So, you抳e got this great business idea which needs an information rich portal to support it. As erstwhile editor of the school mag, you fancy your chances of putting together some creative writing as web content. Right? Wrong, we say! Writing for the Web is quite different from writing for print publication. Why is it so? Mainly because of the way readers access and read information on the net.

People use the Internet mainly to find information, not to read it. People who read printed books expect a linear progression from one chapter to another, and are used to long pages of text. However, when they access the web for information, their expectations are very differ琫nt. Users tend to scan text on screen, pick keywords, sentences, and paragraphs of text. They do not want to see excessively heavy web content.

Visitors to a website read slower off the computer screen compared to when they read from a piece of paper. Large blocks of text, is therefore, unsuited to this media. Also, when large quantities of written matter take time to download, visitors are easily bored, or worse, scared off.

You should keep these differences in mind when creating the content for your business website. The first step in the writ琲ng process is audience profiling – know who you are writing for and what their preferences are. Understand your audience and write for them.

To make your life easier and your website more productive, we have put together the 5 most important guidelines for creating effective web content:

Be concise: Write only half of what you would for a print publication. Keep the pages short to avoid having to scroll down the screen. Long, flowing text is not suitable for on-line delivery. Get the users?attention with clear, concise writing. Avoid \”marketese\” – using buzzwords and extravagant adjectives. Keep promotional writing within reasonable limits.

Write for scannability: Make your pages easy to skim through and locate the key points of interest. Use the \”inverse pyramid\” structure – write the major points at the beginning, and larger chunks of information under subtopics. Write topics so that they can be read in any order. Break up the information into smaller and easily readable pieces. Use headings, lists and colored text to draw the viewers?attention.

Let the users choose: Most important, leave the choice to the reader. Let them decide how much information they need. Provide hypertext links for longer, more detailed pages. Express just one main idea under each topic. Eliminate unnecessary information and provide links to related topics, which can be accessed at will. Explain where the link will take them and what it contains so that the users can judge for themselves. Let your visitors go where they want to, when they want to.

Make it personal: The web is a very impersonal environment and many people are quite intimidated by it. Write in a friendly tone, but do not talk down to your audience. Try to keep your writing style approachable and credible in order to encourage users to trust you and therefore purchase from you.

Edit and review content: Your web site is only as good as the content that is on it. Review it periodically to make necessary changes and remove old, outdated information. Proofread! Proofread! Proofread! to avoid those irritating typos.

Concise writing, information chunking, and hyper linking to more detailed information will help you deliver good, readable on-line content that will sustain the user抯 interest. And that抯 the key to effective web content.

If you think you can handle spam your own way, forget it! It is impossible to surf the web without protecting your computer and mailbox with anti-spam software.

Traditionally, anti-spam software comes in three different forms ?as email plug-ins, stand-alone programs and server-based email spam filters. The email plug-ins receives all spam related messages and downloads them before sorting and signaling the authorities about it. Some types of software blacklists the spam IP addresses, notifies their Internet service providers and blocks them. Some software depends on the user to mark their spam messages and set to work on them based on the user information provided. So far, the best known anti spam software is Bayesian filtering since it follows no rules in its combat against spam. It continues reinvent itself by scanning your read mails with spam ones and thus learning more about new spam technology.

McAfee抯 Spam Killer is an effective spam filter which filters and prevents known scam and protects your inbox against unknown junk mails. Apart from just controlling your email content, it also automatically reports spam to your ISP. The latest version of Spam Killer costs \$24.99 dollars and comes with many unique features like invisible filtering and auto-detection of accounts.

Email Protector removes spam without touching legitimate mails. It is preferred by many as one of the best anti-spam software available today. It is easy to use, affordable and comes with a free trial to check out how effective it is.

Spam Agent of Anti Spam software has more than 1,500 preset filters which scan and eliminate unwanted messages. It also reports spammers and ensures that only unwanted mail is deleted from your inbox. This software comes with the facility of creating one抯 own customized filters for one抯 email boxes and is compatible with Outlook Express and other email software like Eudora.

I”m sure you have placed an ad or two in the free classifieds before today but … did you do it the right way? Are you using spam to help boost your website traffic?

1. OK, let me explain

Free classified ad sites are easy enough to find, simply go to any search engine and put in \”free classifieds\” and place your ad in as many sites as you like.

Most classifieds ask you to put in your email address for responses. Don”t use your normal address, get an auto-responder.

Use the auto-responder address in your ad. Your auto-responder instantly sends out your pre-imputed message to those requiring more information.

2. But what else happens to your ad?

Basically two things; responses from interested persons and spam from spammers. The advantage of an auto-responder is this: From your free classified ads your auto-responder address will most likely be harvested onto spam lists by email gathering software. Which is a good thing!?

