Thursday, September 27, 2007

Paid Link Management Easier Than Ever

Linkworth Announces a New Control Center

Linkworth, a leader in the search engine optimization and website marketing industry, launched its new website four months ago. The new site is sleeker and much more easily navigated, and Linkworth is now proud to announce the crowning glory of their new site--the new and improved Control Center.

(PRWEB) September 27, 2007 -- Linkworth, a leader in the search engine optimization and website marketing industry, launched its new website four months ago. The new site is sleeker and much more easily navigated, and Linkworth is now proud to announce the crowning glory of their new site--the new and improved Control Center.

When a user signs into their Linkworth account, the Control Center tells them everything they need to know about their account and gives them the power to modify their marketing strategy with a few simple clicks. The new Control Center is more user-friendly, with all the features front-and-center, increasing visibility and making it that much easier for Linkworth advertisers and partners to find the information they're looking for.

When a client logs into the Linkworth Control Center, they're now shown their account balance, monthly renewal, messages and alerts from Linkworth, and a list of featured partners. The Control Centered is designed to make planning and executing a marketing campaign with Linkworth a snap as technological advances open new horizons for internet advertisers.

"There was no doubt we needed a big update to our Control Center and website to keep up with the constantly changing web technologies," said Ron Wicker, President and Co-Founder of Linkworth. "While we are happy with the accomplishment, we're already working toward more improvements and preparing for what the web has in store for us around the next corner."

The new Control Center is just the latest innovation from
Linkworth, a company that has been on the forefront of website marketing strategies for the last several years. The site reorganization features new marketing products for both advertisers and partners, and an upgraded Control Center makes selecting products and partners so simple that customers will be able to execute a more directed campaign with as little trouble as possible.

"The new Control Center is just another step in the direction we're heading as a company. With the growing suite of products and services we currently offer, not to mention what is still in development, a more robust and user-friendly dashboard was a necessity," said Matt Stoddart, EVP of Sales. "It's a work in progress, but I'm very pleased with it."

Press Contact: Scarlett Tarjick
Company Name: LinkWorth
Phone: 2144403908
Website:
www.linkworth.com

Thursday, September 20, 2007

Moms Become Successful Entrepreneurs

New Internet Startup Helps Moms Become Successful Entrepreneurs

SimpleStartup.com invents software to streamline the startup, and management of businesses for mompreneurs, helping them make real income in less time.

Salt Lake City, UT (PRWEB) September 20, 2007 -- SimpleStartup, LLC today announced the beta launch of its web-based software, designed to simplify the process of starting a business. SimpleStartup empowers moms by helping them start their own business and offers a community of support to help them succeed.

SimpleStartup offers a unique combination of small business software, business training, and online community to help mompreneurs save money, and avoid common mistakes. "This is exactly what I've been searching for", commented one mother on the company's blog.

Moms can sign up for free, and experience what its like to be an entrepreneur. They'll join a community of moms who are starting a business similar to theirs. With virtually no risk involved, they'll have the opportunity to make money working part-time from home.

SimpleStartup gives moms everything they need to start their business, including: an e-commerce website, a simplified customer database, financial reports that are easy to understand, and the ability to easily manage orders, returns and taxes. Moms can choose from one of eight businesses - from starting a day care, to becoming a freelance writer, and be up and running in under ten minutes.

"We empower moms with the tools they need to realize their financial goals; giving them the freedom to live their dreams", said company founder Dave Martin. "Mothers who use our system will be up and running quickly, have the encouragement and direction they need, and be able to make the extra money they want to keep the balance and priorities that matter so much to them."

About SimpleStartup
SimpleStartup, LLC offers web-based software that simplifies the process of starting a professional, profitable business. It significantly reduces the risks involved with starting a business, helps eliminate common entrepreneurial mistakes, and provides a community of positive support for mompreneurs. For more information about SimpleStartup, visit
http://www.simplestartup.com.

