Press Release Thicket

That’s why I have scoured the net in search of valuable frëe content sources. I’m still not quite sure why I’m revealing my treasured piles of frëe content, but I certainly hope you enjoy them.

One of my favorite sources of content is public domain. This comprises the body of knowledge without a copyright. Anyone can use this material for commercial or non-commercial purposes. Below are some excellent sources for public domain material.

Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg is a library of 18,000 frëe ebooks whose copyright has expired. “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes”, “Pride and Prejudice”, “The Time Machine”, “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer”, and “The Canterbury Tales” have all passed into the public domain.

This means that you can put these on your website or even sell them in electronic or book format.

Explore a wealth of frëe content at Gutenberg.org.

Archive.org
At Archive.org you can find thöusands of works that are currently in the public domain. Want to put some cartoons on your web site? Take a look at the “Film Chest Vintage Cartoons”, which is full of classic animated cartoons from the 1930′s and 1940′s. The collection includes Popeye, Porky Pig, Bugs Bunny, Woody Woodpecker, The Three Stooges and Betty Boop. They also provide tons of other reproducable content including:

Brick Films: Commonly called “LEGO Movies”. Brick films are dedicated to the art of stop motion animation.

SabuCat Movie Trailers: The world’s largest collection of theatrical trailers.

Feature Films: A large number of classic feature films and shorts.

Universal Newsreels: Newsreels were shown before every feature film in the pre-tv era.

Computer Chronicles: Was the world’s most popular television program on personal technology during the height of the computer revolution.

Net Cafe: Television series covering the revolution during the height of the dot com boom.

All of these content sources are available for you to put on your website. You can find them at Archive.org.

Another popular public domain destination is Wikipedia.org. Here you will find over 1 million articles ranging from Greek mythology and Egyptian history to business, health, and technology.

Go to Wikipedia.org for a huge collection of articles you can reprint on your own website.

Creative Commons
Every creative work receives copyright protetion as soon as you put pen to paper, hit save, or press record. Because of this, no one can use that work without express permission from the author.

Creative Commons provides a new content license that allows you to share your work with others. If you want, you can even allow other people to expand upon your existing work. This allows for creative co-authorship.

The Creative Commons license has made piles of content available for use on your web site. Whether you are looking for audio, images, video, or text, you can find an abundance of reusable information within the creative commons.

To search for content to put on your own web site, go to CreativeCommons.org.

Government Web Sites
Works produced by the U.S. Federal government are not copyrighted. If you obtain a government document from the net, you are frëe to copy and distribute the document. I have found plenty of great content about finance, retirement, health, business, and traveling on government websites.

To search for content offered by the United States government, go to http://www.google.com/unclesam.

Article Directories
There are thöusands of writers on the internet and many of them would love for you to reprint their articles on your website. You can find thöusands of frëe web articles at the following article directories.

GoArticles.com
EzineArticles.com
ArticleCity.com

Interviews
I consider interviews to be one of the best sources of quality content for your site. Simply interview industry professionals and post the recording and transcript on your website. This allows you to create original content very quickly.

Don’t be afraid to ask for an interview, most experts would be delighted to speak with you. Remember, this is probably one of their greatest passions. If you ask them politely, your chances for landing an interview are good.

You can conduct an interview in person, over the telephone, or even through an e-mailed questionaire.

RSS Feeds
RSS is changing the way we consume information online. In addition, it has also provided thöusands of new content sources for the online publisher. RSS is simply a file format similar to XML that is used by publishers to make their content available to others in a format that can be easily understood by web publishing software and content aggregators.

By using RSS feeds, you can enhance the content on your site without ever writing a single word. And remember, on the Internet, content is King.

Want to put Amazon products on your site, updated news from the New York Times, financial advice from Motley Fool, or press releases from PRWeb?

This is all possible with RSS. No matter what type of information you are looking for, RSS can provide you with a constant stream of updated content for your web site.

To search for an RSS feed to enhance your own website, go to Syndic8.com. You can even mix and match a variety of rss feeds at RSSMix.com.

Facts & Statistics
Looking for facts or figures to put on your website? Take a look at some of the sources below. You’ll likely be surprised how many facts, figures, and definitions are available in the public domain.

