Today the Internet is the fastest growing marketplace and offers global opportunities to all, from international conglomerates to the individual person at the kitchen table. What though is the most effective form of communication on the information super highway? The Internet has become the place to communicate with one another and the means to search for and locate information. Video streaming brings a whole new dimension to this experience for everyone, be they business persons negotiating a deal, friends and family keeping in touch with their loved ones, or people sharing a common interest seeing one another for the first time.

For communication to be of use, it must be effective. People are expounding vast amounts of time, effort and money to communicate effectively on the Internet. Studies have shown that using video on the Internet gets people’s attention and increases the likelihood that the message will be remembered.

Humans remember:

10% of what they read,

30% of what they see,

50% of what they see and hear together,

And 80% of what they see, hear and do.

(Source: Dr. Mehrabians, Study of Communication.)

This should have a significant impact on how one uses the Internet as a means of communication. Email changed the Internet, but video is changing the World. Email has become the fastest growing form of communication. Every day billions of emails are sent and received and the number continues to grow, (even allowing for the known problems of Spam, viruses etc.) some analysts are predicting that the number of messages will ultimately grow to as many as 100 billion a day! This may sound great, but if one remembers that to be of use communication has to be effective, clearly definite strategies will have to be developed to achieve this aim of successful communication.

The three major problems that have to be considered are:

“How do you make your message ’stand out from the crowd’?”

“How do you ensure uniformity of message (so everyone sees and hears the same message?”

And “How do you try to ensure your message is not confused and misunderstood?”

Some people have started to include pictures and images to help convey the meaning and to add impact, but that still doesn’t solve the problem! This is because we are used to ‘face to face’ communication, where the message is interpreted not only from the spoken word but also the non-verbal communication. 55% of a messages meaning is derived from facial expression and 38% is derived from gestures, body language etc.

So what is the solution? People online need fully integrated video streaming facilities for their online communication and this technology is available now, ranging from Video Email, Video Instant Messaging and even live Webcasting and Streaming Web TV. Streaming Video is the online future, and now is the time to place ones self at the forefront of this next communication revolution.

Streaming video is the transfer of digital media that is received as a continuous real-time stream over the Internet. Streamed video (including audio and possibly data) is transmitted from a streaming server and received and displayed in real time on the receiver’s computer; unlike video downloads, where the file has to be transferred to the receiver’s computer before being watched.

The Internet is rapidly spreading the use of streaming multimedia, no longer is it about being able to video download and listen to audio streaming, the technology has moved on before our eyes to deliver video streaming. From marketing tools, to movie clips, from online infomercials to streaming TV and live webcasting, like it or not, we will all have to embrace this technology or else our sites will become extinct and our communication message lost to antiquity.

The first true video search engine, Google Video, shows that this streaming video technology is becoming part of the day to day Internet experience for millions and millions of people, hence the Google take over of the widely used YouTube. YouTube was founded in February 2005 as a means for people to watch and share original video. Within two years it has grown into a site where more than 70 million videos are watched daily. Most experts agree that the World is rapidly moving to the point of true convergence between the Internet, television and telephone systems that will provide one single service or application for a truly multimedia World.

‘Uses of Digital Media’ a report by Aberdeen/StreamingMedia.com, found that in the United States $2 billion was being spent on streaming media technologies and that this is projected to grow to $12 billion per annum over the next few years. Today the Internet is the fastest growing marketplace and video is the most effective form of communication on the information super highway. The Internet has become the place to communicate with each other and the main medium for finding information. Video streaming brings a whole new dimension to this experience for everyone, be they business people negotiating a deal, friends and family keeping in touch with their loved ones, or people sharing a common interest or hobby seeing each other for the first time.

To fuel this momentum people online need fully integrated video streaming products for their communications and this technology is available now, ranging from video email, video instant messaging and even live webcasting and streaming TV. Streaming video is the online future and, at the present moment, provides an opportunity to anyone who wants to be ahead of the rest. One can help to fill this void and earn whilst doing so, either by having an advanced web site that uses streaming video over the Internet to gain people’s attention and increasing the likelihood that the message will be acted upon and remembered; or by supplying access to the products and technologies that everyone will want to use.

It is like sending text messages using your cell phones. However, instead of sending text message to one person, you use micro-blogging to publish your thoughts and activities to your social network.

