However, if blogging isn’t really your cup of tea, perhaps Micro-blogging might just be.

“Micro-blogging” is the concept of sending short messages to a broad audience. While regular blogging generally takes time, experience, and dedication, microblogging can spread your brand faster and open up access to people and information that might not be accessible by conventional means.

While micro-blogging probably won’t generate you any stand-alone money, it can greatly affect your offline business.

Obtaining benefits from micro-blogging is not simply about the following, though. It is about who follows you, and what kind of information you bring to the table.

Those micro-blogging about what they have for lunch will probably gain less authority off the bat than those who give out the occasional business tip or answer questions from other users.

Learning to balance your giving out information with the taking of information is extremely important for creating an effective micro-blogging presence.

Following too many people can result in an overload, but following few and contributing randomly will hurt you as well. Just as with blogging and social media in general, you must learn to balance your workload.

Build Contacts

Micro-blogging services such as Twitter, Pownce, Plurk, Tumblelog put you in contact with thousands of users, many of whom specialize in a certain field. By leveraging the people you follow, you can generate leads to clients, contacts, partners, affiliates, and more. Following the right authorities will give you insight and information from the messages they send out themselves, and you can use the services to ask questions to a much wider audience.

Having a wide array of local contacts is a huge advantage for an offline business. Being able to communicate with other business owners or possible patrons in your area will allow you to promote your products and services via word-of-mouth, which is still the most powerful form of advertising.

Get Guidance and Information

In the right hands, micro-blogging can be a fantastic research tool, especially when it comes to looking for primary resources. Having experts on hand to give you guidance and console is a fantastic situation to be in when running an offline business. If you happen to be trying to look up legal information, following a lawyer and asking them for advice will give you an advantage over roaming the internet or your county city hall for help and customer service.

The best part about the micro-blogging services is that the feedback is near instant. Whereas emails can take hours and forums can even take weeks, micro-blogging sites take minutes to garner feedback from a variety of people on a variety of topics.

Whether you want to know what kind of features your existing customers enjoy, or what color you should paint your store, you can get upwards of one-hundred different opinions at the drop of a hat.

Sell Products and Services

With a great micro-blogging presence, you can create instant press releases for your products and services. Simply tweeting about your latest release will spur others into “retweeting” your information, and so on and so forth until you have hundreds of potential customers being referred to your business. Learning to use the power of the community to grow the launch of your business is ultimately how micro-blogging will effect your offline business from a profitable perspective.

Micro-blogging is extremely powerful and can be a great tool when growing your offline business. Whether you use it for product and service announcements or for finding new contacts and leads, learning to participate on micro-blogging sites is a skill that any great entrepreneur should develop.

Even Barrack Obama micro-blogged from his campaign trail using Twitter.

The post How Micro-Blogging Can Influence Your Offline Business appeared first on Young Entrepreneurs.

Below is a cutting edge, and not entirely moral trick to sneaking onto the most viewed and most popular pages of Youtube.

Step 1 – Create Your Video

You are not going to have success on a video site without a video, so grab a video camera, or your webcam and make your vid. Infact, ideally your video should be an advert for your site, so ensure that you have your website url in big writing.

WARNING: It is best to create a video without any sound. You will see why in step 3.

Step 2 – Upload Your Video

This can take around 15 minutes to upload. Be patient!

Step 3 – Put the video in an iFrame and insert into your website.

You will need a high traffic site for this to work best. What you need to do is put the video in an iFrame, but use zero by zero for its size. This will make it invisible. Then stick it into the footer of your site and each impression on your site will count as a view of the video, thus rocketing it up the Youtube rankings.

Step 4 – Test.

Check to make sure the video is invisible on your site, also check that the amount of views are increasing in Youtube.

Then just sit back and watch as your rankings rocket in Youtube.

Step 5 – Build rewards.

If your video gets a LOT of views, then it could win awards. This will help it rank in all the top 10 sections of Youtube, and this in turn will sky rocket the views even further.

This is a great way to get thousands of extra unique page views per day. This truly is one of the few ways of getting free traffic to your site.

The post How to sneak into the YouTube.com popular sections and get thousands of free visitors to your website appeared first on Young Entrepreneurs.

Digg.com is one of the most popular social media websites on the net. If you know what you are doing it can be a huge source of free traffic to your website or blog. Today we are going to cover everything you need to know about Digg and Digg marketing/exploitation.

How does Digg Work?

Digg allows users to submit content to the community, this community then judges the quality of that content.

They do this with votes, also known as “diggs”, the opposite is known as “burying”.

There are many rules and algorithms that determine how popular the content becomes, but it is mainly based on votes. The ultimate goal is for the content to reach the frontpage. This tends to drive huge bursts of web visitors to your website.

How Does Digg Benefit Webmasters?

Digg can give you a platform to the world. It can let you spread your message and tell your story. However, if your message is not worth listening to, you will not get heard.

