Burt over at osworld has a wonderful write up on his success with marketing products online during 2006 including some great insights to the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of his money making skills that pay the bills.

It is well worth a read as this is a guy that went $18000 over his target for the year. Here in the UK that is halfed, but it is certainly not a number to sniff at considering he makes most of it via AIS (Automated Income Streams). Catch Burts’ breakdown on his blog.

Oh dear, just was has Mr Michael Arrington gone and done. Without taking sides myself I must say that overall this fiasco (if I can call it that) could see him putting yet another nail in the TechCrunch Coffin. I would hope not as I discover many new sites and get many new ideas from reading the techcrunch site, but sometimes the way he handles things comes across as being quite arrogant or just plain nasty.

In fairness, other times he treats a situation perfectly, though I don’t wish to point to any examples as it is open to personal opinion as is all of this mess.

It is my hope that everything will come up roses from this, but I have a nasty feeling it wont, especially not for the regular readers who have been rubbed the wrong way by this most recent event.

I recently got tagged by George for this blog game, so here are my answers and indeed the people I wish to tag:

1) I used to be a graphic designer before I became an SEO Specialist. During this time I did work for Disney, The BAFTA Awards, Snatch the Movie, and more. It was all very exciting.

2) I saw many parts of Finding Nemo a year or two before it came out as it was having some DVD editing done by the guy next to me at work.

3) I have been racing for over 15 years in karts. I have won many trophys (got a hundred or so boxed up in the loft now) and enjoy it greatly. I now also run kartingextra.com as a community for all the racers from around the world.

4) I don’t like tomatoes. I love ketchup, but just can’t eat the squishy little beasts in their natural state. Horrid!

5) My musical idle is James Taylor. A fantastic song writer and performer. I have seen him live, have all his music, and he helped me meet my wonderful better half, GuinchoGirl. Obviously that is not her real name

So, I guess it is my turn to tag a few people? This has been going on a little while so it may be tough to find people that have not been tagged already… lets see.

MattCutts (lets see if he plays), Dean Hunt, Ewan (great blog if you like mobiles), and Quadzilla (for a little light xmas fun from his side).

Yeah, a cliche title that you have read a billion times before. You may or may not have already read everything that you are about to read, but for the sake of a few moments of your time it could just be the best thing you read this year.

Article marketing for me has been the major reason for the turn around in the amount of traffic my sites were receiving. It’s one of the most effective ways to get targeted visitors to your site.

Getting your articles published in ezines and on sites such as addme.com or sitepronews.com will generate an enormous amount of traffic to your site. As a bonus, you even get 100’s of subscribers to your own ezine or social networking site in one day!

The trick is to write helpful how-to articles on current topics that other webmasters want on their sites, this will boost your link popularity with the search engines and increase your rankings. You must also very carefully choose the right keywords to target in your articles, matching the content on your site. You must target keywords that have high traffic, yet little competition from competing web sites.

By using the power of articles to get traffic to your site you should find that not only do you get traffic from the article publishing websites, but you will also get new visitors and members from the sites that your article gets re-published on. Don’t forget that this also helps you build those ever important and valuable back links from other websites to your own.

There are millions of people that know what SEO is. There are still millions that don’t and you may very well be one of them. If you are, then you should read on to take your first steps with this simple but very effective online marketing technique.

First, we need to get a bit of background on what SEO is. For this we can take a ride over to the ever expanding mess that is wikipedia where we can nab this bit of information:

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a subset of search engine marketing, and deals with improving the number and/or quality of visitors to a web site from “natural” (also known as “organic” or “algorithmic”) search engine listings. In effect, SEO is marketing by appealing to machine algorithms to increase search engine relevance and ultimately web traffic. This is analogous to foot traffic in retail advertising. The term SEO can also refer to “search engine optimizers”, an industry of consultants who carry out optimization projects on behalf of clients.

Search engines display different kinds of listings on a search engine results page (SERP), including paid advertising in the form of pay per click advertisements and paid inclusion listings, as well as unpaid organic search results and keywords specific listings, such as news stories, definitions, map locations, and images. SEO is concerned with improving the number and position of a site’s listings in the organic search results.

SEO strategies vary widely, in accordance with the specific site. Broadly speaking, SEO may be geared towards increasing either, or both, the total number and quality of visitors from Search Engines. The quality of a visitor can be measured by how often a visitor using a specific keyword leads to a desired conversion action, such as making a purchase or requesting further information.

Right, now that we have covered that perhaps we should move onto the details surrounding how to get started in sucking more traffic to your website, yes? Read more »

The secret is out so I guess I should officially mention something here for everyone that is hunting down the information and to give everyone a central point of contact aka me.

RC1 of phpfox was released recently and aside from a few bugs it is looking pretty good. The most important step forward is the re-design of the template system which makes it easier to customise the look and feel of the script. The new template scheme is making use of the Smarty theme system which allows php and html to get together more intimately and with far more control.

The thing is, while I say it’s far easier to make a template for, we have to remember that there are those that simply do not know enough about code and can struggle for hours doing the simplest thing that others could do in seconds. It is for this very reason that I am working on a set of templates to work with the new 1.5 version of phpfox which is also known as Konsort. Read more »

The Internet is changing and changing along with it are the ways people use it to gather information.

Social Networking has become an online phenomenon in the past year or so. It is revolutionizing the way information is being gathered and will be found in the future. Myspace currently has over 100 million registered users and is growing rapidly. Facebook and Friendster follow closely behind.

But there is a rising site among them, Squidoo.com. The website is gaining fame as a more mature social network with reliable information about almost anything. Read more »