In the past few years a dozen micro-blogging sites have added more communication tools to the Web 2.0 repertoire. Besides texts, now you can use audio and video as well. This article introduces you to a few popular ones.

Twitter is the leader. After creating an account, you publish your micro-contents using your web browser, cell phone, or the email client. You can also follow interesting people like artists, athletes, bands, politicians and check out their insights regularly.

Last year, the creator of the popular news ranking site digg has launched Pownce. Besides micro-blogging, Pownce provides functionality for sharing files, events, and links.

The site Tumblr is simple to use and you can publish photos and videos from your cell phone. Even if you are not wordy, you will be able to share your love and hate with others.

If you prefer talking, instead of writing, use MySay. You call the MySay service and leave a message. People in your contact will be able to listen to your thoughts using their phones, emails, or computers.

If neither text nor audio is your liking, you can use Hictu for video micro-blogging. Use your webcam to video your actions and publish it in Hictu with the click of a mouse.

IRateMyDay has an interesting angle to the micro-blogging. Instead of publishing mundane activities of you daily life, you rate your day on a scale of Worst to Great. You can also give some explanation for your rating.

Are you emotionally upset? Instead of using IRateMyDay, use EMotionr. If it is one of the happiest day of your life, rate it the highest possible 10. Don’t rate the lowest 1. It can’t be that bad.

After rating your day or emotion, head towards Moodmill. This site is for managing your mood. Use the mouse to slide the mood indicator and share it with your friends and contacts.

If you are more comfortable with French or German language, you can use Frazr. It has all the features and functionality of Twitter.

Micro-blogging will explode this year because of its simplicity. Twitter will lead the field. Though you can use it effectively in myriad occasions, it can be a big time waster if you are not careful.

It is not a marketing platform but you can effectively use it to establish your brand and promote your products and services indirectly.

If you are planning to spam your Twitter followers with your blog post URLs and affiliate links, you will not go anywhere. Your followers will un-follow you quickly. You will not get new followers.

Twitter is like any other social media site. If you share information and insights about your niche by filtering them from hundreds of blog posts published every day, you will provide value to your followers.

If you find valuable information in your niche, share them with your followers and their number will increase.

You can also use Twitter to post latest news, hot trends in your niche, links to funny pictures, humorous video links, and other interesting things.

You have to post almost every day, preferably couple of times a day, to keep the number of followers growing rapidly.

If you are using WordPress blog platform for your blog, there are few tools you can use to automate your Twitter activities. These tools will help you use Twitter for promoting your brand.

First, you need to integrate the Twitter feed into your blog and encourage your blog readers to tweet your blog posts in their accounts.

Use TweetThis WordPress plug-in to encourage your visitors to tweet your blog post. TweetThis adds a Twitter link in every blog post you create. If needed, this plug-in will also shorten your blog post URL to fit the 140-character limit.

WPTwitp-ID plug-in adds a Twitter field to your WordPress blog comment form. When users posts comments, they can enter their Twitter user ids and the plug-in will create links to follow them in Twitter. You will be providing a service to increase the number of Twitter followers of people who leave comments in your blog.

Another WordPress plug-in called Twitter Tools integrates your blog with Twitter by pulling all your tweets into the side bar of your blog. You can also post new tweets from inside your WordPress blog.

TweetMeme Button helps retweet your post through out the Tweeter network. It also shows a count of how many times your blog post has been retweeted.

Tweeter Updater tool will send a Twitter status update to your account when you publish a post in WordPress.

You can find the web sites for these WordPress plug-ins by doing a search in Google. If you’re not using Twiteer as a brand building platform, you should sign up for a Twiteer account immediately.

Social networking is booming as young adults find one another online to chat, post comments, post photos, and share info about the latest happenings in their world to their Myspace pages and Friendster networking sites. It is not always a good thing for sure, but more on that later on.

So how does it work? Well some genius thought up the concept of Myspace, which is basically a free bulletin board for anyone (not just teens) to create a web site that is all about networking and communicating with friends and creating new friends too. Users create a free account; enter information about themselves, in as much or little detail as they want. They then share their site with their friends. Their friends can then post comments on the myspace. It becomes a great big bulletin board of social interaction. The kids are glued to these things and seem to know how to find one another and chase down the latest hot info in a heartbeat.

So what does this mean to communication in the Internet age for teens and young adults? It puts a fancier face on the outpouring of information exchange between teens.

