Firefox just reached  500,000,000 downloads. This is an absolutely phenomenal milestone for Firefox. It is sort of hard to imagine what that number means. For some perspective, that’s roughly the audience size of 10,000 Rome Colosseums combined. It would be the weight, in kilograms, of 8,500 Boeing 747 airplanes. In dollars, for $500 million you and 15 of your friends can fly to the International Space Station.

OR, you can affect change and invite 15 of your friends to play a game and feed 25,000 people. With your help we can break another milestone today with FreeRice.com –500,000,000 grains of donated rice in one day. Imagine helping to feed the hungry while picking up some new vocabulary too!

Original Post : http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2008/02/21/500-million-firefox-downloads-complete-500-million-grains-in-progress/

When people think of affiliate marketing, generally, they don’t think about the main way you make the money. One thought is that all you have to do is sign up with an affiliate company and the money will start coming in. If only it were that easy. Unfortunately, there isn’t any type of money maker out there like that.

Affiliate marketing is about being passionate about something and promoting it. Trying to sell something you aren’t passionate about will not work. You must have an interest in it or no one will ever believe you or trust you. There are a small handful of people who could do this, but they are already very smart marketers and like to sell. Most people just getting started in affiliate marketing are not that advanced.

When you first get started marketing, you must realize that you have to sell to a list. If you don’t have one, you will not make sales. It’s all about the list in marketing. You must develop relationships with your prospects and market to the right people. People who are looking for your particular product. Otherwise, you are wasting your time.

If you don’t know the first thing about marketing, you owe it to yourself to get educated. One of the first and most important things to learn is how to narrow down a niche. If your niche is too wide and covers a vast number of people, you may not do well. Work on finding the best niche out there with the smallest amount of competition to start.

When choosing a niche, it is a good idea to choose something that you would use yourself. This will make it easier to sell. When you already have a good list of people to market to, you will know what they like and are looking for. What types of products or programs will bring value to your prospects? These are what you should be marketing.

First and foremost, if you don’t even have a list, you must build one before doing anything else. To build this list, you can use a web site that has an opt in, or write a blog with an RSS feed..

The most important part about affiliate marketing, I believe, is that you market something you are passionate about. This is something that will shine through in your marketing approach. Be honest and genuine. This will get you the results you want.

Patrick Godknecht an online marketing expert who wants to share his secrets with the world. To find out more…

Patrick Godknecht

Blogging: The new age online marketing

Business, computer and internet today are highly coupled entities. In the world where

each and every day people are becoming more tech savvy, in a world where internet

penetration is growing at a massive rate and in a world of cut throat competition there is a

immense need to drive humongous traffic at your site. Blogging is one of the ways to

generate strong traffic. Blogging is a medium of self expression; it may be showcasing an

idea, passion or product to the internet world.

This whole concept of blogging started in the year 1999 when a website

www.blogger.com was launched, which offered free blog space. Millions of people

created blog and soon world’s largest conversation begun. Blogosphere was doubling its

size every five months. Businesses soon realized the opportunity of online marketing

through blogging because blog acted as a common ground for companies and customers

to exchange their ideas.

Fundamental reasons why blogs help in enriching a business are fresh and up to date

content, informal way of connecting to the customer and the useful links provided on the

blog for additional information.

Moving further lets have more insights on how blog can be use to generate online traffic

Make customer your friend

Customer buys from someone who he knows; therefore it is of prime importance to get

known to the customer. This can be done by through creating blogs which demonstrate

your expertise and intentions quickly. You can also put testimonials and experience of the

people who worked with you in past.

Enrich customer understanding of the business

This can be done by giving links to white papers, articles and resources relevant to your

business. This will help customer in getting better idea of how you work and what are the

key areas of working.

Buzz Marketing

In this arena influential bloggers evaluate your product or service and write blogs on

them; this attaches a lot more credibility to the product or service. Thus bloggers can act

as product evangelists.