Now every time someone spams your auto-responder address they will get your auto-responder message advertising your website, opportunity etc. Spam lists in turn get on other spam lists that eventually get sold to real people using real addresses believing them to be opt in lists.

If you get sick of the spam mail being redirected to you by your auto-responder, you can have your auto-responder messages directed to a dead address.

3. Dealing with classifieds

Now let’’s say you”ve decided to put in five classifieds a day. What I recommend you do is; each time you get to the page where you enter your ad details that you copy the URL to that page and keep it filed on your desktop. After one month of doing this you will have about 150 URLS that take you directly to the ADD YOUR POST page of 150 classified sites. This will also give you a speedy advertising system.

Simply cut and paste the ADD POST URLS you collected to an email and send it to yourself. Then all you have to do is click on the URLS and you”ll be taken directly to the ADD POST of each classified. With this system you may now add your ad to 10 sites per day as things are a whole heap faster.

4. Bring in the robot

You”ll soon be sick of typing or pasting your name into each classified so to cure that there is a free form filling robot that you should use. By clicking or pasting in the following URL and hitting enter you can now download the form filling, password protecting robot.

Your personal password will stop others from accessing this great little robot. You”ll never have to remember passwords etc again.

5. Tracking outstanding classifieds

If you want to know which classified sites are pulling the most prospects you can key each ad with a number. E.g. \”Website Hosting Now MLM, for more information put \”Free 22\” in the Subject\”. Just remember to put the same number next to the URL you saved from that web page so you can tell which site is attracting the most people. You can probably think of other ways to track ad responses. Tracking is important because you”ll be able to concentrate on the more responsive classifieds and discard the rest.

Also make sure your ad title stands out amongst the crowd e.g.

******\$\$\$\$ MLM HOSTING \$\$\$\$******

Also put in a few key words at the end of your ads as some sights run like a search engine. e.g. mlm, money, etc.

Now when you see spam in your inbox and notice that they sent it to your auto-responder address you”ll appreciate it. It also saves you time sending your message back to them as they already have it. Those high tech spamming robots now work for you, free of charge

A website of your own is no longer a pipe dream. If you have even a modest budget there is an excellent range of low-cost hosting options available, some with free website building facilities. The advent of free hosting providers even means that a quite passable site can be within the grasp of almost anyone with an internet connection.

First of all, however, you must decide where and how the site will be hosted. The key to deciding what you need in a hosting provider is to understand the nature of the website you are planning to put on the Internet.

For instance, if you are posting just a few personal web pages that hardly anybody will access, a very basic, perhaps free hosting service may be just the thing for you.

But before you dive in to either free or paid hosting, here are some tips that will help you avoid time wasting or costly mistakes.

1. Uptime Simply put, uptime is time that your site is available for Internet users to access it, browse through its pages, and place orders. For you, uptime means time that you can receive orders and make money.

Uptime is generally measured as a percentage – the percentage of time a website is up and available to Internet visitors. In industry terms, the more ”9s” a hosting provider achieves in uptime performance, the better.

2. Security If your website will sell goods or services then you will need to collects credit card payments and personally identifiable details from customers. In this case security is of utmost importance. In fact, your customers must feel confident that your site is secure, or you will not receive their business. Security is also linked directly to uptime.

3. Redundancy In addition to security and standards compliance, a good hosting provider will provide adequate redundancy. In simple terms, this means means having more than one of something – multiple servers, multiple firewalls, multiple databases and storage units, etc. In other words a hosting provider with redundant servers, for example, can ensure more uptime because if one server goes down, another can takes over and do the work of the first without losing website performance.

4. Facility Maintenance and 24/7 Monitoring To protect against disaster and other threats, a good hosting provider will maintains a locked, temperature-controlled data center equipped with fire protection and an alternate power source. The facility should be monitored on a 24/7 basis, as should performance details such as server uptime, load, traffic, etc. Monitoring should include an established intrusion detection system to guard against security breach.

5. Technical Support The amount of technical support you receive from your hosting provider is often contingent on the amount you are willing to pay in monthly hosting rates. Some low-cost providers offer no technical support at all, while others in the low-to-mid-cost range offer email or online chat support. Some of the best hosting providers offer phone support (sometimes toll-free, but not always) in addition to online support methods.

When browsing the Internet in search of a suitable provider, or turning the pages of a computer magazine, check what they have to say about these five areas of their service and keep these tips in mind before making a decision.

I wish you success!

The music of Grey’’s Anatomy has become one of that show’’s many calling cards. Every episode features new and great music from diverse artists that the audience would likely have never been exposed to otherwise. It is truly an incredible feat for an already conceivably popular and successful show to add another notch to its belt in the form of music selection.

