In one of Aral’s post about migrating Flickr photos to wordpres using the Flickr to WP plugin, i find an interesting coffee cup design and i was like “wow, is that not cool?”. Attaching the picture here, and same time asking you to please let me know if you know where i can find that cup…would love to have my coffee break with that cup.

According to Pinterest: Pinterest lets you organize and share all the beautiful things you find on the web. People use pinboards to plan their weddings, decorate their homes, and organize their favorite recipes.

Best of all, you can browse pinboards created by other people. Browsing pinboards is a fun way to discover new things and get inspiration from people who share your interests.

The idea is that each user has a theme board where he can pin stuff he/she likes from around the web, and everything is represented through images. The visual appeal of the site is what seems to have triggered its immense growth…Pinterest is the fastest site in history to reach 10 million unique visitors in one month.

Why is that so important?

The most important reason is because the people behind Pinterest site got many things right to make it such a hit, so there’s a lot to learn there. Even if you are not planning to launch a social network anytime soon, you can still use Pinterest to promote your sites, to expand your network and even to make some money directly with it.

Let’s have a look at this video

What is “Pinterest Followers” and why you need them?

Pinterest – the web’s latest social media craze, is a great way to build awareness for your blog or website. Many businesses already noticed the importance of Pinterest Followers, and are already gaining huge followers base. As with most social media promotion techniques, your ability to influence others through your Pinterest presence is limited if you don’t have that many people following you in the first place…so is why Pinterest Followers Are Important!

Now to the point: How to get free pinterest followers?

Here are 10 ways to get more pinterest followers for free:

1 – Tie In to Your Existing Social Networks

One of the fastest and easiest ways to get more Pinterest followers is by tying your account to your existing Facebook and Twitter profiles. Doing so (and setting up your permissions correctly) means that every new item you pin will be displayed to your followers on these networks. Since you already have established connections with subscribers on these sites, you’ll find that many of them elect to follow your Pinterest profile naturally.

2 – Make it Easy to Pin Your Content

Integrating Pinterest buttons into your blog posts, product pages and other areas of your site can help boost the number of times your content is pinned and lead to new followers for your profile. Because Pinterest is still relatively new, simply having these buttons in place provides a visual reminder for people to subscribe to your profile and engage with your content on this new site.

3 – Create Boards to Supplement Your Posts

Alternatively, why not create a Pinterest board that’s built around one of your blog posts. For example, if you run a dog training tips website and recommend several different products in a new blog post, create a Pinterest board tied to this post that shares these recommendations in a visual way. Doing so makes your content more engaging and gives readers a reason to follow your profile.

4 – Pin Regularly

As with any social media site, determining how often to pin new content involves finding the ideal balance between posting so little that there’s no value in following your profile and posting so often that people get annoyed with your constant updates. For best results, aim to pin between 5-30 new items a day, depending on the number of active Pinterest boards you maintain.

5 – Curate Your Own Pins

If you only ever repin content from others, you aren’t bringing anything new to the table, which gives Pinterest users even less of an incentive to follow you. Instead, create your own new pins based on content you find on other social networking sites or from resources you’re familiar with that haven’t yet been featured extensively on Pinterest.

6 – Follow Other Pinners

On Pinterest – as on Twitter, Google+ and Facebook – following other users (especially power users with thousands and thousands of unique subscribers) is a great way to get your content noticed and spread across a much larger network of people. To find other pinners to follow, search for a few of your industry’s general keyword phrases on Pinterest and take note of the users that appear to publish the most content and have the most followers. Follow these users yourself and repin some of their content – many will return the favor by following you back and sharing your pins with their networks!

7 – Arrange a Follow Exchange

I find a website named PinScratch. They are offering Free Targeted Pinterest Followers. I would recommend to jump on the offer before it is discovered by many others. If you one of the first people to join, you probably will get much more followers than expected. According to their FAQ, it is very easy and fast to start receiving followers. Whyle we are at it, why not Pin the image below?

