Recently, I received an offer for Pay Per Play advertising. If you haven’t heard of it, in a nutshell it is a 5 second audio commercial that will play each time a visitor hits your site. You will get paid for every visitor to your website, 100% conversion with nothing to do and nothing to click. To me, this concept is huge. TV and Radio have been doing this to us for years, whether or not we want to hear an advertisement, it is presented to us. The big corporate giants have been branding themselves this way on TV and radio for a millennium. Sure you can change the channel to avoid an advertisement, but; you have already heard the sponsors message. I get up and leave the room when the commercial stretch comes on during a program I’m watching. I have commented to my wife on numerous occasions that there are way too commercials during my favorite shows.

Pay Per Play is different though; it’s a one shot, 5 second clip. It’s here and then it’s gone. It doesn’t play over and over and there is never more than one. If a major advertiser wants to throw me a few pennies to say their name on my website, more power to them. To me, it’s all upside for the website owner; or so I thought.

I went to the site and read everything I could find and my conclusion at the end of my research was favorable. Then I did a search on Pay Per Play on the search engines. What was a solid decision in the beginning became a bit unsteady; but for me, I believe the scale still tips toward Pay Per Play being a good addition to a website.

I found that across the web, Pay Per Play is being met with mixed emotions. Pay Per Play is not scheduled to go live until February 1st, 2008 so everything is speculation about it’s debut and further it’s efficacy to publishers and advertisers alike. Some believe Pay Per Play will rival Google AdSense for revenue to it’s publishers. Others are not so sure, in fact many netizens have come right out against such an unwanted intrusion and vowed to immediately leave a website if such an audio message is played over their speakers.

I also found that there is some dirt being thrown about the company that has brought the concept to market. To mention them here is not appropriate; but due diligence is warranted if you think Pay Per Play is a good opportunity for your sites. As with any new opportunity, the people that come to the table have histories of successful and not so successful ventures and there seems to be some bad blood regarding a previous affiliate program. If I were being asked to lay down a large amount of cash here, I might have some reservations and be inclined to do more research before moving forward. With Pay Per Play as it is, there is no upfront cost, so to me the company and the players will start with a clean slate; but I will keep a keen eye to make sure everything stays on the up and up.

This opportunity seems to be profound. I have often compared the internet to the California Gold Rush in the 1800’s. Many, many affiliate marketers that were lucky enough to get in before the Dot Com crash had the opportunity to mine the easy gold and make huge piles of cash with not a lot of effort. Fast forward to today and the rest of us show up and find there is real money still left to be made; but it will require rolling up our sleeves and working harder and smarter to find the gold. Ahh and be ever cautious of the fools gold! In the gold rush days, many a fortune were lost on Fools Gold.

So that begs the question, is Pay Per Play a new found gold mine or is it fools gold? Will it rival Google AdSense? The jury is still out on the answer; but somebody, somewhere will stumble onto the next big internet wave.

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Some of us reading this may not realize that before email, there was just the United State Post Office delivering our precious mail through rain, sleet, snow and dogs with bad attitudes. And even if it took them 50 years (yep, it really happened) they would deliver you’re mail to whomever was still alive by then. Well, the post office still delivers mail, but now we have options … yes, I’m talking about email, which has revolutionized the way we send and receive mail.

Lets look at the differences between old and new …

1. Stamps
No need for those with email of course. If you’ve ever tried to mail several letters, you probably remember the awful taste of the stamps (does anybody remember those special flavor stamps like “Beef Stew”?) and the envelopes. Nor do you any longer suffer through those nasty little tongue paper cuts from the envelopes. Plus, if you needed more than a couple of stamps, you got them in rolls. Take the first stamp off and *Boing* … a string of stamps! Much worse than map folding.

2. Spam
Well, there isn’t much improvement there. Even during snail mail’s heyday there was spam. In fact, my parents used to send me to the mailbox and sort out the Sears, Magazine offers, JC Penny’s and other spam from the regular mail. I was kinda like a homemade “Spam” filter and all the ads were thrown in the garbage … Mostly .. there may have been a few that found their way into my room.

