Are you using an antiquated browser?  Some people don’t ever think of upgrading their browser because it is almost too obvious.  One of the best of the new browsers is the Opera browser.  It is secure, powerful and fully customizable, the Opera Web browser is also considered to faster and more secure than other browsers available on the market.

 Best of all it is free and very secure. Many browser collectors consider it to be one of the best because it is so speedy and so basic and solid.  You can block pop ups easily and it is almost invulnerable to hackers and viruses.

Perhaps the feature it is most known for is tabbing as well as lots of tricks for quick navigation including a feature called Speed Dial, which makes it really easy to access the sites you visit on a daily basis with just a click. It is also a browser that is known for its speed in general. It is supposed to access web pages thirty percent faster than Internet Explorer. It’s speed is comparable to Firefox but faster than Firefox if you use the tabbing feature of this browser.

There is also a way of making notes that you can attach to a web site while browsing. Yet another unique feature is the, or Create Search shortcuts that you can make from any search field on the Web.  The latest version is Opera 9.25 and it offers lots of great tools for advanced users of browsers such as web site developers. Surfers love this browser as well as it has all kinds of Mouse Gestures that can be customized and also a special Zoom and Image Control feature.

Popularity: 53% [?]

You can have the niftiest looking website in the world but you are only sabotaging yourself if your customer is sent invoices that look like they were written by a two year  If professional looking invoices are important to you then you might want to look at the FreshBooks service.

Freshbooks is an online invoicing and time tracking service that can be installed right online saves you time and makes you look professional.

You can try the trial by sending out one of sites many very polished looking Fortune 500 style invoices. It interfaces well with the U.S. Post Office so that you can send invoices by post or by regular email.

You can also this tool to set up an invoicing system with your staff so they can send you invoices that are personalized. Fresh Books will also help you keep track of when a deadline from an employee is due, when it is time to release an advance and create reports so you can keep track of your business.

Freshbooks is worth investigating if you want a more corporate or professional looking image. If you want your company to look bigger than it is then Freshbooks is also a good idea.  Your press releases will look like they are from a big operation.  Why is this important? It s because studies have shown that the more professional the invoice, the more secure people feel about paying you.  The idea is that if you are going to brand yourself you might as well brand big.

Find out which freelance or outsourced projects are worth maintaining by using the Fresh Books many reports that help you keep track of deadlines and monies due.

You can also use the reports generated by Fresh Books as a record for proving your income when it is tax time.

Popularity: 49% [?]

Rosalind Gardiner is a Canadian marketer who has penned a very successful book called The Super Affiliate Handbook. Gardiner’s appeal as a writer is that she is a relative newbie to the Internet marketing business which is very attractive to single mothers, the disabled and others looking for a way to make an online home business work for them.

Gardiner was inspired to write her series of Super Affiliate Handbooks after learning how to be one herself. Gardiner’s learning curve was a trial and error process that took her five years to master before she became successful at it. Currently it is estimated that she makes around five million dollars a year as an affiliate marketer.
The selling point of her books is that she will save you five years of blundering around the Internet and choosing the wrong products if you learn from the experience that she has to impart.

Although it is about being an affiliate marketer, the books main focus is on building a functional website and how to use the pay per click search engines to support ads that will bring traffic to your site. Even if you are not an affiliate marketer you might find the insider information that she has to offer about such programs as Google and Yahoo to be valuable for the promotion of any site.

Gardiner’s book also takes the reader into the realm of market research and using keywords to find the right kind of product. She also teaches the reader how to use similar tactics to recruit willing sellers should you choose to become a publisher or a vendor.

Rosalind Gardiner’s books are also significantly cheaper than any other affiliate guru’s books, yet they are still packed with information (meaning they don’t read like the Coles Notes of somebody else’s masterpiece.) The book is essentially a hands-on tutorial that offers practical advice on how to start your own affiliate business, maintain it and then grow it.

Popularity: 59% [?]

Over a decade ago people got excited when Peter Pan got his own website.  This website is still thriving and is a stellar example of how an unknown can become a celebrity online simply by appropriating a common myth.

A reexamination of the old favorite reveals that it is still one of the weirdest sites online and is still going strong on site donations.  It basically features a rather fey fifty three year old man dressed up as Peter pan who lives in Tampa Bay Florida.  He says he started the site so that “Tinkerbell would have an easier time finding me.”

The site is bright green and features this Peter Pan look-alike dressed in full Peter Pan costume complete with pointy hat with a feather, buckled shoes and green tights.  One of the strangest pages on his site features his Petard Pan Fashions.  This is a collection of Peter Pan style outfits that he has put together for various fairs and festivals including a ballet version, a satin version and a dark green velvet version.

