This week’s edition includes some easy ways to make a difference with social media, a look at how video conferencing technology is improving education, some new social strategies for businesses of any size, and much more.

Social Media

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• Dear Foursquare: This Is Not the Right Time to Sell

  The location-based network’s extraordinary growth and buzz have caught the eye of Internet heavyweights, notably Yahoo. But if the Foursquare team aims to be a worldwide game-changer like Facebook and Twitter before them, it may be wise to forego the big pay day and keep on truckin’.

• 9 Ways to Do Good With 5 Minutes or $25

  Social media makes it easier than ever to make a difference. Whether you can donate a little bit of time, or a little bit of money, check out these easy ways to contribute on the web or on your phone.

• How Social Media Can Effect Real Social and Governmental Change

  Transparency, open APIs, and free-flowing information are just a few of the ways societies and governments can be improved. This post discusses some important social media campaigns that have made a difference.

• 4 Tips for Tapping Into Twitter Conversations
  Twitter is so much more than just sending updates and links into the void — it’s the world’s real-time conversation. If you want to take part, heed the advice in this post.
• Exclusive: Tour the ‘If I Can Dream’ Command Center [VIDEO]

  The interesting new reality/online video hybrid show ‘If I Can Dream’ hit the web on March 2nd, and its impressive production and technical values have turned more than a few heads. This exclusive tour of the show’s HQ sheds some insight on the unique experiment.

• 5 More Ways to Go Green for Earth Day

  Earth Day may have come and gone, but that doesn’t mean you’re off the environmental awareness hook. Explore these social strategies for going green any time of year.

• How Social Media Helped Travelers During the Iceland Volcano Eruption

  The Icelandic volcano eruption cost millions in airline revenue and left thousands stranded, but it may have opened new windows of communication. See how travelers and airlines took advantage of social channels to relay vital information that call centers and websites could not.

For more social media news and resources, you can follow Mashable’s social media channel on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook.

Tech & Mobile

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• HOW TO: Give Your iPhone a Spring Clean

  With so many tempting apps available for download, it’s easy for your iPhone to get cluttered. Well spring is here, and it’s time to organize your mobile life. Check these tips on streamlining your beloved handheld.

• 5 Ways Classrooms Can Use Video Conferencing

  Web-based video chat has allowed students to connect with a world of experts and curricula that were previously unavailable. Take a look at these five examples of high-tech education in action.

• 10 Free iPhone Apps to Help You Go Green for Earth Day

  Environmentalism doesn’t stop at your desktop. Staying green on the go can be a little bit easier with these 10 resourceful iPhone apps.

• 10 Excellent Examples of Recycled Gadgetry

  If you’re all about gadget-themed decor and apparel (and who isn’t really?), you won’t want to miss these awesome products, built from the circuits and wires of yesterday’s tech.

For more tech news and resources, you can follow Mashable’s tech channel on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook.

Business

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• Why It’s More Important Than Ever To Be an Early Adopter Brand

  If your business aims to compete at the speed of social media, it’s critical that you be ahead of the curve on the latest trends. This post discusses why.

• HOW TO: Reignite Your Business Network Online

  Without a viable network, your business probably wouldn’t be successful. If that old Rolodex or business card pile is growing stale, here are some tips for reconnecting online.

• How Recruiters are Using Social Media for Real Results

  Social media has opened up a whole new channel for recruiters to scout. Here are some tips from the pros who have landed great candidates from the social web.

• How Companies Can Use Sentiment Analysis to Improve Their Business

  What are people saying about your brand on the web? Is it good or bad? How bad should it get before you intervene? These questions can be answered by employing a sentiment analysis strategy.

• 5 Unique Ways to Use Twitter for Business

  Contests, customer service, recruiting — it’s all been done on Twitter. If your business is looking for some fresh ideas, be sure to check in here.

• 8 Social Media Strategies to Engage Multicultural Consumers

  The purchasing power of multicultural consumers is growing exponentially. If you want to reach them, you need to understand how to connect. This post has some tips on using social media to do so.