3. Composing a Letter
Before email we had to write out our letters with a pen or pencil and several pieces of paper. Ever had a pen leak all over you’re fingers and the letter? And it always seemed to happen when you were just about finished. That was about the worse thing that could happen, except for the deep grooves in you’re fingers from clenching the pencil for a few hours. Now we can type our letter out and correct them with out the steaked eraser marks and correction fluid (unless you use it on you’re monitor screen), and the worse thing is getting carpel tunnel or frustrated trying to find the right keys.

4. Speed of Delivery
As a kid, I had to write a letter, lick the stamp and envelope, apply a return address label, run out to the mailbox, and the letter would sit there until the mailman (later “Femailman”) picked it up in the afternoon. Then I got to anticipate a return letter for days,
weeks or even months! This may have been a good thing to teach patience, but it sucked later when I needed my Income Tax Return. Now I compose my letter, and send it to the recipient who can read it at his/her leisure almost instantly.

It is obvious to me that email is far superior to snailmail in many different ways .. but one thing still hasn’t changed … you can send your email really fast, but you can STILL wait day, weeks or even months for a reply!

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(CNN) — Entertainer Michael Jackson has died after being taken to a hospital on Thursday after suffering cardiac arrest, CNN has confirmed.

Jackson, 50, had been in a coma at the hospital, sources told CNN.

Brian Oxman, a Jackson family attorney, said he was told by brother Randy Jackson that Michael Jackson collapsed at his home in west Los Angeles, California, Thursday morning.

Family members were told of the situation and were either at the hospital or en route, Oxman said.

“I can only tell you that the family members are crying and I just have not been able to confirm anything, other than to hug them and tell them that I love them,” Oxman said.

Fire Capt. Steve Ruda told CNN a 911 call came in from a west Los Angeles residence at 12:21 p.m.

Ruda said Jackson was treated and transferred to the UCLA Medical Center.

Asked specifics of the patient’s condition, he said he could not discuss them because of federal privacy laws.

The music icon from Gary, Indiana, is known as the “King of Pop.” Jackson had many No. 1 hits and his “Thriller” is the best-selling album of all time.

Jackson is the seventh of nine children in a well-known musical family. He has three children, Prince Michael I, Paris and Prince Michael II.

At the medical center, every entrance to the emergency room was blocked by security guards. Even hospital staffers were not permitted to enter. A few people stood inside the waiting area, some of them crying. iReport.com: Remembering Michael Jackson

A large crowd was also gathering outside the hospital, according to video footage.

Outside Jackson’s Bel Air home, police arrived on motorcycles. The road in front of the home was closed in an attempt to hold traffic back, but several people were gathered outside the home.  source

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Farrah Fawcett died at 9:28 AM today. Ryan O’Neal and Alana Stewart were at her bedside. She was 62.

She died at St. John’s hospital in Santa Monica in the ICU. Also present — Farrah’s longtime friend and hairdresser, Mila Murphy, and Dr. Piero, who has been caring for her.

Farrah’s only child, Redmond, was not present. He’s currently in jail. A petition will have to be filed for Redmond to be able to attend the funeral — as of now, this hasn’t happened.

The “Charlie’s Angels” star was diagnosed with anal cancer back in 2006.

UPDATE: We’ve learned Ryan and Farrah did not marry during her final days. Alana Stewart, who has known Farrah for 30 years, said “she will always be there as that angel on the shoulder of everyone who loved her.”

Ryan O’Neal just released the following: “After a long and brave battle with cancer, our beloved Farrah has passed away. Although this is an extremely difficult time for her family and friends, we take comfort in the beautiful times that we shared with Farrah over the years and the knowledge that her life brought joy to so many people around the world.”

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Hundreds of thousands of online stores around the internet; with yahoo alone boasting more than 20,000 stores. The only way you can build traffic to your yahoo store, is by strategically featuring in online searches. The higher you rank on the SERPs (Search Engine Ranking Pages) for the specified product category you are offering, the higher relevant hits to your website and higher conversions.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the key to obtaining a high rank on search engines. When SEO-field, your yahoo store gains steadily in search engine rankings.

