donderdag 21 april 2011

Posterous

Posterous is a simple blogging platform started in May 2008, funded by Y Combinator. It supports integrated and automatic posting to other social media tools such as Flickr, Twitter, and Facebook, a built-in Google Analytics package, and custom themes. It is based in San Francisco.
Updating to Posterous is similar to other blogging platforms. Posting can be done by logging in to the website's rich text editor, but it is particularly designed for mobile blogging. Mobile methods include sending an email, with attachments of photos, MP3s, documents, and video (both links and files). Many social media pundits consider Posterous to be the leading free application for lifestreaming. The platform received wide attention when leading social media expert Steve Rubel declared he was moving his blogging activity entirely to Posterous.
Posterous also has its own URL shortening service, which as of March 2010 can post to Twitter.
Posterous allows users to point the DNS listing for a domain name or subdomain they already own to their Posterous account, allowing them to have a site hosted by Posterous that uses their own domain name.
In May 2010, Posterous was recognized as one of the “2010 Hottest Silicon Valley Companies” by Lead411.

dinsdag 19 april 2011

Squidoo

Squidoo is a community website that allows users to create pages (called lenses) for subjects of interest. Squidoo had 1.5 million hand-built lenses as of October, 2010.

EzineArticles

EzineArticles is a matching services between hundreds of thousands of expert authors and Ezine Publishers looking for supplemental content they can use for next permission-based email newsletter. As of April 2011, it was ranked #102 in traffic among global websites, and #88 in the United States, according to Alexa Internet. The site was founded by Chris Knight and rose to be the #700th most visited website within two years of its launch.

Gmail

Gmail is a free, advertising-supported webmail, POP3, and IMAP service provided by Google. Gmail was launched as an invitation-only beta release on April 1, 2004 and it became available to the general public on February 7, 2007, though still in beta status at that time. The service was upgraded from beta status on July 7, 2009, along with the rest of the Google Apps suite. As of November 2010, it had 193.3 million users monthly.
With an initial storage capacity offer of 1 GB per user, Gmail significantly increased the webmail standard for free storage from the 2 to 4 MB its competitors such as Hotmail offered at that time. Gmail has a search-oriented interface and a "conversation view" similar to an Internet forum. Software developers know Gmail for its pioneering use of the Ajax programming technique. Gmail runs on Google GFE/2.0 on Linux.

Traffic Bug

Traffic-Bug completely automates Social Bookmarking, Directory Submissions, Search Engine Submissions and RSS distribution.

Social Bookmarking. Social bookmarking is an extremely effective technique for getting new sites indexed faster by Google. Not only that but the links from social bookmarking sites can generate a nice increase in your sites rankings as well. To top it all off social bookmarking can be extremely effective at raising your sites natural traffic volumes.

Directory Submission. Directory Submissions is a technique that has been around for quite some time. Directory Submissions is a great way to build a large volume of back links back to your site. A very large portion to SEO is how many back links you have pointing to your site. Traffic-Bug is one of the very few software's if not the only one that completely automates Directory Submissions. There are other software's out there that can do directory submissions but not like Traffic-Bug. With Traffic-Bug you can simply set and forget and it will go on and on building you backlinks and even solving the CAPTCHA for you!

RSS distribution. This is another greatly powerful method to raising your sites rankings and helping get a site indexed as well as slightly improving natural traffic. RSS aggregators take your RSS URL and display them on their sites. Not only will this allow a chance for real visitors to follow your link back to your site but it provides link juice and can help with rankings.

Search Engine Submissions. There are hundreds of search engines on the web and Traffic-Bug ensures that you will be listed on all of them. Currently the software already does 139 Search Engine submissions. Even if some search engines aren't that popular it could still provide you some traffic you might not have received otherwise .

Traffic-Bug has a nice balance of short term and long term. Social Bookmarking and RSS distribution can greatly help a sites ranking in the short term while Search Engine Submission and Directory Submission can begin to help your site in the long term.

