I just witnessed something so strange I had to write to tell you about it!

We have two cats, Sammy (a Persian stray) and Sweetie (a Siamese also a stray). Sammy is the sweetest cat you’d ever want to meet. Even my father thinks so, and he’s not cat lover lol!

Sweetie is also just that, only she’s got a bit of the devil in her. While she can, and does roam, the neighborhood (never too far), Sammy has supervised walks outside since some s.o.b. declawed him way back when and then abandoned him.

Okay, enough preamble…

Just now I was at the back of the house looking out the slider, and Sweetie had just stepped every so carefully around me to go out to lay by the pool. Or at least I thought that was her objective. Then suddenly I hear her making soft, sweet, consistent “calls.” Thinking something might be wrong I stood very still to try to discern what sort of sound this might be. I didn’t have to wait long (and her eyes are much sharper than mine). There was a dove perched on the wall and she was IMITATING the bird, as she crept closer and closer. The bird almost appeared to be waiting patiently for her arrival! (Yikes!)

Well, of course, I stepped in and put a nix to that, but wow! Hypnotic or what??

(Maybe this is where I throw in how to NOT be hypnotized into false beliefs online when it comes to marketing…?? Sorry couldn’t resist!)

As for arcades… Later today, I’m taking two 17 year olds and a 16 over to the Las Vegas strip to our local GameWorks. My son turned 17 on Wednesday and they are all impatient to go spend money like there’s no tomorrow playing even more games then they all typically play in a week’s time cramped into a few hours It’s very odd to think your kids (or kid in my case) can attain such a great age in such a short amount of time!

As for what’s coming up…

We’ll be writing about several other marketing methods and services we are using that are building our backlinking to this blog in record speed (see yesterday’s post for one) this coming week.

Granted, I’m sort of jumping around here, so in closing on this gorgeous Saturday I just want to slip one fine point in here. By now you have got to have read about and been advised repeatedly (not only here but everywhere – blogs and static websites alike) – of the fine art of building your business (blog or website or…) by using blog COMMENTING to your advantage.

Yet I sit here shaking my head. I visit a TON of blogs daily for ourselves and our clients, and while I do not comment on all of them, I would say on average I manage at least 10 comments per day. Good, well thought out, or hearty thank you comments. Yes I have the Google PR and Alexa Rank plugin on my trusty Firefox, but it does not keep me from posting ANYWHERE I really appreciate the information I’ve received. Whether it’s a cute/funny picture, a resource I needed more information about, or just a person’s “this is how my life is going,” taking the time to comment does MORE THAN build backlinks, it helps (and lets) other people know YOU exist.

Don’t let this wonderful opportunity continue to slip through your fingers. A comment a day – three minutes of your time – and you will be AMAZED at the results – yes with just ONE comment a day!

How easy can that be???

Enjoy your Saturday!

In our continuing quest to extend the reach of Online Internet Marketing Strategies, our Whole Hog Blogs system and service, and assist our clients with their blogging, we scour the internet for likely social media and internet marketing websites to list these blogs.

We’re happy to report that SpicyPage is one of these spots you should not miss!

Late yesterday, I signed us up for this service, fumbled my way around inside for a bit, listed a few sites, visited and “thumbs up” where appropriate other people’s blogs, and made a few new friends (notices of others wanting to friend us arrived almost instantly!).

Then we sat back to see how long (if at all) our SpicyPage would take to appear in the search engines (we watch Google primarily).

Lo and behold, this morning doing a quick backlink check, here’s what we found!

Go ahead, click on the image. It will take you right to our listing in SpicyPage! And the nice people there are already voting and commenting.

[Please do VOTE FOR US using the voting widget is in our left hand sidebar at the top.}

And, this service doesn’t stop there!

If you want to pull in some cash with your blog, there are blogger/advertiser opportunities you can investigate and sign up to do (we haven’t gone that far yet, we’re pretty busy LOL!).

Here’s a bit from the SpicyPage About Us page:

“Founded in September of 2006, Spicypage is the social online community where anyone shares, talks about what websites or blogs they discover on the net. It is a friendly community that allows everyone to find easier ways to spread the notable sites or blogs when stumbled upon them.

SpicyPage lets you post, comment on, vote on, share your favorites sites or blogs with your friends and others like you. SpicyPage is a new way of web-ranking solution to determine the best sites or blogs, 100% powered by its members. Discover and bookmark the new and the best sites/blogs out there and connect with people of the same interest as you.”

On top of all that, it is of course free for bloggers to sign up.

Don’t miss this social media marketing opportunity to promote yourself and your blog(s). We definitely are giving this one the thumbs up!

This may seem like the most obvious to some, but other Entrecard users might be “surprised” at this twist to visiting other people’s blogs and dropping cards.

Log into your own Entrecard account.

Using either the cards shown across the top or even starting with a current advertiser, right click on the card and open that site’s information in a new window (you could even just visit your own blog and start there, but logging into Entrecard is fastest).

Then (remember you are in a “new window” at this point), click on the link out to that particular blog. Find the Entrecard widget and drop your card.

NOTE: LEAVE THAT CURRENT BLOG OPEN IN YOUR BROWSER! Later you can revisit it to comment, but at a minimum you will allow the window to be open long enough to help NOT penalize the blog owner (read up on “bounce rates” to learn what I mean). Be kind

Leave the window OPEN and RIGHT click on the current advertiser who’s card is showing on that widget.

(Highly suggested: Use Firefox and make sure your newly visited sites will open in a new TABBED window or use the RIGHT CLICK method above.)

Drop your card on this next site and click on the advertiser doing his or her thing on this new widget.

Once you get a rhythm going, it’s easy to go from blog to blog to blog. If you “get stuck” (and you will every now and then), just start the process over with a new choice from your dashboard or under CAMPAIGN.

This way you don’t keep visiting the same ones over and over (unless you really want to), and get to add numerous visits quickly and easily.

Here’s another suggestion that really is well worth your time and (no) trouble:

As you close the Tabbed Windows one by one, take a look around and see if there isn’t something you’d like to put your two cents in about… in other words leave a comment!

It’s sort of amazing how few people are really using Entrecard to its greatest advantage. A quick, simple, super easy way to FIND WAYS TO COMMENT on other people’s blogs. You won’t always get a “follow” link, but you’ll be doing yourself and your blog/website a huge favor in terms of word of mouth advertising about YOU.

So let’s recap:

1. Drop Entrecards efficiently
2. Comment for personal name branding
3. Comment for backlinking

Do this each day for 5-10 minutes and you’ll have 100s if not 1000s of backlinks for yourself in a very, very short amount of time!

Enjoy!

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!