ARE MUSICIANS TAKING ON SOCIAL NETWORKING ON THE WEB?

If You Would Like to Connect With Some of the Top Musicians and create your own Social Network at the same time; Then Read On…

If you are one that loves music, and would love to network with these artists, then you just may have your opportunity. Many of the artists, such as 50 Cent, Ludacris, Kylie Minogue and many more have decided to move away from the vast space of MySpace, to a new alternative site, a site that is destined to be a star on Web 2.0. This site is Ning, a place where you can connect with some of your favorite artists.

How Does Ning Work and Will It Benefit My Viral Marketing Campaign?

Ning was founded by Marc and Gina Bianchini in October 2004 to provide an opportunity for you and me the ability to create our own social networks for anything and everything. Ning is the power behind the largest number of the Internet’s social networks, and social networking is all about viral marketing.

You will have the opportunity to use the latest and greatest in social networking, features that are truly customizable by you to fit your needs. This is a platform that provides all the features you need to be a success in the social networking arena. The only thing you need to bring to the table is your time and determination. With this you will be able to build your own social network. This is not a prefitted site, this is one you create yourself.

What is the Purpose of Ning?

The founders first started Ning on a very simple premise, they wanted to provide a way for anyone to create their own social networking site. They were expecting some amazing results and they got that and so much more! They have artists, athletes, musicians , educators, journalists, students, alumni, hobbyists, and any other group of interests you can imagine. The diversity of these groups is amazing and quite profound.

As you check out the Ning website, you will find a very informative FAQ section, where you can learn about their Network Creators community.

Are you a business or company that wants to promote your private label? If so, check out Ning for Business.

You will find these features on the Ning website as posted there:

# Members can invite new members, meet new people, and make new friends on your network.

# Full message center with address book importing from Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and Hotmail.

# See your network members when they are online now.

# Customizable profile pages just for you.

# Photo slideshows, video players, music players, and network badges, that can be embedded anywhere on the Internet, seamlessly funneling new people to your network.

# Set your own different privacy settings for every photo, video, group, or blog post they contribute.

# RSS feeds of your network’s features, such as members, discussions, photos, videos, music/podcasts, and blog posts.

# Got a logo or brand? Add it to make your network totally unique.

# Choose your own theme from the options provided then customize them to make them your own.

# Public or private, that is totally up to you!

# Choose how your photos, video player, music players, and network badges appear on your site.

# Do you want to ask your members some profile questions before they join? You get to create this, and the questions will be private as well as the answers, for your eyes only.

# Do you juse Facebook? Enable “one-click” Facebook Promotion so your members can add photo slideshows, video players, and music/podcasts from your network seamlessly into Facebook.

# You have the ability to moderate photos and videos before you post them.

# Choose from a set of supported languages (English, Chinese, Dutch, French, Portuguese, Spanish) or translate your social network into any unsupported language by changing one file in the code.

# Member profile questions created by you for your network.

# Member blog posts with photos, files, and widgets.

# Manage blog posts and moderate comments.

# Choose the option to publish in the future.

# Ability to customize the appearance of member profile pages.

# Option to add widgets to profile page.

Take advantage of this great social networking platform and create for yourself an even bigger and better network and keep your viral marketing campaign on fire!

Affiliate Programs and How They Can Boost Your Income

What Do You Know About Affiliate Marketing?

As you already know, Internet marketing uses the Internet to market products as well as their promotion. You can be using this method to promote your own products or the products of others.

This is where we get into the affiliate programs and how they can benefit you financially by earning commission on the quality products you are promoting for others.

There are several avenues of marketing that you can use such as your website and web pages, personal blogs and Email Opt-in lists. You are going to promote the product with a squeeze page or promotional letter, In your letter, you will include an affiliate link which will contain the affiliate identifier.

With your affiliate identifier link, your visitors will click on the link, be sent to the product sales page or website, and with their purchase, you will be given a percentage of the sales price. This is very similar to sales in brick and mortar stores, however with an affiliate program, your part is very simple and self running. All you need to do is do the initial set up and optimize the traffic.

You need to realize though that Not All Affiliate Programs are the same, so choose wisely.

What you need to know and look for in choosing the right affiliate program:

1) Training and Support

Affiliate programs will usually provide training and support, which is crucial for those just starting out on Internet Marketing. This is so important as it will be the only way for you to become effective as well as profitable. You need to look for affiliate which offers sufficient training and the know how in selling their product. There are however, Internet marketers who have experienced great success in affiliates without the training and support, but wouldn’t it be nice to have that training and support?

