This method involves 9 character passwords with the same beginning and ending characters (2 each) and five characters chosen in the middle according to a formula.

Step 1: Pick 2 Starting Characters

To make it easy to remember, all your passwords are going to start with the same characters. But these are not just any characters. Pick 2 characters from the list of special characters that you see above the numbers on your keyboard and to the left of the Enter key.

These characters are: ~`!@#$%^&*()_-+={}[]:;”‘<>?/|\

Pick any two of them as your password starting characters. To show you an example as you read through the steps, let’s pick % and * (pick your own two).

In my example, all my passwords are going to start with %*.

Step 2: Pick 2 Ending Characters

In the same way pick two different special characters that will be at the end of your passwords. Don’t pick the same characters as your starting characters.

For the purposes of my example, let’s pick & and +. That means, all my passwords are going to end with &+.

Step 3: Use the Website Name to Create the Middle Characters

Take the first 6 characters of the website domain name where you want to use the password. If the domain name is shorter than 6 characters, then use the full domain name.

In my example, let’s create a password http://www.agentmapit.com.

The first 6 characters of the domain name is “agentm”.

Now we’re going to substitute some characters and capitalize others.

Substitute the following characters: a becomes @, e becomes 3, i becomes 1, o becomes 0, and u becomes ^.

Now we have “@g3Nntm”.

Now, decide on a standard for yourself regarding which character(s) you’re going to capitalize.

For this example, let’s say we’re always going to capitalize the 2nd consonant.

So now we have “@g3Ntm”.

The next step is to drop the last character (”m” in our case), and append the Ending Characters (*^) that you picked in Step 2.

Our password is now “@g3Nt&+”.

Now add the Starting Characters (Step 1) to the beginning of the password.

The final password is “%*@g3Nt&+”.

A Few More Examples

Domain: http://www.twitter.com, Password: “%*twiT3&+”.
Domain: http://www.tweetlater.com, Password: “%*tW33t&+”.
Domain: http://www.facebook.com, Password: “%*f@C3b&+”.
Domain: http://www.ebay.com: Password: “%*3b@Y&+”

Remember

Pick your own 2 starting characters and your own 2 ending characters.

Make your own capitalization rule (you can capitalize more than 1 character if you want to.)

You can also use more than the first 6 characters of the domain name if you want to. It just means your passwords will be slightly longer.

This interaction is what “social networking” is all about – with the most glaring examples being platforms like Facebook and Twitter. They provide you the opportunity to interact with an ever-broadening network of people who share your interests, or are interested in what you have to say.

Those of us interested in using these social networking sites as marketing tools can find it a bit overwhelming. Keeping up with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, ActiveRain, and many others is difficult and time-consuming. And if there is no comprehensive strategy for our social networking it will eventually become tiresome and of questionable value.

As part of a sensible online social networking strategy, most “experts” agree it is important to have your blog at the centre of things. Your blog is where you can express yourself in greater depth, and without worrying that you are being too pushy or sales-oriented.

Generally speaking, your friends and followers on sites like Facebook or Twitter do not like to be bombarded with a sales pitch whenever they read your entries. But using your tweets and Facebook entries to point them to interesting stories, articles, videos, or special offers is perfectly acceptable. The easiest place to point them is your own blog.

This strategy is no mystery and it has been discussed many times by marketing experts: use your blog to build your online identity, publish your opinions, and present your special products and offers. Use the other social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) to drive traffic to your blog.

In other words, as I said above, your blog should be at the center of your marketing strategy. Looking at it this way may encourage you to reconfigure your whole online marketing strategy. But that is probably a good thing.

Twitter 101 is meant to be the definitive guide for optimal Twitter usage. It explains the basics of Twitter, getting started, common Twitter terminology, best practices and includes business case studies. You can also get the Twitter Guide for business as a downloadable slideshow.

Carney said today (July 23) that the Canadian economy would see modest growth in the third quarter of 2009. The Canadian economy has been officially in recession for 9 months – quite a bit shorter than the last two recessions in 1990-92 and 1981-82.

That’s right. The recession that many thought would be a depression only lasted 9 months. Carney attributed the turn around to low interest rates, healthy house sales, government stimulus programs, and continued growth of family borrowing.

Carney also said that the Canadian economy shrunk so much during this recession that climbing all the way back would take quite a while.

See The recession is over. Cue the recover.

Youtube.com – This is one of the most widely used and easiest places to find blog content. Say you have a “golf swing tips” blog. Just go to Youtube, search for “golf swing tips” and pick the one you want to include in your blog. Find the embed code and copy it into the appropriate place in your blog. Make sure to accompany the video with a short commentary of your own. You can add links to your commentary, just like an ordinary blog post.

EzineArticles.com – This is the best article site on the web. Search for articles using keywords. Pick the article you want to re-publish. Copy it into your blog, making sure to publish it just as you found it. That includes retaining the author’s “resource box”, links to his or her websites, and all links within the article.

Google News/Yahoo News/Bing News – If you occasionally want to publish a current “news” story, then one of the high profile news sites will give you lots of ideas. For example I just did a search in Bing News (bing.com) for “electronic gadgets” and found:

- Third of teens use cell to cheat
- Sony CEO says restructuring steps on track
- iPhone to hit stores as Apple awaits Jobs’ return

…and many more.

Most of these stories provide good fodder for blog posts. Remember, don’t just copy the news story, and be sure to add your own comments.

Free Original Articles with reprint rights – About the only place you will find top quality free articles is in a membership site of which you are a member. For example, if you are an AgentMapIt member we provide free articles ideal for use in blogs and newsletters. These are high quality, original, “free” PLR articles (PLR stands for “Private Label Rights”). For example, see Free Green Tips.