The CIA World Factbook provides a number of statistics on countries, territories, and dependencies. Each profile tracks such demographics as population, ethnicity, and literacy rates, as well as political, geographical and economic data.

http://www.census.gov/: One of the largest repositories for data and statistics related to the U.S.

http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/Main_Page: One of the best encyclopedia’s ever written was published over 90 years ago. Search over 40,000 articles, all of which are available for publication on your own site.

http://www.bibliomania.com/2/3/257/frameset.html: A searchable interface of the 1913 public domain Webster’s dictionary.

Private Label Articles
Private label articles can be bought for pennies per article. This is possible because they are sold in bülk.

Many people criticize these articles and have declared them as worthless. However, I am here to tell you that private label articles can be very powerful when used appropriately.

Unless you have hours of frëe time every day, it is unlikely that you are going to be able to create the amount of quality content that your web site deserves. This is where private label content enters the picture.

You can use private label articles to:

• Add content to your web site.
• Acquire hundreds of inbound links by syndicating the articles to article directories.
• Create a frëe report for your visitors and other website publishers.
• Create an information-packed RSS feed.

However, the key to using private label articles effectively is to optimize them. Straight out of the box, these articles are near worthless. To give them value, you must add your own touch.

Inject your personality into the article. Combine multiple articles and do some additional touch-ups to ensure that the article is in top shape for your readers.

Once you are finished you can add your resource box and send it off to article directories and website publishers.

If you are looking for one of the top private label article providers, go to InfoGoRound.com.

Images
Quality images can make your content much more inviting and keep people at your site for longer periods of time. Fortunately, there is a site that offers thöusands of pictures completely frëe of charge. Find it at Stock.XCHNG.

Quotes
Quotes can give your website a special touch. Quotes provide interesting content in addition to an element of credibility. I often like to add related quotes to my web site simply to engage the reader’s attention.

To find some quotes for your website, go to QuoteLand.com.

In the end, you always want your content to be unique. Not for the search engines, but for your visitors. With quality content comes quality links. Once you have built up a reputation for delivering unique content, you will nevër have to worry about having an audience eager to visit your website.

About The Author
Kim Roach is a staff writer and editor for the SiteProNews and SEO-News newsletters. You can contact Kim at: kim @ seo-news.com

First, Google made a change in its Adsense program, letting advertisers choose between putting their ads in the search results or on the content pages of Adsense publishers. Search won out and started to receive the higher bids. Search results convert better than content ads.

Next, Google has cracked down on Junk Adsense sites, like they should. These sites consisted mainly of software generated re-hashed search engine links and were totally annoying to say the least. But Google also cracked down on ‘squeeze pages’ or ‘affilíate landing pages’ – a lucrative source of income for many online marketers, mainly because these pages helped marketers build an opt-ín list or use permission based email.

The results of these changes produced an Adsense meltdown for many online marketers.

Some Internet marketers are speculating recent changes could even mean the death of Adsense. One online marketer, Scott Boulch even published a free report entitled ‘The Death of Adsense”.

Many affilíate marketers would agree with Boulch on some of his points, especially the obvious fact that using Adsense on your web content is starting on the bottom rung of the online marketing ladder. Instead of receiving pennies per clíck with Adsense, alert marketers and webmasters have already discovered that by using CPA (Cost-Per-Action) and direct affilíate links, they can produce significantly more revenue from their web pages. Why eärn pennies per clíck when you can eärn $5, $10 or OVER $100 per clíck?

But the fine people at Google are catching on…

In the past Google has made its own swing to the Cost-Per-Action direction with its referral system for the Firefox Browser and giving webmasters credít for signing up Adwords and Adsense accounts.

Many online marketers believe Google needs to expand on these baby steps and open their Adsense affilíate program up to third party products/advertisers. In a recent company statement Google offered some hope: “We’re always looking for new ways to provide effective and useful features to advertisers, publishers, and users,” the company stated “As part of these efforts we are currently testing a cost-per-action (CPA) pricing model to give advertisers more flexibility and provide publishers another way to eärn revenue through AdSense.” Basically, in cost-per-action, advertisers pay for leads, purchases or customer acquisition. It would help with the clíck fraud issue and the monetary returns could potentially make Adsense’s revenues pale in comparison.

As more and more commerce goes online… acquiring customers for such diverse services as ínsurance, real estate, telephone, marketing, web hostíng, travel, mörtgage loans, cable TV, banking… you name it, almost any service or product sold in the marketplace is now turning to the Internet for customers and lifelong clients.

