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Energy Statements – Five Steps To Fulfill The Planning Requirements For Small Development

admin — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 17:43:36 +0000

Energy Statements – Five Steps To Fulfill The Planning Requirements For Small Development is a post from: wordpressrobot.com

The Five Common Sources of Renewable Energy

admin — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 19:48:39 +0000

The Five Common Sources of Renewable Energy is a post from: wordpressrobot.com

Five Mandatory Questions You Need To Ask Before Submitting Your articles To An Article Directory

admin — Sun, 31 Oct 2010 17:20:46 +0000

My staff keep reminding me that I am one of the most prolific writers they have ever seen. I have a tendency to write 10 to 15 articles a day and a 300 page training manual in just 2 weeks fully edited ready for publishing which is a little freakish but I enjoy writing and I enjoy sharing my knowledge with people. One of the top ways of doing that on the Internet is to write your articles and submit them to an Article Directory but I have recently seen some very dark issues creeping in with articles submitted to some of the article directories.

This has really happened to me…

As a technology geek and yes I will call myself a geek cause that is what I am, I often write articles on technology subjects like how to use excel, how to build webpages, etc. However, when I submitted my articles to five article directories recently I found some really disturbing aspects to the way they do business and present my articles. One of the most disturbing issues was that if you had any domain names or links in either your webpage or in your Author Bio they stripped them out. If you had used keywords in your Hypertext, they removed your links and substituted their own to your competitions website. See, it seems some article directories are now using your work to advertise other people services within your articles.

When I saw this for the first time, I was flabbergasted. Not just because somebody else was using my work and saying that it was their, but more so, they were using my keywords to hijack my back links back to my website to my competitors. I had also found from these five article directories that they had licensed my work to others, so that they could put their names on my articles.

This one issue alone opens up a plethora of issues with Google, MSN, AOL and Yahoo?

The entire search engines above frown on duplicate material on websites and by somebody using your material without permission you could find that anyone of these Search Engines could ban your site. The really scary aspect to this is that you are not responsible for this and it really is a form of identity theft and more copyright infringement.

For all except one of the directories, I was able to overcome this problem by simply going in and deleting the articles to reclaim my work and stop my competitors from stealing my work but one of the directories did not have the capabilities to do this.

So from my experience I have written five mandatory questions you should be asking your directories so that this does not happen to you!

Q1. Do I Own The Rights To My Articles?

This seems pretty straight forward but I have found in the fine print of some article directory sites, it will say that by submitting your article to this directory that you agree that the directory now owns the intellectual property of this article. If you find that, then my recommendation is to run. Most quality directories do require you to give them a non-exclusive license to reprint or reuse or redistribute your article and this is quite acceptable as this is what you want, but you do not at any stage want to lose your rights to your articles, especially if you are not getting paid for it.

Q2. Can I Pre-format My Article with HTML

Some directory articles have rules that prevent you from including HTML in your article. What this means in many cases is that you cannot format the article the way you want. This can be a major problem for you if you have bulleted lists or numbered lists as you can sometimes find these lists are all on one line or not properly formatted.

I have even seen situations where, I have submitted articles to this type of article directory only to find that all my paragraphs are lumped together and the articles look terrible. The bottom line is this, select your article submission directories carefully and make sure you can pre-format the article in HTML. I should note that there are now many Article Submission directories that allow you to enter articles with full html including pictures.

Q3. Are You Going To Sell or Provide My Email Address To A Third Party?

Everyone that I know hates spam. Me in particular, especially since I get around 1,000 spam emails everyday! Be very careful though, some article directories have written into their operating agreements that they can pass your email address onto third-parties. This means, they could sell or supply your email address to anyone. Most article directories that I deal with, have very strict policies on protecting your privacy and your emails but some article directories automatically put your email address up on the article with your name.