• 5 Masterminds That Have Redefined Startup Life

  Along the road of Internet entrepreneurship, there have been thought leaders who took risks, and changed the game for everyone. Check out these five profiles of some of the most influential minds in tech business.

• Why Retention Should Be Your Top Priority in Social Media Marketing

  If your business model hinges only on how virally your product is shared, you may be missing the bigger picture. For long-term sustainability, customer retention is key.

• Top 10 YouTube Tips for Small Businesses

  YouTube is a too-often neglected channel for promoting your business. Because it’s free and has incredible reach, it’s the perfect platform for small businesses to set up shop. Here are 10 best practices to note while exploring your web video strategy.

• HOW TO: Add Blogger Outreach to Your PR Plan

  The opinions of bloggers reach far and wide, making them a great vehicle for your brand. If you haven’t added blogger outreach to your PR arsenal, read these tips for best results.

For more business news and resources, you can follow Mashable’s business channel on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook.

(Via Mashable!.)

Between Twitter, Facebook, and Googles new social networking tool, Buzz, its hard to turn a corner without running into another social network. But how do you know which networking tool fits you best? Were here—with big charts and all—to help.

Last week Google Buzz made us ask ourselves what we wanted out of social networking. To answer that question, we charted what we liked and disliked about setup, privacy, usability, and other aspects of Buzz, Twitter, and Facebook. Here’s the result.

This chart doesn’t cover everything about every network out there. MySpace is (seemingly) on the decline or, at best, re-purposing itself. LinkedIn is really a business contact pool, FourSquare a geo-location game, and other networks generally too niche to be compared in the same aspects and categories.

For the simple read, here’s the full chart of our Buzz, Twitter, and Facebook comparison. We color-coded each answer to give a context of where it stood, in comparison to what we know is possible and what a smart user would like to see. Red means that you can’t rely on this network for this feature. Yellow indicates that the network offers it or makes due, but could definitely be better. Green means something works, and can be considered a selling point.

Click on the chart for a bigger view, or right-click to download the full-resolution file.

There’s a lot of text there already to parse through, but it’s obviously segmented and specific to each function. Having dug into the settings of each network and debated it with my fellow editors, I’ll try to offer up a concise take on how I’d explain each network to someone completely new to any of them. I hope it might spur some thought about which network you’re using now, too, and why.

Facebook

Facebook’s strongest feature, as it stands now, is that it’s relatively easy to figure out who your ‘friends’ are. You can pull them from your webmail address book, sure, but you have to check off those you want to be a friend with, and they have to reciprocate. After that, you start seeing their status updates, photos, and other activities on Facebook.com, right when you log in. Simple enough, right? Not exactly.

You cant, or at least shouldnt, create two separate Facebook accounts for personal friends and work contacts/co-workers/casual acquaintances, all of whom are likely to hit you up on Facebook sooner or later. So its up to the user to create groups of friends, set what those different friends can see. Also, your Facebook identity is tied to certain ‘networks’—an employer, a school, a location—that you have to remember to set controls for, too. Dig around and youll almost certainly find the very fine-grain controls you might need. But then, every few months, Facebook changes up their offerings, for better or worse, and it’s up to the user to notice and re-learn how to decide what’s private, to whom, and, in a much more worrisome way, what’s being made public and search-able on the web.

Facebook does have a pretty great iPhone app, and offers a good amount of access to third-party clients like Brizzly and TweetDeck. But they’re still limited in some ways meant to drive you to the web site, and their non-iPhone mobile apps and sites are tough to love.

Twitter

What’s easy to like about Twitter is the simplicity. You get an account, you see a suggested list of famous users that you can feel free to ignore, and then you’re asked to write 140 characters about something, anything. It will be made public, search-able, and able to be re-broadcast by other users, unless you’ve decided to lock your entire account and require your permission to view it. You can follow other people, block the occasional jerk from following you, reply to others’ posts, message other users privately (if you both follow each other), and, over time, you’ll learn about third-party apps and context tricks that make the service make more sense. I started using Twitter one day into my first SXSW, and I had it mostly figured within one or two over-eager days.