Media contact:
Dave Martin
SimpleStartup, LLC
801-979-8587
dave(at)simplestartup.com

Press Contact: David Martin
Company Name: SimpleStartup, LLC
Phone: 801-979-8587
Website:
http://www.simplestartup.com

Thursday, September 13, 2007

Barstool Racing and Search Engine Races

Barstool Racing, Bar Stool Racing, Bar Stool Races, and Search Engine Races

I admit that I had not heard of barstool racing before hearing a commercial on the radio for Ask.com. In the commercial, the woman speaking is in customer support and talks about how popular Ask is getting and that she is getting more emails. Then she reads one and her voice changes to that of a young man. Yeah, somewhat surreal.

Anyway, his letter is to say how awesome Ask is, because he told his friend about something called "barstool racing" and his friend bet that it didn't exist. When his friend did a search on "his" search engine, all he found was some links. When the young man searched in Ask, he found listings, photos, blogs, and other things.

In my search for "barstool racing" in MSN. Google, Yahoo, AltaVista, Ask.com, Hotbot, Excite, Alltheweb, and SplatSearch.com, only SplatSearch failed to list www.barstoolracing.net is the first listing. Even SplatSearch had two listings for the search.

So does Ask really think their results are all that much better? After sucking for so many years and killing off the popular butler (The butler always did it for me...!), they suddenly seem to want our attention, but having a quality search product is not enough. No we have to endure misleading commercials like this one, garish and annoying ones like "Chicks with swords", and I think there was some other that I have successfully blocked from memory.

Ask may be succeeding, I don't know. All I can tell you is that I find their marketing either insulting or repulsive. They don't seem to realize that doing some more realistic and practical marketing would go much farther than what they are doing now. Getting people to try or switch search engines is easy, the hard thing would be getting them to stay. But if they have good results then that would not be that hard.

By the way, when are search engines going to start rotating their results? You and I both know that the same site as the top listing across all search engines is bogus. I'm sure that even for barstool racing there are several very good results that would deserve a turn in the top position, but for some reason, there is only room for one at the top. Until this changes, they will not best serve the needs of searchers or site owners, and will not help reduce the fight by everyone to be at the "top".

(hris

Wednesday, September 05, 2007

Web Site Owners and Bloggers Paid To Make More Money

Web Site Owners and Bloggers Paid To Make More Money

09/05/2007 - (NTSWIRE) Minneapolis - New Publishers and Webmasters that join Auction Ads and start earning money with the Ebay affiliate program will find they are $25 richer just for joining. Auction Ads today announced that all new publishers would be paid a signup bonus of $25. Since the payout threshold is $50, this means a publisher would only have to earn $25 before being able to receive their first check.

The registration process is easy and adding the AuctionAds code to your site is also easy. It's as easy as using Google AdSense and you can have AuctionAds on the same pages as your existing AdSense, there is no conflict.

AuctionAds have been very popular since the ads feature small images and text from current Ebay auctions. Rather than signing up with Ebay, Webmasters and blog owners and easily sign up with Auction Ads and avoid a longer signup process and learning to use the Ebay API. Ads can be targeted with keywords and even maximum and minimum prices so that you get just the kind of ads that YOU KNOW best suit your sites.

The end date for this promotion has not been announced, but it is suggested that you sign up right away even if you are unable to add the code to your site or your blog today. Don't miss out on this great incentive to join a program that really needs no incentive.

Join Auction Ads Here

PR Contact
EbayAuctionAds.com
7141 Oak Pointe Curve
Bloomington, MN 55348

Tuesday, September 04, 2007

Why Don't Ads Pay For SMS messages?

This Conversations Is Brought To You By...

by Steve Smith, Tuesday, September 4, 2007
ACCORDING TO SOME RECENT STATS, there are over 20 billion SMS messages passing across the ether each month in the U.S. market alone. As the father of an adolescent, I am not surprised. I think my daughter's teen suitors alone account for a good chunk of that figure. The signature beeps my daughter assigns these incoming SMS flirts are bad enough even when she doesn't answer them right away. Just walking down the street, she sounds like a truck backing up.

