ADUTAINMENT: Advertising as Entertainment
JellyBasket.com - JELLY by the CASE or as a GIFT BASKET.

Intermountain Healthcare Selects Cognos as Business Intelligence Standard: - Cognos 8 BI to deliver operational and analytical reporting, dashbo
Cognos (NASDAQ: COGN; TSX: CSN), the world leader in business intelligence and performance management solutions, today announced that Intermountain Healthcare - a nationally-recognized, nonprofit healthcare network of hospitals, clinics, health insurance plans and physicians across Utah - has selected Cognos as its Business Intelligence (BI) standard.

Thinks You Should Know Before You Bid On A Business
Whatever your reason for going out on your own, you must keep your reason in the forefront of your mind. If you forget your reason for starting your own home business, you will not be working for yourself for long.

Pacific Data Marketing Expands Fixed Asset Management Services Workforce
Pacific Data Marketing, a provider of Sage FAS Fixed Asset Software, physical inventory management services, and Sage human resource management and payroll solutions, has announced that they've hired Tracey McEuen as a senior consultant specializing in Sarbanes-Oxley 404 (SOX 404) compliance, Risk Management, and Business process Controls & Policy. The newly-hired fixed asset consultant will bolster physical inventory management services related to Sarbanes-Oxley 404 (SOX 404) compliance.

Therative, Inc. Selects GolinHarris and Carat Fusion to Lead Integrated Marketing Campaign to Launch New Acne Treatment Device
Therative, Inc. today announced it has retained two leading marketing services agencies to support the launch of ThermaClear, the company's new FDA-cleared acne treatment device. The company has named GolinHarris as its public relations agency and Carat Fusion as its marketing agency. Both teams are based in San Francisco and are working collaboratively with Therative's marketing team on the February product launch.

The Disadvantages of Business Litigation in Orange County
Although identified with large suburban areas and numerous tourist destinations, Orange County is fast becoming a promising place for business activities. In fact, more and more companies and firms are being established in various localities to operate and to provide their services and products.

Affiliate Marketing Made Easy!
Have you been trying to find a way to earn extra income online? There are so many ways to generate extra cash online. You could fill out surveys, or maybe do some get paid to try programs, you could get paid to write articles for article sites,or you could become a sales affiliate, and the list could go on. There really is quite a few good ways to make money online.

Discovering The Perfect Home Business Opportunity
Although many people dream about being able to work from the comfort of their home, few have any idea of what they could do to actually make this happen While it is always great to have a creative, unique idea when starting a home based business, there are several home business opportunities available to anyone who can?t think of something on their own and are willing to take a risk

Funeral Director Leaves the 'Funeral Home Business' for a Lucrative 'Internet Home Business'
By joining Prosperity Automated System ( PAS) Brian Hafey, a formal Funeral Director, joins a friend and sponsor who has made $15,000 in just the last 30 days with a company recently recognized by names as big as CNN Headline News and the Discovery Channel. Prosperity Automated Systems (PAS) is a model of excellence in “Innovative Home-Based Business Solution.”

Article Marketing
A revolutionary marketing device that I call article marketing I now will share with you. Now the sole question is can article marketing me? That depends on if you are looking to build pr, increase your inbound links, and boost your traffic.

Pragmatic Marketing Surpasses 45,000 Seminar Attendees Trained
Following another record year, industry leader continues strong growth in attendance at product management and marketing training seminars

Pragmatic Marketing Named One of the Year's Fastest-Growing Companies by Inc. Magazine
2007 ranking is second time company has received this honor.

MLM Recruiting - The REAL Reasons Why People Join Network Marketing Companies
If there was a way that you could guarantee to explode your MLM recruiting, and touch people in such a way that most would follow you to the moon if you went..

Edge Training Systems Introduces a New Influence and Negotiation Training Video and On-Demand Streaming Video Program
Edge Training Systems, a producer of leadership and employee development solutions, today announced the addition of a new training video program: Leading The Way - Negotiating With Influence & Persuasion. Leaders and managers are constantly challenged every day to influence people on all kinds of matters. This video program is designed to teach participants how to move people forward to a specific business outcome using influence and persuasion.

Book Review: Step Up - How To Win More And Lose Less In Business By Daniel Grissom
The average bookstore is awash in self help business books, entire sections are dedicated to the subject. They also tend to have a common theme. How make a better 'widget' and more importantly, sell these better and more profitable 'widgets.' Sure they may reorder the chapters, change the occasional graphic, but it is the same old tired story! The soporific effect of this genre makes it a good alternative to sleeping pills, and the books certainly are not addictive!

DSG Solutions Group Announces National Women's Tour for Executive Women Detailing Opportunities for Women in Business
DSG Solutions Group announces the 2007 Magnificent Women Organization's "The Art of Personal Branding" Fall Conference for Women Executives and Business Owners. The conference is recognized as one of the nation's most promising events for women business owners, and will hit twelve major cities, including Atlanta, Boston, New York, and San Francisco.

Internet Marketing Techniques in the Online Dating Community

Online dating has become one of the most competitive and profitable sectors of the Internet. Like any other industry, there are those few giants who seem to dominate the field, but there are countless other ?little guys? who are making their moves to secure their own chunk of the market. And due to the unique nature of the Internet, a couple companies are starting to find success even without the the monster budgets of the giants. By the simple employment of various Internet marketing techniques, these companies are starting to make waves.