That simplicity, and reliance on third-party sites and apps for picture posting, link shortening, and the like can be confusing to newcomers that aren’t into digging around, for sure. And the speed and volume of the main stream can be overwhelming and off-putting. But Twitter has grown slowly into a network that adapts to users’ needs, whether by force or through user innovation. If you don’t like how noisy and fast your main feed is, creating a list of high-priority friends and thinkers will do the trick. As you figure out what you like and don’t like about Twitter, you’ll be able to find third-party apps and interfaces that cater to those interests. We’d love to see expanded features here or there (for discovering who’s following you, and perhaps hiding certain posts from all but a few close followers, for example), but Twitter is a pretty novel solution for those who like to share short updates with the web at large.

Buzz

Whatever we write about Buzz will be slightly inaccurate in a week’s time, most likely. Buzz is brand new, and already it announced an apology and upcoming ‘fixes.’ From what weve seen, though, it seems like it wants to be the solution that FriendFeed never was to tracking your friends and contacts multi-varied interests. Some friends change their IM status to say whats up, while others post on Flickr, Twitter, their own blog, and other places. Rather than making you head to each site, or make those friends become endless self-promoters, Buzz aims to connect you to everything your friends are doing from a place youre already familiar with—your Gmail and Google contacts.

And that, of course, is where the uproar started. Buzz showed up, suddenly, inside Gmail, and when asking users to sign up, assumed too much that they’d like to turn their email contacts into people they ‘follow,’ and maybe make that following status public. If Google could reassure Buzz users that what they did on the network was only among their followers they’ve individually approved, it would be more appealing. The service also needs a dedicated home, instead of being spread across mobile sites, Gmail, Google Maps, and elsewhere, and gain better controls for how much ‘buzz’ flies at you. But it’s promising, still, because it’s not a public-type Twitter, or a walled-off Facebook, but something else entirely.

Which Social Network Fits You Best?(survey software)

How would you revamp our chart of social network strengths and weaknesses? What did we get right, wrong, and miss entirely? We’re open to your ideas, suggestions, and links, in the comments.

(Via Ian Scott.)

is a weekly column by Mashable Co-Editor Ben Parr, where he digs into social media trends and how they are affecting companies in the space.

Google may have finally figured out social media, even if there have been some major slip-ups in the way. The implications of that realization could dramatically change social media as a tool and as an industry.

On Tuesday, February 9th, Google launched Buzz for Gmail, a service for sharing thoughts, multimedia, and your social media feeds with your friends utilizing Gmail as the conduit. The result: over 160,000 Google Buzz posts and comments per hour.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that Google didn’t launch a small addition to Gmail — no, it has dropped a nuclear bomb whose fallout will permanently alter the social media landscape. I could never have predicted that it would become so popular so fast when I first learned about it.

Why? Why has it grown so rapidly? Why has it riled up such strong emotions on both sides? Are the privacy issues going to permanently damage Google? And most of all, what does Google Buzz mean for Twitter, Facebook, and the rest of the social media world?

I’m going to tackle all of these questions and more in this week’s in-depth column.

Google Buzz’s Skyrocketing Usage

While it’s still very early into Buzz’s life cycle, initial indications show that Google has a hit on its hands. Linking Buzz to Gmail’s millions of users has clearly brought people into the company’s new social domain.

Google has only released two numbers so far: there have been over 9 million posts and comments in about 56 hours, amounting to around 160,000 posts and comments per hour. That’s even more impressive if you consider the fact that most users didn’t get Buzz until Wednesday the 10th.

The other number: over 200 mobile check-ins per minute, nearly 300,000 mobile check-ins per day.

Those numbers are simply stellar.

Why Have Users Embraced Buzz?

It’s a question that has both simple and complex answers: why has Google Buzz taken off as a service (thus far) in ways that Orkut, Google Friend Connect, and Google’s other attempts at social media did not?

