Free Sources For How To Get Website Traffic

There can be a misunderstanding by those new to online marketing of how to get website traffic that it is essential to try and get the main page of your website as close to or even on the first page of Google. Whilst such a scenario will provide a boost of traffic levels to your website and blog, it is not the be all and end all of sourcing quality targeted traffic.
If you think of it for a moment, you will see that everyone's pursuit of achieving first page status on Google is impossible. Due to the fact that there are only ten spots on the first page, therefore a lot of marketers are going to be disappointed. So rather than try every method possible, and some that are illegitimate in the eyes of Google, it is better to use proven methods of how to build website traffic that, whilst they do require some effort, will reap rewards well into the future.
The key lesson for how to get website traffic is the importance of adopting a multi method approach. So what should you be using your time on to attract targeted traffic to your website? I hope that you spotted the use of the word "targeted"? Through adopting the following methods, it is not just any traffic that will be attracted, but quality targeted traffic that wants to find the very information and help that you offer on your website.
There is a requirement to create, on a regular basis, unique content articles and have them submitted to the article directories and other sites that are calling for content. They will be picked up by other websites and blogs where there is always a big demand for quality, unique content. Through having your content featured in these places, the value of the backlink will be higher as it is located from a source of relevance to your site. Another factor for how to build website traffic is that you must have a blog and be writing posts on a regular basis. To cut down on time spent creating content, why don't you rewrite an article that you have already used and split it into two blog posts?
Other methods to utilise include making regular posts on related forums in your niche though it is important to keep within the rules of each particular forum. If it is a blatant attempt to get traffic to your website then you will be quickly found out. You should also be undertaking a little social media marketing such as recording videos for YouTube, plus Twitter and Facebook. It could well be the case that depending on the characteristics of the target audience in your niche, a significant proportion of them could hang out on these websites. Remember, track down and go to wherever your audience is based.
By undertaking a range of methods you will be diversifying and spreading your website's presence across the internet. It will take time, yet the effort will be worth it as more and more of your content will start to appear in the search engines if you ensure that each piece of content is focused around one keyword or phrase.
Through utilising this strategy of how to get website traffic you will, over time, receive targeted traffic in ever higher volumes, in fact it will be impossible to turn off. And pages of your website and blog will be feature high in the search engines as the links will start to appear, even on the first page of Google for the keywords and phrases that you have targeted.

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How Facebook and iPhones Are Saving The Environment

Facebook is helping save the environment. So is your iPhone. Surprised? I was too when I first realised but after I thought about it for a while, I am jumping on this bandwagon.
Let's start with your iPhone, or other smart phone for that matter. How is that helping the environment? Think about it. Before, you used to have your phone, your camera, your mp3 player and your DS or PSP. That's four electronic items. Each of these needs charging. Each of these came in it's own packaging. Each of them were shipped individually from where they were made and each were likely picked up by you in separate trips. That's four times the carbon emission per product. By simply buying an iPhone you have cut your carbon emission for technology products by three quarters. Pretty impressive no?
That's not all. The digital content distribution provided by iTunes Store allows us to buy music electronically. This means there is no CD, no manufacturing carbon footprint, no shipping carbon footprint. The book store means that we no longer have to ship books all over the world. Let's face it. Books are heavy and take up a lot of space (compared to a CD anyway). There's a lot of carbon involved in making and shipping them. Even though the wood to make the paper usually comes from sustainable sources, the reduction in carbon is significant. Downloading apps means that you save on all the games packaging and harmful chemicals involved in the production of all of the CDs and manuals. Another winner.
On top of that, Apple are known for making their products from eco friendly and sustainable materials. The phone is eco friendly in it's construction and also in the way it takes information distributed through various channels rather than forcing us to buy physical products.
Facebook is another example of where physical products are being converted into digital products. It is easy to upload hundreds and thousands of photos onto Facebook and have everyone check them out. To do this before you'd have to print hundreds of copies and send them physically to people. Granted, you might not want to send all your photos around but digital cameras and Facebook allow the photographer and the viewer to make decisions about which photos are worth keeping and which are not.
There are many other products and sites that are helping to save the environment. Usually unwittingly. Wikipedia has all the information in the world on it's servers. No one need ever buy an Encyclopedia ever again. YouTube allows all artists to distribute their videos to anyone willing to watch them with no packaging or anything. WordPress and other blogging websites allow anyone to write a book or a blog or whatever they want and distribute it cheaply and easily.