This is as big a problem as someone actually selling your email address, as some spammers use tools called mail bots or email bots that look for the html tag mailto and then pickup the email address after that html tag. This is a big problem for all of us, as this means the spammers know they have a valid email address, so ensure when you are choosing an article directory that they do not sell or provide your email address to any third party plus that they do not put your email address on the page your article is on.

If you are not sure, have a look at some of the articles in the article directory as that will give you a pretty good indication as to the way the articles and email addresses will be handled.

Q4. Do You Allow Hyperlinks or Domain Names in your Article Or Author/Bio Line?

The whole reason for you or I writing articles is so that we can get our work published onto the internet and promote our business whether it be through back links or from people reading your article and then deciding to visit your website. If you are not writing articles for this reason, then I hope you are getting paid a lot of money cause if you are not getting links back to your website, then you will not get any traffic.

There are some article directories that do not allow hyperlinks in the main body of the webpage, where as others do allow it on special occasions. Some article directories do not even allow hyperlinks in the Author/Bio Line which as far as I am concerned means you may as well go elsewhere because if you are not getting at least a domain name shown in the Author/Bio Line then how are people going to know where your site is. If you are selecting an Article directory, make sure in their writing rules area that it specifies that even if you can have an active domain link, that you can at least have an inactive domain link or web address link.

A sample of an inactive domain link is shown to the right – http://www.1-on-1.biz

What this means is that the reader of your article at the very least can see your domain and can copy and paste your domain into the address section of the browser. You certainly will not get as many people visiting your website if you are using inactive domain links in the Author Bio area but at least if people really want to see what you have to offer they can get there relatively easily.

Remember one thing, the human race inherently lazy so if you do not make things as easy as possible your sales will never soar.

Q5. Do You Allow Hypertext Links in your Author/Bio Line?

A Hypertext link is one of the most important links on an article page. Essentially what this type of link is, is where a person will see normal text but when they click on the text it will take them to a particular webpage. For example I have included a Hypertext Link below –

How to Profit from a Direct Sales Website

I have written the code for the link below. Note that I have substituted the for [ ] brackets simply for this article.

[a rel="nofollow" onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackPageview', '/outgoing/article_exit_link']);” href=”http://www.1-on-1.biz/dms.asp”] How to Profit from a Direct Sales Website[/a]

The link is shown in the a href section and the text “How To Profit from a Direct Sales Website” is the Hypertext. The reason it is important for us to structure our links in this way as it tells the search engines that that page is related to those keywords. The more times a search engine finds those keywords and links on different websites, the more points you will accumulate for that page, and the higher the likelihood that search engine will rank you high when people use those key terms. I will say though, that SEO technology is more involved than just that one issue, but it is certainly an important issue that can make the difference to your webpage being at the top of the search engine results or at the bottom.

What I mentioned at the start of the article was that 5 article directories I was submitting articles to were keyword hijacking my articles. Essentially when they were presenting my articles in the directory, all my links in the author bio line that contain the “a href” section were dropped and changed to my competitors simply because my competitors had paid for that service. Ultimately, when a user was to click on my keywords and my Author BIO line they were going to my competitors which I consider a dirty tactic. Keyword hijacking degrades an article directory because eventually the article writers wake up to this issue and simply cease putting articles into the directory and the quality of the directory will die off so all I can say to those article directories that are doing this, I hope that you are making lots of money, because this technique is not going to last.

The bottom line is this, if you are trying to build your sites traffic, then you are better off spending your time submitting articles to those article directories that allow you to use HYPERTEXT in the Author Bio lines. Very few that I know will let your get away with that in the main article and to be honest, it can actually get you banned from the article directory.

To finish off …

Let us be frank here, it takes a lot of work to build successful websites and it takes even a lot more to write high quality articles, so why would you want to short change yourself by submitting your articles to article directories that do not want to work as equal partners, because remember that whilst you are writing quality articles for the article directories, you are helping them build traffic to their website and build their PR ranking with Google. Both you and the article directory are in fact benefiting from your work.

