Here we are already into March of 2011.  What have YOU done for your online business so far this year?

Each new year I try to sit back and evaluate what worked in the previous year for my business and also what DIDN’T work.  From there you can expand on the strategies that worked the best for you and eliminate those those failed.

When you eliminate that bad parts, you will free up some time to explore new strategies too.

One of my new projects this year is to spend more time providing helpful tips and strategies right here on this blog of mine.  I seemed to have slacked quite a bit last year in this arena, but I am ready for focus more time here.  So let me know what questions you have about internet marketing in general or if there are any product reviews you would like to hear about.

Stay tuned as there will be more news to follow!

Here is an interesting news post that one of my article writers thought I should share.  (I have not used either Posterous or VigLink myself, so I have no additional comments to add.)

Posterous is a very simple content publishing system allowing users to publish to many different services via email.  Their business has been going strong for quite a while now, resulting in them gaining many dedicated users.

Recently however, they have committed a fairly large no-no for a web startup, violating their users’ trust.

As one Posterous user has reported, they have been silently converting links inserted in content passed through their service into affiliated links using another service called VigLink.  VigLink, in and of itself, is a legitimate company, allowing users to accumulate revenue without inserting affiliate links themselves.  It also ignores all already present affiliate links, meaning if you put in your own Amazon link to a certain product, it will still be there when posted.

So in short, VigLink plays very fair, but Posterous, in using them, has not been doing so at all.

Co-Founder of Posterous, Sachin Agarwal conceded in a phone interview that they were definitely in the wrong when not informing users of what they were doing with links.  He also brought to light some other interesting tidbits of information.

Apparently, they have been doing this for a while now, it is just that no one has noticed it before.  He said they are just experimenting, and are not sure at this point whether or not VigLink will be permanently integrated into the Posterous service or not.  Regardless of whichever happens in the long term, users will be able to opt-out, or maybe even have to opt-in to use the feature.  Argawal has stated that if the permanent integration does occur, and a user is opted-in to use the feature, then they will be able to generate revenue from using it, which might actually increase the usage of the service, because not only will it be an easy to use content publishing service, but it will be an easy to use content publishing service that can make a user some easy, passive, revenue.

Posterous, Argawal also stated, is in the process of drafting a statement about the integration of VigLink, a company that has recently received capital from the likes of Google Ventures.  Little is known about how much this incident have affected their usage right now, but the possibilities of future money making, might actually serve to make this good press for both the Posterous, and the VigLink services.

Argawal needs to get this under his belt and move on, this was a huge mistake and very dishonest business move. Users realize the bills need to be paid, however they prefer transparency from their service provider and regaining their trust after something like this is going to be pretty tough.

Google search has been pretty static for quite some time, the search giant is usually pretty slow to make changes to its main sections of the site, namely search and the homepage. However, Google released on May 5, 2010 screen shots of the changes that are coming to Google.

Google has always been my search engine of choice, it just made sense and was the easiest of all the search engines I have ever used. I will admit, however that Bing really caught me off guard with that amazing homepage layout, sometimes I just visit their site to look at the interesting photos. Sorry, back on track, Google has made some pretty big (small) changes.

The first thing you will notice is a much improved sidebar experience. Google has now added a sidebar to the search results, you now have a ton of different options (like you did before with a bit more work to find them) of narrowing down your searches. On the sidebar now of Google search you have: Everything – which is the normal, vanilla Google search, News, Blogs, Images, Books, and a drop down menu called more, much like Google has on their main navigation along the top of the site. This will allow you to search each section more easily and quickly. Sometimes I had to Google “Google Blog Search” in order to find blogs that were relevant to my searches. Not anymore.

The second thing you will notice on Google is some more color! Well, not really but they have added some new icons, which are still just blue and green, but it is a start I suppose.

Google also has a new feature called Google Squared, which is available through the always fun Google Labs part of the site which basically allows you to find and compare different things. A great example of Google Squared is one of their sample searches on the Google Squared website located at: http://www.google.com/squared/ which is a search for “best picture oscar winners” and it brings back up a table of all of the Oscar winners from every year and has them sorted in table format for easy viewing. Way cool. I think it feels a lot like searching Wikipedia for something similar, where you would find a list, albeit this is much more detailed that Wikipedia is usually in such lists. I can see this being a very useful feature in the future.

Google is also launching a new mobile version that will help streamline the search process for those of us that always seem to be searching from our smartphones.

Google is always on the cutting edge, or close behind it when it comes to new technology and features for it’s services. Google has done a great job with these revisions and I can not wait to start using them myself, make sure you check them out as soon as you can. Start by Googling it!