Source: Netforbeginners.about.com

Whether you’re a seasoned Internet veteran or a newbie learner, you know how slow it can be to search the Web. You go to Google.com or Vivisimo.com, you type in keyword phrases, and then you skim through hundreds of hits, hoping for something that interests you. By the time you’re done, you’ve spent 45 minutes to find perhaps two or three useful web sites.

There is a much smarter and faster way to search the Web. By joining a special network of Web users, you can cut your searching time in half. It’s called StumbleUpon.com, and it’s based on people sharing their destination recommendations electronically.

StumbleUpon is not a search engine driven by keywords, but rather a “browsing engine” driven by StumbleUpon is based on a central database of thousands of users’ personal suggestions on what they consider to be quality websites. Member suggestions are categorized by topic of interest, and are updated daily to reflect thousands of members’ votes.

The more that members (”stumblers”) like a particular website, the more highly that website is ranked. As a member of StumbleUpon, you get access to thousands of hours of other people’s search experiences, and can contribute your own suggestions.

Membership is free, and the database is accessed through a no-spyware toolbar you add to your Firefox or IE browser. You take 2 minutes to join the free network, and then you tell it what your personal interests are: culture, politics, trance music, pets, motorcycles, scrapbooking, health and wellness…hundreds of areas of interests.

Spread the word: related/bookmark it/readit

Read the rest of this entry »

By : Daniel Moro | Source : http://www.articlesbase.com

What Exactly is a Squeeze Page?
List building is an important process for every online business, and squeeze pages are one of the best tools to build your mailing list.

A squeeze page is a web page designed to do one thing and one thing only: to obtain or gently “squeeze” your visitors’ information so that you have their permission to email them with your newsletter or other information.

Most squeeze pages will convert at 30 to 50% but a really good squeeze page might convert visitors at 60% or even higher. The conversion rate will depend not only upon the design of the page but also upon the quality of the traffic coming to the page.

Here are the key components of a good squeeze page.

An Attention Grabbing Headline
Immediately under your web site title or logo you need a bold headline that grabs your visitors’ attention. It’s best to come up with two or three good headlines and then test each to see which has the highest conversion rate.

Your heading or subheading should also promise to deliver something valuable that your visitors want or need. One of the statements I have used is “Learn the Secrets of Driving Traffic To Your Web Site Like Crazy!” If your visitors believe that you will deliver what you promised, and it is something they want, then they will sign up. It’s as simple as that.

Offer a Gift
Offering a free gift such as a free report or free e-book is one of the most powerful techniques to entice people to give you their name and email. If you don’t have an e-book to give away, write one. It doesn’t need to be 100 pages. Many e-books given away like this are just 16-25 pages. Try it and watch your conversions soar.

Spread the word: related/bookmark it/readit
Read the rest of this entry »

By : Michael Arrington | Source : Techcrunch.com

Rich Skrenta, who created the first computer virus (Elk Cloner), co-founded the Open Directory Project, and co-founded online news site Topix, may have bitten off the biggest challenge of his career - taking on Google. In search.

Skrenta left Topix last June. He started his new company, Blekko, almost immediately, along with five others from the Topix core team. They raised $2 million in seed funding in September from Baseline Ventures, two early Googlers (David DesJardins and Jeremy Wenokur), and the founding team.

The company is still deep in stealth and, apparently, working out of a garage in true startup style. The Blekko website, which today has nothing on it except a picture of a puppet created by Skrenta’s daughter, isn’t even close to having a landing page up, let alone the final product. But eventually Skrenta says they’ll launch a full scale search engine to compete with the big guys.

Skrenta, who’s very media savvy, won’t say much about how he’s going to tackle search (he’s not a fan of PageRank though:“PageRank wrecked the web. Google is the cause of all of this. and Google is going down with it.”). He says they are looking at improvements on the back end (indexing and query serving) as well as the user search experience itself.

Beyond that, he says we have to wait. And it might be a long wait at that. The company, Skrenta says, may not have a public prototype available until 2009.

Spread the word: related/bookmark it/readit

Read the rest of this entry »