8 – Arrange a Pin Exchange

While it’s considered inappropriate to pin your own content too frequently, you can always team up with other site owners or retailers in your industry to organize a “pin exchange” that allows more of your content to be seeded on to Pinterest without your direct involvement. A group of friends who all sell items on Etsy, for example, could arrange to share each other’s content on Pinterest in order to build recognition without appearing too “scammy”.

9 – Pin Newsworthy Content

As mentioned in Tip #5, if you want to build your number of Pinterest followers, it’s important that you be seen as a “thought leader” in your industry – not just someone who repins content from other people. To increase this perception, try to be the first to create pins for news items within your industry. You could even create boards to feature new products that are released in your niche, making you the “go to” pinner serving your field.

10 – Write Searchable Pin Captions

One of the ways that people find new Pinterest users to follow is by searching the site for interesting key phrases in order to uncover new pinned content. If your pins don’t appear in these searches, you’re losing potential followers that could have subscribed to your boards. For this reason, it’s important to integrate relevant keywords into your pin captions. Don’t simply stuff your pins full of meaningless keywords, but at the same time, don’t use basic captions like, “So funny!” that don’t give Pinterest users or the site’s search engine any information about what’s going on in your pins.

Are you on Pinterest yet? If so, do you have any other techniques for attracting followers to your profile? We would live to hear what you got in the bag, please share them in the comments section below.

Looking for more Pinterest Advice? Check out Pinterest Tips.

One last recommendation, Use Good Quality Pictures! Because Pinterest is such a visually-focused site, the quality of the images you use in your pins will go a long way towards attracting new followers. If the Pinterest bookmarklet doesn’t automatically capture an attractive image (or, if there are no good images used on the source content page in the first place), manually create the pin on your own using a high quality, visually appealing picture from a Creative Commons image directory.

The founders of BO.LT have spent their careers creating web sites and web pages that are compelling and consumable. They built the first ecommerce site to do $1MM in daily revenue, leading each phase from 1.0 to the social web. Their passion is in the bread and butter of the web – the pages that hold the content, interaction and links from which the web is constructed.

Jamie and Matthew Roche are the co-CEOs of BO.LT. Over the past 15 years, the two brothers have created three successful startups. Most recently, they created the Adobe Test and Target platform (formerly Offermatica), which was purchased by Adobe in 2009 and defines the category of online testing and targeting. The platform continues to serve billions of impressions per week and is a cornerstone technology for marketing optimization.

Prior to Offermatica, the two advised and built solutions for many of the most powerful companies in the world, including Walmart, Intuit, Intel, CNET, Nike and many others. The Roche brothers have spent their careers focused on removing the barriers that separate marketers from their audiences.

James and Matthew Roche each hold a bachelor’s degree from Yale University

Mark Cyster, BO.LT’s CTO, has been the lead architect at each of these startups, and has unparalleled experience in delivering extremely high-volume, high performance distributed architectures for marketing. Cyster was the lead architect at Offermatica and now leads a team comprised of former lead architects and CTOs from cable, consumer, and media companies.

Request an BO.LT Invite

Read more about BO.LT Founders here.

The most strong and popular web design trend over last couple of years is a sliding horizontal panels also known as Sliders or Carousels. It’s a very effective method to increase the web site usability and engage the user.

WOW Slider is a jQuery image slider (both, for MAC & Win systems) with stunning visual effects (Blast, Fly, Blinds, Squares, Slices, Basic, Fade, Ken Burns, Stack, Stack vertical and Basic linear) and tons of professionally made templates. WOW Slider is packed with a point-and-click wizard to create fantastic sliders in a matter of seconds without coding and image editing. WordPress slider plugin and Joomla slider module are available also.

