Want to know about the performance of your blog or website on the social bookmarking sites? You can check Social Scan, a simple online tool that will enable you to check the link popularity of a blog or website among some of the top social bookmarking sites.

Social Scan is very easy to use. Just enter the URL of the blog or website that you want to scan and hit the submit button. Within seconds it will pull and display the total number of links from different social sites. Presently, Social Scan displays the link popularity from Blinklist, Bloglines, Delicious, Diigo, Digg, Furl, Reddit, Shadows, Simpy, Stumbleupon, Technorati and Yahoo MyWeb.

Need an interactive profile for your online activities? Want to have a free business card for your online presence? Take a look at retaggr, an interesting and free service that will enable you to create a beautiful profile that tells about you and your online activities. You can use your profile on retaggr as a profile card or business card. The profile card will pop up wherever your name appears on retaggr enabled blogs or websites. So, the retaggr profile card is an interesting widget to tell the world about yourself and about your blogs or websites.

Your profile card on retaggr will express your personality with your photo and links to your blogs, RSS feeds and profiles on social networking sites. Your profile card also shows your recent twitter activity and allows others to get in touch with you through Skype, Gtalk, MSN etc. So, retaggr will enable you to consolidate all your online activities into one profile. You can add any widgets to your profile and link to it from anywhere on the web.

You can add retaggr to your web page by using their easy installation tools. The installation is very easy. After installation, your profile card will appear against your name when you publish a post. You can also specify content from your site to be shown within the profile card. Anyone can embed or link to your profile card, by clicking “Embed” on your profile card. You can use your card to comment on other blogs and tag people you know on images anywhere on the web. Your profile card will pop up on comments you have given and images that you have tagged.

So, retaggr is more than a beautiful business card or profile widget. You can use it to organize your profiles and promote your brand, business or blogs. If you want to put all your online activities into one profile, then you must use retaggr. It is very interactive and works on all kind of blogs and websites. Get your free profile card today!

Want to make your blog posts more interesting and vibrant? Then you should try Zemanta, a free content suggestion tool for bloggers. Basically, it will save your time by suggesting relevant content like images, links and articles from the web, while you are writing a blog post. Zemanta supports Blogger, WordPress, TypePad, LiveJournal and MovableType and works on both Firefox and Internet Explorer. You can start using Zemanta by installing the required browser extension. But, for hosted WordPress or MovableType powered blogs, they also have plugins. Well, both browser extension and the plugin will give you the same Zemanta experience. So, no need to use both of them!

Zemanta suggests related articles and images that are either clearly licensed as Creative Commons, or approved by stock providers. It suggests contents from over 300 top media sources and numerous user blogs. And images are pulled from Wikimedia Commons, Flickr and other stock photo providers, through contextual comparison. Based on the text of your, it automatically displays some tags that you can apply to your blog posts. Zemanta also suggests relevant links from Wikipedia. Well, at present, it supports only English language.

I have tested Zemanta on one of my blogs and it is really interesting. It specially helps me to find relevant Wikipedia links to insert in my blog posts. You can test the demo of Zemanta before installing the extension or plugin. You can find popular articles from the popular section on their website and re-blog any article that has ‘reblog’ button posted underneath. Try Zemanta today and enjoy blogging!

Want to advertise your products or services for free? Take a look at WhyNotAd, a new Web 2.0 wiki style, free online advertising service. WhyNotAd allows anyone to place free ads and classifieds. They accepts almost any kind of advertisement except spam and porn ads. WhyNotAd have a nice interface and they claims that they are the world’s first to launch an all-in-one Web 2.0 ad, advertising and classified portal.

WhyNotAd is made for free advertising. So, you can upload anything you want. For example, ads, advertising, brands, classifieds, events, functions, news, sell stuff, buy stuff, personals, press releases, photos etc. Besides placing ads, you can also use this new service to discover new and exciting stuffs or offers. They have an ‘Ad Ranking’ feature that depends on number of votes received by individual ads and it decides the rankings of ads on search results. Even you can send ads and classifieds to your friends and vote on the ad ranking, without having an account. Well, in order to post an advertisement, you must create a free account.

They have different categories for ads and you can provide descriptions and images along with your ads. Their URLs are search engine friendly and it may help your advertisement or classified to rank better on search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN. There is no restrictions on the number of ads you can place. Even you can bookmark interesting ads for future reference. They also allows users to flag inappropriate ads in order to keep their portal clean.

In my view WhyNotAd is a nice concept and people will use it. You can use it as a free internet marketing tool. Their interface is good looking and easy to navigate. I found it very easy to post an advertisement on their site. So, why don’t you give it a try? It is free!

