Facebook Virus - New Network Threat

Facebook is a social networking tool for communicating with friends. Users can add friends and send them messages, and update their personal profiles to notify friends about themselves. Additionally, users can join networks organized by city, workplace, school, and region. The website's name came from the colloquial name of books given at the start of the academic year by university administrations in the hope of helping students get to know each other better.

Nowadays, however, a virus named "Koobface" is turning its point to all the users of the famous social networking sites. This virus can distribute all kinds of curious web links through the information system of the social networking site. People are prompted to click those links, which results in their computers getting infected, and their personal privacy information, such as credit card number, etc, being stolen.

If a Facebook user is infected by the virus "Koobface", lots of messages with such kind of title as "You look just awesome in this new movie", etc, will be sent out to his friends. The friends who receive the messages will be directed to other website which claims that they should download the so-called updated software of Adobe Flash Player. If the computer users indeed download the required software, then the computers are going to be infected.

Recently, Facebook virus attacks Google Reader and Picasa, which throw their users into threats. Therefore, people who have these software installed, remember not to casually click any unknown links, in case of getting infected. You need to have a security tool to safeguard your computer, such as Spyware Cease, to protect your computer against virus attacks.

About the Author: Amy Jones

http://www.spywarecease.com

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15 Effective Ways to Boost Traffic To Your Website

If you are trying to make money online, you need traffic and a list. Before you can build a list, you must have traffic to your site or opt in page. I have listed some of the ways I drive traffic to my website.

1. Provide fresh, unique and useful content

It is important for you to have high quality and unique content on your website so that visitors will spend more time there. If you have useful information on your website, you, considered an expert in your niche, will get customers much easier.

2. Optimize your website for search engines.

In order for your site to appear on the search engines, your niche keywords and phrases must be in your headlines and the rest of the content. This means that your website will show up and will rank high when people search for those keywords. Ping your website when you add new content. This makes search engines robots index your website, which ultimately drives traffic to your website.

3. Offer free reports and content.

Giving away short reports or eBooks in which you include your website URL is an effective way of driving traffic and building your list. Encourage sharing of these items, thus making them viral. The more reports or eBooks you write the more traffic you will drive to your website.

4. Participate in targeted forums.

Make useful posts in the forums related to your niche, and have your website link in your signature. Every time you post or respond to questions on the forum, your website URL is seen by all visitors to the forum.

5. Write and submit articles.

This is a very powerful tool for driving traffic to your website. In all your articles, make sure you have a resources box or author's biography, which includes your website's URL. After reading your article, people will want to visit your website. Allow reprinting of your articles, one article with reprinting rights can create hundreds of backlinks to your site.

6. Encourage Social Bookmarking

Give your visitors a way to share your site with others. Instead of confusing your visitors with icons from 16 different social bookmarking sites, you show them a single Share icon. Popular social bookmarking and sharing widgets are from Share This, Add This, Add to Any, and Tell a Friend. Some of these widgets provide you with tracking and analytics while others offer multi-lingual support. Choose the one which best fits your need.

7. Include your URL in your business email signature.

Anyone you communicate with can potentially be a prospect, so promote your website every time you send an email.

8. Publish your own newsletter.

Publish a newsletter that offers free tips and content on a regular basis. The newsletter can have links to items of interest on your site, increasing traffic. A newsletter keeps your URL in front of people for return traffic. Again, encourage subscribers to share your newsletter.

9. Start a forum.

By having a forum on your niche, you are established as an authority on your topic. By answering questions and helping people in your niche on your own forum, you drive more traffic to your website.

10. Arrange a joint venture.

Identify webmasters and list owners that complement your website so that they can advertise your site to their list. This is no cost traffic. Contact some list owners and present your request.

11. Create RSS feeds.

Submit the feed URLs to the major RSS feed directories. This will help generate traffic to your website.

12. Offer an affiliate program.

Having an army of affiliates advertising your site is an effective way of generating traffic. Create links and other material so all your affiliate has to do is copy, paste, and promote.

13. Use video marketing.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video is worth ten thousand. Create a video about the product or service that you offer on your site and post it on YouTube and other such video sites. Add your URL to the video; this will enable viewers to visit your website.

14. Exchange links with sites of a similar niche.

Trading links with other sites is a no cost way to increase web site traffic. Every visitor to the exchange site is a potential visitor to yours. All you have to do is reach an agreement with other webmasters.

