One of the most important strategies for a successful writing career is to make sure you have the right tools. The first thing you need is a relatively fast computer loaded with virus and spyware protection software. To elaborate, I recommend obtaining the free version of AVG for virus protection and Spybot Search and Destroy for spyware protection. Both programs are free.

The next thing you need is a good connection to the Internet. I recommend broadband, wireless or using an aircard. In my opinion, dialup is not good enough. I also recommend good protection against hacking. Some say that the Windows software is good enough, though I like to err on the side of caution.

I recommend a LAN based firewall. In my opinion, the Linksys D-Link router is a good choice. For wireless security, the I recommend either Linksys or the Apple Airport Express Base Station. If you travel with your laptop, I recommend using the Asus WL-330gE Wireless Access Point, which is a portable router.

For communications, I recommend a cell phone and Skype on the Internet. Some people prefer a land-based line and this is fine, though if you travel a lot, I’ve had the best results with Skype. Another option is magicJack, but I’ve found that it drains too much power on a laptop, especially if you use wireless. magicJack is better for a hard wire connection.

For recording conversations, I recommend the Pamela application, which works fairly well. After the fact, if you want to edit the audio, get yourself a copy of Audacity. It’s a free application and works quite well.

For working with text, the two main options are MS Word and Open Office. When working with Web documents, I recommend writing your content in Textpad or Notepad. Do Not Use Microsoft Word for HTML. MS Word has a tendency to insert undesirable characters into your message. This is especially noticeable with quotation marks and apostrophes. As an alternative, compose your text in ASCII format using Notepad on the PC or similar on the Mac.

Another option is to use a third party program like Textpad. This is especially applicable if you intend to send in HTML submissions for posting on the web. NEVER, ever, use MS Word for this purpose. MS Word creates a huge amount of code when it makes a conversion to HTML and it will create a nightmare for the editor on the other end.

Instead, use a program like Dreamweaver, which will give you pure HTML output. The down side of Dreamweaver is the cost, so if you want a no-frills HTML editor, I recommend NoteTab, which offers several options: A text editor, a replacement for Notepad and an HTML editor.

For illustrations, I recommend CorelDRAW or Illustrator. Both will do the job, though Illustrator is more expensive. For image editing, you have several choices: Photoshop on the high-end, then PHOTO-PAINT, Paintshop Photo Pro and GIMP. For my business, I use Photoshop and PHOTO-PAINT. For screen shots, I highly recommend Snagit, by Techsmith. This is a great program and will allow you to save your screen shots in a variety of formats.

Photography is another consideration. If you use images in your articles, there are several options. One is stock photography, which could be great time saver. Another option is to shoot the images yourself. If you choose this path, I recommend buying an all-purpose point and shoot camera like the Canon G11, partly because it offers Camera RAW, which allows for extensive image manipulation. The one down side of point and shoot cameras is their poor performance in low light conditions. If low light performance is important to you take a look at the Canon Rebel.

By Nathan Segal

This is one of the most important aspects of writing for magazines and journals because it will have a bearing on which publication you write for and when. There are 3 main ways that magazines pay for articles. They are: By word, by page or by assignment.

If you write for a magazine that pays by the word (say 25 cents/word) and you write an article which is 1000 words in length, you just earned $250.00. If you write for a magazine that pays by the page (say $50.00/page) and you write 4 pages, you just earned $200.00. Finally, there are magazines that pay a flat rate, say $500.00/article (and they will tell you how many words they want in the article).

The second thing you need to know is when the magazine will pay you. Like the section above, there are 3 main methods: On submission, on acceptance and on publication. The first method is my favorite, partly because you can submit your invoice along with your article.

The second method indicates that while the publication has received your submission, they still have to review it, edit it, make corrections, ask for clarification from you, etc., before they accept it. Once they do, you’ll get paid.

The third method, my least favorite, is on publication. This is when the magazine has a spot in their editorial calendar for your article and will publish it at that time. If you work for publications that do this, be prepared for a long wait.

One magazine I worked for made me wait 9 months and they still hadn’t published my work. I finally pushed them to pay me, otherwise who only knows how long it would have been before they actually did so. I never wrote for them again.

Note: It’s important to understand that even when a magazine accepts your work, you probably won’t get paid right away. Many magazines have a 30 day payment policy. Some have a 60, 90 or even a 120 day payment policy in place. If this creates havoc with your cash flow, don’t write for these publications.

Internet video marketing is becoming widespread, now that video sharing and live-casting tools are becoming vital aspects of the Internet age.

