After several months in development, we’ve finally launched our new Media and Marketing search engine, MediaQuay.com.

Still a few bugs and tweaks to iron out, but we’re just about there.

We hope you like the service.. if you happen to come across any problems we would love to hear from you.

As you may already know, our mission for MediaQuay.com is to provide the No.1 resource of media, marketing, and creative services in the world, so your contribution to help us achieve that will be GREATLY appreciated

The first step is to click here and list your business FREE, or submit your press release here.

After navigating around the site please pop back to this post and tell us what you think in the comments box below – the good, the bad, or the ugly! we want to hear it!

Alternatively, shoot us an email at support@mediaquay.com. We welcome your input!

Thank you for visiting MediaQuay.com.

Sincerely,

Smart Media Innovations Pty Ltd and the MediaQuay Team

PS: Watch out for our new iPhone app in September. Finding agencies on the run is just around the corner. Stay tuned!



Forty years after the first Earth Day, the world is in greater peril than ever. While climate change is the greatest challenge of our time, it also presents the greatest opportunity – an unprecedented opportunity to build a healthy, prosperous, clean energy economy now and for the future.

As we have documented on several occasions the future of journalism and media is currently in transition and moving further away from traditional print and newspaper business models. We expect a big shift towards entrepreneurs who move to develop new ways of meeting consumer demand for information and engaging in public discourse. Consumers are also increasingly turning to the Internet for news and information (as opposed to newspapers) due to efficiency and accessibility – while advertisers are moving ads to online sites and scaling back on print ad buys. So, many are questioning how traditional journalism can survive and THRIVE in the future… and where it’s going to go?

The following three video’s published on the topic are a great starting point for developing your own conclusion, which will lead you to further investigations. We anticipate this to be a continuing discussion over the coming year as we ride this “paradigm” shift in current media business models.

If you are a publisher, we would dearly like to hear your thoughts on the future of journalism, in particular the future of digital publishing. Please comment and submit your thoughts below.

Has the Internet Killed Print Journalism?

Citizen Journalism vs Traditional Journalism

A fun video.. Certainly hits a few nails on the head!

The Evolution of News – Jeff Jarvis

As you might know WordPress is an open source blog publishing application powered by PHP and MySQL which can also be used as a content management system – and now becoming a very popular platform for developing almost any type of community or website that your heart desires.

It has many features including a plugin architecture and a templating system – used by over 2% of the top 10,000 most popular websites in the word. If you want something implemented to your site, there is a good chance you will find a WordPress plugin to suit your needs.

There are plugins for web advertising, flickr, twitter, e-commerce, newsletters, weather, RSS, SEO, Analytics and just about anything else you can think of. Many of these are developed as “widgets” that can easily be added to your site using the WordPress management system. And we can all grow tired of our website designs over time, but changing the design has always been such a hassle — until now. With WordPress themes you can instantly activate a new web design while still retaining all of the content within the site. There’s no hassle of copying and re-sending all of your content to a new web designer or developer, or wasting time migrating files.

Currently, WordPress is the most popular publishing software on the internet, and for good reason. Anyone (even a beginner) can begin using it to great effect. Within minutes you can create a beautiful looking blog or website and have ALL of your content indexed by the search engines, literally over night. If you can send an e-mail, use Microsoft Word or set up a Facebook account, then you can use WordPress. It’s website creation for non-techies.

These are all reasons why Smart Media Innovations Pty Ltd has been using WordPress as our main publishing platform for developing hundreds of sites over the years, and why we recommend it to our clients.

To help you get started with WordPress (and to ensure that your content is being indexed by the search engines) we have listed two top resources for installing wordpress and included our top 7 SEO plugins (plus a few others) to help you get off on the right foot. We also know it isn’t always easy sorting through the thousands of seo plugins available – so here are 7 good ones to get you going.

