Study: Online spending rises during U.S. holiday season

Online spending increased during this year’s holiday season in the U.S. with more people making online purchases, research firm ComScore said in a study released on Wednesday.

Group: Online ad networks mostly comply with privacy rules

Despite concerns from some privacy groups and U.S. lawmakers about behavioral advertising, most large advertising networks generally comply with a set of privacy and data-handling standards adopted by the Network Advertising Initiative a year ago, the NAI said in a report released Wednesday.

Apple takes holiday customer satisfaction honors

Consumers were happier with their online shopping experience at Apple’s site this holiday season than at any other computer or electronics maker, a customer satisfaction measurement company said.

How To Write Articles Faster with an Article Skeleton

Have you heard of “blank page syndrome”?

That’s when you sit down to write and the absolute blankness of the page becomes overwhelming to the point where you just can’t think of anything to write.

For a writer, there is nothing worse than starting out writing with a blank page.

I’ve heard that professional writers will purposefully end their writing day in the middle of expressing an idea, so that when they start writing the next morning they just pick up with the thought they left off on, rather than starting a new idea from scratch.

That is a writing trick that allows you to keep your momentum flowing so that you don’t have to go through “blank page syndrome”.

When you’re doing article marketing, you need to produce a steady stream of articles every month. That means that you will be writing pretty regularly, and you’ll have to find a way to contend with “blank page syndrome”.

I’ve got some good news for you–in the same way that professional writers create a cycle of writing momentum by arranging their writing so that they never (or rarely) have to look at a blank page, so you can use what I call an “article skeleton” to rid yourself of the dreaded blank page syndrome.

An article skeleton is the bare bones of a future article. It can be a title, an intro paragraph, or just a few points to more fully elaborate at a later date.

If you can get in the habit of creating article skeletons, your will relieve much stress from the writing process, make it easier to write articles faster, and even have some fun with the whole process!

Here’s how to create an article skeleton:

1. Set aside some time to spend on brainstorming. The purpose of this session is not to write a complete article, but rather come up with several ideas for future articles.
2. You may already have some ideas–quickly start writing down makeshift titles and major points to cover. I find that sometimes the intro paragraph writes itself. The power behind coming up with article skeletons is that the pressure is off–you do not need to do anything final. You are just coming up with ideas, possible intros, and points to cover. The ironic thing is that once there is no pressure to produce a great piece of writing, your writing will often improve along with your creativity. Many times when I look back at an article skeleton I find that I’m very happy with what I’ve written and don’t need to change a thing. Then the little bit that I have already written just propels me to finish out the article.
3. Come up with as many article skeletons as you can–don’t spend too much time on it though. You should not be thinking too much about this or laboring over wording or crafting sentences. A good time limit for each article skeleton is about 5 minutes.
4. Get the skeleton in place and then set it aside for a rainy day.
5. When you sit down to write and are drawing a blank, look through your collection of article skeletons. Look at the titles and see what topic catches your attention. When you open the draft and see that you already have a head start, it’s a huge relief! It’s much easier to write the article once it’s already started.

I’ve got several dozen of these ‘article skeletons’, and it’s always a joy to open one up to find that the article is already started for me. Articles get written so much faster when you don’t have to deal with the “How should I start writing this article?” feeling.

Are you ready to kiss “blank page syndrome” goodbye? Will you try this technique of creating a reserve of article skeletons?

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Steve Shaw is an article marketing expert, and founder of the popular articles submitter, SubmitYOURArticle.com, used by thousands of business owners. Discover how to use the power of article marketing to reach thousands of potential prospects for your website – download a powerful free report on successful article marketing from http://www.submityourarticle.com/report

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

How To Write Articles Faster with an Article Skeleton

Squidoo – Squidoo Marketing Strategy For Increased Profits

As an avid user of Squidoo it became clear to me that there must be a million Squidoo lenses.

That’s what squids (Squidoo users) call a FREE domain and website at Squidoo.

Very impressive, really.

And these sites are touted as perfect for affiliate marketing, and I think they are.

Just remember to pick the right offer and keywords.

Come to think about it, it’s a little like that everywhere. After all, there IS competition.

So, just for sake of example lets say you have picked an affiliate offer from clickbank and it’s for FREE home electricity from solar panels called Solar Panels HQ. It’s purely for example but in case you don’t know this is a fairly hot topic and it will probably grow.

One of the most popular ways affiliate marketers get traffic to their offer sites is by article marketing with good, traffic producing content and the automatic SEO improvement by means of keyword text links in the authors resource box.

It’s just a GREAT two-for-one!

But there’s a catch to the great free site and domains you can get at Squidoo.

The catch 22 here is that Google will usually only show one Squidoo site in the top ten results. Sometimes, but rarely, two.

In order for Google to show YOUR Squidoo lens you’ll have to make your lens the best one in your group.

Think of it this way…Typically, Google will only pick ONE squidoo lens and ONE Ezinearticles and ONE video.

Having the product name in the title is one of the best things you can do so that Google will want to rank the site for “Solar panels.” Now, we can check out our competition! which is just another way of saying find out who we are up against.

I typed in this search in the Google search box. Type in… site: Squidoo.com “solar panels” and you will see approximately…. �Results 1 – 10 of about 21,400 for site: Squidoo.com “Solar Panels”. (0.27 seconds)�

Gee. That’s a lot. 21,000 or more sites mention “solar panels.”

So how many Squidoo sites are actually targeting that phrase?

Type in allintitle: “solar panels” site:squidoo.com – Results 1 – 10 of about 466 from squidoo.com for allintitle:”Solar panels”. (0.17 seconds)�

Well. That’s less competition. but still quite a few.

Note: I picked one a few months back that came up with 775 in this search and I’m doing OK. But I would prefer LESS!

So I typed in “Home made solar panels” and got, with the allintitle search Results 1 – 1 of 1 from squidoo.com for allintitle:”Home Made Solar panels”. (0.16 seconds)�

DUDE!!! Only ONE COMPETITOR AT Squidoo for Home Made Solar Panels! Amazon (among others) has an affiliate program for solar panels! Some of you aspiring affiliate marketers might want to get going on this!

Checking further I went to Google keywords Tool (type google keyword tool into Google search – you can learn a TON from Google searches) and got 2600 searches per month for “home made solar panels” and “home made solar panel.” You can’t get it much more targeted than that! The best key phrase would have to be “buy home made solar panels” which is a strong indicator of buying intention.

I checked the page one Google results for those terms and I saw that the results were filled with PR3 and PR4 sites.

You can handle those guys! Competition? Nada! You would want to get a few links from .gov and .edu PR 5 and 6 sites and I think you’ll soar right past them with a well targeted Squidoo lens and find yourself with the Holy Grail of Internet marketing. Which would be FREE TARGETED TRAFFIC direct to your offer by way of Google and the other search engines.

It really can’t get much better than that.

This real plan is current at 5PM Dec 24th 2009.

You might want to get moving!

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Riley West has been happily telling people about simple affiliate marketing for quite a while now. The formula is Web Page with Offer + Traffic = Sales. You do need a place to put your offer, after all! See this spelled out at Squidoo Marketing and don’t miss out on the unique description of a simplified affiliate marketing plan at One Week Marketing.

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

Squidoo – Squidoo Marketing Strategy For Increased Profits