Online communities like MySpace, Facebook and Friendster have totally revolutionized the way we keep in touch with friends and family members online. While this is great and all for leisure and entertainment, these sites don’t really offer any benefits for business-minded people. Its this void that sites like LinkedIn aim to fill.

LinkedIn is an online community for business professionals to meet, share ideas and keep in contact with each other. Networking in any business setting is essential if you plan to grow and expand your company. As I have said before, its all about “who you know”, especially in the tech industry. You really do need to know as many people as you can and get your name out there. You never know when having the right contact will benefit you.

The site is free to join and once you have created an account, you can begin to set up your profile. If you have worked with any online communities, you should already be familiar with most everything.

Your profile page is more or less an online resume. You can list previous jobs and your education background, as well as provide as little or as much detail about each as you wish. You can even receive recommendations from others on your connections list, like a business reference or a letter of recommendation. Stuff like this goes a long way when job hunting!

The meat and potatoes of LinkedIn, however, is the networking. A powerful search tool is provided which makes it pretty easy to find contacts you have worked with. Once you have established a contact, you can look at their connections list to find others you might know or have done business with. You can request that a friend introduce you to a new contact or elect to initiate contact yourself.

LinkedIn also offers a ton of other features, like job searches and a very neat question and answer section where you can post questions to your contacts or the community in general.

I joined LinkedIn last year but just recently started making a heavy push for new contacts and it is already starting to pay off as a few new business opportunities have developed. If you are already on LinkedIn, feel free to add me as a connection. See you there!

I recently conducted a blogging case study (completely by accident) and decided it would be fun to share my results here with everyone.

About this time last year, I started adding new blogs to my bookmarks list. These were blogs that I enjoyed reading and covered a wide variety of topics: personal, technology, financial, etc. Basically just stuff that I was interested in.

I have tried to keep constant with most of these blogs over the past year, but I didn’t have enough spare time to visit each one every day, every week or even every month.

So, fast-forward to present day. A couple of days ago, I decided to check back in on some of these blogs and see what all I had missed in the past few months. To my disappointment, many of these blogs were either no longer updated, or simply no longer existed at all.

Last year, I added a total of 62 blogs to my bookmarks list. As of just a few days ago, over 25% of these blogs are now defunct. By defunct, I mean either A) the blog has not been updated in the past 60 days or B) the blog no longer exists. So why are a quarter of the blogs I use to visit no longer around?

That’s a good question, and there are probably several answers. I would suspect several of these blogs jumped into existence simply to make a quick buck. As the owners soon found out, making money online takes a lot of work. Others probably just got tired of not being successful - and by that, I mean not having a strong following. Updating a blog is not much fun when nobody ever comments on your posts. Still others may have become too busy in their personal life to continue updating their blog, which is fine.

But, for the life of me, I don’t know why people just totally abandon their sites! If you don’t plan to update it any more, make a post saying so! You at least owe it to your readers to explain why you won’t be updating the blog any longer. I have seen this countless times in the computer hardware website scene, and it’s a real shame. I have seen countless sites (really good sites) come and go, with no explanation. One day, they are seemingly doing great, the next day, they cease to exist or are simply left for dead.

Have any of you seen some of your favorite sites come and go? Or perhaps you are guilty of abandoning a site yourself? Speak up, let’s hear it

I know, it sounds very obvious, but proofreading your work is extremely important. Here are a few quick tips that I’d like to pass along to you all.

First and foremost, use a spell checking program. I personally use Microsoft Word when editing product reviews and articles for my tech site. It only takes a minute or two to run a document through Word, so there is really no excuse not to.

Second, get someone else (two people if possible) to read over your work before posting it. I can remember back in high school when my English teachers would always tell me to read back over my essay to check for errors. Now, I don’t know about you, but for me, it is nearly impossible to edit my own work… not because I don’t want to, but simply because if I made a mistake the first time, odds are I will pass right over it the second time as well. Having a friend or two that can look over your work will help you to catch errors that you did not catch.

So why do I put so much emphasis on proofreading? Well, think about it. You only have one shot to make a good first impression. If someone reads one of your articles and it is full of errors, you have just instantly degraded your integrity. People will tend to not take you as seriously if they see that you haven’t even mastered the basics of the English language.

For example, I am a member of a popular college sports website (I pay a monthly fee even). The site offers some really good articles on Ole Miss football, but I can’t help but notice that nearly every one of their articles have at least 2-3 spelling / grammar errors. I could understand if this was a single person writing these articles on his/her blog, but this is a very large site with several thousand members! I even e-mailed the editor about this and offered to help proofread their stuff before it goes live. I never received a reply.

Now, don’t get me wrong… nobody is perfect. Everyone makes mistakes, and at times, errors will still slip through regardless of how much proofreading is done. The difference here is one or two stray errors vs. every single article having a handful of mistakes.