Step 1) Install WordPress

>> Click Here for Detailed Instructions

>> Click Here for Video Instructions

Step 2) Install our Top 7 SEO Plugins

1. >> Onlywire Multi Poster – FREE – syndicates your posts to Web 2.0 sites automatically
2. >> MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer – FREE – excellent pinging tool
3. >> Twitme – FREE – automatically posts to twitter for more backlinks
4. >> All in one SEO pack – FREE – optimizes your WordPress content for the Search Engines
5. >> Google XML Sitemaps Generator - FREE – this plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog or website.
6. >> SEO Tag Cloud Widget – FREE – Love ‘em or hate ‘em, a lot of people use tag clouds on their blogs, however since their inception they have been fairly unreadable by search engines, until now. With this plugin your tag cloud will be converted into an SEO-friendly HTML markup that can be indexed.
7. >> Dagon Design Sitemap Generator – FREE – this plugin creates a sitemap for your WordPress powered site. It’s important that the search engines can easily navigate your site.

In conclusion, WordPress empowers you to do just about anything that your imagination can conjure up – without costing you an arm and a leg. With developers constantly working on applications, plugins, and themes all around the world – you will never have a need to look at another publishing platform again.

Get started today!

Please comment: If you have anything to add, or know of any great SEO plugins for wordpress that we might have missed here, please comment below.

As always, for further information (or assistance) on any of the above, please feel free to contact us and we will be happy to assist you as best we can.

*UPDATED: Optional Plugins and Applications - to give you several ideas of the type of things you can do with WordPress!

These are ALL brilliant applications that can be easily implemented at the click of a button, and will certainly add to your bottom line. Well worth a look.

>> Market Me Tweet

Market Me Tweet is the only Twitter Application that allows you to Brand, Market, and Manage your twitter profiles and tweets, all in one! Click here to find out how we use it to drive a lot of traffic to your sites.

>> Ninja Affiliate

Ninja Affiliate is a unique WordPress plugin designed to effortlessly embed affiliate links into your WordPress blog and instantly double (or triple) your affiliate marketing commissions. A great way to instantly add an additional revenue stream to your blog or wordpress site.

>> Wishlist Member

Wishlist Member allows you to create a powerful and fully customizable membership platform on any WordPress powered website. Fast, simple and very effective! Perfect for anyone looking to include paid subscription, paid content models.

>> Job Press

JobPress is a WordPress theme that turns your website / blog into a fully functional Job Board. Its easy to use and install, plus you can monetize your job board effortlessly with just a few clicks.

>> Email Marketing – Aweber

Aweber is the Mercedes Benz of email marketing. Quickly create and run your email campaigns cheaply with this powerful, easy-to-use email marketing platform. We personally use Aweber and if you haven’t already done so, we HIGHLY recommend that you sign up and start building a mailing list today. It’s a must that you constantly follow up and communicate with your customers. Aweber helps you do this properly.

>> Squeeze Theme

Grow your email list and expand your profits with Squeeze Theme. Setting up effective squeeze pages has never been so easy and with jst a few clicks, you can completely change the look and feel of your site using Squeeze Theme! Combine this with Aweber and you will be quickly on your way to building an ever lasting asset that will pay you for years to come.

To succeed online you must focus on effective keyword research. By choosing the right keywords you can succeed at the SEO game. I have personally worked with hundreds of clients seeking number one rankings but who have given adequate focus on keyword research. This is incredibly important when your site is competing against well ranked sites that have been in the top ranking for some time.

The first step is finding a keyword that isn’t all that competitive. Once you do, the next step is to make sure that the keyword you have selected gets enough traffic. Don’t overlook this important aspect of keyword research. I worked with a company that was proud of their number one rankings. When I did some research to discover the type of traffic they could expect, I found less than one hundred searches each month on the keyword they selected. Even with top rankings, they would never see the traffic they expected.

Assuming that you have been able to find a keyword phrase that doesn’t have a great deal of competition and generates enough traffic, it’s time to look at your competition. You are competing against other web sites who currently rank in the top few positions for your chosen keyword. Research each of these top ranked sites to determine their Google page rank, age, and the number of sites linking to them. The more inbound links they have the more difficult they will be to outrank.

Once you’ve conducted your keyword research and decided which keyword phrase you are going to optimize for, it’s time to focus on optimizing your web pages. This can be done by focusing on on-page optimization techniques and off-page optimization techniques. Start with a well formatted web site that includes keyword phrases in meta tags, page titles, and so on. Then turn your attention to off page optimization which includes building links and getting your site listed in major directories and social media profiles. Add additional link building techniques like bookmarking to enhance the quality of your web pages and web sites.