While most videos are highly dependent on web sites such as Youtube, Vimeo, Livestream or Justin.tv, viral videos can deliver your promotional messages to huge audiences worldwide.

Despite its potential, this marketing technique was underrated because not all audiences were able to watch videos. As wireless solutions and gadgets created more video viewing possibilities, Internet video marketing became dominant. It is an enticing tool for two reasons – it generates a large amount of free traffic and it elevates businesses to the top of the search engines.

This method of advertising is one of the best ways to publicize products and services. It creates less competition than traditional strategies. An added advantage is if your video goes viral, especially if social media and community submissions are used. These tactics rely on content, message, and attractiveness to the market. Without these things, the marketing technique could fail.

To minimize failure, study the masters. A good video is one that has the potential to go viral. If it does, it will make a huge difference to your marketing campaign and your profits.

Watch an expert video by Neil Russell; The Net Cash King on Effective Video Marketing.

In this tutorial you’ll learn how to find Joint Venture partners. There are several ways that you can do this. One way is to use keywords using the Google Keyword Tool and do a targeted search.

A second way is to use a program called Copernic, a program that will allow you to do highly targeted searching. The program comes in 3 versions: Free, Professional and Corporate. For our purposes, the free version will do the trick. In this article, we’ll look at the topic: Pie To get started, click on Search: New (or CTRL+N).

In the dialog box, you have several options for searching, which are: All the words, any of the words or the exact phrase. Directly below that is a popup which governs categories. As you can see, there are many options. When I do a search I like to cover the broadest possible area, so I set this to: The Web.

The primary keyword for my niche, which is: pie baking. Watch how that brings up quite a few web sites. Notice on the right that each site is ranked, with the most relevant sites appearing at the top of the search. Hovering your mouse over one of these listings gives you more information on the site. If you want to visit the site, hover your mouse over the URL, right-click on it and in the pop-up window that appears, scroll to: Open in New Window: Web Document. In my case, this opens the web page in Internet Explorer.

Before we go further, you’ll need to visit Alexa.com Alexa is a site that gives you important ranking information about sites, including backlink information and more. Before you can take advantage of this information, you need to install the Alexa toolbar. For best results, I recommend that you install in on Internet Explorer. I’ve had issues with the toolbar not working properly with Firefox.

Once you have the toolbar installed, we’ll head back to Copernic. At this point, we’re going to go deeper with our search. It’s fine to search for the primiary key phrase, but that’s not going to be enough to find joint venture partners. Instead, what you’re looking for are sites where they’re getting a lot of traffic. To find that, you’ll need to add more keywords to your primary search. Some good ones to use are: ezines, blogs and newsletters.

To save time I’ve already created a search using pie baking blogs.

Looking at the results, I liked what I saw with the Allrecipes listing and I decided to check it out on Alexa.

Now that we have the site up in Alexa, I want you to look at this number in the box at the top of the browser. This is the ranking given to the site by Alexa. The smaller the number, the better the ranking. To put things in perspective, if the site ranks at 3 million, you wouldn’t want to work with them as a JV partner because they’re probably somewhere near the back of the search engine rankings. Instead, to find a good JV partner look at rankings of 300,000 or less.

Now that you see this number in Alexa, we need to find out more information about the site, so we’ll click on the number.
This takes us to Alexa, which displays important information about the site. Among other things, you see the world traffic rank and the country rank.

Again this is one of the factors in determining whether this site would be a good match for your JV efforts. Other things to look at are the number of backlinks to the site. As you scroll down the list, you get information about those sites. Some of them might turn out to be good JV partners.

Next, have a look at search analytics and scroll down the page. The first thing you’ll see are the top queries from search traffic. As you go down further, you’ll see High Impact Search Queries. This is useful, not just for the keywords, but it gives you more info about what’s popular on the site, so when it comes time to write your JV intro letter, you’ll have lots of information.

The last thing is to make sure you have all the contact info for this site for writing your queries later. When saving this information, I recommend using one of two methods. The first is if you have Acrobat installed on your computer. Use the Print to PDF file option and save all these pages as PDF’s in a folder. The second option is to use an image capturing program such as SnagIt, to capture the information, so you can refer to it at a later date.

This is all information you’ll need for your joint ventures. More is explained in the chapter on joint ventures, as well as what you need to know when sending out JV requests.

If you are involved in Internet marketing, the topic of backlinks comes up often. If you’re new to Internet marketing, however, you may not grasp what they are and how you get them.

