Autumn has arrived in the Northern Hemisphere while our friends south of the equator are enjoying Spring. I’m enjoying my visits to various sites and am sharing with you today some of my most recent bookmarks. Lots of good stuff for your review, some of which I have already shared elsewhere in the world of social media.link love

Combating Junk Mail

If your mailbox tends to get cluttered with junk mail over the waning months of the year, How to Get Off Mailing Lists offers timely advice on what action to take to rid your home of unwanted solicitations.

Improve Your SEO

Sometimes it pays to re-examine your way of doing things, including search engine optimization (SEO). Five Simple Ways too Improve Your SEO offers basic steps every blogger should take when it comes to optimizing their sites.

The Extraordinary Monetary Value of Social Media

It can seem impossible to quantify the value of most social media sites. The majority of them charge no fees and their income is derived solely from advertising. Yet, when I hear what some companies have paid for sites such as MyBlogLog and MySpace, I guess I am not too surprised to hear what Facebook could fetch if their asking price is met.

Now You Can Purchase Blog Comments

I won’t link to the site, but I’ll link to an article that explains it all — Terrible Idea: Buy Blog Comments Sells Spam. Yes, if you are that desperate to leave linkable comments on other blogs but you don’t have the time to do that, you can hire someone to provide that service for you. Yes, blog spamming has now gone mainstream — cringe!

Your Writer’s Union

All right, I admit it: I am not pro-union. That being said, freelance writers who feel that they need representation may want to check out the National Writers Union to see what they’re all about. Dues are based on your annual writing income and are paid semi-annually. Contract advice, grievance assistance, and advocacy are just a few of the benefits offered by the NWU. Nearly every writer I know meets their eligibility requirements; whether you should seek representation is something you’ll have to determine.

Finally, I leave you with this quote from Nathaniel Hawthorne to chew on as you take up your next writing project:

�Words — so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.