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Using Social Networking Sites for Book Promotion

With regards to online promotions for authors, there is such a thing as spreading oneself too thinly. With the recent surge of social networking and bookmark sites, the urge to join every new community is strong. It is true that you want to certify your name and/or book as a brand, and devoting time to socializing via sites like MySpace and Friendster can help build a potential readership, which in turn may improve word of mouth promotion of your book.

However, trying to manage a presence on several sites at once can be daunting and time-consuming. Plus, too much time spent marketing takes away from writing that next book.

So where do you find the balance to maintain your creative writing while employing effective online marketing techniques? Is it better to spread yourself in tiny portions across a multitude of social networks, or concentrate your energy on two or three and let the readers come to you? The authors of a marketing book I once read called "Focus" touched on the theory that a business that maintains a focus on one product or service tends to be more successful that the company that attempts to branch out into different things. This thought can be applied to online marketing: make one or two social communities part of your marketing focus, and your chances for sales may increase.

Of course, this begs the question, "Which social networks?" MySpace, for one, is perhaps the best known and most popular of the active sites. Its multi-functionality and growing database of users gives the author greater opportunity for establishing a following. As for other up-and-coming sites whose names may become dictionary terms, here is a short listing. Determine which ones may be most useful to your book marketing, and focus your energy on creating a visible presence through the services they offer.

delicious - delicious is regarded as one of the first widely known social bookmarking websites on the Internet. "Social bookmarking" refers to the collection of favorite websites and pages, made available for other Internet users to browse. Websites are grouped by keywords which are made searchable through the site and may be viewed as lists or as "clouds". A cloud is a grouping of keywords where the larger font words represent phrases with the most websites attributed to them.

As a registered delicious user, you can add and edit favorite URLs and save them to an RSS feed which can be applied to your site or blog through an aggregator. Many people use del.icio.us to reference favorite sites or to promote multiple URLs with which they are associated. For somebody marketing via the Internet, del.icio.us offers the opportunity to create inbound links to websites for link popularity, and to offer delicious user the chance to find your site under a specific keyword. For delicious to be truly effective, however, your site would have to be tagged by other delicious users. One way to achieve this is by adding a special button to your website to entice visitors to add your URL to their bookmarks.

As a marketing tool, delicious works best if people use it to tag you. Keep a profile at del.icio.us for the promotion of your URLs and books, and spend time on it when you have some to spare.

Flickr - Flickr is a social community founded on photo sharing. Offering widgets to allow blog users to add gallery functionality to their templates, Flickr enjoyed an explosive popularity as a social site, and through its acquisition by Yahoo it maintains status as one of the top places to visit and share pictures. Here people may upload vacation snaps, photos of bizarre but true hometown imagery, and personal photos designed to bring people of the world even closer.

Can Flickr benefit the author? In a way, yes. Readers are fans, and fans have an interest in various aspects of the lives of those they admire. Flickr presents the author with an opportunity to share with readers through pictures. Snapshots of recent booksignings or conference appearances may be uploaded to a gallery and shared with all. Exposing a personal side to your writing persona, however large or small, cements a bond between you and the reader than can grow and ultimately benefit your sales through word of mouth.

As a marketing tool, Flickr can help bring a personable quality to your site or weblog. Update occasionally as you have pictures of book-related events and objects to share.

Faqqly - This is a unique social site in that it encourage users to ask each other questions. These questions form your personal FAQ, or Frequently Asked Question list. Once you set up a profile, you can offer information about your book and writing career. The idea is that people on Faqqly will ask questions about your books and writing, and as you answer you create the FAQ. It is very similar to being interviewed.

As a marketing tool, Faqqly presents an opportunity to market yourself to interested readers. Rather than maintain a personal FAQ on your site, you can link to your Faqqly profile and encourage reader interaction, thereby enhancing your rapport with your audience. As you can be alerted to new questions, you won't need to devote too much time to FAQQLY unless you can spare a few minutes to reciprocate questions to other FAQQLY users. This in turn, exposes you to a wider FAQQLY audience who will hopefully visit your profile.

From bookmarks to impromptu interviews, social networking sites offer the author many opportunities for self-promotion. Choose the sites that best fit your time schedule and energy, and keep your focus and a polished profile for yourself and your books. Use your time to write and give readers something else to look forward to when they revisit you on these sites.

Source: Free Articles

Communication Skills for Managers

Performance appraisal is probably the most misused and abused management tool in history. When asked, the majority of human resource managers will swear blind that it is their most important device for reviewing members of the team. The reality is that, on the whole, managers, supervisors, and employees hate the thoughts of them and they rarely get done. Human resource professionals spend a lot of time whipping people into doing them, while managers look for a variety of reasons to delay the process.