Enormous sums of monëy will change hands. Perhaps, the most lucrative of these is customer acquisition. Advertisers are turning to the Internet and webmasters/marketers for acquiring these lifelong customers for their respective services and products. Businesses and companies are quickly realizing paying an attractive lead generating fee/commission is smart business. They quickly build a client base for their services or products and quickly recoup their expenses – realizing in the long run these leads will generate huge profíts.

It can also mean huge profíts for the CPA networks like ValueClick’s Commission Junction and Rakuten’s LinkShare who supply the advertisers with publishers and website marketers to harvest these leads. It can be a lucrative venture for all involved, especially for those online marketers who have cornered the search engines for lucrative niche markets in big ticket items. Even small ticket items pay quite well for those marketers who know how to market online.

Contextual advertising is fine, but CPA (Cost-Per-Action) will offer much better returns for the website owner. Making any profitable site much more profitable. It will and is opening up a whole area of marketing opportunities that nevër existed before we had the Internet. Creating a complex structure of advertisers, publishers and the Affilíate/CPA companies that connect the two.

Of course, cutting out the middle man has always been even a more profitable venture for most marketers. As more and more webmasters realize they can make much more with dealing directly with companies, rather than going through a middle process like Google Adsense or the countless other affilíate/CPA networks … online marketers can reap even bigger rewards.

For an online marketer when you get a telephone call or email from the CEO or the affilíate manager with a company or service you’re promoting with your website – you know you have made it! Dealing directly with a company usually means bigger commissions and special exclusive deals just for you or your sites.

Only fly in the ointment, all that extra paperwork and business wheeling and dealing. Many marketers and website owners like the idea of someone else handling all the tracking, collecting payments, promotional materials… they just like to sit back and build more websites and content. It gives the affilíate marketer a lifestyle that they are looking for on the web. They just like to market and promote with their sites and let someone else worry about the details. Therefore, there will always be a place for contextual ads like Google Adsense… “Rumors of my demise have been greatly exaggerated.”

However, could CPA be a better alternative for the current Adsense contextual ads?

Google would be the natural choice for a middleman if there ever was one. Besides, many savvy marketers know the Google brand name is trusted online, any product/service promoted through Google would be an easy sell. Many argue Google already dominates the web, why should it not be the one to handle these CPA transactions through its Adsense program.

On the flip side, over countless updates and changes to its indexing, many webmasters have experienced more than a few negative dealings with Google. Many have won, many have lost in this Google Age, but all have realized riding the Google Search Engine is like running with the bulls at Pamplona, totally thrilling unless you’re one of the unfortunate few who get trampled in the process.

About The Author
The author is a former teacher who now works full-time online operating numerous websites, including two sites on Internet marketing. For the latest web marketing tools try: http://www.bizwaremagic.com. For the lastest trade information in your own industry try: http://bizwaremagic.tradepub.com.
2006 Titus Hoskins. This article may be freely distributed if this resource box stays attached.

I also noted that with the explosion of devices with which to serve Internet applications, compliance with W3C standards has become critical.

When the final release for IE 7 for Windows XP, Server 2003 & Vista is launched, hopefully before the end of 2006, the tables will be turned, so to speak.

Internet Explorer 7 will be more standards compliant and your HTML code will be subject to much more rigorous interpretation than is the case with IE 6, consequently some web pages that look fine in IE 6 might not look the same IE 7.

In IE 7 Microsoft has made a solemn effort to fix the browsers acquiescence to W3C standards and CSS(Cascading Style Sheets) compatibility. CSS interpretation as recommended by W3C has been improved tremendously giving designers and developers more leverage in functionality for cross-browser design.

Microsoft asserts that they are taking W3C compatibility issues seriously.

Concisely what this means is that IE 7 will tend to interpret your web page code more scrupulously than before.

Therefore, if you have been designing your pages and have not bothered to chëck how they render in W3C Standards Compliant browsers like FireFox, you may be in for a rude shock when IE 7 finally rolls out.

If you have not been incorporating W3C Web standards in your design strategy you may need to re-design for IE 7.

How should you go about it?

Design for “strict” browsers like FireFox first. Not only is FireFox a more standards-compliant browser but it is also the primary competitor to Internet Explorer. A contender backed by Google’s marketing machine — and therefore, is not likely do “a Netscape” on designers.

Prior and up to IE 4.x, Netscape was the leading browser in the market with almost 80% of the market, but in a bid to force the issue culminating with proprietary goofs by AOL to whom Netscape sold out, they screwed up big time with versions 4 up to 6. A bitter war of attrition with Microsoft in the late nineties did not help either.

