I did a search on PRWeb.com and discovered that Internet Marketing Center had been using this form of marketing for some years. From the search results at newspad.prweb.com, the earliest press release was dated 2005.

Here’s some the the press releases which I feel are representative. You will like to model your next press release base on these samples:

1. Give Readers Solid Value: Internet Marketing Expert Takes a Stand
   Derek Gehl sends a free eBook instead of his scheduled promotion and gets 8,000 downloads in 18 hours plus a 1000% increase in traffic to his blog.
2. Three New Last-Minute Internet Marketing Strategies…
   Internet Marketing Center CEO Derek Gehl wants online businesses to know they still have opportunities to increase their holiday sales as the busiest shopping season of the year draws to a close.
3. Derek Gehl’s Team Heads to Florida …
   CEO of The Internet Marketing Center to end national seminar tour December 2nd-3rd in Miami.
4. Internet Marketing Expert Brings Two-Day Free Seminar…
   CEO of Internet Marketing Center adds limited extra seating for hotly anticipated November 4th-5th Internet marketing seminar in Canada’s largest city.
5. Strategic Alliances Build Better Web Site ROI, Says Internet Marketing Expert
   Internet marketing expert explains how to build better web site ROI by forging valuable strategic alliances with other businesses to create new streams of income.

The above press releases are excellent content to promote online marketing businesses. In addition, you get backlinks from these press releases and in turn help you to gain higher PageRank and top search engine ranking in Google and Yahoo.

Thank you, thank you… to all those who link to me. I appreciate your reading and citing of what I’m ranting writing here.

I’ve noticed Google dancing over the past 10 days. A couple of my websites suffered a drop in pagerank – from PR4 to PR3. I think it’s because I’ve neglected them(for a long time, maybe more than 9 months) and have not been adding new content and implemented new link building campaign with them. So it’s sort of expected.

The good news is, for those websites that I actively SEO and build links, the pagerank have improved. I have a couple of web pages gained from PR4 to PR5. One point to note is that, these websites are focusing on Singapore-based traffic – in my own jargon, it’s Singapore SEO‘ed!

However, gaining higher pagerank is one thing and actually gaining higher position in the search engine result is more important. Isn’t it?

I am going to work on Wordpress as my preferred blogging platform. There are just too many benefits with Wordpress for me to adopt this fantastic blog engine despite the hassle of installing and constant upgrading my website so very often.

And here’s just 2 of The Most Important Benefits…

Search Engine Friendly

Wordpress is definitely more flexible for me to to SEO optimization. One of the biggest advantages is that you can use search engine friendly URLs e.g.
http://shihengcheong.com/blog/2007/01/predictions-for-2007/
which is preferred by the search engine rather than
http://shihengcheong.com/blog/?p=49

Trackback

One of the main reasons why this blog did so well, in terms of Alexa ranking, is because of the trackback feature. You see, when I quoted others’ blog posts, Wordpress can automatically create a comment at the post I quoted. And I am getting a lot more visitors to my blog because of these comments.

This is one of the most powerful way to promote your blog. I guess this is also part of social media marketing.

When we speak of domain name trading, people tend to think of registering a new name and selling it for a profit.

In actual fact, in domain name trading, I am talking about selling used domain names. “Used” in this case means the domain is actually pointing to a website with content and preferably indexed by the major search engines.

When the domain is used and has several backlinks(inbound links), there is a good chance that traffic is already coming to this domain. The more traffic coming to the domain, the more valuable. Because, you can monetize this traffic and also further improve your revenue by search engine optimization.

It is for this reason that savvy domain investors are paying top dollars for expired domain names.

What are the other reasons that people are pay thousands of dollar for an used domain name?

(It was reported that Diamond.com was traded for US$7.5 million)

Surprise! Surprise! My Alexa traffic ranking keeps improving – I mean the Alexa ranking of this site has improved tremendously, from over 5 million to under 280k! [Jan 23 - It's now ranked at 229,003]

And I want to know where does the traffic come from…

I have been tracking the visitors using MyBlogLog and also my server’s AWstat. But, there is not really such a big jump in the numbers – not so many unique visitors. So it must be repeated visitors and very likely from Kian Ann’s Blog Marketing blog. And this is a good thing. Thank you Kian Ann.

Blog With Wordpress

I believe my switch from Blogger.com to Wordpress is instrumental to this rise in traffic ranking. The trackback and comment features enable me to put my URL when I cited other’s blogs and commented on them. If you have not been using Wordpress, please install it now. It is quite easy. However, if you really need help, consider getting the Wordpress Complete book, click at the picture of the book for more information.

So, we thought Singapore blogs is a good niche and we will attract lots of traffic because we know there are plenty of Singapore bloggers – people young and old are blogging or starting to blog. So we started with some famous Singapore blogs such as…

• Mr Brown
• Xiaxue

We wrote to some of them and ask for reciprocal links at their blogs but none of them return the favor. What to do… Singaporeans!

Press Release via PRWeb.com

Our biggest marketing effort was the press release on the launch of SGBlogs88.com on PRWeb.com. Kian Ann wrote the press release and I submitted it to PRWeb.com. I thought it was well written and attracted quite a surge in traffic during the first 2 days of the release.

Why We Abandon the Word-Cloud Project

Unfortunately, Google was aware of such word-clouds made popular by www.500words.com and started to filter out these websites when more and more internet marketers created too many such word-clouds by Aug/Sep 2005.

Anyway, we sort of abandon the project and did not further our marketing and promotion. However, SGBlogs88.com does pull into constant traffic due to our initial efforts and we manage to sell several suggested tags.

Revival of Famous Singapore Blog Tags

It seemed that the word-cloud fever had cooled down and maybe it’s time to do something on our little Famous Singapore Blogs experiment. So, over the past 2 days, I revamped the website and give it a “less word-cloud” look. In fact, I think it looks more like a blog.