Look the bottom line is this … make sure you check out and tick off each of these questions –

Q1. Do I Own The Rights To My Articles?
Q2. Can I Pre-format My Article with HTML
Q3. Are You Going To Sell or Provide My Email Address To A Third Party?
Q4. Do You Allow Hyperlinks or Domain Names in your Article Or Author/Bio Line?
Q5. Do You Allow Hypertext Links in your Author/Bio Line?

Five Mandatory Questions You Need To Ask Before Submitting Your articles To An Article Directory is a post from: wordpressrobot.com

The Five Comedic Character Archetypes

admin — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 20:17:01 +0000

THE FIVE COMEDIC CHARACTER ARCHETYPES

What is an Archetype? An archetype is an original model of a person, ideal example, or a prototype upon which others are copied, patterned, or emulated; a symbol universally recognized by all.

In the analysis of comedic personalities, which is what we are about to do, an archetype refers to a “stereotype”, and/or an “epitome” (someone who fits the definition of a stereotype to a tee).

I will be referring to these comedic character archetypes in reference to TV sitcoms, specifically Friends, since everyone knows who these characters are, even if only because their girlfriends and wives made you watch it.

The five comedic character archetypes are:

There are other, less prevalent comedic archetypes that can be worked into a story:

Stories that comedy based are normally self-contained because the story is based solely on these characters and, in a sitcom, is resolved by the end of the episode.

If you liked the content of this article please check out my website at www.thestartingpointpodcast.com – David Grimes II, Writer

The Five Comedic Character Archetypes is a post from: wordpressrobot.com

Directory Paid Survey – Five Secrets To Finding Great Paid Online Survey Directory Sites

admin — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 20:15:21 +0000

Directory Paid Survey

Finding a great directory of paid survey sites is not an easy job, there are a lot of bad eggs in with the legitimate sites and it is really hard to pick out the good ones, so here is some invaluable advice to help find the golden ones the gooses lay.

(1) Take a look at the paid survey directory website – is it made using cheap HTML, have lots of spelling mistakes, exaggerated claims or hype? If the site looks like it has been put up in a hurry, it is likely to be a scam – stay away from it.

(2) Look for reviews of the directory site in question. You can do this by Googling the name of the directory in quotation marks and the word review i.e “Cash Surveys Only” Review. Obviously you will be on the look out for good reviews. You can also visit paid survey site forums, blogs and sites like Scam.com and Ripoffreport.com, to make doubly sure there is no mention of the paid survey directory in a negative light in there. Directory Paid Survey

(3) Another great check for finding a legitimate paid survey site is to send them an email asking a general question about paid surveys that requires a human answer. Wait for the response and see if you are satisfied with it, if you are then that is a good directory site to subscribe to.

(4) Choosing a good paid survey directory site will save you a ton of research, so it is good to do your research on paid survey directory sites rather than individual survey sites.

(5) Your ultimate aim is to find a paid survey directory site that lists just cash surveys only, as this is where the real money lies in completing paid surveys.

There are paid survey sites all over the Internet and the best way to find the good sites is to find a good, reliable directory that takes you by the hand, supports you, provides you with a decent (huge) list of paid survey sites and is not afraid to answer any questions you have. Save yourself the search by following the link below . . . Directory Paid Survey

Directory Paid Survey – Five Secrets To Finding Great Paid Online Survey Directory Sites is a post from: wordpressrobot.com

