3. Mix of spam and phishing. If you haven't heard of phishing before, it refers to misleading emails you get dressing themselves up to look like legitimate emails to get confidential, often financial, information from you. Some common examples are Paypal or Bank emails that claim you need to login with your private information to verify contact information or update account information. In reality, this is a malicious third party that steals your private information and can cause you MAJOR identity and financial problems.

So what can we do about this?

It's time to get serious about spam blocker software - as a first line of defense. Regulation isn't working, while it is getting tougher and tougher to quickly decide what is spam and what is not in your inbox and as we have seen, stakes are getting higher.

There are hundreds of shareware, freeware and otherware solutions on market, time for experimentation is over. In my trials of over 12 different spam blocker solutions, we found incredible variance in reliabiltiy, effectiveness leading to our finding that there were only a small handful of serious spam blocker solutions. For our findings, feel free to visit our review page over at: http://www.blockmorespam.com/spam_blocker_software.html

Following is an excerpt from Jill Whalen's High Ranking ezine. Jill does this stuff full time and she's well respected. I'm including this because it's enlightening. Here we go...

*** BEGIN EXCERPT ***

READER QUESTION: Is manually submitting each site better?

JW: You don't actually need to submit your site at all to search engines -- neither manually nor in an automated fashion. They all have spiders that "crawl" Web and find all pages that exist, as long as there is a link to them from a page they already know about.

READER QUESTION: Once submitted ...do you keep submitting ...if so how often? (So you don't get kicked out.)

JW: Never.

READER QUESTION: The Microsoft submit supposedly submits to hundreds of search engines and directories

JW: It's a waste of time and bandwidth.

READER QUESTION: Is this good or bad (the number of SE's submitted to)

JW: It's neither, just useless.

READER QUESTION: I heard more better ...but there are some pretty cheesy search engines out there

JW: "The more better" is incorrect. There are only 4 major search databases that matter: Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask Jeeves. Their databases power all of other engines that make a difference.

*** END EXCERPT ***

Interesting, huh? So, let's move on.

Writing and Submitting Articles:

I KNOW that there are talented writers online who have not capitalized on their writing skills yet.

If you're in this group, you need to write and submit articles.

IF YOU'RE NOT IN THIS GROUP, you need to write and submit articles.

You see, nobody is out there grading you. Google does not moralize over your ability (or lack thereof) to write a coherent article. Google will, however, spider links back to your IBSoftShop if you include it in your article's resource box. The more you do this, better you'll get.

Writing and submitting articles is a long term approach to generating traffic that you should start right now. Set time aside weekly to consistently get your name and your site's URL out there in various article directories. Can you spare one hour a week? If yes, do this.

I just published an article on this topic titled "How to Vote for Your 0wn Website in Search Engines." You can read it here: http://www.gothrive.com/articles/vote-for-your-own-website.html

Next, can I save you some time?

Here's a short list of activities and "programs" that will consume your time with very little if any result:

- Start Page Networks - Exit Traffic Exchanges - Safelists - FFA Pages - Lurking in Forums

There are others too, but who really benefits from a start page network, exit traffic exchange, safelist or FFA page? The person who owns and runs it. They benefit because they get to market to you and you get to market to other people who want nothing other than free traffic. Remember free traffic? Forget it.

You could spend next year whiling away hours on free traffic schemes or you could find PPC traffic that will turn your $10 investment into $49.85 in profit and then duplicate this success 10 times, 50 times or 100 times. Which will you choose?