I have taken some time off from updating Online Rookies for the time being. I have been busy working on another online business venture and have recently undertaken a new project. I just launched another site that is dedicated to promoting guest blogging strategies.

Guest blogging is probably the most popular method for people to build links and draw traffic to their sites. Unfortunately, many people have a hard time creating an effective guest blogging campaign. They run into a variety of challenges, which can include:

• Having a hard time generating content that is relevant for the niche they hope to post on
• Having a difficult time finding new guest posts
• Struggling to convince publishers that they are offering high quality content that will benefit their readers

You will need to know what works before you start guest blogging. I hope that you check out my new website Guest Blogging Resources if you want to learn more about content marketing.

I am going to be covering a number of topics on my new site. Among the topics that I am going to cover will include:

• Writing awesome content
• Sourcing sites to guest post on
• Outreach strategies to secure guest posts
• Ways to leverage your guest post to receive the most traffic
• Best practices for incorporating your links into the post for maximum exposure and SEO benefit

Innovation has crept into every sector and photo editing is no exception. There are many excellent photo editing tools available which have made community managers’ much easier. Here are some of the popular photo editing tools that can be used to create a lasting impression.

1.) Pic Monkey

PicMonkey is one of the tools that replaced Picnic when it became obsolete. The photo editing tool is open source and does not require any registration. Pic Monkey has all of the essential photo editing tools: exposure, rotation, cropping, sharpness, colors or resizing. The software even comes with an auto adjust feature that simplifies community managers’ jobs. It also has some quick selection tools such as infrared, Warhol and sepia which are very easy to learn.

Portrait fixing can also be done effectively with PicMonkey with various features which include red eye removal, teeth whitening and wrinkle smoothing. Pic Monkey has become one of the top choices for photo editors.

Pic Monkey also has a text editor feature that allows one to change the fonts inline. Additionally, Pic Monkey allows for texture selection, creation of picture frames. People who have had a hard time learning PhotoShop will be able to breathe a sigh of relief. PicMonkey is much easier to learn and use.

2.) FotoFlexer

FotoFlexer is another free browser based photo editing tool. This tool is excellent for community managers who want to edit images directly through Picasa, Flickr, Facebook, Myspace and PhotoBucket. FotoFlexer has all the basic photo editing tools you will need to create stunning graphics. These include exposure, rotation, cropping, sharpness, colors or re sizing of the picture among others. Red eye remover and photo effects are also available.

Additional funny things as adding glittering text, creation of posters and interchanging of faces in the pictures can also be done through FotoFlexer.

FotoFlexer is a little more complex than the Pic Monkey, but you can usually learn the features within an hour. It is worth the effort if you want to edit photos you have found on your favorite social networking sites.

3.) LunaPic

LunaPic is another photo editing tool that community managers can learn fairly quickly. This is a free browser tool and you do not need to install flash to use it.

The screen on its left side has the toolbar. This helps you remember innovative features in the Paint Shop Pro, be it the eyedropper, fill tool or the eraser. The only downside of Luna Pic is that it takes more time to learn than other photo editing tools.

This tool is of great use in situations when the community managers do not have to work an extra bit on doing the color and brightness adjustments. The one stop photo effects were with extreme ease with Luna Pic and editing most images can be done very easily. Community managers who are hard bend on time and have to do many editing tasks.

4.) Phixr

For community managers who are looking for a simple interface, the best photo editing tool to try will be Phixr. Phixr too has all the basic photo editing tools that you need at your disposal. Additionally one can add some fun effects too to the images edited through Phixr making it an innovative tool when it comes to posting funny images on social networking sites as Facebook and MySpace.

You do not need any expertise in graphic arts and community managers despite their professional background can handle distinct kind of images with ease with any of these image editing software.

The photos can be easily turned into visually engaging pictures through any of these pictures editing software Apart from the above listed photo editing software, a range of other innovative picture editors are too available and almost all of these come for free. Take your pick from those listed above and make your work, an easier lot to manage.

About The Author: Brianne is a writer/blogger. She loves writing, travelling and reading books. She contributes to Hydroxycut.

