Paul Bragiel, former co-founder of Meetro ( an instant messaging service with geolocational functionality) is now introducing a new take on something tried and true. The Forum. Bragiel’s team of designers and programmers have created Lafora. Think standard forum plus, blog and news integration, embedded photos and video fuctionality, automatic newsletter generation for forum admins, WYSIWYG editors for publishing, threaded comments, member profiles generated from the by the topics participated in, a hottest topics section, forum search (search for content within all Lefora forums), unread message tracking, and lastly but certainly not leastly, everything has been SEO’ed! Sounds pretty cool right? Visit Lefora and be one of the first to take advantage of Lefora’s free forum hosting!

Screen Shots:

Joost seriously must be close to the next big thing. I can simply run an S-Video cable out from my laptop to the tv, switch my resolution size and joost! I have a large assortment of programs to choose from to watch at my leisure. The video and sound quality is good and the user interface sort of makes you feel like you’re in the future. When I first started watching some of their shows I was pretty amazed at how easy the whole setup process was and pleased that in less than 5 minutes of downloading and setup, I was watching what looked like a pretty decent show from the National Geographic Channel. The first show I watched was actually not that great but I did notice how Joost was handling their advertising. A little reminder window popped up in the bottom right hand corner of the screen for United Airways. I felt that this method of advertising was perfect because the advertising remains effective and it doesn’t interrupt the program. I can absorb the program info and advertisement at the same time. This worked nicely. But then I switched to a documentary about West Point and was bombarded by full-fledged and repetitive Nike commercials. This was annoying because I was shown the same exact commercial twice with about 4 minutes of show in between. So I switched to another documentary called Picante about chili peppers. Seemed like a cool little documentary and it was, until I kept getting the same Nike ad over and over again. That did it for me and I shut it off.

Right now the only benefit of Joost is the ability to watch what you want when you want. The shows are ok but they seem more like pilot episodes that didn’t quite make it to mainstream cable. If advertising can remain in the reminder pop-up window format then they would have a winning delivery method. The normal commercials are…well…normal. No one really wants standard tv on their laptop. People want to watch their programs when they want them without the commercials. The compromise for Joost would be to kill the standard commercials and keep the small advertising pop-up window. If they’re simply replicating status quo television then why is this service useful? They’re in beta after all so I’ll give them another go in a month or so.

There are hundreds if not thousands of sites out there that will allow you post content. Some have been around longer than others and are sometimes more established which can potentially provide you with a louder voice when spreading the word. This Guide will help you get the most for your link building efforts and hopefully show you how to avoid spammy pitfalls while implementing your campaigns.

Definition
There are sites that are strictly for bookmarking, meaning that the text fields simply require the URL, Title, Description, and Tags, i.e. Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Bluedot.us, Simpy, etc. However there are other sites that fall under social news (Reddit, Digg, Shoutwire), Social clipping (ClipClip.org, Clipmarks), How to Guides, Directories, List sites, and tons of niche sites that fall under these categories. So how do we make sense of all this noise so that we can most effectively leverage them? First we have to save, then organize.

Organization & Categorization
Different folks have different ways of organizing their campaigning efforts. For me, I use FireFox and store all my useful search marketing links as such:

You can see the large amount of subcategories that I have under link building. The most used categories are the Bookmarking (General) and Social News (General) but you can see that these verticals branch out to other niche sites like Social News (Shopping) and Social News (Tech). It’s important to make sure that the content you are submitting is relevant to the site you’re submitting to. If we submit content about baby products to the tech site we’ll obviously get zero attention and probably some angry readers. Additionally, this won’t help you build a presence within these sites. Since most of these sites have a social or sharing aspect to them, you’ll want to aim towards building a trusted profile. You’ll want to be seen as someone who is contributing to the site’s intent and not just peddling your wares.

