I stumbled across this site recently and thought it was a pretty clever idea.   YouLikeHits.com allows you to:

• Get Twitter followers
• Get Facebook likes
• Get MySpace followers
• Get StumbleUpon followers
• Get Digg followers
• Get visitors to ANY website

Interesting service…it’s FREE to signup and you get paid to receive mail & email, check out special offers, and social network.  You also get paid for referring other people.

PeopleString ‘Where You Own the Web’. It is the new wave in relationship and social communities; it has the Creativity, Culture, Expressive Forums and places to meet new people and network; but now it combines all that with giving you a share in the revenues that are created by the users of the website.

The ‘other’ social sites keep all of the money for themselves and never give any to their users. They are making millions off of your actions and keeping it all. PeopleString shares the revenues that are generated by its members. This is unique for online social communities. Who other than PeopleString gives its members back 70% of the revenues?

I’ve talked to people that have received money from this, so it’s definitely legit.

You should check it out!

SocialMarker is a free tool that I use fairly often.  It makes it a heck of a lot easier to submit my sites to social bookmarking services, than if I was to do it manually.

After my negative review of SocialBot yesterday I figured I should discuss what I do find useful for social bookmarking.

So why do I use SocialMarker?

• It helps me get traffic.
• It helps me get a lot of backlinks, some from high PR sites.
• It works with many of the popular social bookmarking services…51 in total!
• It’s free!

Now let me explain how it all works:

1. First I load up whatever page I want to submit in FireFox.  I’ll use im-fun.com as an example.
2. I have a “SocialMarker” bookmark in my Bookmarks Toolbar.  The SocialMarker site explains how to get this setup.
3. I click the “SocialMarker” bookmark.
4. Another tab appears with SocialMarker loaded and the Title and URL of my page auto-populated.
5. I manually enter text (a description of the page) and appropriate tags.
6. I select the social bookmarking services that I want to submit to (I usually choose the “Dofollow” and “Best” ones, not all of them).
7. I click “Submit”
8. SocialMarker loads up a frame that opens up pages for each service, with buttons at the top to navigate between services
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9. I then go from service to service, logging in (often I’m already logged in from a prior session), and submitting my page by dragging and dropping each field from the helpful bar at the bottom of the screen.  Often SocialMarker is smart enough to populate these fields without me having to do anything.
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So, although there’s still some manual effort involved, SocialMarker does make it easer to submit sites to social bookmarking services.  And it sure doesn’t hurt that it’s FREE.  I’ll keep using it until I find something better or win the lottery and can finally afford to spend more money on internet marketing tools.

One last thing I should mention – I also use the Tag Format Converter tool (or the downloadable spreadsheet) that I wrote.  There’s 5 different tag formats that social bookmarking services require; you can’t just use the default comma-separated format for each service.  Yes, it sucks ass.  Hopefully one day those social bookmarking bigwigs will decide on a standard format.  But that’s just wishful thinking

Today I’m going to talk about Free Traffic System, which touts itself as being able to give people “free targeted website traffic in any niche”.

Well first of all, as you probably found out when you were 5 years old, nothing in the world is entirely free (except bad advice and in some cities drinks for ladies on Tuesdays).  So although this site does offer a free service, they also encourage you to become a Pro Member and get additional benefits and features.

That being said…this is what the Free Traffic System is all about:

Article Submission

1. You write a unique article (at least 450 words) that isn’t plagiarized or already posted word-for-word on your own site.
2. You SPIN it, which involves putting [spin][/spin] around synonyms throughout your article.
   • Here’s an example sentence: One day I [spin]went|drove|walked|ran[/spin] to the [spin]store|market|grocery store|drug store|shopping center[/spin].
   • So as you can see, because I spun a phrase 4x and another 5x, that creates 20 (4×5) possible sentences out of a single sentence
   • If you do that once or twice in each paragraph throughout your article, you have turned your single unique article into many unique articles.
3. You determine appropriate keywords for your article (preferably ones you’re targeting in your marketing campaign)
4. You determine appropriate URLs for the keywords which you’ve embedded in your article
5. You enter everything above into Free Traffic System
6. You type in category keywords to find blogs that would be suitable for your article
7. You select 30 of these blogs
8. Over the course of the next few days, your article is automatically submitted to these 30 blogs!
9. The entire process typically takes me about half an hour

Article Reception

Now this is functionality you could use if you want your niche WordPress blog to run on auto-pilot.   It’s basically the inverse of the Article Submission functionality that I described above.  Note that it’s completely optional and my guess is that most folks just do the article submission.