Have profiles on multiple social networks? Then you must have felt that it requires lots of time to manually update your status on those profiles. Now, say goodbye to manual update of your profiles on those networks and use Ping.fm, a simple and free service that will make updating your profiles at multiple social networks and blogging services an easier task. It supports all the major social networking services and blogging platforms. With Ping.fm, you can update your status on these services from anywhere using AIM, GTalk, iGoogle, WAP, iPhone, SMS and E-mail.

Ping.fm supports Bebo, Blogger, BrightKite, Facebook, hi5, Jaiku, LinkedIn, LiveJournal, Mashable, MySpace, Plurk, Plaxo pulse, Powence, Tumblr, Twitter and Xanga. They also have a Trigger system, that will enable you to decide what goes where. There are three methods that you can chose from while using triggers. These methods are Status Updates, Micro-Blogging and Blog Post.

In my view, Ping.fm will give you more freedom to post your content to your social network profiles and blogs. Right now it is in beta version and you need a beta code to sign up. I hope that soon it will be opened for public.

photo credit: Michael in San Diego

With popularity of internet and increase in online shopping, affiliate marketing has become one of the most effective ways to advertise and market products or services online. It is also one of the easiest ways for anyone with a website or blog to make money online. In affiliate marketing the affiliates promotes the products or services of merchants by using various techniques. In return, the merchants pays a commissions to the affiliates on sales generated due to their efforts. That’s why affiliate marketing programs are often described as a win-win situation for both the merchant and the affiliate.

So, both the merchant and the affiliate enjoy some benefits in affiliate marketing. In fact, there are many benefits on the merchant’s side. It gives the merchant a wider market to advertise a product or service. Affiliate marketing also gives maximum exposure to the product or service that may not be possible with other traditional advertising techniques. You can call it free advertising, as the merchant pays the affiliates only when a sale is completed.

On the other hand, the affiliates also enjoys many benefits from affiliate marketing. As an affiliate marketer one can earn by advertising an ad or link to the merchant’s website, which prospective customers will hopefully click and proceed to make a purchase. As soon as a prospective customer clicks on the ad or the affiliate link, it is redirected to the merchant’s website and when the customer buys that particular product, the affiliate earns a commission. The more referrals there are the more profit for the affiliate. That’s why it can be called as the easiest way to make money online.

Affiliate marketing is also an excellent way to earn money from the comfort of home. It is a profitable home-based business, as there are virtually no startup or production costs. Affiliate programs are usually free to join. And the products are already developed and proven by the merchants. You do not have to worry about inventory, order processing, and product shipping. All you have to do is to find as many prospects as you can. And the merchants will do the rest. Also, there is no shortage of products. You will get hundreds of products relevant to your interest area or website content.

In affiliate marketing, sales experience is not necessary. Most affiliate programs offer excellent support when it comes to providing marketing tools and resources. And, because of the wide reach of the internet, you can easily find thousands of prospects for the products or services that you are promoting. You can intensify your advertising campaign by exploiting more aggressive and productive strategies such as article marketing, viral marketing etc.

Another benefit of an affiliate marketer is the minimal risk involved in the business. If you are not getting good results from a product, you can simply dump it and choose another alternative. Unlike other business, there are no long-term binding contracts that will force to to market a product or service even if it’s performance in poor. In affiliate marketing, you are your own boss.

So, affiliate marketing is one of the simplest and most effective business model that you can find on the internet. It will provide you the opportunity to earn a good amount of money in the cost of least money and least effort. And if you can provide extra effort to market the affiliate products, then sky is the limit. So, become an affiliate marketer today and give a boost to your quest to make money online.

Love to use Twitter? Love to follow your favorite persons on Twitter? I am sure that you will love TwitterCounter too! Yes, TwitterCounter, a new service that will enable bloggers, social networkers or any individual to view and track the number of followers they have on Twitter. Similar to FeedBurner chicklet, this unique service provides bloggers with a widget to displays the number of Twitter followers on their blogs. It also allows anyone to view the stats about the popularity of any person on Twitter.

To show your Twitter follower number, just copy a code from TwitterCounter.com and paste it on your blog. It will display the cool counter on your blog. TwitterCounter daily updates the number of followers and shows the stats for past 7 days in the form of a nice chart.

Well, the interesting part is that anyone can see and track the popularity of other person on Twitter. Just enter the Twitter account name and hit the ‘Show Stats’ button. For example, to see the popularity of Kevin Rose, enter ‘kevinrose’ and you will see the interesting stats about the number of Kevin Rose followers on Twitter.

In my view, this is an interesting addition to Twitter related applications. It is a simple application and has lots of potentiality. Nowadays, everyone is familiar with the popularity of FeedBurner RSS reader counter. So, I think that TwitterCounter will also become a big hit among bloggers. Right now it is in beta stage and I hope that some more features will be added in future versions. Check it today!