At heart Peter Pan is a philanthropist and uses his weird site to raise lots of money for all kinds of charities. He has also monetized it somewhat by linking it to his own business called Elfin Technologies which offers web hosting, custom banner graphics, customized software applications and technical writing.  He has also developed software for accelerating the speed of your computer called Elfin Magic Software.  However his main interest is designing custom electronic devices when nothing else will do

It turns out that Peter Pan’s real name is Randy Constan and he has an impressive résumé.

So far being weird is working for Peter Pan.  His website so far has over ten million hits.

Popularity: 59% [?]

According to Jack Neilson’s very popular web design advice column called “Alert Box,” the principles of web 2.0 are not for everybody.  AJAX, rich Internet UIs, mashups, communities, and user-generated content can sometimes unnecessarily complicate a business that is already working smoothly .

Sometimes they add an element of high maintenance that steals precious hours form your life. Also if you focus too much on changing your information delivery infrastructure you might end up neglecting return on investment issues that matter to your users.

The key is to know whether or not your web 2.0 enhancements are relevant to your own selling purposes or not. They can be effective for online industries where a lot of searching through a site might be necessary such as searching through car for sale or auto listings are necessary.

Before employing any of the main three rich Internet applications it might be a good idea to see if they are even necessary. Neilson defines these four rich Internet applications as being community user features (such as social networks, forums and other ways for users to generate content), mash ups (which means using the services of other sites as a development platform) and advertising sites (such as sites that use only affiliate advertising as the model.

In essence, you should take a use it or lose it approach when it comes to employing web 2.0 principles on your website or blog. This is because there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. For instance a mashup can easily lead your customer to a different site then yours. Some Internet experts would say that this is exactly what you don’t want and that you should do everything within your power design wise to keep your visitors on the same page as you.

Popularity: 73% [?]

Joe Vitale is one of the most persuasive marketers in history. He is largely known for his writing style which is known as “hypnotic.”  Vitale loves hypnosis so much that he named his companies – Hypnotic Marketing Inc. and The Hypnotic Marketing Institute. He is also an ordained minister and a certified hypnotherapist and recently made an appearance in the block bester best seller The Secret.

He also runs several off shoot companies of his “Hypnotic Marketing” brand www.jhypnoticmarketing.com including Hypnotic Writing, Hypnotic Selling Tools and the Hypnotic Library.

Aside form being an ordained minister, Joe Vitale has also written several respected best-selling books on marketing. Among t hem are “Turbocharge Your Writing”, “CyberWriting: How to Promote Your Product or Service Online” and “The AMA Complete Guide to Small Business Advertising” He has also written numerous other books related to marketing and generating sales including the notorious “The Power of Outrageous Marketing” and “The Attractor Factor.” As a testimony to his copywriting skills, almost every single one of his books on marketing has also been a best seller.

Joe Vitale also offers a software program to help anyone write better sales letters, articles, news releases, speeches and even entire books. It’s called Hypnotic Writing Wizard. He also has a brand-new membership program for those serious about learning marketing called Hypnotic Gold. His most recent book, co-authored with Jo Han Mok, is The E-Code: 47 Secrets for Making Money Online Almost Instantly.

One thing that is absolutely unique about Joe Vitale is his comprehensive understanding of marketing history. He is one of the few marketing gurus that has a great knowledge of the marketing men from the early to mid 1900s. His love of trivia and ability to connect the past and apply it to the present and name it as a marketing truth is what makes Joe Vitale such a popular and educational writer.

Popularity: 60% [?]

Pamela Anderson is one of the most famous and successful of celebrity bloggers on the Internet. Why is this stereotypical “dumb blonde” who recently announced in her blog  at that she is thinking of giving up “acting” to become a Las Vegas Showgirl so popular. It is because she knows how to market herself as a brand.

If you look at Pamela Anderson’s graphic design on her website you will see that she has cartoonified herself with the elements she is most well known for – the large breasts and the eyelashes.  In fact there are very few current pictures of Pam on there possibly because she is aging.  She is all about creating illusions about herself that guarantee the persistence of her stereotype.  Many of the drawings on her site resemble anime drawings, which is a nod to the popularity of graphic novels.  There is not a single photo of the heroine from Barbed Wire in sight.

Her website is also strewn with her various causes including PETA but this is just a philanthropic disguise to mitigate the blaring presence of the ads on it for her upcoming movie “Blonder and Blonder.”  The site is also filled with flash animation including a blinged out ad about how to Stop Canada’s Cruel Seal Hunting.

