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Finding Hip Hop Mix Podcasts

Many music podcasts are available online for downloading; if one wanted to find, for instance, a hip hop mix podcast, there are a few sites available to help. The first possibility would be to go directly to a site which creates one and subscribe to it using a podcast client which automatically checks the feed for new episodes and downloads them for the user. If, however, one did not know of any hip hop mix podcast sites, or simply wanted to find new podcast sites, the best possibility would be to check a podcast directory, a list of podcasts that can be browsed.

Hip hop mix podcasts could easily be found at one of these podcast directories. A podcast directory stores lists of podcasts which have been ubmitted to the site, and categorizes them by genre, type of podcast, region, and other meta data. To find a hip hop mix podcast, visiting a podcast directory and checking under music podcasts, and then under hip hop music would find many podcasts which play that type of music.

The hip hop mix podcast could then be subscribed to by inputting the feed address listed into one of the many podcast clients. The music will come in episodes, the name for each downloadable portion of a podcast. Some of these podcasts may feature independent artists, musicians trying to break into the music industry who have chosen podcasting as a way of sharing their music and gaining a following. Others may be remixes of popular songs that have been changed in some way to give a different feel to the music. Often, the artists may already be established, though, and they still see
podcasting as a way to introduce themselves to a larger audience. They may grant rights to pay certain hip hip songs to a podcaster, letting them play the music as part of their mix distribution while requesting a link to a site where more information can be learned about the artists and music can be purchased. Artists that have done this include alias, edan, outerspace, RA the rugged man, roots manuva, and outer space.

A large number of podcasts featuring hip hop mix podcasts are actually radio stations, however. These broadcasters have found that podcasting their shows and selections is an easy way to reach more listeners and gain a greater audience. These podcasters can reach more people easier and cheaper than they can by playing hip hop mix music over the airwaves in their local areas. Playing hip hop music over the internet is probably the way many future artists will do their work, and there are many ways available even now that they can do so and make a profit. For instance, some podcasts are designed to work on a payment basis. A hip hop artist who wished to share his music could charge for addition to the feed list, then issue a unique
feed address to the user, allowing them to hear new pieces of hip hop music released. The hip hop music file could even be designed so it could not be copied and used by another user at a different computer, to ensure that the artist could maintain control over his work.

Apple Spot: Box

Another Great Spot from Apple Computers

Viral Marketing 101 - Not Using It Could Kill Your Business!

Creativity.

This is one virtue a site must possess to lead the race in the ruthless competition in the Internet based business. With so many competition and rivalry going on, every method of marketing must be employed and utilized.

It doesn’t matter if you have a killer product or a fantastically designed website, if people don’t know that you exist, it doesn’t matter, and you are not going to make it big. Worse of all, you business could just get killed.

While there are so many methods and schemes used by so many e-commerce sites today, there are still some of those that can help you with an extra boost in the popularity ratings. One of these is the so called Viral Marketing.

While the term Viral easily depicts a virus, a word very much dreaded by all computer owners, it is not what it seems. You do not actually use a computer virus to spread your business; on the contrary it just might kill you. Everyone has had enough of all those pop up ads and spywares.

Viral Marketing Overview

Viral Marketing also known otherwise as Viral Advertising is a marketing technique used to build the public awareness of one’s product or company. They use many forms of media to reach out to the public without actually promoting the product by riding on in other forms of addictive means that could get a person hooked and be obliged or amused to actually pass it on, with the product or company advertisement along with it.

In a nutshell, companies ride on the idea that if people like the content of a media they will pass it on to their friends and family. They sponsor the certain media, such as a cool flash game, funny video, amusing story and such, which one may pass on to another with the company brand or logo or the products description or any other content to help promote the company or its product.

Viral marketing has become a popular means of advertising and marketing because they are relatively low cost. To avoid being tagged as spam mail, viral marketing counts on the eagerness of one person to pas on the product. If a person sees the name of the person they know as the sender, they won’t block it and open it as well.

Many companies offer incentives such as discounts and rebates when they help in spreading their viral marketing. They rely on the number of recipients a viral marketing gets from one person in determining the amount or number of incentive they can be attributed with.

