Saturday, March 31, 2012

Jane's Addiction - Jane Says (Americablog)

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Everything you Will need to Know about Adverse credit Financial ...

In regards to Loans, there is one valuable point which you might recall, your credit score score may be the only factor that is certainly separating you from the superior credit level. Nevertheless you might not ever have the ability to get your fingers on the fabulous fee if your credit score score is less than pleasing, you can easily make variations later on on because of the life of that financial loan.

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Tags: loans, loans for people with bad credit, money

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Reputable Social video marketing | The Blogging Site Since 2008

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Friday, March 30, 2012

63 Free (or Almost Free) Ways to Market Your Business - Search ...

oh-yes-its-freeWhether you're a boot-strapped startup on a shoestring budget or a blue chip company with a giant stack of cash in the bank, every company can use free marketing ideas to promote their brand, products, or services.

After digging deep into my bag of marketing tactics from over the years, I've pulled together 63 free (or almost free) marketing tips and tactics that any business on the planet can use big or small to generate publicity, buzz, and awareness on the cheap.

  1. Author and publish guest posts on high profile or well-trafficked sites in your niche. It's a great way to promote both your brand and your expertise. Free guest blogging communities, like My Blog Guest and Guest Blog It, are a good starting point.
  2. Find bloggers to review your products. Use simple query operators, such as "[your product type] + reviews [or] review" (e.g., "lingerie reviews"), to locate promotional review opportunities for your product offerings. You can also use free link building tools from Buzzstream to generate prospecting queries.
  3. Similar to leveraging product reviews for free promotion, mine the search results for bloggers who host product giveaways, using simple query operators, such as "[your product type] + giveaway" (e.g., "charm necklace giveaway").
  4. Hold a sweepstakes, contest, or a giveaway on your site, promote it on your site, and on your social media accounts for some free buzz.
  5. Pool proprietary data from your organization's niche, industry, or even customer database (get customer consent and anonymize the data, of course) and compile it into a free report, like the HubSpot State of Inbound Marketing Report or the Veracode State of Software Security Report.
  6. Leverage social media and social distribution channels to both demonstrate expertise in a subject and to share your content.
  7. Make content distribution frictionless by adding social sharing icons site-wide (Facebook, Twitter, Google+). Use a free Wordpress plugin like Sharebar or have a Web dev resource implement developer sharing code, like Facebook's "Like" button code.
  8. Answering questions is a great way to build relationships and your expertise while helping others unselfishly market your brand and you can do this on social sites:
  9. Answer questions on Google+
  10. Answer questions on Facebook
  11. Participate on the Q&A website Quora and build your business.
  12. Join relevant or niche-related groups on LinkedIn and answer group questions and post news and event about your organization.
  13. Leverage inboxQ to find and answer questions on Twitter.
  14. If you're in the clothing, fashion, beauty, entertainment, design, photography, food, jewelry, or a similar lifestyle-niche business, you're a natural fit for image sharing on Pinterest, which can generate great exposure with high quality photos of your products. Here are?56 Ways to Market Your Business on Pinterest.
  15. Given that YouTube is the world's second largest search engine, create a YouTube Channel and leverage proven video marketing tactics, like "how-to" style video content and response videos to improve search visibility and potentially drive leads.
  16. And make sure you claim your social media profiles with a tool like KnowEm.
  17. Join forums that are relevant to your companies niche, join in the conversation and offer insightful and helpful answers to questions.
  18. Blog, blog, and blog some more. Give your wisdom and experience away for free. Leverage your blog to build relationships and build brand awareness.
  19. Spotlight individual thought leaders: ego bait-type posts are a great way to connect with influencers in your niche, who in turn can help expose you and your company to their audience.
  20. Run a big best blogs in your niche type post featuring a bunch of great blogs and bloggers. Again, this is a form of ego-stroking that builds relationships, social engagement and many of participants will help promote the article. Tip: create "best blog" badges that blogs on the list can add to their sites.
  21. Run a big group interview - helps you build relationships and brand evangelists within your niche, gets links, social media engagement and you can potentially create a super authoritative document that ranks for a competitive topic.
  22. Do individual video interviews on news-makers in your niche via Skype. Post them on YouTube, embed the YouTube code on your site, transcribe the video with a cheap tool like CastingWords, post the transcribed content on your blog for search engines to grab.
  23. Run a weekly roundup where you highlight blog posts from around your industry; helps you make friends and valuable connections. Tip: be sure to @ the bloggers on Twitter from your roundup each week.
  24. Turn inquisitive emails from clients or notable comment questions from your blog into Q&A type blog content; mention the client or question-asker in the post and link back to their website or social profile (good for relationship building, word of mouth marketing, etc.).