2) Look for High Commissions

You are going to put in the effort to bring in the traffic to the affiliate product with your sales pitch, then directing the customers to the affiliate sales page, and for your well earned efforts, you will receive a percentage of the sale in form of commissions. As you look at the different Affiliate programs to market, look at the amount of commission they offer, some are hardly worth your effort.

The most popular site to promote affiliate programs is Clickbank. You will soon see that Clickbank is the largest online marketplace on the Internet. Clickbank places hundreds of thousands of products which are sold on a daily basis. There are some that pay up to 75% of the purchase price.

3) Affiliate Referral Programs

There are a few programs that will offer you a chance to recommend their affiliate programs yourself. This sill ultimately award you with a greater percentage of all the sales generated for the program you recommend. This is where your viral marketing techniques will come in effect, the more you recommend, the more money you will make.

4) Triple Combination; Affiliate Training and Support, Referral Commission and Product Commission

You will be happy to know that there are some programs out there that offer the best of all three worlds of affiliate marketing. You can have all of these with training to help you in your marketing efforts. A wonderful example of this is the Internet Marketing Center’s Affiliate program. With this combination, you can reap huge commission benefits.

You can make some good money with Internet marketing bringing you closer and closer to your goal of financial freedom. But remember, you need to be willing to put in the time and effort.

You Ready To Become A Published Writer?

Well, now is your chance to get all those words out of your head and into your own published book. If you have written an Ebook, why not a WEbook?

So Tell Me, What is WEbook?

You are being introduced to a brand new, one of a kind, online book publishing company. This is a revolutionary move for book publishing. This is a groundbreaking era of User Generated Books. Music has become a major part of the web, WEbook will become a major influence in the marketplace for writers to earn revenue from their writings. They will be able to sell their work in markets such as Barnes and Noble and Amazon. WEbook will be working with the mainstream in marketing these books. Along with the marketing, they will also be providing some great give-aways via the web and mobile phones.

What is the Prognosis?

Excellent and bright! This model, who is funded by Greylock Partners along with some other individuals, hopes to be the web’s leader in this type of media industry. If you haven’t noticed, there have many collaborative publications and wiki’s that have been steadily making themselves known. You will begin to see projects like this start showing up in several media forms, the majority being creative writing.

What a great forum for wanna-be writers to begin to use their talents, to fulfill their dreams of becoming a published author. Just imagine, with all the talent we have here on the web, bringing them all together, meeting and communicating with each other, exchanging creative ideas, the possibilities are endless.

It doesn’t matter if you are a fiction writer, or non-fiction, short stories, children’s books, thrillers, and so much more. This is who WEbook will be about, all about YOU!

WEbook is YOU!

WEbook is you, your best friend, your neighbor, your uncle who has been working on that thriller for years. It may be your buddy who thinks he only knows how to blog and that’s it. This is for anyone who has a creative mind and loves to write.

Why WEbook?

Why Not? This is a great chance for a broad community of writers to come together and finally become known for their talents. You may have written several Ebooks, or essays, or even a great article writer, but who knows this besides you? Don’t you think it is time for you to be an author and see your creative works published and be able to earn revenue on it?

How Do I Get Started?

Just start writing, add one sentence to another. If you have an idea, start writing, don’t stop to make corrections, just write, let your creativity flow. Short articles become chapters, chapters become books. Have your family or friends look over your work, do some editing where needed. You will find out tons more information on their website.

Come and and be the first join this great new revolution of online book publishing. You are destined to be a success!

Hey You! Give Me A Hi5

Another Social Networking site to check out!

Hi5 has just announced the birth of its developer platform as a well supported open social network. This is extremely popular in Latin America, and has become a founding member of a non-profit organization “OpenSocial Foundation”, which was announced last week by Google, MySpace, and Yahoo.

Hi5 has a very interesting platform in which this is the first OpenSocial supporting network that offers API messaging.

This means that this site can include invitations, notifications, friend updates, and any other methods that will benefit your viral marketing techniques. This is a function that is not currently being offered on MySpace.

Mark Pincus of Zynga, who is a maker of social gaming, makes this comment to the press, in where he stated: “ “hi5 is taking the right approach to launching their platform. By opening some reasonable viral channels and making the social map available to developers and their users, hi5 is highly likely to become one of the biggest application platforms and see widespread user adoption. This is key for social games, such as Poker and Triumph, which quickly enables users to start and play games with their friends.”

