I’m pleased to have recently been accepted to Blogrush, which is a referral program for bloggers. I say “pleased”, because this is my second attempt!

Initially I was disheartened that I didn’t cut the mustard, but the filtering does mean that the chances of links to poor quality blogs shown on your site are reduced. And to be honest, I hadn’t published many quality posts at the time of my first application.

I’ve been a member of ‘my blog log‘ for some time. This is a similar service, which has been recently bought by Yahoo. I have to say it does generate traffic and subscribers from people with a similar interest. It’s quite nice to see the faces of your readers too!

So far, I like Blogrush - some of the links in the sidebar have sent me to some interesting blogs, in particular this one from Unlocked Profits - How To Get Free Web Site Traffic In 2008. My New Years resolution will be to write some guides for work’s website available for download…

If anyone has any opinion let me know…

• Is it easy to use?
• Does it generate traffic or subscribers for you?
• Do you think it looks spammy?
• Have you used other services to better effect?
• Is traffic not important for your blogging?

Friendr.net has just launched; Friendr.net has been worked on by Virtuaffinity website developer Jim Neath.

This is a new social media optimization tool, that helps people add MySpace friends to their profiles.

This tool is useful for people who use their MySpace profile to promote their business or band, without spamming the typical MySpace users who purely use it to contact their friends and associates. MySpace is a great tool for keeping in touch; but spamming can be a problem.

As Social Media Optimization is relatively new, and the scope of Web 2.0 projects is constantly increasing, best practices and Social Media Marketing etiquette will also evolve.

Here are a couple of suggestions from an article by Kent Lewis of Search Marketing Standard:

• Respect the community
• Building and maintain a consistent and robust profile (or brand)
• Engage in the community by commenting, contributing and sharing regularly
• Don’t include blatant self-promotion
• Don’t post biased information
• Don’t breaking community rules
• Don’t spam

Learn more about Social Media Optimization from Wikipedia, or a brief summary of it from PushON Online Marketing specialists.

ContractStore has re-launched their site; this is a great example of well written, relevant content which can act as search engine food, increasing search engine rankings and also as a great resource for users.

The site is an E-commerce store offering free business templates, and also premium contracts which can be downloaded and used for a fee.
The descriptions have been enhanced to be relevant and to include important keywords for the site, whilst still being nice for a user to read.

This week I’ve created my first Squidoo pages…

Naughty SEO which is about bad practice SEO, ‘black hat’ techniques and pros and cons; and Website Analytics which is about website analytics tools (surprisingly enough!). These pages also have related links and resources.
I was surprised at how easy it was to create a page on Squidoo, and as they say when you sign up, it seems to be addictive. Unfortunately I’ve left a massive typo in one of the headings and the Squidoo server is running slower than my patience can tolerate!

I’ve also published my first post on the PushON blog, it’s about how search engines are changing.