Getting Started On Twitter–A Five Step Guide

admin — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 05:35:06 +0000

Twitter is all the rage now; I wish I had a nickel for every time a client mentioned it. Succeeding in it is another matter, though, and at first it can be hellishly confusing.When I first started, and was following dozens of people, I felt like I was in a busy sports bar during the Super Bowl. I remember thinking: I don’t know these people. I don’t know what they’re talking about. I must be in the wrong place.It helps to know the rules and a little about the culture before you jump in. It’s not rocket science but it does take a little study and work.1) Plan: First, think about why you’re even on Twitter.Know what you want out of Twitter. Are you there for networking, building a brand, driving traffic to your blog? Determining this early will help guide your strategy and improve your odds.2) Package yourself: First you need to pick out a Twitter ID. Consider your name first (I use @markivey); alternatively, you could use another name with your company, role or skills (example: @mediaphyte). You want something that will build your brand and/or illustrate your expertise.And don’t skimp on your profile; make it sound engaging, and choose some nice wallpaper—this part is all about personal packaging (you can also customize your own wallpaper, using your company’s logo if you want). Study other Twitter examples because you need to get it right.3) Follow the right people: Twitter is about following and being followed (more on connecting/conversing later) You can use the basic Twitter search or, better, one of the tools I recently reviewed like Twellow in my blog (www.ioncorporation.com/blog, date: Feb 6). These search engines can make life much easier for you by identifying the right people to follow.Start with the influencers and industry experts in your industry. Find people with common interests and/or just people you want to track because they’re interesting. Check out some of the really big names here. Look for interesting directories and specialized lists; for instance, here’s 10 journalists worth following. And don’t forget your colleagues–you may have people all over your company tweeting. As one example, here’s a partial list of employees tweeting at Cisco.4) Learn the lingo: Before you jump in and start tweeting, get up to speed on the lingo and abbreviations. Some common terms*:• “tweet”: is a message.• @ ID : A message with the @ sign preceeding the Twitter ID is a reply message; so if you want to send me a message, start with @markivey. (Note that your entire network can view this message).• DM ID: Putting a DM in front of someone’s ID is a private message (you can only send private messages to people who follow you).• RT: a retweet. If you find a post particularly interesting, you can copy and paste it and retweet it, as long as you give credit (tools like Tweetdeck have a RT button). (this is one of Twitter’s most interesting features, and how some Tweets go viral).5) Manage efficiently: The last task is to download a “client” to manage your tweets and traffic. Twitter.com is ok for starters but you’ll soon want to move on to a better platform. These include clients like Twhirl and TwitterFox, which have built in search features, URL shorteners (which you’ll need) and nice interfaces to view and respond to your Tweets. Twitterfox is a Firefox extension, while Twirl is a downloaded application.My favorite, though, is Tweetdeck.What I love about Tweetdeck is you can arrange the people you follow into separate, manageable categories. I currently have four categories: “social media” (people who follow social media); “individuals” (business contacts, other influencers in other areas); Favorites; and “all.”But you can set up categories for almost anything–influencers in your industry; friends/family/close contacts, sports/hobbies; special lists, like journalists or even by twitterers in your geographical area. Just add a new “pane” for each group.You can also set up search features in separate categories to hunt for certain keywords, like your company name, personal ID or an issue or event (ex: China or World Series) . I have searches set up for “Twitter tools” and “Twitter tips.” The default search is search.twitter.com and Twitscoop, which reports on hot trends and keywords in Twitter.One warning: Tweetdeck is a memory hog. It can also be addictive. Plan to set aside designated times, say 20 min. 3 times a day, to check it or you may wind up sitting there watching it for hours.One way to become more efficient is to integrate Twitter into Outlook with a tool like Outwit. You can update your Twitter status and follow your friends without having to open any other applications.Outwit allows you to schedule your Tweets to be delivered every minute to an hour, and dump them into a separate folder. This way you can check them at your leisure. You can also easily categorize them by name and save them, something you can’t do with Tweetdeck. One downside: your email box can quickly get overloaded (as if you need more email).* Resources: there are hundreds of terms thrown around in the Twitter universe, some of the downright goofy. For instance, Twittish means “took skittish to twitter”. Check out this glossary for more.

note: you can follow me at http://twitter.com/markiveyNext: building a community with Twitter.

Getting Started On Twitter–A Five Step Guide is a post from: wordpressrobot.com

Five Ways to Promote Your Business Online — Part Iv: How RSS Can Attract Visitors to Your Small Business Website

admin — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 00:33:06 +0000

What Is RSS?