Now, there is even Flickr badge to spice up the look!

Hopefully, with this new look, we will get more Singapore bloggers to buy a tag at our Famous Singapore Blog Tags site.

I know there may be already too many of such article directories and the search engines may take drastic action to filter out duplicated contents. But then again, never try never know. One thing is for sure, I will need to contribute my own original articles to make my niche directory unique.

Also, I will need to spend some money on paid directory listing and PPC ads to get other to submit their niche articles to this directory. So stay tuned and I will report my progess here.

My reasoning to them is simple. The Internet is a place where people look for information and when one can provide the sought after information, people will come to the website. And one of the easiest way is to use Google Ads to monetize your blog traffic – I call this type of blogging. Adsense Blogging. As traffic grows, money flows…

Here’s an article that will explain how you can possibly Make Money Writing Blogs:

You have created a blog and your blog is dedicated to a niche industry. Have you ever thought that the blog could make money for you? We would look here in this article, ways and means, to make money blogging. Lets first have a look at what are the prerequisites for a blog needed to make money:

1. Blog needs to be dedicated to a niche market.
2. Updated regularly.
3. Enough back links (Don’t worry for it. Directory submission would be enough to begin with)
4. Good blog host or application (blogger, Xanga or typepad recommended)
5. High quality articles or news items supported with images.

Get the above criteria in place and Hurrah… You are ready to Make Money Blogging.

Top 5 Ways to Make Money Blogging

Lets now take a look at top 5 ways using which you could make money blogging:

1. Google Adsense
Google Adsense delivers text and image ads to the authorized websites/blogs depending on the content of the website. Small code is required to be pasted at proper locations on a webpage and Google automatically recognizes the page. Google shares the revenue it gets from the advertisers whenever a visitor clicks on these ads.

Google bills advertisers on price per click basis (PPC). Advertisers are required to pay only when any visitor clicks on their ads. They bid against each other for the keywords in order to receive better placement and thus prices for each keyword differ from one another. It is better to choose keywords for your blog which pays high $ per click.

2. Amazon
Amazon Associate program is another important way to make money blogging. The Amazon Associate program gives opportunity to website/blog publishers to promote any product from its inventory by adding a predefined code to their website/blog, which, when clicked by a visitor, takes them to the relevant product page. Once the visitor buys the product, the blog owner will be compensated with a commission.

3. Blogads
You can use Blogads as an effective tool to have a better control over the advertisers in your blogs. You can analyze and compare your profits with any one of your online agencies. Blogads can be simply specified as an advertising service used for the web logs or blogs. From the total money generated by Blogads, it retains 20% of it and the remaining money is paid to you through PayPal or checks.

Alternative Services:
• Crispads is another useful network focused on the blogs. You can put your advertisements in their blogs using Crispads. You can move through their RSS/ATOM feeds that help in generating revenues.
• Tagword – It is similar to Blogads. It makes you select the ads and their price.

Users can place their text-based ads in the site within minutes and the ads will be displayed instantly on the website.

4. Affiliate Programs
Your affiliate programs can help you earn a lot of money for selected products and services. Lot of websites offers you to become affiliate members. These affiliate programs can provide a better reach and an in-depth exposure to the products. The commissions for the sales differ according to the quality of the product, sales and marketing strategy involved. You can gather information related to the commissions by looking into the catalogues of Link Share and Commission junctions.

5. Text Links
Text links has emerged out to be the best form of moneymaking source that you can use instead of cluttering or crowding the page with ads. You don’t have to make these text links prominent within your website. This link can act as an extra value to your site and will also help to promote the rankings of other sites. In most of the cases you will find these text links placed in the bottom of the web pages. The best part of this strategy is that the publishers send and accept links as the market continues to grow.

About the Author
Matt Bacak, The Powerful Promoter and Entrepreneur Magazine e-Biz radio show host, became a ‘#1 Best Selling Author’ in just a few short hours. He has helped a number of clients target his specialty, opt-in email direct marketing systems. The Powerful Promoter is not only a sought-after internet marketer but has also marketed for some of the world’s top experts whose reputations would shrivel if their followers ever found out someone else coached them on their online marketing strategies. For more information, visit Bacak’s site at http://www.powerfulpromoter.com or sign up for his Powerful Promoting Tips at http://www.promotingtips.com

Getting listed in DMOZ and Yahoo! Directory will boost your website search engine ranking dramatically. However, both of the directories mentioned are nearly impossible for online home-based business owners. Here’s why…

Googlebot loves DMOZ because it is a human edited web directory and those who made it to DMOZ are considered as high quality web pages. Also submitting to DMOZ is free. However, it takes ages to be listed in DMOZ – 6 months if you are very lucky. So for small online business owners, this may not be a viable solution to gain search engine visibility.

As for Yahoo! Directory, it’s US$299 for a review of your website – there is no guarantee that your website will be listed. Again, US$299 is a lot of money to most of us. And YC will tell you that you could get 60 content rich pages for that much money and it is probably a more effective ways to drive targeted traffic that will make you some money.

So, we are left with no other option to get a link from a reputable web directory – until now.

The good news is: there is a relative new human edited web directory that will review your website for possible listing at US$39! The web directory is pageranked PR8 by Google. And many of the sub-pages are PR5. I just got my Singapore SEO Services & Web Hosting website listed under the Web Hosting section(PR5). It costed me US$39 and took less than 24 hours to get into PR8 web directory. Yes, less than 24 hours – I submitted at 11p.m. last night and at 8 a.m. this morning, my website was already listed on a PR5 web hosting page!

Now I will just have to wait a few weeks and get a better PR and also SE ranking with GYM.