Google is making many big changes that will affect the entire industry. They already introduced innovative algorithm changes such as Panda & Penguin. There are now a number of speculations that Big G will come up with more newer and even stricter changes in the near future. This year will be very tough for sluggish webmasters. Every website owner should keep an eagle eye out for the changing dynamics of search patterns to conceive a right decision at the right moment. All algorithm updates give better rankings to genuine website while they also penalize link building methods. You need to understand these factors, which will mean the difference between success and failure.

Blog Out Loud

You shouldn’t be surprised that blogging is at the top of the list of factors that helps a site in earning organic visitors. It has become the biggest source of earning organic traffic for every good website. You can add a blog in your website to communicate informally with your targeted customers.

You will need to understand the importance of blogging before launching your website. You must get right to the point when you are writing on your blog.

You can use your blogging application as a stable medium of communication with existing and potential customers.Use your blog to talk about your products and services in an engaging way. This will help your customers learn about your products & services more clearly. For example, you can publish your product development methodology. You can personally write keyword rich content for your blog to improve your rankings.

Channelize Your Web Content

The content distribution is becoming more important with recent algorithm updates. Google is starting to give preference to sites that add value to the online community with quality content. Therefore, you should try to distribute great contents to premium sites and receive a link to your website. You can post your content to high quality sites to improve your page rank and domain authority. You can also try guest blogging, social media bookmarking, video marketing, and specially designed keyword rich press releases. Considerably, the content distribution and marketing increases the visibility of your main site.

Be Virtually Social

You need to capitalize off of social media marketing to stand out with Google if you want to get organic traffic. Create official profiles of your website at all leading social media websites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. It will help you in developing a strong customer base with potential customers. You need to integrate your social media profiles with your website.  Use social sites in specifically to promote your web pages instead of your social media pages. Usually, Google does not prefer delivering search results with full of Facebook and Twitter Pages.

Use Google Analytics

You should add Google analytics to your website to scale your virtual marketing efforts. This search engine tool will help you in understanding the demographics of your customers. It will help you direct your web marketing efforts in the right direction.

Get Certified

It has become important for websites to earn additional certifications to improve their content. In 2012, Google banned several websites that copied contents and violated copyright and trademark rights. Therefore, you should use original content on your website. Sometimes, small-scale business owners get the images from web and use them on their websites regardless of copyright issues. Doing so can be a suicidal activity. You should not use a single bit of content taken from other sources. However, you can give name of the owner at the place of using someone else’s content.

You can update your site with these factors after reading about the complete post. However, the adherence should be precise and qualitative.

About the Author:
Chris Miller is a blogger cum developer for a leading Drupal Development Company. He writes concrete information on open source CMS’s. Hire drupal developers from Xicom Technologies Ltd. for advance drupal module development.

2. Display Your Logo
The overhauled Company Pages allow your enterprise’s logo to be depicted in either standard (60 by 60-pixel configuration) or square (50 by 50-pixel configuration) variants or both. The standard logo is displayed on the upper side of your main page while the square logo is specially meant for status updates on your social network. LinkedIn encourage you to use white-tinged logos in consonance with their new design.
3. Post a Brand Image
The Company Pages also invite you to host an attractive image on the home screen that best represents your brand or its philosophy. For instance – if you’ve started a property leasing business in downtown San Francisco, you may show an appealing photograph of actual leased premises. Ensure that the image you choose has an electronic size within 646 by 220 pixels in accordance with inherent rules (LinkedIn does, however, allow editing post the upload).
4. Exhibit Product Information
You are advised to use the new Company Pages thus to promote your products or services:
a) LinkedIn have incorporated small on-screen windows to help display an overview of your products and services. These distinctive windows may be used to arouse visitor interest and compel them to visit your main portals for future action.
b) Special personalization options have been provided such as the ability to embed YouTube videos and images to go with the information. These may be engaged by activating the “Services” tab once you have logged in.
c) Remember to populate your main portals with complete information related to your offerings such as fresh launches and forthcoming events as well as guides on how first-time visitors can access more information.