maandag 18 april 2011

Google Analytics

Google Analytics (GA) is a free service offered by Google that generates detailed statistics about the visitors to a website. The product is aimed at marketers as opposed to webmasters and technologists from which the industry of web analytics originally grew. It is the most widely used website statistics service, currently in use at around 57% of the 10,000 most popular websites. Another market share analysis claims that Google Analytics is used at around 49.95% of the top 1,000,000 websites (as currently ranked by Alexa).
GA can track visitors from all referrers, including search engines, display advertising, pay-per-click networks, e-mail marketing and digital collateral such as links within PDF documents.
Integrated with AdWords, users can review online campaigns by tracking landing page quality and conversions (goals). Goals might include sales, lead generation, viewing a specific page, or downloading a particular file. These can also be monetized. By using GA, marketers can determine which ads are performing, and which are not, providing the information to optimise or cull campaigns.
GA's approach is to show high level dashboard-type data for the casual user, and more in-depth data further into the report set. Through the use of GA analysis, poor performing pages can be identified using techniques such as funnel visualization, where visitors came from (referrers), how long they stayed and their geographical position. It also provides more advanced features, including custom visitor segmentation.
Users can officially add up to 50 site profiles. Each profile generally corresponds to one website. It is limited to sites which have a traffic of fewer than 5 million pageviews per month (roughly 2 pageviews per second), unless the site is linked to an AdWords campaign.

Simplenote

Keep notes on the web, your mobile device, and your computer.
Find notes quickly with instant searching and simple tags.
Share a list, post some instructions, or publish your thoughts.

Evernote

Evernote is a suite of software and services designed for notetaking and archiving available in a paid version or a more restricted, advertising-supported, "free" version. A "note" can be a piece of formattable text, a full webpage or webpage excerpt, a photograph, a voice memo, or a handwritten "ink" note. Notes can also have file attachments. Notes can then be sorted into folders, tagged, annotated, edited, given comments, and searched.
In October 2010, the company raised a $20 million USD funding round led by Sequoia Capital with participation from Morgenthaler Ventures and DoCoMo Capital.
Evernote supports a number of operating system platforms (including Android, Mac OS X, iOS, Windows and WebOS), and also offers online synchronization and backup services. Use of the online server is free up to a certain monthly usage limit, with additional monthly use reserved for paying subscribers.
The Evernote web service launched into open beta on June 24, 2008 and has reached 7 million users.

HostGator

HostGator is one of the world's top 10 largest web hosting companies with more than 5,000,000 hosted domains. We have over 600 employees to provide you superior around the clock support. We are the perfect choice whether you are looking for business, personal, or even Fortune 500 hosting.

Every web hosting plan comes with a 45 day money back guarantee, 99.9% uptime guarantee, and is fully guaranteed by the owner himself. If you ever have a problem with the regular support, just ask that your ticket be assigned to Brent and he will personally take the time to give you the VIP attention that you deserve.

Wordpress Direct

Create a beautiful site in minutes with 1500 themes.
Boost your site's search engine ranking.
Maintain high quality sites automatically.

eBay

eBay Inc. (NASDAQ: EBAY) is an American Internet company that manages eBay.com, an online auction and shopping website in which people and businesses buy and sell a broad variety of goods and services worldwide. Founded in 1995, eBay is one of the notable success stories of the dot-com bubble; it is now a multi-billion dollar business with operations localized in over thirty countries. eBay expanded from its original "set-time" auction format to include "Buy It Now" standard shopping; shopping by UPC, ISBN, or other kind of SKU (via Half.com); online classified advertisements (via Kijiji or eBay Classifieds); online event ticket trading (via StubHub); online money transfers (via PayPal) and other services.

Google's Keyword Tool

Find keywords based on your site content. Instead of entering your own keywords, try using the Website Content option. It lets you enter the URL of your business website, or of any site related to your business. The AdWords system will then scan your page and then suggest relevant keywords. (This feature is available only in some languages)

Create new, separate ad groups with similar keywords. We recommend creating several ad groups in each campaign, each with a small, narrowly-focused set of similar keywords. Use the Keyword Tool to discover relevant keywords, then divide them into lists of 5 to 20 similar terms. See examples of ad groups promoting a single product or service and multiple products or services.

Identify negative keywords. The Keyword Tool can show you off-topic keywords that users may be thinking about. Suppose you sell cut flowers and you give the Keyword Tool the keyword 'flowers.' It may suggest the related term 'gardens,' and you may want to add that term to your ad group as a negative keyword. That will keep your ad from showing on searches for 'flower gardens' or similar terms. This helps make sure only interested customers see your ads.

Find synonyms - or not. The Use synonyms box in the Descriptive words or phrases option is always checked by default. (This means it might suggest 'bed and breakfast' as a synonym for the keyword 'hotel.') If you uncheck the box, the tool will suggest only keywords that contain at least one of the terms that you entered.