  25. Run reviews on and help promote beneficial products or services in your niche (ego-stroking, relationship building).
  26. Create an online survey and host it on your blog (you can use Survey Monkey or a free WordPress plugin like WP-Polls to manage results).
  27. Then create a follow-up post announcing the results from your survey on the blog, add pretty data charts to your blog post, issue a press release.
  28. Respond to all comments on your blog; engaging with your readership and nurturing a community on your blog is a fantastic and low effort way to build your brand and your site's following.
  29. Solicit guest posts on your blog and get free user-generated content and make friends in your niche.
  30. Sign up to get free media opportunity alerts from HARO (Help Out a Reporter), which will connect you with reporters who need expert insights for their stories.
  31. Flipping the HARO idea around, if you've got a bunch of in-house experts, leverage that asset and create an expert's page on your site and offer free expertise to authoritative publications/personalities - many universities have success with this same strategy.
  32. Volunteer your company's founders or thought leaders for interviews at other publications and blogs
  33. Give a donation to a local organization or a national charity and get exposure on their donors page and potentially a link back to your site.
  34. Sponsor an event and get listed as a supporter on their event site.
  35. Organize a local Meetup event (if you get someone to sponsor it, it'll probably be free).
  36. Speak at a local Meetup event; generate exposure for your company and services and position yourself as a thought leader.
  37. Offer a testimonial or endorsement for a vendor or colleague on their website.
  38. Ask for a testimonial or endorsement from your clients. It's a free form of proof of concept for your products and helps instill trust, which can lead to more sales.
  39. Create a free tool, gadget, widget or app and brand it with your company logo and in some cases embed a hyperlink back to your website to raise the "SEO value" or your own site. Advertise your free tool on your blog, issue a press release, conduct outreach to industry sites that might cover it, look for free tool directories or a free distribution platform like Upload.com to get exposure.
  40. Or get even more targeted and build a tool or feature you know a thought leader will love and give it to them for free (make them a brand advocate).
  41. Leverage the "Freemium business model" and give away some part of your product functionality for free because "the concept of free" makes people feel like they have nothing to lose.
  42. Sell your products and market your business on Craigslist.
  43. Join the local chamber of commerce for free brand building and studies show that 63 percent of consumers want to buy from local chamber members.
  44. Reward your long-term customers with loyalty discounts (word of mouth marketing, brand advocates).
  45. Respond promptly to customer complaints (again, and can't say it enough, word of mouth is the best marketing tool, free or not).
  46. Use SlideShare to market to a large audience for free: post presentations, case studies, create how-to-guides, repurpose blog content, etc. The domain strength of SlideShare alone helps your content rank well.
  47. Engage with popular blogs in your niche via intelligent comments. Link back to relevant value-add content on your site where applicable.
  48. Help influential people in your space promote their own products on your blog and on social media (I guarantee that most will return the favor and help promote your stuff too).
  49. Create a free how-to webinar or video.
  50. Create awards for your industry, promote it on social media, reach out to everyone nominated for an award, create branded badges for the winners.
  51. Partner with related, established but non-competitive companies to co-sponsor webinars, white papers, etc.
  52. Create a free newsletter signup on your site and publish a free newsletter each month. Tip: to get fresh content on the cheap, you can repurpose content from your blog, Webinars, turn a white paper into a series of newsletters with a link to download the rest for free, and so on.
  53. Offer a series of "free tips" to people who have given you their email address.
  54. Offer live chat and live customer support on your website.
  55. Market other products, services, upgrades from your company in your thank you emails and pages.
  56. Create an affiliate program; determine if it makes the most sense to skip the third party providers or do it yourself.
  57. Attend industry conferences and chronicle the conference (live blog sessions, take pictures at events, etc.).
  58. Ask employees to link to products/offers from their personal sites and profiles, as links raise the "SEO value" of your website, which can drive higher rankings.
  59. Give a discount to people who share your product (tweet, blog, etc.).
  60. Build charitable donations into your pricing (percentage of your profit goes to charity).
  61. Organize a campaign against a particular injustice in your niche and get free publicity.
  62. Think totally outside the box and do stuff like helping others with no expectation of reciprocation, which can cause really cool things to happen for your brand.
  63. Read blogs, subscribe to RSS feeds of top marketing blogs and get even more free, or almost free ideas, each day to help market and grow your business on the cheap. This big list is a darn good place to start.

(Thanks to my business partner Tom Demers?for adding some great suggestions to the list.)

Finally, check out the comment thread below. I'm encouraging everyone who reads this article to add more ideas to the list, which hopefully will elicit even more free marketing ideas.