“RSS” originally stood for “Rich Site Summary.” Now it is popularly known as “Really Simple Syndication” because it is a quick and easy way to disseminate, or syndicate, fresh content across the web. RSS is published in XML format and is also referred to as a newsfeed.

How Can RSS Feed Help Your Small Business Website?

In addition to good keywords and good keyword phrases, fresh and relevant content is another imp ortant component of SEO (discussed in Part III of this series). Search engines are constantly on the lookout for new content. To do this they use what are called “search engine spiders” to “crawl” websites and add them to the search engines. RSS or newsfeeds update frequently and because of this they add content to a website on a fairly regular basis. Search engine spiders love this! Your website visitors will too, if you provide them with content that is relevant and interesting. RSS adds to what I call your “expertise quotient.” The more information you can give your visitors the more inclined they are to viewing you as an expert in your field. If they see you as an expert, they are more likely to turn to you (over your competition) for the goods and services you provide. For instance, let’s say you run a violin repair shop and you are one of two or three in your area. If your website can offer visitors information about how to care for and repair their violins, you establish yourself as an expert. When it comes time for a violin user in your area to get his violin repaired, he’s more likely to come to you because you’re the expert.

How to Get RSS Feed on Your Website

Borrow It

The simplest way to include RSS feed on your website is to borrow feed from other sources. RSS is available on a wide variety of topics. For instance, if had a golf business and you did a Google search for “RSS golf” you would find 106,000,000 sites (as of this writing) offering golf info and most of them providing RSS newsfeed you can use on your website.

Create Your Own

Creating your own RSS feed greatly improves your expertise quotient because the information is coming directly from your own background and experience. Now before you write yourself off as not being an expert, take a moment to think about what you do for a living. People come to you all the time looking for advice and information in your particular area of expertise. You wouldn’t be in business if you didn’t know your business! Now instead of just talking about it, you can write it down and turn it into an RSS feed. Instant content! Instant expertise! The really big advantage of creating your own RSS is that you can make it available to people all over the ‘Net and those feeds translate into instant backlinks to your website.

For instance, DellwoodWebDesign.com has an RSS page with links from the National Federation of Independent Business. The newsfeed features snippets from the NFIB. Clicking on any of those snippets takes you to the NFIB website. That’s an instant backlink for them courtesy of DellwoodWebDesign.com. Now, imagine you creating your own RSS feed and having others use it on their sites. If Joe web designer decides to use your RSS on his site, that RSS points back to its source–and that’s you!

But how do you get that feed on your site?

To include RSS on your website you need to use something called an RSS aggregator. The easiest way to do this is to use a service like RSSinclude from RSS-Info.com. Getting RSS feed onto your site could not be simpler and it requires very little coding. All you do is find the RSS feed site you want to include, plug it into the RSSinclude form, and it generates the code you need. You can even customize it to make the feed look like it is part of your site.

If you have created your own feed, RSS-Info features a free RSSeditor that helps you create and upload the feed you create. You don’t even need to know XML. Just fill out the form, answer a few questions and you have instant RSS feed.

The hardest part of the whole process is incorpoarting the code into your site and a good web designer can do that!

RSS is a way to build instant credibility with your visitors. It can set you apart from your competitors as the expert in your field. It provides fresh content to your site on a regular basis and it can help improve your website’s page rank. There’s very little reason not to incorparate RSS as part of your small business website.

Five Ways to Promote Your Business Online — Part Iv: How RSS Can Attract Visitors to Your Small Business Website is a post from: wordpressrobot.com

The Five Tips to Optimize Twitter

admin — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 05:41:57 +0000

Home business owners and internet entrepreneurs alike are actively trying to crack the code to Twitter optimization. The question here is how to do the little things to facilitate viral growth and enhanced google ranking. These five tips will provide a good first step toward those ongoing objectives.