Specify a language and location. If you're using the Keyword Tool while signed in to your account, you may see an option to tailor results to a particular location and language. If you happen to be targeting Spanish speakers who live in France, make sure you set the Keyword Tool to that language and location.

Start broad and then get specific. Try broad terms like 'flowers' in the Keyword Tool first. Then try specific terms like 'red roses' or 'miniature cactus.'

Amazon

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) is a US-based multinational electronic commerce company. Headquartered in Seattle, Washington, it is the largest online retailer in the United States, with nearly three times the Internet sales revenue of the runner up, Staples, Inc., as of January 2010.
Jeff Bezos founded Amazon.com, Inc. in 1994 and the site went online in 1995. The company was originally named Cadabra, Inc., but the name was changed when it was discovered that people sometimes heard the name as "Cadaver". The name Amazon.com was chosen because the Amazon River is one of the largest rivers in the world and so the name suggests large size, and also in part because it starts with "A" and therefore would show up near the beginning of alphabetical lists. Amazon.com started as an online bookstore, but soon diversified, selling DVDs, CDs, MP3 downloads, computer software, video games, electronics, apparel, furniture, food, and toys. Amazon has established separate websites in Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Japan, and China. It also provides international shipping to certain countries for some of its products.

Google

Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program. The company was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, often dubbed the "Google Guys", while the two were attending Stanford University as PhD candidates. It was first incorporated as a privately held company on September 4, 1998, and its initial public offering followed on August 19, 2004. At that time Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt agreed to work together at Google for twenty years, until the year 2024. The company's mission statement from the outset was "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful", and the company's unofficial slogan – coined by Google engineer Paul Buchheit – is "Don't be evil". In 2006, the company moved to its current headquarters in Mountain View, California.
Google runs over one million servers in data centers around the world, and processes over one billion search requests and about twenty-four petabytes of user-generated data every day. Google's rapid growth since its incorporation has triggered a chain of products, acquisitions, and partnerships beyond the company's core web search engine. The company offers online productivity software, such as its Gmail email service, and social networking tools, including Orkut and, more recently, Google Buzz. Google's products extend to the desktop as well, with applications such as the web browser Google Chrome, the Picasa photo organization and editing software, and the Google Talk instant messaging application. Notably, Google leads the development of the Android mobile operating system, used on a number of phones such as the Nexus One and Motorola Droid, as well as Google Chrome OS, which is still under heavy development but is best known as the main operating system on the Cr-48. Alexa lists the main U.S.-focused google.com site as the Internet's most visited website, and numerous international Google sites (google.co.in, google.co.uk etc.) are in the top hundred, as are several other Google-owned sites such as YouTube, Blogger, and Orkut. Google is also BrandZ's most powerful brand in the world. The dominant market position of Google's services has led to criticism of the company over issues including privacy, copyright, and censorship.

iTunes

iTunes is a proprietary digital media player application, used for playing and organizing digital music and video files. The application is also an interface to manage the contents on Apple's iPod and iPhone lines, as well as the iPad.
iTunes can connect to the iTunes Store to purchase and download music, music videos, television shows, iPod Games, Audiobooks, Podcasts, movies and movie rentals (not available in all countries), and Ringtones (only available on iPhone and iPod Touch 4th Generation). It is also used to download Apps from the App Store for the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad.
iTunes was introduced by Apple Inc. on January 9, 2001. The latest version, which is currently version 10.2.1, is available as a free download for Mac OS X v10.5/Windows XP or later on Apple's website. In June 2010, Apple released a new privacy policy pertaining to the capture and collection of users' real-time location information. The information had been included in various device-specific EULAs since 2008, but was only recently included in Apple's general privacy policy.

Google Maps

Google Maps (formerly Google Local) is a web mapping service application and technology provided by Google, free (for non-commercial use), that powers many map-based services, including the Google Maps website, Google Ride Finder, Google Transit, and maps embedded on third-party websites via the Google Maps API. It offers street maps, a route planner for traveling by foot, car, or public transport and an urban business locator for numerous countries around the world. Google Maps satellite images are not in real time; they are several months or years old.
Google Maps uses a close variant of the Mercator projection, so it cannot show areas around the poles. A related product is Google Earth, a stand-alone program which offers more globe-viewing features, including showing polar areas.