It used to be that only the geeky teens had web pages about themselves. They were the only ones who knew how to build them. Now with these easy to use tools at their disposal every teen or young adult can have a site. That means connections and networking spreads very fast.

The sharing aspect of these sites is not only their good side but also their bad side as well. In the last year many schools and parents have become alarmed at the content of some of these Myspace sites that students have built. In typical teen fashion some kids say on their site what probably should not be said in public. They post as though it were a diary and then it gets spread around. That means that hate and meanness spread within the community quickly. Some schools have cracked down and told students they would be expelled if they do not clean up their sites. Parents, just finding out about the technology and checking it out for the first time become alarmed at the things that are said on these postings.

Of course that aspect comes back to the old thing of parents needing to be in tune with their kids and what is going on in their world. You cannot give a kid a computer and internet access and then walk away and not pay any attention.

The other thing that has raised alarm in this world of social networking is kids will post news of a party in their area, to their site. Instead of getting to “just” their friends it ends up spreading to the whole area. Homes have been overrun by crowds of kids trying to attend parties. One such event even ended with a fatal stabbing when the crowd got to big and unruly.

These are the types of things that can happen with or without such social networking sites in teen�s lives. These sites are not going to fade away. Myspace has over 60 million subscribers and was recently bought by a major corporation. They intend to make a lot of money off these sites for years to come. After all it is a very juicy target market for advertising revenue.

There are reportedly 230,000 registrations every day. The present owner of the website Rupert Murdhoch’s News Corporation created a stir in the corporate world by purchasing MySpace for US$580 million in July 2005.

People use MySpace for a variety of reasons – establishing identity, making friends, socializing, joining and creating interest groups, expressing their views, promoting themselves, promoting their business – to name just a few. Though MySpace is not a commercial organization people use it to expand their business. However, business promotion should not appear as spamming. Any objectionable behavior by a member can even result in cancellation of the membership.

Creating Your Profile

There are many features available to the members of MySpace for expressing themselves and for communicating with others. The member first creates his/her profile for which many different formats are available. There is lots of flexibility to what a member can add to his/her profile – personal details, text, links to other web pages, photographs, audio clips, videos, graphics and so on. The member can design his/her profile to make it attractive, reflect his/her personality and convey message to others. The profile can be modified periodically to maintain freshness and change the content.

Any business promotion should be done in a subtle way so that it doesn’t appear as advertisement. For example, while explaining about his/her interests the member can make reference to the business. It will be helpful to add keywords in the profile in a natural way because MySpace has its own search engine and the member’s profile can come up in the search when someone is looking for those keywords.

Making Friends

MySpace is “a place for friends”. You can browse profiles of other members to select your friends. The search engine of MySpace can be used for locating other members by criteria such as age group, location, interests etc. Once you locate a person you would like as your friend, you open his/her profile and click on the link “Add to Friends”. A message will go to him/her with your MySpace link. He/she can see your profile and accept or reject your request. If your request is accepted which is mostly the case, you become friends. Otherwise there is no need to feel bad; you simply look for other friends. You can also get requests for friendship from other members that you can approve or reject.

Making friends in this way is a slow process. To speed up the process software programs are available. Many members use software that can add hundreds of friends by click of a button. These members may be interested in promoting their business. Although MySpace doesn’t approve of such software, it is possible to restrict the number of friends made every day to a low level and avoid getting into trouble. There are other programs for adding friends quickly that are generally accepted such as MySpace trains.

Communicating With Other Members

MySpace offers several ways by which members can interact with one another.

E-mails: Members can exchange personal messages with any of their friends from their member’s area by email facility provided by the system.

Bulletin: Members can send one-way messages to all their friends by way of bulletins. When you are sending a message to all your friends it will be in your interest to make the message helpful and interesting to others. This is a great way of projecting and establishing yourself in the community.

Groups: There are hundreds of groups available in MySpace and each group consists of members interested in a particular area. The groups are segregated by categories that make it easy to locate groups active in your area of interest. You can send a request to join any groups of your choice. Let us say you are interested in joining groups dedicated to a particular niche. Chances are that you will find groups that are interested in your niche, or in a closely related niche. Once you join those groups you get a highly targeted audience. By your conduct within the group you can find customers, subscribers or other like-minded people. Each group will have its own set of rules and it is expected that you will follow them when you join the group. You can also start your own groups that will be under your control.