The latest updated version is March 30, 2012 WOW Slider v2.1 and has the following improvements:

• Fully accessible as a pure CSS slider, if the Javascript is turned off
• Improved import to WordPress
• New Aqua template
• New Flip effect
• “Delay between slides” and “Effect duration” maximum increased to 60 sec
• “Use relative paths to image in project” option
• “On-demand image loading” option
• Option to set page color
• Parameter to start from specified image or random image
• Parameter to run slideshow in specified or random order
• Image settings panel is always visible
• Fixed bug with “Preserve aspect ratio” on Mac
• Updated translations: Bulgarian, Finnish, Gujarati, Indonesian, Montenegrin, Arabic, Catalan, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Hungarian, Romanian, Serbian, Slovenian, Ukraine

If you are interested with this jQuery Content Slider tool and want to find out the core features, please visit WOWSlider.

Establishing a Unique Marketing Presence

If you do not want to spend hours almost everyday checking that your internet advertising is clear, easy and concise to find, you will need to start you and also stay consistent with your internet image. You should determine what you are interested in saying about yourself, your own business, your services or products, your pricing and also say it the exact same way wherever you advertise. There might be some listings where you do not get too much room for your business info so you might want a complete version as well as a condensed version but there is nothing more troubling to an internet client than finding two listings for the same business field with different information.

Google AdSence

Google and Yahoo are grabbing billions of dollars once collected by traditional print and broadcast outlets. Like magazines and newspapers, Web sites are most often ranked based on how many people visit them and how long they are there. Just like traditional print media often exaggerates how many copies they sell, websites too exaggerate/ inflate numbers of visitors to their site.

Advertisers who use internet advertising and pay for each click of the product are therefore always concerned how reliable clicks/number of views are as a quantifiable measure of consumer interest. Most scholars who study online advertising estimate that 10% to 15% of ad clicks are fake, representing roughly $1 billion in annual billings.

Google, Yahoo and other similar search engines divide these proceeds with the person(s) owning the site:  Site owners are sometimes “domain parking” companies, which are dummy, rudimentary sites and only redistribute ads of the search engines. These sites contain no content/real value, and some owners do arrange for the ads to be clicked on, triggering huge bills to advertisers.

Recently, Google decided to retire the Hosted domains product within AdSense to assuage the fears of their advertisers.

Apart from Pay per Click ads, there are ads priced according to “impressions,” or how many people view them. To cater to the needs of greedy site owners who wish to present blown-up figures of visits and clicks, a number of sites variedly referred to as paid-to-read, paid-to-surf, GPT(get-paid-to) have sprung up. Nomenclature and functioning of these sites overlap; so please do not go by the labels. Paid-to Read or PTR sites are often click-fraud rings.

A pay-to-surf company provides a pop-up window or “viewbar” on a member’s computer that tracks websites the user visits. Advertisers pay the pay-to-surf company a small amount (typically US$0.50) for every hour of a member’s surfing. Advertisers’ banner ads are then displayed while the member browses the web. Members are typically restricted to surf for not more than 20 hours per month. But they are paid for each referral they bring.

Utilities started appearing in the meanwhile which allowed users to simulate surfing activity. Mechanical mouse-moving devices, for example “JiggyMouse”, allowed users to get paid simply for leaving their machines on. To fight fraud, Pay-to-surf companies started building fraud-prevention software, but the fraud program developers outwit them easily.

The first and most well-known pay-to-surf company was AllAdvantage. It launched in March 1999 and grew to 13 million members, but had to be closed down after 18 months, due to fraudulent activities of its members.

Fighting all of the above are the search engine companies who must ensure the advertisers their advertisements are reaching genuine customers interested in the product and each click is the result of their activities alone. Scores of automated clicking programs, known as clickbots, are available to be downloaded from the Internet and claim to provide protection against detection. They disguise a PC’s unique numerical identification, or IP address, and can space clicks minutes apart to make them less conspicuous. Google must continuously monitor and check their possible usage.

The digital empires of Google and Yahoo depend on the Internet advertising gold, and Click fraud is the scourge that poses the single biggest threat to this wealth.

Rightly, Google and other search engines do not like incentive traffic!