Dropbox

Dropbox is a Web-based file hosting service operated by Dropbox, Inc. that uses cloud computing to enable users to store and share files and folders with others across the Internet using file synchronization. It was founded in 2007 by Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi as a Y Combinator startup.
There are both free and paid services, each with varying options. In comparison to similar services, Dropbox offers a relatively large number of user clients across a variety of desktop and mobile operating systems. There are a total of 10 clients, including versions for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux (official and unofficial), as well as versions for mobile devices, such as Android, iPhone, iPad and BlackBerry, and a web-based client for when no local client is installed. Dropbox uses the Freemium financial model and its free service provides 2 GB of free online storage. Users who refer Dropbox to others can gain up to 8 GB of free storage. The service's major competitors include Box.net, Ubuntu One, SugarSync, Mozy, ZumoDrive and SpiderOak.

Google Docs

Google Docs is a free, Web-based word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, form, and data storage service offered by Google. It allows users to create and edit documents online while collaborating in real-time with other users. Google Docs combines the features of Writely and Spreadsheets with a presentation program incorporating technology designed by Tonic Systems. Data storage of any files up to 1GB each in size was introduced on January 13, 2010.

Google Groups

Google Groups is a service from Google Inc. that supports discussion groups, including many Usenet newsgroups, based on common interests. The service was started in 1995 as Deja News, and was transitioned to Google Groups after a February 2001 buyout.
Membership in Google Groups is free of charge and many groups are anonymous. Users can find discussion groups related to their interests and participate in threaded conversations, either through a web interface or by e-mail. They can also start new groups. Google Groups also includes an archive of Usenet newsgroup postings dating back to 1981 and supports reading and posting to Usenet groups. Users can also set up mailing list archives for e-mail lists that are hosted elsewhere.

Skype

Skype is a software application that allows users to make voice calls and chats over the Internet. Calls to other users within the Skype service are free, while calls to both traditional landline telephones and mobile phones can be made for a fee using a debit-based user account system. Skype has also become popular for its additional features which include instant messaging, file transfer, and video conferencing. Skype has 663 million registered users as of 2010. The network is operated by Skype Limited, which has its headquarters in Luxembourg and is minority owned by eBay. Most of the development team of Skype is situated in Tallinn, Estonia.
Unlike other VoIP services, Skype is a peer-to-peer system rather than a client–server system, and makes use of background processing on computers running Skype software; the original name proposed – Sky peer-to-peer – reflects this.
Some network administrators have banned Skype on corporate, government, home, and education networks, citing reasons such as inappropriate usage of resources, excessive bandwidth usage, and security concerns.

Market Samurai

Rank Tracker - track your website rankings over time instantly
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Monetization - turn traffic into cash with instant affiliate ads, published straight to your site
Find Content - research articles, and find content to republish immediately
Publish Content - write, schedule and publish content straight to your blog
Promotion - build high-authority backlinks to improve your site rankings

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RSS Subscription Extension

This extension auto-detects RSS feeds on the page you are reading and upon finding one will display an RSS icon in the Omnibox, allowing you to click on it to preview the feed content and subscribe.

The extension comes with 4 feed readers predefined (Google Reader, iGoogle, Bloglines and My Yahoo) but also allows you to add any web-based feed reader of your choice to the list.

Google Global

Google Global, Developed by Redfly LTD (Redfly Marketing) is an extension that allows you to see how Google search results appear in different countries, regions and cities. Google global has default countries set and allows you to add customized locations so you can see how search results appear in the exact location that you require. Excellent for SEO/Marketing companies who work with clients in different regions.

What's New?
* Google Chrome Support!
* New option to remove the icon from the menu bar.
* New Option to enable the AdTest parameter so you play nice with other advertisers.
* Some performance enhancements.
* New Default language change option (Most of you will not need to change this)
* LBL option (This feature is still in beta and does not work when the adtest option is enabled)
* Automatic updates for future releases.
* Some performance enhancements.

Ultimate Chrome Flag

This extension displays country or region name, Geo, Google PageRank, Alexa Rank and WOT info for the websites you're visiting.

This extension shows a country or region flag indicating the location of the website you're visiting. And the following information will be shown in the popup:
• Country or region name
• Domain name and IP address
• Geo information
• Google PageRank
• Alexa Rank
• WOT (Web of Trust) information
• Copy domain name and IP address to clipboard

On the popup, click domain name, Geo, Alexa Rank or WOT will go to corresponding site to view detailed information of current site.

SeoQuake

Displays the Google PageRank, Alexa rank and other SEO parameters of any webpage, highlights nofollow links, text density, check and compare urls.