5. Advertise Company Policies and Career Details
Company policies and career information too, like products, may be displayed via special on-screen windows. You ought to depict information like working procedures, recruitment tenets, and career vacancies for maximum impact. This technique is engineered to arouse interest and persuade more visitors to cull further details.
6. Hire Administrators
LinkedIn now allow you to ally with experienced online experts (like web engineers and content developers) to help structure, boost, and sustain your Company Pages. Simply navigate to the “Company Pages Admins” settings option and register yourself to benefit from this facility.
7. Use Updating Facilities
The Company Pages come with options to advertise important updates as well as choose entities who will view this updated information – you would do well to use the same.
8. Track All Trends
Finally, LinkedIn have provided special menu options like “Follower” and “Page” Insights to help monitor your pages’ activity and reveal vital data like visitor demographics and product popularity – harness these for higher traffic and recognition.

This guest post is brought to you by Sandy Coops of www.cabletimenc.com, a site that offers savings and current information on time warner cable.

Creating Unique Content:

Everyone knows how important content is for a website. However, most people give much more emphasis to keywords rather than the subject matter when they actually start writing. The best way is to satisfy both users and search engines is to post fresh and unique content which provides all the necessary information. If the users stay for longer time in your website then it will rank better with Google, Bing and Yahoo.

Implementing of Semantic Markup:

Semantic markup will not improve it directly but what it can improve the click through rate significantly. Also, semantic content will help you highlight other essential information such as photos and testimonials. In turn, this will increase the number of people who click your website links. This can increase your traffic considerably.

Anchor text has to be diversified:

You could avoid using the same content repeatedly. Google considers this to be spam. One survey found that 67% of all websites were penalized because they overused keywords while writing for the website. It will be better for you to choose four or five keywords which are crucial for your website and alternate between them.

Using videos:

Videos are a brilliant way to increase the traffic to your website. Generally, it has been viewed that people like to watch videos. Therefore, you can create promotional videos for the services and products you want to sell. Some of the experts of SEO like to first upload the video in Youtube and then connect them with the website. Using videos will almost invariably attracts more users to your website.

Provide social sharing option:

You need to consider how powerful social media can be. Provide social media sharing options within all content. Likes and tweets help illustrate how popular your content is, which improves your SEO rankings.. Various search engines like Google and Yahoo also gives on the importance of the rankings.

Following all these said guidelines you can surely promote your contents in a better way which will help you to sell your service and product more.

About The Author: Brianne is a writer/blogger. She loves writing, travelling and reading books. She contributes in Dr. Hugh Hetherington

Many countries have laws that stipulate that large corporations and conglomerates have to use cloud solutions that keep their customers’ data within the country they reside in. These laws can be particularly burdensome for companies that have customers all over the world.

Maintaining sovereignty over the cloud is possible, but you are going to need to make sure you know what you are looking for. Here are some tips that you can use to make sure the provider complies with your nation’s sovereignty laws.

Ask Where the Servers Are Hosted

The company should be completely transparent about where the servers are hosted. They may have servers in various countries, but can still let you know where you should expect your data to be kept at any time. You need to be able to trust that your cloud provider is being entirely honest and transparent with you when you ask for this information.

Make Sure the Company is Trustworthy

You need to make sure that any cloud company you work with will be trustworthy. They need to be professional and show a genuine concern about looking after your individual needs.

Determine What Security Measures They’ve Taken

You need to make sure that the cloud company has taken the necessary steps to protect any sensitive data you store. They can’t guarantee that your data will never be compromised, but you should be guaranteed that they are doing their due diligence and investing their resources in protecting as much as possible.

Your cloud provider will outline their security plan in their service agreement. Make sure that these measures satisfy your company’s internal security policies and your country’s consumer protection and data sovereignty laws. The company should have the necessary accreditations in your company. The General Services Administration is one of the most important accreditors in the United States that should back any cloud firm you are considering using.

Consider an App Dedicated to Data Sovereignty

Some applications have been released on the market that can help companies make sure their cloud plan satisfies these legal requirements. One application you may want to look into is AnyCloud. This application can tap into various cloud hosting providers and make sure that the data you are storing will be deployed onto the right servers.