Forums: Click on the forum button on MySpace web pages and you will find forums arranged category-wise. Forums provide opportunities to learn from others and establish yourself as an expert in your field. Your forum post are linked to your profile page and you can attract visitors by posting in forums.

Blogs: You can set up your own blog and make your posts. This is a powerful medium for sharing information. By regular and relevant posts you can increase traffic to your blog and to your profile page. Also, more content on your blog will improve its searchability by MySpace and other search engines.

Classified: You can put your ads free of cost to MySpace classified. The ads in the classified section are arranged city-wise and category-wise. But you can post to classified only if you have an account for at least 7 days. This is a way of fighting spamming. The classified section has a user-driven flagging system and you should ensure that other members do not consider your ads as spam.

These are just some of the options available with MySpace. There is tremendous scope for members to use MySpace to their best advantage. It is a good idea to explore the site thoroughly and learn from profiles of other members to derive full benefits from this service.

The Internet is constantly evolving and a trend is clearly visible – interactive sites are gaining in popularity. And MySpace is as interactive as you can make it. In fact, MySpace is setting the trend for others.

As a matter of fact, the Kelsey Group says that “70% of U.S. households now use the Internet as an information source when shopping locally for products and services.”

It’s become obvious that small business owners who don’t have an Internet presence are at a serious disadvantage, and are losing more ground every day to their competitors.

But where to start? Many small business owners want to get online but the idea of it becomes overwhelming. One of the things many people are concerned about is the cost. Having a professional website created can be expensive, as can the online marketing needed to promote the site. Fortunately with a little work, there are some great low budget online marketing solutions for small businesses.

First, don’t immediately buy web space or register your domain name with the first site that pops up in Google. Web space can be pricey or fairly cheap; it all depends on what company you go with. There are some sites that offer free hosting, but those sites usually force you to include banners or pop-up ads on your site. If you want to be taken seriously, you definitely do not want to host your business on a free hosting site.

There are places on the web that offer a good amount of storage for less than $100/yr, which is not bad. You can also find sites that will register your domain name for less than $10/year, such as the popular GoDaddy.com.

Once you have your website set up, how do you get people to visit? One of the best ways is to take advantage of social networking sites like Squidoo.com and MySpace.com. MySpace.com is a huge site designed to let people keep in touch with others. However a lot of businesses set up MySpace profiles and send out “friend” invitations to clients and prospects. Retail store owners, service providers, authors, bands, magazines and even tourism companies do MySpace marketing. Same thing with Squidoo. This form of marketing is becoming even more powerful than reciprocal linking.

Don’t forget message boards, chat rooms and link exchanges either. They are great ways to get your word out. When you first began your low budget online marketing campaign, you’ll probably spend anywhere from 5 to 10 hours a week promoting your site, or you can train an employee, intern or your resident teenager to do it.

The simplest way of marketing your small business is to include your website address in your signature in emails and posts to message boards, even if they aren’t related to your business. While this doesn’t market directly to your targeted audience, it does make people aware of your website. Who knows, maybe they’ll know someone who needs your services.

It’s very easy to do low budget online marketing for small business because so many things on the Internet are free — message boards, networking sites like Squidoo and MySpace, and of course, email. The main thing it will cost is time, but even that can be “bought” at budget prices on sites such as rentacoder.com and getafreelancer.com. So there’s no reason for even the busiest small business owner not to get their business online, even if they’re on a tight budget.

By building backlinks to your website, you benefit in a number of ways. First, your placement in the search engines can improve, since the number of backlinks pointing to a website appears to have considerable impact on search engine ranking (love). Second, you may also attract traffic, as visitors on the other sites see your link and click over to see what you’re offering.

The rest of this article will focus on several backlink building methods that are great for beginners and experienced marketers alike.

Social Bookmarking

There are now literally thousands of social bookmarking sites. These sites offer an opportunity to bookmark all of the websites (including yours) that you find interesting and want to keep track of. Bookmarking your site often means you’re creating a backlink too.

Website Directories

These also are in great supply. These sites are storehouses for information about all sorts of websites, sorted by topic. Many allow you to submit your website for inclusion for free and create a backlink if your website is accepted.

Link Exchanges

These are also known as reciprocal links. You allow me to put my link on your website and I allow you to include your link on my site. Reciprocal links are considered more valuable if they are placed on a website whose theme is relevant to yours.