Accounts & IP Addresses
It’s best practice to open an account in every site with the same username, password, and email address. This keeps things simple and you won’t be running around trying to remember the unique password you created for dogmeetscat.com. Also remember that most of these sites record your IP address and associate it with the username and password that you’ve created. If you create three accounts with three separate gmail addresses for dogmeetscat.com, they might know that these three accounts are coming from one IP and are most likely being used to spam the system. Don’t be surprised if you’re IP address gets banned if you’re doing this.

*If you have to be a dick you could use open wi-fi networks to create accounts. This way you can have 3 accounts for dogmeetscat.com and have a unique IP address for each account.

Fields: URL, Title, Description, and Tags
When bookmarking your content, be sure to change the Title and Description of your post for each site that you post to. This prevents the bookmarking sites from ranking for the content you’re trying to get your URL to rank for. It will also look less spammy, because there’s no way that 10 different people will submit the same URL with the same description. Maybe the same title but entering the same title and description for every site you post to will obviously indicate that a single person was submitting the same content to multiple sites.

Use common sense and practice these same methods (non-duplicitous) when submitting content to social news, directories, list sites, how to guides, wikis, etc. Oftentimes you won’t be able to add anchor text with your keyword phrase to these locations. If you can, great! If not, the next best thing is to make sure that the keyword(s) that you’re trying to rank for are contained within the URL of the content to be submitted.

How to expedite the bookmarking process
There are a few services out there that can help you post quicker by basically populating the javascript bookmarklet links of the bookmarking sites with your content and then displaying the posting link for your quick posting pleasure. Here are a known few:

http://socialposter.com/
Good but it’s slightly buggy when it processes the content for submission. It sometimes adds symbols to the information or removes commas. It also directs you towards using the same Title and Description for each post. User interface is pretty bland but it does a good job at speeding up a tedious process.

Alexa: 46, 261
Compete: 97,436
Yahoo! Backlinks: 6,658

http://www.onlywire.com/
Another mass bookmarking application. This one records your account information. However these guys seem rather shady because in their TOS they claim they have the right to add their own affiliate links into a user’s bookmarks.

Alexa: 5,122
Compete: 39,477
Yahoo! Backlinks: 51,294

http://www.addthis.com/
AddThis is a widget that blog users can add to the bottom of their posts. When you click on it, you can choose from a list of 34 different bookmarking sites to post to. This is not a web app, simply a widget.

Alexa: 3,206
Compete: 2,067
Yahoo! Backlinks: 3,199,868

We here at Squareoak would love to hear more information about this topic. If you have anything to add or know of other web applications that perform similar functions, we’d love to hear it.

Happy Bookmarking!

I’d be willing to venture a guess that many of our visitors are self-employed search marketers that love their work and relish in the fact that pants aren’t part of their self-employed dress code. That aside, what happens when the one-person show turns into something very profitable or we decide to fragment our efforts and build a separate company focused on other possible internet media ventures? Wouldn’t it be great if we had a tool that could organize, construct, and record our new business plan? A new website has been developed that can help us do exactly this.

Startup Business School is a web based business plan creation application developed by online entrepreneur Richard Banfield, founder of Fresh Tilled Soil, Tia Carr-Williams, VP of Communications at TycoonSystems.com and IndustryPlayer.com, and Alex Fedorov, new media designer and Fresh Tilled Soil Co-Founder.

According to the website, Startup Business School “provides the knowledge and tools to succeed during the early stages by providing a step-by-step startup process and range of support services that are appropriate to the stage in the lifecycle of the new business.” This step-by-step process is a 12 step process where you create your company, then move into rapid prototyping, operations & launch, and finally marketing and ideas. Along the way there are lessons for each step. Each section has about 4 questions that you need to answer as accurately as possible to help maximize the successful planning of your future business.

Tools that are included in the Startup Business School program are a strategy creation application, a contact list feature that allows you to build and collaborate with your team and advisors, a huge database of online business advice videos for guidance along the way, a sales roadmap application, and loads of documentation on various business topics.

Best of all, Startup Business School is completely free!