15. Brand yourself.

No, I am not talking about a hot iron or a tattoo; I am talking about creating a name for you, a brand. Join social sites like twitter or facebook. Keep your interaction mostly social. Post a bio that tells everyone what you do and how you make your money including your URL. In time, they will come to you or your site. On occasion, if you have something truly great on your site, mention it. Do not push or act like a fast talking used car salesman. If someone has a problem, help them solve it. The solution may be a free report or paid product you offer.

By following the tips outlined above, you will create a great number of backlinks to your site. These links will boost your search engine stats and drive a lot of traffic to your website, boost your sales and grow your online profits.

Now, get busy and take action.

About the Author

Rudy Lorrah have spent years in advertising, then in design, installation, and service of electronic systems. Now I do Internet Marketing, Mentoring, and Teaching Product Creation at http://www.TopBusinessChoice.com.

How to Build a Facebook Fan Page

A Facebook Fan Page is a public profile that enables you to share your business and products with Facebook users. People can be your fan without being your friend, and pages are designed for businesses.

How do I get one?First of all it's Free. Anyone can set-up a fan page, the only caveat being you have to be associated to the business or organization, in other words have permission to speak for the organization. If you're the fan page administrator you have to have an account on Facebook, if you don't it will ask you to set one up.

Go to the link: http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php

Follow the step-by step instructions. When it asks for the fan page name give this some thought. The name you give your Page is permanent, so make sure it's the one your fans and customers will recognize. It only takes a few minutes, and the set-up has about five questions.

Take note of your page address. It looks something like this: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Unilyzer/147971667594 In this link 'Unilyzer' is the name of my fan page and the link number is the ID.

What are Facebook Fans?Facebook fans are like your friends on your personal account. They will receive notices when you add new wall posts, photos, and videos. I recommend becoming a fan your own page, and inviting your existing Facebook friends to 'Fan' your page. Make a wall post with a link to your new fan page. Using your existing network to build your fan page is a great place to start.

Need More Documentation?Download Facebook's Guide to Fan Pages. This is a great ten page guide, published by Facebook, for setting up a fan page and getting started.

About the Author

Rebecca Zappacosta is an Internet Marketing & Web Development Guru based in Dallas, TX. Visit her blog at 'http://www.unilyzer.com' for more no-nonsense advice on Social Media and Internet Marketing. You have permission to publish this article electronically, in print, in your ebook or on your web site, free of charge, as long as the author bylines are included.

Repurpose Your Content

It can be overwhelming to think about all of the content you have to create to maintain a social media and internet marketing campaign. Coming up and generating original ideas for blog posts, tweets, fan pages, videos, and podcasts can be challenging. However, by compounding your content and using a blog post to inspire a chain of related tweets, posts, and video you can reduce the time and increase the effectiveness of your online marketing.

Here is the formula for getting the most mileage out of your content:

Write a blog post with the rule of three. The post contains an introduction paragraph, three supporting examples or arguments, and a conclusion.

Turn the blog post into tweets. Take your main point from the introduction paragraph and post it as a question to your twitter followers. Then take the first sentence of each of your supporting examples or arguments and drip tweet them through out the day. Make sure to link to your original blog post in all your tweets.

Turn your blog post in to wall posts. The conclusion of your blog post summarizes the overall point your making. Take this nugget of an idea and find a related video, resources, or book on the topic. Post the video or resource on your Facebook wall along with a link to your original blog post.

Turn your blog post into a video or podcast. Take the blog post introduction and personalize with your own voice and style. Take the three supporting arguments and find an expert in the opposing or supporting side and interview them. With a podcast format you can call them and record their voice. With video you can be like a journalist and interview a local expert in the topic. Suggest several resources for the audience to get more information and wrap up with your final conclusion. Don't forget to plug your website and encourage folks to subscribe to your channel.

Digg and Ping your blog & videos. After you post to your blog and video site of choice, make sure to recommend yourself on the social bookmarking sites. This introduces your content to folks and generates incoming links. If your using a tool like WordPress to write your blogsite make sure you have it set to auto-ping blog indexing sites like Feed Burnner and Technorati.

As you can see one blog post can be easily repurposed into four different social media channels. This not only saves you time, but keeps your message consistent. If one blog post can generate four different pieces of content you can exponentially increase the reach of your online marketing.