If you plan to use paid traffic to bring visitors to your site, backlinks aren’t likely to be on your radar screen. If you want to get organic traffic, that is, traffic from searches in the search engines, backlinks are critical because they help your site to rank well in Google. The higher you rank in Google, the more people will click through to your website and the more profitable your business will be.

What is a backlink? A backlink is a clickable link on an Internet site that links back to one of your websites. This link is hyperlinked, and can be a URl, an anchored word or phrase or a hyperlinked image.

Unlike Bing and Yahoo which are driven by factors on your site (though together they hold less than 25% of the search engine market), Google uses backlinks (on other sites) to figure out if your new site on, say, Siamese fighting fish, should rank highly in their search engine results or not.

Anchor text is an important factor when it comes to getting good backlinks. If you want to rank for “blue rabbit”, you want the backlink to include the anchor text “blue rabbit.” In addition, the more links you can get from authority sites the better, since Google counts these “votes” more when the incoming links are from more authority sites.

Getting backlinks doesn’t have to be rocket science. While it’s true that the preferred method was to simply ask webmasters for links, in today’s market, that’s not a viable option for most websites.

If you want serious numbers of backlinks, asking webmasters for links just won’t cut it. If you want to rank for keywords, you need something that works to help you get hundreds and thousands of backlinks to your site so you can rank for the kinds of keywords that you want to rank for.

Other important factors when it comes to the value of backlinks include things such as whether the link has a nofollow tag, the Google PageRank of the site that is giving you the link, whether the link is contextual or on its own and a host of other factors.

If you want to learn how to get the most out of your backlink building, make sure to check out the backlinks forum for key strategies and link building tactics.

In this tutorial you’ll learn how to find those great writing jobs using keyword research. If you’re not familiar with the ways that you can search online, here are some simple, yet important things to consider. There are 3 main keyword searching options to find great writing jobs online. These are: Broad Match, Phrase Match and Exact Match.

When you type keyword phrases into Google, you’ll notice that the search engine will give you other possibilities. Make note of these since they could guide you to even more targeted searches.

First off, we’ll look at Broad Match keywords: This keyword combination uses all the words in the search. For example, let’s say you search for the keyword: Technical writing. This brings up many millions results, which is huge. This is because the search is for both technical and writing.

If you look at the searches related to technical writing at the bottom of the page, you find a wide variety of keyword phrases. If none of these are what you want, your search is too broad and you’ll need to narrow it down.

The next keyword combination we’ll look at is Phrase Match. This keyword combination gives you search results that match the exact phrase. Here’s how it works. You add quotation marks around your keyword, like this: “keyword” In this case, the result comes back with millions of results, but less than before. That’s still quite a bit, but as you can see, we’re narrowing things down.

The 3rd option is Exact Match: This keyword combination is for searches that are for that phrase only and as written, without any other words in the search. Here’s how you would use it in a search: [technical writing] In this particular case, we received roughly 24 million results, which is not what we wanted. Sometimes this option gives results which are the exact opposite of what you would expect, as in this case.

Still, we can go even deeper, with Long Tail Keywords: This is where we really drill down and get specific. We’ll refine this search further by doing a broad match search with the keyword: technical writing jobs telecommuting. This returns roughly 80,000 or so results.

If we want to narrow that down even further, we can do a phrase match search by adding quotation marks. This gives us only a few results. Be aware that this could be going too far, but I wanted to show you just how targeted you can get with your searches.

Are you working on an article for the next newsletter? Do you have a list of questions from a client that you’re chasing down? Are you researching and preparing for an upcoming presentation?

I’m know I’m asking a lot of questions. Still, if you work on commission, answering these questions can be a real time-saver. Here’s one more: How can your efforts on one project be used to develop additional marketing tools?

All of the time and research you put in to developing a presentation can easily be broken up into a series of blog articles or newsletter articles. As an example, if you’re creating answers to a serious of questions, you can reuse that content for a variety of purposes.

Do you see what I’m getting at? Reusing and finding additional marketing vehicles for the content means reaching a larger audience.

Reusing content is an aspect of good marketing. You should approach every marketing project thinking about how you might rework it to serve as content for another marketing tool. Not only will it make the most of your initial research time, it will serve to multiply the number of marketing pieces in your content library.

Here’s your challenge: Experiment a little. Take a look at your past articles, presentations and your reading list to see what could possibly serve as content for another marketing tool. The more you recycle the better your return on investment.