Google and Yahoo use sophisticated algorithms and intelligence from advertisers to identify the vast majority of fake clicks by correlating users’ geographical location, the average time spent on the site, and whether or not these clickers became customers ultimately.

To protect the interests of advertisers further, the search engine companies allow advertisers to identify sites on which they don’t want their ads to run.

So, if you are a blogger who has enabled adsense on your site, how can you ensure you do not run into problems with the search engine master? Here are a few points you should be careful about:

• Do not advertise blogs or websites on Traffic Exchange sites, such as EasyHits4U. Traffic exchange is against Google’s TOS.
• Do not advertise or write articles advocating PTR/PTC sites like neobux, PTC Box, Easy PTR, Fast PTR, Readbud, etc.
• Do not host explicit adult content. The definition of adult content is subject to speculation. Google says “sites may not include: Excessive profanity, violence, racial intolerance, or advocacy against any individual, group, or organization, hacking/cracking content, illicit drugs and drug paraphernalia, pornography, adult, or mature content, gambling or casino-related content.” Be careful to remove spam comments having links to porn/ adult sites, drug peddling and gambling sites.

Think About Your Video

Let’s say the overall goal is to post a video that is going to help promote your business in some way – whether that be by posting a tutorial, a commercial, some tips for your specific business, etc. It is important to remember your main goal and your target audience because you’ll need to keep them interested in your video. Remember, this is your chance to get your video and business name out world wide, so it is important to keep the viewer’s attention.

How To Set Up Your YouTube Videos

So you are ready to use YouTube. You have all these fantastic videos that you are ready to share with the cyber world, but what is the next step? First and foremost, you want to visit http://www.YouTube.com. This is Youtube’s website. On the top right corner there is a link titled “Create Account”. Follow the steps to create your account and then you will be ready to share away with your videos.

Before attempting to post your videos, remember that there are some requirements each video has to follow in order to be posted on Youtube. The majority of the time, this will not be a problem, with the most important guideline being that the video has to remain under 10 minutes. There are also file size requirements (100MB or less).

The following is a beginners guide to uploading a video onto YouTube:

Very first thing you have to do to upload a video is click the “Upload Videos” link. These are located on the top right of the page and are on almost every page on Youtube.

Next you are going to be asked to briefly describe your video. You will first need to enter a title and a description for your video. Keep these simple as people are not going to want to read a long description (they are on a video watching site, not an E-Book site). After the description section there is an area to enter tags for your video. Tags are keywords that will help your video be found based off what the user is searching for. You are going to want to use important words for this section.

Following the tags section you will have to select a category and language to place your video in. It is important to select the correct category and language, as this will also help your video be found to users who are looking for that specific type of content. Finally, click “Go Upload A File”. The next page asks if you would like your video to be available to the public, or private. If you are wanting to get your business name out there, you will want to keep this public as this allows the millions of visitors the opportunity to view your video. Next click, “Upload Video”. This will bring you to a page to browse your computer for the video you wish to upload. After finding the video, select it and your video will be live within minutes.

Get People To See The Video

The video you just uploaded is a hidden gem among the sea of the internet. Next, we need to get people to find this gem. One very basic way to get people to view your video is to create a link on your business website to your YouTube video, or have your YouTube video embedded on your site itself. With that said, you can also link to any sites (business or social networks) that your business is linked with. Just remember, the more exposure to the video, the better. One great tactic that many businesses use is promoting some sort of contest through their YouTube account. The draw of winning something will bring in more viewers.

YouTube also allows users many great ways to get people to your video. When you initially signed up for YouTube, you created a channel. In other words, if you signed up as “Business 1″, there is now a “Business 1 Channel” on Youtube. Having your own channel allows you to create your own playlists. This playlist can consist of videos you upload or videos others have uploaded that you have viewed and want to share with others. Sharing someone else’s video may in turn entice them to share your video.