About the Author

Rebecca Zappacosta is an Internet Marketing & Web Development Guru based in Dallas, TX. Visit her blog at 'http://www.unilyzer.com' for more no-nonsense advice on Social Media and Internet Marketing. You have permission to publish this article electronically, in print, in your ebook or on your web site, free of charge, as long as the author bylines are included.

Facebook: $750 Mil In Hand Worth More Than $2Bil In Sky

It came up conversationally, but I believe I'm the only person at my company to have firsthand experience as a user of Facebook.com. It was kind of funny to have all these online advertising professionals asking me all about the website everybody used in college. Didn't they get the memo? I'm new. I should be asking the questions around here. The subject of Facebook.com is an interesting one that's worth a closer look.

Without question 2005 was the year of MySpace. Before Rupert Murdoch's $580 million social networking venture took the interactive world by storm, it's difficult to believe that even the most optimistic of the billionaire's lackeys would have predicted that new acquisition would more than quadruple its reach within a matter of months. With 23.5 billion page views by February, MySpace became the second most trafficked site on the Internet.

Murdoch's success naturally generated buying interest in anything deemed online social networking. One proposed deal in March 2006, was Viacom's unsuccessful $750 million bid for Facebook.com, the phenomenon started by wunderkind Mark Zuckerberg. After Facebook.com declined the offer, its founders pegged Facebook.com's worth at two billion dollars. Perhaps the brilliant sparks from MySpace's success has blinded Facebook.com to the flipside reality of Friendster's paradise lost. There's a real chance Facebook won't see an offer this generous again.

Facebook.com is essentially an online medium of communication for college students and high schoolers. For its valued reach Zuckerberg and his crew of Harvard dropouts (taking their cue from Bill Gates, no doubt) must be looking for Google-sized compensation, but the two billion dollar figure is arbitrary and difficult to justify. Perhaps Facebook is emboldened by their own wise decision in not selling to Yahoo for $15 million in 2004.

Zuckerberg was likely trying to establish a market value for his creation, not an unwise move on the face of things. However, Viacom's offer was not by any stretch of the imagination pocket change and the number of entities that can and will double the bid Facebook already got is finite.

Facebook's traffic numbers, as referenced on Alexa.com, during the last three months are not encouraging; that is, if the goal is to fish for more and greater buyout bids. The numbers actually have trended downward since March, anathema for enticing hyper bidding growth. These diminishing statistics can be at least partially attributed to the cyclical nature of the school year since Facebook, after all, is geared towards the college student. It doesn't matter how great the product is, it won't keep students from doing their own thing during summer vacation and this yearly dip is potentially damaging.

Seeing as how fast online fads can expand and contract in social networking as we've seen in its short time span, what if the numbers don't come back? What if something new pops up in two months that steals Facebook's thunder? (And, again, MySpace's success serves as good reason why this thunder is worth stealing.)

Facebook.com's success has also been marred with some controversy that could taint its popularity with students. At Syracuse University a flap over freedom of expression ensued when a Facebook.com group went overboard in critiquing a student teacher and ended up with expulsions from the class and social suspension before three students transferred. After Penn State's football team beat Ohio State this year students rushed the field and made a ruckus. Overwhelmed police made only two arrests that day, but later in the week they logged onto Facebook.com and, like Canadian Mounties who always get their man, got plenty of names and faces and photos from the info posted by students about their on-field shenanigans. Kids talk and these stories spread like wildfire, which may affect Facebook.com negatively - they can't control misuse of their product and the negative repercussions that come from it.

The future is promising for the social networking business space and I don't believe Facebook.com is doomed. Still, given the nature of short-lived and over-hyped dotcoms, Facebook may have reached their growth climax this school year, with possibility for expansion and success only contingent on acquisition. Time may not be on their side because as the pages of the calendar turn there will doubtlessly be new fads and trends that will threaten to make something else the "Next Big Thing" at Facebook.com's expense. The clock is ticking.

About the Author: Allan Ayazyam

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How to Use Social Networking for Recruiting

You may be interested in tapping into the power of social networking website when finding job candidates. There are four social networking websites that can work well for recruiting, if used correctly: LinkedIn, Facebook, Ryze, and Doostang. It might make sense to use just one of these sites, a few, or all, depending on your goals and what particular industry you are in. You can use these sites alone, or combine them with other popular job hunting sites such as Monster and CareerBuilder when hunting for potential candidates.