Your plan should include daily, weekly and monthly tasks that can attract links from authority websites consistently over time. Your goal should not be to generate thousands of inbound links quickly because Google will penalize your website. Rather, focus on steady link building. If you want to enhance your organic search engine ranking, begin with keyword research. By selecting the right keywords, you’ll be able to optimize your website faster than your competitors. After choosing the right keywords, focus on integrating your chosen keywords into your web site. Then you’re ready for link building and other off page optimization tactics that significantly improve rankings.

Simple language differences and tiny changes in presentation can be the difference between an extremely effective marketing campaign that nets you millions and a complete and utter failure.The Internet marketing world is a world of subtlety.

It is very difficult to predict, what change is to be brought in to have a more effective marketing strategy. Many people have suggested the idea of split testing.

It is one of the few research tools that an Internet marketer has at their disposal that actually guarantees more conversions ” rather than simply implying that more conversions are supposed to occur. Split testing is a sales tactic that tests two different sales pages, keywords, PPC copy and other online sales tools using an equal number of impressions/views to see which one converts more effectively.

Here is an example: Imagine that you are buying advertisements through Google adwords in hopes that you will be able to maximize your hits per day. Start two ads at equal rates and put small differences in them. Add something subtle to one such as “money back guarantee” and leave the other one as it is.

You let your ad campaign run for a few days. See which ad is the first to 40 or 50 clicks and that ad is very likely your most successful PPC ad. With split testing, you would then take that result and say to yourself Okay, well, money back guarantee got me the most clicks ” should I put that phrase in the beginning of the ad or at the end of the ad? Then you run the split testing again, with that small change.

When you have completed this, you will have your highest preforming ad. This technique can also be used for sales copy, newsletters or anything that will increase your conversations. Some people rotate their sales pages using software and see which one gets the most sales. Through this they will eventually find the perfect sales copy. It will have a high enough conversion rate to almost guarantee success in internet marketing.

Since emarketing is still developing, a lot of what we know to do relies more on anecdotes rather than any type of science. Random tests convey that science. If you use huge samples sizes it ascertains that the promotional ways you are using so that you can maximize on sales is the most valuable and successful method that there is. This method should therefore give you confidence that after all the promotions you are guaranteed of the best exchange rate there is.

Because of this, it is those marketers that are willing to use Split testing that tend to have the most success in the field. In many ways, the best marketers never stop split testing, as they continue to look for the pinnacle of ad copy in an ever changing online world. Split testing is one of the few effective research tools that you can use on your own work.

Start split testing today.

One way to help boost your results in the search engines for a specific keyword is to build a link wheel around the webpage you want to give a boost. You do this by writing six articles that you can position on social media and other websites and link back to your page and one of the other six articles inside of each of them.

When you think of a link wheel, try to picture an old-fashioned wooden wheel with spokes. At the center of the wheel is the article or webpage that you want to move up in the search engine results. At the outside end of each spoke is another article or page that you control. Each of these outside articles links to the center article or page. They also link to the next article on the outside of the circle. In this way, you will connect the dots with links to draw a wheel around your main page.

To help you understand better, you can try drawing a picture of the wheel. Write the name of your target article or page in the center. Now draw six lines reaching out from the center article. Make these into arrows pointing back toward the center to represent the links. Now you need to complete the wheel by making lines in between each article on the outer edge. Make these lines into arrows as well. All of the arrows should go in one direction, either clockwise or counterclockwise. This shows which articles will link to each other.

Next, you need to know what pages to put the links on. You can use pages on a number of different sites to make your wheel. Any service that allows you to publish a webpage or article containing at least two links will work. Some examples include Squidoo, Hubpages, Blogger and Ezine Articles. Just pick six of these types of sites to use to build your link wheel.

You don’t need unique content for each of these pages. Only the main page at the center of the link wheel needs to be unique. The other articles can all be rewrites of the same article. You are not going to be promoting the outside articles to human visitors. Their only purpose is to provide backlinks for your main page.

