One Last Hurrah For Picnik Photo Editor
Well, the awesomeness of Picnik is not dead, but I must admit that I kind of feel like google has crushed another great only service by goggling them up. The Picnik service, for those who are not familiar with it, was a very fast loading and easy to use online image editing tool that would allow you to re-size, crop and even perform some rather cool effects on pictures right from your web browser. I have been personally using this site ever since Google shipped me a CR 48 laptop last year and fell in love with its simplicity and ease of use on an all web laptop.
Google Swallows Another Cool Web App
For those that have been playing around with the new Google ChromeBooks you already know that they integrated the basic features from Picnik right into the OS. If you open an image from your file manager you will be able to choose the “edit” button at the bottom right to see what I am talking about. Other Google users will see the Picnik image editing features
Picnik Is Refunding All Existing Paying Members Money
Just a little more proof that Google has no need for more money, but a very nice gesture all the same. You will be getting a full refund from Picnik very soon if you are currently a paying customer. Even if you are on the last day of your 1 year subscription they say you will still receive a full refund just to say thanks (or I’m sorry) not really sure which..
The Good News – Free Premium For Everyone
So if you have paid for the premium service on the Picnik photo editing site or not, you are going to be able to to use the premium service for free until the site officially closes on the 19
of April 2012. This means you can start adding all those cool photo masks you wanted for free!
I am definitely sorry to see this site go, but we will still be able to access many of Picnik’s great features right inside of the photos section on Google+ so don’t worry its not gone for ever, just moving over to a new online home.
The integration into the photo sharing on Google+ is just one more of the reasons that I am starting to prefer this social network over the old blue one 
and I am sure that there are many more cool updates to come soon enough.
Put me in your Google Plus Circles
Here is my official Google+ profile : Nick Simpson Google+
And here are some great Google+ pages to add too..
AlienServ Web Hosting On Google+
Social Monkey – Free Social Bookmarking Tool
There are a lot of social bookmarking tools out there to help webmasters get more inbound links to their sites. However, most of the big name tools are expensive and need a lot of updates to continue working properly. The Social Monkey web site has an awesome bookmarking tool that makes adding bookmarks to new posts, web 2.0 sites and more a snap.
Do I Need This Social Bookmarking Tool?
For many marketers doing the small stuff like bookmarking their newest content can be one of the most time consuming tasks. This free tool will instantly give save you hours a week if you are a one man operation. Using this tool you can post to 25 bookmarking sites instantly, you don’t even have to create the accounts it does it for you! This is very similar to the tool that we reviewed in the Social Bookmarking Power post we did back in November of last year. This tool brings an added value of creating the accounts automatically, it contains better reports and they even have a one time upgrade that is a pretty good deal, considering most all similar services use a monthly subscription. The free version is completely functional you are simply limited to one submission per day and only to 25 social bookmarking sites. The upgrade boosts you to 3 per day and up to 100 social sites per pop.
Buy Me A Coffee On the Social Monkey!
If you enjoyed me sharing about this tool click the banner below and if you ever decide to upgrade, I’ll get free coffee out of the deal, or something like that.
Social Monkey Link Building Updates Coming Soon
I have just started using the Social Monkey tool, so I will report back later on this post after I have had more time to analyse its impact and usefulness.
For the time being go get your membership while its still free and post below with any comments or questions you may have on this awesome free web site tool!
To Success,
Nick Simpson
Social Bookmarking Power
We all know that social bookmarking is a powerful marketing tool. The fact is that many of the most popular social bookmarking sites carry a lot of weight in the google search algorithm because they are driven by real people. Most search engines value the popularity of links and the amount of bookmarks in their search results as part of the equation that their scripts cannot find without the help of human interaction. This makes linking to your business web sites a very important part of any marketing campaign. If you are not using social bookmarking as part of your seo and traffic generation process, you are most likely missing out on quite a bit of free traffic.
The new SocialAdr web site offers a whole new way to webmasters to take advantage of social bookmarking and implement it into any marketing campaign. Before you go to this site and start utilizing the powerful free bookmarking tools there, lets talk a little more about what social bookmarking options are out there for webmasters and internet marketers.