Looking to find the best information on marketing strategy, then visit www.yoursite.com to find the best advice on marketing.

Customer satisfaction is a reflection of how we feel about goods or services, so when this report ranked the most popular social networking site at the bottom of the list, it seemed a bit of a surprise.

According to the Foresee Annual E business Report, the respondents gave answers including privacy and security concerns, the technology that controls the news feeds, advertising, the constant and unpredictable interface changes, spam, navigation issues, annoying applications with constant notifications, and functionality, to name a few. There are plenty of complaints about Facebook.

Still, according to July 2010 Hitwise data, Facebook is the number one web site in the country, with 9% of all web site visits (Google has 7.4% and Yahoo! 3.8%) and 55% of all social media visits. Facebook’s market dominance in the U.S. and around the world is indisputable. How can it be so popular if people dislike it so much?

There are a few reasons Facebook continues to have market success despite abysmally low customer
satisfaction:

* Facebook has its own version of a monopoly. Although there are literally hundreds of social networking
sites available around the world, Facebook has surged from 200 million global users 15
months ago to more than 500 million today, according to the New York Times. There really is no
other choice for people wanting to connect with friends, family, and colleagues regardless of interest,
age, geographic location, gender, etc.

* Research shows that customer satisfaction with social media sites is somewhat age-related. Older people are less satisfied with Facebook than are younger people, who are less impacted by the privacy concerns and changes to the interface.

Young people helped to make Facebook successful, and they like it a little better. However, the fastest-growing Facebook segments are all older adults, so higher satisfaction among young people won’t carry the company far.

* Customers are willing to suffer through a poor experience in return for the benefits Facebook provides.
This is a rare scenario in the American economy: usually customer satisfaction is intertwined with market success. The few exceptions to this rule (airlines, cable companies, and fast food) are
operating in a sphere where there are no true standards, so the bar is low.

If MySpace stages a comeback, or should any other competitor to Facebook deliver a truly superior customer experience, Facebook should have cause for concern. Right now, only Wikipedia and YouTube surpass Facebook in terms of customer satisfaction, and they’re not in direct competition. One aspect of Facebook loyalty not often discussed is that it acts as a storehouse for many people’s pictures and videos.

As for businesses, it acts as a platform to connect with a wide audience which is why social media is an important marketing tool. Do check out our ‘Amazing Stats On Social Media’ blog. For example, there are more than 3.5 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts) shared each week on Facebook.

SysComm is an Internet Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, Social Media and SEO Company. We provide a complete service package including Internet marketing strategies, SEO services and search engine marketing. SysComm is also an SEO consultant.

Want to find out more about Social Media, syscomminternational.com for your Search Engine Marketing needs.

By Nathan Segal

In this article, we’re going to look at 4 fast methods of ways of starting your career as a freelance writer. These are: Write for Free, Write Book Reviews, Write Profiles and Look for Editing Jobs.

Writing for free is a great way of getting started and is a method I’ve used many times in the past. It might even lead to a job with that publication. Once you get a feeling for writing, and more importantly, working within the style guides of different magazines, you can move on from there.

When I began writing, I had many options. My decision was to specialize. I chose to stick with photography and computer graphics software. Both of these can be highly technical areas and if you write for these publications, you’ll be expected to do in-depth research. I started with reviews (which can be really time-consuming). Later on, I progressed to “how-to” articles, which were much easier (and enjoyable) to write.

The 2nd method is to write book reviews. This is an easy way of getting your writing career going and will give you referral material for other jobs. When you’re in the early phases of writing, getting credibility is very important. This will increase your value in the eyes of editors. When writing a review, create a strong opening paragraph. When writing the review, let the reader know what the book is about without giving away the story.

The 3rd method is to write profiles. This is one of my favorite forms of writing and is a great writers market. You get to interview a person and tell their story. It’s also an easy way of writing, if you do it correctly. I had one writing gig (Streaming Media World) and the vast majority of my work was interviewing people. Over time, I became quite good at it and could create articles quickly. Most of the time I recorded telephone interviews,which I’d transcribe and edit later. If I had enough lead time, I’d do an email interview, which made life easier.

I’ve saved the best for last. The 4th method is to look for editing jobs. If you have good writing skills, consider looking for work as an editor. Here are some compelling reasons why: The pay is better, the hours are generally better, you don’t have to write everything from scratch and you get to learn a new skill and improve your writing.

Starting your career as a freelance writer? These are 4 great writers markets to enter.