Blog Comments

Many blog owners welcome readers’ comments in reaction to their posts. The reader can generally include a website link along with their comment, creating a backlink. Just watch out for blogs that include the “no follow” tag because then the backlink won’t count.

Press Releases

Submitting a press release entails writing up a short news story about your website or some of its content. It’s a who, what, when, where, and how of something likely to be of interest to the media. As with many of these methods, there are free and paid options. Of course you include a link to your site in your content.

Article Marketing

Some say article marketing is the best method to draw free traffic and ultimately lots of backlinks. The webmaster writes an article on a topic relevant to their site and submits it to one or more article directories with a resource box incorporating links pointing back to the website.

Link Networks

These are typically private networks of blogs or websites on which members can post content which includes a link to their website. Often the blogs that are available in these networks have a fairly high page rank, say PR5-PR7, which is an attractive feature. The value of a backlink can increase if it is placed on a web page with a higher page rank

Using all of these methods at the same time to create backlinks might lead to being scattered and ineffective. If you’re interested in building links to your website, start with one method, complete it thoroughly and then move to another.

Of course some of the techniques, like article marketing, are never complete. There is always room for more, so intersperse this with other link building methods. With some concerted effort you will be able to create hundreds or thousands of backlinks to your website and really feel the search engine love.

At first glance, Digg.com seems to be a lot of information stored in one place, but with a second look will actually show you how organized it is. The search function is particularly useful, and the range of topics, images, and information that it covers is rather exhaustive. From learning about mountain bikes to hearing the latest news out of Washington, this is one of the best sites that you can frequent, especially when you are looking for a diverse field of information.

At its most basic, Digg.com is a sharing site. People will post things that they find interesting online, and no matter how obscure or how important it is, you will be able to find it here. Digg.com is one of many social bookmarking sites that have appeared, and there is a good reason for that. Despite its invaluable presence and despite its admitted scope and staying power, many people are becoming impatient with the results that come from a simple Google search. People are looking for relevance when they look for information, and nearly the only way to get that is by looking through material that has already been gone through for relevance by other people.

On Digg.com, you start contributing as soon as you sign up, and something that might surprise you is the level of community on this site. This is one great way for people to get to know one another, and it is a great way for you to get information about your blog out there. Many blogs end up being linked by other people, and you will find that this improves your link building status; your links will not only be out there, they will also be contributing to your Google search engine rankings.

As any marketer will tell you, part of the key to success to marketing online is to give people content, and with Digg.com, you can do exactly that. Take some time and look at the content you have simply bookmarked for your purposes. Similarly, many bloggers have a list of links on their sidebar, you can get started just by putting that up. Reach out and make sure that the members of your Internet community know that you exist!

The savvy internet marketer is learning how to use this powerful marketing method to grow their business and make valuable contacts for the future.

Of course this also means making more money if you do it right. Let’s take a look at 4 ways to use social media marketing to make money online.

1. Blogging is a very strong way to combine various forms of social media marketing all in one place. If you do not have a blog you are losing ground to your competitors who do.

2. Social bookmark your blog posts to create traffic from social directories and as search engine bait for search engine traffic.

Be sure and use a quality blogging platform such as WordPress. They offer a terrific plug-in that makes social bookmarking a blog post very simple.

Social bookmarking gives you a way to get backlinks to your blog very quickly. You should be bookmarking to social directories such as Technorati, Digg, Stumbleupon, and Propeller.

Also go get a Twitter account and learn how to make friends and use it to drive traffic to your blog. This is fast becoming one of the top social sites online.

3. Video such as You Tube is becoming a favorite way for bloggers to add some excitement to their blogs, but it is also much more than that.

For example many affiliate marketing programs now offer videos embedded with your affiliate i.d. that you can use to pre-sell a visitor before sending them to your affiliate website.

Many bloggers are also easily creating videos and putting them online on their blog. This is a very powerful form of social media that is giving your visitor what they want. Many people are a product of the TV generation and like to learn by watching as opposed to reading.

4. Discussion forums are a great place to make friends and sell products if you do it right. They can also be an excellent place to create joint ventures and millions of dollars are sold online now because of these.

There is much more we could say about social media including social networking in places such as FaceBook, My Space, and many others. The bottom line is making money online via social media all comes down to finding a way you enjoy and then mastering how to use it to your business and personal advantage.