PLR Articles – You can buy groups of articles that have been written by someone else and bundled as a package of PLR articles. PLR stands for “private label rights”, which means that you can publish the articles as they are, modify them, just use parts of them, and put your own name on them as the author. Most PLR packages are poorly written – often by non-English speakers – and often 5 or more years old. They have probably been recycled several times, so if they are any good they have probably been published elsewhere a number of times. I don’t recommend using PLR articles.

Outsource your blog post writing – There are all kinds of people out there prepared to write quality short articles for next to nothing. For example, if you are using the Categorize and Cycle approach (where you have 4 or 5 categories and try to write on article a week in each) you could have a ghost writer create 5 articles for each of 4 categories (20 short articles). Chances are you can find someone to do this for less than $150. Often they will do it for as low as $5 each. Stretch those articles out over two or three months (you can add your own stuff between outsourced articles) and you have a pretty inexpensive way to create a totally original blog.

Of course different writers will have different areas of expertise, and the writing quality will vary from writer to writer. A good place to find writers is on forums such as The Warrior Forum.

Outsource your entire blog – Finally I would be remiss not to mention our own blogging service. Our Blog and Mail service includes setting up and maintaining your blog, writing and posting unique articles at least once a week, helping you create a contact list, and sending an email to that list at least once a month. In other words, this is an entire marketing program built around having your own blog and regular email campaign. You really don’t have to do anything. We do the entire thing.

This approach is even more effective when integrated with an aggressive Twitter campaign.

As you can see, even if you have very few ideas and have limited writing skills it is not that difficult to create your own interesting and effective blog. However it is important to remember what I said at the beginning of this report: without traffic your blog might as well not exist. The very first thing
you should do is think through how you intend to get traffic to your blog.

In my estimation the traffic generation methods discussed by would-be blogging gurus usually come down to SEO and they do not work for local business blogs. The only method I have found that does actually generate traffic is the Blog and Mail method outlined elsewhere in this blog.

1. Pick an interesting topic for your blog
2. Write interesting posts with catchy titles
3. Optimize your blog posts for the Search Engines
4. Promote your blog on blog directories and bookmarking sites

If you do these things, the forumula says, you will get the attention of the Search Engines (especially Google), and they will send you a “stampede of targeted traffic”.

In case you haven’t noticed, this formula relies almost exclusively on the Search Engines for traffic, and because of this it is seriously misleading. I can state with no hesitation at all that if you use this formula to get traffic to your blog you will almost certainly be disappointed by the results.

Yes, there are bloggers who get tons of traffic, and much of that traffic is driven by the Search Engines. But what you’re not told is that these bloggers have built up their list of followers over quite a long period of time, usually using a strategy other than simply relying on the hit and miss results you get from the search engines.

And if you are a local business – a real estate agent, accountant, lawyer, chiropractor, restaurant, landscaping company, etc., etc. – you are addressing a narrowly targeted local niche where the fact is only local followers matter to you. You will soon find that to rely on the search engines to deliver a lot of traffic from such a relatively small target market will be extremely disappointing.

For more ideas on traffic strategies that do (and don’t) work, get this free report called Blogs That Work.

Getting traffic to your blog is the biggest and most important issue for bloggers. Not topic, not content, not design.

Traffic. That is where your blogging strategy should start. If you don’t have a traffic strategy you’ll be spending a lot of time writing stuff that very few people will ever see.

There’s no doubt that a blog can often be the best way to put a consistent face on your business. Rather than a static website that makes no attempt to invite visitor interaction, a blog can be a perfect way to engage your people and build a relationship with them.

But there is a problem with blogs, and we might as well state it right at the beginning. Your blog will only be effective if it has two things: good content and quality, targeted traffic.

And of these two things (content and traffic) traffic is by far the more difficult issue. Getting quality traffic is the problem for web marketers. In fact, if your website or blog has no traffic it might as well not exist.

– Blogs That Work – Get The Free Report

So, this may sound odd, but it is really the place to start in developing a blogging strategy.

Ask yourself: “How can I generate traffic to my blog?” If you don’t have a good answer to this question you should probably stop before you go any further.

I started using Twitter a few months ago and then stopped after a short time. It didn’t make much sense to me and, it was cluttered with spam, and to tell you the truth, I couldn’t get my own act together.

Last week after watching a couple of Perry Belcher’s videos I decided to take another crack at it. You can follow me here.

Figuring out your own objectives is something you really have to do before you can expect any serious results from any of your marketing efforts – online or offline. That’s especially true with Twitter where you are trying to put yourself out there in 140 characters or less. The message has to be simple, concise, easily summarized and easily grasped. It also has to be enticing enough or interesting enough to get people to respond – to get them to follow you, or read your tweets, or click thru to your linked sources.

But I don’t pretend to be a Twitter expert (yet). I can see that it has potential but I’m still trying to figure out the best way to get the most out of it.

Have you had any Twitter success?

Say you’re interested in dog training. If there is a dog training topic already created in TipDrop you can share your insights in (relatively) short entries of 255 words max. If there is no topic in your area you can create one.

Other members can vote your tips up or down. The more votes a tip gets, the higher it stays on the tip page for that topic.

This is a great way to build a focused identity for yourself based on the quality of your tips. Check it out at TipDrop.com.

If you have a website promoting local services (such as a local real estate site) it is difficult to compete with search engine optimization experts who have built sites targeting your most important keywords. These “experts” have no interest in serving your market with useful information. What they want is to gain local ranking so Google will send searchers to click on their pay per click ads.

It’s a free world, so people can do whatever they want with their websites. But it’s too bad Google has to reward website owners who play the game this way.