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What It Means To Be An American - Freedom To Dream

A 20th century French writer and philosopher, Albert Camus once said, "Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better." That quote perfectly exemplifies what it means to be an American. It is commonly appreciated that Americans have the freedom to do what they want, say what they want, and ultimately be what they want. There is a difference that truly makes being an American great. Though there are many free nations in the world, and in those nations, you have the same kinds of freedoms, the beauty of being an American is that you have the ability to become more than what you are, and to transcend social and class barriers. The root of these barriers is an imposed subjugation that is willingly accepted for many different economic reasons. These reasons cultivate groups of people that seek to decrease mobility and raise these barriers. Our ability to struggle against that is one of the many freedoms that we enjoy and in light of all this, people still come from all over the world to America knowing that being here makes it at least possible for them to be better than what they were.
The picture that we've painted is that America is the land of opportunity and when seen from the outside-looking-in, America looks like just that, especially compared with many other countries in the world. Although America has many economic woes, people are still very optimistic about the opportunities we have. America has the best universities, one of the highest standards of living, a beautiful environment, and a set of rules and laws that generally promote an idea of justice and fairness. There is that feeling that people have in America which is that you can do whatever you would like as long as you work hard enough. When directly compared to the rest of the world; developing third-world countries or countries with repressive governments, America looks very bright. Another factor that people see is that America is the richest country in the world by far and in the age of trickle-down-economics, people would rather be in the richest place to hope that some of that wealth will trickle down to them. When the realities of the opportunities we have are looked at in great detail, especially in comparison to other developed countries, there is a bleaker picture to be painted.
When asked what it means to be an American, a group of ten year olds almost unanimously stated that what it means to be an American is our freedom. That freedom, compared with most other developed countries is not necessarily unique. A survey by Forbes Magazine did not even rank the United States in the top ten countries for happiness. America spends more than any other country on health care per person, yet it is far down the list regarding actual health service and coverage. Among developed countries, the unemployment rate in America is higher than most even with data obtained after the recession. Most disturbingly is our class system being ever more stiff and unyielding due to economic conditions that encourage submissiveness and menial servility. This fact is not at the forefront of peoples' minds though which can be a good thing regarding optimism. Michael Norton, a professor at Harvard Business School conducted a study which showed a graph of the income distribution of Switzerland and the United States. This graph was shown to a group of Americans and these people were asked which one they thought was the United States. Everyone in the study thought that the income distribution in Switzerland was in fact the United States. Income distribution in Switzerland is considerably less consolidated in the top 1% than the United States yet most people in this survey thought that that graph represented America. What is even more disturbing is the rise of a new global plutocracy, populated by the well-to-do's worldwide. In Paul Krugman's book, The Conscience of a Liberal, he speaks in great detail concerning the vast, and growing, divide between the haves and the have-nots.
Though the perception of America is that it is the land of opportunity; there are forces at work that are basically extracting wealth and enslaving people. Although politicians would never say so directly, their actions show that they're now fully bought and paid for by this new plutocratic global society. In Thomas Stanley's book, The Millionaire Next Door, there are surprising statistics that attempt to show people the scope of what is going on. It is very hard for people to imagine the forces at work or the extreme inequality that we face. The richest 1% of America has more wealth than all the lower class, all the middle class, and half of all the upper class, combined. There are some who would call these statistics and others some sort of an attack on the rich, but as wealth concentrates into a select few individuals' hands, the dream of America and the fundamentals behind being an American are being oppressed. Woodrow Wilson once said "No country can afford to have its prosperity originated by a small controlling class." The enslavement of America and the oppression of the American dream is done, in part, by debt and interest. Integral players and leaders of this plutocracy are the banks. Thomas Jefferson once said:
All these doubts and fears prove only the extent of the dominion which the banking institutions have obtained over the minds of our citizens, and especially of those inhabiting cities or other banking places; and this dominion must be broken, or it will break us.
The fundamental value and what it means to be an American is this ability to become more than what you are and to have the freedom to fight and speak out against those who would hold us down.
For us to hold onto the meaning of being an American it starts with acknowledging the forces at work that seek to take that away from us. These forces are not ruthless cold-hearted individuals per se, but in peoples' endless yearning for wealth, there are actions taken specifically for the purpose of exploiting to satisfy ones greedy desires. When put into the right perspective, people will not stand for it. We do have the ability to become more than what we are and to rise up and surpass the class barriers we face. Americans have a way of turning these complicated issues into policies that promote justice and fairness and doing that, is what it means to be an American.