Let’s start with the most obvious one, and one I think was a brilliant move, despite the privacy issues: it’s wired directly into Gmail. With a flip of a switch, Buzz gained tens of millions of users. With the Buzz tab just directly under ‘Inbox,’ the service creating its own unread count, and Buzz emails flooding inboxes, how could people not try it out?

The embrace goes deeper than that, though. I asked the Mashable Buzz community the following:

‘Why do think Google Buzz has gained traction so quickly? What’s the #1 reason you find yourself using Buzz?’

Here are some of the responses we received that I believe really sum up Buzz’s popularity:

– Adrian Eden: Ease of use and simple interface

- Eyal Herlin – it just works for me. i like the zero effort setup and the making of connections easy

- Sheldon Steiger – #1? It’s embedded into Gmail. After that, it seems to be exposing me to people and subjects that were not readily visible in the other networks.

- Roy Ruhling – On a scale of 1-10 for ‘socialness’ of social networks Twitter is about a 3, Facebook is about a 4 and Buzz is about a 9. It honestly and truly connects people from all over the world instantaneously

- Daniel L – The main reason buzz is growing so quickly is because it is easily accessible to Gmail’s large and already established user base. Normally, Gmail is the one site i always have open because it has my calendar, my to do list, and my chat all in one window. Because of this, i always see when i have new Buzz, and i will tend to check it and respond. This is the #1 reason i use it — convenience.

Summary: Easy to use, accessible, convenient, closer social circle, moves in real-time, engaging…

Google’s got a monster on its hands.

Addressing the Privacy Issue

One of the obstacles to Google Buzz’s growth — and a major point of criticism — has been the privacy issue. Since it’s linked directly into Gmail, people can figure out your email address. Since it auto-followed your most emailed friends, people could figure out your email habits.

All of these issues are legitimate, but here’s the thing: Google is responding with lightning speed. Yesterday the search giant made some serious privacy tweaks, making auto-follow into auto-suggest and giving you the ability to completely kill Buzz if you so choose.

In a few months, few will remember these privacy snafus. Just as people have forgotten about the Facebook News Feed fiasco and other Facebook disasters, people will forgive and forget about Buzz’s initial privacy concerns.

In that sense, Google will get the best of both worlds: it has seeded Google Buzz with people and content via the auto-follow and automatic opt-in features, but it won’t feel the heat for privacy issues due to the recent changes to both. It may have been unintended, but it was savvy.

The Potential Impact on Twitter and Facebook

Now that we’ve established that Google Buzz is growing and isn’t likely to go anywhere anytime soon, it’s time to look towards what will happen next.

If Google Buzz is here to stay, what does that mean for the two kingpins of social media, Twitter and Facebook?

If you don’t think both companies haven’t had constant meetings over the potential impact of Buzz, then you are kidding yourselves. There’s no way both companies don’t have people analyzing scenarios and Google’s plan for its social media wunderkind.

To analyze the potential impact of Buzz on both services, lets look at the key questions for Twitter and Facebook, and some possible answers:

Q: Will Buzz Kill either Facebook or Twitter?
A: No. There’s probably nothing that could kill either service. The user bases are too large and passionate for that to happen.

Q: Could Buzz slow down the growth of Fb/Twitter?
A: Absolutely. Imagine that 15 million people are spending 15 more minutes in their Gmail inbox because of Buzz, whether that’s browsing what their friends are saying or creating their own posts. There are only 24 hours in a day, so that time has to be taken from somewhere.

Yes, part of that time is being taken away from tweeting and facebooking. Even if it just means one less status update per person per day, that adds up to millions of updates lost to Buzz.

The effect could be a lot worse. We just can’t know yet.

Q: Could Buzz become bigger than Twitter?
A: It already is:

While we can’t pinpoint an exact number, Twitter has probably around 18-25 million users worldwide. Heck, let’s say there are 30 million to be generous. Gmail has over 38 million uniques in the U.S., and that was back in September 2009. Worldwide, that number is simply larger.

Yes, there are far more tweets than comments/posts on Buzz right now, but beating those engagement numbers isn’t out of the question for Buzz.

