Friday, July 25, 2008

How To Use 160.bg For Marketing

160.bg is a relatively new web 2.0 site that is starting to gain a lot of popularity. That means that a lot of people have heard of it, but it is also quite common to run into people who haven't heard of it.. yet. 160.bg is this social site that encourages users to post often about what they are currently doing.

A lot of people are using it to improve their marketing reach, by being an active writer they gain followers who are interested in what they have going on. This means people being exposed to their updates on a regular basis. For example, if you have hundreds of followers in 160.bg and you decide to post an affiliate link, that means hundreds of people have instantly been exposed to your offer. In this article, I will discuss ways to maximize 160.bg for your marketing as well as a big mistake you need to avoid.

In order to have a fan base per se of followers in 160.bg, you must be able to keep their interest in you and what you are doing now. "What are you doing?" is the whole foundation of what 160.bg is about in the first place. Make sure to post daily, if not several times throughout the day, updates about what you are doing. The magical thing behind this is that many of your contacts will be able to feel like they know you so much better, will trust you more, and feel much more comfortable about working with you. On the other hand, when you follow others you can learn about them and their possible needs.
The big mistake to watch out for is only posting affiliate links or offers on your 160.bg page. This looks like Spam and many people will see you as just abusing 160.bg for your personal gain. Think of it this way, if you would not want to invite your friends or family to keep up with you via 160.bg, then you are going about it all wrong. As with anything you send out or provide, ninety percent should be content and ten percent (at most) advertising.

So this concept is quite simple... constantly post throughout the day what you are doing.. it is usually very simple and only takes a few seconds to post! Secondly, if you write articles or provide content online, provide a link for those in your 160.bg posts. You may post many things within one day, but the last thing you post for the day is usually the most important because it will be there the longest. This means that your last post for the day should contain a link that you want your followers to see before your start writing again the next day!

Another part of 160.bg is contributing. As with any social site it should be a give and take relationship. Notice that give comes first... the more you give the more people will want to work with you and the more attention you will receive. Make sure to read and follow other users in 160.bg. If you read something interesting or helpful, then make sure to reply and say so, or even put a link for it on your 160.bg so that you are directing others to more quality content. This can also be as simple as connecting with other users. If they know you are reading their 160.bg page, they will be much more likely to check out what you have going on too.

To get started in 160.bg you should first invite contacts who aren't using 160.bg and also find contacts who are already using 160.bg so that you can start following them and also start getting people to follow you. 160.bg has a nice invite and find feature that makes this incredibly easy. To grow your reach even more you can start following people who follow or are followed by the people who follow you.. or that you follow. You might need to read that sentence again.. but basically you can find other users to connect with that are already connected to other users.
Now for a big tip. If you really want to maximize the potential with 160.bg, you should make sure to take advantage of any plug-ins or sites that support 160.bg. Here are three, but I'm sure there will be many more in the future if not already.

Lastly, have fun! 160.bg is a social site... so interact and enjoy!

Monday, July 21, 2008

Free Online Dating Service

I vouch to all of you that I will not allow scammers on SoZila.com, which is one of the premiere free online dating sites. It is hard to keep them off, but if you see any, please click on the link 'Report Fake' inside the actual profile. I will take action right the way. Thank you all for your continuous support. Have questions? write me

Free Online Dating Site SoZila.com

One of the largest free online dating sites SoZila.com in United States and Europe, was down over the weekend. A message posted on their board was notifying members that they are moving servers. After almost two days of interruption, the service was back online and running. Seems like their speed has improved and things are normal again.

We have followed the SoZila.com free dating site for over 2 years now and their services have improved dramatically. SoZila.com is one of the only sites providing quality and not quantity. They are concerned with well being of their customers and closely watch who registers on their website. They manually approve profiles, thus not allowing spammers to have access to their clients.

SoZila.com free online dating has a bright future ahead

Wednesday, July 9, 2008

Social Networks and Spam

According to a new report, over the past 12 months more than four-fifths of social networking site users said that they had received unwanted friend requests, messages, or posts on their social or professional network profile. While friend requests on their own seem innocuous enough, they are often just the first step towards whatever the spammers' intended malicious activity is, be it redirects to phishing or malware sites or even just unsolicited advertisements.

