The Biggest Deal in History is History!

It’s not that i have slept too long or i was too busy or even too lazy to write an article about the Biggest Internet Deal Ever going up in smoke. There wasn’t just anything to write about. The deal was off the table and the world didn’t stand still. I didn’t feel too good about the high speed accusation of the Wall Street Journal about Microsoft jumping on Facebook right away.

So - Whats Next?

Facebook is a target, no doubt about that! Google was accused to have made an offer of 2.3 billion US$ to buy Facebook in 2005. The rumors didn’t get very far and where completely stopped when Microsoft bought a Facebook share of 1.6% in 2007 for 240 Million Dollars. The value of Facebook was thereby set to 15 Billion Dollars! Microsoft is not the only investor in CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook. Hong Kong Billionaire Li Kai-Shing and German Venture Capital Group Founders Fund are only two to name. Some bad tongues have it, they might even have cut a better deal than Microsoft.

Google’s Facebook Investment Attempt Prevented by Microsoft

At least the influence of Microsoft seemed to be strong enough to withhold the attempt of Google to make an Investment last year. As well Microsoft as Google would like to get their hands on the personal data of the 70 Million Facebook users. Momentarily neither of the search engines are able to crawl the password protected user data. So far about the “We promise never to sell your personal data”. What about selling the whole cake with all the data in it to a third party? But when we are talking about a 20 Billion Dollar Deal, that is as much as Facebook supposedly is worth today, such details can often go under…

What Internet Marketing Experts Say

In the opinion of Internet Marketing Experts such as David Kirkpatrick, Facebook is far less likely to be the next target for billions to be spent than the largest social networking site, MySpace. Even though according to Alexa.com, Facebook overtook MySpace on page views for the first time in April 2008 and is still aspiring with the same consistency, as it did over the past three month, MySpace stays the Largest Social Networking Site on the Internet for now. So who knows; maybe News Corp. would be willing to sell, looking at the things as they are. But it won’t be 20 Billion, that much is sure.

What is happening on the Social Network Market?

Other companies are pressing hard on the social networking market, all dreaming of the big money to make when one of the large Internet Companies will buy them. A dream that has come true for many such as FeedBurner, bought by Google for 100 Million Dollars in last June. The methods and ideas to start a new social networking site seem to be never ending. Yuwie started up in September last year and reached nearly 700.000 users by now by sharing their revenue with their users. The newest project that is running up the stairs is sharing 1.000.000 Dollars amongst the people who sign up with them For Free before July 1st 2008. They are up for big things; at least that seems to be the opinion of more than 1.000 people signing in up every day! You can check it out for yourself and grab a piece of the cake by clicking the banner below!

What exactly are Social Networking Sites?

There is a lot of talk lately about social networking websites and their value for Internet marketing and online business. There is also a lot of talk from social network sites who can’t really keep up with spam attacks, so what’s the fuzz all about?

Social networking sites are websites like MySpace and FaceBook to name the most recognized. In total there are more than 2′000 social networks out there. To publish a comprehensive list of social networks would already take weeks. And now literally every day this number grows. Social Networking sites are community websites where everyone can join in for free, add personal information, blogs, gadgets and, most important to Internet marketers, links to one’s own work. Honestly, we are all writing our stuff for someone to read and not only to pass our time. what better place could there be than social networking sites with millions of users, grouped into networks of interest and location. Social networking websites are the best places to find not only mind-like people but also very targeted traffic to whatever you offer on your blog or website.

The Biggest Social Network Websites Today

By today, MySpace, the largest free social network on the Internet, counts for about a third amount of traffic as Google with FaceBook catching up fast, already having more traffic than MySpace in April 2008. But lets have a look at some serious statistics at this point.

1. MySpace has reached 30% of the amount of traffic Google got in the same time. And the numbers are rock solid. 300′000 people out of 1 million visit google.com that means that every third visited page is a google page and according to these numbers, every 8th visit on the web goes to MySpace! Well that is a lot of people hanging out there and that is a lot of potential traffic to your website or blog by participating on just this social networking site. But there is more to come.

