One of the great advantages of being a member to some remarkable sites, like Entrecard, is the ease at which you find out about really cool “other sites” going live on the net. Websites designed to help you promote your blog and your business.

Tonight I found one such website while approving an advertiser for our blog in Entrecard. Yes, it was that easy

The website is 125 Exchange.

When you click through you’ll notice the “affiliate looking” url (ours), but at the moment there is no indication that we get anything other than the great satisfaction of helping you find yet another spot to promote your blog.

Before I tell you about the set up, I did want to make mention of the look and load of this service. Wow! We like green, and the animation is super easy on the eyes. You’ll like it, too.

Okay, you sign up in two seconds, check your inbox and confirm, and then head inside where the inner workings are really easy to follow. Start by listing your own ad, you’ll need a 125 x 125 banner (just like Entrecard) and a tiny bit more information including the average daily amount of visitors your blog gets (check your cpanel stats). You will also be able to pick what categories you would like your banner to show up on, as well as indicate what types of sites should be allowed on yours.

To the right, in our Highly Recommended sidebar box, you’ll notice the current 125Exchange card showing. Go ahead, click on it! It will open in a new window and you won’t lose your place here at OIMS.

Well that’s it for tonight, we thought you’d enjoy finding another spot to do more free advertising for yourself and your blog.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is not our article, but the information is well worth your time.

by Gary Smith

The Web 2.0 social media revolution is in full steam. Are people finding your website?

As an entrepreneur, how do you make your business website stand out amongst 435 million other websites and more than 1 million blogs competing for your audience’s attention?

It’s not as hard as you might think.

To begin, let’s look at the demographics of Web 2.0 social networking sites, Myspace.com, Facebook and YouTube.com. This will give you an idea on how to position your message in the Web 2.0 World.

The Web 2.0 Social Networking Revolution

Web 2.0 is a real revolution on the Internet. And these aren’t just college kids…

- 62% of MySpace visitors are older than 25 (40% are 35+), and 83% are making over $30,000 a year. Nineteen percent (19%) are making $100,000 and up…

- On Facebook.com 46% are over 25 and 34% are 35+, but they’ve got deep pockets. Eighty-eight percent (88%) make more than $30,000 and twenty-three percent (23%) make $100,000 or more.

In the years ahead these numbers will get ridiculous…

- Social media giant Facebook is currently ADDING a million 25+ (non-student) adults per week to their rosters. That’s 52 million new users a year.

- YouTube.com gets over 50 million unique visitors per month. That equals over half a billion a year.

- Facebook and MySpace have the equal daily traffic of Google. Experts predict within the next year they will DOUBLE the daily traffic of Google search.

So your prospects are there. The traffic is there. The spending power is there. So NOW is the time you want to establish your presence on the social networking websites.

Web 2.0 Strategy: Why You Should Be a Maven, Not a Marketer

As a website owner, how should you position your message in the Web 2.0 world?

The increasingly savvy buying public will quickly shun marketers. Internet readers want information from the Internet. They don’t want advertising, marketing, or a “pitch”.

According to Schefren in his Attention Age Doctrine, the solution is to become a social media “Maven”.

A Maven is a trusted authority, like a friend, on the social media websites. As you gain their trust, your audience will return to you over and over again wanting to invest in your advice.

Five Steps to Becoming a Social Media Maven

Social Media Maven Step 1: Get in the Game

Begin blogging immediately. Create a video explaining how to solve a problem and put it on YouTube, MySpace, and Facebook with links back to your main website. Just those two things alone will establish more Web 2.0 presence than 90% of your competition.

Social Media Maven Step 2: Share your passion

Build your Web 2.0 website around your passions. Thirty-two year old Gary Vaynerchuk transformed his wine knowledge to his video blog, http://Tv.Winelibrary.com. It now has thousands of subscribers and does $50 million dollars a year in wine sales.

Social Media Maven Step 3: Be Controversial

Your audience will remember you more when you challenge the status quo. Controversy sells. Think like the tabloids and the local news channels here. For example, Web 2.0 Business Coach Rich Schefren challenges traditional marketing wisdom in each release of his Attention Age Doctrine special reports at www.attentionage.net/doctrine

Social Media Maven Step 4: Create World Class Content

You will drive repeat traffic to your website by offering top notch “how to” information. Gary’s wine tastings are highly educational on the benefits of wine, how to cook with wine, and how to choose a wine for your special occasion. Rich’s reports teach Web 2.0 marketing principles.

Remember, as soon as your audience feels that you are “pitching” them, you’ve lost them. So provide content not advertising.