Social Bookmarking Tools
There are a quite a few different tools that have been devised to assist internet marketers in their quest to reach a massive amount of people with these social sites. Social bookmarking power is just a simple way of explaining the advantage of these sites and if you utilize the opportunity given to you by taking full advantage of these services, the results really are very powerful. Most of the tools that are on the market to help you get more social bookmarks faster, offer some value but also have some common failings that will not help you in your search engine optimization efforts.
Why They Don’t Work
The main problem with these applications is that they require you to submit from your own computer. This means that all of your submissions will show up from the same IP address. This is a tell tale sign of a spammer and does not really benefit you the way that most believe it does. Some bookmarking applications also do not allow you to spin your content so all of your bookmarks look identical no matter how many times and how many sites they are submitted, another black flag to most search engines.
Real Social Bookmarking Power
Instead of spending a lot of cash on an application that may be outdated soon, you could take advantage of this new totally free online resource that allows you to get more dynamically submitted results from different IP addresses. By using the power of a huge membership base you can get any site you are trying to focus traffic to bookmarked by different people from all over without spending a dime. This new way of automatically sharing bookmarks can be a great way to get some extra traffic to any site you want and also drive some healthy search engine results.
Here is the resource site I am talking about : SocialAdr
When you start using this powerful social bookmarking web app, you will be able to submit spun content so each time your link is bookmarked you will have a unique title and unique description. This site offers a very cool bookmarking service that is both unique and very beneficial. So give it a look and see for yourself, Social Bookmarking Power can be easier to obtain than you think!
Read MorePing From Skype or Gtalk!
If you read the Webmaster Business Plan blog, you have most likely heard me talk about ping.fm and how it is a great tool for webmasters and internet marketers to keep updated on many social networks easily and effectively. Well there is something that I just noticed, no it’s not new, I just finally looked at the bottom of the page and noticed it. So some may already be well aware of this feature and heck you may already be using it.
The feature I am talking about is of course the ability to update your ping.fm account and then in turn all of your social sites from your Skype or Gtalk clients. All you have to do to set this up is login to ping.fm and look at the bottom right. you will see links to these services. They give you an email address/account name to add as a contact. Then you will send one message to make your account verified to use the ping. fm api using your credentials and you are done.
Now any time you send a message to this new contact in your IM app of choice, all of the social networks that you have setup with ping.fm will be instantly updated for you! This is a great way to get the word out about a new blog post, specials you are running or anything for that matter.
You can see what I am talking about in the image below, just click the thumbnail to open the full size image.
Well if you are always chatting on gtalk and skype already, now you can blast social networks very easily too. Now that is what I call being productive.
This is just one more little trick you can add to your arsenal of social marketing tools. I hope you enjoy this new found feature as much as I did,
Nick Simpson
Read MoreLink Wheel SEO and Traffic
Are you using a link wheel to raise your traffic and boost your seo efforts?
If you are not, you should be, the link wheel concept seems to be one of the most solid techniques out there to start getting some relevant and very targeted traffic to any website. There are no expenses involved in building your own powerful link wheel, this is another reason seo experts love this method. It seems that this is one of the most talked about techniques in the seo world recently.
Yes, link wheels are a great way to get some free traffic an they can be implemented in a few hours time. You need to understand what a link wheel is first, then you can start using the power of a link wheel on your site or to drive traffic to an affiliate product. The concept is simple but setting up an effective link wheel may take a little more effort.
Are Link Wheels The Best Free Traffic and SEO Method?
Here on Webmaster Business Plan we discuss many different methods to generate traffic to your website and most of the time we try to keep all the information on the free side. The link wheel concept is no different, you can put together an seo friendly, traffic getting link wheel in no time at all and it will cost you nothing but a little effort. We don’t like to use terms like “best” anything, but this sure is one powerful force to be reckoned with as far as search engine optimization and traffic generation. So, for now this is at least our favorite methods to get some serious traffic, maybe not the best but damn close!
So What Is The Basic Concept Of A Link Wheel?