1. Account and Usernames

Your username is very important since it serves as a core relevance item. It’s unchangeable and fundamental to your Twitter identity. It should embody your company’s name in some way so that your followers easily recall it when performing subsequent searches. Choose an account name, which can be the same or different from your username, which followers can refer to you as in a conversation.

2. Bio Content

I’ve seen successful marketers using two contrasting approaches for this content. One extreme seeks to connect with the reader by offering a truly personal and relatable short-story about them. While this method lacks in optimization, it does have its merits by soft-selling the business’s brand, history or value proposition in a down-to-earth manner. The other spectrum features the company describing itself by using every keyword-rich phrase possible, which intuitively enhances optimizes but at the expense of some readers who are turned off.

3. Leading off

The “lead-in” is approximately the first forty characters of any tweet. This text is believed to carry more relevance since this section is what can be used as a title tag. Instead of using the entire tweet which could conceivably exceed forty characters, Google will isolate just the “lead-in” for search purposes. Just remember to balance the keyword density with conversational text that can also positively impact tweets.

4. “Retweetability”

Twitter’s rule of a 140 character maximum includes “RTs”, other usernames, and of course the original tweet itself. As most marketers would agree, getting retweeted is the ultimate goal in the social media world. Limiting your tweets to around 120 characters will allow for multiple retweets when accounting for the additional text.

5. Spreading the word

Don’t limit yourself to Twitter exclusively. The most sites containing your Twitter URL, the most Google will rank it highly. Increasing your back-links on articles directories, blogs, press release sites and video sharing sites are prime examples for spreading the word about your Twitter profile.

The Five Tips to Optimize Twitter is a post from: wordpressrobot.com

Robert Scoble’s five tips for Video blogging

admin — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 13:19:45 +0000

www.thomascrampton.com Caught up with Robert Scoble recently – aka scobleizer – who gave five tips for better video blogging. (Including choosing a better camera angle than the one I did with this interview!) Full posting on www.thomascrampton.com

Robert Scoble’s five tips for Video blogging is a post from: wordpressrobot.com

Five Simple Steps to Twitter Optimization

admin — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 05:42:02 +0000

All types of internet marketers and home based business owners are wondering how Twitter plays into Google’s search engine ranking. The five steps listed below should clarity some of the common misunderstandings in addition to offers some simple pointers you can implement when optimizing your tweeting.

1. Account and Usernames

The username you decide to you should have relevance to your company or brand and your followers should be able to easily remember it since its attached to the end of your Twitter url. Your account name shows up directly after your username and can be the same or different. Decide on an account name which not only promotes your company but also you as an individual and leader.

2. Bio information

There are two different ways to tackle this area. On one hand you could include only the most keyword-rich verbiage as a means to maximize optimization. This strategy is more obviously noticed users are only given 160 characters, however, it’s often less personal and down-to-earth. By contrast, other marketers choose the more personal route without the keyword stuffing. These descriptions are often more effective in relating to the reader, however, lack the potential for optimization.

3. Tweeting

The first several characters, or the “lead-in”, in any tweet hold more weight in relevancy. Several studies show that this text carries more significance to search engines since it determines the tweet’s title tag. Count on the first thirty to fourty characters influencing the “lead-in”. Keep in mind that you need balance the keyword density with conversational verbiage to it retains a personal touch.

4. Your “Retweetability”

Since Twitter only allows for 140 characters, its often difficult to include your message along with the “RT” and username text in the case of retweets. Remember that retweets will feature some of the most recent usernames who have also retweeted the message. Viral tweets that spread like reproducing fruit flies should be no more than 120 characters to allow for several retweets.

5. Spread the word

Disperse your profile URL as widely as possible. Common ways of doing this are writing social media articles or press releases so that people will come across your company or brand when learning about the growing industry. Youtube videos that offer news or instructional content are also key for spreading your twitter information as a byproduct.

Five Simple Steps to Twitter Optimization is a post from: wordpressrobot.com