Although the content which is mainly a collection of fast and furious comments that are quite vague about her various relationships the site would anger some fans of web 2.0.  Anderson’s site is so loaded down with adobe pdfs and flash animation that it takes ages to load especially if you are using one of the older browsers like Internet Explorer.

This dumb blonde is also not as dumb as she looks. As ethical as the site appears you cannot look at it unless you register so it is obvious that she and her web master are making money collecting and selling addresses. Maybe she should change her name to Spammy Pammy.

Popularity: 67% [?]

If you are a small web business it is very simple to make free web conferencing part of your overall information architecture on your website.  After all installing web conferencing is not as complicated as it sounds.

However it has all kinds of virtues. It allows you to share information and work in tandem with your colleagues.   It is the ideal platform for telecommuting employees but it can also be used to meet with friends or family. The best thing about it is that it can save you hundreds or even thousands in business in long distance bills.

When looking for free web conferencing try to find a web conferencing program that is more than just a chat you can upload power point, jpg and other types of images. Not all of them out there have that capability. Some will even allow you to upload more complicated visuals such as power point displays.

Large documents are also easily transferred from one participant to the other and all images and documents can be uploaded so that everyone can view them at the same time. The best thing about these is that it allows you to host live conferences and interact in real time.

There are all kinds of ways you could use this free web conferencing including to train people online and present graphics. If you are running a psychic line or an adult based business then you can hold group chats or self help seminars.

Also if you get a platform like this it is a good idea to make sure that it can save online sessions.  Some of the group chats are great for brainstorming new products in that way.

There are number of free web conferencing programs available online but one people often talk about is VYEW as it has a lot of the information features just described.

Popularity: 37% [?]

James Yuille is first and foremost a sales person. The sometimes cold and impersonal world of the Internet can actually turn away customers, which is exactly why James Yuille wrote a book on how to use old-fashioned customer service techniques to create a bond with your customers.

The name of James Yuille’s groundbreaking book is “How to Gain and Retain More Customers – A Self Study Guide.” It is a combination of a crash course in selling techniques crossed with practical ways to implement strategies that make your customers comfortable with your payment and delivery processes. Aside from that it is also a very affordable, practical book about “how to sell” that is applicable to both online and offline businesses.

his book James Yuille also explains how to organize your web site and word your promotional materials so that you are attracting your “target market” as opposed to thousands of window shopping surfers who may have stumbled upon your site because of an ambiguous keyword. One of his key concerns is how to use copy in a way that will encourage potential customers to book mark your site and return again another day to actually buy.

It also takes you through the process of doing what is called a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats). The SWOT is an analysis that clearly defines your ideal customer. It helps you figure out how much you can make from one very interesting customer over a period of time (such as a life-time.) He also gives you valuable advice about how to sell back-end products and set up a referral and affiliate system to support your business. 

Many Internet marketing gurus only touch on the subject of really pleasing the customer. James Yuille takes the usual “the customer comes first” attitude and takes it one step further. In his book you will find a template for a well thought out system to build the ideal ecommerce site.

Popularity: 46% [?]

You know that a product design and marketing is working well when it starts evolving into a conspiracy theory. According to as story published on the MTV site that is precisely what the new Nine Inch Nails Year Zero album is doing.

The album already has conspiracy theoriest and apocalypse watchers talking about a society on the edge of extinction where military police raid private residence, the State controls your thoughts bit brother style and the individual experiences a total loss of liberty.

This clever marketing pain which is like a mix of Aldus Huxley and George Orwell has involved the implantation of various websites that have been planted on the Internet.  An example is the really disturbing IamTryingToBelieve.com, which is dedicated to exploring Parepin, which is a drug that is being allegedly added to the water supply. Although it is supposed to be fiction it’s implication of bioterrorism has a ring of possibility.

The site also makes mention of citizens witnessing something called “The Presence,” which shows a giant god like hand defending from the heavens in a series of out of focus photographs. 

Also hidden on the site is a hidden e-mail address which once found sends information about Nine Inch Nails next preapocalyptic projects and also the location of other Nine Inch Nails sites. Members on a NIN fan site, EchoingtheSound.org, soon began to uncover even more sites, all seemingly unrelated upon first glance. Once tied together it seems that they all amount to creating a rather grim totalitarian picture of life in the United States circa the year 2022.

However the conspiracy was supposed to have been kick started with a t-shirt that was sold when the Nine Inch Nails last went on tour.  Apparently certainly letters and numbers on the shirt were highlighted and a secret message was spelled out to fans.

Popularity: 59% [?]