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WordPress announced a new crop of plug-ins today. Nothing mind-blowing, but some pretty nifty toys that you might find useful. Check ‘em out!

1. Auto-Scroller makes it possible to scroll the posts easily and rapidly, with a click.
2. Intelligent Content Ad Insertion lets you insert advertisements in post, page and feed content without having to manually adjust the code of your theme, or RSS feed.
3. Skin Tags allows a tag to break across the column, creating a more del.icio.us-style tag cloud.
4. TechTags adds a single line to a post or page to display Technorati tags. Great for those tag-heads out there.
5. WP-Offline lets your readers cache your entire blog for offline reading using Google Gears. I don’t know why anyone would want to cache an entire blog to read it offline… but it’s available.

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Amazon just announced that it will be offering a flat 20% commission on all Mp3 downloads from their marketplace. This is great news for those of you that use the Amazon affiliate program (Amazon associates). If you don’t, you can sign up by clicking here - Amazon associates program.

This increase is over double the top commission for selling anything else on the site. Your Amazon associates income increases with volume normally (the highest producing affiliates earn about 12%), but with the new Mp3 program, everyone earns a flat 20%. This is a really easy to make some extra affiliate income especially when most songs are less than a dollar. You can even buy complete albums starting at $5.99.

Head on over and check out this program. It could be a great way to cash in on a fast and furious mp3 market. The commissions will drop to 10% in January, so earn that money while you can!

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Monika, from The Writers Manifesto, offered to take a look at TNX.com, a text link brokering service with a unique spin on the traditional system used by other brokers. Here’s what Monika had to say after trialling the system out for herself in this review…

TNX.net Review

TNX is a text link based advertising service that works with a points system rather than just being a simple paid links service.

Their aim is to provide webmasters with highly targeted visitors via search engines and give advertisers a platform to purchase links from various websites.

The sign up process is free and quick and within minutes I was able to access the back office. I signed up with TNX because I wanted to learn more about this company. Lately there have been quite a few bloggers reviewing their site and the general opinion is kind of mixed. On my quest to find out more, here is what I learned.

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People who run e-commerce sites - sites that are focused on making sales of a product - have a history of great difficulty when it comes to search engine optimization. We are told to build links to improve search engine rankings, yet why would a person link to a site that is essentially a glorified shopping cart?

One of the most common ways that e-commerce store owners have gone about an SEO campaign is to add a content component to their site, hoping to attract links for the content, which in turn will raise the overall ranking of the entire domain. Unfortunately this tactic tends to impact the ability of the e-commerce site to do what it is meant to do - make sales - because the addition of content creates a “mixed message”, confusing visitors and reducing conversion.

Search engine traffic can be the difference between success and failure for many e-commerce sites, and since it’s free traffic, there isn’t a single store owner out there who wouldn’t want to capture top rankings. Many millionaires are created because of their ability to optimize for product related search terms in Google, Yahoo and MSN, so what is the secret to their success?

In this article I’m going to demonstrate one technique, a fairly extensive technique - a secret weapon - that search engine optimizers use to help one main site dominate rankings for both top level keywords and long tail phrases. This is powerful stuff, so if you own an e-commerce store or any website that you want to rank number one for a specific term, it’s time to pay attention!

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Talk about an odd couple. Social networking giant Myspace has teamed up with internet phone provider Skype to bring Voip (voice over internet protocol) service to Myspace IM users. The proposed service update would provide Myspace IM users the ability to enable voice chat.

This will bring voice chat to Myspace in a big way. Skype is the worldwide leader in Voip technology, and this pairing should provide a fantastically intuitive edge to social networking.

Earlier this week Myspace announced their API release, which would be huge for third party developers. This second big announcement could be just what Myspace needs to edge out Facebook once and for all in the social networking market. Facebook seems to be the more innovative company, but with over 80 million registered users, how could anyone not be bullied by Myspace?

This race for social networking supremacy is far from over but Facebook is rumored to have a “big announcement” coming within the next few days or weeks. Speculation would lead me to believe that the proposed 4 billion dollar partial buy-out of Facebook, may be the announcement that we are waiting for. All of this is strictly speculation at this point though. I guess we’ll have to be surprised together.

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