Microsoft grabbed the opportuníty and gobbled the Browser market overnight.

With version 7+ Netscape has been revived. How well it will compete with IE and FireFox remains to be seen.

I will be the first to admit that most the web pages I have built in the last several years are not always standards compliant… and so are ninety five percent of other web pages — as I stated in my previous article, “if strict W3C standards were to be enforced in browsers, most websites would go out of business.”

To design for FireFox a designer needs to combine Valid CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) for “look and feel” and W3C compliant HTML for web page structure.

The combination of these two design strategies is powerful in that it elicits tremendous flexibility, ease of maintenance and opens up extensive possibilities in website design. The benefits are rewarding, and every webmaster should attempt to utilize this two pronged scheme in their design routine.

Making changes to and/or styling a site designed with CSS is much easier and more elegant than messing around with a traditional table-based design.

CSS may look intimidating to a first-timer but once you familiarize yourself with the basics you can progressively harness the power of CSS to your full benefit. In addition, most web page design tools such as Dreamweaver or FrontPage have built-in modules with which you can automatically generate CSS code, which you can then view in a plain text editor for study purposes.

To aid you in your CSS endeavor you need the following developer tools: Web Developer Extension for FireFox and the Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar. Great time-saving tools for creating, understanding, and troubleshooting Web pages.

As a matter of fact, by installing some of the 1,500+ available FireFox extensions you can eliminate the need for quite a chunk of standalone desktop applications.

After designing your Web page remember to use a MarkUp Validation Service to chëck whether your Web page conforms to W3C recommendations. If there are errors, the validator will notify you of them and suggest corrections.

Also, remember that when designing using W3C standards guidelines a lot of code(tags) that were very valid in the “Pre-Standards” era have completely depreciated and will be ignored completely by browsers. If you ignore these errors during validation, your web pages might not render correctly.

In many instances, you may nevër be able to achieve 100% HTML or XHTML validation. In such cases you may want put the following DOCTYPE declaration in your document — at the top of your web page before the tag:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN”>

A “Document Type Definition” or DTD supplies Web browsers with information about which (X)HTML specification your web page is built upon, which instructs the Browser how to render the page for viewing.

In the example captioned above a standards compliant browser will interpret your web page as an HTML 4.01 document, and because it is marked as “Transitional,” it will display it in “quirks mode,” meaning that the browser will forgo the strict standards mode, and display your page like it would be displayed in older “non-strict” browsers, while still supporting any tags developed after IE 4, Netscape 4 and others.

On the contrary, the following DOCTYPE declaration tells the standards compliant browsers that your web page should be displayed in strict compliance with the DOCTYPE declaration.

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN”>

A complete list of recommended DTDs can be found at the W3C Website.

If you leave the DOCTYPE out, the browsers automatically switch to “quirks mode,” therefore, it is important to include the DOCTYPE declaration on every web page that you build in order for it to be rendered correctly.

If your Web pages render well in FireFox at present you probably will not encounter any major problems in IE 7 other than minor adjustments here and there. However, I think a realistic designer should at least make a meaningful attempt to follow W3C guidelines for it is the correct way forward.

Do it now so that you will be ready for the future…re-designs and total overhauls are a time consuming and painful process. A process, which becomes much easier if your initial design incorporated structurally clean and modular (X)HTML with CSS compliance.

About The Author
James Opiko writes for AfroArticles.com. Get free Online Coding Tools, Audio Code Generator Software for your website, emails & newsletters.

“We selected Ask.com over other providers because of its great search technology and tools like Zoom related search, which cannot be found on other engines,” said Brian Kalinowski, CEO of Lycos, in a press statement. “By partnering with Ask.com, we aim to deliver a world-class search experience to our millíons of Lycos users.”

Ask appears to finally be making its move and actively seeking partnerships with other smaller search firms. While it is good to see forward momentum for any search firm whose name does not begin with the letter G, it is also important that some sense of competition be re-injected into the organic search market.

In the same press statement, Ask CEO, Jim Lanzone said, “With stiff competition in the marketplace for syndication deals, we are pleased that Lycos recognized the merits of our search technology and advertising products. This new relationship will enable Ask.com to broaden its search offering to new users while also increasing the reach of Ask Sponsored Listings inventory.”