The basic concept of a link wheel is nothing more than creating multiple Web 2.0 properties on the Internet that inner link to each other and also link out to your main website or “money site” and in effect make a wheel of sites that link together. There are complete products that are nothing more than explaining this process with a couple pictures. We believe you can find better things to spend you money on, so we are going to explain it all here and give you a chance to compete with the big boys in any niche by grabbing some serious traffic with the power of your own link wheel.
If you can imaging you main site in the middle of a circle or wheel and sites like blogger, squidoo, hubpages and wetpaint surrounding your site this is how it starts. Now each of the sites surrounding yours will link in to your site and then link to the next free blog or web 2.0 site. So blogger would link to your main page and would also link out to your squidoo lens. Squidoo would link to your site and then link out to your hub on hubpages and so on.
Why Are Link Wheels Effective?
Well, there are a couple reasons for this. The main reason that these become very effective as far as google and other search engines are concerned is that the sites that you are going to setup for external linking are considered authority sites. You know, sites with high page rank and ones that are used as part of the search engines “social indexing”. Yes, these authority sites pack a real punch when it comes to search engine optimization and when you link multiple authority sites to each other and they are all linking out to your site, guess what, the search engines let little old you, share a little of that authority!
Keywords And Link Wheels
Understand that just because you have setup a few blogs really fast, you are not out of the woods yet. The keywords you focus on are just as important here as they are anywhere else. If you focus on some low competition keywords you will be sure to get ranked fast, but you can shoot a little higher on the competitive keyword target, because after all you do want some keyword phrases that will bring you some good traffic.
Once you have decided on your keyword phrase, you will wan to get your keywords in your blog addresses, lens urls and so on. Also you will want to make sure that you are using variations of your keyword phrase in all of your link’s anchor text. You may want to use a few long tail keyword phrases and then focus in on your main keyword set. This is a good way to keep the links mixed up and still give the focus to the correct term as you are developing your link wheel.
How Many Web 2.0 Sites Do I Need In My Link Wheel?
Ultimately this really is up to you. You can build a very small, simple link wheel with three to four external blogs, but you may want to continue to grow your link wheel through time. The more external web 2.0 sites you include in your link wheel will help re-inforce the link strength to your main site, but also can drive some healthy direct traffic to your sites as well. The power of the link wheel is 2 fold, keeping people in a loop of your own information until they end up on your main site and hopefully buy. Secondly, you are building an authority presence on the search engines, so you will benefit in raised google rankings for your keyword phrase. So, there is no reason to limit yourself to four sites in your link wheel, when you could have as many as you like.
A More Effective Link Wheel
If you really want to get the most out of your link wheel, you may have to make some more mini link wheels on the outside. This means nothing more that adding social bookmarking to each of your Web 2.0 sites or blogs you are using as your main feeder sites on the link wheel. Since you can only add one link to a social bookmarking post, you really cannot expand the theory of the link wheel using these sites. However, you can reinforce the strength of each of your new inbound link properties by giving each of them some exposure on these hugely popular and high page ranked sites like digg, stumbleupon, mixx, reddit and others.
So What Does A Link Wheel Look Like?
Well everybody has a different take on what an effective link wheel should look like. I have found many different ideas on the net, most of these are free on flicker, but I have saved these so long ago, I do not have the accurate credits to give here, so I do apologize for that.
Here are some of the best visual examples of link wheels out there. You can take any of them and put them to use in your online business instantly or you can study them all and choose one you want to follow.
Complex Link Wheel Diagram
Link Wheel Chart
Link Wheel Diagram
Link Wheel Explained
Link Wheel Type 3
Well that’s pretty much it for link wheel’s, let me know if you have any questions or comments in the comment section below and happy link wheeling to you!
Read MoreSocial Bookmarking Made Easy
If you are new to internet marketing and do not know what social bookmarking is no problem, we will cover that here to. If you are already using social bookmarking sites to get more traffic and higher exposure to your websites, then you are going to love what we have to share with you here today. I know that many people spend a lot of time doing the social bookmarking dance. Going to digg, stumble, reddit and then mixx and so on. Well, this can be effective as far as boosting a websites rankings in SERP and getting some much needed traffic, but is not so time effective.