Q: Could advertisers and brands switch some of their dollars and focus from Facebook and Twitter to Buzz?
A: With millions of people using Buzz, how could they not?

Buzz is already taking a chunk out of Twitter, Facebook, and other social media services. That’ll only grow as brands and advertisers better understand what they can do with Buzz and its millions of users. Buzz is equivalent to throwing a giant super magnet into a room filled with nails.

Predicting How Google Buzz Will Play Out

Google Buzz has landed, and its impact is already changing the landscape. Gmail integration, real-time commenting, ease of use, and a new base of users that might not have been as socially engaged are now part of the Buzz universe.

Not only can you expect Facebook and Twitter to respond with their own features and partnerships, but you can expect developers to shift their focus as well. Remember last year when there was a Twitter app gold rush? I do — as the service skyrocketed, countless developers embraced Twitter’s API and built amazing apps on top of it. Facebook had the same experience when its platform first launched.

Now it’s Google’s turn. Buzz is an open platform, meaning that developers will soon be able to create new apps for Buzz — everything from iPhone apps to analytical services will be built on top of it.

Now if Google wanted to really shake up the developer ecosystem, it could offer ad revenue share for Buzz apps and its own app store. Gmail advertising is already well developed, and if you haven’t noticed yet, Buzz already has Google ads being placed against it. Offering apps the ability to quickly and easily monetize within Google Buzz could really take away from development resources being placed towards Twitter, Facebook, and mobile platforms.

If Buzz can keep up the momentum, everyone from publishers (like ourselves) to developers to Fortune 500 companies will have to pay attention to the conversations happening on Buzz. If this thing can drive traffic or put a big brand on its toes because of a buzz that goes viral, then there’s no telling how far it will go. Oh, and Google’s only just begun with this thing — more killer features are in its immediate future.

The social media landscape has been permanently altered. To ignore Buzz would be a costly mistake, because Google has finally created the definition of a game-changer.

(Via Mashable!.)

To enable it, just hit up the Labs link in Gmail, find the Google Voice player in mail feature, click enable, and save your changes. Now not only can you read your transcribed voicemail from directly inside Gmail—you can listen to it, too. In fact, your message status will even sync to Google Voice, so if you’ve listened to it in Gmail, it’ll show as listened to in Google Voice, too. Handy.

(Via Lifehacker.)

Take the work out of finding sites related to the one you’re browsing. SimilarSites is a user-ranked search engine designed to return a list of the most similar web sites.

Plug in a web site at SimilarSites or by using their Firefox extension SimilarWeb and you’re presented with a list of related web sites. For each site on the list you can give it a thumbs up or thumbs down. While our test searches returned fairly accurate results there were a few items in each search that definitely merited a thumbs down. In addition if you find a site in your search results that you’re interested in you can run a SimilarSites search on that site with a single click. If you’d like to find site suggestions by keyword instead of using an existing site as your source, check out previously reviewed Youlicit to find related web sites by keyword searches.

(Via Ian Scott.)

In one of the more intriguing surveys of recent weeks, website One News Page has found that over half of the people it surveyed will be replacing Google with Bing as their main search engine.

The news portal surveyed 1,000 people and found that 55 per cent of those who answered preferred to use Bing to search for things on the internet.

Even more unbelievable, 68 per cent of those surveyed actually liked the name Bing – they must really like Chandler from Friends – and 90 per cent said they would use the expression ‘to Bing it’.

Just Bing it!

‘Microsoft has a winner in Bing and in a couple of years it may be a force to be reckoned with,’ said Dr Marc Pinter-Krainer, founder of One News Page.

‘Microsoft finds ways of entering late into mature markets and flexing its huge marketing muscles to grab substantial share.

‘My verdict is that Bing will give Google a good run for its money, and the resulting competition in the search engine market can only be a good thing.’

In other news, three out of three out of four TechRadar journalists will never say the expression ‘to Bing it’ without sniggering. And that is a fact.

(Via TechRadar: All latest feeds.)

If you’re like most people, you have a decently-filled out profile. You’ve probably listed a few of your favorite movies, put down your high school and posted a couple photos. Now that you’ve gotten this far, it’s time to spread your wings.