Using Viral Marketing to your advantage

The main and foremost advantage of viral marketing is that you get a lot of publicity and public awareness about your site and your company. You get to generate a flow of traffic that are potential customers. With a little ingenuity and imagination, plus some incentives or prizes, you can reach out to a great number of people and announce your existence.

Most every site and companies are catching on to the effectivity of Viral Marketing and Advertising. Not using it could kill your business. Along with other schemes and methods in promoting your site, like Search Engine Optimization and such, viral marketing could easily push you ahead in the rating games.

Viral Marketing could be a sneaky way to get people to know about you and your company. You get them to pass your advertisement along. They are also very low cost that not investing in it could be downright a business suicide. All it takes is a great idea, a good addicting game, a funny story many ideas are still out there. Create a gossip or a buzz, many movies are promoted by using scandals and gossips to make them moiré popular. Remember the movie “The Blair Witch Project”?

Many big companies have tried viral marketing and have had many success stories with it. A classic example is Microsoft’s Hotmail. They were the first known big company to utilize the scheme and it has worked wonders for them.

Now it’s your turn to use viral marketing to work wonders for you. Act now and reap the benefits Viral Marketing will provide for you and your sales figures.

Increasing Link Popularity

Search engines are the gateway to the Internet; they are the first tool that potential customers use to find the products and services they need. This is why link popularity is so imperative. If the customers do not find your website, you have no possibilities of making any sales.

You’re probably wondering what the blazes is popular about a link! Well, in a word - plenty! Link popularity refers to the ranking assigned to your website by the search engines, and it determines the ranking your page gets when keywords are entered into a search engine. So, you’re probably wondering, how do I make my link popular?

Search engines are discretionary, giving status and ranking to sites that have links to their pages from related, quality sites. It’s a simple formula, but a very important one. Google created the system, and now virtually all the most popular search engines employ it to rank your web pages in their indexes.

The more commonly used your keyword is, the harder it will be to achieve link popularity, but without achieving this step, it is almost certain your site will never rank highly on any search engine. But don’t be discouraged; there are tried and true ways of achieving link popularity using the most competitive keywords.

There are a few things you should be aware of. The first is that just linking up with a large number of other websites will not achieve link popularity. In fact, it may have quite the opposite effect. This is particularly true when pertaining to websites that are nothing more than “link farms” - pages containing line after line of indiscriminate links. Search engines may aggressively discriminate against your website if you are associated with a link farm, so steer clear of them!

The next thing to bear in mind is the quality of the site you are linking to. Never link to a page you have reservations about your visitors seeing. The last thing you want your website to appear as is indiscriminate and cheap. Linking to sites of poor quality will only lessen your link popularity, if not completely destroy it.

So let’s get to what you need to do to achieve supreme link popularity and improve your rankings to stellar status on all the popular search engines.

The first step, and the fastest way to get your foot in the door, is to get a listing in a popular directory, such as Open Directory Project and Yahoo. If your site is business-related, you will want to be listed on Yahoo, and despite the fact that it will cost you around $300 a year, it will be money well spent. If your site is non-commercial, the listing will be free, but it will take time and follow-up to actually get it listed. Open Directory is gives you a free listing whether you are business-related or non-commercial, but be prepared to make a lot of follow-up inquiries before you see your site listed.

You are aiming to get listed in the highest level of appropriate category, and this just takes some common sense. For example, if your company ships Alpaca wool from an Alpaca farm located in the middle of Nowhere, Tiny State, do NOT submit your listing to “Retailers from Nowhere, Tiny State.” BIG MISTAKE! All you have to do is look a little deeper - and submit your listing to the “Fine Alpaca Wool” category. You will not only associate yourself with culture and quality, but you will be listed in a national category.

The next step after you have attained directory listings is to locate other quality sites that will increase your link popularity. Try to find sites that are in some way related to yours, so not only will your link popularity increase, but your customer base may also be expanded. You want to avoid your competitors and look for sites that are useful to your site’s visitors. Let’s look at the Alpaca Wool site example. Linking up to a site that sells knitting supplies would be helpful to your visitors, and the chances of the knitting supply site wanting to link up to your site are also greater. By linking to a related site that will be relevant to your website’s traffic, you are increasing both of your site’s business prospects - and both of your sites’ link popularity.

