13 May 07 ThinkBigsites, and make buzz about your webpage

We have reviewed, in the short but intense life of Review the Market :-), several companies that helped us to improve the way our website looked or the traffic it was getting, but never so far an entreprise we have seen  got as a slogan the promise to design your page on a way that it would create a buzz on the net :-).

We are talking about ThinkBigsites, a website optimization firm that focus in offering to you more website traffic  and  website optimization services to boost your visibility on the net.

On this last point in which I was particularly interested, they offer blog design optimization, SEO, webdesign and hosting, custom webprogramming, link building and even designing newsletters for you to reach potential customers or readers by email.

There is also a Blog marketing section where they work with us on improving and/or giving a more profesional look, to create a plan and strategy for your blog ( which is something I actually did not know was something it had to be done….mmmm…. :-)) or increasing the presence of your business in the blogosphere.

If all that was not enough, we can also get online support in the form of a webmaster to do the maintenance of our pages, or to fix quickly any problem that may arise. In summary, I guess the whole offer sums up as a good and complete package for bloggers like us, that may be passionated about blogging and writting, but sometimes may need some help in the rest of necessary work to keep the blog live and kicking all the time.

 

13 May 07 Best of the week

As usual, the summary of this week in case you missed something :-).

• Medgle, search your medical symptoms
  
• AimPromote, on demand lead management
• ShareThis, your favourite sites
• Apogee Search, get money from your web
• MediaMax, 25Gb of free space
• Mapmyname on the internet
• Foundyouonline, new dating service

Enjoy the weekend!

11 May 07 Found you Online, new free personal dating system

# Sponsored Post #. It has been some time since we haven’t had the opportunity to review a new dating service on Review the Market. Have you found already your dreamt partner since last time we talked about it? ;-). Ok, as some friends of mine say : “tidak apa-apa” ( do not worry :-)), because we have just been asked to review a brand new and free website that may finally deliver to you what you are looking for. We talk about Found you Online, which is in fact, not only a dating website, but a combination of social network and meeting facilities with dating features. :-).

Let’s go then to explain. As soon as you land in their home page, you have three options, depending if you are single looking for a free dating, if you are searching for former free classmates or if you want to get in touch with old military colleagues doing a quick military friend search. This last one is for me pretty new and innovative, as I have not seen anywhere else a place to find friends you served with in the army (US we are talking). As said, all this is for free and whatever category you click on and register, you will be able to find and add photos, contact details, videos, etc.

Just try it out, go to singles ( for instance ) and enter some data ( age, location, gender), then click search ( you can select only ads with photos ), and voila! you get a pretty nice list where you can see all possible candidates and their contact info. Just let us know what happens next, ok?

 

 

11 May 07 Map my name: locating everyone on the internet

Using the popular Google Maps, the project Mapmyname is a new and interesting online application pretending to locate everyone on the internet by adding simply your name to their database. The tool is a project from a couple of portuguese students where you can register and add your location and personal data, then it will appear on the global world map where people can locate you easily.

 

Let’s say you are on a business trip to Barcelona, and you want to see if anyone from the online community is located there, you then simply zoom in the map and you will see the name of the registered people who lives in the area. Should you wish to contact that person, you just need to click on their names to see their profile.

 

I can think of several useful applications for social networking involving this tool, although still requires many people to register their geo-locations, but give it time and we may find out that a complete map of internet users built around Mapmyname!

11 May 07 Review the Market welcomes PayPerPost

  It was about time to give the news, but we wanted to test and try for a few days before commenting anything :-), finally we are glad to say that Review the Market has joined PayPerPost, the site, I guess you all know, about sponsored reviews of new products, services, applications, etc, etc.

The Internet is becoming, if not already is, the best source for new stuff to spread quickly around and when you love writing about everything that is coming brand new out of the oven ( being that the reason of this blog ;-0 ) advertisers come often quickly to you to ask you to try their products and write about what you think about them.

Becoming part of Pay Per Post will now allow advertisers to find us even more easily, however we are just a couple of weeks old within their system so we are still playing with the several available options. Anyhow I think I can give already some opinions about it.

• I like pretty much how easy is to spot which opportunities are available and matching your blog profile, you do not need to get approval from the advertisers every time to write about what you want. Just spot what it is interesting to you and take directly the opportunity. Among the 6-7 systems on the net available to do sponsored reviews, within PPP there is no lack of possibilities, so it is likely that everyday you can write a post and get paid for it. I like also the possibility to give part of your earnings to charities using their system, so yes, you can also be a nice and helpful person writing paid reviews!

• I think it needs improvement the amount of time that it takes to load their site ( and I mean it!) . I do not have a bad connection and still it takes much longer than usual to log in every time I access the page. I have also seen that it takes a few days to get your post approved, which I believe it is due to the huge amount of entries they have, but still it is not nice to see for so long that your review is pending approval on your admin interface.

However, we wish a long relationship between PPP and Review the Market, which is right now waiting for all this new and cool stuff to get out so it can be reviewed!

10 May 07 MediaMax, 25 Gb free storage account

I had a small problem some days ago with my computer that, despite the several backups I have in countless CDs, made me fear with panic of having lost many important data ( and this is a very bad feeling, you know :-)). So I started searching the web to find a brand-new-web 2.0 application-type where I could store and access all my stuff from everywhere ( I can’t neither understand why I haven’t done it yet ;-)).

Among the several options I found, I have finally decided to open a free account in MediaMax, because they offer 25 Gbytes of free storage!. I went playing with the service for a while and have seen that the sorting options, upload and download features are quite good. The system also automatically sorts your files depending if they are photos, videos, documents, etc.  I have not seen anywhere else such big storage accounts on their free versions.

But this is not all, if you feel you need more, then you can subscribe to the professional plans which offer up to 100 Gbytes. So far, I am just backing up everything important in my computer ( my photos at full size ;-)) and let’s see once I get the virtual drive full :-).

08 May 07 Apogee Search, helping you to get money from your site

# Sponsored Post # Apogee Search is a SEO company that has been around in the market already for a few years . One of the reasons we are writing about it today is to let you know about an interesting section they have and the service they offer because I guess it could be pretty useful for all of us, working a bit to improve our positions in search engines, rankings, visibility, etc. The topic I am talking about is how to Avoid Search Engine Marketing Malpractice, a hot subject on the network these days as there has been some big news about companies ( one hotel chain) being blacklisted in Google and their pages completely removed due to the use of those black hat SEO techniques.

The company offers specialised services on a variety of online marketing methods that include paid search, natural search, affiliate marketing, and pay-per-call ( not sure if I missed something else :-)). In fact, you could simply ask them to review your blog or website and let them do the job of improving every single page on it so you can earn some more cash and exposure. Their solutions seek to drive qualified and targeted visitors to B2B and B2C websites, so if you are a shop for example you will attract more leads, customers, revenues and profits. Something I was impressed when I read about them was that it become since its creation in 2001 one of the 25 larges Search Engine Marketing firms in the world, which is indeed not bad at all just for a 4 years old firm :-).