AnyCloud can be a good solution for companies that are storing data for a number of customers throughout the world. These firms can make sure that the data is stored on cloud hosts in each respective customer’s home country. However, the application still needs to be tested for accuracy.

Data Sovereignty is Possible on the Cloud

Many people mistakenly believe that it is impossible to use cloud computing firms to comply with these laws. These firms may refrain from using cloud services. You can still take advantage of cloud technology to store data and run your business more effiicently, but you need to do your part in making sure that your data will be properly protected.

About the Author: Kalen is an engineer and technology writer for Scale Matrix where he talks about private cloud hosting.

Deciding to create a home based business is an excellent way to finally fire your boss. You read that correctly. Instead of getting fired or quitting your boring old job, you can now use this different line of thinking. You may work for your boss, but your boss needs you just as much as you need them. This means that you can now fire your boss.

Is a Home Based Business a Good Idea?

Home based businesses are not the best idea for everyone. There are plenty of people who are just not cut out for this type of work. Don’t get blinded with the idea that owning and operating your own home based business is a simple task because it is not. In most cases, you will have to work harder to get your business off the ground. This means that you will often have to put in more hours than you did at your regular full time job. Home based businesses are only right for people that are self-motivated and ready to work. Your business will never get off the ground if you are not ready to put a lot of hard work into it. Not everyone will admit that they consider themselves lazy, but if you do consider yourself lazy, then owning and operating your own home based business will probably not be a good idea.

Image credit: wiki Commons

Giving Your Home Based Business a Jumpstart

Once you have decided that owning and operating your own home based business is a good idea, you will need to do everything you can to make sure that your home based business is a success. There is a really good chance that this is not going to happen overnight, but we have already discussed that it is going to take a lot of work.

However, there are a few great things that you can do to give your new home based business a super boost. One of these things is, creating a website for your business. The benefits of having a website are astronomical.

Your home based business will be able to communicate with people and possible customers from all over the globe. This is something that only large businesses had the opportunity to do in the past. The Internet has leveled the playing field, and it has made it easier for small home based businesses to succeed in what would have otherwise been an impossible task.

Creating Your Home Based Business Website

Having your own website really can help propel your new home based business to success much faster, but not if the website is created incorrectly. If your website is created incorrectly, it will be nothing more than an anchor that holds your business back. This is not what any business wants, especially a new home based business. Anything that slows your business down can really make things very difficult in the long run. The entire purpose of the website is to make your business more of a success. Make sure that your small business website is created correctly. This may mean that you need to hire a team of professionals to do it for you.

Michael Jones is a freelance writer who enjoys contributing his wealth of knowledge to many internet websites and blogs. He knows how important the Internet can be for every business. He also notes how important Web Design Nottingham is for businesses located within that area.

In the SEO game, link building has always been the number one way to earn SEO value for your site. Since the beginning of search engine optimization, this has always been the tried and true tactic of pushing google’s algorithm to view your site as highly valued. In this article, we’re going to explore a new and emerging SEO currency that’s been noticed by top gurus in the past 3 – 4 months. This new currency is called “Co-Citations”.

You see, what these professional SEO’s were noticing, were sites that were ranking highly for a given keyword phrase; yet had little to no inbound links with that keyword anchor text – and no pages with that title text either. What these ranking sites did have, were several relevant mentions across the web within text, where their brand or web domain was featured (not even linked) next to the search keyword phrases. These instances that absolutely do not represent links, but obviously do contribute to SEO value have been named Co-Citations

Why is this change happening?

What this means, is that as usual, google’s algorithm is getting even smarter. … and sure, it’s always gotten smarter – identifying poor quality spam links, or refining the HTML tag quality review of a given site, but this is different. Google is no longer really scanning the web like a robot; their scanning the web the way the human eye would. Think about it; if you were doing research manually on the web for relevant sites in an industry, would you care if the referring site actually linked out to the other site? Absolutely not – you have eyes, you can read and process the mention, or “citation” of that site, and attribute the value on your own. Now that’s exactly what google is doing – so it’s time to start thinking less about SEO “tips and tricks”, and more about creating quality content across the web.