Virtual directory for Press

Blogs act as a virtual directory for journalists as they offer readymade content on any

topic. If a company write blogs for every new product they make, journalist find it easy to

publish it in mainstream press and thus increasing exposure of the product. Blogs can

also help in communicating a message to the press at the time of crisis as uploading it on

the official website may take a longer time.

Knowledge repository

Blog also act as a knowledge management tool where in you can see all the past postings

for any reference. For a new customer a company’s blog may act like a tool to track the

company’s history from the beginning as the blogs are stored in a reverse chronological

order. Thus blogs also help in researching a company.

After looking at in how many ways blog can help to generate online traffic let us have a

look into how we can achieve this more efficiently and effectively. Some of the tips are

as follows

Monitor your blog

All the while we have been talking about importance of blogs, but monitoring them is of

equal importance. Monitoring a blog give us insights of who are reading your blog,

customers are coming from which blog source link, which search engines are finding

your blog etc. There are various sites which offer these facilities some of them are

www.gostat.com, www.sitecounter.com etc. Knowing from where you are getting most

of the customers you can concentrate on that area and thus can use blog more efficiently.

Use Feed

Feed is a small file containing latest updates about the website. Feed is updated every

time website gets updated. Whenever you update your blog an update is sent to the

subscriber through a spam-free, virus proof delivery channel that by passes their mail

inbox. Thus feed can help in updating customer about the latest updates on your blog

which may encourage him to visit your blog.

Promote your blog

Once your blog is created include the blog link in your email signature, newsletters,

website and other promotional materials. There is a need to make blog an important

aspect in marketing strategy. Mention the blog link wherever your company name goes

along with your website link.

Get Indexed

There is a need to get your blog indexed by blog search engines as well as other search

engines like yahoo and Google to provide better exposure to the blog.

Importance of Keywords

Most of the search engines do a web search on the basis of the keywords provided by the

user. Thus there is a need for bloggers to choose relevant keywords while creating a blog.

For example google’s blog page rank technique algorithm gives lot of importance to

multiple content matching through keywords user have entered.

Write concise blogs

Writing a blog is an art, it checks how quickly you can grab attention of the user. Make

your point in first 200 words otherwise reader won’t find it interesting to read it further.

Do not waste words. You can also use pictures and videos to explain your point of view.

Apart from these basic writing rules should also be followed like use short paragraphs,

punctuate properly, avoid passive voice etc. There is also a need to write a blog with full

passion and conviction to trap reader’s attention.

Gone are the days when companies use to have their websites only to interact with the

customers. These days’ companies are having both websites and blogs in place and

General Motors (GM) is one of the best examples of it which maintains its blog

http://fastlane.gmblogs.com/about.html along with its website. Thus we can see blogging

is the next big thing in online marketing as it helps in generating tons of traffic.

Happy Blogging all the way!!

Respected Sir,
This is in reference to your announcement made on Dec.14th 2006 directing Govt Telecom Players MTNL and BSNL to Offer 2 MBPS to all their customers.
I am a MTNL customer from Mumbai having 590NU Plan which covers Night Unlimited Usage.
The Announcement from MTNL directed only the fixed usage members with the increase in bandwith and the Actual Users Like myself under the Unlimited Plan are barred from this Offer.
It must also be noted There is a total Unlimited Plan for both BSNL and Delhi MTNL Custumers but surprisingly MUMBAI MTNL is barred from this plan too.
I have asked for assistance to provide this plan to MTNL Authorities but this has fallen on Deaf Ears.
I have also posted an open Letter to MTNL Authorities regarding the same here : http://www.indiabroadband.net/mtnl-b…thorities.html (Open Letter To MTNL Authorities)

but still no reply or explanation has been provided till yet.
Looking at the services offered at other countries even 2 MBPS is quite low but it still raises hope among us for bright future.
I request you to kindly look under this matter and provide a proper solution to this problem.

Thank You.
Aakash Shah
statusinfotech@gmail.com