The reason for this is that it's often an uncomfortable practice to carry out, people undertake performance appraisal for the wrong reasons and from the wrong perspective. This can end up putting the manager and the employee on different "sides". Appraisals are used for determining pay increases, who gets let go, who gets promoted. Most commonly, they are used to focus on what people have done wrong.

So what is the real point of performance appraisals? Generally, the aim of the practice is to:

• Give feedback on performance to employees.
• Identify employee training needs.
• Document criteria used to allocate organizational rewards.
• Form a basis for personnel decisions: salary increases, promotions, disciplinary actions, etc.
• Provide the opportunity for organizational diagnosis and development.
• Facilitate communication between employee and administrator.
• Validate selection techniques and human resource policies to meet federal Equal Employment Opportunity requirements

The most important purpose or goal of the appraisal is to improve performance in the future, in both employees and team leaders. Managers can get valuable information from staff to help them make their jobs more productive. Through feedback given in performance appraisals work units can identify problems that interfere with everyone's, and take steps to rectify them. If there is a shift from affixing blame to identifying barriers to performance the fear and dread associated with appraisals will be removed.

When managers put away the "blaming stick" in appraisals and move to a cooperative, dialogue approach, the whole process can become more comfortable and effective. Because, it puts the manager and employee on the same side, and working towards the same goals, getting better and better.

Performance appraisals are always awkward for everyone. While managers make an effort to be as objective as possible, there are always concerns about specific performance appraisals, and their accuracy. When you’re evaluating your staff it’s wise to be aware of factors that may affect your assessments. Here are a few factors you should be aware of, so that you can examine your own assessment processes to ensure that they are as free from bias as possible.

Generalising

Generalising, or the halo effect, is the tendency to rate someone high or low in all categories, based on their performance in other areas. Results of performance appraisals, where generalising occurs, do not help develop employees because they are inaccurate and unspecific to their entire performance.

Different Standards of Evaluation

Evaluation terms such as fair, good, excellent, etc, are commonly used in performance appraisals, yet managers should be aware that the meaning of these words will differ from person to person. In any case, the use of these categories is not recommended; they are just too unspecific and do little to provide sufficient information to evaluate individuals and help them develop.

Current and Lenient Bias

Current bias is the tendency to assess people based on their most recent performance and to ignore previous behaviour. Leniency bias occurs when the employee gets rated higher than warranted, this is usually accompanied by rationalization as to why this is appropriate.

Opportunity Bias

This occurs as a result of ignoring the notion that factors beyond the control of the employee may either restrict or facilitate their performance. In the case of opportunity bias, credit or blame is given to the employee when the true cause of the performance was opportunity.

False Attribution Errors

There is often a tendency, in performance appraisal, to attribute success or failure to individual effort and ability. So when someone does well, we give them credit, and when someone does less well, we suggest it's somehow their fault. While there is some truth in this, the reality is that performance is a function of both the individual and the system he or she works in. If both factors are not taken into account, it will be increasingly difficult to improve on performance.

Although performance appraisals are commonly dreaded throughout the company, from team leader to employee, they are a necessary tool in ensuring development. If conducted fairly and appropriately the information gathered can be used to vastly improve the performance of the entire team.


Source: Free Articles

Site Linking and Search Engine Strategies: Key Rules

Linking your internet home business' website to other similar sites is important because it helps in getting search engines find and index your website. Linking to different unique site will advance your web site page ranks and link popularity. Link popularity is a key tool used by search engine algorithms to rank and list website URLs.

What is the benefit of being indexed by search engines? If you can be found on the search engines under your keyword searches, and thus will get free traffic send to your site by the search engines. For your internet home business succeed, you will need a lot of traffic.

For you to be indexed by the search engines, and listed high on the list of search engine results displayed to surfers searching for specific keywords, there are certain rules you should follow. Listed below are the key common search engines blunders which you must avoid, and some key steps you must take to ensure success with your internet home business.

? Do not submit your internet home business URL to search engines more than once in one month. If you submit your site to search engines more than one a month, this may be considered as spamming, and you can get your website penalized.

? Do not try to trick search engines. For example, on your internet home business URL, do not repeat keyword phrases next the same keyword phrase in your metatags or page copy. This can be considered as spamming.