Ask.com is, in and of itself, an interesting search engine, and one whose story could have turned out very differently. It is nevër too late to start over and, 2006 has been a time of renewal at Ask. Owned and operated by the InterActive Corporation, Ask has new energy, an almost impossible goal its staff fully believes in, and, ultimately, a new lease on life. No longer defined by their popular but ineffective butler mascot, Ask has spent the past ten months reinventing itself by incorporating the strongest offerings from IAC such as Citysearch, Ticketmaster and Expedia into the search products it offers its users.

Things looked very different at this time last year for the small Oakland CA based company. Then again, things looked very different in the search engine marketplace at this time last year. Today, Ask appears to be looking for partners to bolster themselves as the smallest of the largest search entities. With the enormous lead Google has over the rest of the pack, these types of partnerships are both necessary and inevitable.

The second item from November 1st’s news is a story from British newspaper the Times Online saying Google’s rake of UK advertising monëy has surpassed Britain’s second largest advertising funded TV station. With annual revenues projected to surpass 900 million -poundUK this year, Google has blasted past Channel 4′s anticipated revenues of 800 million – poundUK.

Again, this might not seem like much of a surprise to long-term Internet watchers but it is a massive story for advertisers and media buyers who continue to spend the majority of their clients’ monies on traditional outlets like television, radio and print. The ad-purchase pendulum was already rapidly swinging away from the traditional media and reports like this only add momentum to that movement.

Channel 4 CEO Andy Duncan was quoted in the article saying, “People need to wake up and realise that this is not just a cyclical issue – there is deep structural change, rather like global warming.”

Comparing Google’s success in drawing revenues that would otherwise fund other advertising venues to Global Warming might seem a bit extreme at first glance however, Mr. Duncan is quite correct in his observation that the global advertising environment has altered so significantly that traditional assumptions no longer necessarily apply to the emerging realities. The monëy is not flowing the way it used to, threatening what was once solid ground with accelerating submersion.

The biggest thing most of us will have to worry about in regards to Global Warming is if, not where, we will find lunch. Similarly, traditional media outlets are struggling to find ways to survive now that the rivers of wealth have been diverted to fund the efficiency of the electronic marketplace.

A third news item, a report published in the New York Times that has certainly been noted by media buyers shows how badly newspaper subscriptions have declined over last year while, at the same time, viewership of websites published by those same newspapers has increased by about 24%.

According to the article, the LATimes has lost 8% of its daily circulation. The Boston Globe is down by 10% for its Sunday edition. In 1984, circulation of major daily newspapers in the United States peaked at 63.3 million. Today, that number has decreased by about 1/3 to 43.7 million. Clearly, not as many people are taking delivery or buying newspapers anymore. That doesn’t mean they are not reading them. According to the Newspaper Association of America, over 57 million people visited the websites of American newspapers in the third quarter of 2006.

The mainstream media marketplace is changing rapidly and ad buyers are having that reality hammered home to them time and time again. At the same time, the search engine marketplace is changing quickly as well.

Over the past several weeks, the search engine marketplace has shifted significantly with the third quarter reports from the two largest paid search entities, Google and Yahoo. What these reports revealed is that there is no longer any real competition in the PPC marketplace with Google literally sucking the profít away from Yahoo.

While the ceiling is not caving in at Yahoo, a weak fourth quarter report will not bode well for a revival of competition in paid search. Yahoo’s weakness however, provides an open lane-way for other formats and methods of paid-search advertising, one that Ask is only too happy to start to explore. Ask is not the only company exploring the paid-search marketplace. In the last couple of months, Microsoft’s adCenter has started to look like a serious player with inventory and interface improvements.

Now, I realize everything I have said above seems, on its own, either inconsequential or perfectly obvious. The inference I draw from these three stories, all of which appeared on November 1st is that these stories are both indicative of and propelled by, the seismic shifts happening in the search marketplace right now.

Weakness at Yahoo makes a place for Microsoft, Ask and its new alliances, and a host of other alternatives at the paid-search advertising table. On the table is a rapidly growing pile of monëy, most of which is likely going to go to Google. What’s left is a fortune worth fighting over. 2007 is going to be bizarre and highly fluid.
About The Author
Search marketing expert Jim Hedger is one of the most prolific writers in the search sector with articles appearing in numerous search related websites and newsletters, including SiteProNews, Search Engine Journal, ISEDB.com, and Search Engine Guide.

He is currently Senior Editor for the Jayde Online news sources SEO-News and SiteProNews. You can also find additional tips and news on webmaster and SEO topics by Jim at the SiteProNews blog.