Fellow blogger Derek Semmler tipped me off on a new website earlier today called Sphinn. Sphinn is the latest in a slew of Digg-like websites which allow members to submit news articles which are then voted on by other members. Articles that receive a lot of votes, or Sphinns, are deemed “Hot” and are sent to the front page for all visitors to see. The result of your efforts? Traffic, of course!

While Sphinn is still relatively new and won’t bring you the kind of traffic that Digg will, it does have one big thing going for it: targeted traffic. If you are a blogger, SEO expert, affiliate marketer, etc., you will no doubt find many useful articles at Sphinn. The reverse is also true: articles that you submit are more likely to be accepted with open arms.

As we all know, Digg users are, well, a “special” group of folks

Did you get in on today’s DealDotCom.com Offer? If not, too bad, because the product is completely sold out!

Today’s deal was for WordPress Affiliate Pro, a great WordPress tool that lets you turn any word into an affiliate link on your WP blog.

Keep a keen eye on tomorrow’s Deal Of The Day. New deals are posted at midnight and remain live until they are sold out.

If you are not a member of DealDotCom.com yet, I would encourage you to go ahead and register. These guys offer incredible deals on a daily basis and also provide one of the best affiliate marketing programs on the net. Click here to head over and sign up now!

DealDotCom.com opened its virtual doors today by offering the very first product for sale! The product, EasyMemberPro, is billed as an excellent way to start up your very own membership based website without having to write all of the PHP / HTML code - sounds very useful. The product comes with unlimited licenses, which will allow you to use this software as many times as you like.

DealDotCom.com is offering EasyMemberPro at a full 50% discount! The product originally sells for $297 via their website, but is up for grabs at only $148.50 - not bad at all!

If EasyMemberPro isn’t for you, have no fear, as their will be a brand new product available for purchase tomorrow at an incredibly low price.

If you are not a member of DealDotCom.com yet, I would encourage you to go ahead and register. These guys offer incredible deals on a daily basis and also provide one of the best affiliate marketing programs on the net. Click here to head over and sign up now!

When I started writing product reviews seven years ago, I used my online screen name in the by-line. Looking back, I probably couldn’t have picked a worse name if I tried. My screen name is “playafly187″, which is based on a local Memphis rapper named Playa Fly. I was big into rap music back then (and still am to a certain degree), hence the name selection. I added 187 to the end, which is the police code for homicide. Great name choice, eh? I’m in no way a “player”, I can’t “fly” and last I checked, I have never killed anyone!

I used this screen name exclusively for several years, and only started using my real name in the by-line within the past year.

If you want to be taken seriously as a blogger (or a writer in general), it is imperative that you use your real name. Using your real name gives you instant credibility and shows that you are proud of your work. Many screen names that I have seen (mine included) tend to give a negative impression about you and the type of person you really are.

It’s a miracle that I was ever able to get any sponsors to donate review items for my site when using my screen name in e-mails. I have no doubt that I could have secured a ton more sponsors had I only used my real name when initializing contact with a potential sponsor.

Keep this in mind the next time you make a blog post or publish any other written material online.

Nearly everywhere you turn, girls are more successful at what they do online, despite the fact that guys outnumber girls by a large margin. Rubbish, you say? Let me prove it.

There are countless examples of this online, in nearly every segment of the web, but stick with me as I take a look at a few that you might be more familiar with.

Let’s say I am a girl… a very attractive girl, and I have a Myspace page. I post a lot of “revealing” type pictures of myself on my profile and my photo albums. It wouldn’t be uncommon of me to get 50-100 new friend requests a day. After a while, I would have built up a friends list of several thousand people. Great, I have a ton of “friends”… so what?

Having a huge friends list gives you direct access to each and every one of these people… that type of advertising is priceless! I could set up a 3rd party website (related to your niche audience), throw some ads on it, then make a bulletin post on Myspace, asking all of my friends to go check out the site. If your site is useful, word will spread and you’re off to the races. A perfect example of this is 17-year-old Ashely Qualls, who started a Myspace Graphics website, threw some ads up on it and is currently bringing in $70,000 per month. Yes, it’s really that easy.

This type of “marketing” isn’t limited to Myspace… or even to girls! Another perfect example is a story that I read over at John Chow’s blog about someone trying to make money from Facebook. The “person” in question claims to be a 19 year old girl who got caught drunk by her parents. The story goes on to say that her dad is going to kick her out… BUT WAIT!! She struck up a deal with her parents, that if she could create a Facebook group and get 1 million other teens to join and admit they have drank under age, she would be allowed to stay.