SEO is usually thought about as placing the right keywords in the right spots. However, with the search engines becoming smarter and smarter, this no longer suffices. Yahoo stores use a complex proprietary language called RTML, making the task of SEO integration even more difficult. For your yahoo store to succeed in the race for search engine listing, here are a few notable SEO ideas:

Product Descriptions

Product descriptions that contain strategically placed keywords can bring prospective customers streaming into your yahoo store. Moreover, if a user is searching for a particular product, there are very high chances he/she is about to buy it.

Product Image Names

An often overlooked yahoo store SEO aspect is product image names. Search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN Live etc. recognize image names and even provide extensive image search features. Naming your product images correctly can play an important role in improving SEO listings.

SEO oriented Blog

Blogs are notoriously search engine friendly and can provide a big impetus to your search engine listing. A regularly updated blog with SEO friendly content can bring your yahoo store to the forefront of user searches, and also draw a lot of traffic. Blogs can help solidify the notion that you are not a fly-by-night online retailer. This builds trust with the users and leads to higher conversion ratio and user loyalty.

Bread Crumbs

Bread crumbs are amongst the frequently ignored yahoo store SEO feature. Bread crumbs are smart navigation markers which provide an exact product listing position to the search engine, making it easy for them to relate these product listings with user searches on their website.

Meta Tags

Dynamically generated meta tags containing unique keywords and descriptions on each page of your yahoo store are great support to the over SEO effort. These meta tags are amongst the first places a search engine looks into when spidering your page; making them strategically important in search engine listing.

Page Title Tags

Page title tags inform the search engine what exactly to expect inside a page. Poorly and unprofessionally titled pages can prove to be a big disappointment for the search engine and your yahoo store may be demoted in search engine listings. Hence you need dynamically generated smart page title tags to be approved as relevant content by search engines.

With the above 6 SEO ideas, your yahoo store will be all set to gain prominence in search engine listings and provide profitable traffic to your website.

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Understanding search engine optimization software can really help you to rank your site well. Knowing that it’s not a cure-all is one of the first steps in understanding it. There’s no magic ‘automatic’ number one ranking involved. It takes some manual work on your own as well. But the aim of working with it is to take advantage of its automation and for trying to rank in the top 5 to 10 spots in the search for your topic.

One of the most important steps in Search engine optimization is choosing keywords or phrases. You do this by taking into consideration who your market customers are, and what they would want to find when they visit your site.

Search engine optimization software assists you in getting these top ranking spots in the search engines. The main search engine that most shoot for high rankings in is Google. Being ranked high in the search engines is like being at the head of the line for a handout. The closer to being next in line, the better chance of getting something good.

Getting your page ranked high is exactly why you should use search engine optimization software. It will assist you with the basic things involved, freeing you up to do some of the other things that need to be done in order to make the process work. The software can give you key information about directories, keywords, and other relevant facts for optimizing your site.

The SEO software of today is constantly being updated to keep up with the new ranking algorithms of engines like Google and Yahoo. One of the best advantages to the use of SEO software is the amount of time it saves, especially if you’re tied up with processing orders or handling things like customer service.

SEO software is a great aid in running a website. It frees you up to handle other tasks that are conducive to a successful site, such as customer service and processing orders. You have to be careful that your keywords are not too general or that you’ve landed yourself in a niche that’s highly competitive. This will make it seem like your SEO software is ineffective. But not so.

Ineffectiveness can mostly be due to the fact that these SEO softwares deal in SEO basics. There’s a lot more to SEO that the software programs are not going to deal with, leaving you with some work to do of your own. The best search engine optimization is done by hand.

There are some SEO software programs that make big claims for getting you to rank at the top. Be wary of these, especially if you’re new to this and can see the benefits of it without understanding that no SEO software program will achieve this apart from your own work.

By understanding search engine optimization software you can better utilize it and take advantage of the benefits it has. It’s a great assistant, but it can’t replace your own manual contributions.

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