The Spam Problem

Out of those surveyed, two-thirds of respondents said they would consider switching social networks if the spam level became too frequent. The companies running the social networks need to take note of that - if anything, spam messages were one of the contributing factors in many people's decision to leave MySpace for Facebook. The amount of friend requests from people who weren't real got to be out-of-hand on MySpace - turning down those bots' requests became almost a daily chore.
But don't think that just because you've left MySpace behind that you're going to avoid the spam - it will just follow you to wherever you are. The report notes that over the past 12 months, respondents received an average of 64 unwanted friend requests, invites, or postings.





Image Courtesy of Facebook Talk

In fact, the security issues are the top reason why boomers (ages 40+) aren't joining social networks. Out of those surveyed who did not use social networks, the number one reason (at 47%) involves privacy and concerns about having personal information accessible on the web. While those issues may speak more to the boomers' mindset regarding how open you should be on the web with your personal information, the social network spam problem does nothing to help alleviate these non-participants' concerns, either.

Spam on Twitter and FriendFeed

We recently uncovered what had appeared to be some of the first FriendFeed spam, but was actually a malfunctioning API client. But as both FriendFeed and Twitter and other, newer social sites continue to rank higher and higher in search results, the spam problem on those networks is only going to increase. Take for example, this search for the terms "tumblr full text rss" - the number one result is a link to the RWW Twitter profile thanks to a tweet that also contained those same terms. Do a search for "Scoble" and you'll find Robert Scoble's Twitter and FriendFeed profiles on the first page of results. And Alex has been seeing this Twitter spam since last night:



With strong SEO like this, it's only a matter of time before we're fighting off spammers in this newer social networks, too.
And don't think it will always be easy to identify the spammers from rest either - those spammers can be crafty. Stop Twitter Spam notes that spammers are now scraping the public timeline to steal other people's tweets and re-purpose them as their own. Case in point is Twitter spammer jennyvalley (account no longer exists), whose profile had tweets from several different languages! Of course, that may be a clue that she's not legit, but it won't be too long until spammers refine this process to make the bot seem more like a real person.


Image Courtesy of Stop Twitter Spam
Twitter has taken the time to clean up the spammers recently and so far, FriendFeed seems to be flying under the radar (unless you count this), but it's only a matter of time before the spammers sign up there, too - especially once they realize the potential "Google juice" to be had.
To keep from getting spammed on your social sites, you must take precautions when on social networks - be careful who you friend and don't reveal info that could be used to steal your identity. If you're sending friend requests out for approval to people you don't actually know - like on Facebook, for example - a quick note explaining who you are and why you want to friend them can be helpful to identify you as "safe to friend," too.

Monday, July 7, 2008

How to protect yourself from a new kind of online scam

We've recently discovered a new kind of online scam. It's elegant in its simplicity. It's hard to combat, because all it steals is reputation and this reputation may be yours. What's worse, it preys on ordinary people who, unlike many enterprises, may not have enough of a web presence to easily fight back.

JLove, billed as Jewish dating service, is simply generating a huge number of pages falsely claiming that various people are members of its service. It's basically a new version of an old technique. The classical form of the technique is to generate a website on every conceivable travel destination, using free content from somewhere, but adding no value. JLove goes further, by generating pages for many combinations of more or less Jewish first names and last names, which then falsely claim the person with that name is a member of their service. More details of JLove's shenanigans are here, including examples of real-life harm or great annoyance.

A variety of people have asked about how to combat this kind of scam, and there's really only one good answer: Everybody should have their own web presence, visible to the search engines. Of course, that's easier said than done, but my two-part (so far) advice about search engine optimization for enterprises has a lot of applicability to people as well. For starters, if you don't already have a personal web page (with your name in the URL), get one. Then get a few friends (or your employer) to link to it. And so on.

In the specific case of JLove, you can also help by linking to the blog post cited above, which calls JLove out. But for the more general case -- well, it boils down to this. The Internet WILL tell stories about you, true or otherwise. Make sure your own version is out there too.

We still feel that the future of dating is a Free Online Dating Service such as SoZila.com, where every newly created profile is manually approved by the owner.

Thursday, July 3, 2008

Is IamFreeTonight.com a fake service?!

I am starting to believe that most dating sites that proclaim themselves 'FREE' are more or less 'FAKES'. Having thousands of users ONLINE at any moment, just seems impossible.

IamFreeTonight is another proof of my theory. I decided to look at it in more detail and right off the bat on the very first page, something caught my eye. I saw an ad of two college girls from Duke University, looking for double dating. Well good enough, sounds good to me! Then I scrolled down and I see a description of how the service works. There is a bigger photo, with the same two girls in it :)

Attached is the photo I am talking about. I wonder if I get on the site and make myself available for tonight, how many people from Nigeria will respond :)