SES Toronto 2012 is June 11-13. Register before May 11 and save up to $300!

Source: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2164835/63-Free-or-Almost-Free-Ways-to-Market-Your-Business

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Video film My Hot Wheels

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Source: http://buzz-videos.eu/video-film-my-hot-wheels/

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Thursday, March 29, 2012

How 'The Hunger Games' scored a marketing win

Lionsgate took a number of huge marketing risks with 'The Hunger Games,' including a March opening. They paid off with the biggest box-office debut outside of the summer season.

?The Hunger Games? movie was expected to be big. But no studio could have dared hope for this.

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The first film installment of Suzanne Collins? bestselling trilogy of young adult novels, which premiered Friday, brought throngs of fans to theaters, to the tune of $155 million at the domestic box office and $59.3 million internationally, garnering a fat $214 million in global profits on its opening weekend. It shattered box office records in the process (before adjusting for inflation).

?The Hunger Games? is the biggest film to open outside of the summer blockbuster season, as well as the biggest nonsequel film debut in history. It was the third-biggest opening weekend of all time, behind last July?s ?Harry Potter: The Deathly Hallows Part 2? and 2008?s Batman sequel, ?The Dark Knight.?

The film sent stock prices soaring for its parent studio, Lionsgate, and even lent a boost to floundering teen clothing retailer Hot Topic, which sold out some of its supply of Hunger Games merchandise well before the film?s premiere.

"The amount of momentum and speed with which the momentum of this film swept the country was phenomenal," says Vincent Bruzzese, president of the Worldwide Motion Picture Group, a film industry market research firm based in Los Angeles. "It doesn't hurt that it was a very well received movie, critically.? No matter what, from the marketing alone it would have performed, but if you have a good movie on top of that, you get a weekend that just doesn't die."

Lionsgate's marketing for "The Hunger Games" did everything right, according to Mr. Bruzzese. For one, the studio didn't take the formidable built-in film audience from the books for granted, making efforts to ensure that the film could stand alone apart from the books.

"They understood that while they had a lot of incoming equity, it wasn't enough on its own," he says. "They had to create a phenomenon. 'Twilight' did a similar thing, didn't take [the books' audience] for granted. They knew they had to expand the support and let the movie stand on its own so people who didn?t read the book would go see it too."

Furthermore, promotional material for the film shifted the focus away from story elements in the books that would appeal to one group or another, in favor of broad archetypes that resonate across age and gender lines.?

"There is a much stronger concentration in the books on the romance. The marketing and the movie shied away from that. They really played up the dystopia, and Katniss as the reluctant but the extraordinary hero, hit archetypes that resonate with everyone." He notes that the "reluctant revolutionary hero" storyline can be found in another huge book-to-movie series, Harry Potter. "Those archetypes know no gender."

What's more, having a female lead is no deterrent in drawing men into the theater, as evidenced by box office hits like "Lara Croft: Tomb Raider," "Resident Evil,"?and "Salt".

That sets the "Hunger Games" franchise apart from "Twilight," which relied wholly on drawing in the female demographic for its box office success. "You don?t spend a single marketing dollar in that case towards males," Bruzzese says.

He notes that another recent blockbuster, Avatar, employed the same broad-base marketing tactics in reverse: "Avatar" was a science fiction movie, but marketing focused on the Pocahontas-esque love story aspect of the film, to lure in a reluctant female audience.

In addition to a highly effective marketing campaign, the film may have girls to thank for its success. From ?Twilight? to ?The Help,? it?s been a big year for book-to-film adaptations geared toward a female audience. ?The Twilight Saga? Breaking Dawn, Part 1? has grossed $702 million worldwide since its November 2011 release. All together, The "Twilight" franchise has grossed over $2 billion so far, and there?s still one movie to go. The gender breakdown for the audience of ?Breaking Dawn: Part 1? was overwhelmingly female, a whopping 80 percent.

?The Help,? the film based on Kathryn Stockett?s novel, has netted more than eight times?its $25 million budget.

The big boy-book film release so far this year? ?John Carter,? one of the biggest financial flops of all time. Disney released that film, based on the 11-book ?Barsoom? series of Edgar Rice Burroughs novels two weeks ago to a chorus of scathing reviews, and expects to lose $200 million on the project. But if male-targeted adaptations aren't faring quite as well in recent years, it may be because the risk factor for studios is generally a lot higher.

"With males, you're looking at science fiction and fantasy, and those books tend to be on a larger production scale," Bruzzese says.