? Do not have a home business website with duplicate content. Some internet home businesses that involve affiliate tend to have website with the same content. Have unique content on your website, and you must regularly add fresh content to your website. Having unique, fresh and useful information on your internet home business URL is the best way to get indexed and ranked high by search engines.

? Link your site to high ranking sites that are similar to yours. You can approach owners of similar internet home business sites about having reciprocal links. With reciprocal linking, your get to put their main links on your site and they put your main link on their site. You can do this manually, or if you can afford it, you have purchase a tool that automates this, such as The Link Machine.

? Creating one way links to your site is also very important and potentially more effective than reciprocal links. You can create one-way links to your site by submitting articles that have a link to your website or participate in forums. The more links you have pointing back to your website, the better. These links will be related to your keywords, so that means you will get some traffic that will be good for your internet home business.

? Keep your site simple. Keep your pages on one or two levels of subdirectories. This makes it easy for search engine to reach all levels of your site.

? Be patient! The process of establishing your internet presence, creating links back to your site and links with other similar sites takes time. Search engines do not index your site overnight. There are billions of other web pages that compete with yours.

If you consistently follow the recommended strategies above, your efforts will soon start to pay off as you get index by search engines, and get some traffic send to your site, which will boost your internet home business.

Internet home businesses rely on a good and steady flow of traffic for you to make some sales and earn some profits. Follow the strategies outlined above, and your site will soon get indexed by the search engines.

Source: Free Articles

Google Adsense and the Potential for High Profits

Chances are, you've heard of Google; the enormously popular search engine that everyone is using these days. But did you know that there's a way Google can help you make money? It's true; and the best part is you won't have to do very much to make it work. That's the beauty of Adsense.

Google Adsense works on the principle of passive income. In other words, you will generate income with a minimal amount of active participation on your part. Think of it this way: Instead of having to do all of the cooking and cleaning yourself, imagine if you had a robot that could do it all for you, while you sat back and watched. Adsense works in a similar way, except instead of a cleaner house you get a fatter bank account. Sounds pretty nice, doesn't it? We will show you how to make passive income work for you.

The world's richest people all understand the concept of passive income. That's how they can jet-set off to fancy parties and exotic locales while their businesses continue to flourish. They have more than just crackerjack staffs and winning ideas. They have passive income on the payroll.

Once you've invested the small amount of time to learn about Adsense and set it up, all that is left for you to do is to sit back and watch as your bank account – or PayPal balance increases.

What is Adsense, anyway?

In a nutshell, it's a fast and easy way for a website owner to make money through the placement of Google ads on their site. Adsense takes the guesswork out of ad placement, by choosing ads that relate very closely to the content on your site. You no longer have to search for relevant ads yourself; Google Adsense does the searching for you.

Without Adsense, you would have to spend countless hours searching for different ads for each of the pages on your site. All that searching could seriously eat into your golf time! With Adsense, you will be able to concentrate on providing your site's visitors with high-quality content.

The program rewards site owners for providing web surfers with interesting content. You will generate an income stream from your website or blog just by participating in the program. Some site owners have earned monthly incomes in the thousands of dollars! Even if your initial incomes are small, Adsense has the potential to earn your site a very comfortable second income stream. You'll even earn while you sleep! And if you own more than one site, the earning potential is just that much greater!

The way it works is this:

Google Adsense compensates the affiliate on a pay-per-click basis. Each time an ad is clicked, the advertiser pays Google a certain amount. After they have deducted their amount, Google will forward you the rest, usually on a monthly schedule.

Do you want to earn money while you travel the world, play with your kids or simply take time out for yourself? That can be a reality with Adsense. With a simple set up and some tried-and-true strategies for taking full advantage of the program, you will soon see the dollars rolling in. So relax, put your feet up, and let Adsense work for you.

Source: Free Articles

Making Money With MLM

In every MLM program, there are inevitably those who profit more than others. These elite few are also those most often identified to such programs. They drive fancy cars, live in large mansions, and cash in massive commission checks every month. They are also the ones most often called upon to speak at the MLM gatherings.

In contrast, there are also those who never seem to get anywhere with their programs. They work hard enough, but their work just does not seem to translate to real results. This is because they are missing a key ingredient: technology.

In recent years, multi level marketing has gone high tech. Some of the most successful companies in recent memory, were those that introduced cell phones or internet based products in to the MLM mix. However, the contribution of the technology seems to have stopped there for some members, to their detriment. They simply have not been able to tap into what is available.