Facebook is about social networking, so it’s time to actually do get social and do some networking with people other than your spouse or that crush from high school you really don’t remember. A couple of the best ways Facebook allows users to do this is through fan pages and groups.

The first question is whether to start a fan page or group, or maybe even both. Although they sound similar to one another, fan page and groups are two different Facebook features that accomplish different things. Groups are basically the same on Facebook as they are at other websites. They are general destinations for people with like-minded interests to gather and become members of. Group members can write on the group’s wall, exactly as you could on a profile page, as well as leave topics and posts on the discussion board.

Facebook Groups are good for narrowing in on interests. If you’re a part of an organization in a city, you can use a facebook group for promoting upcoming events or post relevant topics that members would respond to. Although groups can be used for conversation, they often become more of an brand identity, rather than a place for dialoguing with other group members.

Facebook Fan pages on the other hand, although they sound like groups, are actually much different. Fan pages allow the same type of interaction as group pages but with much more options for customization and personalization. Similar to group pages, a Facebook Fan page has a wall and can have a discussion board, but it can also have much more, like Facebook applications, flash and html code. Because of the flexibility of using html code, fan pages can be customized to look similar to a web site. Although fan pages often are pages devoted to a particular athlete, actor or hero, they are quickly becoming much more than that, with pages for marketers, realtors, magazines and writers.

So do you want to create a fan page or group page? If you want a deeper relationship with your members and users who are going to come back after joining, then Facebook Fan pages are the way to go. They offer much more customization and allow further reach and interaction with users. If you have a more targeted audience, then you may want to go with a Facebook Group page.

What have been some of your favorite Facebook Fan pages or Facebook Group pages?

(Via Tutorial Blog.)

Once Facebook Connect has been activated, you’re able to publish your Diggs, comments, and submissions back to your Facebook News Feed. You can also quickly invite your Facebook friends to Digg. Kevin Rose gives a quick tour of the integration in the video below:

This is an important move for both companies. For Digg, it means a lot more exposure on Facebook, as their millions of existing users link their accounts and publish information back to their News Feeds. For Facebook, it represents a huge new partner for Facebook Connect, which the company hopes will become an identity standard for users across the Web. The partnership was first announced all the way back in August of last year.

(Via Mashable!.)

“

(Via Tybee Guy.)

How long do you think you would stay and chat to this person? Do you think you would want to become friends? Probably not.

And the same goes for your website! You can create the most stunning website, with flash animations, video or audio features, rotating logos etc but the truth is, if your website doesn’t have any depth, no amount of “pretty” will get visitors to come back, let alone purchase anything!

Just as Dr Phil warns against spending your entire time planning a wedding (and spending thousands of dollars on it), instead of preparing for a lifelong marriage, many first time entrepreneurs become absorbed by the visual aspects of their website. They spend hours agonizing over colour schemes and designs (and then spend thousands of dollars having special effects added), but sadly don’t give any priority or time to the content of their website.

Every month millions of new websites are being added to the internet and you are competing against all of them! Even if they are not in the same line of business as you are, they are competing with you for visitor attention.

And even if you do manage to get a visitor to your website, but fail to provide the necessary information, your potential customer will click away in seconds, not to be seen again!
As a new or prospective website owner, you are faced with three major issues, when it comes to having a successful website:

1. Driving traffic to your website
2. Converting visitors into paying customers
3. Getting customers to come back and purchase more

1. Driving traffic to your website

This is a broad subject and has been covered by an earlier article, entitled “30 ways to promote your business & website on a shoestring budget”.

2. Converting visitors into paying customers

This is one of the areas in which most business owners fail. The main reasons are that they:

(a) Don’t provide information that their customers are looking for. For example, if you are selling furniture and your website only features a “general” category of products being sold, but not specific items, their prices and measurements, the customer will go somewhere else. If someone is looking on the internet for a sofa, they need to know whether it will fít into their home, whether it is within their budget and how it will look. The customer wants to know the information there and then. They are not going to wait until they can speak to someone on the phone or even drive to the store to find out. They will find another supplier (even an overseas one) who does provide the information. So when creating your website, PLEASE PLEASE ensure that you supply as much information as possible about each product and service, including its price (or price range).

