Twitter rose from the lowly ranks of new microblogging social networking sites swiftly. Some say an entire Presidential campaign was won partially off the viral nature of this site – but regardless of whether or not you believe that, there’s no denying it can be a very powerful method of reaching a large audience.

The problem to date has been to determine just how to single out the right people to communicate with. With the implementation of robots to add friends or auto-follow people, you never knew if those who reciprocated your follow were even interested in your products or services that you market online.

In 2009, Internet marketers learned how to get traffic to their domains, blog, Squidoo lenses and forums simply by devising a potent Tweet and sending it out to the web-o-sphere.
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The movie Julie and Julia took blogging mainstream for many who had no idea that an everyday, average individual could command attention and pursue their passion using an online technology available to the masses for free.

And it’s not just movies and rare blog success stories that make people want to blog. In 2009, the job market resulted in a ton of layoffs for journalists and print newspapers and magazines went out of business. These writers will take their skills to the Internet.

Blogging will boom in 2010 even more than it already has in marketing circles. Just like reality TV has now become a career pursuit for some young adults, blogging is being viewed as a potential income source for those who don’t want to take the regular route to financial success.

Perez Hilton has been very open with the amount of money he’s raking in – and it’s substantial. There are so many blog success stories that you can learn from and apply them to your 2010 Internet Marketing strategy. Read the rest of this entry

Your website is where your business resides, it’s like the headquarter of an offline company. Hence, it is important to practise good website design principles to make sure your site reaches out to the maximum number of visitors and sells to as many people as possible.

Make sure you have clear directions on the navigation of your website. The navigation menu should be uncluttered and concise so that visitors know how to navigate around your website without confusion.

Reduce the number of images on your website. They make your site load very slowly and more often than not they are very unnecessary. If you think any image is essential on your site, make sure you optimize them using image editing programs so that they have a minimum file size.

Keep your text paragraphs at a reasonable length. If a paragraph is too long, you should split it into seperate paragraphs so that the text blocks will not be too big. This is important because a block of text that is too large will deter visitors from reading your content.
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If you’re using AdWords or AdSense you must have heard about an emerging practice in the underworld of computing called “click fraud”. But what exactly is click fraud and how is it accomplished?

Well AdSense uses a payment mechanism that awards a certain amount of money to a publisher (someone who holds an AdSense banner on their page) every time a person clicks on the said banner. So click fraud is the attempt to have people clicking the ads just so that they can earn a greater income.

There are people setting up sites for the sole purpose of fraudulently generating revenue through Google’s AdSense program. These users achieve an incredible number of clicks through many methods, some complex and sophisticated and some rudimentary and simple.

One of the most complex is through the use of so called “hitbots”. These are automated programs who emulate clicking the links in AdSense banners (there are some that actually click the banners as well).

Google’s AdSense protection scheme is by no means perfect and nearly anyone can find the details of surmounting the protection mechanism, ironically just by doing a Google search.

Another, more rudimentary method is to hire a lot of people in a poor country to click the links on your site. This means these people will actually sit all day and just click links so you can earn a fortune. They come from very poor countries like India, and they’re prepared to do so for just $0.50 an hour.

Of course, there’s a problem with this mechanism. Once Google receives a large number of clicks from a single address, the address and the site that had the AdSense banner will be banned, and the illicit behavior might even get the fraudster sued.

To prevent this from happening, many people use a large number of proxy servers for the purpose of clicking. These are basically trojans, located on computers throughout the world (though mostly in the US). What’s even more daunting is that these clicks will appear to originate from an actual computer so such scams are really hard to detect.

And don’t think this happens only in isolated instances. There is a great deal of illegal activity in this domain.

In fact there’s so much that if search engine companies don’t increase their security with such programs as AdSense, such criminal behavior could become more become even more damaging.

Google has a very strict policy regarding click fraud, and it has sued those employing such techniques in the past. But while the search engine giant tries its best to minimize the risk of click fraud there’s certainly room for a lot of improvement.

It is estimated that more then 20% of the clicks that follow an AdSense link are just done in order to get money from the person paying for the ad. Some people believe the number of fraudulent clicks to be even twice as large.

There are a great deal more schemes involving click fraud, such as groups of AdSense publishers clicking each other’s links (which is referred to as “clicking rings”, or spamming people so that they click such links.

Despite Google still holding click fraud on a leash, the phenomenon is certainly raising concerns for the advertisers on AdWords, but despite this advertising with Google’s AdSense still remains more profitable for the advertiser, as opposed to traditional untargeted advertising schemes.