Sounds like just another cheesy Facebook group, right? Wrong! Here’s the catch: an Ebay auction went live yesterday for a chance to advertise your site/business/company on the group’s “Contact Me” section… genius! I’m about 99% sure this whole story is a total hoax, with intentions of simply making a lot of money by selling this “ad spot” on the Facebook group. As of writing, the current bid is up to $50.34. It wouldn’t surprise me to see this sell for several thousand dollars. Not bad for making a quick Facebook group, throwing together a sappy story and adding a picture of an attractive girl. (UPDATE: It looks like Facebook may have shut down this group!)

We can take this same strategy and apply it to another online social scene, lifecasting. What is lifecasting? This term is very easily defined as broadcasting your daily life via the web in real time, using a webcam and a computer (laptops are preferred, so you can “go mobile”). Sites such as justin.tv and ustream.tv allow members to broadcast live. Both sites are free to join but you must be ‘accepted’ to justin.tv, whereas anyone can join ustream.tv and start broadcasting right away. I encourage you to check out both of those sites… for a day, for a week, whatever. What you will find is the same thing I found: girls dominate. Sure, there may be more guys broadcasting, but that is not important. Look at the “current viewers” - odds are, girls will have more viewers than guys at any given time.

So, how can you earn money from lifecasting? Well, you could take the Myspace approach; set up an outside website with advertising, then simply drive traffic to it. Include links to your site(s) on your lifecast homepage. Or, you can do what many others are already doing: simply ask for money! Yes, as crazy as it sounds, asking for donations via lifecasts actually works. Don’t believe me? Ashley recently had a viewer donate $500 to help her “go mobile” and her sister Amber had a user donate $250. This is FREE MONEY folks… it doesn’t get any easier than that. Would someone donate that kind of money to me, a below-average looking guy? HA!

The same can even be done with blogging. Blogs in general tend to do better with females behind the keyboard… granted they follow the same set of criteria that a guy would use to drive traffic (content, interaction with readers, etc.). Once you have a large reader base, you can throw some ads on your site, register for Review Me, sell some private ad spots, etc. and once again, let the money roll in. There is huge money to be had in blogging!

Even subtle attempts can carry you a long way. Take MyBlogLog… this popular blogging social networking tool allows you to see who has recently visited your blog by showing a small avatar, so you can put a face with your reader. Many people also use this to drive traffic to their own blogs. I have seen time and time again where a blogger (usually male) will use an avatar of an attractive girl, in hopes of luring other bloggers to their site. Does it work? You bet it does. Score for free traffic!

Ok, so girls have a better chance of “success” online, but why? Well, that’s really simple. Most guys online (and when I say guys online, I mean people who spend more time online than they do in “real world” social settings) have nothing better to do. Perhaps they are social outcasts, you know, the kind who couldn’t get a date if their life depended on it. That is why they turn to the internet. On the web, you can be anyone, say anything or do anything… stuff that you may not have the guts to do in “real life”.

And naturally, being a guy, they are attracted to girls. Online guys like the attention that they may get from online girls. They feel a connection with these web personalities, and face it, if a girl has never given you the time of day before… well, you’re going to be drawn in to this. If the online girl (or guy pretending to be a girl) is aware of this, they can play into this role and further lure the guy in. Hook, line and sinker!

Bottom line: sex sells… always has, always will. Do you think it’s wrong or unfair of girls that use this to their advantage? What about guys who set up fake profiles, pretending to be girls, with the hopes of luring in unsuspecting guys and at the end of the day, make a quick buck?

As you may already know, I do all of my work on the internet. My primary method of contact with other people (fellow site owners, bloggers, sponsors) is e-mail. It’s not uncommon to receive 50-60 legit e-mails a day, and send out just as many, or more. As important as e-mail is, it is all useless if you can’t find the right person to contact to begin with.

I run into this issue more than I consciously think about. Yesterday, I decided to update my news e-mail contact list. This involves checking the sites of everyone on my contact list to verify their site still exists and is active. You would be surprised how many tech sites fall off the face of the planet or simply quit posting updates.

Once this is complete, it was time to search the net for new sites to send our news releases to. This can be a time-consuming task, no doubt. Once I find a new site, I then have to locate their contact information… and this is where the frustration begins.

If you run a website or a blog, your contact information should be readily and easily available to your users. I have found myself searching a site for 20+ minutes, trying to locate an email address to contact the owner or the news editor without luck. Seriously, what are these people thinking? How do they expect their readers or potential sponsors to get in touch with them if they offer no contact page at all?

I have had this same problem with blogs as well. A few months ago, I found a really good blog and wanted to contact the author to ask him a question. Guess what? I couldn’t. They had no type of “contact” or “about” page at all. Absolutely terrible.

In closing, if you run any type of website or blog, don’t forget to include some way for your readers to contact you. If you don’t, you will most likely miss out on some important opportunities or even worse, lose readers.