On the same note, underneath all videos (unless this option is turned off) there is a section for commenting. Commenting on other videos is a great tool to promote your business. Keep in mind, this DOES NOT mean to comment on someone’s video “Check out my video…”. This is spam, and will most likely be deleted. What you want to do is comment on a users video that is related to the topic of your video. Also, you want to keep the comments relevant and not so generic. A comment like “cool video”, ‘”nice job”, etc. will not gain you any attention. A comment that is more conversational shows the author that you are paying attention throughout their video as well as reading the comments. This will possibly strike their interest in clicking your username, and therefore being brought to your channel to view your videos. The more you do this, the better the opportunity of getting numerous views is.

There are also the following options on Youtube to help get your video out there: emails/messages, bulletins, chat, and rating. These will help because you will be emailing, posting, and chatting on related topics will prove to be useful because you can get someone’s attention who is already interested in the topic your discussing (what your video is about). This will in all likelihood nudge the other users to view your profile/videos. Just as any other social network, the more connections you have, the more the word about your videos and business will get out there.

A YouTube Success Story

As discussed earlier, the main benefit of getting your videos out on Youtube is that it give you the opportunity to “advertise” your business to millions of users, and at the rate of $0. Yes, Free 99. This gives the potential growth of your business an infinite amount. A great example of this is a blender company called Blendtec. Blendtec became an internet sensation, mostly in thanks to YouTube. Blendtec is a company that sells heavy duty blenders. They created a simple, cheap video series (first video cost them $50 total) on YouTube displaying how well their blenders work. The names the series “Will It Blend?” They used their Blendtec blenders to blend random objects such as baseballs, golf balls, glow sticks, cell phones, magnets, etc. Now, this may sound like just a simple idea it was extremely effective. The following are the amount of views a couple of these videos have received: Glow sticks: 6.9 million views, iPhone: 9 million views, golf balls: 5.9 million views, magnets: 2.7 million views, baseball: 1.4 million views. Just these five examples produced 25.9 million views for this blender company. They have many more videos out there (producing over 100 million views), but I think you get the idea. According to CEO Tom Dickinson in his interview with inc.com, the company skyrocketed over 700% in value because of these videos.

As the above example demonstrates, the potential growth for your business due to YouTube video promotion is limitless. It is important to remember that YouTube allows you to promote video for FREE. Target the right audience, come up with interesting, creative videos and stick with it. Here is also a video to watch for more youtube for business tips.

The Global Strategic Management Institute has created a series of social media marketing conferences to aide the almost countless organizations who are shifting their marketing dollars towards social. One of this series of events is Social Media Strategies Summit. Global Strategic Management Institute (GSMI) is excited to announce the upcoming conference:

Social Media Strategies Summit – June 12-14, 2012 • Miami Beach Resort • Miami, FL

About The SMSS Miami

Social Media Strategies Summit Miami has been featured as one of the Top Ten Events to attend in 2012 and has been designed to apply to a variety of industries. Six tracks has been build, each outlined to focus on a particular industry. While tracks are organized by industry attendees are encourage to move freely between tracks based on their individual learning objectives. Each track includes sessions focused on the following categories:

1. Corporate Case Studies
2. Community Engagement and Customer Service
3. Measurements, including analytics, ROI and tools
4. Sales Approach
5. Legal Risks & Strategies
6. Marketing Strategies & Tactics

Companies are encouraged to send representatives from various department teams within your organization so they can each attend various sessions and collaborate increase the benefits. Group discounts are available so be sure to take advantage of the twelve interactive workshops and forty-eight learning sessions.

If you or your team are responsible for your company’s branding, marketing, strategy development, monitoring, customer relations, community engagement, public relations, media sales, business development, or legal, or you are the Chief Executive, Chief Marketing or Chief Branding Officer this summit was designed with you in mind.

About FOWD

FOWD kicks off with the choice of four different, day-long workshops, each lead by a totally inspirational industry leader. That should get you fired up for the next two days of conference sessions, with talks from some of the most creative and exciting minds working in web development and design today.