As a webmaster or blogger, the main benefit of using Digg is to get huge promotion for free. Before Digg arrived, there was no way of getting worldwide coverage for free, this allows small site owners and bloggers to compete with the big boys.

My Digg Experiences

I have been on the Digg homepage many times. In one example I received over 247,000 unique visitors to my website in a period of 7 days.

This huge burst of website visitors was hugely beneficial to my site, and it got me hundreds of backlinks, which still helps my Google rankings to this day.

On average I find a Digg success brings 50,000 visits, and around 200 backlinks.

4 Steps to Getting on the Digg Homepage

All of your Digg success or failure is determined before you hit the “publish” button. So here are some areas you need to look into:

* A great headline – Your headline must be catchy and attractive. Digg users like sensational headlines, and ideally you want to build curiosity through your headline.

* A unique and interesting angle to the story or message – There are billions of webpages on the net, how can you make your story or content stand out from the crowd? Aim to make your content different. Find a new angle, and think outside the box. For example, there was a recent article entitled: Retirement lessons we can learn from Britney Spears.

* Keep It Simple! – You need to use the KISS test: (Keep It Simple Stupid). This means that your message or story should be easy for everyone to understand.

* Solid formatting of the content – Don’t use huge paragraphs and big blocks of text. You can make your content easy to read by using shorter paragraphs, bold text, bullet point lists and images.

What type of content does well on Digg?

1) Anything with a unique angle does well.

2) Novelty content is hugely popular. For example, there was a recent story about a kitten with two heads.

3) Geek content – Apple, iphone, Linux, Mac, web design, Google, etc… Digg users love this stuff, so give it to them!

4) Lists – 10 step guides, 101 reasons to, 35 marketing tips etc…

Summary

You now should have enough information to succeed with Digg.com, however, before you get started you should monitor the Digg site for a few weeks and get familiar with it.

Also, use the Digg search feature and type your keyword into it. Look at the stories from your industry and look at what works in your niche.

See you on the frontpage

The post An Extensive Look at Digg.com and Digg Marketing appeared first on Young Entrepreneurs.

In the first week i launched my Car Blog i received 15,000 visitors, i simply just stumbled every article i posted. So simple and can be a really good way to gain back links and brand awareness.

Social Sites: Digg, Stumbleupon, Del.icio.us, Reddit and Propeller.

2. Guest Blogging

Guest blogging can be a great way for unknown bloggers to get out there in the blogosphere, write a blog post for a related blog and link back to your website. This technique is great because your stealing your competitors readers, if they read your blog post and like it, they will visit your website. Usually people will just check your website, with out even reading the blog post because the owner of the blog has allowed you to blog post so you must be a knowledgeable person in your field.

3. Comment on Related Blog’s Posts

Reading and commenting blogs is a way of generating a big portion of your daily traffic, on some of my websites it accounts for as much as 15% of the traffic. If you respond to a blog post promptly after it is posted and give a valuable response, people will click to view your website.

4. Link Exchange

Exchange links with other related blogs, is very effective and highly recommended for people starting a blog.

5. BlogRush

Works in the same way as a link exchange, you add a Blogrush widget and it displays links to other related websites. The widget will display one of your latest blogs posts on some other related blog, for every impression your website gets, your link gets another impression on someone else’s website.

6. Technorati

Currently tracking 112.8 million blogs and over 250 million pieces of tagged social media, posts your latest blog posts in related sections, fans will be alerted when you post new posts also.

Visit Technorati

7. Entrecard

Also works in the same way as a link exchange but with a 125 x 125 image, you receive credits for displaying other websites image on your site and with those credits you can buy advertisements on other websites.

Visit Entrecard

8. Feedburner and RSS

Getting everyone to sign up to your RSS feed is a great to increase traffic, it will alert your sign up’s that you have added a new blog post and to check it out!

FeedBurner & Aweber

9. Search Engine Optimization

Optimizing your website is important, learn how to optimize your blog urls, headings, meta’s and titles.

My Guide on Search Engine Optimization

The post 9 Ways to Increase your Blogs Traffic for Free! appeared first on Young Entrepreneurs.

Pros

– Can bring 100,000’s visitors in just one day!

– Gets you quickly indexed by search engines, a hour after hitting homepage of digg the article was picked up on Google for a very competetive term!

– Back Links, you can pick up 100’s of links to your website.

– Will increase your website value, more visitors your website gets usualy means higher priced paid for a website.

– Capturing emails, although the conversion rate is low, you still can manage to pick up a few 100 email address’s.

Cons

– Digg users rarely click on adverts

– Stay on your website for a average of 7 seconds which means no comments, or posts.

– In many cases will crash your server because of the amount of visitors flooding into your website

– It isnt targed traffic, the visitors to your website may not be interested in it at all

– They are the kind of critiques that can only say bad things about something.

The post The Pros and Cons of the Digg Effect appeared first on Young Entrepreneurs.