Example of link citation

To further clarify exactly what Co-Citations are, let’s take a quick look at the following example:

Let’s say the following co-Citation example is for an off road tire store called JC Whitney, and the actual citation exists on a tire blog called offraodtireblog.com. The Co-Citation on offraodtireblog.com would look like this:

“For the best off road tires, check out JC Whitney – they rock!”

You can see that in the citation, there is neither anchor keyword text – or even the JC Whitney domain name… Yet in the below screen cap, you can see that they are the number two natural search result for the keywords “off road tires” – and furthermore, the resulting landing page doesn’t even feature the keywords “off road” in its page header, or description tag. This search result predominance is a direct result of the “Co-Citation”, and others like it – that include JC Whitney’s brand name in close proximity with relevant keyword text.

Google is actually smart enough to see a brand name, and then match up the domain URL that corresponds to that brand to attribute the SEO value – without any linking involved.

How does the size affect its page prominence and impact?

The size of your “Call to action” button needs to be consistent with your website’s layout. A larger call to action may be fine if you have a lot of content on your website. A smaller “Call to action” button is going to be buried if you have a lot of content. But a larger “Call to action” button on that page would look out of place. That is why it may be a good idea to put more than one “Call to action” button on a content heavy page.

Make it too big and it will look like an image

If a “Call to action” button is too big then a user will automatically assume it is an image that is hyperlinked to another website unless the call to action is clearly stated (such as a “buy it now” button). A larger button will work if it actually is a link to another landing page. People are more likely to recognize a call to action button if it is a more reasonable size.

Is the color appealing, boring or threatening?

The color of your “Call to action” button is going to have some sort of emotional response attached to it. A blood red call to action that is shadowed with black or darker red is going to look threatening. One that is caterpillar green will look more dull. A dark blue may come across as authoritative or trustworthy, depending upon your user’s cultural upbringing (for example, the Chinese see red as lucky not threatening).

Is the color passive or does it demand attention?

This is a very subjective quality. A number of things determine how well a button will grab someone’s attention. This includes the shape, background, size, text and font. As a rule of thumb, you should try to use the same colors you use for your branding efforts. However, you may find better conversions if the color contrasts to the colors on your website.

PayPal made the brave move of making their calls-to-action dark yellow. It is dark enough to stand out against their white background, but is in-fact a stark contrast color to their dark blue brand colors.

Does it stand out from the background?

Many amateur web designer make the mistake of trying to make their call to action button stand out in a flashy way. However, being too conservative can be a problem too. You need to find a happy medium between being sexy and flashy like Las Vegas and being cultured and refined like San Francisco.

Does the shape fit into the page design?

This question may seem nit-picky, but you would be surprised how many people put a star shaped “Call to action” button on a modular and boxy web page. Many designers use a square “Call to action” button on websites that are built around a more circular design.

Do not go out of your way to match web page shapes with your “Call to action” button, but make sure that the two are not at odds. For example, a web page that is boxy and modular will often look good with a rectangular “Call to action” button that has round edges (like a pill). A distended oval shaped “Call to action” button often looks good on websites with a circular design so long as the text does not look out of place on it.

Does the shape look like a “Call to action” button or an image?

The shape of a button can confuse users as to what its function is. For example, a box shaped “Call to action” button is often mistaken for an image because people are used to seeing images in boxes. Round “Stop” and “Go” buttons are also often mistaken for links or images, instead of being recognized as “Call to action” buttons.

Where it is placed on your page?

The “Call to action” button’s prominence on the page is one thing, as is its contrast from surrounding content. It needs to stand out enough so that a user does not have to search for it, but cannot be so imposing that it puts a person off. Some marketing agents would say that a call-to-action should scream at a user, but this technique doesn’t seem to work as well anymore. A good landing page should be so convincing inspire the user to look for a “Call to action” button.

Is the language used on the “Call to action” button correct?