1. You create a new WordPress user that has the “AUTHOR” role
2. You enter details into Free Traffic System about your blog, such as:
   • Title
   • Category
   • URL
   • Username
   • Password
3. You sit back and wait while new articles get posted to your blog on a regular basis (I find the frequency depends on how unique your “Category” / niche is)

Pros of Free Traffic System

• Easy to use once you figure out how spinning and keywords work (they do provide an instructional video)
• A single article gets unique-ifide (yes, that’s definitely a word!) and submitted to 30 blogs for FREE!
• Great for getting traffic
• Great for getting one-way backlinks to your site with anchor-text keywords (in other words…SEO crystal meth)
• Great for getting unique content, on auto-pilot, posted to your blog

Cons of Free Traffic System

• Could be a bit confusing at first
• Article Reception functionality doesn’t allow you to specific WordPress categories for the posts (I’ve had to manually move posts between categories)

Overall, as far as cost/benefit analysis goes, I highly, highly recommend Free Traffic System.  It sure aint perfect, but…come on…it’s FREE!  Plus I don’t know of any other way to get articles unique-ified and submitted to so many blogs without a whole lot of effort.

As you can probably tell, I’m a big fan of WordPress.  I’ve used a few other Content Management Systems (like Joomla, Drupal, PHP-Nuke, etc.).  But I’ve found that for internet marketing, WordPress is simply hard to beat with its ease-of-use, maintenance simplicity, and the huge community support of free plugins and themes.

So, here’s the list of plugins that I routinely use with each WordPress installation:

Akismet

• Catches spam Comments on your posts or pages.
• I find that it’s very accurate.
• You do have to enter a WordPress API key though to activate it (which I’m not a big fan of doing…why does WordPress need to know what spam I’m receiving?).
• Does anyone know why it has such a strange name that has nothing to do with spam?

All in One SEO Pack

• I call this thing “Search Engine Optimization For Dummies”
• You don’t really have to know much about SEO to get some serious benefits from it
• It can do custom HTML headers like keywords, descriptions, titles
• You can even set “noindex” for different types of archives so you won’t get hurt by having duplicate content

Dagon Design Sitemap Generator

• An easy-to-use HTML sitemap generator
• Tons of features, super configurable, but not complicated

Exec-PHP

• Occasionally with some sites I need to execute PHP within posts, this plugin makes it extremely easy
• If you don’t know what PHP is skip this one

GoCodes

• URL shortener and click tracker all-in-one!
• Simple interface
• Great for hiding affiliate links (instead of using http://youraffiliateID.vendorID.hop.clickbank.net you can use http://yourdomain.com/go/FriendlyProductName)

Google XML Sitemaps

• Rather than creating an HTML sitemap, like the plugin I mentioned above, this one creates an XML sitemap
• It also notifies many popular search engines when changes are made
• Tons of options, but works great out-of-the-box

Thumbnail Viewer

• Sometimes I like putting image thumbnails in my posts so visitors can click the thumbnail hyperlinks to see the full image
• That’s exactly what this bad boy is for
• It’s very simple and fast (full images load real quick)

WordPress.com Stats [Edit - June 30 - Now I like "StatPress SEOlution" better!]

• If you’ve ever used WordPress.com to host a site, you’re familiar with their admin “stats” page
• That’s exactly what this plugin emulates, except it works for sites you host yourself
• You must enter your WordPress API key to activate it (you can get this for free from WordPress.com)
• My only complaint is that it doesn’t show unique visitors, only “views”
• It tracks UNIQUE VISITORS and other cool stuff like which countries visitors are from and search engine spider stats

Yet Another Related Post Plugin

• Dynamically determines which posts are related to each other
• Places links at the end of each post so visitors can then view the related posts
• Lots of options, and easy to use

If you’re not sure how to find or install these plugins, you have two options:

1. From the WP admin panel, go “Plugins” > “Add New”, then use the “Search” form to find the plugins you want
2. http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/, download the ZIP files, then FTP the contents to your web server root/wp-content/plugins directory