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A New Era of Hi-Tech Death Squads

In a spectacular night operation US gunship helicopters flew to Abbottabad, Pakistan to kill Osama Bin Laden: This has been the biggest story in the last week and if you are not aware of it you probably do live in a cave. I have no qualms about Osama's death: He was a mass murderer of innocent people and died of the same kind of violence that he himself idealized and perpetuated.
What I question here is the new era of death squads. Previously, two nation-states have successfully used death squads to eliminate those that they deemed as people who had harmed their citizens, posed a threat to their security, or were declared "killable" due to their views about these two nations. This honor of sending death squads into foreign countries, ironically, was previously shared by Israel and the Islamic Republic of Iran.
While there is not much written or said about Israeli death squads, the Irani death squads of the mid seventies raised quite a few hackles in the west. Trained and despatched to take out the fugitive leaders of the Shah's regime, the Iranian death squads specialized in killing all those deemed responsible for murdering Iranians during the Shah's regime. People like Daniel Pipes, one of the darlings of American neoconservatism, found this quite wrong: Pipes actually makes it the main point of his book on Salamn Rushdie. Pipes, of course, is silent about the Israeli death squads.
With the killing of Osama, we have now entered a highly technologized stage of death squad tactics. Here is what has happened: United States deployed its special forces to take out a wanted man while flying illegally over the territory of one its closest allies in the region. The operation also involved invasion of a house and then, of course, the execution of this wanted man.
As I said earlier, I don't care much about Osam's death, but this new precedence of a nation sending a death squad into the territory of another sets a dangerous precedence. And since the action was taken by the US government, it is even more dangerous as it will certainly be emulated by other nations. So, while most Americans are rejoicing over this victory, they should also keep in mind that if this kind of tactics is normalized, the world will become, at the least, quite an interesting place.
There is now a possibility that the mercenary security companies that do provide death squads to the corporations in Africa and South America could also start bidding for the contracts on such global ventures. The question is also deeply philosophical, especially about the very nature of modern state of exception. As Agamben has taught us, "the state of exception is the norm," so would this new phase of technologized kills now become a norm. I see no reason for it not becoming so: there is immense popular support for it in the US. How would this shift in the role of justice restructure our desires and expectations of justice itself? Would this instance make it convenient for sending our death squads to take out all those declared "killable" by a particular nation-state? Will the private citizens, or non-state agents, also use the same methods to take out their "killable" others?
As a Pakistani, naturally, my concern is mostly about Pakistan. It seems the Pakistan Army and the Pakistani intelligence agencies need to answer some very serious questions. And they are not answerable to the people of United States and its government but to their own people.
A simple question: How could have Osama lived so close to the Pakistan Military Academy, in a heavily guarded house without the ISI or the MI knowing about it? For five years?
A more serious question that the military brass must answer, preferably in a public National Assembly hearing, is about the failure of their conventional air defense systems in detecting the flight of US gunship helicopters over their territory? I am not suggesting that they should have prevented a strike on Osama, but that they should have, at least, detected it.
We say in Punjabi, which translates very crudely to English, "Do not rejoice on the death of your enemy, for those you love will also die one day." So, I have no reason to shout in joy on Osama's death: he was, as I said earlier, a washed out terrorist responsible for the murders of thousands of human beings, Muslim and non-Muslim. I would have proffered if he had died in obscurity of kidney failure.
I am also not worried much about Osama's death, somehow, mobilizing more fundamentalist terrorists in Pakistan: It seems that the mullahs and their fanatical followers were doing quite fine already and this is not likely to effect their "enrollment" rates much. The manner of Osama's death, however, has given him the kind of posthumous credential that a natural death would have denied him: for all practical purposes, in the eyes of his followers and sympathizers, he is a Shaheed. This, in the long run, would create and sustain the Bin Laden mythology for the Muslim fundamentalists. The techologized, hi-tech elimination of Osama bin Laden, it seems, will become, within the logic of mythic narratives, a fine didactic tool for the Alqaeda and other terrorist groups.
So, let us start working on a counternarrative of hope and life or this mythologized narrative of death will come to haunt us with its immense symbolic and material power.

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