First, let's look at LinkedIn. This website is by far the most professional oriented of the social network websites. It was started in 2003 by a former PayPal executive, and it now has over 30 million members in over 150 different industries. People use this site as a place to keep up-to-date professional information about themselves, like a real-time resume of sorts. Its strengths lie in its professionalism and is primarily used for professional contacts only. If you wish to communicate with a candidate on a more personal or casual level, this is not the place to do it.

Facebook might be viewed at the opposite end of the spectrum from LinkedIn - it is definitely more casual and less professional. Why would you want to use Facebook for recruiting? Well, for one, it simply has a vast pool of people - over 150 million people worldwide. Custom applications have been built for Facebook specifically for job recruiters, some of which link into more traditional job-hunting websites. Other Facebook applications, such as Indeed Jobs, let potential employees search from millions of jobs across thousands of websites. Using the right apps, Facebook members can also post their profiles in specific niches, making them visible to recruiters.

Another interesting option for locating qualified candidates is the website Ryze. It was founded in 2001 by a former engineer, and now boasts a half million members. Ryze is popular among aspiring entrepreneurs and those looking to start small businesses. It is a powerful tool for people looking to network with like-minded business owners. People who want to network on Ryze, and potentially seek employment, are encouraged to fill out a complete profile about themselves and upload examples of their past work. While it is a professional networking site, many people add more personal details about themselves than is typical for a site like LinkedIn, for example.

Doostang is another professional social networking website that is relatively new to the scene. It has about the same number of members as Ryze, approximately half a million, but Doostang is an invitation-only network. It is heavily populated by business school graduates with at least five years of work experience. It stands relatively alone among social networking professional sites, and markets itself as an exclusive network. It may or may not be right for you, but if this is your niche, its exclusivity might allow you to make some powerful contacts.

Whichever website or combination of websites you choose to utilize, you will likely be drawing from a good pool of candidates. People who use these websites tend to be highly motivated and strong networkers. They also tend to be selective about where they work, and seek out companies that will let them fully utilize their talents and advance their careers.

About the Author

Henry Joen has been writing articles for nearly 3 years. His newest interest is in outdoor fire pits. So check out his latest website that discusses fire pit outdoor deals and outdoor gas fire pit info so you can give your backyard a special focal point that the whole family can enjoy.

Using Facebook for Business

The secret's out that social media can be used to the advantage of businesses and organizations of just about all walks. And even though for some owners the details are still sparse and the benefits are unclear, there's a growing willingness to open up shop in an unfamiliar land. As long as it will pay off.

So does social media pay off for businesses?

Take Facebook as an example. More than a convenient way to keep up on friends, this medium has grown leaps and bounds into a platform that does everything. It's not just updates and profile photos anymore.

The entrepreneurial mindset has taken residence at Facebook, and now there are a whole array of methods to market your brand.

For instance, here are a few ideas for using Facebook for business:

• Show examples of customers using your product in creative ways
• Promote an upcoming event and invite people to it
• Hold a contest
• Open the floor to customer suggestions (this is as much a listening tool as it is anything else)
• Start a whisper campaign about a new product or service
• Highlight a star employee, or honor a customer
• Link to groups that your fans will appreciate and benefit from

As you outline your plan, remember that people are online looking for your brand. Someone wants to find you. And, like your company's email newsletter, Facebook offers another avenue for getting new people to your website, where they can call your phone number, fill out your contact form, or buy from your e-commerce store.

As you contemplate what to do next, consider these 3 basics of using Facebook for business:

Complete your page/profile. Filling out your company's name and phone number is only the beginning. This is your chance to talk about why you do what you do; make use of it.

Keep it fresh. Creating a social media account just to let it fall into abandon later is as bad as not setting it up in the first place. For the same reason you wouldn't send your resume from 10 years ago to your current potential employer, your fans don't want to read what was "current" about you last year; they want to know what you're doing right now.

Always remember what it's really about. Facebook's purpose, in part, is to connect people. Consider what fans are looking for at Facebook. They're probably looking for a face to put with your company's name. You can assist by updating your photos, videos, events, discussions, and notes.

Put these basics into regular practice, and you're over halfway there.

About the Author

The Internet Marketing Strategy team at August Ash likes to talk about these kinds of things. In fact, they really, really like to talk about these things. They aren't bad listeners, either. If you're looking to bring your business or non-profit into the social media age, give the internet marketing Minneapolis team at AAI a call.