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With a hard-hitting credit crunch beginning to take its toll truth about enzyte on the masses, and rising fuel and food costs already causing distress, more and more people are turning to the web in order to cut costs and to make use of the valuable financial tools that exist online. We hope this list comes in handy, and let us know if you feel there are anymore that deserve a place below! There’s an always increasing number of tools and websites devoted to helping you manage your money. Each of these will be unique, but many have similar functions for budgeting and tracking expenses, and some will integrate with your bank accounts. The list includes both free and paid tools: Online savings accounts offer much higher interest rates than you can get from traditional bank savings accounts, and they can be pretty convenient too. Of course, these banks will not be available to all parts of the world. The list is separated by the US and UK. Most bloggers would love to get more traffic with social media, regardless of how much they’re getting now. Unfortunately, a relatively small percentage of bloggers ever see significant results. If you’re looking to get more out of social media it’s important to know what’s holding you back so that you can fix it. When most bloggers start using social media they wind up submitting their own posts to Digg and maybe some other social media sites, and they get very few votes. At this point, it’s typical to wonder how others can get hundred or even thousands of votes while your submissions barely get any. One of the keys to being noticed on social media sites is to build a network. Digg is notorious for favoring users that have a huge number of friends (although changes to the algorithm have improved this somewhat). A strong network can help you with just about any aspect of blogging, and social media marketing is no different. There are a few specific ways that your network can help you to get some exposure through social media. First, members of your network are more likely than others to vote for your posts. I’m a frequent user of social media, and I’ll be the first to admit that sometimes my voting decisions are influenced by my relationships with other bloggers. I think it’s only human nature to want our friends to do well, so building a strong network will lead others to look for opportunities to vote for your posts. Second, many social media sites include a feature for sharing a link with a friend. StumbleUpon’s share feature can be used directly from the toolbar, and Digg’s shout system is also used extensively by many Diggers. The more friends you have, and the better relationships you have with these friends, the more opportunities you will have to request a vote when you need it most. Also, many bloggers send requests to friends via email or IM. Third, your network will impact the overall readership of your blog. Those who are very well-connected and active networkers tend to have large, responsive audiences. These audiences will be more likely to vote for your submissions without any prompting. On many blogs you’ll see buttons (such as the “Digg This” button) or links to make it easier for readers to vote. If you’ve been struggling to gain any momentum with social media, take a look at your networking habits. Have you been actively getting to know other bloggers and social media users (this involves more than simply adding someone as a friend at Digg or StumbleUpon)? Social Media Marketing is like any other type of marketing, it requires strategy and execution. If your current plan only involves submitting your posts and hoping that they get a bunch of votes, that’s not much of a plan. Your social media plan should be defined by what you want to accomplish. The most obvious benefit of social media marketing is traffic, but the traffic means very little if it doesn’t convert into something. Otherwise, you’ll be left with some impressive stats for a few days, but nothing of real value to show for it. Do you want to use social media to gain subscribers (difficult, but possible)? Do you want to build links? Do you want to brand yourself or your blog through social media? Whatever your goals are, it’s important to understand what is most important to you so you can develop a plan to make it happen. Your plan should also include the type of content that you’re going to promote through social media. Are you going to use informational posts, resource lists, controversy, humor, news? Find the type of content that will best help you to meet your goals. The specific social media sites that you’ll be targeting should also be a part of your plan. There are hundreds or thousands of different social media sites, and it’s just not possible to effectively target more than a few. To have the best results you should be an active user at the sites that you’re targeting so you can get to know the users and what types of content work well. Then you can cater your content to that specific audience. [Read more →] Sometimes, blogging software just isn’t enough and you have to transition to a full blown content management system, where you can easily run polls, guest books, photo albums, forums, and more, but the change can be difficult if you don’t have the technical knowledge on installing and configuring complex applications like Drupal. Those that enjoyed the hosted environment of WordPress.com might enjoy a new hosted service called UcoZ. Ucoz provides its users with an almost Drupal or PHP-Nuke (if you can remember back to when that was popular) like content management system that supports a variety of features out of the box that go beyond just blogging. There were two features that really excited me about UcoZ, the first was that UcoZ includes unlimited disk space, something that most hosted services do not provide, and usually when they do, they don’t allow the uploading of multimedia files. UcoZ has a section dedicated to uploading your podcasts (mp3’s) and videos, as well as easily embedding YouTube videos and whatnot. When you first sign up, you don’t really have unlimited space, but like Gmail does, it has a counter, which starts at 200MB and grows from there over time. It is based on some formula mixed in with your sites traffic. The more traffic you get, the faster your space grows. The second feature that really drew me in was that UcoZ includes FTP access, something that no other hosted service like this has ever allowed from my experience. FTP access allows you to quickly, and easily upload huge blocks of content, images, videos, and the like to the service, making it easier to build out your content fast. Without this ability, most other hosted services are frustrating to use. While signing up, UcoZ allows you to select either a subdomain or use your own domain to host your site. I would recommend using your own domain if you have one as there is only one dot com available in their list. The good thing though is that there also dot org, dot net, dot co.uk and other extensions for those not willing to purchase a domain. The other great thing about all of these domains you can have a subdomain on is that they also support multiple languages, and so if you want to blog in German, Ukrainian, or Russian, you can easily switch the language of the site. Once you’ve signed up, you need to chose the theme you want to use, and you’ll have many options ranging from themes relating to online games to business, to personal, and everything in between, and once you’ve selected your theme, you aren’t stuck using it as is because there is a full customization tool that allows you to change the header images, content blocks, colours, CSS, and even the template code. You have full control over what you show the world, and it is a very nice feeling, though maybe more complex and involved than most users will ever need. For those of you always tweaking things, you’ll love the built-in backup tool which allows you to backup your current theme before making changes. This means you can come back to previous looks if, like me, you mess everything up. I love when companies are smart enough to save me from myself. |