BlogDoofus

I just got an email that confirmed that I’ve won an entry in a $3.5K National Poker Week Freeroll Texas Hold’em tournament. Now before anybody expects me to start making big plans and sending out party invitations I’ve got to say that I don’t really think there’s cause for all that.

After all, this is only a single freeroll tournament and while winning it could almost certainly lead to getting into more tournaments and starting down a path that could lead to the final table at the main event, there’s also way too many paths to choose from right now and most of them lead to the end of one game at something considerably less than first place.

Time will tell I suppose. I’ll have to post again when the tournament is over. It starts at 1:30pm Eastern time on July 4th. The way these things go I could be out of it entirely by 1:35 or It could go half the night. There’s 2477 people entered in it so far and the cap on entries is 12,000 people.

Technorati Tags: freeroll tournament, main event, poker tournament

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Article marketing is a very effective method of widening the presence of any business. By publishing articles via multiple article directories, you can reap benefits ranging from increased web site traffic, lead generation, visibility in the search engines, new customers and reputation.

Article marketing has grown from out of Search Engine Optimization (SEO); the practice of optimizing web pages with keywords in the effort to increase the search engine rankings for that page. There’s three steps for an article marketing campaign; research, writing and distribution.

Research

Keyword research is the first step. It’s important to use keywords in your article that you want improved rankings for search engines. Somebody that sold Outer Banks rentals online would research which keywords people are searching for that are related to that term.

Then next step is to make a list of about 8 to 10 of these keywords and make it a point to use those keywords in the article. Also, it’s a good idea to find out what terms are relevant to those keywords according tot he search engines and use as many of THOSE terms in the article as well.

This is actually a fairly simple process once you learn how and can easily take as little as 30 minutes to have a keyword rich, contextually relevant article

Writing the article

Obviously you can’t just throw all these keywords and related phrases together and tell yourself that you’ve got an article ready to go. The goal is to write an article that is related to your topic and use the keywords within the article in as natural a fashion as possible. If a keyword or phrase can’t be used in a way that reads naturally, skip it and goon. You should also avoid allowing yourself to turn the article into a sales pitch or advertisement. Most article directories wont even accept articles that are written like sales copy.

Distribution

This is the part of article marketing that takes the most time. There’s a LOT of article directories that you can submit your article to. It’s a good idea to do the submissions manually because more and more directories are taking steps to prevent automated submissions.

Technorati Tags: web promotion, seo, link building, article marketing

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MySpace is one of the biggest online communities / social networks in the world. Originally founded to be a platform for bands and musicians to keep in touch with their fans it has quickly become a platform for everybody.

A growing trend on MySpace and other social networking sites is that of businesses establishing accounts in the name of the business and using it as another avenue to promote themselves and their products. Outfits selling anything from Fastin to the latest hot new games and dvd’s.

On MySpace you create a personal profile that includes a choice of standard elements such as blogs, buddy lists, etc. You can also change the look of your profile without having any knowledge about html and web programming by using any of dozens of sites that sell MySpace Layouts. These sites offer premade layouts and dizzying selection of background grpahics.

One of the things to consider however is how the layout you choose will affect the performance of your profile page. It’s a good idea (not to mention just plain considerate!!) to remember that there’s still a majority of people out there that don’t have computers powerful enough to get the best experience with that over-bloated, javascript laden profile template that you think looks so cool.

There is currently more than 200 million MySpace users around the world and a growing number of them are business interests of one form or another. I’ve even heard (though I haven’t seen any proof) that there are government level types from several countries with MySpace profiles that they use to keep in touch with the Joe Sixpacks of the world.

Technorati Tags: social networking, business presence, social advertising, myspace

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There’s several reasons why AdSense has become a vital part of any content site. The first of which is because it’s advanced quite a bit in knowing what both publishers and advertisers want with a highly developed system that allows full ad customization. They’ve developed delivering the most appropriate advertising for a given content to science.

A second reason is the ability of Adsense publishers to track not only their websites but the AdSense income based on webmaster-defined channels. Improvements in search engines gives webmasters the ability to monitor their ads performance using customizable reports that details page impressions, clicks and click-through rates. You can know at a glance what keywords are working for what advertisements. whether you’re selling alarm systems or virtual real estate in domain name sales and hosting the process works the same and automatically places advertisements on pages with relevant content.

Finally, advertisers have realized benefits of having their ads served at targeted websites. This increases the possibility that a visitor will be interested enough in their ad to actually click on it.

Technorati Tags: content sites, targeted advertising, pay per click, ppc advertising, advertising, adsense

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one of the biggest problems with most forms of digital communication (email, instant messaging, forums, etc.) is that most people tend to forget about etiquette (the basic rules of communicating clearly and politely).

Here’s some good guidelines that everybody we should follow.

1. Never assume everyone knows everything.

Remember that everyone has to start sometime and that just because you consider something so basic that “everybody” ought to know it, there’s always newbies that haven’t yet learned those basics that you consider so obvious. To them it’s not obvious at all.

It’s also a good idea to remember that not everyone will agree with you about what is or is not important or worth reading. Perhaps you might auto-delete an email about an ephedra diet pill but it’s just as likely that somebody else will find it a great discovery.

2. Take time to examine e-mails and unsubscribe from things.

It seems like everywhere you go these days somebody is asking for your email address. Newsletter subscriptions, when you buy something online, etc. This ends up turning into tons of email landing in your inbox every day.

A good spam filter can help dispose of a lot of it but it’s also a good idea to look through some of that spam once in a while and unsubscribe from the mailing lists.

Even if you only do a few of those a day, you’ll eventually make noticeable progress in cutting down the spam you receive.

3. Respond to e-mails as soon as possible.

Aside from the clutter and confusion that can be avoided in your inbox, responding to emails as soon as possible will keep you from forgetting to do so. It also shows the other party that their email to you was important enough to reply quickly

4. Choose your words carefully

In the online world it’s all too easy to be misunderstood because the people you’re communicating with can’t see your facial expressions or hear the tone of your voice. This means that if it’s possible for something you say to be taken more than one way, it’s a good idea to clarify which context you’re speaking in. It may be obvious to you that you were just making a joke or being sarcastic but others, especially when you’re talking to people who don’t know you.

5. Don’t forward e-mails unless you have to

When you get one of those e-mails from someone that’s jokes, inspirational stories or other cutesy thing that is the current rage. Stop and think twice before deciding to pass it on. If you do decide that you simply MUST share it with somebody, copy and paste it in a new e-mail so that you are not including e-mail addresses of everybody else that’s gotten it and passed it on. If you decide that’s to much work to bother with then perhaps it’s not worth forwarding in the first place

Just remember that those multiple forwarded emails don’t actually accomplish anything. Microsoft or Bill Gates is NOT going to give you a million dollars if it gets sent to a bazillion people. About all it’s going to do is waste a lot of people’s time and piss off mail server admins when their system load triples because of things like that.

Technorati Tags: email, email subscriptions, clutter, email tips, email etiquette

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