By : Nidhi Gupta

Viral marketing is usually the exchange of free downloadable material in exchange for some type of personal information. Sometimes just an e-mail is required to receive certain downloads, or sometimes just the IP address of the computer that a user is connected to (which can usually be figured out even without a user knowing).

Most of the time viral marketing does very little harm. It is not the same kind of malicious practice of putting dangerous harmful viruses or spy ware onto a person’s computer to steal their identity. Most “innocent” practices of tracking are just to keep tabs on visitors who use products.

The concept of viral marketing is controversial because sometimes it could be construed as spam. However, senders of e-mails to people who have not knowing provided any personal information will usually give current recipients an option to decline receiving further e-mail.

Most honest website owners will also provide some type of terms of agreement for people read stating something to the affect of “By clicking on this link you are aware that we will have access to your personal information to send you a monthly newsletter.”

The overall practice of viral marketing is fairly controversial in nature. Some of the problems caused by viral marketers were addressed at least somewhat, however, with the passing of new Spam laws.

More action may be needed in the future if any new problems arise. Additionally, further action may be needed to protect people from malicious site owners who use web hosting tools to scam people.

How Viral Marketing is done?

Usually online viral marketing is done by the use of a simple viral marketing script. This script could be the download link to a piece of free software, video game, movie, music file, etc.

Two of the most commonly given away viral marketing promotional items that are downloaded from fun sites are smiley faces and screensavers. Usually along with these is a person is required to download something else, such as a search toolbar or other type of tool that contains cookies or other more innocent type of spy tools.

Why Viral Marketing Irritates People?

Even companies that do not harm a person’s computer can be annoying to some people. Certain companies will continue to send people more than one e-mail every single day, and it will flood their inboxes-even some of the largest free e-mail inboxes.

True, a person may have agreed to give away his or her e-mail. However, that person may not have necessarily agreed to receive more than one e-mail a week from a company, let along more than one a day.

To some people viral marketing is as annoying as the old days when people would be approached saying they will receive a free gift from a company in exchange for a home phone number, only to be bombarded once a week or more by that company to market products or services.

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By : Admin

The PE here is progressive enhancement, the better looking sibling of graceful degradation. Progressive enhancement and graceful degradation are common topics in design and accessibility circles, but these are just as important to SEO as well. These techniques are often used along with advanced technologies like JavaScript, Ajax and Flash, but are even applicable to basics like application of CSS.

Let’s start with some basics…using neither of these means that visitors or search engines may come to your Web site and see blank pages not a good presentation and akin to slamming the door in someone’s face.

Graceful degradation was a step to overcome this, where sites were designed for the latest browsers and technology, but were also made to degrade gracefully, hopefully delivering most of the content to the visitor, or at least informing the visitor that he or she may not be getting everything. This was meant to make for a nicer, friendlier Web experience. An overly simple example is the use of noscript tags for JavaScript functions to at least inform the visitor that JavaScript was necessary, rather than leaving the person clicking on something with no result or whatever affects that apparently wasn’t working.

Graceful degradation might be seen as being focused more on the developer than the end user. Progressive enhancement though is the opposite, developing for the lowest-common-denominator, and then progressively building on top of that. PE has delivery of content at the forefront, with presentation and the bells and whistles as added enhancements.

So why is PE so good for SEO? Well, simply put, search engines are rather limited in their abilities. Sure, they may have patents to their names, highly complex algorithms directing them, supported by multimillion-dollar data centers and the most advanced computing technology, all backed by Ph.D.s in various flavors and more engineers than us average folk could ever imagine, but their spiders are pretty much limited to following simple HTML links from page to page.

Without progressive enhancement, many sites add lots of great interactive functionality at the expense of cutting search engines off from the rich content on the pages.

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By : Nidhi Gupta

RSS feeds are a popular data format used for serving users with frequently updated content and they offer great opportunities to publishers who are looking for alternative systems to generate revenue from their original content.

With the growing popularity of RSS feed-based syndication, many Internet publishers became concerned that subscribers to their RSS feeds would not be exposed anymore to the advertising on their web pages, as some readers could now read all of their content inside their RSS reader. In this light, some decided to publish only a short part of their articles in their RSS feeds so that those interested would click through to their site to read the rest of the content.

While initially this approach has given good results to those using it, recently more and more online publishers have decided to provide the full content of their articles inside their RSS feed not to alienate those readers on the move or offline who were frustrated by their inability to read the full content of the articles without clicking through to the main site.

The revenue models offered by these RSS feed monetization services are different ones: they span from CPC, CPM to flat rate plans; additionally, publishers can choose between contextual text-based ads, banners and interstitial ads, which are often completely customizable.

In this mini-guide we have reviewed for you the most popular services that allow independent publishers that are interested in monetizing their content to generate an alternative revenue stream from their RSS feeds. While reviewing these services, I have identified the following traits as my points of reference:

• Type of ads: the typology of advertisement offered, whether contextual or random text links, banners, interstitial ads, etc.

• Every how many posts the ad is shown: the exact positioning of ads within the RSS feeds.

• Ability to select and approve the ads: the possibility for the publisher to choose which ads can be included and which cannot.

• Stats about ads performance: the availability of a control panel that allows the publisher to monitor the revenue and performance of ads within RSS feeds.

• Rate: the method of payment offered to the publisher, whether CPC (Cost per Click), CPM (Cost per Mille – which estimates the cost per 1000 views of the ad) or flat rate.

• Requirements: special requirements that the publisher needs to have in order to insert ads in her RSS feeds (which might correspond to a high authority, pagerank and number of RSS feeds subscribers)

Google AdSense for Feeds

AdSense for feeds is a program that enables publishers to place relevant ads in the feeds they syndicate. Google technology understands the nuances of language, and places ads that are closely matched (or “targeted”) to the content next to which they appear. If you are a current AdSense publisher and your feed has more than 100 active subscribers, you may qualify for participation in AdSense for feeds (which is still in beta).

Kanoodle BrightAds RSS

Kanoodle is a pay-per click network which includes hundreds of thematic ad categories from which you can freely choose. Through BrightAds RSS, Kanoodle’s content-targeted sponsored links will be inserted directly into site owners’ RSS feeds within posts or as individual posts, with relevancy of the ads assured through Kanoodle’s topic-based approach.

Pheedo FeedPowered

Pheedo’s FeedPowered advertising platform converts your RSS feeds into rich, dynamically updating advertising that engages your audience. Pheedo retrieves your RSS feed several times an hour and updates your FeedPowered advertisements with any newly published items. With Pheedo FeedPowered you can also monetize your syndicated video content.

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