The music that permeates over the show comes at many times, during emotional scenes, montages, happy scenes. The usage is unpredictable, but the effect is always the same. One of the best parts about Grey’’s Anatomy use of music is that most shows will use well known songs. Or, at least songs that we have heard before. This doesn”t create any sort of emotional response because we have history with the songs we know and we have certain feelings that accompany it. With Grey’’s Anatomy, these songs are new, mostly ones we haven;t heard, and are therefore inextricably linked to the show.

Grey’’s Anatomy has proven the greatness of their music selections by bringing us numerous soundtracks that feature songs from the show. While they don;t have every song the show has ever played, they have the most memorable and the best. Also, after every episode a number of fan sites will go to great lengths to tell us what the songs were and what bands they were played by. It is a great way to acquire new fans, and Grey’’s has mastered it.

Using article marketing is a great method of attracting interested/targeted visitors to a site, providing you show knowledge in the subject area. This has become even more important now that a new search engine algorithm is gathering pace.

Latent semantic indexing is a new phrase that SEO’’s are touting as a hugely important factor in determining how well a website ranks in the search engines.

Although the term may sound complicated it isn”t as difficult to implement as you may think, and it is important that webmasters begin to realize how they should be using the new algorithm on their websites and also with article marketing.

Although article marketing has long involved demonstrating an author’’s expertise around a topic and to then be rewarded with targeted traffic for that knowledge, we should also be including related terms around the topic so that we show the search engines that the article is highly relevant and useful to readers. Let’’s take an example:

I want to write an article about my hobby; soccer. To show the search engines that I know a lot about soccer I should be using terms that they deem relevant. To do this we should head over to Google and type in the keyword I”m writing an article around with a tilde (~) key before like so:

~soccer

This suggests a number of keywords in bold that Google deems highly relevant to the keyword \”soccer:

sports world cup official site

These keywords should be included in the article to demonstrate to the search engines as well as our article readers that the article covers the keyword well. Whenever an article is being written with the aim of ranking well in the SERPS this method should be employed.

It’’s no longer enough to write an article with a certain level of keyword density. I”d suggest that you”ve read over and over about the importance of keyword density; and that scattering the keyword that you are hoping to rank for throughout the article is the best way to go about writing. This is no longer the case and demonstrating our knowledge of a keyword to readers as well as the search engines (by providing relevant synonyms like the example above) is becoming important.

There no way you can enjoy browsing the Internet today without adding a few helpful tools. Pop-up blocking software is one of those tools you just can抰 do without, if you want to stop those intrusive pop-ads cluttering your desktop and interrupting your Internet experience.

Most pop-up blocking software relies on the way that most programs work with specialized proxy servers. Once the pop-up blocking software runs on the PCit is able to examine the addresses that your browser requests.

Although pop-up blocking software is an inconvenience, there are several good reasons to install it. Blocking pop-up ads frees up precious bandwidth, while protecting the individual user抯 privacy. Pop-up ads also clutter a user抯 screen, and take time away from the tasks at hand, since the user has to manually close each intrusive window.

Many a times the users are not aware that there is pop-up blocking software on their computers. This is since several popular downloadable Internet toolbars and browser plug-ins use the blocking software as a hidden feature. Users are advised to seek the advice of their systems administrator to locate this hidden software. Some blocker software relies on pattern matching to function. They look for windows and images that match known sizes and ad shapes.

Although blocking pop-ups remain a concern, there are other techniques that are being widely used by advertising companies to enter the user抯 computer. Advertisers use ad servers to place cookies on the user抯 computer. These cookies then enable advertisers to track the user抯 surfing habits. Although these companies often claim the function of the cookies they set is to help regulate the type and amount of advertisements, the facts are different.

Apart from the use of pop-up blocker software, users can also apply some ad-blocking techniques to block pop-ups. This calls for users to turn off all graphics, Java, JavaScript, and Flash in the browser. These users will also have to sacrifice a lot of their Internet experience, which primary reason users choose pop-up blocking software over these more extreme techniques.

The music of Grey’’s Anatomy has become one of that show’’s many calling cards. Every episode features new and great music from diverse artists that the audience would likely have never been exposed to otherwise. It is truly an incredible feat for an already conceivably popular and successful show to add another notch to its belt in the form of music selection.

The music that permeates over the show comes at many times, during emotional scenes, montages, happy scenes. The usage is unpredictable, but the effect is always the same. One of the best parts about Grey’’s Anatomy use of music is that most shows will use well known songs. Or, at least songs that we have heard before. This doesn”t create any sort of emotional response because we have history with the songs we know and we have certain feelings that accompany it. With Grey’’s Anatomy, these songs are new, mostly ones we haven;t heard, and are therefore inextricably linked to the show.

Grey’’s Anatomy has proven the greatness of their music selections by bringing us numerous soundtracks that feature songs from the show. While they don;t have every song the show has ever played, they have the most memorable and the best. Also, after every episode a number of fan sites will go to great lengths to tell us what the songs were and what bands they were played by. It is a great way to acquire new fans, and Grey’’s has mastered it.