Full list of SEO parameters:

Google PageRank
Google Index
Yahoo links
Yahoo linkdomain
Bing index
Alexa Rank
Webarchive age
Delicious index
Whois link
Page source
SEMRush rank
Nofollow links

SitezMeter

This handy SEO tool shows you the Google PageRank of webpages beside the address box.
The PageRank value is cached locally, so it doesn't have to hit the server every time you switch tab.
Moreover, click the icon in the popup window provides extensive information about web sites traffic - instantly find out how popular a web site is, its rank, and how fast it is growing. Please check out the screen shot for more detail.

Chromed Bird

Chromed Bird is an awesome Twitter client extension for Google Chrome with lots of features.

Some of the most important features are:
* Check trending topics right inside the extension;
* *Experimental* support for real time timeline updates (You need to enable "Use streaming API" on the options page);
* Upload images from inside the extension; (Chrome 8+ and not yet on OS X)
* Change extension's locale from inside the options page;
* Expand the original tweet replies are referring to;
* Follow / Unfollow users by using the inline user actions menu;
* Browse tweets from a specific user directly inside the extension;
* Add and remove timeline tabs "on the fly" using the new right-click context menu;
* Create custom search queries that will update automatically;
* Preview image links by hovering them (Thanks to Takuo Kitame);
* See all your tweets in an unified timeline;
* Follow your timelines (including @mentions, lists, DMs and favorites) and navigate through your tweets;
* Compose, reply, RT, share, favorite and delete tweets;
* Create short URLs within the extension;
* Preview shortened URLs before clicking them;
* Track read / unread tweets;
* Notify user whenever new tweets arrive;

Google Chrome

Google Chrome is a web browser developed by Google that uses the WebKit layout engine. It was first released as a beta version for Microsoft Windows on 2 September 2008, and the public stable release was on 11 December 2008. The name is derived from the graphical user interface frame, or "chrome", of web browsers. As of January 2011, Chrome was the third most widely used browser, and passed the 10% worldwide usage share of web browsers, according to Net Applications.
In September 2008, Google released a large portion of Chrome's source code, including its V8 JavaScript engine, as an open source project entitled Chromium. This move enabled third-party developers to study the underlying source code and to help convert the browser to the Mac OS X and Linux operating systems. Google also expressed hope that other browsers would adopt V8 to improve web application performance. The Google-authored portion of Chromium is released under the permissive BSD license, which allows portions to be incorporated into both open source and closed source software programs. Other portions of the source code are subject to a variety of open source licenses. Chromium implements the same feature set as Chrome, but lacks built-in automatic updates and Google branding, and most noticeably has a blue-colored logo in place of the multicolored Google logo.

Twitter

Twitter is a social networking and microblogging website, based in San Francisco, California, also having servers and offices in San Antonio, Texas, Boston, Massachusetts, and Salt Lake City, Utah. Twitter, Inc. was originally incorporated in California, but has been incorporated in the jurisdiction of Delaware since 2007. Since being created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launching that July, the website has gained popularity worldwide and is estimated to have more than 200 million active users, generating 65 million tweets a day and handling over 800,000 search queries per day. It is sometimes described as the "SMS of the Internet".
Twitter enables users to send and read text-based posts composed of up to 140 characters, called tweets, which are displayed on the user's profile page. Users can subscribe to other users' tweets – this is known as following and subscribers are known as followers or tweeps ('Twitter' + 'peeps'). By default, tweets are publicly visible, though senders can restrict message delivery to just their followers. Users can tweet via the Twitter website, compatible external applications (such as for smartphones), or by Short Message Service (SMS) available in certain countries. While the service is free, accessing it through SMS may incur phone service provider fees.

Ustream

Ustream.tv is a website which consists of a network of diverse channels providing a platform for lifecasting and live video streaming of events online. Established in March 2007, the site has over 2,000,000 registered users who generate 1,500,000+ hours of live streamed content per month with over ten million unique hits per month. It received $11.1 million in Series A funding for new product development from DCM and investors Labrador Ventures and Band of Angels.
During the 2008 United States presidential election, the website was used by nearly all of the major candidates to help their campaigns, by allowing a greater number of voters to ask political questions. Former Senator and 2008 Presidential Candidate Mike Gravel became the first candidate ever to stream an alternate debate on Ustream that allowed Sen. Gravel to respond to all of the questions being asked, as well as comment on the responses from the other candidates throughout a nationally televised debate.