The text on the button needs to support the message you are trying to convince. You probably won’t sell too many high quality products with a “Call to action” button that reads: “Cheap prices only a click away”.

Does the “Call to action” button look like a malware download?

Some buttons are commonly used by malware designers to trick their visitors into downloading their programs. Make sure you know what these buttons look like so you don’t use them. Your call to action button shouldn’t look intimidating in any way.

Can you make the “Call to action” button look more familiar?

People are more comfortable using something they are already familiar with. That’s why most websites use similar looking shopping carts. Try to can create a “Call to action” button that looks like one they have used before so your users feel safer clicking it.

If your host doesn’t have the script installed wordpress installation can take 5-10 minutes and is a little bit technically, fortunately in this day and age it is quite hard to find a web host that does’nt have these scripts pre-installed.

It’s not just the installation that’s easy with wordpress though, there are many free plug-ins available, plug-ins add funtionality to the site with a little research you can make a wordpress site do virtually anything you want and best of all is the fact that most of this functionallity can be installed with one click, more on my favourite plug-ins in a bit. Let’s talk about content first.

Benefits of Easily Adding content

 As mentioned wordpress was originally intended to be used as a blogging platform, the idea of  blogging started in the 90′s, blog is an abbreviation of weblog. The trend started life as a personal online journal or diary, a record of a person’s life and experiences that combined text, pictures, and maybe some video. Early blogs needed their authors to be technically savvie, with the development of platforms like wordpress, blogger, etc. they became easier to update and therefore more mainstream. In this day and age you can find all kinds of sites on all kinds of subjects most of these sites use some kind of blogging platform or CMS.

Regularly adding unique content has many benefits one of them being SEO and improving your sites ranking in the SERPs, (Search Engine Results Pages). Search engines love sites which regularly add new content, the more relevant content you have on your site the more chance you have of showing in the search results. Adding fresh content to your site can help you become an authority in your field and attract links to your site.

These links could help your site directly by sending traffic from the referring the sites and indirectly by improving your sites search engine rankings, search engines count incoming links as a vote for your site so the more high quality and relevant links you have the higher you will rank and the more traffic you will get from the search engines.

Using wordpress for your site means you and your staff members can easily add this new content, there is no need for you to employ a full-time web master, anyone that can use word processing software like Microsoft word should be able to use wordpress. If your business address, phone number, etc. change they can easily updated with no knowledge of HTML.

Optimising Your WordPress Site

 As mentioned above attracting links and frequently adding new content can help you get free targeted traffic from the search engines like Bing, Google and Yahoo. WordPress is quite search engine friendly in it’s standard form but a few changes to your site can help you get even more free and highly targeted search engine traffic.

The first thing I do to any site as soon as I set it up is change the permalink structure, as standard wordpress post urls look like this example.com/?p=123, this type of structure doesn’t given the search engine spiders any help in understanding what your page is about. I like to change this so the URL contains my keywords like this example.com/keywords.

The second thing I do is change the meta title tag and meta descriptions for all the pages and posts, the meta title is a very important part of your on-page SEO, it is important to use your keywords in this meta title tag. The meta description is shown in the search results, Google say meta description is not a ranking factor but it can increase your click through rate. It is a good idea to take some time and to create a compelling meta description relevant to all the pages and posts on your site.

A very good free SEO plug-in is The Yoast WordPress SEO, this plug-in enables you to make meta title and meta description changes as I have described above for every post and page on your wordpress site. The plug-in can also create an XML site map, robots.txt file, breadcrumbs, canonical urls and much more.

The plug-in also enables you to check each page is optimised for your target keyword ensuring your keywords are included in the page title, URL, content, meta description, etc. If you already have a wordpress site and don’t use the Yoast plug-in I would recommend you try it.

Other wordpress plugins I like include Better WordPress Minify which helps your page load faster by minifying your css and JavaScript files and Quickcache, quickcache is another plugin to speed up your page load speed.

This guest post was supplied by Mark Stubbles, Mark owns a number of sites on topics that interest him like cycling, cars and SEO, he offers guest blogging and other SEO services on a freelance basis.