By Shannon Lilly. Article Marketing is a practice that no webmaster, blogger or Internet marketer should go without doing. Even if you've never written a single thing in your life, you can benefit from article marketing. Read through this mini "how-to" on article writing and if you still think you can't do it, I'll give you some options to get your article written. But I have faith that you can do it if you just take the time!

By Michelle Greer. You've created a company newsletter because it's part of the "business plan". Every month or so, you take a look at the deliverability and click-through rates. You know people actually open them. You also know your email marketing campaign needs work. It's just not as exhilarating as building your Twitter following or creating that Colbert Fan Club on Ning. Although email marketing isn't often associated with Web 2.0, 3.0, or 12.0,

By Michelle Greer. 33% of consumer time is spent online, and yet internet advertising only accounts for 7% of advertising spending. Unfortunately, these users often have the attention span of a three month old golden retriever when it comes to online advertising. Advertisers have to think smarter to capitalize on this untapped market. How are ad networks making sure that ads actually connect to the products and services they want to buy?

By Michelle Greer. You can have the most attractive website of all your competitors. You can hire usability experts, professional photographers, and the greatest PHP developers money can buy. If you aren't on the first page of Google, you might as well be from Mars. Sorry. Why? It's not that we don't value what you have to offer. It's that we, the search engine using public, are too hard-pressed for time and/or lazy to bother to look for you.

By David Snyder. Much has been made around the Web about the "Truth and Myth" post by Software Engineer Andy Golding on the Google News blog. There have been quite a few posts written about how the ideas discussed by Golding relate to publishers, SEOs, and PR professionals. What about the social media marketer and corporate reputation manager? Many people, who have not found the value of great reputation management tools such as Trackur ,

By David Snyder. Li Ka-shing, Hong Kong billionaire and CEO of telecommunications conglomerate Hutchison Whampoa, has increased his investment in Facebook in excess of $100 million. Li announced the investment in Facebook during Hutchison's earnings call on Thursday . Li shared his opinions on Facebook on during an earnings press conference for Hutchinson : "Facebook is doing very well, and we could have some synergy between the 3G services of Hutchison and Facebook,

By David Snyder Google has had a tough March. First it lost Sheryl Sandburg, a pre IPO executive largely credited with making Google the sponsored ad cash cow it is today. Now it has lost Ethan Beard , its former director of social media. Beard will be joining Facebook as the site's director of Business Development. He told Tech Crunch : "Yes, I can confirm that I have resigned from Google and will be going to work for Facebook.

By David Snyder A New York assemblyman has put together a bill that if passed will make it a punishable offense for certain Web companies to collect personal information about their users for advertising purposes without their consent. Richard L. Brodsky, the assemblyman who sponsored the bill, stated, "Should these companies be able to sell or use what's essentially private data without permission? The easy answer is absolutely not.

By Jake Pitt First, the boring crap: According to a Nielsen Company report, total advertising spending for the first half of 2007 decreased 0.5% from the same period in the prior year. However, internet advertising showed to still be rockin' strong, actually increasing 23.2% over this period. What this shows is that the product lifecycle of traditional media advertising )TV, magazines, etc.( has reached the decline stage,

By David Snyder Microsoft launched a new adCenter community Monday. The new community replaces the adCenter blog and forums with product specific blogs, categorized user forums, multimedia distribution, and user profiles . This new SEM resource can be found at adcentercommunity.com . The community offers advice on adCenter advertising, the adCenter API, and adCenter analytics. In her welcoming blog post Carolyn Miller, a Microsoft Program Manager and blogger,

By David Snyder Yahoo took a step towards developing its search technology for the future by announcing the adoption of some key standards of the "semantic web." On Yahoo's company blog, Amit Kumar, director of product management for the company's search site, said the organization had begun to support key semantic web standards.

By David Snyder Tim Armstrong, Google's President, Advertising and Commerce for Google in North America, outlined his companies vision for its role in media purchasing last week. Speaking at the American Association of Advertising Agencies Media Conference in Orlando, Florida, Armstrong explained Google's plan to develop a media buying "dashboard." According to Media Post , Armstrong stated: "It basically takes a mix of different media types and puts them together,

By David Snyder LiveDeal Inc., a publicly traded company out of Arizona, announced a long-term sponsored search agreement with Yahoo Inc. today. The sponsored search results will be delivered to Livedeal.com, and will be displayed on LiveDeal's classifieds and yellow pages. "Yahoo's considerable base of high quality local advertisers complements Livedeal.com's combined classified and yellow-page marketplace platform.

By David Snyder While Bill Gates is banking on natural language search , the folks at Vodafone are throwing their hats in the empty ring of image search. Vodafone demonstrated their search engine, Otello, at Cebit 2008 in Germany . The technology works by sending MMS )Multimedia Messaging Service( images via mobile device instead of entering words or phrases. Otello takes the image, retrieves information having to do with the image, and sends it to the user's cell phone.

By Alan Johnson I'm sure most of you have realized that things are not looking all that great for Yahoo!, and let's just say that both management and investors are beginning to face the facts. To make matters worse, it seems that Google is, according to TechCrunch , close to securing yet another victory, with the folks over at Ask looking into switching to Google for search and abandoning or selling Teoma.

By David Snyder Yahoo! unveiled a new project named "search monkey" at the SMX West being held in Santa Clara, California. The project is a set of open source tools that allow publishers and users alike to enhance search results as they pertain to a particular web site. Basically these tools give publishers a way to refine their search results in Yahoo . Sound familiar? If the project does,

By David Snyder LiveVideo.com , which launched February 20th, is the brainchild of Myspace Founder Brad Greenspan, and the first fully interactive, global, live streaming platform. The site allows connectivity 24 hours a day, allowing users to generate content independently or with colleagues and friends. The platform also integrates features such as LiveTextChat, LiveCoHost, and LivePolls to allow unlimited feedback and user engagement. Among LiveVideo.

By Alan Johnson I'll be the first one to admit that things have definitely been interesting the last couple of weeks, with Yahoo! obviously in the spotlight: Microsoft's bid, Yahoo's letter to their shareholders, all of the merger scenarios and Microsoft's unwillingness to raise their bid. If I were to describe these events using just one word, it would have to be "entertaining". Aside from the way things have unfolded,