whatever…easier.
45. How to save money on…whatever.
46. How to be seen as…whatever.
47. How to have the…whatever…you always wanted.
48. How to stop doing…whatever.
49. How to justify…whatever.
50. The problems with…whatever.
51. The importance of…whatever.
52. What caused…whatever?
53. How to understanding the subtleties of…whatever.
54. What not to do with…whatever.

Interviews (in the form of writing, videos, audio, or a combination):

55. Interviews with industry experts.
56. Interviews with people who work at your company.
57. Interviews with people who’ve used your products or services.

Miscellaneous:

58. Best posts of the year.
59. Breaking industry news.
60. Industry predictions for the future.
61. Provide an analogy between what you do and something in life that people can relate to.
62. Satirize your industry or products (could be via a comic):
63. Reader polls and the results.
64. Industry awards.
65. Product and service reviews and recommendations.
66. Quizzes or tests.
67. Expose bad things that are happening in your industry.