Not all sites want to link to other sites, so you will have to do some research when you are looking for possible linking partners. Google is an excellent starting place for your search. Make sure you enter keywords that you think quality customers will also enter to find your own site. Remember, your criteria are quality, highly ranked, non-competing websites that have a links or resources page. Go to these sites and objectively assess them. Look at the quality of the product, the graphics, and the ease of use. Then check out the other sites they are linked to, and determine if your own site would fit in with the crowd.

When you decide you have found a good prospect, you must set out to woo them. The first thing to do is to add a link on your own links page to their site. This is an essential first step; it shows good faith, and ups your chances significantly of their reciprocity. After you have added their link, you must contact the webmaster of their site. Since this is almost always done by email, you want to make sure it is immediately clear that your message is not junk mail. This requires that you tell them right off the bat that you have added a link to their page on your site. A hook like this almost always insures the reader will read on.

Next, be sure to be flattering and let them know how much you appreciate their website. Make sure you emphasize that you have actually visited their site, and that their site is not just a random pick. Give them the address of your links page, and ask them to check out the link for themselves. It’s a good idea to mention that they will not only benefit from the increased traffic your website will direct their way, but you will also increase their link popularity. Briefly, explain why link popularity is so essential, but do this in a sentence or two so you don’t sound like a professor! Finally, tell them you would greatly appreciate if they would reciprocally add a link on their own links page to your website.

Go through this process with as many appropriate sites as you can find, bearing in mind the criteria of quality and non-competitiveness. After you have emailed all relevant sites, be sure to check these website frequently to see if they have added a link to your page. Give it about a month, and if no link appears, try another charming email. Then give it another month, and if your site is still absent from their links page, it’s time to remove their link from your own links page. The only time you want to pursue a link further than this is if you believe a site is crucial to your link popularity and your business needs. Just remember to keep all your communications complimentary and cordial.

Then set up a schedule to check your ranking in search engines frequently to see if your link popularity has improved. This is not achievable in the blink of an eye. It will take some time and a good deal of work. There is no way around the labor-intensive quality of improving your link popularity, which is why search engines regard it with such importance.

By the way - make sure you have a beautiful, streamlined site or you will never persuade anyone to link up to you. Be prepared to keep plugging away at this process, as long as it takes, until you achieve link popularity stardom!

Making Money Selling Other People’s Products

A lot of people are now getting into online businesses and online marketing either to supplement their “real world” income or for it to become their primary source of income. Why? Because online marketing just provides them a lot of benefits!

First, you can reach just about anybody in the world who has Internet access if you market your products online. That means a wider market for you, which can translate to larger profits. Second, setting up an online business requires only a fraction of the cost required to set up an actual business establishment, which means a lot of savings for the business owner.

Another aspect that has attracted a lot of people towards online marketing is the fact that one doesn’t have to have his own products to get started. In online marketing, one can start making a lot of money just by selling, or even by just trying to sell, other people’s products. And getting started with this kind of marketing strategy is actually quite easy. All that one needs to do is to set up an agreement with an online retailer or merchant, and after everything is settled, one can immediately start making money by selling the merchant’s or the retailer’s products.

Incidentally, the most popular and the fastest growing method of selling other people’s products online is affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing, in its simplest definition, is a relationship between an online merchant or retailer, who has products to sell, and his affiliates, who are willing to promote the merchant’s product on their website.

In a typical affiliate marketing set up, the merchant provides his affiliates with banners and text ads that links to his site. The affiliates will then get these ads posted on their website and they get paid whenever traffic or sales is directed to the merchant’s website. Affiliates are often paid on commission basis, although other online merchants would opt to pay a fixed fee for the affiliate’s compensation.

Starting to make money online with affiliate marketing is relatively quick and easy. All that one has to do is to sign up as an affiliate for an online company that offers affiliate programs. An alternative method, and usually an easier one, is to sign up as a member of an affiliate network—a network that hosts a variety of affiliate programs for different online merchants or retailers. Signing up is usually free, although other companies and networks may require you to pay a particular fee. Such fees, however, are made as payment for additional services that the company may render, like providing you with tools and assistance to jumpstart your online business.