A company can do a lot with a number one search engine ranking, and certain Internet marketing practices can get you there. It's not a simple process, nor is it fast, and Internet marketing ?specialists? who tell you otherwise are just as likely to get you banned as they are anything else.

But in the online dating community there's a new website that managed to work its way to the top of the ?online dating? and ?free online dating? heap. Both of these keyword phrases receive thousands upon thousands of searches every month and are highly desirable and coveted keywords. Into this highly competitive market walks Mingle2.com, a website built and maintained by a single guy who put it together without giving up his regular day job. In a mere 100 days he had managed to get himself to the top of the pile, ranking in the top five, if not the top one or two, for ?online? and ?free online dating.?

How did he do it? Companies are paying good money for SEO firms to do exactly that, and, generally speaking, it doesn't happen that often. At least not without resorting to some of the famous black hat Internet marketing techniques.

So how did Mingle2 do it? What about OKCupid? They're the other site contending for the top spot on the natural search rankings. Both of these sites have managed to beat the giants like Match.com and e-Harmony for that top spot. The question is, will they be able to maintain their position?

Both Mingle2 and OKCupid have used similar Internet marketing techniques to facilitate their growth. Were any of these techniques ?black hat?? Will they be able to maintain their positions or will the giants overtake them again? Did their techniques win them the favor of all the major search engines?

It seems these days that no two search engine marketers can agree on what constitutes the best practices for Internet marketing. There is, of course, some accepted standards. Keyword density, useful content, anchor text, and link recruiting ? everyone agrees that these are important, they just don't know how important. And with the search engines continually changing and evolving their algorithms, we may never know. But by examining some of the current practices and trends, we can get an idea.

So what Internet marketing techniques, exactly, did Mingle2 and OKCupid use to gain their rankings? First, they both put the keyword ?free online dating? in text links. Lots of text links. But surely Google doesn't like seeing the same link over and over again, you say. And you're right. So we simply get around this by adding a city name after each keyword. Now the keyword is listed 40 to 50 times, but technically it's a different word each time. Note: Mingle2 has since removed those links from the homepage.

Of course, having 40 or 50 keyword occurrences on a homepage doesn't look good. So what do you do? Well, the two answers so far seem to be: hide the list in a div at the bottom of the screen or just fill above the fold with all the information and pictures a visitor will need and then list the geographic specific keywords below the fold. And if the list is on a light blue background, with white text, well... it's still readable.

Are these black hat Internet marketing practices? Not really. Is the number of keyword text links spammy? Kind of. Are the links valid and relative to the site? More or less. The argument could certainly be made that they are useful additions to the site. Call it a case of ?spammy validity?, then. It's not wrong... but it doesn't quite feel right, either.

What about those all important links? Both Mingle2 and OKCupid have, in the strictest, technical language, a jillion links each. Okay, maybe not that many, but close. How did they do it? Through an SEO technique that, in recent years, has almost been forgotten. It's the good old fashioned widget. A funny little doohickey (again with the technical lingo) that, for one reason or another, outside websites place on their site and link back to yours. In the olden days this often came in the form of web tools or other items. Both OKCupid and Mingle2 employ the graphic widget. Get on their site, take a test, receive a graphic, post the graphic that shows the test results on your website/blog/MySpace page/etc. It only takes a single widget that is neat enough for a blogger to pick it up, and soon the entire community is posting their own graphics, which, by the way, carry a link back to the original site.

Mingl2 seems to have just this in mind. He offers a number of funny little quizzes ? everything from rating your Geek Level to percent chance of surviving a zombie apocalypse. Neat, yes? Yes. Anything to do with dating? Well, maybe the zombie thing, but otherwise, no. And why do blogs like them so much? Because one of the quizzes revolves around ?How addicted to blogging am I?? It would only take a single, fairly popular blogger to put that one on his or her site before the entire community was doing the same. And then the jillions of links come rolling in.

So now they've got keyword density, lots of anchor text, and an impressive array of inbound, one-way links. Sounds pretty good. Now, do these Internet marketing techniques work across the board? Not necessarily. Mingle2 and OKCupid rate incredibly well on Google, but mediocre at best for MSN and Yahoo (at least at the time of this writing). And the same goes for results on the metasearch engines.

For right now these sites have apparently found a way to work within Google's algorithm, but will it last? And how did it work so well in the first place? Aren't unrelated links supposed to be worth a lot less? Aren't relative links the goal of Internet marketing? And links from widgets aren't exactly the most permanent of institutions. On the other hand, blogs seem to be Google's babies, these days. Could it be that a link from a blog is worth more than a related link?

The toughest part is that it could all change tomorrow. Something that is validly spammy one day, could just be regular spam the next. The online dating community is intensely competitive and the fight for high rankings will continue, and marketers in the online dating industry will continue to push to find out the best way to work with the search engines and come out on top of the heap.

Andy Eliason is a writer at Main10, an Internet marketing and development company. If you'd like to learn more about Internet Marketing or any of their other services, please see http://www.main10.com/search_engine_optimization/internet_marketing.php or http://www.main10.com/.