So far, hi5 has announced that almost 8,000 developers have registered to build some great applications on this site. They are able to do this through their canvas pages.

According to Mashables edition on March 31, 2008 — 06:10 AM PDT — by Adam Ostrow — he stated; “One additional stat from hi5 that piqued my interest: despite having a reported 80 million users, hi5 claims that it has only 25% active user overlap with any other top social networks. This isn’t especially surprising given the network is usually cited for being popular outside the US, but highlights the significant reach OpenSocial offers.”

There are several categories and groups to be found on hi5, and according to Adam Ostrows article, they are;

Alumni, Schools and Education (336883)

Automotives (17163)

Business (22215)

Cities and Neighborhoods (70942)

Companies and coworkers (16651)

Computer and Internet (19928)

Countries and Regional (23975)

Cultures and Community (63502)

Entertainment and Arts (72743)

Family & Home (13821)

Fashion and Beauty (31554)

Games (34396)

Government and Politics (16056)

Health and Wellness (9560)

Hobbies and Crafts (29674)

Music (161750)

Pets and Animals (17226)

Religion & Beliefs (36762)

Romance and Relationships (206525)

Science and History (7972)

Sports and Recreations (91579)

Other (194086)

Can I Use RSS FEEDS To Increase Traffic?

Traffic is something we all want when it comes to our websites and blogs. There are a variety of ways to do this, but the one method that is rising to the top is through RSS FEEDS.

I recently wrote an article on ‘what is an RSS feed, and how to Set them up“. Here is the followup article to that. If you haven’t read the first one yet, click here to do so now.

What does RSS stand for? RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or Remote Site Syndication. They both mean the same thing, so it doesn’t really matter what you call it. No matter the name, it works as a great traffic generating tool. You could go to any popular news website and see the feed options. This is a great way to stay on top of the latest headlines and news all over the world.

How Do You Get RSS Feeds?

You subscribe by clicking on the RSS button, then you will automatically get the news into your reader, or a reminder on your homepage. This is a simple way to stay in touch with your favorite websites and blogs. Are there advantages to RSS over Email Marketing?

Yes, and the main advantage is there are never any spam complaints, you have a 100% deliverability without any of the problems. You can usually count on your message being delivered to the readers.

When you have set up your RSS feed, you should submit it to the RSS FEED directories. Your message will have greater exposure to readers. You can do this in a matter of minutes then gain all the benefits.

A great site to read up on this is rssfeedgenerate.com. Here you will find some great instructions on the “How To’s”.

Another recommendation is to check out Mashables RSS Toolbox.

Does RSS Help Search Engine Rankings?

RSS is a fantastic tool for increasing rankings on the search engines, that is if you have it on your website. You probably already know that search engines love the websites that are continually updating their content, and the RSS Feeds will help your website to accomplish this. You will therefore achieve higher rankings on the search engines as well as increasing your website traffic. This is a win-win situation!

The keys to making money on the Internet is to increase your traffic and build up a mailing list. You can do this by using RSS Feeds, if you don’t take advantage of this great tool, you will be missing out and tons of opportunities.

There are 5 Key Points in using RSS Feeds to help you monetize your website and bring in lots of traffic.

1. Learn how to use RSS Feeds, If you aren’t sure how they work, educate yourself, start using this great tool and become familiar with it.

2. Attach links from other blogs and websites which will increase your your own popularity and traffic to your links.

3. Once you set up your RSS Feed, submit it to the RSS directories. This will increase your search engine ranking and increase the popularity of your link.

4. Keep your RSS Feed up to date which will have your site indexed by the search engines frequently.

5. Take advantage of the RSS Press Release. You will be able to use this instead of email marketing, helping you to spread your information and news to your readers the moment it comes in.

6. This is great for real-time advertising. Let’s say for example that you have a client that wants a particular product that you currently out of. You can use RSS to notify him when it comes available. Your customer will be well served and this will increase their loyalty to you. You will be taking care of your clients which will bring more money to you.

7. It is so important to create your own Brand! You are establishing your own credibility which is huge in this business. You will be putting your name out in front your readers just by using RSS Feeds. You will eventually become a trusted source of information.

You should now have a few ideas on how RSS Feeds can be used to generate traffic which is the key to your success.