Guest post written by my buddy Brian Workman

My son is having a slumber party this Friday to celebrate his 11th birthday. 7 boys, all age 11-12, are going to be taking over my house! We have a lot of fun activities planned outside to get their energy out, and of course, pizza and cake. I’m thinking we will end the evening with a movie in the living room to hopefully help everyone wind down and get ready to fall asleep. I’m going to check out http://www.expertsatellite.com/ later to see what movies are available right now. My son says he wants a horror film, but I know better than to do that! I’d have 7 scared boys sleeping in my bed! Ha! I’m pretty sure most of their moms would only allow PG-13 at the most anyway. I’m thinking I might need to pick out the movie ahead of time and okay it with the parents as they drop their kids off for the party. You never know what some families rules are about stuff like that, and I certainly don’t want to step on any toes.

If you have too many advertisements on your blog, you may get hurt on your search engine rankings, according to Google.

In 2012, online advertising spending will exceed print advertising spending for the first time ever.  It is interesting to note that while the newspaper advertising business continues to deteriorate, the magazine industry is holding fairly steady in its revenue projections.  Of course, this shouldn’t be a big surprise since we already reported online advertising topping print advertising back in 2010.  Guess it depends on whom you ask.

Search engine market share in the United States in December 2011 shows Google continuing to lose market share to Yahoo! and Bing.

The great thing about the internet is that it is constantly changing.  It seems like every year, there is something new to discuss and new technology to implement.

One such technology is cloud technology.  If you’re not sure what cloud technology is just imagine…a cloud.  No, not that kind of cloud; the kind of cloud that can store all of your stuff that you use on the computer.

The advantage is that you don’t have to store all of that wonderful stuff on the hard drive of your computer or on the servers at your company.  The days of going on vacation or traveling for work and needing to dial back into the office are gone if you use cloud technology.

And, it’s not just for work either.  Fun stuff can come from the cloud as well.  Imagine holding all of your favorite songs in the cloud so that they can be accessed no matter where you go.  It’s the same with your pictures.  Visiting the grandparents and want to show them pictures of Junior?  No problem.

One of the top cloud companies is Just Cloud.  You can go here for a just cloud review if you are looking for a supplier of cloud technology.  Just Cloud is one of ten companies that are reviewed on the cloud technology review site.

Technology continues to evolve and cloud technology is one of those technologies that will continue to evolve.  The day will come when all you need as a computer is a dumb box.  No need for software and no need for all of your tools.  I know I’ll love not having to pay for Office every time I get a new computer.

But, most important, maybe I won’t get all of those darn viruses that my computers continue to seem to get.  Instead, the cloud will get the viruses.

Gotta love technology.

Building links is not easy work.  It is time consuming and difficult to get good links.  The days of simply getting a bunch of crappy directory links and seeing a rise in your search engine rankings is over.

Lately, I’ve turned to a virtual assistant to help me build links.  You have to spend time with the assistant in training, but it can be worth it if you put in the time to train them on how to get quality links.

You may also consider hiring a Back Link Service like Link Vehicle.  I have found them to be great to work with as a link building service for all of my sites.  Just tell them what you want and they’ll find the links for you.

It hurts to be losing friends on Facebook.  If this is happening to you too often, it’s time to take a look at your inner self and see what’s up with the man in the mirror.  Here are the reasons you are losing friends on Facebook.

When it comes to seo, there are so many different tactics that you can use that it’s often difficult to know where to start.  People say that search engine optimization is such hard work.  I don’t really think that is such hard work, but I do believe that it is busy and time consuming work.

When it comes to the most dreaded part of seo, link building, I tend to do it in front of the television at night.  It’s mostly busy work to obtain links in my opinion so I can multi-task when building links.  That is, if you call watching a football game and working in between plays multi-tasking.

Here are four of my top seo tips when it comes to link building through various tactics.

1.  Blogging — Blogging is one of those things that you need to do consistently.  It’s a great way to build content for your site.  And, quality content can bring inbound links and help your search rankings simply by having the keywords utilized more on your site.

There are two kinds of blogs that you can create.  Most experts agree that putting a blog on your main URL itself is the most important as this will help you build content there.  Moreover, Google likes sites that have updated information and blogging allows what is normally a pretty static type of site (your corporate site) to have continually new content.

The second type of blog site is an industry specific site.  With this type of site, you can report on your own company on a separate URL and it doesn’t seem self-serving.  Often, savvy readers can see through this tactic, but it really doesn’t matter that much.  Getting links from a site outside of your primary domain can be helpful.  Just be sure to include stories about your competitors as well.

2.  Guest Blogging — Writing copy every day is tough work.  It’s hard to come up with new ideas all of the time.  That’s why offering to provide unique and new copy to another blog site in your niche is a great way to get coverage.  Any blogger would welcome a day off from writing so if you give him good copy that is new and never used before on the web, he’ll likely print it even if it means giving you a link back.  It’s the least they can do.

3.  Article Marketing — Some people think that article marketing is valuable for the links that you get on the article marketing site itself.  I don’t hold much value for those types of links.  What I do hold value for, however, is that some of the top article marketing sites do show up in searches.  Your hope is that some lazy blogger is going to go there and grab your content and reprint it on his blog.  That may result in a link that you wouldn’t otherwise have.  Stick with the more popular free article sites like eZine Articles.  Some of the lower ranked ones won’t be worth your time.

4.  Giveaways — We try to do a lot of contests.  People love winning free things and they will link to it.  On a fantasy baseball site that we are involved with, they actually give away free DVD’s of old World Series highlights.  We also provide a text message entry for the sweepstakes.  These have been helpful to us in gaining exposure and getting backlinks.

By now, I don’t think it’s that big of a secret that the team behind GetClickz.com is also very involved in the world of sports blogging. We manage websites dedicated to fantasy football and college football as well as some of the recommended URLs in the sidebar.

Since we are such big sports guys as well as full-time online marketers, it has often baffled us that the world of sports marketing is still VERY driven by banner ads on BIG media sites. Often, it seems like companies that want to market in the sports arena take the road often traveled instead of being proactive in the new media sphere.

Hopefully the below infographic from Coyle Media will inspire some of those traditional sports marketing companies to get off their duff and test the waters in social media. Cause there’s no question that the people sports marketers are trying to reach are using social media to communicate with their community.

Sports Marketing from Coyle Media, LLC.

On top of all of this information, and factoring in the marketing budgets many of these corporations throw at their media buys, it would seem that a comprehensive social media campaign would be very affordable and successful for a company looking to break into it.

One other quick note on this infographic – it would be very interesting to see what the numbers would look like if collegiate sports were included, as well. Particularly NCAA men’s basketball and football. I’m sure the large college-age fan bases there would even further skew the numbers.

Internet Use by Country

China is loving the internet. Chinese citizens are spending 2.7 hours per day online versus Japan’s 2.9 hours and the USA’s 2.3 hours.