Let us show you a better way to do this without chasing your tail all day long. However first, we want to make sure we are all on the same page, so let’s get started.
What Is Social Bookmarking?
Social bookmarking is nothing more than putting a link to your favorite websites on a site that is built to share your favorites. Much like you can add a bookmark or favorite to your web browser, you can add a similar listing on these “social bookmarking” sites. This is a great way to share your favorite websites and web destinations with your friends and family and is also a very “White Hat” way for webmasters and internet marketers to get a little google juice and some direct traffic to their websites.
What Makes Social Bookmarking So Powerful?
There are a couple reasons that using social bookmarking as an method of online marketing works. The first is the fact that your link will be put in front of hundreds of thousands of people on each site you submit it to. Just the other day I got 800 unique visits from a single submission to stumbleupon.com I don’t claim to get these results every time I submit a link, but I can guarantee that you will never get free results like this without using them.
Another big reason that internet marketers and webmasters cannot live without using these services is that the top search engines look to these social bookmarking sites as Authority Sites and they check them for what’s new and what’s popular. In most cases this translates into a boost in your web site’s ranking on the search engines.
So yes, you NEED to be using these sites if you are serious about online business, internet marketing and getting mad crazy traffic to your sites.
How Do I Add My Site To Social Bookmarking Sites?
This really varies from site to site. Most all of the popular social bookmarking sites will require you to create an account to post your website bookmarks, but none of these sites charge for membership so don’t worry, this is free. Once you have created an account and logged in, most sites have a similar setup to add a link, you choose a title, description and category for your web link. In some cases you can also choose a set of keywords and an image to associate with your bookmark as well.
Most of the more popular social bookmarking sites will allow you to get a plugin for either Firefox for Internet Explorer to make it quicker and easier to add your bookmarks to their site. These can be nice, but at the same time if you want to get your bookmark spread to many sites, it is not an effective way to do this by any means. If you add one or 2 of these bookmarking toolbars to your browser, that is more than most people want or would really use in the first place. Don’t worry, there is a better way and we are getting ready to get to that.
Effective Tools For Social Bookmarking
There are a couple of tools out there that can make your social bookmarking efforts more effective and much easier to keep up with. Some are free to use and some of the best ones are not, we will discuss both and let make an educated decision as to which one is right for you and your online business. Most people can see the benefit right away from the free tools and personally I decided to start using the payed tools pretty quick because I saw so much value and control that was not offered by the free ones.
Free Social Bookmarking Tools:
- Social Marker – This website offers a cool and free tool to allow you to send your bookmarks out to many sites all at once. This site can make a days worth of worth of work achievable in a few minutes!
- OnlyWire – This is another secret guru type tool most folks don’t tell you about until you have already bought a paid product from them. Now this is by far the best free one, but it has a huge downfall. The fact that they force you to put a link back to there site on the site you wan to bookmark really takes away from their appeal, to me at least.
- Social Marking – another site that attempts to make social bookmarking easier, I am not convinced. It has a very archaic setup and really does not seem to automate much, besides there sales funnel. Maybe a good resource for some but after using there free system, I think there plan is to get you to buy there service, so probably not the best out there, but it is free?
Top Paid Social Bookmarking Tools
- Bookmarking Demon – No, this is not a free tool, but it really is worth its weight in gold. Am I an affiliate, Yes! And the only reason I am is because this tool is so powerful that I cannot stress how much value it brings to the plate of any internet marketer or webmaster. If you are looking for a product that will automate, schedule and blast you social bookmarks to all the right places in just a few clicks you will blow you money on this one and come back and thank me for suggesting it. It Really Is This Good Folks!
I hope the information I have shared with you today proves to be a driving force in your online marketing efforts and gives you results like you have never seen before. I understand that there is a learning curve to everything and I will add some follow up posts to explain the ins and outs of social bookmarking to make sure you get the most out of your efforts. As always if you any questions about what I have outlined above feel free to contact me at any time and I would love to help answer any questions you may have.
You can also get more free information by joining our free Webmaster Business Plan Mailing Here.
To Success,
Nick Simpson
Read MoreFree Web Site Tools