If you wish to make it big in the marketing world, you must learn to do a few things very well. One, you must learn how to sell the largest number of your products to the largest number of possible people. Two, you must learn to attract and utilize skilled people that can help you grow your marketing venture. Both skills are certainly attainable using conventional methods but technology would make them far easier to master.

The big secret to making money from multi level marketing is to learn how to use technology to your advantage. At the top of the technology list is the internet, which is the centerpiece of the new world economy. As we go deeper and deeper into the new millennium, expect the internet to grow at exponential rates and for internet business to become more and more successful. As the global market made possible by the internet consolidates, more and more financial opportunities will come up.

The growth of the internet is there for you to take advantage of, and if you are really serious about making it big in the MLM game, you will not ignore it. Embrace technology as it comes and learn to utilize it to suit your ends. There are various ways you can do this. You can start selling web based products, place ads for partners, write a newsletter, create a content website, all things that you can do as part of a multi level marketing program. Additionally, recruiting and related activities can be facilitated by the instant communication made possible by the worldwide web.

By taking advantage of todays high powered technology, you will put yourself on the fast track to MLM success.

Source: Free Articles

How Good Is GPS In Mobile Phones

GPS technology has been used to keep track of mobile phones. The use of GPS technology in cell phones is not new however the latest mobile phones have GPS devices loaded in them which has made it extremely easy to keep track of someones location all the time and that too with great accuracy.

The use of GPS in mobile phones has so many advantages. Any person who is caught in an emergency situation can use their mobile phones to find their way out. It can be used to provide information about your ETA to your family members. It is also of great help in finding elderly or children when they are lost.

The movement of vehicles can be accurately tracked by the fleet managers and business owners using GPS, thus helping in their business. GPS technology has also been used by hospitals and police when they need to reach a place in an emergency situation.

The use of GPS technology in mobile phones was not common earlier. The technology was not perfect as the broadcasting of the radio signal would continue even when they were not in use, and hence it was not used. Triangulation method was used by mobile companies to keep a track of users location. But it was of no use to the companies and it was also a very tedious process.

But with the development of an excellent technology, GPS in mobile phones became common. Along with the many advantages, its use in mobile phones has several drawbacks.


Its biggest disadvantage is that it interferes with ones privacy. Anyone who carries a GPS mobile phone is always tracked even without his knowledge. No one likes to be tracked down like this all the time. The government and the courts have taken certain measures to make sure that everyones privacy is safeguarded. The courts have ordered law enforcement agencies not to obtain any GPS tracking information. Such information can only be obtained when the cell phone company claims the information to be extremely important or in the benefit of the country. The government has allowed GPS tracking information for e911 emergency calls only. For all other things, the consent of the cell owner is a must.

The benefits of GPS technology in mobile phones can be utilized in a proper way only if the rules and regulations made by the courts and the government are followed. The technology can then be used for all the right reasons without interfering with ones privacy.

Source: Free Articles

3 Tips On How To Get The Affiliate Marketing Help You Need

Affiliate marketing is one of the best ways to make money online. You sign up with an affiliate program, promote their product, and make some money. The problem that most affiliates have is that they don't have any clue on how to market the program that they signed up with. So they end up never making any

money on the internet. There are all kinds of ways to promote your product. However, finding the affiliate marketing help that you need is not an easy thing to do if you are a newbie.

You could try and guess or just give up, but why do that when the help you need is within your reach. You just need to know where to go to find the marketing help you want. So I am going to give you a few of the ways that you can get that help.

1. The affiliate program you are promoting is always the best place to start. When you sign up with the program, you will get a website, a user name and password to sign into the affiliate program back office. Here you will be able to find classified

ads, banners, text links, or emails to help you promote the product. A lot of the affiliate programs will also provide you with marketing help that will get you started in marketing their product.

2. If you don't find the affiliate marketing help that you need in the backoffice, you can find out who your sponsor or upline is. Your sponsor should have a way for you to contact them. Whether it is through email or the phone. Once you know who they are, contact them with any questions or problems that you are having. They will be more than happy to help you get started. That is what they are there for.


3. Articles are another great way to find the affiliate marketing help you need. They are full of information. You can do a search on any search engine for articles about affiliate marketing. You can also find directories of articles, and do a search on the directory. Just type in affiliate marketing help,

and articles will come up that have information about how to market affiliate programs.

As you can tell, there is a lot of ways to get the affiliate marketing help that you are looking for. You just have to take the time to find the right one for you. It is up to you to find out how to market the affiliate program that you are promoting. Just remember that you are not alone. There is all kinds of help if you are willing to look for it.



Copyright ? Melody Heddings
Source: Free Articles
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