If you are regularly browsing the Internet, a spam blocker is a necessity for you. Or you will find your inbox crowded and jammed with junk mail. It not only eats up your limited storage space, but also makes you vulnerable to viruses and other Internet nuisances.

A spam blocker will stop spam right on its way to your inbox and saves time, energy and space when you stop reading mail after mail of dubious offers.

Pop-up links are major sources of user information to spammers and even inadvertent clicking of one of those pop-ups could be disastrous for your inbox. Pop-up and spam blockers thus become important for the integrity of your computer as well as your email program.

The Google Toolbar comes with a pop-up blocker which will prevent most of the spam and pop-ups. You also have Mailwasher Pro, which is a regular spam blocker that prevents spam mail from ever reaching your inbox. This spam blocker will scan your emails before it reaches your computer and lets only trustworthy content to be displayed on your email inbox. And this is exactly the advantage Mailwasher Pro has over any other spam blocker. Others will have to first download the email on to your PC before they can evaluate it.

But at the same time, there are various spam blockers which will result in a junk-free inbox for you. One of them is Qurb, best suited for Outlook Express. It does instant searches of your incoming mail and protects your email id and your computer from all kinds of spam.

SpamArrest is also an effective spam blocker program and does not require a PC to function. It can be integrated into your email program and will filter spam that comes into the mailbox.

CloudMark Desktop is a highly self-sufficient spam blocker which learns from all anti-spam activity that goes on in the user抯 computer. It stores information on all blocking and unblocking actions of the computer and analyzes it with the activities of all other computers which have CloudMark Desktop installed. The result is that you get extremely refined and spam free Internet working hours.

With the advent of broadband Internet access and the proliferation of free video hosting sites like YouTube, Blip.tv, Revver and Veoh.com, today anyone with a camcorder and an Internet connection can produce a video and share it with the world. Producing video for the Web can be a powerful marketing tool for your business. Some benefits include:
?Free or low-cost publicity and exposure for your company
?Instant access to a worldwide audience on the Web, 24/7
?The ability to use your video hosting site抯 HTML code to add the video to your own Web site

Here are 4 simple steps for getting your video on the web:

1. Produce a short video
揝hort?is the key word here, for several reasons: First, online viewers have a much shorter attention span when watching video on the Web. Second, longer videos mean larger file sizes. Most free video hosting sites have a 100MB limit; some even less. For great, do-it-yourself, online video tools, visit Serious Magic and look at their inexpensive 揤log It?software. Techsmith抯 Camtasia Studio software may also meet your needs for simple video production.

2. Output your video for online viewing
Once you抳e got your video, it still needs to be encoded and compressed to make it 揑nternet-friendly.? Video files can be enormous, but compression software shrinks the video file size so it plays more smoothly on the Web. Remember to save or export your file to an online-compatible size, which is 320 X 240 resolution; and compress it so it抯 under 20MB, if possible. Be sure to save your video file in a format that most video sites accept, such as a Quicktime movie (.mov), a Windows movie (.wmv) or Flash (.flv) file. QuickTime Pro (for Windows or Mac) is ideal for compressing your video and transferring it to whatever file format you prefer (Windows, Flash, MPEG).

3. Upload to several free video hosting sites
Now comes the fun part ?You get to upload your video and share it with the world! Most of the popular video sites have relatively easy upload instructions: First, you抣l have to create an account for each site. The video hosting sites usually have a two or three step process that allows you to browse for your video file on your computer; add a title and description; and then click 搖pload?to post your video file. Most sites will also give you options for adding a thumbnail photo, selecting your genre or category or, in some cases, signing up for revenue sharing. I suggest that you go beyond the obvious sites like YouTube and Yahoo, and upload your video to some of the newer, more feature-rich sites such as Veoh, Revver, iFilm and Stickam. Visit the individual sites for easy upload instructions.

4. Promote and share your new 搊nline TV channel?br> After you抳e uploaded your video, the video hosting sites provide the option of 搒haring?your video by giving you a link/URL that you can e-mail to your contacts. Most sites also include a great feature that allows you to copy the HTML code and 揺mbed?the video into your own website or blog. Simply cut and paste the code provided into your own site. Finally, use RSS (Really Simple Syndication) to offer 搒ubscriptions?to your online videos.

Follow these four steps and you can have your own video on numerous video websites and on your own home page, as well!

Sidebar: Beyond YouTube?Everyone has their own favorite video site, from Bolt.com to Lulu.tv, there are dozens of video hosting sites out there. I find the most 搖ser-friendly?sites to be Blip.tv, VideoEgg and Veoh. For a video hosting site geared more toward business, check out Brightcove.com.