Everyone who maintains a website is desperately finding ways to drive traffic into their websites. There are many paid and free internet traffic generation services. But I found a service which is more effective compared to others. It is called as Buzzfuse .

It is free to register and all you have to do is enter your email address. Then you will receive a confirmation link and all you have to do is to follow the steps mentioned. Buzzfuse use a new way of marketing your product (article, image, video, song etc.). They start with letting your friends to know about it and then if it is good, it will be ranked according to the popularity. Then it will go to the friends of those friends. This is a very good viral marketing strategy and you can get more traffic to your web site. If your product is really interesting and worthy, you will also earn money. Why don’t you have a trial with Buzzfuse and recover the truth. You will definitely love it.

Image courtesy: brighterworlds

I received an email from the BlogCatalog team informing me about this wonderful new widget. It is called the News Feed. I think it is better to inform you about it by their own words. Here is an extract from that email.

The BlogCatalog team is excited to announce to you the launch of our newest widget, the News Feed. A widget that many bloggers are calling the most useful, innovative widget that BlogCatalog has launched so far.

How will you benefit from the News Feed widget?

The News Feed widget is a powerful little tool, that when added to your blog will automatically display what you are doing on social networks, that you have added to your BlogCatalog profile, and even more exciting as you use the News Feed widget your blog traffic will increase.

The News Feed comes in a range of different colors to match your blog and automatically displays your activity from a number of social networks including: Amazon Wish lists, BlogCatalog, Delicious, Digg, Facebook, Flickr, Last.fm, Multiply, MySpace, Sphinn, StumbleUpon, Twitter, YouTube, and more.

What makes that so cool?

It makes your social network data portable and it keeps your blog fresh, even when you are somewhere else. It also helps people see which networks you’re active in so they can connect to you on one or all of them. And if you don’t want them to see one, no problem. Just turn it off. It’s that easy.

What’s even better is that your friends can subscribe via RSS to your social activity so they know anytime you submit an article to Digg, StumbleUpon a great site, or post something new to your blog. It can even help some of your posts go viral because all of your BlogCatalog followers and your blog readers will be up to date on your activities.

In fact, you can promote your friend’s post too. Write a comment on Twitter with a link or favorite their YouTube video and then everyone within your network or who reads your blog will see it. The bottom line: it’s very dynamic and versatile tool because it’s one of the first cross social network solutions out there.

So why not check it out? to get the New Feed Widget just go to:
http://www.blogcatalog.com/account.widget.php?type=feed

And, if you’d like, leave us a few comments on our discussion forums at:
http://www.blogcatalog.com/discuss/entry/introducing-the-newsfeed-widget

For some creative ways to use the News Feed widget to get your posts to go viral read:
http://www.blogcatalog.com/discuss/entry/get-your-blog-posts-to-go-viral

Let us know what you think!

The BlogCatalog Team

Most of us use free email services to create email accounts and maintain them. Sometimes we use these email accounts to send very important emails. I also have experienced this. But there are times we hate these email services due to many reasons. I will describe some disadvantages of these free email services in this post.

The most important disadvantage is the security and privacy. We cannot control our privacy and security of our emails and profile data. All the free email service providers including Gmail, Yahoo and hotmail say that they guarantee the full privacy. But can we make sure that they actually do that. Most of us receive unwanted emails (spam) even if we don’t provide our email addresses to a third party. Some of you may know that many free email services sell their email addresses to various marketing companies. Therefore we can’t believe on the guarantees of these free email service providers.

Another disadvantage is most of these free email services provides simple web based email facilities where we can’t do many modifications. For an example if we use Gmail web interface to send an email, it is very hard to add a picture from our local machine instead of sending as an attachment. It also limits the customization of text and images. It is hard to add a customized email signature also.

Many companies provide free email services to make it as a good advertising and marketing medium. Actually that’s all they want and don’t care about how it affects the email user. For an example when you log into your Gmail or Yahoo email account, you will see advertisements in the right side and top. This is not a big headache in Gmail, but in Yahoo it is a real headache especially with their new webmail interface. I’m not comfortable with it and actually it is a headache for me. I think that most of you feel in the same way. It is possible to assume that we will lose our actual email workspace size in the coming future where more and more advertising and marketing methods are added to our web email interface. Up to now, there is one way that we can stop this by configuring an email client like Outlook or Thunderbird for our email account.

As far as I know, some companies and individuals pay less attention to the emails they receive from free email services addresses as they experience that most of them are spam. Due to this, there is a great possibility that they will miss very important emails sent to them. This will also affect us if we send important emails from free email services.

Therefore it is better if you can have a personal email account in your own domain (Ex. yourname@yourdomain.com) if it is affordable. If not, make sure that you use an email client and put an attractive mail subject where the receiver will put more attention to your email.

Most of us suffer from unwanted emails (spam emails). They fill our inbox very quickly. Some spam emails are blocked by the email service. But sometimes we receive emails from the websites or people that we know and use, in an unwanted time and sequences. I have experienced this frequently. I’m pretty sure that you have also experienced this or still experiencing it. Therefore I thought to write this article on how to avoid this by following some basic precautions.

Actually, if you are receiving unwanted emails, the responsible person for these unwanted emails is you. I say this because you are the one who provides your email addresses to various people and websites. Therefore you better start practicing the following guidelines on your email addresses if you are not doing it now.

The first thing you must do is deciding the people and websites that you are going to provide your primary email address. Give an importance to each person or website. If you don’t bother receiving emails from them it is ok to provide your primary email address. If you want to give your email address only once and don’t wish to receive emails from that person or website again, my advice is to create a secondary email address from a free email service like Gmail or Yahoo and provide it. Many websites ask to enter a valid email address even for a single download or for some data. Then some of them sell these email addresses to various kinds of email marketing services and individuals to market products and services. If you provide your primary email address, you will be receiving various kinds of unwanted emails. If you provide your office email address, the situation will definitely become worse. Therefore always keep a secondary email at least to provide for these kinds of websites and people.

Never provide your real details like address and phone number when registering for a secondary email account. Sometimes, the marketing companies can extract your personal data. Then they will contact you using those data. And never open or reply to emails that you are not quite sure about. Because some emails carry viruses. There are email blocking settings provided by your email service. But they differ from service to service. You must find out about those settings and configure your mail account to minimize the amount of emails that you receive.

There is no doubt that the internet has become a much needed facilitator for our day to day life. Many people use the internet heavily for their different kind of purposes. Some of them make living from the internet. But the internet has both pros and cons. I’m not going to write about cons here. I will write on one of the most important feature in the internet which is improving in a remarkable phase VOICE OVER THE INTERNET (or technically called as Voice Over the Internet Protocol-VOIP).

In the past few years the technology behind voice over the internet has improved in a very reliable and effective way. In the modern age, voice over the internet is being used even for business related conferences and has gone further level up to video conferences.

General people use this feature often through chat clients like Yahoo Instant Messenger, Google Talk, MSN Messenger, Skype, etc. These chat clients provide free call facilities PC to PC. Some of them like Skype provide PC to Phone call facilities on cheaper rates. Actually this feature has revolutionized the modern international communication. People can talk to their loved ones and friends who live in abroad if both parties have a PC and an internet connection. This is a great relief for the people like me who are living in developing countries. I use the above mentioned chat clients calls even for my professional purposes. Sometimes I contact my foreign clients through chat client calls.

Many people use voice over the internet as a daily communication medium. And I can’t predict about how it will be in few years. But I believe that someday the voice over the internet will replace the traditional phone communication system offering very cheap rates compared to them.