(b) Don’t make it easy for their customers to find the information. It is important that your website is easy to navigate. This means placing your navigation bar at the top or left hand-side, as this is the first place majority of people look for. Contact details should be displayed not only on “Contact Us” page, but also at the bottom of each page.

(c) Don’t prove their credibility. Sure many companies speak about themselves and how great their products are and why you should buy from them, but the reality is no-one really believes them. International Marketer & Author Darrell Berg-Smith (www.darrellberg-smith.com) says that you should “Forget selling; prove your expertise. Start to position yourself as the expert on your product or service. You don’t do this by claiming to be the expert, or displaying your impressive CV. You do it instead by sharing your knowledge and giving your customers helpful, relevant information, without a sales gimmick and for free.”

Another way to prove your credibility is by simply placing testimonials from happy customers on your website. If you don’t have any, GET THEM NOW!

3. Getting visitors to come back and purchase more

In order for your customers to come back to your website, your first transaction with them must prove flawless. Your products/services need to be delivered exactly as stated on the website and be delivered on time (or sooner). In reality, you should under-promise and over-deliver. Provide your customer with bonuses, such as free information. If for example, you sell baby products, you can send your customers tips on how to settle their baby, a líst of child-friendly services in their area, advise on baby skin care etc.

You should also include as much information as possible on your website – free resources, articles, reports, ebooks relating to your industry, service and products. You can easily source free information on the internet. This will ensure that your customers will keep coming back to your website, even if it is just to get information. The more they visit, the more you will stick in their mind as an expert and the next time they are ready to order your products/services, you will be their first choice.

Another way of staying in touch with your customers is by sending them a regular newsletter. This can be done, weekly, fortnightly or monthly. You can do it manually if you don’t initially have many subscribers, but as your subscriptions grow, you should consider using inexpensive mailing software such as GetResponse (www.getresponse.com), which will not only handle your mailing líst, but also allow you to easily send out newsletters.

Remember once you’ve created your website, the work doesn’t stop there. You need to keep updating the content to keep your customers and search engines happy. Your marketing also needs to continue. There is no point in spending thousands of dollars on creating a beautiful looking website if no-one is going to visit it or worse still, refuse to buy products/services.

By Ivana Katz (c) 2009

Apple is really, really close to hitting 1 billion app downloads across the world, according to its new countdown page. If you download an app, you’ll be enrolled in a contest to win a $10,000 iTunes Gift Card, an iPod touch, a Time Capsule, and a MacBook Pro. TechCrunch is holding its own contest in honor of this occasion. Whoever guesses when it will hit one billion, and is closest in minutes and seconds will get free TechCrunch T-shirt. Leave the guesses in comments; we’ll contact the winner.

Apple also featured the all-time top 20 apps, both paid and free.

Top 20 All-Time Free Apps:

1. Facebook

2. Google Earth

3. Pandora Radio

4. Tap Tap Revenge

5. Shazam

6. Pacman Lite

7. Backgrounds

8. Touch Hockey

9. Labyrinth

10. Flashlight

11. Urbanspoon

12. Movies

13. iBowl

14. Lightsaber Unleashed

15. SOl Free Solitaire

16. MySpace Mobile

17. Virtual Zippo Lighter

18. The Weather Channel

19. BubbleWrap

20. Remote

Top 20 All-Time Paid Apps:

1. Crash Banidcoot

2. Koi Pond

3. Enigmo

4. Bejeweled 2

5. iBeer

6. Moto Chaser

7. Pocket Guitar

8. Flick Fishing

9. Tetris

10. Texas Hold Em

11. Super Monkey Ball

12. Pocket God

13. Cro-Mag Rally

14. Ocarina

15. Fieldrunners

16. iFart Mobile

17. Touchgrind

18. iHunt

19. iShoot

20. Monopoly

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

(Via TechCrunch.)