When you sign up with an affiliate marketing program, you are usually required to fill out a form containing information about yourself. Some affiliate programs may also require you to present the URL of your website and describe its contents. This will allow the retailers to verify that you actually have a website with contents that are relevant to their products. Some affiliate programs, however, won’t require you to have a website. After filling out the form and all, you are then allowed to choose the affiliate programs you want to promote.

After signing up with an affiliate program and being an actual affiliate, you are now ready to start making a lot of money by selling other people’s product online. How do you make money? There are actually a number of ways for you to earn money as an affiliate, and most of these ways depends on the type of affiliate marketing program you’ve gotten into.

Many affiliate marketing programs compensate their affiliates in either of three ways: pay-per-click (PPC), pay-per-sale (PPS), or pay-per-lead (PPL). In pay-per-click affiliate marketing, the affiliate is paid whenever he directs traffic to the merchant’s site. PPS and PPL affiliate marketing programs work rather differently. In PPS, the affiliate only gets paid when his referral converts into an actual sale. In typical PPS affiliate programs, the affiliate would usually get 15% to 20% commission for each conversion. PPL affiliate programs work the same way, although affiliates are paid a fixed fee whenever his referral converts into a lead for the company.

Some affiliate marketing programs are two-tier programs, wherein the affiliate is also allowed to recommend other affiliates to the merchant. In such affiliate programs, the affiliate would not only be paid for the traffic or sales that he would direct to the merchant’s site but also for the traffic or sales directed by the affiliates who signed up with the program through his recommendation.

Yet another way of earning more profits with affiliate marketing is through residual affiliate programs. Residual affiliate programs are affiliate programs where the affiliate gets paid a number of times for as long as the merchant keeps the customer the affiliate has referred to his site. One form of residual program gets the affiliate paid a commission every time the referred customer purchases something on the merchant’s site. Another form of residual affiliate program gets the affiliate paid a percentage every month for as long as the company keeps the referred customer.

With a lot of options available and a lot of ways to earn money, affiliate marketing is undoubtedly the most popular and the easiest way to make money by selling other people’s products online. As to how much money one can get from affiliate marketing actually depends on the affiliate. A dedicated and hardworking affiliate would certainly get more from the program compared to those affiliates who would simply sign up and forget about the program later.

What is a Podcast Feed?

A podcast feed is a way of sharing files over the internet. It involves the use of a small, machine readable file that is regularily updated to reflect changes in the files available for downloading. The internet addresses of these files are embedded into the feed file and can be automatically downloaded when wished. At this time, podcasting tends to refer to the use of feeds to share only media files. Podcasting originally occured as a way to share audio mp3 files, and has only recently begun incorporating video into podcasts. However, the technology that allows the files to be shared is not limited to such media files and there is not reason that other files may be shared via podcast in the future.

Today, however, a podcast feed tends to refer to the use of a feed to share media files. Most podcasts are done with audio files, and the individual files that are created and shared are called episodes. These audio files may contain a variety of things; there are music, comedy, news, technology, even podcasts about wine.

Podcasting, because of the low entry cost, especially for audio podcasting allows nearly anyone who believes they have something to say to broadcast it over the internet. Even more established groups have found that audio podcasting works well. Some radio stations podcast portions of their content, sharing it over the internet to allow listeners who missed a specific show to catch up on it later. NPR now does this with its news breaks, and the NPR show “This American Life” offers a podcast of its shows to subscribers who pay a small fee.

One of the newer innovations in podcast feeds is the vlog, or videoblog. These blogs usually contain a feed that distributes a video, rather than an audio file to feed subscribers. Although that would not have been feasible a few years ago, growing numbers of broadband internet subscribers has meant that most users are able to download large files, even video files, relatively quickly. These video podcasts have been readily accepted by mainstream news organizations. They have found that podcasting portions of their content is a way to share their tape and reach a wider audience. The BBC currently does this with parts of its news content. Pieces of the news show that is played over the airwaves is taken and placed online, along with a link to the content placed inside the RSS feed. Those who subscribe to the BBC feed can download the news clip and watch in from the comfort of their home computer.

In the future, podcast feeds may be used for a number of purposes besides simply sharing media files. Some analysts predict that the feed system could also be used to share software updates, or any of a myriad of other file types. For now, however, podcasting is dominated by small audio and video files.