The power of guerrilla marketing is on your side. I thought I would share with you a few ways that I have managed to get new visitors without spending a dime.

• Write for other websites - You can submit directly to related websites or write articles for an article distributer like EZineArticles. They allow you to attach links and bio info to your article and if its reprinted watch your traffic grow.
• Join traffic exchanges - Make sure the exchanges you join are targeted or it will be a waste. Also make sure the link is worth your time by verifying quality websites within the exchange. Don’t join too many or you’ll be infested with banners.
• Offer RSS feeds and email subscriptions - Subscriptions mean repeat visitors and repeat visitors are always a good thing. It also help word of mouth to spread about your website content.
• Submit to directories - Of coarse you’ll want to start by getting into DMOZ, but it never hurts to do a Google search on directories in your website’s niche.
• Join every community imaginable - Especially if you are a blogger. Profiles where you can add your link and feed are an absolute must. Services like MyBlogLog allow you to connect with bloggers while exposing your website helping to gain backlinks, build traffic, create branding and it never hurts to have your blog linked in with a lot of others somehow. This seems to be the only problem with not hosting on a service like blogspot or wordpress.com, so bypass it by joining EVERYTHING else.
• Get Dugg, Stumbled,Redditted ect - Social bookmarks bring insane bursts of traffic. It never hurts to have an account at one of these and bookmark your own content as well as other good stuff *If you feel guilty ask a friend with an account to bookmark you instead
• Discuss your website in public - Don’t be shy to tell family, friend, coworkers and colleagues about your website. They are much likelier to actually check it out hearing it from a face they’ve seen than seeing the link somewhere.
• Advertise ofline - If you own a store or office you should already be doing this, but in other situations you can find many ways to promote your site offline. Post flyers, leave business cards, take out ads, hold events like dinners or concerts. Be creative and be proud of your website.
• Comment on other blogs, post in forums - Add something useful to conversations and make your link available in doing so. Most blogs allow you to post your link separately from the comment text and adding a link to your forum sig works wonders. Commenting first or nearly first is likely majorly boost your traffic.
• Submit to search engines - Do not pay for this. There are many services that charge fees to submit to major search engines but you can do this yourself at no cost to you. Most search engines have a submit your site page on them somewhere and cPanel has a built in search engine submission feature that works just fine to get your site listed.
• Ping it up - If you are using wordpress, you have a built in pinger already. Pinging is a way of letting other websites know that you’ve updated. Blogflux has a great service that ping several major blog aggregators with one click simplicity.
• Link to others and trackback - Trackbacks show on the site you are linking as a link back to your site. They are a great way to leave your card on another blogger’s page and theres a chance they might see something they like on your site and return the favor.
• You tell us - What is a way that you have increased your traffic without spending any money?

Comments are currently  down due to these bugs but my blog has recently been raped by comment spam so this may be a means to an end.

You can start by picking up a green friendly shopping bag like the one we just had pressed up for you (shameless isn’t it?). For just under $15.00, you can tote around our original dismembered logo while running your errands.

The money you spend on this and other great products from our selection at our shop will help to pay our hosting bills and improve our service to you from this and other blogs in our network.

This is said to be another way that Google can improve service and support for Adsense users. I also read recently that a domain must now be over 5 days old before it qualifies to make money from Adsense. This is Google’s attempt to weed out those who register domains for a five day grace period (offered by some registrars) to test out how profitable the domain can be and then dumping it if they don’t make enough. Read more about it in Bob Ritchie’s post about domain tasting.

I am still a fan and avid user of MyBlogLog and chose to implement the community on my website in a different manner. MyAvatars is a plugin that displays the commenter’s Gravatar or their MBL avatar next to their comment. I found this was more of an everybody wins approach to using display pictures because they still get their profile linked and I, in return, get a comment.

After all, wasn’t that the original intention of having a blog as opposed to just a collection of articles? Getting comments? Many of us choose to reward our commenters with a top commentators list (much like the one I have). Well would it make sense if all somebody had to do was load my page to get onto the top comments list? Ofcoarse it wouldn’t. So, to me, it just makes good sense for someone to have to comment in order to get their picture on this website.

Although it seems to have generated a serious amount of buzz, it doesn’t all seem to be positive. As a matter of fact, most of the incoming visitors were looking to uninstall webfetti.

As you might have guessed, I didn’t test the software myself. I didn’t really see a need to as I have no problem customizing my profiles manually. For others it isn’t that simple. I would definitely recommend doing a little research before installing software to customize your myspace. There are hundreds of online Myspace profile editors that will do it for you. As I mentioned in the other post, most of these sites will try to nab a backlink out of you for supplying the code to edit your profile. If this is the case, I have a quickfix for you below.

How to uninstall WebFetti

Some programs provide an uninstall; The ones that don’t can be uninstalled by going to:
Start Menu>
Control Panel>
Add/Remove Programs>
Wait for the program list to load and select the one to remove.

Then hopefully most of the program is removed, but the registry can sometimes contain leftovers.
Start>
All Programs>
Accessories>
System Tools>
Restore>

Restore to as recent a date as possible before you installed the program causing the problems. You may still need to reset some of your IE or Firefox options as this is a toolbar (and they ARE usually naughty like that).

Another option is to run REGEDIT and look for anything suspicious that starts when Windows starts.

Removing Links from your recently edited profile

Most Myspace profile editors will supply you with a large and confusing code. It will usually start with a tag that looks like this:< style type= “text/css” >< /style >
This is the part you need to keep your profile looking as it did in the editor. In order to remove the the link to the profile editor website, all you have to do is find the tag that looks like this: < a href=”http://www.pimpmyprofile.com” > Of coarse the text in between the quotations is going to be whatever site you got the script from, but you get the idea. What you need to do is highlight from the beginning tag < a href=”sitename” > to the end tag, which will look like < /a >. It may be a capitol or lowercase a, but these are anchor tags, which are what makes links.

So now you have a safer way to edit your profiles, without installing any spyware or malware carrying toolbars. A good place to start is with Thomas’ Myspace Editor. Very simple to use and can be found with a simple Google search.

I was talking to some friends about how we all hate that the school uses Microsoft Word. After trying to find a Microsoft Word compatible word processor, many of them had given in and made the jump to actually buy microsoft software to use at home.

“WHAT?!?!” I replied in horror. I couldn’t wrap my head around it.

Some students use a free alternative to MS Word called Open Office. OpenOffice does everything you can do with MS Word and then some. It is probably the best open source word processor. However theres still the matter of physically transferring the document by email, usb key or whatever mobile device and then hoping it will look the same when it is printed out at school (cuz you know you don’t have any ink at home and you might as well use the school’s ink for all the college tuition your paying).

I prefer to work on and store my files in the same place with Google Docs. That way I always know I can access them on any computer anywhere. I don’t have to open my text files in any other program to read and print the documents, but if I wanted to Google exports in several useful formats such as PDF, .txt file, Word, OpenOffice format and even HTML.
I’ve also used Docs and Spreadsheets to work on group projects because we don’t have to be in the same place or even working at the same time and we can communicate and collaborate.

Apart from the collaborative features and optimum accessibility offered from Docs is the fact that you will save space on your PC and you can create and edit different types of documents all in one place. MS Word is part of Microsoft Office, a suite that installs several programs to do different types of things. Powerpoint for presentations, Word for word processing,   Outlook for emailing, Excel, Access,  and so on and so on. These are all things you can do from your Google account, most of them right inside Docs and you don’t need to install any software to do it.

If you haven’t tried Google Docs and Spreadsheets for yourself you don’t know what you’re missing. You can save yourself dozens of headaches and all you need is a Google Account.