FOWD shows are what they are because of the amazing attendees they attract. Speakers always remark on how engaged, interested and appreciative our audience is. So there is always guarantee for a great atmosphere, and after a hard day’s web learning, you can enjoy the impressive levels of fun had at the after-parties.

Workshops

FOWD is committed to bringing you the best speakers in the industry – presenting on the hottest, most relevant topics and technologies. See the schedule for days, tracks, and topics. The full conference schedule is still being finalized, so please do check back soon for updates.

BO.LT is a place to capture and share interesting content

BO.LT gives you a way to save, organize and share stories, articles and vacation plans. You can gather great design examples, gift ideas, useful tips and any other meaningful content you find on the Web and save it all within your own personal, permanent collection.

When you share with BO.LT, you express yourself with every page you share. Every page you copy and add is your personal, permanent replica, to which you can attach your profile picture, your comment, and an invitation to explore what you care about. If you get inspired, you can even edit the page content and images before you share it.

Bookmarked content can be changed, moved or deleted. Links shared on Facebook and Twitter get buried after you share. BO.LT is different because it creates a gallery of permanent page copies that you can share and revisit at anytime.

BO.LT is a place where you can add anything you find interesting and share it wherever there is interest! Some of the stuff you bolt because it is funny, or useful (or even private!). Once it is in your BO.LT collections, it will be there when you come back.

But other stuff you want to share! So go for it. You can Tweet, Share, and even Pin with the touch of a button. And wherever that page goes, you go too. And when you share with BO.LT you can search for it later – because some content should be around more than a few hours.

The BO.LT Blog is also up, where you can check out the latest news and updates at bo.lt.

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TECHNOLOGY

The BO.LT Page Cloud

The BO.LT Page Cloud runs on top of our highly-scalable, edge-based page delivery platform. We have clusters of servers geographically distributed to move your content close to the folks who want to see it so they don’t have to wait.

Unlike many general-purpose cloud platforms, including Amazon and Google, the BO.LT Page Cloud is designed and built solely for the high-speed delivery of targeted, frequently updated HTML pages. Our Page Cloud has several advantages:

• Instant publishing – When you load a page into BO.LT, it is available instantly
• Instant changes – Whether you create a new version, target content, or rename it, your changes are reflected immediately. No waiting
• Flexible loading – Upload an FTP, clone a page, or create a new version with an editor
• Automated page optimization – Pages are automatically speed-optimized
• Targeting and Testing – A BO.LT address can automatically rotate or target different alternative pages to support A/B testing or even targeting to different visitor segments
• Automated analytics – We recognize and can often optimize tagging for tools like Google Analytics
• Your own URLs – We give you pages with your link, and you can change the link to whatever you would like

When a page is loaded into BO.LT, the HTML, CSS, Javascript, and images are copied onto the Page Cloud. Some assets, including embeds from third-party sites like YouTube, are not copied, in order to take advantage of the unique characteristics of those networks. Form submits and other critical actions from pages are proxied back to the appropriate servers so that you do not lose customer submissions.

read more about the Apps on BO.LT

Manage multiple blogs from single dashboard with ManageWP WordPress Plugin. ManageWP service has been created to ease the maintenance and save the time usually involved with management of multiple WordPress blogs.

It allows full admin functionality from one centralized dashboard – you can write posts, create categories, perform upgrades, upload new themes and plugins, manage comments and much more with just one click. ManageWP interface is build very similar (in most cases identical) to normal WordPress interface that you are already used to so you should have no problems finding your way around.

Take The Tour

Here is a list of the ManageWP plugin features:

• Automatic blog upgrades to latest version of WordPress
• Plugin and theme upgrades. Install and manage new plugins and themes. Bulk installations on multiple blogs.
• Add new content (from genuine WP editor). Manage your post and pages.
• Managing comments
• Managing categories and tags
• Organize your sites in groups and perform bulk operations on them
• Full Backups (your plugins, themes, uploads and database)
• Automatic scheduled backups of your blog (daily and weekly)
• Clone the blog to a new domain

Visit ManageWP Plugin website for detailed information and plugin download.