Another reason could be that the film-fertile genre of young Adult fiction is a girl?s world.? According to 2003 research by young adult librarians Dawn Cartwright and?Patrick Jones (now a teen author), young boys tend to gravitate toward informational texts, nonfiction, magazines, and comic books in their reading. Girls, moreover, tend to have a better comprehension of narrative fiction.

Comic book movies are a proven box office draw, with a hefty male audience. But informational nonfiction? Not so much.

Another factor behind "Hunger Games'" phenomenal debut was its release date in March, a month generally devoid of options for moviegoers.

"They created a tentpole event status in a month not known for blockbusters," Bruzzese says.

As a result, promotions for the movie dominated ad space across platforms, including television, online ads. billboards, and in theaters.?And the success of "The Hunger Games" is good news for the entire movie industry, not just Lionsgate. There were no other new? film releases last week, but the second-place finisher, the comedy "21 Jump Street," held very well in its second weekend, netting $21 million in the US.

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/csm/~3/sQ8yXbyiVNI/How-The-Hunger-Games-scored-a-marketing-win

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Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Viral disease -- particularly from herpes -- gaining interest as possible cause of coral decline

ScienceDaily (Mar. 28, 2012) ? As corals continue to decline in abundance around the world, researchers are turning their attention to a possible cause that's almost totally unexplored -- viral disease.

It appears the corals that form such important parts of marine ecosystems harbor many different viruses -- particularly herpes. And although they don't get runny noses or stomach upset, corals also are home to the adenoviruses and other viral families that can cause human colds and gastrointestinal disease.

In a research review published in the Journal of Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology, scientists point out that coral declines are reaching crisis proportions but little has been done so far to explore viral disease as one of the mechanisms for this problem.

"Coral abundance in the Caribbean Sea has gone down about 80 percent in the past 30-40 years, and about one-third of the corals around the world are threatened with extinction," said Rebecca Vega-Thurber, an assistant professor of microbiology at Oregon State University.

"We've identified 22 kinds of emerging disease that affect corals, but still don't know the pathogens that cause most of them," Vega-Thurber said. "Most researchers have looked only at bacteria. But we suspect viruses may play a role in this as well, and it's important to learn more about what is causing this problem. Corals are the building blocks of the tropical seas."

A research program at OSU, one of only two of its type in the world, is studying viral "metagenomics" in corals, meaning the analysis of multiple genomes at the same time. It may help explain one of the underlying causes of coral decline, Vega-Thurber said, and is one of the most comprehensive analyses yet done on the types of viruses in a marine animal. It may also shed light on the broader range of viruses that affect not only corals but many other animals, including humans.

One of the surprises from recent research was the predominance in corals of herpes viruses -- similar but not identical to the herpes virus that can infect humans. Herpes viruses appear to constitute a majority of the viruses found in corals, and one experiment showed that herpes-like viral sequences were produced in coral tissues after acute episodes of stress.

"We were shocked to find that so many coral viruses were in the herpes family," Vega-Thurber said. "But corals are one of the oldest animal life forms, evolving around 500 million years ago, and herpes is a very old family of viruses that can infect almost every kind of animal. Herpes and corals may have evolved together."

It's not yet certain, researchers say, whether the viruses being found on corals are actually causing diseases.

"Just because you harbor a virus doesn't mean you are getting sick from it," Vega-Thurber said. "This is part of what we have to pin down with further research."

Some of the possible causes of coral decline that have been identified so far include global warming that causes coral bleaching, loss of symbiotic algae that help nourish corals, pollution such as sewage runoff, and human-coral interactions.

A "mucus" sometimes found on corals can harbor human-borne viruses, and levels of these viruses have been correlated with terrestrial human population density.

"We have found that nutrient increases from pollution can cause increased levels of viral infection, as do warmer water and physical handling," Vega-Thurber said. "Now we have to determine if those increases in infection cause actual diseases that are killing the coral."

Corals are often a major component of marine ecosystems and biodiversity, especially in the tropics. They host thousands of species of fish and other animals. And whether or not viruses are implicated in coral disease, it may also be that they are passing diseases along to fish.

Research is "likely to reveal that viruses have numerous and profound roles on coral reefs," the scientists wrote in their study. "As the diversity, distribution and function of reef-associated viruses becomes increasingly well defined, so will our ability to predict, prevent and/or mitigate disease epizootics on coral reefs."

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Oregon State University.

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Journal Reference:

  1. Rebecca L. Vega Thurber, Adrienne M.S. Correa. Viruses of reef-building scleractinian corals. Journal of Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology, 2011; 408 (1-2): 102 DOI: 10.1016/j.jembe.2011.07.030

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Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/03/120328090941.htm

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