2. FaceBook has picked up the pace in April 2008 and in my humble opinion FaceBook has written history here. For the first time in the rather short life of social networking websites, FaceBook has overtaken MySpace. as you can see in the example at the left side. Things are moving fast and social networking sites are growing by the day. New networks pop up almost every week. Where it stops; nobody knows.

3. Yuwie, another free social network is the very best example in how a social networking site still can be very successful even though the competition seems to be overwhelming at the first glimpse, but look at this; Yuwie gets more than 1′800 new members per day. They have only launched their site in September 2007 but reached the rank of slashdot.org, one of the oldest social networking websites, within a single month! May that has something to do with the fact that Yuwie actually pays their members for surfing around their network. A rather interesting approach and very unique. It sure is worth checking out.

As i mentioned in the beginning, there are more than two thousand social networking websites up and running at the moment. A social network software is rather expensive to buy but if you are up for the challenge, here is a free open source social network software where you can create your own social network website online. It is actually more of a social networking portal but with a very good backbone. I went to Ning, just to show you an example, and created my own social network within one hour. I’m still the only member i guess but you can change that by clicking on this nice Ning button and join my new social network site.

Visit Internet Marketing Community

How do Social Networking Websites Help Your Business To Grow?

That’s a lot easier than you might think and the results off your efforts are almost immediately visible. You should become member of at least some of the bigger networking sites and you should bookmark your work on these websites. Social Bookmarking is mostly done by the click of a button and adding some tags and a description of the page to bookmark. Now, doing this to all 2′000 social networking sites isn’t very realistic, but by adding a simple button code like this one to your posts and pages you can save yourself some time and additionally give your readers the chance to bookmark your article to their favored network sites by one click.

Now here is an idea how you can save yourself a lot of time buy bookmarking your articles to 20 or so large social networking websites at once. OlnyWire offers you a two click solution by simply dragging a little button onto your browser window. It might take you a couple of hours to setup all the accounts but you only need to do this once and it gives your website or blog a tremendous additional exposure.

List of Links to more information about Social Networking:

• Social Network List on Wikkipedia
• Social Network Meta List

After several hours of downfall the Ad to Any Button is back online. During the last two days the button was not very useful. An error message stating service work was all that came up. Now everything seems to work fine and the new update was worth the little fall back.

What is the Ad to Any Button?

Social bookmarking has become a must these days for every serious Internet Marketer or Blogger. Although there are already some software programs around that promise the full autamatization of social bookmarking, it is still the everyday reader who will make the difference. The real people who subscribe to your pages or even better, to your RSS feed.  

One more thing to say here, if you use a WordPress blog, don’t bother to try the sidebar wiget Add To Any offers on their website. The result is rather disapointing and they sure need to work on that. As you can see in the picture of my hotel reservation software blog at the left, there isn’t an actual widget but a button alone. The button is not even a fancy one like the one above, but just a simple link to an Add to Any landing page with not much functionality.

This has resulted in a crowd of bookmarking icons on many websites that let’s them look like everlasting Christmas. All these little rss buttons are placed in order to give their readers a fair share of choices on the social network service they would like to use to bookmark the page or feed. To solve this problem AddToAny as come up with a one click button, one button for most of the big social network sites. That not only makes things easier but also saves a lot of space on a website or blog. The Add to any widget can be customized to an extent so anyone can choose to have it as a bookmark or rss feed button. There is also the possibility to simply ad a text link…. but the button looks nice.

With the latest update, the Ad To Any Team has developed something really useful now, It’s called “Total Keyboard Navigation.”

This means that anyone arriving at a page containing an  Add to Any Button (like the one you just look at) can use their keyboard to share, save or subscribe posts and pages. A definitive plus for keyboard geeks like me.

Use the search box, that pops up as soon as you roll over the Ad to Any button and start typing the first letters of the name of a service you are looking for. The list will than automatically be re-sorted and your favorite social network service will appear at the very top of the list.

What’s even cooler is that you can navigate the list by using the arrow keys on your keyboard. Just hit "enter" once, then start moving in any direction, hit "enter" once again to go to the selected service.