But if you are a resourceful media innovator rather than the father of a teen girl, all of those SMS alerts sound more like ad inventory being wasted. It was only a matter of time before someone came along to knit this flow of messages into networked ad inventory. While I am sure there are others working on a similar idea, MoVoxx is the first company I have seen that is starting to serve ads into a collection of SMS publishers. Using inventory from SMS alerts by NASCAR, newspapers and some major league sports groups, MoVoxx is hoping to transform a 2-cent-a-message expense into a ten-cent-a-message revenue opportunity.

"We are able to charge high CPMs because most publishers have data on their cell phone users," says managing partner Alec Andronikov. In most cases, the publishers are getting just age, gender and zip code, but that is already enough to do more precise targeting than many mobile campaigns. When users opt into the NASCAR mobile alerts, for instance, the publisher gets basic demographics and zip codes. If NASCAR has 200,000 subscribers nationwide, there is enough mass there to net perhaps 80,000 users in a general geographic region for a supermarket chain to target. MoVoxx will split a CPM of up to $100 with the publisher. The company devised an opt-in series of alerts for dining out specials from Mercury News and nightlife offers for San Francisco Guardian.

Ultimately, MoVoxx should be able to fly campaigns across multiple publications as it aggregates audience. Of the many billions of SMS messages that are moving each month, Andronikov guesses that 500 million of them are some kind of publisher-pushed alert that conceivably could be sponsored. Right now, he claims about 3.5 million uniques with sports, travel, dating and newspapers comprising the largest content categories. The creative is a very simple call to action that has to occur in a limited 20 to 80 characters of space. The character limitation of an SMS makes it difficult to include a full URL link to the sponsor within the message, especially if you are trying to meter the response by sending the user to a precise and lengthy URL. Generally a reply to the alert will trigger a return message that then includes a link to a Wap page. Andronikov claims a response rate of 2.5% to 4% on the SMS ads.

This sounds like an ingenious plan to me. It gives publishers a revenue stream that only encourages more content development. For advertisers, it offers mobile targeting on a text platform that people really do focus on. Just given the brief, concentrated nature of an SMS message, those 4% response rates don't surprise me. It is almost impossible not to read the ad in the context of an SMS screen. The only downside to ubiquitous SMS ads is the larger issue of mobile ad clutter. As much as the sponsorship model makes such great sense for expanding a media platform like mobile quickly, it also stuffs even more promotions into a small space. Most of the consumer research we have seen shows little negative impact on carriers and publishers from mobile advertising. Indeed, I suspect that most mobile users don't mind a text link or banner ad in their WAP pages, and if marketers get the formats right, I imagine even some kind of mobile video advertising also will fly without much complaint. And generally, I am a big proponent of ad-supported mobile media. As much as I like having games, news, and some distractions on a phone, I don't believe these are high-value items to most users that a fee-based eco-system can bring to its full potential.

But there is the real risk of choking the platform with ads coming from too many directions at once. As each piece of the mobile media environment -- text, WAP, video, MMS, voice, games, etc. -- looks towards ad models, someone has to start asking how it all adds up in the user experience as she traverses the deck that she still pays $60, $70 or more a month to use. A single banner on a WAP site is no big deal. A three second pre-roll on a video clip (if marketers can be this disciplined) is also reasonable, as is a text ad on a search result or some branded entertainment slipped into a mobile video library. Without a shred of supporting evidence, however, I do have to wonder about the cumulative effect of consumers encountering ads at every turn.

At what point does the phone go beyond delivering welcome messages from NASCAR, and start looking and feeling itself like a NASCAR racer, stuffed to the windshield wipers with branding messages?

Post your response to the public Mobile Insider blog.

See what others are saying on the Mobile Insider blog.
Contributing writer Steve Smith is a longtime new-media consultant and columnist, and current editor of Digital Media Report for MinOnline.com and Mobile Media Report for TelecomWeb.com Contact him at popeyesmith@comcast.net. 

  Mobile Insider for Tuesday, September 4, 2007:
 
http://publications.mediapost.com

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It's 10 PM, Do you know where your domains are?

Do you have a valuable domain name? Are you sure you still have it? How would you know if the registration information had been changed and it was now under someone else's name? These questions and more were raised over at the DomainTools Blog, and if you own a number of domains or any that are expensive you may want to read up on this topic.

(hris