Social Media Maven Step 5: Engage in the Conversation

Web 2.0 is a dialogue not a monologue. Internet businesses profit more when they observe and listen to their communities first before they broadcast their messages. Savvy mavens such as Gary and Rich encourage their audience to ask questions. The answers to these questions then become part of their user-generated content.

How Marketing in a Web 2.0 Social Media Environment Is Exciting

Visualize it like a big radio or television station or movie screen where you’re the star. You’re building a fan base so you need to entertain, inform, and deliver consistently for your audience.

You have more publishing power at your fingertips right now than at any time in history.

So use it.

Share your passions.

Reveal your trials and tribulations

Tell your story.

And, watch how quickly your audience builds.

=======================================

Master Copywriter, Gary Smith (www.rightbraincopy.com) has taught thousands of entrepreneurs how to write copy that persuades, motivates and inspires prospects to buy. He strongly suggests using Web 2.0 Internet Marketing Strategies revealed in Richard Schefren’s Attention Age Doctrine. Get it now for FREE at: http://www.attentionage.com/doctrine & discover never-before-revealed Web 2.0 tools and techniques to win in the Attention Age

Simply put, WhamX is a Web 2.0 Social Bookmarking news and article site that allows you to vote on your favorites. (That is a direct quote from their website.)

WhamX.com would like to become (don’t they all) bigger and better than Digg over time. It can be done, if you make enough people aware that you exist.

So how do you use WhamX?

First, you create your account. Update your profile with whatever information you would like others to see, including an Avatar for yourself or use theirs.

Then you click on the Submitted button and at the bottom of the page (still in the white text area), you will see the bookmarklet to grab. Either store it in your favorites, or if you are using Firefox, draw it up to the Bookmarks level and let go.

The other thing to remember is with this and just about every other service like this, in order to submit something (or vote or do anything) you have to be LOGGED IN beforehand.

Our suggestion is to pick the ones you want to be active with on any given day. Say you want to be able to hop in and out of BlogCatalog, Digg, WhamX, and Entrecard (just a few or you’ll drive yourself crazy). First thing in the morning (or after logging on and getting ready to start working), go to each of these sites and log yourself in. Then stay logged in. Usually that means leaving the browser window open down (at least) on your start bar or using the Tabs in IE 7 or Firefox to leave the web sites open.

Then as you go about your day posting your own stuff and reading and commenting and creating back links to others about theirs, you’ll already be logged into your chosen few and good to go

Below you’ll see a screenshot of the WhamX social bookmarking site, and it is good to note that (according to my Firefox browser with its plugin for checking this sort of thing), WhamX is prepared to give you full credit and full backlinks for your time and effort.

Enjoy!

We’ve talked about social bookmarking in earlier posts, but this evening in quite a roundabout fashion, I arrived at the Socialmatic website.

To be 100% honest, anything that could make some of the aspects to being online and growing a new (or existing) website or blog easier… hey I’m all for it.

Unfortunately, our own experience to date has been Onlywire, and we’re sorry to say it ain’t been good (or worth the effort)

However, that aside, we are aware of the pros and cons of using “automated methods” to post to social bookmarking sites. In a contest of mastery, doing things the good old fashion manual way most likely would win hands down. Primarily for the fact that you know it gets done, and also nothing ever really takes the place of real human interaction.

That said, we’ll be gearing up to run an experiment of sorts with this “newly re-discovered” social bookmarking tool.

There is also another factor to consider prior to bookmarking anything, and that is should it really BE bookmarked? Social bookmarking for the sake of doing it is (in our opinion) a complete waste of time – you could be out there doing so many other things really. Also, just because it’s marked doesn’t mean it will be found, there’s no guarantee.

The exception to this rule would be a site that indexes their submission quickly. Getting a good, solid backlink is worth the time and trouble

But all in all, be honest with yourself and think … should I or shouldn’t I, is this worth it or not…

I digress… Back to the experiment at hand. We’ll be taking selective posts we stumble across out online, and testing this service (maybe throwing in a link or two of our own to check the backlink thing in say Google or Yahoo!, too).

On the plus side, if you’re going to use a service like this, Socialmatic isn’t a mass submitter per se. When you find something worth bookmarking, and log into the SocialIt area, their engine is suppose to randomly select five spots (not all 30) and do its thing. This also sounds more like a winner.

It will be interesting to test, and if you’ve already tried it and like it or hate it, please do let us know (might save us some shoe leather LOL!).

PLEASE DO LEAVE YOUR FEEDBACK – We Follow and CommentLuv back, too!