However, the way you set up your links is important. When you create your links to the center page, make sure you use your targeted keyword as the text for your links. For example, if you want your webpage to rank well for “best way to make money online, ” you need to use “best way to make money online” as the text for your links.

Building a link wheel around a webpage or article can give you a huge boost in the search engine rankings, but the six-page wheel described in this article is just the beginning. If you really want to boost your rankings, you can build multiple wheels around a single article. You can also build secondary wheels around each of the pages in the original wheel. Just make sure you build your backlinks slowly and steadily so that your webpage doesn’t get sandboxed.

Social media is a concept that bubbled up through the masses starting, roughly speaking, around 2005. While social media sites like MySpace and Facebook began as ways for primarily young people to find each other and keep in touch, corporations soon saw how these sites could be used to improve customer relations. By 2009 social media begun to revolutionize the way corporations managed customer relations.

According to IT research and advisory company Gartner, by 2010 60% of Fortune 1000 companies will be using social media in some form as a way to improve customer relations. That’s the good news. Gartner also posits that over half of the companies using social media for this function will do it wrong and actually harm customer relations. Gartner suggests that companies focus their analysis on customer online buying in order to offer a direct calculation of return on investment in terms of sales and customer loyalty coming through social media sites.

Gartner says that there are four steps businesses need to pursue to successfully use social media to manage customer relations. The first step is clearly defining the purpose of the social media initiative. Second, they must be willing to give up some degree of control over the medium, because the public wants some degree of ownership of the relationship as a reward for participating.

Companies then have to reward those customers that participate socially. This may mean allowing them to vote on, or otherwise rate contributions and information on the site. Finally, companies must appoint someone in-house who has the skills to head up a social media customer relations initiative. Using social media for customer relations should never be an afterthought. In fact, it should probably have someone specifically devoted to it full time, with their own staff if necessary.

There is no question that social networking has changed the behavior of a critical mass of individuals as customers and prospects. According to Gartner, they can no longer be described adequately based on demographic information, which is the usual target for corporate customer relations efforts.

When it comes to your company, you’re not going to want to invest a lot of time or effort in such an undertaking without knowing if it will pay off in terms of driving quality traffic to your company’s website.

Non-linear Creations did a one-year study of the effects of five social media sites (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Stumbleupon) on their own home page. After a year, it was determined that social media sites drove about 18% of their site’s visitors from the referring sites in aggregate.

In the Case of Non-linear Creations, Linkedin and Facebook outperformed the other social media sites. That’s important, but it isn’t the whole story. What about conversion rates? Non-linear Creations measured conversion rates by whether visitors downloaded one of their white papers, subscribed to their blog or newsletter, or contacted them by phone or email. In this case – driving real prospects – Linkedin outperformed the other sites. Traffic from Linkedin was much more likely to convert than the average site visitor. Other social media sites actually underperformed the average.

There’s no guarantee that Linkedin will give your company the tangible results that Non-linear Creations got. It probably depends on what type of business you have. It is not quite understood what the less tangible benefits are of reaching customers online in a way that makes them feel as if the brand is listening and cares enough to interact in the way they desire. One of the things people dislike about customer support call centers is their anonymous feel. It keeps them from feeling a sense of relationship to the brand. So far no obvious downsides of using social media for customer service, so it would seem to be in any company’s best interests to use this form of outreach.

It certainly isn’t hard to create accounts on social media sites. The hard part is in actually interacting with customers on them, listening to them, and analyzing your online visitor numbers to see which social media sites give you the most return on investment in terms of online sales or some other metric. At that point you’ll have to determine how much effort to put into making under-performing social media referrers more effective.

5,419 uploads in the last minute, 71,248 things tagged with jump, 3.0 million things geotagged this month. Do you still need a reason to get yourself a Flickr account?

Flickr is quickly becoming a popular online marketing tool for it allows creative agencies to market their products through a visually appealing medium. It can help you generate traffic to your website and ensure that your website ranks higher on the major search engines like Google, Yahoo! and Bing too. Consider this, according to Nielsen or NetRatings, Flickr is the fastest-growing photo sharing site on the web. It is the 7th most trafficked social media site overall.

