Ivygirl Media & Design

There’s a new list-building giveaway event that starts on July 3rd! The “Massive List Building Giveaway” already has a ton of contributors and has the potential to drive some serious traffic to your site…

With so much buzz about Twitter lately, marketers everywhere are asking the same question: how can we utilize this to market our service or product?

And that’s a good question.

What you shouldn’t do however, isn’t as difficult to decipher and after finding this on JackHumphrey.com, I thought I’d share – here’s a good look at how NOT to use Twitter:

I found this at Jack Humphrey’s Friday Traffic Report who got it from Alex at HowtoSpoter.com and as I’m sure the creators intended, I wanted to pass it along.

The idea is simple but genius and gives “viral marketing” a whole new twist.

Dubbed the Reciprocal Review Carousel, the idea has the potential to really increase those all-important incoming links and thus, boost your traffic and search engine ratings. Follow the directions carefully and let me know how it worked for you.

— copy and paste the Reciprocal Review Carousel and instructions below this line —

Reciprocal Review Carousel idea is based on a few simple yet effective link-building and blogging techniques I have learned:

• Build value of the blog by creating a helpful link from within content.
• Provide value to community by doing a review on a blog you personally like.
• Link to YOUR blog has exact anchor text you want and helps you boost Google Rankings.
• No more than 30 outbound links from any page to prevent penalties for link farming.
• Viral effect of the link – as more bloggers participate, link to your blog with YOUR anchor text, coming from quality content post will spread.

Here is How to participate:

• Copy the entire text between the specified lines.
• Create a post on your site and put at least one paragraph explaining how you joined the Reciprocal Review Carousel.
• Paste the text you copied into your post.
• Remove the Bottom Review and At the Top add your own review with a link to a site reviewed, at least 2 sentences about the site and a note – Reviewed by: Your Anchor Text. Link your anchor text to your site. Here is an example:

WordPress Web 2.0 Guide is a blog providing very useful information on building your very own Web 2.0 portal based on WordPress. Detailed instructions and howto guides make it possible for anyone to create a sparkling and engaging blog and join the community of like-minded individuals. Reviewed by: WordPress Web 2.0 Spot-er

Sites Reviewed:

• Get the most from life at HappyGoKate.com. From blogging to saving, spirituality to mastering the law of attraction, you’ll find it here. As the tag line says – “life is what you make of it… why not make it something amazing?”

• Peter Lenkefi writes about Web 2.0 marketing strategies at Web2Center.com. He has some killer videos over there you should check out along with a ton of good information on blog marketing and various “new media” promotion tactics. Reviewed by: Link Building Maniac, Jack Humphrey, for the Friday Traffic Report

• Andy-Coates.com is an original creator of Viralink concept and a blog publishing information on Magic, Personal development and blog development. I have found a wealth of information on getting your blog noticed and generating the traffic for free. Reviewed by: WordPress Web 2.0 Guide

• FitForFreedom is well-established blog where you can find multitude of information on achieving financial freedom. Blog is run by Marco Righter and his writing style greatly adds to the value of information he provides. Reviewed by: Alex

• Secure Your PC For Internet blog run by Colin and provides essential information everyone accessing internet should know. Identity theft is becoming more and more of an issue and by visiting his blog you can minimize the risk of being compromised. Reviewed by: Alex

• VI-SU blog is all about WordPress, AdSense, SEO and Internet Marketing. Although mostly written in German I have found that using Google translate is worth the effort for his posts. Reviewed by: Alex

• Home With Heather is a great informative blog targeting WAHM (Work At Home Moms) and run by … you guessed it – Heather Masson. Information on what works for her in Internet Business written is very easy to read and comes from her personal experience. Reviewed by: Alex

• A Copywriter’s Blues blog published by Alex Badalic, a veteran of advertising turned musician gives you great food for soul. I have found some nice old videos of Johnny Cash performance and he has a lot more of vintage videos to satisfy fans. Reviewed by: Alex

• Did You Smell That blog authored by one of the veterans on network marketing filled with business ideas you can use. David Ledoux is well known and respected in online community and now he makes his experience available via blog posts. Reviewed by: Alex

• Best Damn Blog run by Richard Wing is all about Internet Marketing. Your visit will be rewarded by honest reviews, freebies and information you need to succeed in this cut-throat business without sacrificing your integrity. Reviewed by: Alex

— copy and paste the Reciprocal Review Carousel and instructions above this line —

And that’s all there is to it!

Crash posted an excellent step-by-step at the SEOmoz blog to help you get your linking campaign under control. After all, anyone who’s ever attempted to increase their search engines rankings through link building knows that its a thankless, tedious and sometimes overwhelming process.

And for those just starting to explore the link-building possibilities (yes, there are many), a little “101″ certainly wouldn’t hurt. Check it out and compare notes – who knows? You might just get an “Aha!”

Which brings me to my question of the day: do you have a tried-and-true method for link campaigning? Ready, set, SHARE!

Sometimes, its the little things that make the difference and when you’re talking about standing out amidst the zillions of other web sites out there, that statement couldn’t be more true.

I’m not sure how it happened but somehow, somewhere, we turned our back on service. And I mean the good old fashioned kind of service where customers were valued and loyalty was forged.

Case in point: a certain web hosting company, which shall remain nameless hosts a shopping cart for one of my customers. They’ve had an ongoing issue with their MySQL database but for some reason, they don’t seem to want to acknowledge it. I’ll skip all the technical details but in short, it doesn’t work properly. It isn’t talking to the open source software it installs and it isn’t creating users to set permissions to the account.

The result? The shopping cart, blog or other OS application doesn’t work. And I’m beating my head against a brick wall to get it fixed.

Building a website is easy. Building a successful e-business is another thing altogether. How to make the most of your web presence? Here’s five easy tips to maximize your site.

Give Good Service
There is nothing more annoying than a site that doesn’t offer adequate customer service. FAQ’s and contact information are just two ways that you can offer assistance to your customers. Users with a question don’t likely want to wait until your regular business hours to give you a call and they’ll likely surf somewhere else to find the answers they seek. Your objective is to make the business process as painless as possible. That means a quick checkout, easy navigation and yes, good customer service. Make sure your site includes answers to all the questions an uninformed user might ask. You’ll be surprised at what a little service can do for your sales.