Flickr is primarily a photo-sharing community, owned by Yahoo!. You can use your Yahoo! Login ID and password to log onto Flickr and use your account to tag your photographs, share them and participate in the community discussions as well. The photographs, which you post on Flickr, might leave a lasting impression in the minds of the millions of Flickr users and some of them might end up being your potential customers as well. By networking actively on the community forums, you can build your contacts and build greater awareness about your business and services as well. You could use the links from Flickr to further your link popularity too!

Video is for everyone too! As a member of Flickr, you can upload and share videos (business videos and presentations too!) just like you do with photos.

To avail the benefits of SEO through Flickr, you need inbound links, which you could obtain in the form of links from other blogs and websites. Ensure that the photo title matches the title tag or element. You are assured higher rankings for the phrase. Most importantly, you should only try to sell unique and noteworthy product or services-related photographs through Flickr.

Quick tips for marketing your business on Flickr:

* Use your business/website name as your Flickr display name.

* Use the best, relevant photographs to advertise your business.

* Actively participate in the Flickr community. Find groups relevant to your business and join them.

* Tag your photographs with terms that are relevant to your business or service. Provide a link to your Flickr account on your website.

However, don’t post advertising messages on the discussion forums or stuff keywords in your tags. You could end up turning “off” the community and users, and not being able to generate any interest in your photostream too. To top that, Flickr added “nofollow” tags to links placed within its website last year. Flickr implemented these tags for the same reason as a number of other social-media sites – to prevent misuse and spamming.

Go here to read more about Yasir Khan.  Feel free to get a totally unique version of this article from our article submission service

Press releases have been a great way to bring traffic to a business, and of course advertise. It doesn’t matter whether they want to tell the public about a new product or just talk about the company-press releases have always been the way to do it. Over the years though, press releases have changed quite a bit, and the way they’re used has changed too.

In the past, a press release was used solely as a way to promote a product, company, service or event through the media. Perhaps you released a brand new product with some fantastic features that customers have been looking for. Your company writes up a press release, sends it out to all of the major news providers in your area and hopes that it sparks their interest.

One of the ways that a press release could get out, is when a journalist catches wind of it and believes it is good story material. They will write an article on it or feature it in their news program. Your company will suddenly get free advertisement, and the media got a new story. This was a win win situation for everyone involved.

The entire game has changed now. Press releases still exist, and they are still being used in the mainstream media, but now there is a new type of press release out there, which is an internet press release. Online press releases are sent to online press release sites instead of real life media outlets. Do these help bring traffic to your business? Yes of course they do.

The online press release is beneficial to all parties involved. Your goal is to create back links that will take customers directly to you. Press release sites are usually sitting high on the search engine lists, and you’ll find that posting with them will get you all the traffic you need.

If you want yet another benefit to an online press release, then just look to Search Engine Optimization or SEO. You can actually put back links into your website AND include keywords that are highly searched for in different search engines. Once you know how to take advantage of it, you’ll get all the hits you’ve wanted, and you’ll get a steady string of income, as well as reputation.

Basically when an individual chooses to search, and then see your press release, they are probably going to click on it. Through this you will get tons of traffic. If you remember to use your SEO, then the amount of traffic definitely will not be small.

It doesn’t matter what your product is. It could be a women’s clothing line, and when people search, they’ll use certain search terms. If your press release contains those terms, then they will be directed to your press release. If they find it to be interesting, then they will probably head over to your website to see what you have.

Keep in mind that when you use an online press release, there’s still a chance that you will get regular media attention. Even though you are going for SEO, you may still get noticed, after all, it’s very important for the media to find stories. Basically if you have a good SEO’d press release online, you might still receive the benefits of regular media coverage. You never know!

As with every other area of marketing, advertising and promotion, the realm of press releases has changed and evolved over the last decade. While traditional press releases are still powerful, online press releases are quickly growing in importance. You can increase your presence, improve your ranking in the search engines and send high quality traffic to your website.

Kevin Thomas is a 21 year entrepreneur network marketing coach and SuperGuide who is teaching people how to use low cost social media marketing for online business success learn more at The Carbon Copy Pro Times